“The forbidden zone”: A psychological reading of the analog-digital difference
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The difference between analog and digital technology is often viewed as one between energy-based material content and information-based abstract patterns. This distinction has inherent psycho-physical implications, as our digital landscape appears to move away from embodied media towards code stored somewhere in a cloud, ultimately suggesting a notion of bodyless intelligence. This article seeks to reframe the transition from analog to digital, shifting the focus from the body-mind relationship to an exploration of internal psychological dynamics. Reading the foundational discussions from the seventh Macy Conference on Cybernetics reveals that recourse to a notion of psychical apparatus was essential to delineating this distinction. What will be presented is not only a description of our inner structure as both analog and digital but a reading of analogy and digitality as concepts dependent on the structure and dynamics of the human psyche as described by psychoanalysis. Those two concepts were articulated in a particular cybernetic historical moment that took psychanalysis as a model of their joint double-coded action. Regarding our current state of affairs, this double-coded action might offer insights into how to deal conceptually with a digitized world and its new idea of machine intelligence without a nostalgic regression towards the analog.
Author: Asaf Hazan
Institution: Bar-Ilan University
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,180
OpenAlex ID: W4417506465