Peaks and Troughs of Intensity: From Digital to Analog Embodiment

The above two illustrations, from Shores’ Deleuze’s Analog and Digital Communication; Isomorphism; and Aesthetic Analogy,  which show the translation/transmuation of an analog signal (continuous) into a digital one (discrete), give me room for some (very) lose musings. The first is that we tend to polarize these two kinds of forms. For instance emulsion photography is thought to be analog (as opposed to pixelated digitalization), yet the presence of film grains in an emulsion image tells us that the suspended silver halides indeed do pixelate to some degree.

In such cases the structure of the recording material simply falls away composing differences that make no difference. On the other hand, the pitting in a cd’s material, the consitutent thresholds that make up the recording material, also fall away as differences that make no (additional) difference.

What I want to say is that the discrete elements which are thought to make up digital copying, elements that under some defitions are linked through syntactical (not temporal) powers, are themselves materialized events subject to analogical relations which hold them together. A brain’s neurons which may exhibit something of a binary on/off digitalization, or a computer’s circuit which also expresses on/off threshold states, is part of a structural matrix of other temporal thresholds. Parameters of felt limits contain these peak/valley alternations, conditioning them and orienting them.

Additionally, if we are to ask, Is there a digital-like relationship between discrete elements and syntactical joinings which marks out the behaviors/capacities in abiotic world? Are not the features, lets say in a protein, that mark out differences that make a difference in its production (as a kind if peak or valley), also as discrete joined by the syntax of its structure, giving a protein molecule a digital status, of a kind? And are not the temporal unfoldings of this molecule (or any molecule), when in interaction with its environment, of a continuous and therefore analogical nature? This rock I hold in my hand is exerting discrete differences (joined in a structural/syntactical array) upon the threshold centers that make up the perception field of the hand, (these thresholds also linked through a structural/syntactical array), such that to ultimately separate out the digital and the analogical is to lose their essential interaction and really parallel development. The rock analogically “feels” and records the discrete differences that make a difference of my hand, just as the hand does the rock.

When we construct codified, syntactical wholes (linguistic, conceptual for instance), we are not just abstracting. We are creating new feeling bodies, analogical bodies which reveal their on diachronic expression and recording upon results.