# 42. The Cut (w/ M. Beatrice Fazi, Alexander Galloway, Matthew Handelman, and Leif Weatherby)

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/disintegrator-6686019/42-the-cut-w-m-beatrice-fazi-alexander-galloway-matthew-handelman-and-leif-weatherby
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/disintegrator-6686019/42-the-cut-w-m-beatrice-fazi-alexander-galloway-matthew-handelman-and-leif-weatherby.md
Podcast: [Disintegrator](https://stenobird.com/podcast/disintegrator-6686019)
Published: 2026-02-04T15:19:24+00:00
Episode link: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/42-the-cut-w-m-beatrice-fazi-alexander-galloway-matthew-handelman-and-leif-weatherby--69785248
Audio file: https://api.spreaker.com/download/episode/69785248/digibabe.mp3
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Duration seconds: 3896

## Resource

We're joined by the four authors of *Digital Theory* — M. Beatrice Fazi, Alexander R. Galloway, Matthew Handelman, and Leif Weatherby — for a roundtable on their new collaborative work. Digital Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) makes a deceptively simple but far-reaching claim: the digital is theoretical. Not in the sense that we theorize about it, but that digitality itself — mediation through discrete units — is a condition for thinking as such. Just to get it out of the way, listeners to the pod know that these four thinkers need no introduction. This is literally the cohort that we've held in our minds over the past few years (there's probably nobody whose shaped our brains as formatively on this subject than Alexander Galloway, whose writing was the subject of Marek's en route masters thesis and the first PDF sent between Marek and Roberto). The conversation opens up a series of productive disagreements within the group. What's the relationship between the digital and computation? For Fazi, the digital is discretization — "the cut" — while computation is systematization, building, constructing. This distinction allows the book to think the digital before and beyond the computer, back to proto-writing tokens and forward to whatever comes next. A major target here is what Galloway calls "analog philosophy," the dominant strain of theory over the last few decades that privileges affect, sensation, intensity, immanence. Deleuze is named directly as the great philosopher of the analog: obsessed with the fold, hostile to structuralism, drawn to "a language of breaths and screams." The authors aren't throwing Deleuze overboard entirely (to them the "Postscript on the Societies of Control" still hits) but they're skeptical that his ontology can account for digi…

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