p. 22, important distinction between analog machines and digital

« While human beings can surely engage in activities that resemble or are even equivalent to digital ones, it is their capacity to engage in analog activities-their propensity so far in history to engage most of the time in such activities-that are of signal concern in this study. Famously, Deleuze and Guattari write at length in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizo-phrenia (I983, 1987) that much of human life and human society can be characterized in terms of machines; they go so far as to include much of everything we recognize as part of a "machinic phylum."

There is much to recommend this view, and it is not my purpose to put it under scrutiny here. But what is notable for our purposes is that these machines are generally analog: like most of our world, they are machines built for one or more specific functions, sometimes able to be repurposed for other uses, inexact, rough, fuzzy.

They don't choose between 1 and o to build up symbolic operations; rather, the machine of the animal elbow moves at any number of stretchable angles, which no part of the body needs to decompose into numeric approximations. While enough frames-per-second can make digital animations appear as smooth as analog ones, there is still a translation occurring inside the computer that the animal body does not need to make.

There is no mystery here; analog machines are at least as old as digital ones and pose no conceptual obstacles (that they might is arguably a symptom of exactly the computational mania with which this book is concerned). Lawn mowers, toasters, drills, typewriters, elbow joints, pianos, and jaws may be mechanical, but there is no reason to suspect them of being digital (Derrida [1993] offers an excellent account of the machinic qualities of the organic world that nevertheless remain different from digital representation). That digital media can approximate their function should raise this suspicion no more than the existence of baseball or golf simulations makes us suspect that these games are digital. »