115 Historical Materialism: A Postdigital Philosophical Method Megha Summer Pappachen and Derek R. Ford 1 Introduction This chapter is interested in postdigital research rather than research in the postdigi- tal era. On the one hand, the postdigital era is our current moment marked by the afterlife of the universalization of computerization and digitization. On the other hand, the postdigital is also a phase: something which comes and goes and is con- ceptual and philosophical in addition to literal. As Gabriel Rockhill maintains, eras mark ‘a historical time period’ whereas phases are ‘always distributed in a precise manner across time as well as in space and in society’ (2017: 4). The concept of the postdigital has always resisted any precise temporal placement. Petar Jandrić reminds us that ‘forms of binary code are found in ancient texts in China and India’, and that in an era long before written language, binary code was found ‘in various forms of communication such as smoke signals and drums’ (Jandrić 2019: 162). Even before the advent of the digital, we were somehow already past it, and with the postdigital. Today, authors have agreed to agree on the spelling of ‘postdigital’, no hyphen. But in 2015, Geoff Cox was still messing with the ‘post-digital’. In an early essay on postdigital temporality, Cox questioned the need to announce a new era. Rather than ‘announce the end of this and that’, he said, we need to rethink how we approach time as researchers (Cox 2015: 151). Creating post this and that is histori- cist in ethic and not very postdigital (understood as a timeless phase rather than an era). M. S. Pappachen Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA D. R. Ford (*) DePauw University, Greencastle, IN, USA e-mail: derekford@depauw.edu © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Jandrić et al. (eds.), Postdigital Research, Postdigital Science and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31299-1_7