Full Description
In a crucial shift within posthumanistic media studies, Bernhard Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions fundamental for a given culture. Cultural Techniques aims to forget our traditional understanding of media so as to redefine the concept through something more fundamental than the empiricist study of a medium's individual or collective uses or of its cultural semantics or aesthetics. Rather, Siegert seeks to relocate media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and nonhuman, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real are still in the process of becoming. The result is to turn ontology into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur.
Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic practices like reading, writing, counting, or image-making. The analysis of artifacts as cultural techniques emphasizes their ontological status as "in-betweens," shifting from firstorder to second-order techniques, from the technical to the artistic, from object to sign, from the natural to the cultural, from the operational to the representational.
Cultural Techniques ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating to the production of the sign-signaldistinction in old and new media, to the reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of trompe-l'oeils, grids, registers, and doors. Throughout, Siegert addresses fundamental questions of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic.
Grounding posthumanist theory both historically and technically, this book opens up a crucial dialogue between new German media theory and American postcybernetic discourses.
Contents
Acknowledgments 000 Translator's Note 000 Introduction: Cultural techniques, or, The end of the intellectual postwar in German media theory 1. Cacography or Communication? Cultural techniques of sign-signal-distinction 2. Eating Animals-Eating God-Eating Man: Variations on the Last Supper, or, The cultural techniques of communion 3. Parletres: The cultural techniques of anthropological difference 4. Medusas of the western Pacific: The cultural techniques of seafaring 5. Pasajeros a Indias: Registers and biographical writing as cultural techniques of subject constitution (Spain, 16th century) 6. (Not) in Place: The grid, or, cultural techniques of ruling spaces 7. White spots and hearts of darkness: Drafting, projecting and designing as cultural techniques 8. Waterlines: Striated and smooth spaces as techniques of ship design 9. Figures of self-reference: A media genealogy of the trompe-l'Doeil in 17th-century Dutch still life 10. Door Logic, or, The materiality of the symbolic: From cultural techniques to cybernetic machines Notes Bibliography Index
