Cultural Techniques

This volume designates a shift within posthumanistic media studies that dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations, that reproduce, displace, process and reflect the distinctions that are fundamental for a given culture. It seems that we need to forget our traditional understanding [...]
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This volume designates a shift within posthumanistic media studies that dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations, that reproduce, displace, process and reflect the distinctions that are fundamental for a given culture. It seems that we need to forget our traditional understanding of media to be able to re-define media on another level than the empiricist level of individual or collective uses or the level of cultural semantics or aesthetics. The goal of this book is in consequence to re-locate the concepts of media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and non-human, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real, are still in the process of becoming, thus turning ontology into a domain of what is meant by the German word "Kultur". Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic practices like reading, writing, counting or image-making.The analysis of symbolic or non-symbolic artifacts as cultural techniques emphasizes their ontological status as "inbetweens", which shift from first order 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. The essays in this volume on the production of the sign-signal-distinction in old and new media, on the reproduction of the anthropological difference, on eating, on seafaring, on drafting, registers, the grid, doors, and trompe'oeils as cultural techniques thus address fundamental questions of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic. A book for all those, who are interested in the possibilities of a technical and historical grounding of posthumanist theory, and of a dialogue between new German media theory and American postcybernetic theory discourse.