Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real

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 media’s individual or collective uses or of its cultural semantics or aesthetics. Rather, Siegert seeks to re-locate 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. The result is to turn ontology into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur._x000B__x000B_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 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._x000B__x000B_Cultural Techniques ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating, to the production of the sign-signal-distinction 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._x000B__x000B_Grounding posthumanist theory both historically and technically, this book opens up a crucial dialogue between new German media theory and American postcybernetic discourses._x000B_