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.
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