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.
