Bernhard Siegert: Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real (2015)

“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 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.

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.

Grounding posthumanist theory both historically and technically, this book opens up a crucial dialogue between new German media theory and American postcybernetic discourses.”

Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
Publisher Fordham University Press, New York, 2015
Meaning Systems series
ISBN 0823263762, 9780823263769
xiv+265 pages

Reviews: Geoghegan (Paragraph, 2014), Young (New Media & Society, 2015).
Commentary: Martin (Grey Room, 2016).

Publisher

PDF (8 MB, updated on 2020-1-1)

Erich Hörl: The Technological Condition (2011/2015)

Partial translation of the introduction to Die technologische Bedingung. Beiträge zur Beschreibung der technischen Welt, ed. Hörl (Suhrkamp 2011), a book “seeking to reformulate the (media)technical question under neocybernetic conditions at the beginning of twenty-first century. As such, it is part of a three-volume project. It follows Die Transformation des Humanen. Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Kybernetik, eds. Michael Hagner and Erich Hörl (Suhrkamp 2008), and it will be followed soon by On General Ecology. The New Ecological Paradigm in the Neocybernetic Era, ed. Hörl.”

Translated by Anthony Enns
Published in Parrhesia 22, 2015, pp 1-15
Open access

PDF

More from Erich Hörl, and on philosophy of technology and media ecology.

Jack Burnham: The Structure of Art (1971/1973)

Jack Burnham was a writer on art and technology, curator of the 1970 Software show, and one of the main forces behind the emergence of systems art in the 1960s. In his second book, The Structure of Art, Burnham “developed one of the first systematic methods for applying structural analysis to the interpretation of individual artworks as well as to the canon of western art history itself.”

Publisher George Braziller, New York, 1971
Revised edition, 1973
ISBN 0807605956, 9780807605950
195 pages

WorldCat

PDF (69 MB, no OCR)
PDF (19 MB, OCR’d version via Marcell Mars, added on 2015-4-16)
PDF (83 MB, no OCR, added on 2023-8-4)