Theory, Culture & Society November 2013 Volume 30

Volume 30 Number 6 November 2013

Contents

Special Issue: Cultural Techniques

Edited by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Ilinca Iurascu and

Jussi Parikka

Articles

Cultural Techniques: Preliminary Remarks 3Geoffrey Winthrop-Young

Culture, Technology, Cultural Techniques – Moving Beyond Text 20Sybille Kramer and Horst Bredekamp

Second-Order Animals: Cultural Techniques of Identity and Identification 30Thomas Macho

Cultural Techniques: Or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German

Media Theory 48Bernhard Siegert

After Kittler: On the Cultural Techniques of Recent German Media Theory 66Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan

Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty 83Cornelia Vismann

The Power of Small Gestures: On the Cultural Technique of Service 94Markus Krajewski

Zootechnologies: Swarming as a Cultural Technique 110Sebastian Vehlken

From Media History to Zeitkritik 132Wolfgang Ernst

Afterword: Cultural Techniques and Media Studies 147Jussi Parikka

Review Article

Files, Lists, and the Material History of the Law 160Liam Cole Young

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DOI: 10.1177/0263276413500828

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Article

Cultural Techniques:Preliminary Remarks

Geoffrey Winthrop-YoungUniversity of British Columbia, Canada

Abstract

These introductory remarks outline the German concept of Kulturtechniken (cultural

techniques) by tracing its various overlapping meanings from the late 19th century to

today and linking it to developments in recent German theory. Originally related

to the agricultural domain, the notion of cultural techniques was later employed to

describe the interactions between humans and media, and, most recently, to account

for basic operations and differentiations that give rise to an array of conceptual and

ontological entities which are said to constitute culture. In the second part of the

essay, cultural techniques are analyzed as a concept that allows theorists to over-

come certain biases and impasses characteristic of that domain of German media

theory associated with the work of the late Friedrich Kittler.

Keywords

cultural studies, cultural techniques, German media theory, material culture

This special issue of Theory, Culture & Society is dedicated toKulturtechniken (‘cultural techniques’), one of the most interesting andfertile concepts to have emerged in German cultural theory over the lastdecades.1 Our goal was to compile a collection that can serve as botharchive and toolbox. For readers with a more historically-oriented inter-est in the multilayered past of the concept, we included important earlierproposals to define Kulturtechniken as well as more recent attempts to(re)write the history of the concept in light of current theory debates. Forthose more concerned with possible applications and implications, weencouraged contributors to apply their particular understanding ofKulturtechniken to new, sometimes unexpected, domains – from servantsand swarms all the way to the basic reconfiguration of our understandingof time and machinic temporality. We are, in short, interested in

Corresponding author:

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, University of British Columbia, 1873 East Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1,

Canada.

Email: [email protected]

http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

unfolding the concept and probing its use value. Our two guiding ques-tions are: What are cultural techniques? And what can be done with theconcept?

These questions, however, are as easy to pose as they are difficult toanswer. Although several contributions – especially those by BernardGeoghegan and Bernhard Siegert – will provide in-depth historical over-views, it is necessary to add a couple of preliminary observations. Theseremarks will not answer the question posed in our title; they will at bestserve to trace the obstacles that stand in the way of a satisfactoryresponse. The basic difficulties arise from four closely related points tobe elaborated below. (i) The term Kulturtechniken entered the Germanlanguage on three separate occasions with three different conceptualinflections. (ii) Matters would be easier if more recent employments ofthe term had retired older meanings, but unfortunately all three are stillin use. (iii) It is not always clear which meaning theorists have in mind(if indeed they have any particular one in mind); moreover, some theor-ists like to play the meanings off against each other. (iv) This conceptualjousting is related to attempts to deploy the term in line with particulartheory agendas. In other words, ‘cultural techniques’ is a multi-layeredterm that is often shoehorned into fairly specific approaches. Rather thantackling the question ‘What are cultural techniques?’, it makes moresense to ask: ‘What is the question to which the concept of culturaltechniques claims to be an answer?’

With this in mind, the following observations will offer a mixture ofsignposts and side planks designed to provide some orientation in themaze of possible definitions and to prevent the reader from being thrownoff balance by the sudden changes in direction between the papers. Wewill proceed in two steps. First, we will review the three different mean-ings of Kulturtechniken. In each case it will be necessary to foregroundramifications and implications of the particular way in which the term isused. Second, the emergence of the term’s third and theoretically mostsophisticated meaning will be related to a specific juncture in recentGerman cultural theory. To anticipate one of our principal conclusions,the most important issues addressed by the culture-technical approachare related to problems arising from the development of so-calledGerman media theory. While Jussi Parikka’s Afterword will surveywhat has come out of the lively German discussions – achievements,shortcomings and promising points of contact across the Channel andthe Atlantic – these preliminary observations will focus on what wentinto the concept, and why on occasion it did not go in peacefully.

Triple Entry

The term Kulturtechniken first gained prominence in the late 19th cen-tury, at which point it referred to large-scale amelioration procedures

4 Theory, Culture & Society 30(6)

such as irrigating and draining arable tracts of land, straightening riverbeds, or constructing water reservoirs. It also included the study andpractice of hydrology and geodesy. K., the hapless surveyor unable togain entrance to Franz Kafka’s Castle, is a Kulturtechniker. This firstinstantiation of Kulturtechnik, usually translated into English as ‘rural’or ‘environmental engineering’, is still very much in use. But moreimportantly (and irritatingly), it is at times tactically put to use bysome who have a very different meaning in mind.

It is crucial to highlight some of the implications and ramifications ofthis first emergence. If Kulturtechnik refers to rural engineering, then theKultur in question is far removed from more refined notions of Kultur orculture as ‘the best that has been thought and said’. Matthew Arnold wasconcerned with culture and anarchy, not with ploughing and draining.In this particular context Kultur/culture is first and foremost a matter ofagriculture. As many of our contributors would point out, this particularinflection of the term appeals to its etymological roots: culture, Latincultura, derives from colere (‘tend, guard, cultivate, till’), but the initialmeaning was soon overrun by a sequence of semantic tribal migrationswhich turned culture – that ‘damned word’ Raymond Williams wished hehad never heard (Williams, 1979: 154) – into a concept as overloaded as itis indispensable (for an overview see Williams, 1983: 97–103). Torephrase the initial reference to husbandry on a more abstract level, cul-ture is that which is ameliorated, nurtured, rendered habitable and, as aconsequence, structurally opposed to nature, which is seen as eitheractively resistant (the hoarding dragon that must be killed to releasethe powers of circulation) or indifferent (the swamp that must be drained,the plains that must be settled). But now a question arises that will hauntKulturtechnik throughout its conceptual metamorphoses: which of thetwo domains does this act of creation by means of separation belongto? Is using a plough to draw a line in the ground in order to create afuture city space set off from the surrounding land itself already part ofthat city? In that case matters would be easy: culture creates itself in anact of immaculate self-conception that is always already cultural. Culturewould be culture all the way down. Or do the operations involved indrawing this line belong to neither side? A proper understanding of cul-ture may require that the latter be dissolved into cultural techniques thatare neither cultural nor natural in any originary sense because they gen-erate this distinction in the first place.

The second emergence of Kulturtechniken around the 1970s is linked tothe growing awareness of modern – that is, analog and increasinglydigital – media as the dubious shapers of society. To speak of culturaltechniques in this context is to acknowledge the skills and aptitudesnecessary to master the new media ecology. Watching television, forinstance, requires specific technological know-how (identifying theon/off button, mastering the remote, programming the VCR) as well as

Winthrop-Young 5

equally medium-specific mental and conceptual skills such as under-standing audiovisual referentiality structures, assessing the fictionalitystatus of different programs, interacting with media-specific narrativeformats, or the ability to distinguish between intended and unintendedmessages. All these skills, aptitudes and abilities are part of theKulturtechniken des Fernsehens, the cultural techniques of television. Atthis point, Kulturtechnik comes close to what in English is referred to as‘media competence’. Very soon, however, this focus on modern mediatechnologies was expanded and ‘basic’ skills such as counting and writingcame to be labelled elementare Kulturtechniken (‘elementary culturaltechniques’).

Once again we must unravel the implications. If the first, agriculturalinstantiation of the term aimed at techniques that transformed natureinto culture, this second usage of Kulturtechniken implies a very similaroperation: it indicates a culturalization of technology, in particular, ofthose media technologies frequently denounced as inimical to culture.First we enculture what allegedly preceded culture, now we enculturewhat threatens to erode it. This latter move, however, is highly ambiva-lent, and its thrust or bias depends on which part of the compound nounKulturtechnik you choose to privilege. Does Kultur rule over Technik, oris Kultur subsumed under Technik? If you opt for the former, you areextending the sovereignty of culture into the domain of technology. Youare, as it were, treating media technologies like the barbarians on theother side of wall who may enter and become part of the empire ofculture once it is assured that they support established cultural para-digms. If they submit to Roman rule, they will gain Roman citizenship.Bernhard Siegert, who spent his intellectual novitiate in the anti-humanist red-light district of Freiburg of the early 1980s, is quick todiscern a retrograde agenda at work here. Methodological proceduresand hermeneutic paradigms developed in the high typographic age ofhumanist literacy are striving to co-opt technological domains they donot understand to support an anthropocentrism they have not thoughtthrough. On the other hand, if you grant priority to the Technik inKulturtechnik, the thrust is reversed. Rather than projecting notions ofculture into (future) technology, technology is retrojected into (past) cul-ture. The materiality and technicity so obviously on display in modernmedia technologies is now recognized to already have permeated theirallegedly untechnical, more ‘natural’ predecessors – including the so-called elementary cultural techniques like writing, drawing and counting.Cultural techniques reveal that there never was a document of culturethat was not also one of technology.

A second important ambiguity concerns the question whether acquir-ing the skills and aptitudes required to handle a given technology orprocedure confirms our traditional role as the masters of our tools andprotocols, or whether we are in fact dealing with the reverse process in


the course of which we are inscribed by things and routines. We candetect the faint outlines of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic: Are we reallythe masters of our domain, or is the feeling of mastery a delusion createdand sustained by those we believe we have mastered? Are we duped bythe cunning of our tools? In her contribution Cornelia Vismann recaststhis question in a legal light by introducing the question of sovereignty.How sovereign are we when we interact with tools that prescribe theirown usage, have an inbuilt purpose, and constrain our actions with theirmaterial properties?

One must therefore draw a distinction between persons, who de jureact autonomously, and cultural techniques, which de facto deter-mine the entire course of action. To inquire about cultural tech-niques is not to ask about the feasibility, success, chances andrisks of certain innovations and inventions in the domain of thesubject. Instead, it is to ask about the self-management or auto-praxis [Eigenpraxis] of media and things, which determine thescope of the subject’s field of action.

This formulation would in theory still allow for the notion of a pre-existing sovereign subject that by engaging with ‘media or things’ forfeitssome of its sovereignty but that reasserts it once it withdraws into anunsullied state of non-intervention (for instance, Cartesian contempla-tion). But we know better (as does Vismann). We can see the next, moreradical conclusion rapidly approaching: namely, that the very subjectwhose sovereignty is under debate was created by the operations whichare then said to limit its ‘field of action’.

At this point we have crossed over into the third meaning ofKulturtechnik, which emerged around the turn of the millenniumwithin the newly established domain of institutionalizedKulturwissenschaften. While this theoretically most informed instanti-ation draws on the preceding two, it is also fuelled by philosophicaland anthropological considerations. More precisely: it radicalizes thekey points of the first two meanings to such a degree that cultural tech-niques come to transcend the confines of literary studies, media theoryand cultural studies and enter the domain of philosophy and anthropol-ogy. In order to understand the latter the best point of entry is to returnto the ambiguities of the second meaning and unfold their radicalimplications.

Dressing down Man and Being

To repeat, the second instantiation of Kulturtechnik referred to the skillsand aptitudes involved in mastering a given technology. This meaning ofthe term, no doubt, pays homage to the rapidly expanding and

Winthrop-Young 7

increasingly complex technical, social, and administrative mediation pro-cesses that characterize life in modern society. So extensive are theseprocesses that it was only a matter of time before observers started toquestion the precarious status of its three core entities: (i) the subjectperforming these operations; (ii) the basic concepts, ideas and notionsthat appear to guide these operations; and (iii) the object manipulated bythese operations. To put it in a nutshell: so much is happening betweenhere and there, so difficult has it become to get a grip on the proceduresthat lead from here to there, that we are forced to confront the possibilitythat there was never a ‘here’ or ‘there’ to begin with; both are a productof the between.

Let us start with (iii), that is, the notion that tools, operations proto-cols and/or procedures create the object. In his contribution to this issueSebastian Vehlken offers a media archaeology of swarm research.Historically, the analysis of swarming and emergent behaviour is notmerely assisted by, it fundamentally depends on storage and computingtechnologies superior to the processing speeds of the human sensorium.Whether or not media determine political swarms is up to debate; theycertainly determine our ability to think of swarms in the first place(Vehlken, 2012: 413). On the object as well as the meta-level, then,swarms are the ultimate performance (and product) of cultural tech-niques: they would not be without media, and their emergent behaviourillustrates the way in which so many other, ontologically seemingly farmore secure objects emerge from culture-technical operations.

This leads us directly to (ii) – the emergence of basic concepts andguiding notions from cultural techniques. It is at this point in the debatethat students will inevitably encounter a now canonical passage byThomas Macho (which is quoted in several essays in this issue):

Cultural techniques – such as writing, reading, painting, counting,making music – are always older than the concepts that are gener-ated from them. People wrote long before they conceptualized writ-ing or alphabets; millennia passed before pictures and statues gaverise to the concept of the image; and until today, people sing ormake music without knowing anything about tones or musical nota-tion systems. Counting, too, is older than the notion of numbers. Tobe sure, most cultures counted or performed certain mathematicaloperations; but they did not necessarily derive from this a conceptof number. (Macho, 2003: 179)

We did not start out with the idea or concept of the number and thenderive from it our quotidian counting operations; rather, early countingpractices in time generated the notion of the number. Think, for instance,of Denise Schmandt-Besserat’s (1996) acclaimed history of writing.Writing may have turned into the visible representation of spoken


language, but that is not how it began. Rather, there was a sequence ofexaptations in the course of which humans came to reflect on languageand communication in terms of the sign systems they employed. Writingemerged from early accounting practices involving tokens; the tokenswere gradually abstracted into signs; and finally, the resulting signvalue was used to approximate names for taxation purposes. Countingand accounting precede writing. It is at this point that the idea of writingas supplement to the spoken word can take hold. Procedural chains andconnecting operations give rise to notions and concepts that are thenendowed with a certain ontological distinctiveness – and which are there-fore in need of a techno-material deconstruction.

Finally, point (i), the subject. If ideas, concepts and in some cases theobjects themselves emerge from basic operations, then it is only logical toassume that this also applies to the agent performing these operations.Once again, the recourse to elementary cultural techniques provides thebest example. (Indeed, it is highly instructive to observe how in discussingelementary cultural techniques theorists like Siegert and Vismann will –not without a certain polemical panache – invoke the first, agriculturalmeaning of Kulturtechnik, enrich it with the theoretical sophistication ofthe third meaning, and then deploy it to both encircle and challenge thehumanist overtones of the second.) After introducing the notion of lim-ited and transferred sovereignty mentioned above, Vismann arrives at amore radical diagnosis:

To start with an elementary and archaic cultural technique, aplough drawing a line in the ground: the agricultural tool deter-mines the political act; and the operation itself produces the subject,who will then claim mastery over both the tool and the actionassociated with it. Thus, the Imperium Romanum is the result ofdrawing a line – a gesture which, not accidentally, was heldsacred in Roman law. Someone advances to the position of legalowner in a similar fashion, by drawing a line, marking one’s terri-tory – ownership does not exist prior to that act.

Macho stresses how guiding notions – many of which are the subsequentbeneficiaries of philosophical ennoblement – arise from as yet non-conceptualized quotidian practices; Vismann, in turn, stresses how cul-ture-technical operations coalesce into entities that are subsequentlyviewed as the agents or subjects running these operations (and whoreceive similar philosophical blessings). Students of German philosophywill realize that we have moved from the idealist pastures of the Hegelianmaster/slave into the more arduous Heideggerian territory of ontic-ontological distinctions. Indeed, one pithy way to describe the rise ofKulturtechniken in German cultural theory is to label it part of a large-scale, albeit largely uncoordinated, Heidegger update. As the resolutely

Winthrop-Young 9

anti- or counter-Platonic stance of the Macho quote above indicates, thestudy of cultural techniques aims at revealing the ontic operations thatunderlie and give rise to ontological distinctions which are then liable totake over thought. The older Heidegger came to oppose philosophy toDenken (thinking); the study of cultural techniques provides a kind offlanking manoeuvre by relating the thinking of Sein (Being) to the pro-cessing and operating of bits and pieces of Seiendes (beings).

The anthropological implications are arguably a great deal moreimportant and interesting. They are closely related to the philosophicalimplications, which comes as no surprise given that in the German intel-lectual tradition Anthropologie is as closely related to philosophy asAnglo-American anthropology is to ethnology. To understand what isat stake it is crucial to point out that, from the point of view of theculture-technical approach, the human body is no less of an inscriptionsurface than any other storage medium, including the human mind.Cultural techniques therefore include what Marcel Mauss termed bodytechniques (techniques du corps). Indeed, Mauss’s famous 1934 lecture onbody techniques is indispensable for an expanded understanding of cul-tural techniques. After briefly addressing swimming, marching andtrench digging (the initial focus on athletic and military activities is nocoincidence), Mauss provides a more peaceful but no less revealingexample:

I was ill in New York. I wondered where previously I had seen girlswalking as my nurses walked . . . . At last I realised that it was at thecinema. Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was,especially in Paris; the girls were French and they too were walkingin this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arriveover here, thanks to the cinema. This was an idea I could generalise.(Mauss, 1973: 72)

The essence of this generalization is not to redraw the boundary betweennature and culture in favour of the latter, but to redefine it as a zone ofconstant exchange that has no predetermined location. Walking is notjust a matter of physiology, gravity and kinetics, it involves chains ofoperations that link ambulatory abilities to cultural protocols. It is notjust a species marker or biological given, it is always already the inter-action between the fact that you can walk and the expectation that youcould or should walk in particular ways.

The basic anthropological implication consists in the retrojectionbackwards into the dawn of species developments: what we call thehuman is always already an emergent product arising from the processualinteraction of domains that in time are all too neatly divided up into thetechnical and the human, with the former relegated to a secondary, sup-plementary status. Once again, one of the most elementary techniques


offers one the most illuminating examples: doors. In a recent essay,Siegert – taking his cue from Georg Simmel’s beautiful 1909 essay on‘Bridge and Door’ (Simmel, 1994) – describes doors as thresholds thatcreate and process the distinction between inside and outside. Here weare back to the question raised at the outset: Is the door a part of theinside or the outside? Is that which draws the boundary between natureand culture itself part of nature or culture? It is of course possible tosummon the eager spectre of Carl Schmitt and invoke a sovereignty thatis of a different order than the distinctions it imposes. But it is morepromising to follow the lead of theorists like Siegert (2007: 31–5) andErhard Schuttpelz (2006) and employ the fertile concept of the parasite asdeveloped by Michel Serres. A parasite is not something that comes toprey on already existing structures (like pirates congregating on busyshipping lanes). Rather, the structures as well as what it connects comeinto being as a result of operations involving the always already presentthird party. Any act of communication is an act of excluding the thirdparty which thereby both is and is not part of the communication. In theculture-technical approach, this act of excluding the parasitical third hasits analogue in the way structures and entities tend to render invisible theconstitutive technical operations they arise from.

But to return to immediate anthropological implications. Once youmove from doors, gates and portals to fences, pens and corrals – that is,once you consider the elementary cultural techniques of creating enclosedspaces for catching, keeping, and breeding animals – you are creatingoperative thresholds that effectively generate different species confrontingeach other across that divide. Humans did not come about on their own;we are not a Munchhausen species able to pull ourselves out of our pre-hominid swamp by our own hair. The human is not human all the waydown. Instead we emerged, quite literally, from doors and gates whiledomesticated animals – in opposition to which we were able to identifyourselves as a species – emerged on the other side:

Thus the difference between human beings and animals is one thatcould not be thought without the mediation of a cultural technique.In this not only tools and weapons . . . play an essential role; so, too,does the invention of the door, whose first form was presumably thegate [Gatter] . . .The door appears much more as a medium of coe-volutionary domestication of animals and human beings. (Siegert,2012: 8)

Once again, cultural techniques refer to processing operations that fre-quently coalesce into entities which are subsequently viewed as the agentsor sources running these operations. Procedural chains and connecting tech-niques give rise to notions and objects that are then endowed with essentia-lized identities.Underneath our ontological distinctions (if not evenour own

Winthrop-Young 11

evolution) are constitutive, media-dependent ontic operations that need tobe teased out by means of techno-material deconstruction.

But with quotes like the one above, the German study of the culturaltechniques of hominization is targeting an area of research that is also ofcrucial interest to concurrent development in the North American post-humanities: the co-evolution of humans and technology. Cultural tech-niques are also anthropotechnics. Leaving aside the conspicuousHeidegger-based similarities to Bernard Stiegler, it is possible – and,above all, very interesting – to draw connections between the work ofSiegert, Schuttpelz and Vismann on the one hand and that of DavidWills, Cary Wolfe, Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway on theother (further see Winthrop-Young, 2009). Yet once again, Siegert isquick to draw a dividing line:

While the American side pursues a deconstruction of the anthropo-logical difference with a strong ethical focus, the Germans are moreconcerned with technological or medial fabrications or artifices.From the point of view of the cultural techniques approach,anthropological differences are less the effect of a stubbornanthropo-phallo-carno-centric metaphysics than the result ofculture-technical and media-technological practices . . .Human andnon-human animals are always already recursively intertwinedbecause the irreducible multiplicity and historicity of the anthropo-logical is always already processed by cultural techniques and mediatechnologies. . . .Without this technologically oriented decenteringthere is the danger of confusing ethics with sentimentality: thehuman/animal difference remains caught in a mirror stage, andthe humanity that is exorcised from humans is simply transferredonto animals which now appear as the better humans.

Others may want to debate the validity of this distinction or try theirhand at reconciling the competitive enterprises; we are more concernedwith identifying what is behind the insistence on this mid-Atlantic divide.The emphasis on media-technological practices and medial fabrications,the reference to sentimentality, and the impatience with rituals of decon-struction that do not include an informed technological focus – wheredoes this come from? Where have we heard similar appeals? There areseveral sources (Heidegger inevitably comes to mind), but it is not diffi-cult to pinpoint the most obvious one.

Kittler Determines Our Situation

The papers contained in this issue were written over the last decade, withthe earliest (Kramer and Bredekamp) dating back to 2003. The temporal


frame thus largely coincides with a decade that witnessed not only therapid institutional rise of cultural techniques research in Germany, butalso the internationalization of so-called German media theory – a clus-ter of work commonly associated with the late Friedrich Kittler. Kittler,no doubt, casts a long shadow over this issue, which in many respects is asequel to the 2007 Theory, Culture & Society special issue dedicated to hiswork. It is no coincidence that several of our contributors were at onepoint or another his students or collaborators. The title of BernardGeoghegan’s contribution, ‘After Kittler’, is particularly apposite. InGerman it would be ‘Nach Kittler’ – nach means both ‘after’ and ‘accord-ing to’. But nach or according to Kittler, what should come nach or afterhim? Furthermore, to speak of a time ‘after’ Kittler implies the drawingof a line beyond which he did not venture. Is there such a line? Or is itmaybe more of a moving frontier? However, we should not overrateKittler. As Parikka points out, you cannot lay all of the recent culturaltechniques scholarship at Kittler’s doorstep. Much of it has little to dowith him; a lot would meet with his disapproval. Nonetheless, to fine-tune our opening question: cultural techniques can be better understoodwhen viewed as the response to questions or quandaries that arose frommedia-theoretical work best represented by Kittler’s contributions.

One of the more peculiar qualities of Kittler’s media-theoretical workis the uneasy juxtaposition of a wealth of detailed case studies and theongoing insistence on the impact of historically changing ‘discourse net-works’ on the one hand, and a reluctance to define medium and/or mediaon the other. Students learn a lot about the operations and effects ofmedia but less so what media are. This feature is related to the fact that inKittler’s theory the term ‘media’ appears to operate in at least threedifferent registers. First, it denotes a new object of study. Those whoonce interpreted texts are now scrutinizing phonographs, typewriters,and computers. Second, as Siegert will discuss in greater detail, it denotesa new approach to old objects of study: the usual repository of establisheddisciplinary phantoms – body, mind, sense, senses, meaning, truth, com-munication, consciousness, etc. – are now dissected as thoroughlymediated constructs. Third, it is a rhetorical device itching for a goodfight. Especially in the anti-humanist heyday from the late 1970s to theearly 1990s, it is a polemically deployed counter-term carrying a volatileanti-hermeneutic charge. Media, then, is many things, ranging from averbal club liberally applied to those stuck in old meaning-seeking para-digms to a kind of conceptual defamiliarization tool designed to breakthe narcotic spell deviantly servile technologies cast on their users.

Such conceptual fracturing has its consequences. With the spread andinstitutionalization of media theory its ability to shake up minds anddisciplines was bound to diminish. Prolonged provocation inevitablydevolves into nonproductive tedium, especially if recycled within thesafety of established academic programs. Not coincidentally, the last

Winthrop-Young 13

couple of years have witnessed a small but significant deployment of titlesin which the existence of media is either referred to in the past tense (e.g.Pias, 2011) or denied (e.g. Siegert, 2003; Horn, 2007). This is not only areflection of the technological issue that, as Kittler would have it, thedigitization of channels and information ‘will erase the very concept ofmedium’ (Kittler, 1999: 2); it also signals the abdication of media as acutting-edge conceptual shibboleth. Unfortunately, this has not pre-vented some of Kittler’s more dedicated and hence less original disciplesto continue to write like it’s 1999 and indulge in ever more detailedreadings of ever more arcane technologies. Media theory can forfeit itsrelevance in many ways; one of the safest is to engage in increasingly staleartifactualism.

But how to escape the narrowing tunnel? One response – and onewhich deserves greater attention in the Anglosphere – has been the riseof Medienphilosophie or media philosophy. In contributions by scholarssuch as Sybille Kramer or Dieter Mersch, the basic gesture is to movefrom media (and all the overly artifactual, instrumental and/or determin-ist connotations the term has accumulated) to mediality, though withoutabandoning the crucial Kittlerian lessons gained from scrutinizing theformer. Media philosophy reflects on the generalizations derived fromthe preceding medium-specific studies and attempts a definition of medi-ality, yet it refuses to reacquire the instrumental naivety or techno-centricassumptions of bygone theory decades. One of the core points is to pro-vide an account of mediality as something that belongs neither to theperceiving subject nor the perceived object and which, as a third, enablesperception by removing itself from perception (for a short introductionsee Mersch, 2006: 219–28).

This is very similar to an understanding of cultural techniques as a‘third’ obscured by what emerges from its operations. As Geoghegan willdiscuss in greater detail, the ascendancy of Kulturtechniken may be seenas a response to some of the problems and potential cul-de-sacs ofKittler’s media theory. The pronounced anti-humanism in combinationwith the scorn Kittler heaped on nebulous constructs like ‘society’ mayhave been a necessary inoculation against the instrumentalist, anthropo-centric or technically uninformed ways of dealing with the materialitiesof storage and communication, but by the mid-1990s, when Kittler’s ownapocalyptic anti-humanism had passed its peak, it too had run its course.Here the culture-technical approach offers a viable alternative or escaperoute. To speak of operations and connections allows those inspired bythe Kittler effect to speak of practices without saying society; to readmithuman actors allows them to speak of agency without saying subjects;and to speak of recursions allows them to speak of history withoutimplying narratives of continuity or social teleology. Among otherthings the third meaning of cultural techniques is an answer to questionsraised by Kittler’s work.


Of course there is an alternative, which, to put it bluntly, comes withan interesting bid to out-Kittler Kittler. As Parikka has emphasized, thisis most clearly on display in the media-archaeological work of WolfgangErnst (further see Parikka, 2011). While Markus Krajewski’s contribu-tion on service as a cultural technique combines human servants (Jeeves)and electronic servers (AskJeeves.com) by establishing recursive connec-tions between the two, Ernst discusses the more radical perspective thatthese recursive operations are exclusively composed of inter-machinicprocesses proceeding in machine time. This is not the end of history,yet it marks the awareness of a machine history that needs to be told –if it can be told at all – in ways that radically depart from human his-toriography (further see Winthrop-Young, 2013). Here, the Technik inKulturtechnik clearly gains the upper hand. To offer one of those irre-sponsible generalizations that come easily to outside observers, it appearsthat, like Hegel, to whom he is occasionally compared, Kittler hasinspired a bifurcation into right and left Kittlerians. Nothing, we suggest,reveals this division more than applying the concept of cultural tech-niques to his work. Scholars like Siegert, Vismann and Krajewskiwould qualify as left Kittlerians: his anti-hermeneutic stance is trans-formed by them into a less intransigent post-hermeneutic approach invol-ving certain notions of praxis and limited human agency that Kittler wasprone to eschew. Ernst, on the other hand, would be a right Kittlerian bysubordinating whatever human element may be involved in cultural tech-niques to the closed times and circuits of technological recursions.

Overview

To reflect the issues sketched above, we have divided the collection intotwo parts made up of four papers each (excluding these preliminaryremarks and Parikka’s Afterword). The first part contains introductionsand historical accounts. It leads off with a short paper by Sybille Kramerand Horst Bredekamp, ‘Culture, Technology, Cultural Techniques:Moving beyond Text’, originally published in 2003. It represents thefirst systematic attempt to provide, in point form, a concise summaryof the new concept of cultural techniques, and it comes with the appealthat the use of the concept should result in moving the study of culturebeyond established textual domains, thereby debunking the myth of cul-ture as discourse. Thomas Macho’s contribution seeks to fine-tune theconcept by restricting cultural techniques to symbolic technologies thatallow for self-referential recursion. These recursions, in turn, are crucialfor the generation of humans as – to quote the title of the paper –‘Second-Order Animals’. Cultural techniques, in short, are first and fore-most techniques of identity. The following papers by Bernhard Siegert(who will take issue with Macho’s restriction) and Bernard Geogheganare more retrospective and historical in scope. In his paper ‘Cultural

Winthrop-Young 15

Techniques, or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German MediaTheory’, Siegert relates the (re)emergence of the concept to recentchanges in both the political and intellectual domain and then proceedsto outline his post-hermeneutic account of Kulturtechniken as chains ofoperations that link humans, things and media. Geoghegan’s paper,‘After Kittler: On the Cultural Techniques of Recent German MediaTheory’, addresses some of the specific moments in German post-wartheory outlined above, but it presents a much wider and more detailedview of the diverse meanings and Kittlerian origins of Kulturtechnik thanwas offered here.

The second part contains papers primarily concerned with applica-tions and implications. As already mentioned, Cornelia Vismann’s con-tribution, ‘Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty’, probes the implicationsof cultural techniques for the field of legal philosophy. If cultural tech-niques connect and thereby define the agency of humans and objects(which in Vismann’s famous formulation are objects and subjects,respectively, connected to cultural techniques acting as verbs), it becomesthe analyst’s task to reverse-engineer this wiring: from the emergent fic-tion of human sovereignty back to the techniques that enabled it in thefirst place. Markus Krajewski’s contribution, ‘The Power of SmallGestures: On the Cultural Technique of Service’, offers an intriguingcase study that conceptualizes the history of servants and servers as acultural technique revolving around an increasingly technologized inter-play of bodily gestures on the one hand and tools and instruments on theother. Sebastian Vehlken’s ‘Zootechnologies: Swarming as a CulturalTechnique’ addresses the way in which cultural techniques are involvedin the exploration of swarming, both in the biological and politicaldomain. Finally, Wolfgang Ernst’s ‘From Media History to Zeitkritik’discusses the implications imposed on cultural techniques by the ways inwhich technical media produce and process their own distinct time.Ernst’s discussion has the added bonus of tying together cultural tech-niques with another very promising current German theory strand,media archaeology. But that is another chapter (see Parikka, 2012;Ebeling, 2012; Ernst, 2013) we hope readers will be encouraged toexplore.

Note

1. Over the years Kulturtechniken has been rendered into English as ‘culturaltechnologies’, ‘cultural techniques’ and ‘culture technics’ (with and without adash). Leaving aside the differences between Kultur and culture as well as theproblematic transformation of the noun Kultur into the adjective ‘cultural’,the principal quandary is the word Technik. Its semantic amplitude rangesfrom gadgets, artefacts and infrastructure all the way to skills, routines andprocedures – it is thus wide enough to be translated as technology, technique,or technics.Medientechniken, for instance, are media technologies rather than


media techniques, but Korpertechniken are body techniques rather than bodytechnologies. The corresponding difficulty on the English side is the com-paratively narrow range of ‘technology’ which, ironically, is in part a result ofthe flattening of the term that occurred in the early 20th century in the courseof the Anglophone processing of imported German social theories, especiallyMarxism (further see Schatzberg). We have decided in favour of ‘culturaltechniques’. This is not an ideal solution; in some instances it may well bethe inferior choice. However, a full understanding of Kulturtechniken involvesdrills, routines, skills, habituations or techniques as much as tools, gadgets,artefacts or technologies. At rock bottom, techniques covers more of technol-ogies than vice versa.

References

Ebeling K. (2012) Wilde Archaologien 1: Theorien der materiellen Kultur vonKant bis Kittler. Berlin: Kadmos.

Ernst, W. (2013) Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. and intro. Parikka J.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Horn E. (2007) ‘Editor’s introduction: “There are no media”’, Grey Room 29:6–13.

Kittler F. (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. and intro. Winthrop-Young G and Wutz M. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Macho, T. (2003) Zeit und Zahl. Kalender- und Zeitrechnung alsKulturtechniken. In: Kramer S and Bredekamp H (eds) Bild – Schrift –Zahl. Munchen: Wilhelm Fink, 179–192.

Mauss M. (1973) ‘Techniques of the body’, Economy and Society 2(1): 70–88.Mersch D. (2006) Medientheorien zur Einfuhrung. Hamburg: Junius.Parikka J. (2011) ‘Operative media archaeology: Wolfgang Ernst’s materialist

media diagrammatics’, Theory, Culture & Society 28(5): 52–74.Parikka J. (2012) What Is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity.Pias, C. (2011) Was waren Medien-Wissenschaften? Stichworte zu einer

Standortbestimmung. In: Pias C (ed.) Was waren Medien? Zurich:Diaphanes, 7–30.

Schatzberg E. (2006) ‘Technik comes to America: Changing meanings of tech-nology before 1930’, Technology and Culture 47(3): 486–512.

Schmandt-Besserat D (1996) How Writing Came About. Austin: University ofTexas Press.

Schuttpelz, E. (2006) Die medienanthropologische Kehre der Kulturtechniken.In: Engell L, Siegert B and Vogl J (eds) Kulturgeschichte als Mediengeschichte(oder vice versa?). Weimar: Universitatsverlag, 87–110.

Siegert, B. (2003) There are no mass media. In: Gumbrecht HU andMarrinan M (eds) Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age.Stanford: Stanford University Press, 30–38.

Siegert B. (2007) ‘Cacography or communication? Cultural techniques inGerman media studies’, Grey Room 29: 27–47.

Siegert B. (2012) ‘Doors: On the materiality of the symbolic’, Grey Room 42:6–23.

Simmel G. (1994) ‘Bridge and door’, Theory, Culture and Society 11(1): 5–10.

Winthrop-Young 17

Vehlken S. (2012) Zootechnologien. Eine Mediengeschichte derSchwarmforschung. Berlin: Diaphenes.

Williams R. (1979) Politics and Letters: Interview with New Left Review.London: New Left Books.

Williams R. (1983) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. edn.Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Winthrop-Young G. (2009) ‘Mensch, Medien, Korper, Kehre: Zum posthuma-nistischen Immerschon’, Philosophische Rundschau 56(1): 1–16.

Winthrop-Young G. (2011) ‘Krautrock, Heidegger, Bogeyman: Kittler in theAnglosphere’, Thesis Eleven 107(1): 6–20.

Winthrop-Young, G. (2013) Siren recursions. In: Sale S and Salisbury L (eds)Kittler Now. Cambridge: Polity.

Acknowledgements and Dedication

On behalf of Theory, Culture & Society, the editors of this special issue would like tothank the authors as well as the translators (Charles Marcrum, Valentine Pakis, GuidoSchenkel and Michael Wutz) for their participation. The essays by Bernard Geoghegan,

Markus Krajewski and Sebastian Vehlken were written specifically for this issue; theothers have appeared (or are about to appear) in print:

Ernst W (2006) Von der Mediengeschichte zur Zeitkritik. In: Engell L, Siegert B

and Vogl J (eds) Kulturgeschichte als Mediengeschichte (oder vice versa?). Weimar:

Universitatsverlag, 23–32.

Kramer S and Bredekamp H (2003) Kultur, Technik, Kulturtechnik: Wider die

Diskursivierung der Kultur. In: Kramer S and Bredekamp H (eds) Bild, Schrift,

Zahl. Munich: Fink, 11–22.

Macho T (2008) Tiere zweiter Ordnung. Kulturtechniken der Identitat. In: Baecker

D, Kettner M and Rustemeyer D (eds) Uber Kultur. Theorie und Praxis der

Kulturreflexion. Bielefeld: Transcript, 99–117.

Vismann C (2010) Kulturtechniken und Souveranitat. Zeitschrift fur Medien- und

Kulturforschung 1: 171–181.

Bernhard Siegert’s paper, ‘Cultural Techniques, or the End of the Intellectual Postwar

in German Media Theory’, is the introductory essay in a volume on cultural techniquesforthcoming from Fordham University Press. We thank the authors and the associatedpublishers for the rights to translate the essays. We are especially grateful to Balthasar

Haussmann for the permission to include Cornelia Vismann’s text. It is very fitting thatthis collection concludes with Liam Young’s review essay of her groundbreaking study,Files: Law andMedia Technology. We wish to dedicate this issue to her memory. As a legalhistorian, media theorist, teacher, mentor and friend, Cornelia remains an inspiration to

us all. We hope that this collection will also persuade more readers to explore her work.

Ilinca Iurascu, Jussi Parikka, and Geoffrey Winthrop-Young


Geoffrey Winthrop-Young is Professor of German at the University ofBritish Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Among his publications areKittler and the Media (Cambridge, 2011) and Friedrich Kittler zurEinfuhrung (Hamburg, 2005), as well as translations of works byFriedrich Kittler, Cornelia Vismann and Eva Horn.

Winthrop-Young 19


30(6) 20–29




DOI: 10.1177/0263276413496287

tcs.sagepub.com

Article

Culture, Technology,Cultural Techniques –Moving Beyond Text1

Sybille KramerFree University, Berlin

Horst BredekampHumboldt University, Berlin

Abstract

Originally published in 2003, this article presents one of the first attempts to provide a

systematic summary of the new concept of cultural technique. It is, in essence, an

extended checklist aimed at overcoming the textualist bias of traditional cultural

theory by highlighting what is elided by this bias. On the one hand, to speak of cultural

techniques redirects our attention to material and physical practices that all too often

assume the shape of inconspicuous quotidian practices resistant to accustomed inves-

tigations of meaning. On the other hand, cultural techniques also comprise sign sys-

tems such as musical notation or arithmetical formulas located outside the domain of

the hegemony of alphabetical literacy. The rise of the latter in particular is indebted to

the impact of the digital – both as a domain of technology and a source of theoretical

reorientation. Together, these aspects require a paradigmatic change that challenges

and supersedes the traditional ‘discursivism’ of cultural theory.

Keywords

culture and discourse, cultural studies, cultural techniques, digitization, mathematics,

textuality

1. For a long time, perhaps for too long, culture was seen only as text (seeLenk, 1996). Hardly any other trope has had as formative an impact onthe culture-theoretical debates of the last decades as this semiotic andstructuralist baseline. The metaphor of text dominated until the 1980s,


Prof. Dr. Sybille Kramer, Freie Universitat, Institut fur Philosophie, Habelschwerdter Allee 30, D-14195

Berlin, Germany.



transforming the world of culture into a world of discursive signs andreferents. In that way, it helped deepen the rift between the natural sci-ences and the humanities and cultural sciences.

Isn’t it odd, however, that the historical semantics of ‘culture’ (seeBohme, 1996) refers back to agrarian methods and operations and tohand-based crafts? ‘Culture’ has its largely prosaic origins in the tilling ofa field (cultura agri) and in gardening work (cultura horti); it is first andforemost the work with things – their cultivation – that surround us on adaily basis. Indeed, Latin words such as colere, culture, and culturaharbor the etymological traces of a conception of culture centeringaround techniques and rites, skills and practices that provide for thestability of lived-in space and the continuity of time, and have thusmade our world into a human world by ‘cultivating’ (or de-primitivizing)it (Bohme, 1996: 54). Culture contains an impulse toward action: it iswhat is ‘done and practiced’ (Busche, 2000: 70).

The evolution of the concept of culture, however, ‘forgets’ its genesis.Over time, the material and technical elements of culture recede furtherand further into the background, as the term is ‘refined’ into a culturaanimi with the intention of ‘spiritualizing’ it. This spiritualizationexpresses itself in the educational values of science, art, and philosophy.All it required in the 20th century was a ‘linguistic turn’ (the ‘discovery’of language as the pivot for the conception of ourselves and the world) tofacilitate the congruence of culture and the symbolic, that is, the identi-fication of culture with all that is semiotically given and interpretable.And so it came to pass that the procedures of textual analysis and her-meneutics advanced to become the favorite model for the understandingof cultural orders.

2. This discursivization of culture has – at least – three notable effects:a. Misjudging the epistemic power of the image. The hierarchy betweenlanguage and image, in terms of priority and import, has become indir-ectly proportional to the facility with which images of all kinds – photo-graphs, film, and television – have usurped our everyday world. Practicesthat create images are cultural property, as long as they can be assignedto the realm of art, which is to say, as long as they are sufficientlyremoved from science and knowledge. Understood as the silent step-sister of language, without the potential for argumentation or, evenmore important, knowledge-generation, the world of pictures accruescultural significance in the form of paintings and the mass media. Therest are illustrations . . .b. The disavowal of mathematical formalisms. Those who insist on anintimate relationship with western culture acknowledge without shamethat they don’t want to have any truck with formulas. The fear of

Kramer and Bredekamp 21

formulas is almost a cultural property in and of itself, and formalism isoften suspected of entailing self-alienation. When Edmund Husserldescribed the mathematization and formalization of the modern sciencesas a crisis in the experience-ability of life, he echoed the anxieties of theEuropean tradition of culture (see Husserl, 1970). One common viewholds that where letters morph into formulas, content and interpretationgo out the window; the manipulation of alphabetic and numerical signs isblocking sense and understanding. Language surrenders its symbolicpower in its pact with numbers and becomes a quasi-diabolic technique.c. The lopsided concentration of media-historical and media-theoreticalresearch on the relationship between orality and literacy. Media areassigned a role in cultural history whenever they appear as ‘intralin-guistic’ phenomena, that is, during the transition from speech to writing.In that way, the relationship between orality and literacy could easily bepromoted to a special branch within the humanities, with the implicationthat writing could be understood as a purely discursive phenomenon,that is, as phonographic writing. Musical notation, the operative lan-guages of algebraic and arithmetical formulas, logical calculus, and pro-gram ‘languages’ are all characterized by a graphism independent ofsound, and thus remain outside the boundaries of the traditional conceptof language-based literacy.

This ‘Abc’ of a discursive concept of culture can be reduced to apolemical formula: the direction of our changing meaning of culturegoes from technique to text, from things to symbols, from processingto interpreting. And where things are the other way round – where textsfunction as techniques (as in the computing protocols of mathematics),where symbols reveal their manipulable materiality, and where differ-ences in interpretation become secondary to the algorithms of operativesets – they will inevitably be suspected of being a retreat of the discourse-based concept of culture in the face of the advancing techno-mathematical mechanics of civilization.

3. In 1936, when Alan Turing formulated the intuitive concept of com-putable functions with the help of his model of a Turing machine(Turing, 1937), it was no more than a further proposition in a series ofmathematically equivalent propositions coming from Godel, Church,Kleene, Post, and Markov (see Kramer, 1988: 157). Nonetheless, hismodel differed from those of his mathematical rivals: it is no coincidencethat Turing lent his name to the shift from the ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’ to the‘Turing Galaxy’. Three elements of his Turing machine are central to thisshift (see Kramer, 1991: 4). Turing opens up a cognitive dimension withhis claim that his mathematical formalism renders explicit what a humancalculator does when working with paper and pencil, which is to say,


when writing. Second, he further develops the convertibility between thesymbolic and the technical already surmised by Leibniz, and along with itthe convertibility between the semiotic and the physical, and, by exten-sion, between software and hardware. And he finally projects the Turingmachine as a universal medium by showing that there are universalTuring machines capable of imitating every special Turing machinebecause the codes of the latter can be inscribed – that is, programmed– onto the strip of the universal machine.

Thus Turing demonstrates to what degree (formal) texts can simultan-eously be machines, and vice versa. The Turing machine marks the pointwhen mind and machine are no longer at odds with one another, butacknowledge their relationship (their family resemblance, as it were). Atthe same time, Turing’s inspirations proved incapable of softening thehardened structures of modern culture, perhaps precisely because of hisuse of mathematical language. In order for that to happen a discoursewas required that could claim to follow in the tradition of the humanities,albeit in a culturalist guise.

4. It is indeed no longer possible to ignore the signs that the idea ofculture-as-text is eroding. At the moment, we can identify at least fourfrontlines of this process of ‘erosion’:a. The recognition that culture-creating practices are fluid. ‘Culture’ is nolonger confined to what is enshrined in works, monuments, and docu-ments in stable and statutory form. Originating in the field of languagetheory, the debate on ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ has spilled overand into the social and culture sciences as well as aesthetic and art his-tory, in the process relativizing the focus on text and representations byemphasizing the significance of cultures through acts, implementations,rituals and routines (Wirth, 2002). The English term ‘cultural studies’ hasmade everyday practices into a legitimate object of study (Bohme et al.,2000: 12). The demarcation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture has lost itssharply polarized distinction.b. Uncovering ‘silent processes’ of knowledge. For a long time, science hasbeen seen as the embodiment of theory and the search for evidence cen-tered around a propositional and language-based form of knowledge.But recently the history of science has discovered the technical and sym-bolic practices (Bredekamp, 2001) housed in labs, studios, and lecturehalls, which are responsible for communicating and exhibiting ‘objects ofknowledge’ in the first place (see Bredekamp, 2003; Latour, 1989).Theories of knowledge, in turn, have shifted attention to non-propositional forms of knowledge, that is, implied and embodied know-ledge manifesting and legitimating itself through the handling of objectsand instruments.


c. A willingness to de-hermeneuticize the notions of ‘mind’ and ‘sense.’Philologists explore the material and medial foundations of literaturecultures; they reconstruct the emergence of sense out of non-sense (seeGumbrecht, 1996). The social sciences investigate communication as asocial operation. Media theory, which transformed the ‘linguistic turn’into a ‘medial turn’, reconstructs the technological dimension of mediaby showing that media not only communicate, they also produce whatthey communicate (see Kittler, 1997). The formative effects of mathem-atics on culture and the prehistory of the computer and computer sciencefurthermore suggest (as envisaged by Turing) that the symbolic and themachinic relate to one another like two sides of the same coin (Kramer,1988).d. The epistemological dimension of imagery. The eye of the mind is any-thing but blind (see Heintz and Huber, 2001). Rather, for both the his-tory of cognition and our practices of knowledge, visuality is anythingbut a merely illustrative sideshow – it constitutes the irreducible centerfor the research and evidentiary context of the sciences. In the emergingdiscipline of imagology, ‘the iconology of the present’ (a term coined byHorst Bredekamp and Gottfried Boehm [e.g. Boehm, 2001]), technicalimages are investigated precisely on the basis of their aesthetic potentialas the indispensable element for the formation of scientific objectivity.While Husserl in his ‘crisis statement’ lamented de-sensualization andabstraction as the residue of scientific development, it on the contrarybecomes clear now that it is precisely the sensualization – the aesthetici-zation – of invisible processes and theoretical objects that are the fuel ofscientific change.2

To summarize: the ‘textualization’ of culture has reached its limits. Bytransgressing those boundaries, the concept of culture assumes new con-tours. Culture is no longer a matter of monolithic immobility congealedin works, documents or monuments, but liquefies into our everyday prac-tices with objects, symbols, instruments and machines. The right of exclu-sivity, which language used to claim for itself (with regard to representingculture), is no longer unchallenged. It is in the (inter)play with language,images, writing, and machines – in the reciprocity between the symbolicand the technical, between discourse and the iconic – that cultures emergeand reproduce.

5. Is it a coincidence that the technological phenomenon of the net-worked computer emerges at the intersection of the four tendencies wehave just described? The computer regulates almost all productive pro-cesses; it coordinates the social communication of our society and inter-venes in the production of knowledge. It manages all that precisely byhaving fully permeated the routines and practices of our everyday world.


It is the everyday technology for us all. As a Turing machine made real, itreveals and enacts how formalism and machine, symbol and technology,interpenetrate and how their functional processes can mutually substitutefor one another. Both medium and machine, it demonstrates that thetransfer of signs fundamentally depends on the technical processing asdata. And the binary system as a universal digital code reminds us thatthe computer does not just squash the potential of writing in the flood ofdigitized images, but that, on the contrary, it gives it a new lease on lifeby bringing it back into play as the elementary vision of the technologicaland the machinic. Numerical simulation ushers in a form of writingwhich makes possible new forms of scientific visualization that, in turn,are establishing themselves as a third form of scientific practice side byside with lab work and theorization.

The use of computers has hence advanced to the level of a cultural tech-nique. If, however, the long-term effects of computerization are in ‘thenature’ of a cultural technique, is it not advisable to subsume the varyingdiscourses undermining a text-based notion of culture under the headingof ‘cultural technique’ and thus to endow them with a focused and pro-grammatic direction? Cultural techniques are the hotbed of any culture.Analyzing the physiognomy of a culture means investigating its culturaltechniques. The history of culture always already is the history of its cul-tural techniques, just as the history of science cannot be decoupled fromthe changes in the everyday techniques of perception, communication,representation, archiving, counting, measuring . . .

6. What, then, does ‘cultural technique’ signify? The agricultural originsof the term may be significant, but further elaboration is necessary.Terms that fertilize the work of various disciplines and establish relation-ships among them are allowed to retain a certain level of non-specificity.And yet, any analysis from the point of view of cultural techniques sharessome characteristic features. As a concrete example, let us take a look atthe written computations in the decimal system, a cultural technique offoundational importance for the Gutenberg era that had become canon-ical by the 15th century following the introduction of Indo-Arabic num-bers in Europe.

Paralleling the dissemination of Indo-Arabic numbers in Europe, andtheir corresponding algorithms, object-based computation, as in the caseof a computation board (or an abacus), gave way to computation withgraphic signs on paper. However: what ‘counts’ with the numbers is thatthey can be manipulated following schematic rules. Computing withnumbers can be realized as the operation of the sequencing of signs.The signs function as sensorial or visual markers, or as texture; theyembody a structure of signification that needs to be physically produced


and manipulated in the space between the eye and the hand. For thatreason, the algorithms of computation, which are not subject to inter-pretation, share such great affinities with technical-material practices: acomputer – not to be confused with a human mathematician! – will becalculating all the more correctly the more it behaves like a machine.There is a growing divide between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’;skill and knowledge are going their separate ways. The daily use ofoperative signs removes the burden and complexities of interpretation.Calculus is always already a kind of ‘mechanism of forgetting’. In orderto calculate correctly, we don’t need to be able to provide an answer tothe question, ‘What is a zero?’ Calculating correctly does not require atheory of numbers or algorithms, and for that very reason ushers in anunforeseen explosion of mathematical competence in daily life: comput-ing with Indian numbers is no longer the exclusive privilege of ecclesias-tical and academic circles but enters the world of merchants and thecurricula of general education: thank God for Adam Riese! (Ries,1892; see also Menninger, 1979, II: 254).

Written computation, however, does not only lodge itself in the prac-tices of everyday life and change what ‘everybody’ can do. Almost all themajor mathematical breakthroughs in the 16th and 17th centuries bearwitness to the ingenuity of the decimal calculus, which is grounded in thealgorithmic operations of signs for numbers. That is true for the intro-duction of letter-based computation through Francois Viete, who pre-pared the way for symbolic algebra by transferring computation withnumbers to alphabetic signs and hence generalized algebraic rules inwritable form (Viete, 1970). That is true of Rene Descartes, who byrecoding geometrical figures into arithmetical sequences of numbersfounded analytical geometry (Descartes, 1981). And it is true forGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus, which translates theefficiency of the decimal calculus with finite numbers into the range ofnumbers infinitely large and small (Leibniz, 1846). In so doing, he ren-dered mute the vexing question of whether or not infinitely large andsmall numbers exist in actuality in executing correct calculations aboutthese numbers. And it was Leibniz who, with the invention of the binaryalphabet, spelled out ‘the spirit of calculus’ as the effect of a symbolicmachine (Leibniz, 1966). Moreover, the physical manipulation with cal-culable signs also gives birth to new, that is, theoretical, objects: theevolution of the number zero is a case in point, as are such mathematicalobjects as differential equations or imaginary numbers. On the one hand,the aesthetic of calculus is such that it ‘feeds’ entities into the register ofsensory perception that would otherwise be cognitively invisible; at thesame time, however, such an aesthetic produces and constitutes thesekinds of ‘objects’ at the moment of their visualization in the first place.

In conclusion, cultural techniques are promoting the achievements ofintelligence through the senses and the externalizing operationalization


of thought processes. Cognition does not remain locked up in any invis-ible interiority; on the contrary, intelligence and spirit advance to becomea kind of distributive, and hence collective, phenomenon that is deter-mined by the hands-on contact humans have with things and symbolicand technical artifacts.

7. Let’s recapitulate the outlines of the cultural-technical perspective:cultural techniques are (a) operative processes that enable work withthings and symbols; (b) they are based on a separation between animplied ‘know how’ and an explicit ‘know that’; (c) they can be under-stood as skills that habituate and regularize the body’s movements andthat express themselves in everyday fluid practices; (d) at the same time,such techniques can provide the aesthetic and material-technical founda-tion for scientific innovation and new theoretical objects; (e) the mediainnovations accruing in the wake of changing cultural techniques arelocated in a reciprocity of print and image, sound and number, which,in turn; (f) opens up new exploratory spaces for perception, communi-cation, and cognition; and (g) these exploratory spaces come into viewwhere disciplinary boundaries become permeable and lay bare phenom-ena and relationships whose profile precisely does not coincide with theboundaries of specific disciplines.

Translated by Michael Wutz

Notes

1. This article was previously published as: ‘Kultur, Technik, Kulturtechnik:Wider die Diskursivierung der Kultur’, in Kramer S and Bredekamp H(eds) Bild, Schrift, Zahl. Munich: Fink, 2003, pp. 11–22.

2. ‘. . .we must make clear to ourselves the strangeness . . . that everything whichmanifests itself as real through the specific sense qualities must have itsmathematical index. . . .The whole of infinite nature, taken as a concreteuniverse of causality – for this was inherent in that strange conception –became [the object] of a peculiarly applied mathematics’ (Husserl, 1970: 37).

References

Boehm, G. (2001) ‘Zwischen Auge und Hand: Bilder als Instrumente derErkenntnis’. In: Heintz, B. and Huber, J. (eds) Mit dem Auge denken.Strategien der Sichtbarmachung in wissenschaftlichen und virtuellen Welten.Zurich: Voldemmeer, pp. 43–54.

Bohme, H. (1996) ‘Vom Cultus zur Kultur(wissenschaft). Zur historischenSemantik des Kulturbegriffs’. In: Glaser, R. and Luserke, M. (eds)Literaturwissenschaft – Kulturwissenschaft. Positionen, Theorien,Perspektiven. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, pp. 48–68.


Bohme, H., Matussek, P. and Muller, L. (2000) Orientierung Kulturwissenschaft:Was Sie Kann, Was Sie Will. Reinbek: Rowohlt.

Bredekamp, H. (2001) Gazing hands and blind spots: Galileo as draftsman. In:Renn, J. (ed.) Galileo in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,pp. 153–192.

Bredekamp, H. (2003) Antikensehnsucht und Maschinenglauben. Die Geschichteder Kunstkammer und die Zukunft der Kunstgeschichte, 4th edn. Berlin:Wagenbach.

Busche, H. (2000) ‘Was ist Kultur?’, Dialektik 1: 69–90.Descartes, R. (1981) Geometrie, ed. Schlesinger L. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche

Buchgesellschaft.Gumbrecht, H.-U. (1996) ‘Das Nicht-Hermeneutische: Skizze einer Genealogie’.

In: Huber, J. and Muller, A. (eds) Die Wiederkehr des Anderen. Basel:Stroemfeld und Museum fur Gestaltung, pp. 17–36.

Heintz, B. and Huber, J. (eds) (2001) Mit dem Auge denken. Strategien derSichtbarmachung inwissenschaftlichenundvirtuellenWelten.Zurich:Voldemmeer.

Husserl, E. (1970) The Crisis of European Sciences and TranscendentalPhenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, ed. andtrans. Carr D. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Kittler, F. (1997) Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. Johnston J.Amsterdam: G+B Arts.

Kramer, S. (1988) Symbolische Maschinen. Die Idee der Formalisierungin geschichtlichem Abriss. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Kramer, S. (1991) ‘Denken as Rechenprozedur: Zur Genese eines kognitions-wissenschaftlichen Paradigmas’, Kognitionswissenschaft 2: 1–10.

Latour, B. (1989) La Science en action. Paris: Editions La Decouverte.Leibniz, G.W. (1846) Historia et Origino calculi differentialis a GG. Leibniz

conscripta, ed. Carl I. Hanover: Gerhardt.Leibniz, G.W. (1966) Herrn von Leibniz Rechnung mit Null und Eins. Berlin:

Siemens.Lenk, C. (1996) Kultur als Text. Uberlegungen zu einer Interpretationsfigur. In:

Glaser R and Luserke M (eds) Literaturwissenschaft – Kulturwissenschaft.Positionen, Theorien, Perspektiven. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, pp. 116–128.

Menninger, K. (1979) Zahlwort und Ziffer. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Zahl,2 vols, 3rd edn. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Ries, A. (1892) Adam Riese, sein Leben, seine Rechenbucher und seine Art zurechnen. Die Co� von Adam Riese, ed. Berlet B. Leipzig: Kesselring.

Turing, A. (1937) ‘On computable numbers, with an application to theEntscheidungproblem’, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society2(42–43): 544–546.

Vieta, F. (1970) Opera Mathematica, ed. Schooten F v. Hildesheim: Olms (repro-duction of the Leiden edition 1646).

Wirth, U. (ed.) (2002) Performanz. Zwischen Sprachphilosophie undKulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Sybille Kramer studied history, philosophy and political science inHamburg and Marburg. She received her PhD in 1976, completed herHabilitation in Dusseldorf in 1988 and was appointed Professor of


Theoretical Philosophy at the Freie Universitat Berlin in 1989. Amongher most important publications are Technik, Gesellschaft und Natur.Versuch uber ihren Zusammenhang (Frankfurt, 1982), SymbolischeMaschinen. Die Idee der Formalisierung in geschichtlichem Abriß(Darmstadt, 1988) and Medium, Bote, Ubertragung. Kleine Metaphysikder Medialitat (Frankfurt, 2008).

Horst Bredekamp studied philosophy and sociology in Munich, Berlinand Hamburg. After teaching at the University of Hamburg he wasappointed Professor of Art History at the Humboldt University inBerlin. He has published widely on the art of the Renaissance,Mannerism, art and technology, and political iconography. In 2001 hereceived the Sigmund-Freud Prize for scientific prose.

Michael Wutz (PhD, Emory University) is Brady PresidentialDistinguished Professor in the Department of English at Weber StateUniversity, in Ogden, Utah, and the editor of Weber – TheContemporary West. He is the co-editor of Reading Matters: Narrativein the New Media Ecology (Cornell University Press, 1997), theco-translator of Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter(Stanford University Press, 1999, with Geoffrey Winthrop-Young), andthe author of Enduring Words: Narrative in a Changing Media Ecology(University of Alabama Press, 2009).



30(6) 30–47




DOI: 10.1177/0263276413499189

tcs.sagepub.com

Article

Second-Order Animals:Cultural Techniques ofIdentity andIdentification

Thomas MachoHumboldt University, Germany

Abstract

This paper explores the thesis that the concept of cultural techniques should be

strictly limited to symbolic technologies that allow for self-referential recursions.

Writing enables one to write about writing itself; painting itself can be depicted in

painting; films may feature other films. In other words, cultural techniques are defined

by their ability to thematize themselves; they are second-order techniques as

opposed to first-order techniques like cooking or tilling a field. To illustrate his

thesis, Macho discusses a sequence of historical examples, from body signs and

death masks to digital code and ID papers. These examples serve to reiterate

another basic proposal that is already announced in the paper’s title. The recursive,

self-observing qualities of cultural techniques make them a ‘technology of the self’

and thus render them indispensable for the generation, repetition and maintenance

of identity.

Keywords

cultural techniques, identity, second-order observation, writing tools

1. Symbolic Animals

Ever since Aristotle, humans have been seen as animals capable of speak-ing and inventing, ordering and manipulating signs. In contrast to mostother animals, they make use of alphabets, number sequences, notationsystems or codes: they practice cultural techniques. The term does notencompass all the techniques a culture has at its disposal, but strictlythose techniques that make symbolic work possible. Every culture is


Thomas Macho, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Institut fur Kulturwissenschaft, Georgenstr. 47,

Raum 4.29, Berlin, 10117, Germany.



grounded in numerous techniques that guarantee its survival, such as thetechniques of fire use, hunting, the making of clothes and tools, nutritionand cooking, agriculture, economy, or social organization. Primates, too,are in possession of some of those techniques, which is why Frans deWaal (2001) rightly assigns the term ‘cultures’ to them. Human cultures,however, are not simply composites of these multiple techniques, butevolve out of their symbolic concentration. This symbolic work endowsall other activities with their specific meaning; it gives order to the worldand enables cultures to develop self-reflexive concepts. Symbolic workrequires specific cultural techniques, such as speaking, translating andunderstanding, forming and representing, calculating and measuring,writing and reading, singing and making music.

Cultural techniques differ from all other techniques through theirpotential self-referentiality, a pragmatics of recursion. From their verybeginnings, speaking can be spoken about and communication be com-municated. We can produce paintings that depict paintings or painters;films often feature other films. One can only calculate and measure withreference to calculation and measurement. And one can of course writeabout writing, sing about singing, and read about reading. On the otherhand, it is impossible to thematize fire while making a fire, just as it isimpossible to thematize field tilling while tilling a field, cooking whilecooking, and hunting while hunting. We may talk about recipes or hunt-ing practices, represent a fire in pictorial or dramatic form, or sketch anew building, but in order to do so we need to avail ourselves of thetechniques of symbolic work, which is to say, we are not making a fire,hunting, cooking, or building at that very moment. Using a phrasecoming out of systems theory, we could say that cultural techniquesare second-order techniques.

As second-order techniques, cultural techniques have from their verybeginning been operating as techniques of self-reflection, identity forma-tion and identification. Even today, the majority of cultural techniquesserve as vehicles of self-description, self-legitimation, and authentication,whether in the form of pictures, writings or numbers: be they portraits andpassport photos, signs of the body (such as fingerprints), seals, stamps,coats of arms or logos, signatures and signs, or numerical codes (rangingfrom one’s personal and social security number to the PIN-code at theATM). Cultural techniques have always been practiced as ‘technologies ofthe self’ (in the sense of Michel Foucault, 1988). They constitute subjectsthat have evolved out of a multiplicity of recursions andmedia, not simplya singular ‘mirror stage’, as with Lacan (2002 [1977]).

2. Body Signs

The history of these ‘technologies of the self’ begins in prehistoricaldarkness. When the Paleolithic cult caves in France and Spain were

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first explored, scientists did not only see the impressive and realistic rep-resentations of numerous animals, but also spotted occasional handprints. These prints were either positives, whereby a painted hand waspressed onto the rock, or negatives, meaning that the artists traced thecontour of a stretched-out hand with dabs of color or a blowing tube.(See, for example, the prints in the caves of Pech-Merle, Gargas, ElCastillo, Tibiran, Bayron, La Baume-Latrone, Rocamadour, Bernifal,Font-de-Gaume, Le Portel [cf. Leroi-Gourhan, 1982], or in Chauvet inthe Ardeche Valley, which was not discovered until 1994 [cf. Chauvetet al., 1995: 30, 112]). Sometimes these prints would appear in isolation,other times they appeared in clusters. In Gargas, for example, scientistsidentified 150 red and black hands, 50 in El Castillo, and 12 in Tibiranand Pech-Merle. Originally, the prehistorian Henri Breuil assumed thatvirtually all of the impressions were those of left hands; later, scientistsrecognized that those impressions contained some made of right hands(with the back). Most of the hands are so small that they were firstthought to be impressions of women and children (which was given fur-ther credence by the fact that the caves of Niaux, Aldene or Pech-Merlecontained numerous impressions of the feet of children in the loamy soil).Most puzzling were the hand impressions in Gargas: a substantialnumber of hands appeared to have mutilated or twisted fingers, whichwas originally assumed to be evidence of archaic practices of ritualizedamputations. Only later – as is so often the case with prehistoricresearch – were scientists able to correct their dramatic observations:upon closer scrutiny, it became evident that the fingers of those handsthat had been placed with their back against the rock were bent inwardand, in some instances, retouched and shortened afterwards.

The meaning of these hand prints and their performative practicesremains unclear. Are they connected to the abstract symbols, sticks orspirals, that Andre Leroi-Gourhan classified as gender indications? Werethey produced in the course of magic rituals of ‘rebirth’ of animals orhumans, as was surmised by Max Raphael (1979) or Hans Peter Duerr(1984)? Or were these hand prints indeed the first signs of origination, asMartin Schaub assumes:

The artists of the prehistoric caves have exempted themselvesalmost completely out of their works. Yet the imprint of theirhand is everywhere: as greeting, memory, signature? . . .Did the art-ists in these caves write, or sign their artworks? What is the signifi-cance of the ‘mutilated’ hands one can see every once in a while? Arethey hunting inscriptions, ‘priestly’ signs, the commemoration of avisit, a communication with the dead and descendants, signs ofremembrance, traces of rituals, signs of magical empowerment,grave inscriptions? Many theories have been advanced, but nothing


is conclusive except for the proud gesture that says ‘I’ and ‘here.’ I,my hand, and here is the testimony to that. (1996: 84)

Already in antiquity it was common to sign contracts with an impressionof fingers, but as a medium of crime detection – as a modern technique ofidentification by the police – ‘fingerprints’ were not popularized until thelate 19th century (Galton, 1965 [1892]). At that point, they no longeroperated as active but passive signs of the body – they had been used forthousands of years, when it came to branding cattle or marking slaves orprisoners.

3. Seals, Stamps and Coats of Arms

From a technical perspective, the history of body signs can be seen as achapter in the history of ‘impressions’, which always predate expressions.What is being ‘impressed’ are either parts of the body (such as hands orfingers), or objects onto a surface (such as plaster, clay, or wax). Thetechnique of ‘imprinting’ does not differentiate between bodies and arti-facts, between practices of embodiment and the use of objects extendingthe body. Every imprint requires a ‘carrier or a material substrate, agesture producing that very imprint (usually a gesture of impression, orat least of touch), and a mechanical result, that is, an indented or pro-truding mark’ (Didi-Huberman, 1999: 14, emphasis in original). Thisimprint, however, is not tied to specific objects. In the case of an authen-tication, the imprint should produce a mark that points to its maker – asign that should not be mistaken for an unintended trace, but rather bedecipherable and legible as a specific and individual signature. Whilehumans often take care not to leave any ‘detectable’ traces, theseimprints, on the contrary, should by their very definition indicate whomade them.

Perhaps it was this strategic intention which served to discredit bodysigns, for it is difficult to discern whether the trace of a body, a hand, afinger, or a foot was produced by accident or by design. Who knowswhether it was not for that very reason that Paleolithic hand prints hadto be retouched after the fact? The history of pictures and of writing can,hence, be told as the history of instruments necessary for making impres-sions: stencils, pencils, brushes, quills. The first signs of authenticationwere imprinted onto clay tablets or urns with seals and stamps as early as4000 BC. At first people used carved bones or stones to leave specificpatterns, ornaments, or marks in the clay; only later did they use metal orprecious stones. The seals left individual, unmistakable imprints; if theyserved as a personal emblem, they were often worn like ornaments: stableand reliable elements on a body whose organic extensions were capableof producing fleeting and ambiguous traces only. In the Orient, forexample, people liked to wear pin seals as bracelets – small, cylindrical

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pins with pictures or cuneiform writings. Seal rings with the imprint oftheir wearers became popular in Greek antiquity. (We, too, by the way,are fond of wearing our preferred writing instruments close to us, in chestpockets or purses.)

The ecclesiastical and secular authorities of the Middle Ages, for theirpart, developed differentiated systems of signs as an index of status andaffiliation. Royal dynasties, noble families, knights, but also popes, car-dinals, bishops and later the guilds used colors and signs that had to becomposed into coats of arms, following the art of heraldry. The code ofheraldry distinguished between seven primary colors: the ‘lacquer colors’red, blue, green, and black, the ‘metals’ gold and silver, as well as purple(violet), which could be used as both a lacquer and metal color. Coats ofarms were assembled in accordance with the rule to alternate lacquercolors with metals. They were used not only in the service of represen-tation, but also identified friends and enemies during battle.

4. Speaking Objects

Seals, pin seals and stamps were (and are) objects giving voice to otherobjects. Until today, their most important function has consistedin combining texts, pictures, or objects with an I or a person into aspeech act. With the help of a seal or stamp, a speech act is transferredonto an object; the resultant artifact proclaims, for example, who hasmade or authorized it, or who owns it (aside from the motifs that itrepresents in its image, text, or materiality). Basically, seals functionthe way speech acts do in relation to a written text or a painted picture;the seal and stamp represent – either as an object or ornament – theexternally materialized voice of authority or the author. That’s why thecharge of ‘safekeeping a seal’ in the advanced civilizations of old wasentrusted to the highest-ranking civil servants, because the ‘custodian ofthe seal’, in a sense, exercised control over the voice of the king, his‘second body’. Today’s English ‘Lord Chancellor’, formerly the presidingofficer of the House of Lords and head of the Judiciary, evolved from the‘Custodian of the Great Seal’, and France and Italy retained that title fortheir minister of justice as well. In the Holy Roman Empire, theMargrave of Mainz served as ‘Arch-Chancellor’ and ‘sigilli custos’ until1806, and even in the bureaucracies of today stamps bearing a so-called‘official seal’ are kept under lock and key.

The history of seals (and later of signets in Greek antiquity) can alsobe associated with the development of inscribed objects – i.e. vases orstatues – which have of late become of interest to archaeologists. TheItalian epigraphy expert Mario Burzachechi described these artifacts as‘speaking objects’ or ‘oggetti parlanti’ to account for the curious fact thatmost of their inscriptions were in the first person and – because of wordsrunning together – make sense only when read aloud (1962: 3–54).


Reading in such an arrangement can be understood as a kind of ‘over-whelming’ of the reader by the ‘speaking’ statue or artifact, as JesperSvenbro has argued.

The object of inscription is named in the first person, the writer, bycontrast, in the third. (Objects naming the writer in the third personhave only been found dating back to about 550 BC, and they doso, in part, to hide the real authority identified by the ‘I’.) A 6thcentury amphora may serve as an example: ‘I have been made byKleimachos and I belong to him (ekeınou eimı).’ When you read thisKleimachos will no longer be here; he will be gone, which is com-municated well by the demonstrative pronoun ekeınos. (Ekei-nos isthe demonstrative pronoun of the third person pointing to the factthat the person is not ‘here,’ but ‘there,’ ‘away from here’ (ekeı).)The amphora itself, by contrast, is here. Nobody can claim the ‘I’in the inscription. Kleimachos cannot do that. He writes onto hisown amphora because he already anticipates his future absence(otherwise, it would not be worth his while to write on it). (1999: 74).

5. Portraits and Death Masks

Portraits and self-portraits are among the most important cultural tech-niques of self-reflection. What is unclear is when precisely humans beganto depict their own faces. The Paleolithic caves contained few represen-tations of humans, let alone portraits. For a couple of millennia artisanspainted animals almost exclusively, but virtually no humans; and ifhuman representations were etched into the rock they were typicallynot given facial features. The artisans of the Old Stone Age had ‘a varietyof materials at their disposal and an arsenal of powerful images fromeveryday life, with which they transformed caves into holy places’, butthey did not make portraits of members of their own species. ‘The rep-ertoire of images was to find its apex in the magnificent, richly renderedgalleries at Lascaux in the southwestern part of France. Lascaux has beencalled the Sistine Chapel of the Stone Age. It is a holy place where spir-itual thinking has been externalized, where the drama of the imaginativelife is depicted. And yet in this cave, among hundreds of images, there isnot a single example of a human face’ (Landau, 1989: 189).

In the 1960s, during her excavations at the site of the Neolithic town ofJericho, the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon discovered a series ofhuman skulls that were artfully decorated. Through the retrospectiveapplication of layers of lime and plaster, those faces were given a facelift, as it were, to counter the effects of facial decomposition. TerryLandau writes that ‘each face is distinct and strongly individual. Eachis made with a purpose. That purpose was to perpetuate life beyond

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death by replacing the transient flesh with something more enduring’(1989: 192). Flesh decomposes but bones last; skin can be conserved,much in contrast to the innards. The qualities of various materials suchas stone, metal, wood, clay, plaster or wax correspond to these differ-ences, and these qualities determine how and in what way the materialityof a corpse can be transmuted into the form of a picture or statue.

Georges Didi-Huberman, for example, points out that the famedgolden masks of the royal graves of Mycenae, dating back to the 16thcentury BC, were apparently ‘made directly from a face’ and meant torepresent the ‘three-dimensionality of the head’; they reproduced ‘thesuggestion of resemblance through touch’. At the same time, ‘the attentionto modeling and the hammer work’ evident in these masks also points to ‘asolid schematism’ which testifies to ‘the predominance of ornamentalthinking in the representation of the human form’. What has to be fac-tored in is that the ‘dialectical treatment of physical touch and ornament’would be unthinkable ‘if the gold plate as carrier metal were not asextraordinarily pliable as it is, and if the imprinting process were notinherently reversible. Gold plate can be worked on from both sides’(1999: 34, emphasis in original).

Hans Belting connected the fundamental paradox of the deceased – his‘present absence’ (Landsberg, 1973: 14) – with the oldest impulses of thevisual and plastic arts.

The real meaning of the picture is in its representation of somethingthat is absent, and can only be present in pictorial form. It makesvisible, not what is in the picture, but can only appear in the picture.The picture of a deceased, in that sense, is not an anomaly, but theur-meaning of what a picture is in the first place. The deceased isalways already an absence and death itself an unbearable absencewhose void the picture served to fill and make bearable.

But this second picture is only a response to the first picture, as Beltingnotes (pace Maurice Blanchot):

Death itself is already present in the very picture because the corpsehas already morphed into an image that merely resembles the bodyof the living person . . .The living person is no longer a body, butonly the image of one. Nobody can resemble himself. He [or she]does it only in an image or as a corpse.

Dying, in that sense, means to be transformed into the ‘image of oneself’.

The terror of death resides in the fact that a speaking and breathingbody transforms, at one fell swoop and in front of everybody, into amute image . . .Humans were helplessly exposed to the experience of


life commuting into its own image upon death. They lost thedeceased, who had participated in the life of the community, to amere image.

Belting argues that it was only this contingent experience of ‘becoming animage’ that prompted humans to make pictures or statues on their own.

Now it was an artificial image that countered the other image, thecorpse. Through the act of making images humans became active intheir attempt to resist the experience and terror of death. (Belting,1996: 94)

Later it became common practice to make an imprint of the faces of thedeceased. The Latin term ‘larva’ designates an actor’s mask as well as theghost of a dead person. This double meaning is not coincidental; it refersto the well-known custom of letting the dead reappear as bearers ofmasks. The Romans routinely made waxen imprints and masks of prom-inent figures in public life, which were preserved as effigies and displayedduring various parades. According to the historian Polybius (2nd centuryBC), such waxen imprints were first used during burial ceremonies, latermounted in ancestral portrait galleries, and publicly displayed (and deco-rated) for appropriate occasions. At funerals or sacrificial ceremonies,powerful ancestors were represented either through dressed-up effigies oractors wearing the respective death masks. Romulus and Pompey parti-cipated in this way at the funeral of Emperor Augustus, aside from theEmperor himself (Von Schlosser, 1993: 21).

6. Mirror Images and Shadows

Humans and animals change into their image not just in death, but alsowith each reflection and in every shadow. It is certainly true that reflectionsand shadows don’t produce lasting signs, as Umberto Eco has emphasized(cf. Eco, 1995: 9–37). Maybe it was for that very reason that both wereviewed with suspicion in antiquity. Back thenmostmirrors were construednot as flat surfaces but as convex or concave mirrors suitable for opticalexperiments. Reflections were given legitimate status neither in everydaylife nor in scientific experiments, which may well have been attributable tomaterials from which mirrors were constructed. The mirrors ofArchimedes, like many other mirrors dating from the 4th century BC,were presumably made from bronze; later, almost every other conceivablemetal was used for the making of mirrors, provided it was suitable forscraping and polishing. Greece had its first school for mirror makers abouta century following the birth of Plato, where artisans were taught how tosmooth and polish a metal plate with sand without scratching it. Romansand Etruscans had a preference for silver mirrors. Beginning with the first

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century BC, gold mirrors became part of a preferred medium of paymentfor servants among the upper classes. As a general rule, metal mirrors werenot particularly large; they were mostly conceived as hand mirrors(including a handle) or fold-out mirrors (with a stand). The depth offield and color fidelity of metal mirrors can hardly be compared to thequality standards of mirrors today.

It was only in the 14th century that the first glass-based mirrors weremade in Venice, the center of European glass blowing. The reasons forthis delay, especially given that glasses, glass containers and windows hadbeen made for centuries, are evident: much in contrast to metal, glasscannot be rendered smooth and polished. Glass planes have to be castperfectly, usually as hollow cylinders that have to be pried apartafterwards. The first glass mirrors did not come close to an undistortedreflection. Nevertheless, glass mirrors almost instantaneously held a tri-umphant entry into European households. In 14th-century Venice,wealthy men and women

took to ostentatiously wearing glass mirrors about the neck on goldchains as pendant jewelry. While the image in the glass might bedisappointingly poor, the image of a mirror-wearer in the eyes ofothers was one of unmistakable affluence. Men carried swords withsmall mirrors set in the hilt. Royalty collected sets of glass mirrorsframed in ivory, silver, and gold, which were displayed more thanthey were used. Early mirrors had more flash than function, andgiven their poor reflective quality, they probably served best as bric-a-brac. (Panati, 1989: 230)

The breakthrough into the modern production of mirrors did notoccur until the 17th century. In 1687 the French glassmaker BernardPerrot secured the patent for a uniform rolling process of glass planes.Since then, it has become possible to produce not only optical mirrors orcosmetic hand-held or fold-out mirrors but also life-sized mirrors forwalls and stands. Thanks to that technology, spaces could quite literallybe ‘representative’, such as the Great Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, whichwas built in 1686. Thanks to the new technology for mirror production,the magic of mirrors could be defined anew. Previously, that magic hadfascinated luminaries in such forms as Archimedes’ concave mirror,Lorrain-Glas, the medieval magia naturalis, and the catoptric theater ofillusions in the Baroque: if the old mirrors produced a magic of trans-formation, distortion, refraction, transmission, combustion, reductionand magnification, the new mirrors (beginning in the second half ofthe 17th century) made possible a magic of doubling, deceptive resem-blance, reproduction and representation. If the deception in the case ofan old mirror produced the appearance of an object in distorted formand at the wrong place, the deceptive effect of a new mirror yielded an


object in its natural form and at the right place, except that it appeared ina symmetrically reciprocal, that is, inverted, space.

Simply put: the ‘cabinet of mirrors’, a disorienting labyrinth that is stilla feature at some carnivals, was surpassed by the hall of mirrors, whichdemonstrates the serial reproduction of the king (as can be seen on thetitle page of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan of 1651). The magic of trans-formation took a back seat to the magic of repetition, just as the magicof craftsmanship took a backseat to the miraculous machines of indus-trial consumption. Ovid’s monsters in the Metamorphoses (from were-wolves to sirens) were surpassed by the doppelganger of the Romanticperiod.

The history of shadows proceeded differently. While a reflection could,in essence, be made into a real and stable representation only with theadvent of photography, fixing a shadow was possible as early as in anti-quity. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder tells the following, well-known myth of the origin of painting:

We have no certain knowledge as to the commencement of the artof painting . . .The Egyptians assert that it was invented amongthemselves, six thousand years before it passed into Greece; avain boast, it is very evident. As to the Greeks, some say that itwas invented at Sicyon, others at Corinth; but they all agree that itoriginated in tracing lines round the human shadow. The first stageof the art, they say, was this, the second stage being the employmentof single colours; a process known as ‘monochromaton,’ after it hadbecome more complicated, and which is still in use at the presentday . . .On painting we have now said enough, and more thanenough; but it will be only proper to append some accounts ofthe plastic art. Butades, a potter of Sicyon, was the first whoinvented, at Corinth, the art of modelling portraits in the earthwhich he used in his trade. It was through his daughter that hemade the discovery; who, being deeply in love with a young manabout to depart on a long journey, traced the profile of his face, asthrown upon the wall by the light of the lamp. Upon seeing this, herfather filled in the outline, by compressing clay upon the surface,and so made a face in relief, which he then hardened by fire alongwith other articles of pottery. (Book 35, chs. 5, 43)

It might be appropriate to mention that the young man went to war anddid not return, but his shadow (which was said to travel into the under-world) was captured and fixed as an image before his death.

The technique of shadow painting (skiagraphy) was very popular inGreece. This technique is intimately linked with the cultural techniques ofgeometry and astronomy, where the shadow cast by a shadow shaft

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(gnomon) was retraced and used for measurement (of temporal andspatial relations):

A shaft of the sundial or gnomon casts shadows on the ground oron the face of the dial according to the positions of the stars andthe Sun throughout the year. From Anaximander on, apparently,Greek physicists knew that these readings indicated certain occur-rences in the sky. The light from above describes on the earth or onthe page a pattern which imitates or represents the forms and realpositions of the universe, through the intermediary of the stylus.

As nobody in those days really needed a clock, and as the hoursvaried enormously since summer and winter days, whatever theirlength or brevity, were always divided into twelve, the sundial wasrarely used for telling the time. Thus it was not replaced by thetimepiece but was used as an instrument of scientific research inits own right, demonstrating a model of the world, giving thelength of shadows at midday on the longest and shortest days,and indicating the equinoxes, solstices and latitude of place, forexample. It was more of an observatory than a clock. We do notreally know why the shaft or pin is called a gnomon, but we doknow that this word designates that which understands, decides,judges, interprets or distinguishes the rule which makes knowledgepossible. The construction of the sundial brings natural light andshadow into play, intercepted by this ruler, a tool of knowledge.

To this end, [astronomers] were able to construct a rule as precise asthe stylus which writes. The black ink on the white page reflectsthe ancient shadows cast by the sun via the pointer or sundial.This point writes unaided on the marble or the sand as if theworld knew itself. (Serres, 1995: 79–80)

Cultural techniques as technologies of the self: even the physiognomictables of Johann Caspar Lavater work with shadowy outlines to repre-sent individual (and yet typological) facial features.

7. Signs and Signatures

Seals and stamps produced ‘speaking objects’ long before epigraphicscame onto the scene, and they served as precursors not only of signsbut trademarks as well. Already, by 50 BC, Roman ceramics circulatedas terra sigillata through the civilized world. Imprints of seals conveyedinformation about the manufacturer and the craftsman making theproduct. Individual pieces received a signature, in that sense: a name


functioned as testimony of the manufacturer, and later the owner.At that time, of course, hardly anybody signed anything. In Romanantiquity, with its highly differentiated contractual laws, the imprint ofa thumb was frequently sufficient. In the Middle Ages, people markedcontracts with three crosses. And yet, as early as 439, a Roman lawstipulated that a will could be signed if its content should be keptsecret from witnesses present at the signing; sales contracts too weresigned by name every once in a while. In royal communications, sealswere – well into the Middle Ages – favored over hand signatures, whichwere relatively rare, or three crosses, which certainly made possible thefamous ‘forgeries’ of numerous Merovingian documents or the Donationof Constantine.

The modern system of a personal signature in one’s own hand pre-supposed not only comprehensive literacy (at least of the elite) but also ajudicial system including personal and civil rights and, above all, an acuteawareness of the meaning of proper names as a marker of individualityand distinction. During the Middle Ages it was more often clothing,jewelry, a coat of arms or related attributes that indicated one’s socialstatus and rank, less so one’s proper name. For that reason, any historyof signatures is more directly connected to the techniques of cataloguingand systematizing personal names than to any social and historical inves-tigation into the evolution of the European naming system (the waymargraves, lieges, or saints were given their titles). ‘As impressiveas the evolution of personal identity may strike us in some medievalsources, the written identification of a single person was not just thetriumph of the individual, but first of all the result of his registration’(Groebner, 2004: 51).

Keeping lists of personal names began in the 13th century.Confessional lists kept by church authorities were soon followed bylists of lawbreakers (both sentenced and at large), heretics and peopleburned at stakes – and eventually by a list of taxpayers in the 15th cen-tury. The word ‘signature’, in fact, does not appear until 1536; theEnglish legal system anchored the principle of signature in its statutesin the 17th century. The gradual popularization of the signature inearly modernity is also attributable to the invention of print, which (fol-lowing centuries of perfected calligraphy) facilitated the gradual processof individualized handwriting and, to date, occasionally inspires children(and their adult counterparts) to practice their own signature.

8. Autographs

With the rise of the signature as a distinguishing marker of personalityand identity, seals and stamps were replaced once more by signs of thebody: signatures, after all (unlike seals and stamps), have to be mademanually, in one’s own hand. They endow handwriting generally with an

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iconic quality, not just the signatures of artists that accrued exponentiallybeginning in the 15th century: a ‘typeface’ that is not only legally binding,but can also be understood as an individual’s trace, a sign of character.In 1622, the Italian doctor and professor of medicine Camillo Baldi pub-lished the first treatise on the meaning of handwriting at the University ofBologna, with the following title: Come da un lettera missiva si conoscanola natura e qualita dello scrittore (1992). It would of course be a while forthese first steps in the direction of graphology to be developed. Moreimmediately, knowledge of character – a kind of proto-psychology –ushered in physiognomy, the study of faces. In the third volume ofPhysiognomic Fragments (1777), Lavater illustrated five tables in hisstudy with corresponding handwriting samples, but he remained skep-tical with regard to handwriting’s range of interpretations. Before hand-writing could be associated with the interiority of the subject, the peoplesof Europe had to be alphabetized. Hegel in The Phenomenology of Mindcompared one’s handwriting with one’s voice:

The simple lines of the hand, then, the ring and compass of thevoice, as also the individual peculiarity of the language used: oragain this idiosyncrasy of language, as expressed where the handgives it more durable existence than the voice can do, viz., in writ-ing, especially in the particular style of ‘handwriting’ – all this is anexpression of the inner. (1949: 343)

The many representations (and expressions) of this ‘interiority’, how-ever, had to be first registered and decoded. One year before ThePhenomenology of Mind first appeared, Moreau de la Sarthe, a doctorand professor of medicine in Paris, published a translation of Lavater’sPhysiognomic Fragments; his developments of Lavater’s ideas influenceda number of French clerics who were subsequently preoccupied with theinterpretation of handwriting. Abbe Jean-Hippolyte Michon’s Systemede graphologie appeared in 1875, precisely one hundred years after thepublication of the first volume of Lavater’s Fragments. This work, whichfirst introduced the term graphology, was followed by Methode pratiquede graphologie in 1878. Michon’s system was based on a semiotic rela-tionship of graphological signs – of chirographic idiosyncrasies that wereassociated with ‘signes fixes’ – with corresponding dispositions of char-acter. The publications coming out of Michon’s school of thinking, suchas the Traite pratique de Graphologie in 1885 by Jules Crepieux-Jamin,the son of a watch maker, were quickly translated into German. TheGerman Graphological Society was founded in 1896 by LudwigKlages, Laura von Albertini, and Hans Heinrich Busse. Between 1900and 1908, the society published the Graphologische Monatshefte. In 1917,Klages published the treatise Handwriting and Character. Hardly anyother work by a German philosopher and psychologist has remained


as popular as this one: it is still in print as Gemeinverstandliche Abri� dergraphologischen Technik (‘An accessible sketch of graphological tech-niques’), and, as of 1989, has gone through 29 editions, including numer-ous examples and handwriting samples.

9. Digital Signature and Numerical Codes

The technological revolutions of the computer age have caused a disem-powerment of images and handwriting. These days, hardly anybodypractices personal handwriting, which ratifies what Georg Simmel (inThe Philosophy of Money, 1990 [1900]) noted on the typewriter:‘Writing, an external concrete activity but one that still has a typicallyindividual form’, is counteracted

in favor of [the typewriter’s] mechanical uniformity. On the otherhand, this has a dual advantage: first, the written page now onlyconveys its pure content without any support or disturbance fromits written form, and second, it avoids revealing the most personalelement, which is so often true of handwriting, in superficial andunimportant as well in the most intimate communications. (1990[1900]: 509)

In the meantime, the ubiquity and strategic rationalization of the variousforms of electronic writing have pushed handwriting even further to thesidelines than Simmel ever anticipated. For that very reason, the precioustraces of ‘the most personal element’ were reframed as antiques andrarities and (as with autographs) became highly desired collectors’items at auctions triggering bidding wars. For the photos and autographsof stars, computer data and emails are as yet no match.

Photographic portraits and signatures have become rare documentstoday, fetishes of VIPs. Even in the everyday world, by the way, peoplesign less and less. Physical signs of one’s ownmanual dexterity are increas-ingly replaced by a new type of seal and stamp: the digital signature.Financial transactions are processed and authorized by PIN codes androuting numbers; numerical codes facilitate all imaginable orders, pur-chases, and sales. Accounts, insurances, personal data, phone lines andidentities are all expressed in sequences of numbers. Numerical codes havepushed names into the background. Digital signatures evolved from (mili-tary) cryptology and were introduced in the early 1980s. For the pastcouple of years they have enjoyed virtually the same legal status as ahandwritten signature. Such laws were first passed in the United States,as with the ‘UtahDigital Signature Act’ of 1995, and then inGermany (the‘Digital Signature Act’ of 1997). Digital signatures are increasingly servingas signatures in global knowledge societies. They fulfill the demands of‘privacy and authentication’ no longer by employing hands and faces but

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rather through the use of memories and mnemotechnologies. Whoeverforgets his code gets disconnected – because a code must be rememberedand never be written down (as banks and telecommunications companiesremind us time and again). To put it bluntly: if you want to be an indi-vidual today, you have to be able to memorize numerical sequences.

10. Identity and Identification

As I have tried to illustrate in the preceding examples, theepistemological framework for this paper assumes that cultural tech-niques – such as speaking, translating, writing, reading, picturing, calcu-lating, or measuring – can reflect upon themselves: in speaking aboutspeaking, in writing about writing, in pictures about pictures, in variousnumber or measure-based recursions. Only by being recursive can cul-tural techniques rotate and refer to one another. A writing person can bepictured, and a picture or a mathematical operation can be writtenabout. And, of course, we can speak of writing, calculating or measuring,and we can measure the act of speaking (with the help of, say, a watermeter), or picture it (with a caption), or simply write it down.Understood as recursive techniques of symbolic work, cultural tech-niques can be described and practiced as ‘technologies of self’ in aFoucauldian sense, or, more precisely, as techniques of identity. In acertain sense, they generate the subjects that, retrospectively, come tounderstand themselves as the preconditions and nodal points of theirvery operations. However, the structure of the sentences articulating aself-reflective identity – the aporetic ‘self-consciousness’ of idealist philo-sophy, so to speak – is not a self-identical ‘I¼ I’. Instead, they encode theproposition ‘I know that I p’, as Ernst Tugendhat (1979) has demon-strated in his linguistic lectures on self-consciousness and self-determina-tion. Thirty years ago, Tugendhat (together with Wittgenstein) assumeda ‘linguistic turn’. This paradigm shift has, in the past 30 years, not onlybeen replaced or complemented by a series of other ‘turns’, such as ‘thepictorial turn’ or ‘the sonic turn’, but has been elevated to the level ofcultural-technical generality.

The possible recursions of cultural techniques are what generate ques-tions of identity and identification in the first place; they produce recur-sive relationships, which differ from tautologies in that they requiremedia: screens and mirrors, paper and books, instruments of measure-ment and calculation, sound and visual storage equipment, computer.Cultural techniques cannot be practiced without media, but they cannotsimply be reduced to media technologies either. Even if it is unclearwhich cultural technique should be considered the first, it is safe toargue that cultural techniques are always already older than theirmedia and that they are certainly older than the terms which emergedfrom them. People wrote long before any notions of writing or the


alphabet were conceived; pictures and statues did not inspire the idea of apicture until thousands of years later; to date, some people still sing andmake music without any conception of tone or a system of notes.Counting, too, is older than numbers. Most known cultures did, nodoubt, count or perform certain mathematical operations, but they didnot necessarily derive the notion of a number from such operations. Asearly as during the Paleolithic era, people recorded forms of counting,which is evident from various notched-in bones. We do not, however,know what events or objects were counted: hunting records, the moon-rise, menstruation cycles (cf. Leroi-Gourhan, 1993: 370; Marshack, 1991;Barrow, 1992: 31–33; De Mause, 1982: 272–3)? It was quite possible tocount without corresponding words or signs, such as with the aid ofnotches in bones, fingers, or stones that were meant to represent theobject to be counted: animals in a herd, soldiers, or distances (as withthe Greek hodometer).

The cultural technique of counting does not necessarily force abstractsystems of numbers into being. Some languages, for example, use differ-ent numerals for different classes of objects. In 1881, Franz Boas pub-lished a table of numerals used by native peoples in Canada, in which hedocumented the systems of numerals for flat, round and long objects, andfor humans, canoes and measurements. In his catalogue, he makes itclear that any hypothesis about the evolution of mathematical abstrac-tions should be approached with caution; the Canadian natives, after all,were familiar with plain numerals and measuring terms as well. The his-tory of cuneiform writing, in fact, even suggests that plain numerals maybe older than numerals attached to concrete objects. This leads to theconclusion that the use of plain numerals is independent of the definitionof any abstract notion of numbers. Codes, it appears, may not need anysystematic foundations to function precisely.

Translated by Michael Wutz

Note

This article was previously published as ‘Tiere zweiter Ordnung.Kulturtechniken der Identitat’ in Uber Kultur. Theorie und Praxis derKulturreflexion, ed. Dirk Baecker, Matthias Kettner and Dirk Rustemeyer(Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008): 99–117.

References

Baldi C (1992) Come da una lettera missiva si conoscano la natura e qualita delloscrittore, ed. Antonucci L. Pordenone: Studio Tesi.

Baltrusaitis J (1996) Der Spiegel. Entdeckungen, Tauschungen, Phantasien, trans.Ricke G and Voullie R. Gießen: Anabas.

Barrow JD (1992) Pi in the Sky: Counting, Thinking, and Being. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

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Belting H (1996) Aus dem Schatten des Todes. Bild und Korper in denAnfangen. In: C von Barloewen (ed.) Der Tod in den Weltkulturen undWeltreligionen. Munchen: Eugen Diederichs.

Burzachechi M (1962) Oggetti parlanti nelle epigrafi greche. Epigraphica (TheInternational Journal of Epigraphy) 24: 3–54.

Chauvet J-M, Brunel E and Hillaire C (1995) Grotte Chauvet bei Vallon-Pont-d’Arc. Altsteinliche Hohlenkunst im Tal der Ardeche, trans. Wust K,ed. Bosinski G. Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke.

De Mause L (1982) Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots.De Waal F (2001) The Ape and the Sushi Master. New York: Basic Books.Didi-HubermanG (1999) Ahnlichkeit und Beruhrung. Archaologie, Anachronismus

und Modernitat des Abdrucks, trans. Hollender C. Koln: DuMont.Duerr HP (1984) Sedna oder die Liebe zum Leben. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.Eco U (1995) Sugli specchi. In: Sugli specchi e altri saggi. Il segno, la rappre-

sentazione, l’illusione, l’immagine. Milano: Bompiani.Foucault M (1988) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed.

Martin LH, Gutman H and Hutton PH. Boston: University of MassachusettsPress.

Galton F (1965 [1892]) Fingerprints. New York: Da Capo Press.Groebner V (2004) Der Schein der Person. Steckbrief, Ausweis und Kontrolle im

Mittelalter. Munchen: C. H. Beck.Hegel GWF (1949) The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. Baillie JM. London:

Allen & Unwin.Lacan J (2002 [1977]) Ecrits: A Selection. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.Landau T (1989) About Faces. New York: Doubleday.Landsberg PL (1973) Die Erfahrung des Todes. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.Leroi-Gourhan A (1982) The Dawn of European Art: An Introduction to

Paleolithic Cave Painting, trans. Champion S. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Leroi-Gourhan A (1993) Gesture and Speech, trans. Berger AB. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press.

Marshack A (1991) The Roots of Civilization. The Cognitive Beginnings of Man’sFirst Art, Symbol and Notation. Kingston, RI: Moyer Bell Ltd.

Panati C (1989) Panati’s Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things. New York:Harper & Row.

Pliny the Elder (c.78AD) The Natural History. Available at: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc¼Perseus:text:1999. 02.0137 (accessed 16 August2012).

Polybios (1984) Historia VI, 53. Qtd. in Reinle A, Das stellvertretende Bildnis.Plastiken und Gemalde von der Antike bis ins 19. Jahrhundert. Zurich/Munchen: Artemis.

Raphael M (1979) Wiedergeburtsmagie in der Altsteinzeit. Zur Geschichte derReligion und religioser Symbole. Frankfurt: Fischer.

Schaub M (1996) Hand und Kopf. Die Zeitschrift der Kultur 8.Serres M (1995) Gnomon: The Beginnings of Geometry in Greece. In: M Serres

(ed.) A History of Scientific Thought: Elements of a History of Science.Oxford: Blackwell, 73–123.

Simmel G (1990) The Philosophy of Money, 2nd edn, ed. Frisby D, trans.Bottomore T and Frisby D. London: Routledge.


Svenbro J (1999) Archaisches und klassisches Griechenland: Die Erfindung desstillen Lesens, trans. Schwibs B. In: G Cavallo and R Chartier (eds) Die Weltdes Lesens. Von der Schriftrolle zum Bildschirm. Frankfurt/Paris: Campus/Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.

Tugendhat E (1989) Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination (Studies inContemporary German Thought), trans. Stern P. Boston: MIT Press.

Von Schlosser J (1993) Tote Blicke [1910–11]. Geschichte der Portratbildnereiin Wachs. Ein Versuch, ed. Medicus T. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

Thomas Macho received his PhD from the University of Vienna in 1976and completed his Habilitation at the University of Klagenfurt in 1983.In 1993 he was appointed Professor of Cultural History at HumboldtUniversity in Berlin. Among his major publications are Todesmetaphern.Zur Logik der Grenzerfahrung (Frankfurt 1983), Das zeremonielle Tier.Rituale – Feste – Zeiten zwischen den Zeiten (Vienna 2004) and Vorbilder(Munich 2011).

Michael Wutz (PhD, Emory University) is Brady PresidentialDistinguished Professor in the Department of English at Weber StateUniversity and the editor of Weber: The Contemporary West. He is theco-editor of Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology(Cornell University Press, 1997), the co-translator of FriedrichKittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford University Press,1999, with Geoffrey Winthrop-Young), and the author of EnduringWords: Narrative in a Changing Media Ecology (University ofAlabama Press, 2009).

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30(6) 48–65




DOI: 10.1177/0263276413488963

tcs.sagepub.com

Article

Cultural Techniques:Or the End of theIntellectual PostwarEra in GermanMedia Theory1

Bernhard SiegertBauhaus-Universitat Weimar, Germany

Abstract

This paper seeks to introduce cultural techniques to an Anglophone readership.

Specifically geared towards an Anglophone readership, the paper relates the re-

emergence of cultural techniques (a concept first employed in the 19th century in

an agricultural context) to the changing intellectual constellation of postwar

Germany. More specifically, it traces how the concept evolved from – and reacted

against – so-called German media theory, a decidedly anti-hermeneutic and anti-

humanist current of thought frequently associated with the work of Friedrich

Kittler. Post-hermeneutic rather than anti-hermeneutic in its outlook, the reconcep-

tualization of cultural techniques aims at presenting them as chains of operations that

link humans, things, media and even animals. To investigate cultural techniques is to

shift the analytic gaze from ontological distinctions to the ontic operations that gave

rise to the former in the first place. As Siegert points out, this shift recalls certain

concurrent developments within the North American posthumanities; the paper

therefore also includes a discussion of the similarities and differences between

German and North American posthumanism.

Keywords

cultural techniques, Germany, Friedrich Kittler, media theory, post-hermeneutics

Media Theory in Germany since the 1980s

In the 1920s Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms proclaimedthat the critique of reason had become the critique of culture (seeCassirer, 1955: 80). Over half a century and one world war later, so-called


Bernhard Siegert, IKKM, Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar, Cranachstr. 47, 99421 Weimar, Germany.



German media theory suggested an alternative formula: The critique ofreason becomes the critique of media. The two axioms are difficult toreconcile; it therefore comes as no surprise that in the wake of Germanreunification and the subsequent country-wide reconstitution of culturalstudies (Kulturwissenschaften), a war has been waging that pits ‘culture’against ‘media’. The stakes are considerable. Both parties are striving toinherit nothing less than the throne of the transcendental that hasremained vacant since the abdication of the ‘critique of reason’. Thestruggle has been concealed by a rapid succession of ‘turns’ and repeatedattempts at pacifying the combatants by introducing ecumenicalmonikers like ‘cultural media studies’ (kulturwissenschaftlicheMedienforschung). Around the turn of the century the war of and overGerman cultural studies witnessed the re-emergence of the old concept of‘cultural techniques’. Since this particular term covers a lot of whatAnglophone regions like to label ‘German Media Theory’, it is necessaryto step back and take another look at the latter in order to explain to theother side of the Channel and the Atlantic how the notion of culturaltechniques’ development affects – and differs from – so-called GermanMedia Theory (for more on this observer construct see Winthrop-Young,2006; Horn, 2007; Peters, 2008).

The difficult reception of ‘German Media Theory’ in Britain andNorth America is linked to its marked recalcitrance: it never aspired tojoin the Humanities in their usual playground. What arose in the 1980s inFreiburg and has come to be associated with names such as FriedrichKittler, Klaus Theweleit, Manfred Schneider, Norbert Bolz, RaimarZons, Georg-Christoph Tholen, Jochen Horisch, Wolfgang Hagen,Avital Ronell (and maybe also my own) was never able to give itselfan appropriate name. It definitely wasn’t ‘media theory’. One of theearly candidates was ‘media analysis’ (Medienanalyse), a term designedto indicate a paradigmatic replacement of both psychoanalysis and dis-course analysis (thus affirming both an indebtedness to and a techno-logically informed distancing from Lacan and Foucault).

The ‘media and literature analysis’ – to invoke another short-livedlabel – that emerged in the 1980s was not overly concerned with thetheory or history of individual media. It had no intention of competingwith film studies, television studies, computer science, or other such dis-ciplines. Instead it focused primarily on literature in order to explore newhistories of the mind, of the soul and of the senses. These were removedfrom the grasp of literary studies, philosophy, and psychoanalysis andinstead transferred to a different domain: media. ‘Media analysis as aframe of reference for other things’, I read in the minutes of a 1992meeting of the pioneers of the nameless science convened to sketch thefuture shape of media research in Germany. However, the term media didnot identify a focus or a clearly defined set of objects ripe for investiga-tion; instead it indicated a change of the frame of reference for the

Siegert 49

analysis of phenomena hitherto under the purview of the establishedhumanities. In Kittler’s (in)famous words, it was a matter of ‘expellingthe spirit from the humanities’ (see Kittler, 1980). To repeat, the objectsof research that defined communication studies (press, film, television,radio – that is, primarily mass media) were never of great interest.Literature and media analysis replaced the emphasis on authors orstyles with a sustained attention to inconspicuous technologies of know-ledge (e.g., index cards, writing tools and typewriters), discourse oper-ators (e.g., quotation marks), pedagogical media (e.g., blackboards),unclassifiable media such as phonographs or stamps, instruments likethe piano, and disciplining techniques (e.g., language acquisition andalphabetization). These media, symbolic operators, and drill practices,all of which are located at the base of intellectual and cultural shifts,make up for the most part what we now refer to as cultural techniques.As indicated by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s famous catchphrase, thisreorientation aimed to replace the hegemony of understanding, whichinevitably tied meaning to a variant of subjectivity or self-presence,with ‘the materialities of communication’ (Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer,1988) – the non-hermeneutic non-sense – as the base and abyss of mean-ing. As a result, little attention was paid to the question of what wasrepresented in the media, or how and why it was represented in one wayand not in another. In contrast to content analysis or the semantics ofrepresentation, German media theory shifted the focus from the repre-sentation of meaning to the conditions of representation, from semanticsto the exterior and material conditions that constitute semantics. Mediatherefore was not only an alternative frame of reference for philosophyand literature but also an attempt to overcome French theory’s fixationon discourse by turning it from its philosophical or archaeological headon to its historical and technological feet. While Derrida’s (1998) diag-nosis of Rousseau’s orality remained stuck in a thoroughly ahistoricalphonocentrism, this orality was now referred to historico-empirical cul-tural techniques of maternally centred 18th-century oral pedagogy(Kittler, 1990: 27–53). Derrida’s (1987) ‘postal principle’, in turn, wasno longer a metaphor for differance but a marked reminder that differ-ence always already comes about by means of the operating principles oftechnical media (Siegert, 1999; Winthrop-Young, 2002). The exteriorityof Lacan’s signifier now also involved its implementation according tothe different ways in which the real was technologically implemented.Last but not least, the focus on the materiality and technicality of mean-ing constitution prompted German media theorists to turn Foucault’sconcept of the ‘historical apriori’ into a ‘technical apriori’ by referring theFoucauldian ‘archive’ to media technologies.

This archaeology of cultural systems of meaning, which some chose tovilify by affixing the ridiculous label of media or techno-determinism, was(in Nietzsche’s sense of the word) a gay science. It did not write media


history but extracted it from arcane sources (arcane, that is, from thepoint of view of the traditional humanities) at a time when nobody hadyet seriously addressed the concept of media. Moreover, it was not pas-sion for theory that made renegade humanities scholars focus their atten-tion on media as the material substrate of culture but archival obsession.And the many literature scholars, philosophers, anthropologists andcommunication experts, who were suddenly forced to realize howmuch there was beyond the hermeneutic reading of texts when it cameto understanding the medial conditions of literature and truth or theformation of humans and their souls, were much too offended by thissudden invasion into their academic habitat to ask what theoretical jus-tification lay behind this forced entry.

In other words, what set German media theory on a collision coursewith Anglo-American media studies as well as with communication stu-dies and sociology, all of which appeared bewitched by the grand direct-ive of social enlightenment to exclusively ponder the role of media withinthe public sphere, was the act of abandoning mass media and the historyof communication in favour of those insignificant, unprepossessing tech-nologies that underlie the constitution of meaning and tend to escape ourusual methods of understanding. And here we come face to face with adecisive feature of this post-hermeneutic turn towards the exteriority/materiality of the signifier: there is no subject area, no ontologicallyidentifiable domain that could be called ‘media’. Harold Innis andMarshall McLuhan already emphasized that the decision taken by com-munication studies, sociology and economics to speak of media only interms of mass media is woefully insufficient. Any approach to commu-nication that places media exclusively within the ‘public sphere’ (which isitself a fictional construct bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment) willsystematically misconstrue the abyss of non-meaning in and from whichmedia operate. For those eager to disentangle themselves from the grip ofCritical Theory, according to which media were responsible for erodingthe growth of autonomous individuality and the alienation from authen-tic experiences (a diagnosis preached to postwar West Germany by anopinionated conglomerate composed of the Frankfurt School, theSuhrkamp publishing house, newspapers like Die Zeit, social sciencesand philosophy departments, and bourgeois feuilletons), this abyss wasreferred to as ‘war’. If the telegraph, the telephone or the radio wereanalysed as mass media at all, then it was with a view towards uncoveringtheir military origin and exposing the negative horizon of war of massmedia and their alleged public status. Hence the enthusiasm with whichthe early work of Paul Virilio was received in these circles (e.g., Virilio,1989, 1994). Hence also the eagerness with which a materialities-based‘media analysis’ already early on sought out allies among those historiansof science who in the 1980s abandoned the history of theory in lieu ofa non-teleological history of practices and technologies enacted

Siegert 51

and performed in laboratories, instruments and ‘experimental systems’(e.g., Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Rheinberger, 1997; Schmidgen,forthcoming).

‘Public sphere’ versus ‘war’: this was the polemical restriction underwhich German media theory of the 1980s assumed its distinct shape. Toinvoke the ‘public sphere’ was to invoke ideas such as enlightened con-sciousness, self-determination, freedom and so on, whereas to speak of‘war’ implied an unconscious processed by symbolic media and thenotion that ‘freedom’ was a kind of narcissism associated with theLacanian mirror stage. Against the ‘communicative reason’ as an allegedtelos of mass media, and against the technophobe obsession with seman-tic depth, the partisans of the unmoored signifier embraced the history ofcommunication engineering that had been blocked out by humanist his-toriography. However, the history of communication was not simplydenied; continuing Heidegger’s history of being (Seinsgeschichte), itnow appeared as an epoch of media rather than a horizon of meaning(see Heidegger, 2002). The goal was to reconceptualize media by movingaway from the established ‘logocentric’ narrative that starts out with theimmediacy of oral communication, passes through a differentiation intoscriptographic and typographic media and then leads to the secondaryorality of radio.

But if media are no longer embedded in a horizon of meaning, if theyno longer constitute an ontological object, how can they be approachedand observed? Answer: by reconstructing the discourse networks inwhich the real, the imaginary and the symbolic are stored, transmittedand processed. Is every history of paper already a media history? Is everyhistory of the telescope a media history? Or every history of the postalsystem? Clearly, no. The history of paper only turns into a media historyif it serves as a reference system for the analysis of bureaucratic or sci-entific data processing. When the chancelleries of Emperor Frederick IIof Hohenstaufen replaced parchment with paper, this act decisively chan-ged the meaning of ‘power’ (Vismann, 2008: 79, 84). The history of thetelescope, in turn, becomes a media history if it is taken as a system ofreference for an analysis of seeing (Vogl, 2007). Finally, a history of thepostal system is a media history if it serves as the system of reference for ahistory of communication (Siegert, 1999). That is to say, media do notemerge independently and outside of specific historical practices. Yet atthe same time history is itself a system of meaning that operates across amedia-technological abyss of non-meaning that must remain hidden. Theinsistence on these media reference systems, designed as an attack on thereason- or mind-based humanist reference systems, was guided by adeeply anti-humanist rejection of the tradition of the Enlightenmentand the established discursive rules of hermeneutic interpretation. Thisconstitutes both a similarity and a difference between German mediatheory and that prominent portion of American posthumanist discourse


which is rooted in the history of cybernetics. Within the US, the notion ofthe ‘posthuman’ emerged from a framework defined by the blurring ofthe boundaries between man and machine. However, while US post-cybernetic media studies are tied to thinking about bodies and organisms,German media theory is linked to a shift in the history of meaning arisingfrom a revolt against the hermeneutical tradition of textual interpretationand the sociological tradition of communication. As a result there is adiscernible difference between the cybernetically grounded American‘posthuman’ and the continental ‘posthumanism’ rooted in Heidegger,Derrida, Foucault and Lacan. Within the framework of cybernetics, thenotion of ‘becoming human’ had as its point of departure an anthropo-logically stable humanity of the human that endured until increasingfeedback systems subjected the ‘human’ to increasing hybridizations, inthe course of which the ‘human’ turned either into a servomechanismattached to machines and networks, or into a machine programmed byalien software (see Hayles, 1999, 2010). By contrast, French (andGerman) posthumanism signalled that the humanities had awakenedfrom their ‘anthropological slumber’. This awakening, in turn, calledfor an anti-hermeneutic posthumanism able to deconstruct humanismas an occidental transcendental system of meaning production. For theGermans, the means to achieve this goal were ‘media’. The guiding ques-tion for German media theory, therefore, was not How did we becomeposthuman? but How was the human always already historically mixedwith the non-human?

But it was not until the new understanding of media led to the focus oncultural techniques that this variant of posthumanism was able to discernaffinities with the actor-network ideas of Bruno Latour and others. NowGerman observers were able to discern that something similar had hap-pened in the early 2000s in the United States, when the advent andmerging of Critical Animal Studies and post-cybernetic studies broughtabout a new understanding of media as well as a reconceptualization ofthe posthuman as always already intertwined between human and non-human.

‘Media’ after the Postwar Era: Cultural Techniques

If the first phase of German media theory (from the early 1980s to thelate 1990s) can be labelled anti-hermeneutic, the second phase (from thelate 1990s to the present), which witnessed the conceptual transformationof media into cultural techniques, may be labelled post-hermeneutic.Underneath this change, which served to relieve media and technologyof the burden of having to play the bogeyman of hermeneutics andCritical Theory, there was a second rupture that only gradually cameto light. The new conceptual career of cultural techniques was linked tonothing less than the end of the intellectual postwar era in Germany.

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The technophobia of the humanities, the imperative of Habermasian‘communicative reason’, the incessant warnings against the manipulationof the masses by the media – all of this arose from the experiences of theSecond World War and came to be part and parcel of the moral duty ofthe German postwar intellectual. (At a lecture at the CollegeInternational de Philosophie in 1984, addressing among others JurgenHabermas and Dieter Henrich, Werner Hamacher polemically character-ized German postwar philosophy after Heidegger and Adorno as ‘repar-ation payments’ to Anglo-Saxon common-sense rationalism andphilosophies of norms and normativity.) But it was also precisely thatagainst which the anti-hermeneutic techno-euphoria of ‘media analysis’and the media-materialist readings of French theory rebelled. To polem-ically confront the public sphere with war, to oppose the technophobia ofCritical Theory with Foucauldian discourse analysis, the machinic think-ing of Deleuze and Guattari, or the posthumanist Lacanian logic of thesignifier, was no less a symptom of the German postwar. Not surpris-ingly, US intellectuals who had received poststructuralism as a kind of‘negative New Criticism’ had difficulties coming to grips with the polem-ical tone that permeated Kittler’s writings (Winthrop-Young, 2011).

It was, ironically, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the GDRthat helped re-direct German postwar media theory. Cultural Studies(Kulturwissenschaften), which in 1990 no longer existed in WestGermany but had been practised in the GDR, now became one of thefew Eastern heirlooms to gain acceptance in the newly united Germany.As a result, much of what maybe should not have been referred to as‘media’, but was nonetheless assigned that label in order to be polemic-ally deployed against long-standing hermeneutic aspirations and CriticalTheory’s yearning for a non-alienated existence, could now be designatedas cultural techniques. The war was over – and all the index cards, quota-tion marks, pedagogies of reading and writing, Hindu-Arabic numerals,diagrammatic writing operators, slates, pianofortes, and so on were givena new home. This implied, first, that on both a personal and an institu-tional level media history and research came to abandon the sheltergranted by literature departments. I myself left the institutional spacesof Germanistik (the study of German language and literature) in 1993 tobecome an assistant professor of the History and Aesthetics of Media inthe re-established Institut fur Kultur- und Kunstwissenschaft at theHumboldt University in the former East Berlin. Second, by virtue oftheir promotion to the status of cultural techniques, media were nowmore than merely a ‘different’ frame of reference for the analysis of lit-erature, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Third, given their new concep-tual status it now became possible to endow media with their ‘own’history and lay the groundwork for more systematic theoretical defin-itions. Fourth, critical attention no longer focused on revealing whichmedia technologies provided the ‘hard’ base of the chimeras known as


‘spirit’ (Geist), understanding, or the public sphere. The focus is nowculture itself. Nowhere is this reorientation of German media theorymore noticeable than in the changed attitude towards anthropology.During the postwar phase anthropology was as ostracized as ‘man’ him-self – whom Kittler famously kept debunking as ‘so-called man’ (dersogenannte Mensch). With the shift to cultural techniques, Germanmedia theory adopted a considerably more relaxed attitude towards anhistorical anthropology that relates cultural communication to technol-ogies rather than to anthropological constants. By latching on to the oldconcept of cultural techniques, it signals its interest in ‘anthropotechnics’(e.g., see Schuttpelz, 2006) – though it remains doubtful whether thisindicates an ‘anthropological turn’ (Siegert, 2007).

As indicated above, this postwar turn from anti-humanism to post-humanism appears to resemble the US turn from a somewhat restrictedunderstanding of posthumanism as a form of transhumanism (i.e., thebiotechnological hybridization of human beings) to a more complex pro-gramme of posthumanities eager to put some distance between itself andold notions of the posthuman (see Wolfe, 2010). To be sure, what bothturns have in common is a reluctance to interpret the ‘post’ in posthumanin an historical sense, as something that comes ‘after the human’. Rather,in both cases the ‘post’ implies a sense of ‘always already’, an ontologicalentanglement of human and non-human. However, the non-human ofthe cultural techniques approach is related in the first instance to mattersof technique and technology, that of the American posthumanities tobiology and the biological. In North America the turn from the posthu-man to the posthumanities is indebted to deconstruction; more to thepoint, it follows from the older Derrida’s questioning of ‘the animal’.In short, the German focus on the relationship between humansand machines finds its American counterpart in the questioning of theequally precarious relationship between humans and animals (Winthrop-Young, 2009).

But although the discussion of the man–machine–animal difference(i.e., the anthropological difference) also plays an important part inGerman discussions, and despite the links between German notions ofcultural techniques and the French confluence of anthropology and tech-nology that is now of such great importance to the American debate,critical trans-Atlantic differences remain. While the American side pur-sues a deconstruction of the anthropological difference with a strongethical focus, the Germans are more concerned with technological ormedial fabrications or artifices. From the point of view of the culturaltechniques approach, anthropological differences are less the effect of astubborn anthropo-phallo-carno-centric metaphysics than the result ofculture-technical and media-technological practices. The difference isespecially apparent in the ‘zoological’ works of German cultural sciencesthat tend to be less concerned with discussions of Heidegger, Nietzsche,

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Agamben and Derrida than with the medial functions of animals – thatis, with the way in which cultural techniques like domestication, breed-ing, or sacrificial practices in connection with the emblematization ofcertain medial virtues and capabilities of animals, serve to create, shift,erode and blur the anthropological difference (e.g., Schneider, 2007).

The study of cultural techniques, however, is not aimed at removingthe anthropological difference between human and non-human animalsby means of subtle deconstructivist refutations of the many attempts todistinguish between that ‘which calls itself human’ and that which iscalled ‘animal’. Its goal is not to grant rights to animals, or deprivehumans of certain privileges. Nor is it bent on critiquing the dogma ofpure ontological difference. Rather, it is concerned with decentring thedistinction between human and non-human by insisting on the radicaltechnicity of this distinction – something, incidentally, that Cary Wolfeand David Wills come close to in their recent exploration of ‘AnimalDasein’ and the deep-seated technicity of the human (Wills, 2008; Wolfe,2012). Human and non-human animals are always already recursivelyintertwined because the irreducible multiplicity and historicity of theanthropological is always already processed by cultural techniques andmedia technologies. Ahab’s becoming-whale is not rooted in HermanMelville’s bioethics but in the cultural technique of whale hunting.Without this technologically oriented decentring there is the danger ofconfusing ethics with sentimentality: the human/animal differenceremains caught in a mirror stage, and the humanity that is exorcizedfrom humans is simply transferred on to animals which now appear asthe better humans.

But what, then, were and are cultural techniques? Conceptually wemay distinguish three phases. Ever since antiquity the European under-standing of culture implies that it is technologically constituted. The veryword ‘culture’, derived from the Latin colere and cultura, refers to thedevelopment and practical usage of means of cultivating and settling thesoil with homesteads and cities. As an engineering term, Kulturtechnik,usually translated as agricultural or rural engineering, has been aroundsince the late 19th century. As defined by the sixth edition of MeyersGroßes Konversationslexikon (1904), cultural techniques comprise ‘allagricultural technical procedures informed by the engineering sciencesthat serve to improve soil conditions’, such as irrigation, drainage,enclosure and river regulation. To a certain extent the post (cold) warturn of German media theory builds on this tradition. The corrals, pensand enclosures that separate hunter from prey (and that in the course ofco-evolutionary domestication accentuate the anthropological differencebetween humans and animals), the line the plough draws across the soil,and the calendar that informs sowing, harvesting and associated rituals,are all archaic cultural techniques of hominization, time and space. Thusthe concept of cultural techniques clearly and unequivocally repudiates


the ontology of philosophical concepts. Humans as such do not existindependently of cultural techniques of hominization, time as such doesnot exist independently of cultural techniques of time measurement, andspace as such does not exist independently of cultural techniques of spa-tial control. This does not mean that the theory of cultural techniques isanti-ontological; rather, it moves ontology into the domain of ontic oper-ations. Similar ideas relating to the production of ontological distinctionsby means of ontic cultural techniques are to be found in American post-humanities, for instance, with regard to houses and the cultural tech-niques of dwelling (e.g., Wills, 2008: 56). This discourse, however,remains tied to the level of philosophical universals. There is no suchthing as the house, or the house as such, there are only historically andculturally contingent cultural techniques of shielding oneself off and pro-cessing the distinction between inside and outside. What (still) separatesthe theory of cultural techniques from those of the posthumanities, then,is that the former focuses on empirical historical objects while the latterprefer philosophical idealizations.

Starting in the 1970s, basic skills such as reading, writing and arith-metic were referred to as elementary Kulturtechniken; television andinformation and communications technology were added in the 1980s.What separates this particular usage of the term from its more recentapplication is that it still reveals a traditional middle-class understandingof culture that links culture to humanist educational imperatives.‘Culture’ still serves to conjure up the sphere of art, good taste andeducation (Bildung) in a Goethean sense – in other words, culture isstill seen as the repository of indispensable ingredients for the formationof a ‘whole human’. With this background in mind, the reference totelevision or the internet as cultural techniques aims at subjecting thesenew media to the sovereignty of the book – as opposed to a more pop-cultural usage that challenged the monopoly of the alphabetise (Lacan)over our senses. By establishing a link with the older, technologicallyoriented understanding of culture, cultural techniques research breakswith the 19th-century middle-class tradition that conceived of cultureexclusively in terms of the book reigning over all the other arts.

To be sure, within the new media-theoretical and culturalist contextcultural techniques do refer to the so-called elementary cultural tech-niques, but they now also encompass the domains of graphe exceedingthe alpha-numerical code. Operative forms of writing such as calculus,cards and catalogues, whose particular effectiveness rests on their intrin-sic relationship to their material carrier (which serves to endow them witha certain degree of autonomy), are of considerable interest to thosestudying cultural techniques. By ascending to the status of a newmedia-theoretical and cultural studies paradigm, cultural techniquesnow also include means of time measurement, legal procedures, andthe sacred. At the same time the concept of cultural techniques could

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attain a systematic foundation in the context of palaeoanthropology,animal studies, the philosophy of technology, the anthropology ofimages, ethnology, fine arts, and the histories of science and law inas-much as these disciplines became subject to the ‘cultural turn’ themselves.

In hindsight, the notion of cultural techniques was received – maybeall too willingly – by posthumanist cultural studies because it subvertedthe nonsensical war of succession between ‘media’ and ‘culture’ over thevacant throne of the transcendental by subjecting the two combatants tofurther investigation (Schuttpelz, 2006: 90). That is to say, media arescrutinized with a view toward their technicity, technology is scrutinizedwith a view toward its instrumental and anthropological determination,and culture is scrutinized with a view toward its boundaries, its other andits idealized notion of bourgeois Bildung. Against this background, anddrawing upon the most recent discussions, we can add five further fea-tures that characterize the theoretical profile of cultural techniques.

(i) Essentially, cultural techniques are conceived as operative chainsthat precede the media concepts they generate:

Cultural techniques – such as writing, reading, painting, counting,making music – are always older than the concepts that are gener-ated from them. People wrote long before they conceptualized writ-ing or alphabets; millennia passed before pictures and statues gaverise to the concept of the image; and until today, people sing ormake music without knowing anything about tones or musical nota-tion systems. Counting, too, is older than the notion of numbers. Tobe sure, most cultures counted or performed certain mathematicaloperations; but they did not necessarily derive from this a conceptof number. (Macho, 2003: 179)

However, operations such as counting or writing always presuppose tech-nical objects capable of performing – and to a considerable extent, deter-mining – these operations. As an historically given micro-network oftechnologies and techniques, cultural techniques are the exteriorityand/or materiality of the signifier. An abacus allows for different calcu-lations than ten fingers; a computer, in turn, allows for different calcu-lations than an abacus. When we speak of cultural techniques, therefore,we envisage a more or less complex actor network that comprises techno-logical objects as well as the operative chains they are part of and thatconfigure or constitute them.

(ii) To speak of cultural techniques presupposes a notion of pluralcultures. This is not only in deference to notions of multi-culturality, italso implies a posthumanist understanding of culture that no longerposits man as the exclusive subject of culture. To quote a beautiful for-mulation by Cornelia Vismann: ‘If media theory were or had a grammar,that agency would find its expression in objects claiming the grammatical


subject position and cultural techniques standing in for verbs’ (2010:171).2 Objects are tied into practices in order to produce somethingthat within a given culture is addressed as a ‘person’. In accordancewith Philippe Descola’s (2013) different ‘dispositives of being’ (natural-ism, animism, totemism, analogism), natural things, animals, images ortechnological objects may also appear as persons.

(iii) In order to differentiate cultural techniques from other technolo-gies, Thomas Macho has argued that only those techniques should belabelled cultural techniques that involve symbolic work. ‘Symbolic workrequires specific cultural techniques, such as speaking, translating andunderstanding, forming and representing, calculating and measuring,writing and reading, singing and making music’ (Macho, 2008: 99).3

Macho’s suggestion is certainly very helpful when it comes to counteringa detrimental inflation: nowadays planning, transparency, yoga, gaming,and even forgetting have been promoted to cultural techniques. Whatseparates cultural techniques from all others is their potential self-refer-ence or ‘pragmatics of recursion’:

From their very beginnings, speaking can be spoken about and com-munication be communicated. We can produce paintings that depictpaintings or painters; films often feature other films. One can onlycalculate and measure with reference to calculation and measure-ment. And one can of course write about writing, sing about singing,and read about reading. On the other hand, it’s impossible to the-matize fire while making a fire, just as it is impossible to thematizefield tilling while tilling a field, cooking while cooking, and huntingwhile hunting. We may talk about recipes or hunting practices, rep-resent a fire in pictorial or dramatic form, or sketch a new building,but in order to do so we need to avail ourselves of the techniques ofsymbolic work, which is to say, we are not making a fire, hunting,cooking, or building at that very moment. Building on a phrasecoming out of systems theory, we could say that cultural techniquesare second-order techniques. (Macho, 2008: 100, emphasis in original)

It is no doubt very tempting to follow a proposal of such alluring sim-plicity, but unfortunately it suffers from an overly reductive notion of thesymbolic in combination with a too static distinction between first- andsecond-order techniques. Granted, you cannot thematize the making offire while making fire, but this certainly does not apply to cooking, atleast not if you pay heed to Claude Levi-Strauss’s structuralist analysis.

Cooking, a differentiated set of activities linked to food preparation, isboth a technical procedure that brings about a transformation of the realand a symbolic act distinct from other possible acts. For instance, as partof the culinary triangle underlying the symbolic order of food

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preparation, the act of boiling something means to neither roast norsmoke it (Levi-Strauss, 1978: 478–490). Hence every instance of boiling,roasting or smoking is always already an act of communication becauseit communicates to both the inside and the outside that within a certainculture certain animals are boiled, roasted and smoked – like (or unlike)in other cultures, be they near or far. Because it is constituted by struc-tural differences cooking does indeed thematize cooking in the act ofcooking.

Furthermore, ploughing too can be a symbolic act. If, as ancientsources attest, ploughs were used to draw a sacred furrow to demarcatethe limits of a new city, then this constitutes an act of writing in the senseof Greek graphe. To plough is in this case to engage in symbolic workbecause the graphein serves to mark the distinction between inside andoutside, civilization and barbarism, an inside domain in which the lawprevails and one outside in which it does not. Hence doors, as well, are afundamental cultural technique, given that the operations of opening andclosing them process and render visible the distinction between insideand outside. A door, then, is both material object and symbolic thing, afirst- as well as a second-order technique. This, precisely, is the source ofits distinctive power. The door is a machine by which humans are sub-jected to the law of the signifier. It makes a difference, Macho writes,whether you whittle and adorn an arrow or whether you shoot it at ananimal (2011: 45). But does this not ontologize and universalize an occi-dental rationality that always already separates two different types ofknowledge: culture on the one hand and technology on the other?What if the arrow can be used only after it has been ‘decorated’? Whatif said ‘decoration’ is part of the arrow’s technical make-up? Macho’sview of the symbolic still implies some kind of tool-making animal thatemploys media to perform symbolic work and thus appears as the masteror ‘manipulator’ of the symbolic. As a result the analysis elides both thosetechniques that enable the symbolic to enter the real and the anthropo-techniques that generate the anthropological difference in the first place.

In short, it is problematic to base an understanding of cultural tech-niques on static concepts of technologies and symbolic work, that is, on anontologically operating differentiation between first- and second-ordertechniques. Separating the two must be replaced by chains of operationsand techniques. In order to situate cultural techniques before the grandepistemic distinction between culture and technology, sense and nonsense,code and thing, it is necessary to elaborate a processual (rather thanontological) definition of first- and second-order techniques. We need tofocus on how recursive operative chains bring about a switch from first- tosecond-order techniques (and back), on how nonsense generates sense,how the symbolic is filtered out of the real or how, conversely, the symbolicis incorporated into the real, and how thematerial signifier is present in thesignified and manages to create a physical presence effect.


Macho himself alludes to the possibility of such a processual definitionby speaking of potential self-reference. One prime example is the art ofweaving. If you adhere to the rigid distinction between first- and second-order techniques, weaving will not qualify as a cultural technique becauseit does not exhibit any self-referential qualities. The term only makessense once a piece of tapestry depicts a piece of tapestry, or a garmentappears on a garment. Yet the very technique, the ongoing combinationof weave and pattern, always already produces an ornamental patternthat by virtue of its technical repetition refers to itself and therefore(according to Derrida) displays sign character (see Derrida, 1985). Wemay also distinguish Marcel Mauss’s so-called ‘techniques of the body’(Mauss, 1992) from cultural techniques, that is, from the different waysin which cultures make use of bodily activities such as swimming, run-ning, giving birth (Maye, 2010: 135). On the other hand, the recursivechains of operation that constitute cultural techniques always alreadycontain bodily techniques. According to Mauss, writing, reading andcalculating, too, are techniques of the body (rather than exclusivelymental techniques); they are the results of teaching docile bodies thattoday are in competition with the performance of interactive navigationalinstruments.

(iv) Every culture begins with the introduction of distinctions: inside/outside, pure/impure, sacred/profane, female/male, human/animal,speech/absence of speech, signal/noise, and so on. The chains thatmake up these distinctions are recursive, that is, any given distinctionmay be re-entered on either side of another distinction. Thus the inside/outside distinction can be introduced on the animal side of the human/animal distinction in order to produce the distinction between domesticand wild animals. Or the distinction sacred/profane can be introduced onthe speech side of the speech/absence of speech distinction resulting in asplit between sacred and profane languages. The constitutive force ofthese distinctions and recursions is the reason why the contingent culturein which we live is frequently taken to be the real, ‘natural’ order ofthings. Researching cultural techniques therefore also amounts to anepistemological engagement with the medial conditions of whateverlays claim to reality. However, it is crucial to keep in mind that thedistinctions in question are processed by media in the broadest sense ofthe word (for instance, doors process the distinctions between inside/outside), which therefore cannot be restricted to one or the other sideof the distinction. Rather, they assume the position of a mediating thirdpreceding first and second (see Serres, 1982: 53). These media are basalcultural techniques.

In other words, the analysis of cultural techniques observes anddescribes techniques involved in operationalizing distinctions in thereal. They generate the forms in the shape of perceptible unities of dis-tinctions. Operating a door by closing and opening it allows us to

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perform, observe, encode, address and ultimately wire the differencebetween inside and outside (see Siegert, 2012). Concrete actions serveto distinguish them from the preceding non-differentiatedness. In moregeneral terms, all cultural techniques are based on the transition fromnon-distinction to distinction and back.

Yet we always have to bear in mind that the distinction between natureand culture itself is based on a contingent, culturally processed distinc-tion. Cultural techniques precede the distinction of nature and culture.They initiate acculturation, yet their transgressive use may just as welllead to deculturalization; inevitably they partake in determining whethersomething belongs to the cultural domain or not. What Levi-Strausswrote about the art of cooking applies to all cultural techniques: ‘[T]hesystem demonstrates that the art of cooking [. . .] being situated betweennature and culture, has as its function to ensure their articulation onewith the other’ (Levi-Strauss, 1978: 489).

(v) Cultural techniques are not only media that sustain, disseminate,internalize and institutionalize sign systems, they also destabilize culturalcodes, erase signs and deterritorialize sounds and images. As well ascultures of distinction we also have cultures of de-differentiation (whatonce was labelled ‘savage’ and placed in direct opposition to culture).Cultural techniques do not only colonize bodies. Tied to specific practicesand chains of operation, they also serve to de-colonize bodies, images,text and music (see Holl, 2011). Media appear as code-generating orcode-destroying interfaces between cultural orders and a real thatcannot be symbolized. Resorting to a different terminology, we canrefer to the nature/culture framework in terms of the real and the sym-bolic. By assuming the position of the third, an interface between the realand the symbolic, basal cultural techniques always already imply anunmarked space. By necessarily including the unmarked space that isexcluded by the processed distinctions, cultural techniques always con-tain the possibility of liquidating the latter. In other words, cultural tech-niques always have to take account of what they exclude. For instance,upon closer scrutiny it becomes apparent that musical notational systemsoperate against a background of what elides representation and symbol-ization – the sounds and noise of the real. Any state-of-the-art account ofcultural techniques – more precisely, any account mindful of the techno-logical state of the art – must be based on an historically informed under-standing of electric and electronic media as part of the technical andmathematical operationalization of the real. It will therefore by necessityhave to include what under Old European conditions had been relegatedto the other side of culture: the erasure of distinctions as well as thedeterritorialization and disfiguration of representations – the fall of thesignifier from the height of the symbolic to the depths of the real.

Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young.


Notes

1. This article is also the introductory essay in a volume on cultural techniquesforthcoming from Fordham University Press.

2. The Vismann (2010) essay is part of this collection (see this issue).3. The Macho (2008) essay is part of this collection (see this issue).

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Rheinberger, H.-J. (1997) Toward a History of Epistemic Things: SynthesizingProteins in the Test Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Schneider, M. (2007) ‘Das Notariat der Hunde. Eine literaturwissenschaftlicheKynologie’, Zeitschrift fur deutsche Philologie 126: 4–27.

Schuttpelz, E. (2006) ‘Die medienanthropologische Kehre der Kulturtechniken’,Archiv fur Mediengeschichte 6: 87–110.

Serres, M. (1982) The Parasite, trans. L.R. Schehr. Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press.

Siegert, B. (1999) Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, trans.K. Repp. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Siegert, B. (2007) ‘Cacography or Communication? Cultural Techniques inGerman Media Studies’, Grey Room 29: 26–47.

Siegert, B. (2012) ‘Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic’, Grey Room 47:6–23.

Virilio, P. (1989) War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans.P. Camiller. London: Verso.

Virilio, P. (1994) Bunker Archeology, trans. G. Collins. New York: PrincetonArchitectural Press.

Vismann, C. (2008) Files: Law and Media Technology, trans. G. Winthrop-Young. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Vismann, C. (2010) ‘Kulturtechniken und Souveranitat’, Zeitschrift fur Medien-und Kulturforschung 1: 171–181.

Vogl, J. (2007) ‘Becoming-Media: Galileo’s Telescope’, Grey Room 29: 14–25.Wills, D. (2008) Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Winthrop-Young, G. (2002) ‘Going Postal to Deliver Subjects: Remarks on a

German Postal Apriori’, Angelaki 7(3): 143–158.Winthrop-Young, G. (2006) ‘Cultural Studies and German Media Theory’,

pp. 88–104 in G. Hall and C. Birchall (eds) New Cultural Studies:Adventures in Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Winthrop-Young, G. (2009) ‘Mensch, Medien, Korper, Kehre: Zum posthuma-nistischen Immerschon’, Philosophische Rundschau 56(1): 1–16.

Winthrop-Young, G. (2011) ‘Krautrock, Heidegger, Bogeyman: Kittler in theAnglosphere’, Thesis Eleven 107(1): 6–20.

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Wolfe, C. (2012) Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a BiopoliticalFrame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.


Bernhard Siegert received his PhD from the Ruhr University Bochum in1991 and completed his Habilitation at the Humboldt University inBerlin in 2001. He holds a Chair in the History and Theory ofCultural Techniques at the Bauhaus University of Weimar. Among hismajor publications are Relays (Stanford University Press, 1999), Passagedes Digitalen (Brinkmann und Bose, 2003) and Passagiere und Papiere(Fink, 2006). A volume of essays on cultural techniques is forthcomingfrom Fordham University Press.

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young is Professor of German at the University ofBritish Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Among his publications areKittler and the Media (Polity Press, 2011) and Friedrich Kittler zurEinfuhrung (Junius, 2005) as well as translations of works by FriedrichKittler, Cornelia Vismann and Eva Horn.

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30(6) 66–82




DOI: 10.1177/0263276413488962

tcs.sagepub.com

Article

After Kittler: On theCultural Techniques ofRecent German MediaTheory

Bernard Dionysius GeogheganHumboldt University of Berlin, Germany

Abstract

This paper offers a brief introduction and interpretation of recent research on cul-

tural techniques (or Kulturtechnikforschung) in German media studies. The analysis

considers three sites of conceptual dislocations that have shaped the development

and legacy of media research often associated with theorist Friedrich Kittler: first,

the displacement of 1980s and 1990s Kittlerian media theory towards a more prax-

eological style of analysis in the early 2000s; second, the philological background that

allowed the antiquated German appellation for agricultural engineering,

Kulturtechniken, to migrate into media and cultural studies; and third, the role of

these conceptual dislocations in enriching media-genealogical inquiries into topics

such as life, biopolitics, and practice.

Keywords

agriculture, biopolitics, German media theory, Kittler, media archaeology

Humans or machines? Discourse or hardware? Since the mid-1980s thesewere the methodological orientations that divided the anthropocentrismof Anglo-American cultural studies from the technophilia of Germanmedia theory. In the past decade an emerging field of research knownas Kulturtechniken has deconstructed these oppositions. Proponents ofcultural techniques reread Friedrich Kittler’s media theoretical approachof the 1980s and 1990s – known for its presupposition that a techno-logical a priori defines the scope and logic of distinct cultural formationsand epistemes – with a closer focus on the local practices, series, andtechniques that configure medial and technological arrangements.


Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Humboldt University of Berlin, Georgenstraße 47 10117 Berlin, Germany.

Email: [email protected] (www.bernardg.com)


The absence of a rigorous consensus about the scope and purview ofKulturtechnik speaks, in a sense, to its conceptual fertility. The difficultystarts with the term Kulturtechniken itself, which may be rendered inEnglish as cultural techniques, cultural technologies, cultural technics, oreven culturing techniques. Cultural theorists at theHumboldt University ofBerlin (e.g. Christian Kassung, Sybille Kramer and Thomas Macho)Identify cultural techniques with rigorous and formalized symbolic sys-tems, such as reading, writing, mathematics, music, and imagery (seeKassung and Macho, 2013; Kramer and Bredekamp, 2008; Macho,2013). Researchers in Weimar, Siegen, and Luneberg tend towards amore catholic definition that recognizes a broader range of formalizablecultural practices, including tacit knowledge, the class-laden rituals ofVictorian servants, and the law as cultural techniques (see Schuttpelz,2006; Engell and Siegert, 2010; Krajeswki, 2013; Vismann, 2013).Binding together these varied definitions and understandings ofKulturtechniken is a shared interest in describing and analysing howsigns, instruments, and human practices consolidate into durable symbolicsystems capable of articulating distinctions within and between cultures.

In this paper I offer a brief introduction and interpretation of researchon cultural techniques by way of three conceptual dislocations. First, Iconsider how and why the situation of Germanophone media theory inthe 1980s and 1990s was displaced and redirected towards a more prax-eological style of analysis in the early 2000s; second, I examine how andwhy an antiquated Germanophone appellation for agricultural engineer-ing, Kulturtechniken, morphed into a philosophically and conceptuallycharged term in media and cultural studies; and third, I conclude withreflections on how this conceptual redistribution enabled by the termKulturtechniken facilitates genealogical approaches to media researchand inquiry.

Towards the a priori of the Technological a priori

‘We’re finally allowed to talk about people!’ That’s how oneGermanophone media theorist explained the significance of research incultural techniques to me.1 Of course, ‘German’ media theory2 as it wasdeveloped by Kittler and his associates was full of people: mothers,madmen, artists, authors, inventors, bureaucrats, and the occasionalweapons designer abound. But Kittler’s media analysis maintained thatthese figures were at best proxies or avatars for Aufschreibesysteme ordiscourse networks composed of machinery, institutions, instruments,mathematical regimes, and inscriptions. Kittler maintained that thetask of a true science of media was to drive the human out of the huma-nities (Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften) (Kittler,1980) and reorient analysis towards a description of this discursiveand instrumental infrastructure.

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This assault on anthropocentrism flew in the face of contemporaneousapproaches, such as that of Jurgen Habermas in West Germany or theBirmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, which argued for recoveringand restoring the human interests waylaid by technical communications.Yet even for theorists harbouring such humanist and culturalist sympa-thies, Kittler’s argument for discarding human interests and intentions infavor of analysing how medial, technical, and institutional arrangementsshaped cultural forms proved remarkably fruitful. It established a style ofmedia analysis that could transversally join together the themes andmethods of literary criticism, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and electricalengineering (see Kittler, 1990, 1999).

But a certain planned obsolescence countermanded the power of thisburgeoning media science. Correlating cultural form and historicalchange with the material specificities of distinct media platforms impliedan impending denouement of both. As Kittler put it in an oft-cited pas-sage from his tome Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, first published inGerman in 1986:

Before the end, something is coming to an end. The general digit-ization of channels and information erases the differences amongindividual media. Sound and image, voice and text are reduced tosurface effects, known to consumers as interface. Sense and thesenses turn into eyewash. Their media-produced glamour will sur-vive for an interim as a by-product of strategic programs. (Kittler,1999: 1)

The problem with end of history arguments is they don’t leave you withmuch to talk about once history has come and gone. For all their apoca-lyptic poetry about Alan Turing’s universal machine and ClaudeShannon’s schematic account of communication, Kittler and his mostfervent disciples never had much to say about media after the mid-1980s,when personal computers became a common presence in the domestichome. This seems decidedly unfitting for a theorist eulogized as ‘theDerrida of the digital age’ (Jeffries, 2011).

A troubling ethnocentricism further constrained the agenda of classicGerman media theory. For the Kittlerian media archaeologist, culturesand societies that did not rely on Western technological media could onlybe ignored or shoehorned into ill-suited analytical categories, such asinformation theory’s sender-receiver model of communication.3 In thisway Kittlerian analysis suggested that the products of the NorthAmerican and Western European military-industrial complex coincidedwith an elusive baseline or measuring stick that made sense of humancultures in general. These two shortcomings (the inability to speak topresent technological media conditions combined with the inability orrefusal to look beyond Western contexts), along with a conspicuous


disregard or even disdain for many political or ethical questions (Peters,2007), set increasingly narrow horizons on the Kittlerian program.

That Kittler in his late works reoriented himself towards new prob-lematics, such as European cultural history and mathematics in ancientGreece, might suggest his own recognition of these diminishing returns ofhis earlier methods. More likely, that shift in focus serves as a reminderthat Friedrich Kittler was never Kittlerian, per se (indeed, few discursivefounders’ methods square with their eponymous schools), and that hewas most at home when challenging platitudinous orthodoxies – eventhose assigned to his own name. Even so, this shift seemingly left his mostdedicated disciples alone in the end, writing technical histories of deadmedia and dead theorists.

But as Nietzsche observed, true fidelity demands the courage of apos-tasy.4 In the early 2000s, adepts and admirers of the Kittlerian approachturned their attention towards the more elastic concept ofKulturtechniken. Bernhard Siegert concisely summarizes the emergingprogram this way: ‘The concept of cultural techniques highlights theoperations or sequences of operations that historically and logically pre-cede the media concepts generated by them’ (Siegert, 2011: 15). Forexample, counting historically and logically precedes numbers, singingprecedes formalized scales, and casual farming precedes the invention ofrationalized agriculture. This observation suggests a technical and prac-tical a priori to the discourse networks of classic German media theory.The task for the theorist of cultural techniques is to determine by whatprocesses numbers, scales, or a ploughshare reciprocally and recursivelymodify and formalize the practices of counting, singing, and farming thatgenerated them.

The study of such recursive processes constitutes the topological coreof research on cultural technique. Put in terms familiar to German mediatheory of the 1980s and 1990s, cultural techniques concern the rules ofselection, storage, and transmission that characterize a given system ofmediation, including the formal structures that compose and constrictthis process. The fact that this process comprehends both the emergenceof a new symbolic system and the recursive formalization of this systemaccounts in some part for the ambiguity introduced in English transla-tions. Every cultural technique (Kulturtechnik) tends towards becoming acultural technology (Kulturtechnik). Where English sharply distinguishesand opposes these meanings, colloquial German designates their intimateand ontologically elusive conjunction.

This conceptual shift so easily likened to the formal operations of aTuring machine or cybernetic servomechanism (see Krajewski, 2013)masks a more profound dislocation in the foundations of theKittlerian program. The rift concerns the seemingly innocuous phrase‘operations or sequences of operations that historically and logically pre-cede’. Rather than starting with an already-organized technology,

Geoghegan 69

research on cultural techniques commences with an inchoate mixture oftechniques, practices, instruments, and institutional procedures that giverise to a technological set-up. The methodological specificity of researchon Kulturtechniken is its emphasis on the configurations of instruments,practices, and signs that comprise the a priori of a given technical andcultural system. This is not media archaeology but rather an archaeologyof media.

This effort to isolate and define symbolic sequences, and situate theirspecificity, almost inevitably involves recourse to aspects of anthropologywith an emphasis on human practice – and, more importantly, explicitly orimplicitly, some element of cross-cultural analysis. Every cultural tech-nique always already implies cultural diversity, either within or betweencultures. The Kittlerian privilege assigned to European culture and tech-nologies of Western derivation no longer suffices for this style of analysis.Figures of class tension, barbarians, and parasites quickly proliferate(Krajewski, 2013; Vismann, 2013; Siegert, 2008). In this new set-up inter-lopers and alterity become necessary (but not sufficient) conditions, ratherthan effects, of media-technological configurations. It is the very undecid-ability over whether such methodological reorientations constitute violentruptures or deep-seated revelations for media theoretical analysis thatallow for the qualification of Kulturtechnikforschung as apostasy.

Body Techniques

An example drawn from the work of Erhard Schuttpelz (2010) illustratescertain hallmarks of cultural-technical research. His special interest incomparative and cross-cultural anthropology distinguishes him amongcontemporary theorists of cultural techniques but also coincides with abroader anthropological orientation that differentiates research on cul-tural techniques from that of classic German media theory. In his essay‘Body Techniques’, Schuttpelz recounts a story told by the French eth-nographer Marcel Mauss in the 1935 essay ‘Techniques of the Body’.Mauss argued that distinct cultures have systematic ways of organizingeveryday bodily activities, such as walking, swimming, and running. Hetraced the genesis of this theoretical concept to his extended stay at anAmerican hospital in the 1920s. According to Mauss:

A kind of revelation came to me in hospital. . . . I wondered wherepreviously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked. I had thetime to think about it. At last I realised that it was at the cinema.Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was, espe-cially in Paris; the girls were French and they too were walking inthis way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arriveover here, thanks to the cinema. This was an idea I could generalise.(Mauss, 1973: 72)


Two aspects of this story interest Schuttpelz. There is the fact of a specifictechnique, walking, which is disseminated and conditioned by a newtechnical medium, the cinema. Equally important is that the cinemaitself – by breaking the actions of the human body down into a seriesof discrete, serial movements – makes Mauss’s concept, techniques of thebody, thinkable. Thus far we see the hallmark elements of classicalGerman media theory, with its emphasis on the technological a priori.By emphasizing the role of a technological determinant in Mauss’s con-cept, Schuttpelz is halfway to redefining techniques of the body as acultural technology.

Schuttpelz embarks on a cultural-technical analysis by situatingMauss’s techniques of the body within a heterogeneous set-up of tech-niques, technologies, and signs co-articulated by power and politics that,in turn, have implications for cultural difference and distinction. Helocates the genesis of Mauss’s cultural techniques of the body inEtienne Jules-Marey’s famous motion studies, pointing out that thesestudies were allied with the late-19th-century racist and classist ethnog-raphy that sought to inventory types, such as the gait of Africans,Europeans, workers, and soldiers. Through motion photography, move-ment itself became a symbolic system characterizable by discrete seriesthat could be quoted and recursively modified. These series could articu-late difference between cultures (‘European’ and ‘African’) and within aculture (upper and lower classes), and they also refined existing culturaldistinctions. In this way motion studies refined techniques of the bodyinto a cultural technology of racist and classist differentiation. Subsequentinterventions by cinema, Taylorism, industrialization, and colonialismenabled the French ethnographer Mauss to develop a concept that iden-tified these new cultural formations as techniques of the body.

Although constructed and contingent, these techniques of the bodyalso designated a real, historical, and obdurate phenomenon whose bio-logical underpinnings closely approximate natural life forces. To exploita certain semantic ambiguity unavailable to German, we may say thatSchuttpelz’s history demonstrates how a variety of cultural techniques[Kulturtechniken] were strategically bound together into a potent culturaltechnology [Kulturtechnik]. On their own, concepts, bodies, filmstrips,and politics are techniques; but as components of an integrated symbolicsystem, they become a cultural technology. Although such symbolic sys-tems may be integrated into a single technology or dispositif, sucharrangements are at best temporary consolidations until emergent prac-tices and technologies displace and rearrange the constituent parts.

The Techniques of Kultur

A survey of methodological impasses or case studies (such as we haveapproximated in the preceding pages) may provide an overview to the

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cultural techniques of recent German media theory. To penetrate to thecore of the problematic, however, it is necessary to zero in on the termitself, Kulturtechnik, and its economic conjunction of pleonasm, paradox,and neologism. This combination of connotations derives from the pecu-liar associations of the three terms it brings together, namely: Kultur,derived from Latin colere and introduced into German in the 17th and18th centuries to designate culture; the term Technik, derived fromancient Greek and introduced into German in the 18th century, signify-ing technique, technology, or technics; and Kulturtechnik, a 19th-centuryterm for agricultural engineering that was appropriated in the 1970s and1980s by theorists of pedagogy to designate basic competencies in read-ing, writing, and arithmetic. It is in the bridges and joints among theseterms – which are themselves moving and dynamic, like a drawbridgemounted on buoyant piles rather than an isthmus or fixed overpass – thatwe find the features that define Kulturtechnik as a media theoreticalconcept.5

Take the term Kultur. Even if the term admitted easy translation, thiswould hardly fix or determine its semantic scope. As Raymond Williamsonce noted, ‘[c]ulture is one of the two or three most complicated wordsin the English language’ (Williams, 1983: 87). Everyday contemporaryusage in both languages (but especially in English) often implies anopposition among the terms culture, technology, and nature. Yet theseoppositions are partial and historical, the result of gradual dislocations inmeaning that are, in turn, reanimated and called into question by theagricultural term Kulturtechnik.

For example, the Latin term colere that furnishes the basis for theword culture grafts these three meanings together. The Latin Agri cultura(agriculture) did not break with nature but instead furnished a stable andenduring second nature. In ancient conceptions of colere, then, tech-niques proved constitutive to realizing the interwoven potential ofnature and culture alike. Well into the 17th century, Cultur designatedtechniques of farming and husbandry.6 Modern English and Germanusages retain these connotations, but typically in the specialized fieldsof practice that are divorced from everyday practice. In German super-markets mushrooms farmed under controlled conditions are marketed asKulturchampignon, or cultured mushrooms. Kultur in this context refersto a controlled mechanism for bringing forth and grooming a naturalpotential, whereby technique and nature work in concert.

But a peculiar transposition complicates this meaning and speaks dir-ectly to the concept’s later appropriation in cultural studies. In the courseof the 18th and 19th centuries a metaphorical understanding of culture asthe maintenance and cultivation of human development appeared. Thiscreeping bourgeois conception identified culture with competency inreading, writing, arithmetic, and the arts. Much as a fixed agri-culturecultivated a more refined and productive crop, proper culturing regimes


could make for a more refined and productive human subject. In thesebudding, blooming matrices of associations rich resources for future‘cultural sciences’ (as the German language designates the field of cul-tural studies) take root.

This ethnocentric identification of culture with a matrix of WesternEuropean attainments was contradicted by an alternate Germanophonedefinition of culture as the specific and relative characteristics of a givenpeople. Herder, for example, proposed the term culture to designate thespecific ways of life characteristic of different peoples. This usage recalledthe earlier, more agricultural sensibility of culture as second nature. Tocite one passage from Herder’s text:

Men of all the quarters of the globe, who have perished over the ages,you have not lived solely to manure the earth with your ashes, so thatat the end of time your posterity should be made happy by Europeanculture. The very thought of a superior European culture is a blatantinsult to the majesty of Nature. (cited in Williams, 1983: 89)

This conception combines increasingly fraught reactionary and progres-sive elements. On the one hand, there is an allusion to traditional andagricultural meanings: European culture springs up from a well-manuredearth. On the other hand, Herder labels the self-conceptions of this highlyrefined and technical culture as an insult to the glory of nature. Thisconception grants recognition to the would-be nomads and barbariansoutside the Greco-Roman sphere but also furnishes resources for thelater racist conception that links organic culture with the blood andsoil of a people.

Compounding the contradictory associations accruing around con-cepts of culture, Herder’s usage also adduces an emerging understandingof culture as something opposed to technical or mechanical civilization.It is tempting to see a return to primeval meaning free from technicalartifice. Yet this return, based on an opposition between the cultural andthe technical, is the quintessence of a specifically modern set of oppos-itions. As noted by Hartmut Bohme, the Latin term colere was remark-able for its ability to use artifice to bring us closer to nature. Emerging19th-century usage, by contrast, introduced the imaginary notion of aprimeval culture purged of technique and technology. This conception isquintessentially modern and marks out a profound schism in the mean-ing of culture and technique that continues to trouble present-dayGermanophone and Anglophone thought.

The Culture of Technik

This parsing of Kultur from technique set the stage for philosophicaland vernacular reflections on the term Technik. Consider Heidegger’s

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well-known essay ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’. Although it is typicallytranslated as ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, such a designationtends to obscure a major theme of the essay, namely the relation ofancient techniques [Technik] to modern technics [Technik] and moderntechnology [Technik] (Weber, 1989). Heidegger’s definition of Technik asa general mode of bringing forth or revealing closely overlaps withnotions of colere and Kultur, and his central example is drawn fromagricultural practice:

[In traditional technics t]he work of the peasant does not challengethe soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed inthe keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase.But meanwhile [in modern technics] even the cultivation of the fieldhas come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, whichsets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it.Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. (Heidegger,1977: 14–15, emphasis in original)

Heidegger’s comparison between traditional and modern technics restsupon this ability of the word Technik to refer to ancient and modern, aswell as human and machinic, styles of production, which stages hisinquiry into the chasm that separates technique and technology in themodern era. The standard English translation suggests that Heideggersimply rejects technology. A more faithful translation and reading sug-gests that the use of the term Technik allows Heidegger to reject the late-19th-century de-technicization of culture in order to reclaim a fundamen-tal relation between technique and technology, as well as techne andcolere.

Heidegger’s efforts to reunite technology, technique, and culturewithin techne speak directly to the crises surrounding technology andculture in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. Historian Jeffrey Herfcharacterizes ‘the battle over Technik und Kultur’ as a centrepiece ofphilosophy and politics in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich,arguing that Heidegger ‘believed that the Germans had a special missionto combine Technik and Kultur’ (Herf, 1984: 109). While Heidegger’sconservative contemporaries often embraced a synthesis of technicsand culture, in the end Heidegger remained ambivalent. Enamored oftechne but unable to reconcile himself with modern technics, he retreatedto the Greeks and Gelassenheit for philosophical solace.

To what extent Kittler’s own work was constrained by his indebted-ness to the reactionary modernist tradition remains an open question.That he rejected crude interwar nationalistic and biological racisms isclear. That he raided the works of interwar conservatives such asHeidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Junger for a critique of WestGerman philosophical and anti-technicist humanisms is also evident.


Yet scholars have asked whether Kittler ultimately appropriated the mod-ernist reactionary binary of Kultur and Technik only to give a postmodernand ludic privilege to the term Technik (Winthrop-Young andWutz, 1999:xxxvii–xxxviii; Berger, 2006). Dissatisfaction with such a possibly simplis-tic inversion points towards the peculiar appeal of Kulturtechnik as a con-cept. Binding the terms Kultur and Technik together, it elaborates an oldand established debate that casts a long shadow over contemporaryGermanophone scholarship. Moreover, the very joining of these terms –without explicitly surrendering, banishing, or privileging either – also sug-gests a heterogeneous composite of culture and technology absent fromreactionary modernisms and postmodernisms. And lastly, the agriculturalconnotations of Kultur and Kulturtechnik allow for an introduction ofthose questions of life and bios that the likes of Heidegger and Kittlerscrupulously avoided (probably due to their racist connotations in twen-tieth century German and European thought) but which have recently re-aserted themselves as problematics for critical reflection in 21st centruyphilosophy and media theory.

Of Provinces and People (The Rise of Culturing Techniques)

The introduction of the word Kulturtechnik into German in the 19thcentury to designate agricultural engineering marks the fracturing ofcolere, culture, Cultur, Kultur, techne, technique, Technik, and technologyin the modern era. Once overlapping terms associated with colere andtechne had, in the modern era, grown so rarified and reified that it waseasier to join them together as juxtaposed terms than resolve them into afull and originary meaning. But rather like the terms Kultur and Technik,which seem to consistently waiver between relations of opposition andcomposition, the term Kulturtechnik also designates the partial consoli-dation and reconciliation of these terms during the 19th century. Ashistorian John Tresch notes, 19th-century German thought gave rise toa neglected tradition of mechanical romanticism that sought to reconcileand re-imagine the relationships among mechanism and organicism(Tresch, 2012). Scientists such as Alexander von Humboldt saw in instru-ments and technology resources for getting closer to nature and mediat-ing the achievement of a more harmonious – even organic – state. Thename Tresch gives to this movement is mechanical romanticism.Kulturtechnik could be another.

In 1871 the Royal Prussian Agricultural Academy established a pro-fessorship for Kulturtechnik at the University of Bonn (Strecker, 1908: 3).Although agricultural engineering is perhaps the most apposite Englishequivalent, a more literal translation such as culturing techniques bettercaptures this new field’s position within an emerging 19th-century ethosthat saw in rationalism techniques for realizing the power and potentialsof nature. Charles August Vogler’s Introduction to Agricultural

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Engineering (Grundlehren der Kulturtechnik – first volume published in1898) counted chemistry, mineralogy, botany, mechanics, hydraulics,economics, water management, manufacturing, and law among thisnew field’s constituents. This rational series of interlocking distinctionsfor cultivating the land were supplemented by a new set of distinctionsbetween and among lands. The volume’s introduction detailed the cul-turing techniques peculiar to Bavaria, Saxony, Baden, Hessen, Austria,and Switzerland and exhorted the reader to recognize and celebrate thepower of culturing techniques to ‘serve the Fatherland and elevatenational prosperity’ (Strecker, 1908: 7).

This conception underscores how the term Kulturtechnik is no neutralengineering term. Like Kultur and Technik, from its inception it isinscribed within cultural and technological conflicts of Germanophonepolitics and power. To cultivate any of the three entails the delineationand reproduction of a way of life, be it reactionary or revolutionary. Thiscontinues today, as the Bonn professorship for Kulturtechnik advertisesits commitment to incorporating environmentally sensitive (umweltrele-vanten) concerns into its field of study. This focus on the Umwelt coin-cides with the wider reorientation across contemporary German scientificand political life toward the interpenetration of nature, technique, andhuman culture.

Cultural Techniques as Media Theory

Cultural techniques did not come to German media theory as a directimport from agricultural engineering. Their entry was much more mun-dane, as part of education and the state’s concern with pedagogy andinstruction. According to Schuttpelz, Kittler encountered the term as astudent and instructor at the University of Freiburg in the late 1970s andearly 1980s, when the term Kulturtechniken was resurfacing in German asa designation for competencies in reading, writing, and arithmetic(see Fritz, 1986; Schuttpelz, pers. comm.). This definition recalled the18th- and 19th-century definition of culture as liberal arts.Characteristic of many cultural techniques, it owed its legibility to newmedia technologies. Theorists of pedagogy argued that these skillsdemanded a reassessment and redefinition in the age of media and com-munication technologies (Heynmann, 2008). Culture was no longersomething to be taken for granted but rather a set Heynmann, 2008NIR of techniques and a process, whereby the human subject itself wasmaterial for cultivation. Culturing techniques, then, demanded a stra-tegic and coherent articulation of humans, techniques, and signs, whichitself was adapted to the technical (and pedagogical) regimes of theepoch. Although Kittler does not seem to have developed the term inany focused way, he appears to have brought this definition with him toBerlin in the 1990s, which in turn laid the foundation for the Berlin


School’s continuing preoccupation with symbolic systems of reading,writing, image-making, and music as the ur-cultural techniques.

However, at this point we go beyond historicism and anecdote andbegin to identify the associations among agricultural engineering, elem-entary pedagogy, and media theoretical analysis that endow the termKulturtechnik with such provocative interest and intrigue in recentGerman media theory. The first two meanings (agricultural engineeringand pedagogy) are alternate iterations of a shared tradition. The formersense finds its roots in the traditions of culture as agriculture while thelatter can be traced to Enlightenment notions of culture as the acquisi-tion of literacy and numeracy. Both recall the fundamental relationshipbetween culture and techne, or the process of bringing forth that must belearned and routinized. To term literacy a culturing technique is tounderscore that reading and culture are cultivated and bring forth acertain kind of subject and a certain kind of society through the learningof rote procedures of selection, processing, and reproduction. This prob-lem may be distinct from agricultural engineering but it is not whollyindependent.

In a sense, the pedagogical meanings extend the symbolic andLacanian preoccupations of classic Kittlerian media theory (i.e. ‘theworld of the symbolic is the world of the machine’) (Kittler, 1997),while the agricultural associations provide the agitation necessary tograft alternate problematics into this line of analysis. Already in the19th century the problem of Kulturtechnik broaches questions of nationaland cultural identity, the establishment and maintenance of experimentalsystems, the interweaving of nature and technics, the imbrication of prac-tices and technology, and the routinizing of culturing procedures. Thepractice of rational and systematic farming entails a holistic matrix oftechniques and practices that establish a logic within the soil and anorder among the humans and machines tilling the soil. Farming proced-ures indexed to the seasons introduce a semiotic system that helps founda new order among things, practices, and signs. The results are culturaldistinctions, both as an infinity of distinctions in the land and distinctionsbetween lands. Introduced into media theoretical analysis, this overturnsthe anti-biologism that prevailed in nearly all Kittlerian analysis andpoints towards a genealogical complement or alternative to mediaarcheology.

In contemporary usage the connotations of Kulturtechnik vastlyexceed its designations, but this does not make the etymology any lesssignificant. As Hans-Georg Gadamer observed:

When you take a word in your mouth you must realize that youhave not taken a tool that can be thrown aside if it will not do thejob, but you are fixed in a direction of thought that comes from afarand stretches beyond you. (cited in Peters, 1988: 9)

Geoghegan 77

It is this long linguistic, semantic, and conceptual itinerary that gives theterm its peculiar power – what I earlier designated as a combination ofpleonasm, paradox, and neologism. Pleonasm, for the redundancybetween Kultur and Technik in etymological origins; paradox, for theuncomfortable conjunction they articulate between two phenomenapainfully wrenched apart in the rise of European modernity; and neolo-gism, for the way that a contemporary theorist of Kulturtechnik seems tocoin a new word while reanimating a host of older associations thatcomes from afar and stretches beyond.

A cursory overview of the recent research on cultural techniquesreveals how this rich history of associations returns in the present,media theoretical usage. When Schuttpelz describes techniques of thebody rendered legible and rational in the age of motion photography,he also presents us with an inventory of techniques for taking a bodywith life and potential and endowing it with a more stable, rational formthat articulates a family of distinctions within and between cultures(Schuttpelz, 2010). When Bernhard Siegert argues that ‘the map is theterritory’, and describes the rise of modern cartographic methods as amethod of rationalizing instruments, signs, and bodies around the defin-ition and demarcation of a new territory, we cannot help but feel somesense of Latin colere – with its emphasis on inhabiting and cultivating theland while displacing the nomads – stirring again in our age (Siegert,2011). When Thomas Macho and Christian Kassung argue that calen-dars and clocks are cultural techniques, they are also calling attention tothe ways we interweave technologies, signs, and practices with therhythms of earth, in order to consolidate a common way of life(Kassung and Macho, 2013). When Markus Krajewski details the cul-tural techniques by which Victorian servants selected, stored, and trans-mitted messages in their master’s house, he reminds us that even cultureitself – as second nature – must submit to cultural-technical processesthat curate and cultivate (and occasionally de-realize) its potential(Krajewski, 2013).

Implicit in each of these usages is also a slinking assimilation of con-cepts of life, practice, and bios that is fundamentally lacking from theclassic, Kittlerian approach to media. This also throws open analysis to awider field of contemporary inquiry into themes such as biopolitics, ecol-ogy, and animal studies as media theoretical problems that can andshould be approached by a focus on the cultural-technical systems thatproduce specific forms of life, environment, and species relations. This isnot achieved by jettisoning the modern quarrel over Kultur and Technikbut rather by reframing it with a historically grounded concept thatredistributes the associations among these terms. Putting these termstogether as a composite – Kulturtechnik or cultural technique – remindsus that they are mutually constitutive terms while also reminding us thatthey cannot resolve back into the holism implied by colere or techne.


This constitutive hybridity of cultural techniques, as well as theiremphasis on situated and local configurations of instruments, practices,and signs, traces out the emerging status of media and cultural studies inthe 21st century. Once, gramophones, film, and typewriters seemed toexhaust the dominant media forms of the epoch. Departments of ‘FilmStudies’, ‘Radio/Television/Film’ and ‘Cultural Studies’ suggest a deli-neated field of study that pivoted around platforms and practices. Yet thetendency towards digitization that organized and undermined the frame-work of Kittlerian analysis also gutted the carefully cultivated distinctionamong media as well as cultural, technical, and life sciences (Jenkins,2006; Thacker, 2005). No media archaeology offers a resolution to thisdilemma. Instead, media genealogists must ask how, and under whatconditions, cultural techniques strategically and temporarily consolidatethese forces into coherent technologies.

Acknowledgements

I thank audiences at the University of Tulsa, the University of Chicago New Media

Working Group, and Christian Kassung’s research colloquium for their thoughtful com-mentaries on presentations of this research. I also thank Lisa Akervall, Bridget Hanna,Micaela Morrissette, Ben Peters, and Erhard Schuttpelz; the editors of this issue (Jussi

Parikka, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, and Ilinca Iurascu); and four anonymous reviewersfor their perspicacious readings of earlier drafts of this paper. Funding from the‘Gesellschaftliche Innovation durch “nichthegemoniale” Wissensproduktion’ project of

the German Research Foundation supported the research and writing of this paper.

Notes

1. The best short introduction and overview in English of Kittler’s research canbe found in Winthrop-Young and Gane (2006). Although authored too earlyto address Kittler’s late turn towards mathematics and cultural techniques,see also Winthrop-Young and Wutz (1999). My own, very compact survey ofhis work can be found online at Geoghegan (2011).

2. The question of what’s so German about German media theory is addressedin Horn (2008). The term ‘media archaeology’ is often used to looselydesignate Kittlerian media theory. For a discriminating discussion of thisterm, see Huhtamo and Parikka (2011, esp. 8–12) and Parikka (2011).

3. Friedrich Kittler’s former research assistant Paul Feigelfeld, currently of theHumboldt University of Berlin, is now redressing this problem with a disser-tation dedicated to the role of Chinese and Arabic analytical techniques inshaping ‘Western’ cryptographical procedures. The successful completion ofthis project may yet open new chapters and new avenues in Kittlerian mediaarchaeology.

4. See Friedrich Nietzsche (Book I, aphorism 32; in Nietzsche, 2001: 53). Seealso Nietzsche (Vol. I, Part 6, aphorism 298 and Vol. II, Part 1, aphorism 372;in Nietzsche, 1989).

5. On the bridges and joints of concepts, see Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 20).6. Here and throughout, I have consulted The Oxford English Dictionary, as

well as the aforementioned works by Williams and Bohme.

Geoghegan 79

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Nietzsche, F. (2008) Human, All Too Human. London: Wordsworth Classics.Parikka, J. (2011) Operative media archaeology: Wolfgang Ernst’s materialist

media diagrammatics. Theory, Culture & Society 28(5): 52–74.Peters, J.D. (1988) Information: Notes toward a critical history. Journal of

Communication Inquiry 12(2): 9–23.Peters, J.D. (2007) Strange sympathies: Horizons of German and American

media theory. Media and Society 15: 131–152.Schuttpelz, E. (2006) Die Medienanthropologische Kehre der Kulturtechniken.

Archiv fur Mediengeschichte: 87–110.Schuttpelz, E. (2010) Korpertechniken. Zeitschrift Fur Medien- Und

Kulturforschung: 101–120.Siegert, B. (2008) Cacography or communication? Cultural techniques in

German media studies. Grey Room 29: 26–47.Siegert, B. (2011) The map is the territory. Radical Philosophy 169: 13–16.Strecker, W. (1908) Das Wesen der Kulturtechnik. In: Vogler, C.A. (ed.)

Grundlehren der Kulturtechnik (Zweiter Band). Berlin: Paul Parey, 3–12.Tresch, J. (2012) The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology After

Napoleon. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Vismann, C. (2013) Cultural techniques and sovereignty. Theory, Culture &

Society 30(6).Weber, S. (1989) Upsetting the set up: Remarks on Heidegger’s questing after

technics. MLN 104(5): 977–992.Williams, R. (1983) Culture. In: Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society.

New York: Oxford University Press, 87–93.Winthrop-Young, G. and Gane, N. (2006) Friedrich Kittler: An introduction.

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Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a media theorist and historian of tech-nology. He works as a Wissenchaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Institut furKulturwissenschaft at the Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin. In 2012 hereceived a dual-PhD from the Fakultat Medien of Bauhaus-UniversitatWeimar and the Screen Cultures program of Northwestern University.

Geoghegan 81

His research interests include digital media, historical epistemology,visual culture studies, software studies, the theory of cultural techniques,and the history of electrical engineering. He has held posts and fellow-ships at the American University of Paris, Harvard University, MIT, thePompidou Center, Northwestern University, and the Children’s MediaProject. His essays appear in journals including Critical Inquiry, TheIEEE Annals on the History of Computing, and Interaction Studies. Hemay be reached online at www.bernardg.com.



30(6) 83–93




DOI: 10.1177/0263276413496851

tcs.sagepub.com

Article

Cultural Techniques andSovereignty

Cornelia Vismann

Abstract

First published in 2010, Cornelia Vismann’s article has already attained the status of a

classic. In a formulation inspired by linguistic theory, the author argues that the

relation between cultural techniques and media can be understood in analogy to

grammatical operations. Thus, cultural techniques define the agency of media and

execute the procedural rules which the latter set in place. Together, they articulate a

critique of subjectivity and sovereignty that proceeds by re-examining the notion of

‘culture’ via its agricultural origins to the current moment when the ‘preservation of

cultural techniques’ has entered legal and academic discourse. Ultimately, despite

their apparent separation from praxis, cultural techniques continue to proliferate

through axes of substitution and displacement.

Keywords

cultural techniques, law, linguistics, sovereignty, symbolic order

Acting in the Medium

Cultural techniques describe what media do, what they produce, and whatkinds of actions they prompt.1 Cultural techniques define the agency ofmedia and things. If media theory were, or had, a grammar, that agencywould find its expression in objects claiming the grammatical subject pos-ition and cultural techniques standing in for verbs. Grammatical persons(and human beings alike) would then assume the place assigned for objectsin a given sentence. From the perspective of media, such a reversal ofpositions may well be the most prominent feature of a theory of culturaltechniques. Nevertheless, positions cannot be arbitrarily combined. Ineach case, there are specific things and media entailing specific techniques.Tools prescribe their own usage, and objects have their own operators.




To start with an elementary and archaic cultural technique, a ploughdrawing a line in the ground: the agricultural tool determines the politicalact; and the operation itself produces the subject, who will then claimmastery over both the tool and the action associated with it. Thus, theImperium Romanum is the result of drawing a line – a gesture which, notaccidentally, was held sacred in Roman law. Someone advances to theposition of legal owner in a similar fashion, by drawing a line, markingone’s territory – ownership does not exist prior to that act.

The default positions of media and things that set cultural techniquesinto motion contradict a legally sanctioned, and thereby particularlywidespread, notion: namely, the claim that only the subject can carryout actions and rule over things. Nevertheless, a pre-existing relationbetween media and cultural techniques already determines the waythings are to be handled, even before they submit to the subject’s will.One could very well argue that this ‘default position’, common to allmedia and things, has its origin with those who have conceived anddesigned them. Thus – so the argument goes – even if a tool dictatesits own usage, it is built in a manner that allows it to carry out that task.A thing is constructed with a purpose and, therefore, its manufacturerdoes not merely execute ‘the order of things’. Still – and this is preciselywhat sets the study of cultural techniques apart – none of the tool’sinbuilt purposes is ever independent from the given conditions of pro-duction, its material properties or spatial circumstances. One must there-fore draw a distinction between persons, who de jure act autonomously,and cultural techniques, which de facto determine the entire course ofaction. To inquire about cultural techniques is not to ask about thefeasibility, success, chances and risks of certain innovations and inven-tions in the domain of the subject. Instead, it is to ask about the self-management or auto-praxis [Eigenpraxis] of media and things, whichdetermines the scope of the subject’s field of action.

Once again, the notion of auto-praxis can be understood via a gram-matical reformulation of the theory of cultural techniques. Its equivalentis a specific type of verbal construction, which describes the relationbetween things, media and cultural techniques as mutually interdepend-ent: the so-called medium voice from Greek. Unlike active and passiveconstructions, that particular verb form signals that the acting subject is,grammatically speaking, dependent upon a third element. In the mediumvoice, an action doesn’t derive from someone and encounter something;nor does it work the other way around. Even though the grammaticalconcept of the medium may seem to occupy a ‘nonsensical’ position(Schadewaldt, 1978: 145), between the active and the passive, it implies,at any rate, that operations can also be executed by non-personal agentsthat do not act in a syntactical-juridical sense. Certain actions cannot beattributed to a person; and yet, they are somehow still performed. Thatsituation is reflected by the medium. The issue of legal accountability is


the defining feature of the medium verb form. The medium suspends thenorm of clear assignations, which satisfies legal requirements as well.Perpetrators and victims, those who give orders and those who sufferthem, no longer coincide with grammatical subjects and objects. Themedium creates a relational middle ground here, which does notsimply amount to a reversal of the two positions.

Wolfgang Schadewaldt gives the example of law-making in order toexplain the medium verb form in Greek. Law-making is an operation –or, to put it differently, a cultural technique – executed by a popularassembly. Schadewaldt points out that assemblies have limited agency.They reach their own decisions only to the extent to which the pre-exist-ing laws allow it. Law-making is therefore not an autocratic, unrestrictedactivity, but rather one that is conditioned by the law. That condition,however, drawn from the very legal domain as the operation that ensuesfrom it, is not the only restriction applied to law-making. The place ofassembly, the object of disputation, and the rules of decision also play apart in the production of the actual law. The word Ding, or thing, signalsprecisely the kind of fusion of place and matter that characterizes anassembly. The medium of Greek grammar does away with an issuewhich subsequently becomes the fundamental legal paradox of the sov-ereign ruler, simultaneously placed above and beneath the law. ‘Themedium guarantees that certain operations continue to be bound totheir performer’ (Schadewaldt, 1978: 145).

To illustrate such operations, Schadewaldt gives the example of theverb for bathing, which is used in the medium voice in Greek to suggestthat the bather is carried by the water. As opposed to a spear, which isreleased from the hand of its thrower, the trajectory of bathing remainsbound to the medium of water. The grammatical form of the mediumindicates that very relational quality. Spear-throwing, on the other hand,represents a classic case of active verb formation. The difference betweenthe spear and the water, between ‘that which only initiates, and thatwhich continues to determine a process’, is one that dictates the formof the verb. Implicitly, that distinction presupposes two different ways oflooking at things. The focus is either on the goal (its achievement, itsfailure and the suitability, or, respectively, the unsuitability of its means)or the supporting agent. The ballistic perspective (the active voice, thespear) corresponds to the logic of the law, which continuously associatesmeans with their ends. Moreover, it also partakes of a legal narrativeaccording to which an operation may be attributed to an agent asthe source of a conflict or a legal matter. The medium-based perspective(the medium, the water) is consistent with the method of study of culturaltechniques. Instead of an investigation of causes, which presupposes asearch for an individual culprit in the matter, here the doer is deducedfrom the instrumentalities of the action and the agent is derived from themedium itself.

Vismann 85

Consequently, as far as the study of cultural techniques is concerned, itmakes no difference whether the object of inquiry is spear-throwing orbathing. A spear that is thrown and a body of water that carries a batherdo not occupy different positions. Neither does law-making. Thus, thingsand media will always function as carriers of operations, irrespective ofwhat is at stake in their execution: contexts, instruments or texts, every-thing that is and continues to be. The question that follows from hereconcerns the relationship between the two perspectives: the ballistic viewof the law and the medium-based approach of cultural techniques.Clearly, from the vantage point of cultural techniques, the sovereignsubject becomes disempowered, and it is things that are invested withagency instead. Does that amount to the end of the western idea ofsovereignty? Have responsibility and accountability become useless cate-gories? Some voices insist that the law should treat media and things inaccordance with their media-theoretical importance. They propose thatautomata may be held criminally liable, computers close a contract andthe internet assume authorial functions. Others regard such thing-oriented legal notions as nothing but a re-enactment of a great comedyof innocence, in which guilt is passed on to the blade used to commit thecrime; those latter rather stick to the narrative according to which everyaction is assigned to an acting subject.

What are the consequences of a media-theoretical perspective thatviews things and media as ‘performers’? Can they be granted subjectiverights equal to human rights? Would legal figures be required to explainhow media and things dethrone the sovereign subject, or, at least, cometo share that throne with him? Such questions remain open. The fact thatwe ask them shows that both media and things are leaving behind, or,may even have been liberated from, their passive existence as servileobjects or serviceable means. The turn against framing things in strictlypassive terms partly derives from an ecological impulse, demanding thatnon-humans be treated equally with humans and their specific rights. Toa certain extent, things have had their own share in ensuring that theinstrumental perspective may not be used to adequately describe theircase. In their resistance against serving specific purposes, they lay a claimto a different kind of perception, which – not accidentally – coincideswith a stage of heightened attention to media and things. The study ofcultural techniques has taken up the task of examining that very stage.What remains to be done is to find distinctions among objects (that is,among media and things) that correspond to those that law has long setin place for the subject, by working with different degrees of intention-ality that range from premeditated acts to acts of negligence. When itcomes to objects, however, the quest for a similar distinction in terms ofdegrees of action remains futile. As far as agency is concerned, the lawholds that things and media are strictly passive. The domain of the objectremains outside the scope of legal investigations. Not so in the case of


cultural techniques, where research foregrounds it as a mode of operationneither entirely detached from the acting subject nor fully independentfrom ‘objects’ (i.e. things and media).

Execution and Procedural Rules

The above-quoted passage from Schadewaldt states that certain oper-ations, when executed in the medium voice, continue to be bound totheir performer. What stands out here is the notion of execution – aconcept of central importance to the approach of cultural techniques.As soon as the focus of observation shifts from ideas to techniques, fromnouns to the specific steps in the operation, the attention is gearedtowards the execution of a particular act. To execute generally meansto proceed in a structured manner. Something is executed according toplan. An operation follows a pre-established scheme, even when itappears to be an original act that has not yet been mapped out. Evenacts that are seemingly new and unique do not proceed without a plan.That almost algorithmic dimension of operations becomes fully apparentwhen acts are repeatedly executed – for instance, in the case of rituals.But even a stone cast on an impulse follows a certain course of action.That disposition toward procedural conformity, which does not in theleast contradict the spontaneity of the gesture, is already inscribed withinthe things and media that partake of any given operation. To derive theoperational script from the resulting operation, to extract the rules ofexecution from the executed act itself: that is what characterizes theapproach of cultural techniques.

Whether the matter at hand is a body of water or a spear, a computeror an architectural object like a door or a table, all media and thingssupply their own rules of execution. Such ‘material’ instructions of oper-ation come from a place that is not under the agent’s control. Actingindependently from individual performers, and thus maintaining theirpotential reproducibility, they steer processes into different directions,towards different opportunities, and different persons. Such operationsare sustained by a certain operational know-how, which can be learnedand passed on to others. Reproducibility and learnability are among thekey features of cultural techniques. All disciplines grounded in transfer-able praxis therefore deal with cultural techniques. That is clearly thecase with the classical dogmatic disciplines of theology, medicine andlaw, where dogmas ensure that operations are performed independentlyof persons. Dogmas are therefore nothing else but the linguistic expres-sion of particular acts of execution. They account for a certain kind ofpractical knowledge, which thus becomes learnable and reproducible.Not surprisingly, the Greek term techne is synonymous with dogma(see Herberger, 1981: 11). Not unlike dogma, techne designates thebody of rules and regulations that circumscribe a particular mode of

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praxis. In cases where cultural techniques are performed and mediatedindependently of persons, they take on a specific form, which finds itsexpression in written directions, notations, codes of procedure, rules ofapplication, annotations, and other systems of signs.

Such technical instructions are essential for the study of cultural tech-niques. This is particularly the case for historical studies, where the rulesof execution allow cultural techniques to first assert themselves. Whatwould we know about the powerful cultural technique of record-keeping,about its emergence, or discursive field, without the specific instructionsstipulated in chancery court orders? Instructions represent a layman’sultimate form of access to implicit or tacit knowledge, as Bruno Latourhas defined this kind of practical expertise. Instructions are akin to, butnot identical with, laws. Whereas laws can be transgressed and reinforcedby punishment, the rules regarding proper usage cannot be ignored –without also risking one’s position or job. Those who don’t go by thenorms, who don’t follow the rules of the trade, will be relieved of theirright to exercise their activity. Technical regulations are vital for art. Theprocedural rules reflect its current state of affairs. Thus, when making astatement about cultural techniques, one need not speculate whether theoperational instructions have been followed or not. Their presence callsattention to a particular kind of praxis. Whenever rules are implicitlystored in a machine or explicitly contained in the form of written instruc-tions, they establish a connection between certain operations and theirperformers: that is to say, the agents commonly known as subjects andobjects. Agents stand for both, as shown by the medium verb form inGreek. That is the premise upon which the theory of cultural techniquesis built: namely, a theory of medium-based operations, which in thehands of logic, grammar and the law is split into a subject who actsand an object that serves. In the eyes of the law, the relation of mediationbecomes a question of attribution. Operations are strictly attributed topersonal subjects. From the perspective of cultural techniques, the cat-egory of personal subjecthood is the object of an act of assignation, andthat act, in its turn, is itself a technique, one that occupies a central placein our legally defined culture. The study of cultural techniques raisesquestions about how things and media operate. Thereby, it traces thefiction of sovereign subjectivity, the myth of the subject as legislator,instigator or perpetrator, back to the techniques that make it possiblein the first place.

Cultural Techniques – Cultural Heritage

The term ‘cultural techniques’ suggests there may be other kinds of tech-niques as well. But can anything ever be produced outside of culture(Schuttpelz, 2006: 90)? After all, techniques always wrest somethingaway from nature, whether by fencing in an area, building a house


or setting up a system of irrigation. The opposite of cultural techniquesare not culture-less techniques. There is no such thing as barbarian tech-niques. Culture is already implicit in techne, and colere implies thearchaic techniques of irrigation, planting and taming, which turnnature into culture (Nanz and Siegert, 2006: 8). The counterpart of cul-tural techniques, therefore, is a world where techniques do not exist at all,a notion which cannot even be mentioned without using yet anothercultural technique: the act of naming, which allows things to be usedand studied in the first place.

If culture were nothing but a cipher for the symbolic order, whichcultural techniques intervene in, or even produce, any further attemptat defining culture would be rendered superfluous. That is quite possiblythe reason why cultural studies [Kulturwissenschaften] gave up on defin-ing their subject matter from the very start. Beyond the scientific-institu-tional context, where culture meant spirit and society, the term was leftpotentially and necessarily open. Only the study of cultural techniqueshas taken it literally, and derived its meaning from colere, which com-prises the archaic techniques of culture (in the sense of cultivation).

And yet, its scope is thereby not exhausted. Newer techniques, too, fallunder the semantic field of colere, as illustrated by the decision of theFederal Constitutional Court regarding the Treaty of Lisbon. There is noproper definition of culture in that case either. Rather, the court derivesits meaning from the techniques contained within the term colere. Towhat extent can a state lose its sovereignty without losing its identity?Called upon to answer that question, the court invoked the notion ofdemocratic self-determination, guaranteed by the state, and justified itsdecision by stressing the importance of cultural specificity for democraticdevelopment. Implicitly, then, the court assumes the task of defining theterms of what is culturally specific. Quite surprisingly, what follows is nota concrete list of German cultural trademarks. Instead, the court namesinstitutions supposed to safeguard culture, with particular emphasis onthe system of schools and education, the family, language, several sectorsof the media landscape and the church (Articles 240 and 260 of theFederal Constitutional Court). Ultimately, that inventory is not a farcry from the cultural techniques of education, alphabetization, reading,writing, praying, confessing, playing, as well as those techniques dictatedby computers and the internet. Thus, the institutions listed by the law asguardians of culture correspond in a definite and defining way to thecultural techniques that are the object of scientific inquiry.

The juridical involvement of cultural techniques is always to beexpected when legal means are deployed to prevent imminent loss. Justas cultural identity is defined against the threat of danger (in this case, thedanger of the loss of sovereignty), cultural techniques, too, enter the legaldiscourse only when they threaten to disappear. An international agree-ment issued by the United Nations stipulates the measures to be taken in

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order to save barely extant cultural techniques from oblivion. The intan-gible cultural heritage needs safeguarding – a formulation that couldeasily refer to cultural techniques. The UNESCO agreement concerningthe preservation of the intangible cultural heritage defines its subject asfollows: ‘oral traditions and means of expression, social practices, ritualsand celebrations, the knowledge and customs related to the interactionwith nature and the universe, as well as any forms of specialized know-ledge concerning traditional techniques of craftsmanship’ (UNESCO,2003). Further elaborating on those points, the text focuses on ‘practices,forms of expression, knowledge and skills, as well as their respectiveinstruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces’. The connectionsbetween things, media and operations established through the study ofcultural techniques are thereby also applied to the domain of internationallaw. The spaces, figures and objects that manage the sequence of stepscontaining default operational settings are granted legal protection.

The initiative to safeguard the intangible cultural heritage waslaunched around the same time as the first studies on cultural techniques,suggesting that the legal and epistemic matters are somehow connected.Research and the law intersect in a historical moment when things can besaid to have outgrown their operational habits. The voiceless, incon-spicuous, concrete things turn into problem cases. Practices, representa-tions, forms of expression, knowledge and skills are no longer passed on.Their transmission stalls; their reproducibility is threatened and theinstruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated with themare at risk of disappearing. They become variables. But they do notmerely attract the attention of the law-maker as the guardian of mediaand things. Their separation from praxis brings them into the focus ofresearch as well.

Obviously, there is no direct relation between the scientific and thelegal scope of inquiry. But the coincidence between the academic insti-tutionalization of cultural techniques and the legal move to safeguardfairy tales, dialects, popular celebrations and crafts is not altogether acci-dental. That coincidence results from the shared latency of their object offocus, be it classified under cultural heritage or cultural techniques. Theloss of use value makes room for the application of both conservativemeasures and theoretical constructions. If the former preserve what thelatter observe, then cultural techniques definitely carry with them a his-torical index. They have been co-opted into the academic field of know-ledge around the turn of the millennium, concomitantly with themeasures introduced to safeguard the endangered cultural heritage.And thus, the present from where this very text is written signals themoment when the basic operations of cultural techniques begin todisappear.

But their disappearance is not caused by the state’s self-imposedloss of sovereignty, as is the case with the process of Europeanization.


The initial impulse for both the study of cultural techniques and thesafeguarding of culture comes not from parting with the ‘complacentand conceited vision of the sovereign state’, as the Lisbon Treaty states(Articles 223 and 260 of the Federal Constitutional Court), but ratherfrom the disempowerment suffered by the acting subject. The dissolutionof certain fundamental distinctions underpinning the operations of thelaw, such as the difference between subject and object, entails a demandfor new settings, for drawing new demarcation lines. A case in point isthe debate concerning the question of copyright (the issue of ‘OpenAccess’). If writing on and with the help of the internet has, indeed,become common practice, then the image of a two-step process of writingas artistic creation and economic valuation, as the product of sovereigncreators and serviceable media becomes inappropriate. From the per-spective of cultural techniques, the alternative would be to conceive ofwriting as a continuous series of acts of transfer. The real challenge nowis to accommodate the idea of the non-sovereign subject to the media’sown logic, that is, first and foremost, to find new, functional distinctions,especially for aspects that have so far gone untheorized.

The Order of Cultural Techniques

The theory of cultural techniques thus seems to stand under the sign ofdecline, led in by a series of archival processes and archae-ological pro-jects. Nevertheless, its concern is not with saving any endangered capitalfrom the new flood of globalization or commercialization. Rather, itseeks to describe the chain of substitutions activated by the replacementof media and things. That chain is built along axes of analogy and dis-placement, succession and kinship. A case in point is the axis of digital-ization, which allows for a diachronic perspective on writing – diarywriting, for instance, which evolves into blogging, or the autograph,which finds its extension in the electronic signature. The axis of secular-ization goes back even further in time. Its religious roots can still betraced in a series of cultural techniques of the law. Such, for instance,is the technique of confession, which Michel Foucault has brought tobear upon the practices of interrogation and examination.Psychoanalysis and the police thus reveal a connection to each otherthat does not officially appear in the founding myths of either institution.

Such axes of displacement bring a certain order to cultural techniques.The question now is whether that can be achieved by other means as well.An important role is also played by the distinction between culturaltechniques that organize notions of space and time, those that HaroldInnis associates with the production of states and empires. The culturaltechniques that organize spatial categories comprise border regimes andsurveying techniques, in short, everything that defines the act of drawinga line. Their counterparts are genealogical techniques, which govern

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notions of duration, assign origins and secure the future: record-keeping,adoption and inheritance regulations, but also breeding and grafting.The former involve a legal document, while the latter imply a concreteoperation performed with the help of a knife. That taxonomy calls for afurther distinction between alphabetic and non-alphabetic cultural tech-niques. After all, the technique of irrigation is quite different from paper-based counting. Still, making can also imply text-based operations. Evenwithout being written on paper, the founding act of drawing a line in theground is a cartographic type of marking. It belongs to the symbolicorder, irrespective of how concretely ‘grounded’ the act itself may turnout to be. Similarly, the scion used in the cultural technique of grafting isthe carrier of particular features; implicitly then, the act of grafting maybe seen as a textual operation, with no ‘paperwork’ involved (seeVismann, 2010).

Thus, all cultural techniques maintain or establish some form of con-nection to the symbolic order; the distinction between alphabetic andnon-alphabetic techniques therefore only accounts for one type of clas-sification. The cultural techniques of space and of time (i.e. genealogicaltechniques) make for a more fundamental distinction. Everything else isassigned to a list in which cultural techniques are grouped according totheir differences and similarities, their precursors and successors. Suchlists are never finite. Moreover, the making of lists is itself a culturaltechnique, serving as a reminder that the study of cultural techniques isfolded within itself, eternally recurring and ready to be continued.

Translated by Ilinca Iurascu

Note

1. This article was previously published as ‘Kulturtechniken und Souveranitat’,Zeitschrift fur Medien- und Kulturforschung 1 (2010): 171–181.

References

Articles of the Federal Constitutional Court. Available at: http://www.bverfg.de/entscheidungen/es20090630_2bve000208.html (accessed 9January 2010).

Herberger, M. (1981) Dogmatik. Zur Geschichte von Begriff und Methode inMedizin und Jurisprudenz. Frankfurt am Main: Klosterman.

Nanz, T. and Siegert, B. (eds) (2006) Ex machina. Beitrage zur Geschichte derKulturtechniken. Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank fur Geisteswissenschaft(VDG).

Schadewaldt, W. (1978) Die Anfange der Philosophie bei den Griechen. Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp.



UNESCO (2003) Ubereinkommen zur Erhaltung des immateriellen Kulturerbes.Available at: http://unesco.de/ike-konvention.html?&L¼0 (accessed 9January 2010).

Vismann, C. (2010) Kaiser Justinian, Kultivierer des Textes. In: Wirth, U. (ed.)Pfropfen, Impfen, Transplantieren. Wege der Kulturforschung 2. Berlin:Kadmos.

Cornelia Vismann (1961–2010) was a legal historian and media theoristwho last held a position as Professor for the History and Theory ofCultural Techniques at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Her mainpublications include Files: Law and Media Technology (Stanford,2008), Medien der Rechtsprechung (Frankfurt, 2011) and collections onJacques Derrida and Pierre Legendre.

Ilinca Iurascu is Assistant Professor of German at the University ofBritish Columbia. A former postdoctoral fellow of the Media ofHistory – History of Media Program at the Bauhaus UniversityWeimar, she specializes in nineteenth-century German and comparativeliterature, media theory and early film studies.

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Article

The Power of SmallGestures: On theCultural Technique ofService

Markus KrajewskiBauhaus-Universitat Weimar, Germany

Abstract

Focusing on a subject the author has extensively engaged with over the years (most

notably in his 2010 study Der Diener), the article develops the notion of service as a

cultural technique, and the media-theoretical figure of the servant as its servomech-

anism. The analysis follows three distinct scenarios that highlight, via different chan-

nels of perception (acoustic, optic and haptic), the interplay between corporeal

practices and media objects in the production of specific cultural effects. In each

of the examples chosen, service implies highly regulated networks of recursive oper-

ational chains that regulate in their turn the production and distribution of power

and knowledge. Thus, Krajewski argues, despite, or rather, precisely because of their

apparent marginality and invisibility, the ‘small gestures’ of service join the ranks of

already established, elementary symbolic techniques such as reading or writing.

Keywords

cultural techniques, information technology, recursion, servants, servomechanisms

What would high culture be without literature? What would a societylook like without mathematics and music? Can there be cultural progresswithout services? Without question, reading and writing produce culturaleffects just like calculating and music-making do. But service? If culturaltechniques are designed to carry out an action that develops culturalefficacy in a specific way through the interplay of purposeful bodily ges-tures and the use of aids such as tools, instruments or other medialobjects, then service undoubtedly belongs to this category. However,while it is immediately evident in the case of writing how this elementary


30(6) 94–109




DOI: 10.1177/0263276413488961

tcs.sagepub.com


Markus Krajewski, Faculty of Media, Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar, Bauhausstraße 11, #226, D-99421

Weimar, Germany.



cultural technique of precisely applied finger and hand movements worksin cooperation with a writing utensil (pencil, typewriter, fountain pen,etc.), the interaction in more varied processes such as service remains inneed of explanation.

By way of three exemplary scenarios which will be briefly outlined, thecultural technique of service will be explained and subsequently situatedwithin a broader context of cultural productivity and its effects. Thehistory of service is extraordinarily diverse, complex and nearly bound-less. As the subordinate’s service of his master is based on one of thefundamental social relations between lord and servant, this cultural tech-nique pervades the entirety of history, in time and space, from the earliestrecords to the present day, and not merely in today’s form of Portuguesecleaning women in the industrial nations, but rather extending to themost remote human populations in the Amazon. That being said, thethree scenarios all arise from a courtly context and cast their own respect-ive spotlights on the acoustics (A Courtly Cough), the optics (Signals inSight), and the haptics (Regulating Rooms) of service. In this way, eachwill bring a channel of perception into focus on to which the servantgrafts himself, in the sense of a servomechanism, in order to perform hisprescribed actions in careful observation. ‘By continuously embracingtechnologies, we relate ourselves to them as servo-mechanisms’(McLuhan, 1964: 46). Just as the clerk is a underling to his clock, andthe Native American to his canoe, according to McLuhan, the servantappears literally as the service mechanism of his respective technique,which manifests itself in the form of the dinner tray, the door to beattended, the message to be relayed (by way of a flag signal, for instance)or through another technical gesture. In the discussion of these scenarios,more fundamental questions will be touched upon in passing, so tospeak; namely, what exactly is meant by a cultural technique? ErhardSchuttpelz provides a brilliant analysis of the concept (2006: 88). Butfirst, it is necessary to see the servant in action.

A Courtly Cough

There has long existed a sophisticated communications system at court.Not simply in the optical realm, where the various positions of the court-iers are made recognizable through finely differentiated practices of sig-nification in the form of uniforms, liveries and badges of all kinds(honour key, marshal’s baton, etc.), but also in the acoustic realm, thevarious people are accompanied by corresponding signals that ensure thedesired attention. Subaltern communications and their associated actionsbegin, . . . ahem . . . , with a cough.

To descend a few more levels, old senior footmen, meal attendantsand valets know how to nuance their coughing perfectly. The

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footman who closes the carriage’s door clears his throat delicatelywhen a lady-in-waiting who is deep in thought doesn’t specify whereshe wants to go, after which he jumps on the back and often directsthe coachman with loud coughing.

The valet in the master’s chamber looks at the clock, coughing whena certain hour has arrived, and wakes the porter from his reveriewith a loud cough, who almost forgot to have the coach broughtaround.

Finally, at the table, the court quartermaster directs the entiredinner with an extravagance of the finest and softest coughs, theattendant calls the footman’s attention to his foolishness in the sameway with expressive coughs, a broken plate or an empty glass, and ayoung servant recoils with a start and coughs gently before theterrible abyss into which he nearly fell, as he was prepared to pre-sent the first chamberlain with a wild pig’s head from the right side.(Hacklander, [1854] 1875: 176)

In these scenarios, the servants carry out a variety of instructions andactivities, most in direct relation to a technical object like a clock, acoach, a door or a (broken) plate. Sometimes, however, their actiontakes place without an additional object, as when their task is simplythat of waiting for instructions. While all of these actions already con-tribute to a modest degree to the genesis of a cultural action, for instancethrough compliance with a courtly code of obedience and rule enforce-ment, on another more abstract level, they also bear witness to a corecharacteristic of cultural techniques, namely ‘that the same operation isapplied to results of the operation’ (Schuttpelz, 2006: 95). On the onehand, this means that the respective activities of door service, housekeep-ing, and chauffeuring arise as an effect of a cough and thus as a result of asubtly expressed instruction from a superior. Instruction reacts to service.On the other hand, this constellation shows that a servant, as executor ofthis cultural technique, does not act merely in relation to a suprememaster but is always integrated into a hierarchically established oper-ational chain of immediately superior servants, who simultaneously actas his surrogate masters, just as he himself can act as advisor to inferiorservants. The interweaving of service in recursive patterns proves to be animportant criterion of a cultural technique.

Courtly coughing already suggests symptomatically that an act of ser-vice rarely stands alone, but instead remains engaged in a recursive net-work of services which relate to services. Every such action connects withsubsequent communications in the form of arriving lordships or platesbeing served incorrectly (the right, instead of correctly the left side). The


coughing itself fulfils a primarily phatic function, in that it announces orinitiates the occurrence of something else. But a signal can also elicitsimilar signals, like a cough continually passed onward, even over longdistances. The second scenario shows such a linking of small gestures.

Signals in Sight

Sometime in 1835, the viceroy of Dahomey ran out of resources.However, Don Francisco Manoel da Silva, called Cobra Verde, didn’tlack money or goods. Instead, he lacked ships, needed to transport themany slaves that he hoarded in his fort on the West African coast toBrazil. In his predicament, da Silva ‘telegraphed’ his blood brotherPrince Kankpe in Abomey, in the interior of the country, to obtain hissupport. Werner Herzog’s not particularly realistic 1987 film CobraVerde, based on the novel by Bruce Chatwin, with Klaus Kinski in thelead role, re-enacts this scene in a remarkable way.

One scene shows a young slave in a traditional get-up (bambooskirt), who is on standby, initially in a kind of break-dance – the filmappeared in 1987 – awaiting a signal in consultation with a technicalmedium, the white signal flag, to then set his own signal in motion.In Figure 2, the small man is still in standby mode, while outside,behind the battlement, the chain of messengers waits at attentionto carry the signal forth. The command is finally given after the peoplein uniforms convince themselves that the chain is intact: the messengerraises up and waves his flag, after which the nearest messenger likewisewaves his flag, after which the nearest messenger likewise waves his flag,after which . . ..

The spectators then sees how the signal comes from below, followingthe coastline, spreading toward the horizon. The sign traverses the mes-senger chain like a transverse wave, whereby the signal presumablyencompasses more than a single prolooooooonged sign. Rather, the mes-sengers do not simply wave once; instead, they seem to use a whole set ofsignals through different flag positions, like the French dial telegraphinvented a few years before by the Chappe brothers under Napoleon.The individual messengers or slaves, respectively, stand shoulder toshoulder, their faces directed toward the sea with its own waves, inorder to keep the actions of both of their neighbours to either side inview. This messenger chain is duplicated by a second, more loosely stag-gered sequence seen to the right of the image. These are the servants whocontrol the servants, armed with a rifle and with a handful of slaves inview, watching over the proper transmission of the communication.

The message to be sent seems to get quite long; or at least the entiremessenger chain wags its flags eagerly from the foreground of the imageacross the savannah to the horizon, while the guards crouch in thegrass, considerably more relaxed in their supervisory task. After roughly

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three hours, as predicted by da Silva, the answer comes from Abomey,approximately 100 km away as the crow flies, indeed in the same form,only in reverse order. Tightly packed, the individual messengers standand wave their flags again, until the small slave behind the battlementreceives the signal and waves affirmatively. Meanwhile, the servantdressed like a footman in a red uniform decodes the message forda Silva: ‘The King sends his brother the great leopard’s greeting.’End of message. Even if the content of the message – a brief leopard’sgreeting rather than assurance of a few ships – may have been cause forirritation for da Silva, the transmission of the message seems to worksmoothly.

Apart from its (perhaps involuntary) comedy, this scene illustrates atleast three fundamental aspects of a cultural technique. First, and quiteconspicuously in its beginning with the flag-break-dance of the youngslave, it demonstrates how strongly dependent a cultural technique is ona fusion of bodily techniques and technical media. Without artefacts,whether they be tools, instruments, technical or even human media ina clearly subservient function, no cultural technical action could comeabout (Maye, 2010: 135). And conversely, every technical medium neces-sitates a servant as servomechanism. No directed canoe journey withoutNative Americans, no regulated progress without clerks who ensure theoperation of the clock, no culture without servants and their functions.Thus, cultural techniques like the data transmission undertaken here bythe servants function exclusively in the context of a hybrid arrangementor collective of bodily techniques and media utilization. Communicationcan only ensue amid the interplay of a slave’s waving motion and a flag(hybrid of man and technical medium), or of a slave and his voice, dir-ected at his neighbour (hybrid of the voice of the knowing messenger andthe ear of the subaltern, still-unknowing messenger, acting as an ancillarymedium).

Second, this scene illustrates directly what constitutes an operationalchain. A slave on foot, out on a limb in the hot savannah, could hardlypass along a message. Only the interconnection of the many messengersinto a relay, including its control dispositive through the second row ofguards, guarantees the correct transmission of the message. Thus, theoperational chain consists to a certain extent of a horizontal component,the row of waving slaves, and of a vertical component, the row of watch-ing slaves, which exercise a recursive function similar to coughing atcourt, insofar as they apply the same operation of relay formation tothe results of this operation. Thus, here it is not the individual servantwho constitutes the medium of transmission, but rather the collective,that is to say, the entirety of the slaves and supervisors interconnectedinto the relay.

And finally, it is not only the pure cultural technical action that isrelevant, the what of the event, but also the how. The opulent image of


the messenger series begs the question of why there are so many slavesintegrated into this operational chain. Why is such effort expended, whenthe servants could just as easily have been positioned comfortably withinsight of one another – three instead of three hundred in the first shotfrom the battlement to the next cliff – or even a single reliable messengercould have been sent on horseback to the capital 100 km away, entirelywithout the recursive chain of guards? Without question, this transmis-sion process feeds on an excess of human agents, on slaves in their func-tion as servile, flag-bearing elements of transmission, which can claimgreater significance in their aesthetic arrangement and their optical over-powering logic than mere functional necessity would require. The powerof the ruler is duplicated in his footmen, who ostentatiously flaunt theiridleness for him in vicarious inoccupation. In other words, a culturaltechnique like service also always comprises an aesthetic component,which observes aspects of style beyond pure functionality. Thus, thequestion would be whether even an eminent cultural technique like writ-ing is a cultural technique per se, or if it is only in linguistic refinement,with its necessarily gradual increments, that a cultural added value comesto light that has yet to be produced. In this case, aesthetics and its quali-tative classifications gain particular significance. Or, to choose a simplerexample: just as you can theoretically criss-cross a field, ploughingthrough it entirely unsystematically, a farmer nevertheless usually followsa particular pattern of linearity, prescribed by expediency, but also by acertain aesthetics of the continuing, parallel line. Likewise, these aestheticstandards can be transferred to the messenger chain above, led by thethesis that the mere functionality of the transmission could also havebeen accomplished with far fewer personnel.

Regulating Rooms

In Franz Kafka’s short prose work ‘A Message from the Emperor’ of1917, originating four months after the death of the penultimateHabsburg emperor Franz Joseph, a message is also being delivered,albeit in this case to a ‘wretched subject’. Sent by the dying emperor,here the message is carried onward by a single, human medium. Themessenger on the way to his recipient,

thrusting forward now this arm, now the other, he cleared a paththrough the crowd; [. . .] he moves forward easily, like no other. Butthe crowds are so vast; their dwellings know no bounds. [. . .] he isstill forcing his way through the chambers of the innermost palace;never will he overcome them; and were he to succeed at this, nothingwould be gained: he would have to fight his way down the steps; andwere he to succeed at this, nothing would be gained: he would haveto cross the courtyard and, after the courtyard, the second enclosing

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outer palace, and again stairways and courtyards, and again apalace, and so on through thousands of years. (Kafka, [1917]2011: 41)

This largely subjunctive parable, which may also be understood as acompanion piece with a reversed direction of motion to the doorkeeperparable ‘Before the Law’, initially raises a simple question: why doesn’tthe messenger run away? What actually prevents him from leaving thepalace? Even if the text doesn’t give any explicit information about this, itseems sensible to relate it to the doorkeeper parable simply because of itsarchitectural arrangement. Both texts work with tiered spatial arrange-ments, typical of courts and their sophisticated ceremony, determined bythe question of how and to whom access to certain rooms is granted. Thereason for the imperial messenger’s failed attempts to escape the inner-most palace lies in the court ceremony and its limitation of access to theindividual rooms: the messenger can’t exit the palace because he comesacross a relay which does not consist of simple messenger servants as inthe previous scenario and which doesn’t work with him, but is actuallydirected against him. Within a palace, everyone, including the messenger,is set against a cascade of courtiers who oppose them in order to preventthe delivery of the message. The messenger cannot get through, becausehe is ensnared in the system of power, between the other staff and theirstooges. Why is it then that ‘a strong, an indefatigable man’ (Kafka,[1917] 2011: 41) cannot manage to overcome these hurdles? Because ineach of the chambers he is delivered over to another doorkeeper and hisrespective control of access, who in turn stubbornly adheres to the pro-visions of his own chain of command or is guided by (excessively high?)bribes.

Thus, what are primarily of interest here are the spatial relations, andtheir respective regulation of access, with which the imperial messengerhad to contend. How are the chambers and the architecture of the pal-aces constituted, through which the messenger must force his way for‘thousands of years’, before he could reach the outermost door (butnever, never can this happen)? The classic architecture of authorityknows the representative corridor of power, also called enfilade thanksto its origin in the Vaux-le-Vicomte palace (see Figure 1), that suite ofchambers, antechambers and ante-antechambers into which a normalsupplicant would arrive before the law, or an envoy – overcoming door-keeper after doorkeeper – would ultimately arrive before the sovereign,moving in the opposite direction of Kafka’s imperial messenger. With theenfilade, the emperor had a system of signs that he could use to admin-ister the labile system of his grace and of his subordinates’ access topower, and project them on to a spatial order and logic of access.

In this enfilade (see Figure 2), a courtier passes through variousinstances of power, each controlled by the ‘indirect beings’ at the doors


(to borrow from Carl Schmitt, [1954] 2008), that is to say, the palaceguards and doorkeepers, who have an abundance of power due to theirspecific knowledge and thanks to their precise familiarity with the place.In this inverted version of Kafka’s other cascade of servants in ‘Beforethe Law’, where the way in goes through a series of ever more finelytiered doorkeepers who those seeking entry are able to see just as littleas K. got to see the castle in close proximity, the movement is sufficient toshift from the internal to the external. From the centre of power, wherethe emperor lies wasting away, a view opens up on to an immensely

Figure 1. Ground-plan of Vaux-le-Vicomte palace (1656–1658) with suite of rooms.

Figure 2. Enfilade in the Wiener Hofburg, Leopoldinischer Trakt.

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intricate spatial ensemble of suites, thresholds and detours that one mustnot just negotiate but even be acquainted with in the first place. A par-ticular local knowledge is necessary to make one’s way through a palace.By what logic are these paths constructed, in what way do they reflectcourtly ceremony and the associated practices of service and of relationswith subordinates? What role does architecture play when it comes tocarrying out tasks officiously or giving underlings space for their serviceactivities, whether in a limiting respect or in the form of a particularprivilege or secret enabling? The nesting of the palaces makes the pene-tration of the rooms nearly impossible for the imperial messenger – thereseems to be no outside for him to ultimately reach. What first sounds likefiction has its structural counterparts both historically as well as quiteobjectively in Kafka’s time, for instance in the capital of the Habsburgmonarchy, in Vienna’s Hofburg palace, a conglomerate of various pal-aces from different periods and styles from the Middle Ages to the20th century, which in addition to nearly endless suites of rooms (seeFigure 2), is also complemented behind the scenes by a labyrinthine arrayof service architecture with its service corridors and backstairs, by whichthe imperceptible accommodation of the lordship by the subordinates isguaranteed.

But where does the much-touted power of the indirect being manifestitself concretely? In what tasks and gestures are the mechanisms of acultural technique of service to be found? The subaltern is not generallypermitted to enter into his field of activity with such ostentatious visibil-ity as his lordships; rather, he finds himself in a relationship to them thatdemands servility, obedience and modesty. However, this dictum onlyrelates to the front side, as it were, of that intricate relationship betweenmaster and servant, which counts among the basic constants of history.In fact, in the cultural technique of service one must incorporate anextremely important aspect, namely that reverse side of the grandstage, accompanied by a sometimes equally great abundance of power,even if it’s not always easy to grasp or to describe. Ultimately, one of thefirst requirements of the servant consists of remaining invisible, despitephysical presence. Thus, a general virtue of the servant lies in controllingthe background inconspicuously. These very concrete practices of powerexpress themselves not only in small gestures like opening doors or repel-ling intruders, attending table, assigning or tacitly taking places, in (self)situating or artificial diminution (through bowing) before the displayedpower of the sovereign. Rather, these optimally hidden practices of thesubaltern are also based on medial arrangements prescribed and deter-mined by architecture.

In addition, this optimally hidden practice of servility encompasses theability to find passages without being seen and manage arcane know-ledge. The highways of power, stretching in the enfilade, are filled withcareerists of all sorts and lined by indirect beings like the doorkeepers,


and are always doubled by the secret corridors of the underlings, of thelowest of the servants, who attain unforeseen power through their know-ledge of hidden interconnections. Because, in the end, a palace does notsimply have the official enfilade, but always also a vast collection of secretpassages, hidden doors and special servants’ stairs, through the know-ledge of which only the servants maintain true control.

Just as the enfilade proves to be an indicator of power, with a metre-by-metre advance constituting the primary endeavour of the courtiers (ora departure, that of the imperial messenger), the supposed goal of thisround dance seems to be the royal chambers (or the recipient of theimperial message), long-since abandoned and robbed of its centrality,because power itself is by no means concentrated directly in oneperson. Rather, it shows itself to be decentralized and distributed tosuch inconspicuous locations as thresholds with gatekeepers, concealeddoors and hidden corridors. Power is splintered, its centre long-sincedissolved, and strewn across various stations, delegated to underlingsspread across long suites of rooms who each regulate the day-to-daybalance of power at court in their own way by opening or closingdoors, heating, traversing arcane paths, clearing out closets (and therebyhaving practical control of things), or more simply by talking or remain-ing silent at the right time.

Cultural Technique of Service

At the height of Victorianism, in an age when a large portion of the lowlyand slightly less lowly tasks rested on the shoulders of domestics andsubalterns of all sorts, an insight emerged from an unexpected sourcethat was as modest as it was true: ‘No culture without servants’, as aSaxon nobleman and member of parliament, otherwise better known forhis crude anti-Semitism, announced in 1875 (Treitschke, 1875: 17). Whatmay at first seem to be a thoroughly chauvinistic remark coming from themouth of Prussia’s nationalist court historian Heinrich von Treitschke,professor of history at Berlin University, that he could ‘imagine societywithout servants’ just as little as Aristotle could picture his age withoutslaves, nevertheless proves undoubtedly to be a lucid insight for his timein its simple logic (Bebel, [1892] 1996: 649). What may be seen as com-monplace in the mid-20th century1 could by no means be seen as a self-evident, openly reflected fact shortly after the establishment of theempire. Even if Treitschke hardly intended for his comment to undulyelevate the subaltern class, to outspokenly grant them a significant sharein the well-being of the ruling class, it nevertheless expresses unmistak-ably that it is ultimately the practices of the servants without which nocultural progress can be made.

Here, it is above all the small everyday gestures, the minimalmovements, which contribute decisively to the success of the whole.

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The practised hand movements of the underlings possess far more poten-tial which evolves nearly imperceptibly. If service doesn’t simply meanserving soup and clearing the plates, or organizing the household in everydetail and providing for all possible comforts, but rather also consists notonly of transmitting messages but filtering them, opening doors to thenshut them again (sometimes on their own authority), not only followingorders but anticipating them, if service not only means representing theprosperity of the lordship in glamorous liveries or standing in a rownearly naked with a flag in your hand but also carrying out special mis-sions hidden from view in secret passages and hidden doors, then theagents of these trivial acts have more than a (modest) cultural educa-tional function. They have nothing less than a specific agency. The ser-vants are positioned strategically at the hubs of action, for instance atdoorways, at which they control access. At the same time, they findthemselves at the interfaces of communication, waiting discreetly in thebackground at dinner or waiting inconspicuously with a silver platter inthe study, while policy is made over drinks and cigars. They alone regu-late access to the enfilade, just as they have exclusive access to the supplychannels of the royal residence. Apart from lovesick princes and fugitivequeens, it is only the subaltern – and no special imperial envoy – whorush through the hidden corridors and passageways in the castle and thegreat houses, which form the backbone of the residences.

Aside from their knowledge of arcane paths and their control of thesereal connecting corridors, the domestics contribute with each impercept-ible action to the establishment of a symbolic corridor which houses thereal power. ‘The process of corridor building which we’re discussing hereplays out on a daily basis in minimal, infinitesimal approaches, on a largeand small scale, wherever people exercise power over one another’(Schmitt, [1954] 2008: 25). Through their actions, such as granting ordenying entry, waiting and listening, both in the moments of decisionthat are wholly within the discretion of the servant, as well as throughsecret bribery and corruption on all levels of the hierarchy, the subalternexercise a specific power, even if this power may seem marginal to out-siders. However, their strength lies precisely in this marginality, whenunnoticed monitoring of conversations or unobserved observationopen up new options for action not covered under their original man-date – i.e. serving as a representative according to the will of their master.It is in these fleeting intermediate stages, which momentarily open up aspace for the subaltern to manoeuvre, that their influence lies, elevatingthem for the moment to free agents. Rejecting an unwanted supplicant atthe threshold or letting him in always has consequences for the door-keeper. Taking good news from a messenger in order to present it to thelordship oneself increases one’s own esteem. The infinitesimal act on theperiphery, the unassuming, almost imperceptible gesture, gradually addspower to the one who carries it out, becoming a distinct factor of influence


over time. In short, those medial basic operations that a subaltern rou-tinely performs in small gestures are accompanied by a technique of powerand domination that turns service into a basal cultural technique. If onecannot possess power, but rather only exercise it momentarily, then it isabove all agents like the indirect beings that exercise a ‘conduct of con-ducts’ (cf. Foucault, [1982] 2002: 341) in their control of access to thesovereign and to the official representatives of the ruler, in their knowledgeof the paths to knowledge and in their marginal dominion over the corri-dors. By way of their unassuming gestures, with the help of their marginalactions that filter and disseminate information, select and redistributedecisive tips as an everyday medial base operation, the servants regulateand control the corridors of power and thereby power itself.

On the one hand – according to the semi-official reading – the servantis a representative or proxy of his master, which degrades him to a subjectin the literal sense of the subjugated, or – as with the footman – to a finelyoutfitted persona with no will of his own. The task of the underlingconsists of fulfilling the desires of his lord without question and straight-forwardly executing his orders. He implements the ideas of his master,who in turn assumes responsibility for his deeds (Skrine, 1985: 252).Thus, the relation between lord and master is a basic sociotechnical con-stant throughout history. On the other hand, through his servile practiceslike regulating access at the doorway or transmitting, filtering and select-ing information, the subaltern possesses an abundance of power, thescope of which he learns to gauge and use to his advantage at his job.

Where does the servant’s technique of domination lead – if one mayallow such a seemingly paradoxical formulation? A possible intentbehind extending his scope of action may be improving his own positionthrough self-empowerment and increasingly becoming a master in hisown right. It contributes to the consistent increase in influence of themarginal agents. In contrast to others who are searching for work ingeneral, servants are continually looking for a place made for them –the annual change in duty station sets the rhythm – and not least withinthe social hierarchy (see Robbins, 1986: 53). Thus, a component of thecultural technique of service consists of continually renegotiating one’scurrent place in the hierarchy and moving it a little further up if possible:repositioning oneself. Improving one’s standing. Climbing up. Every cul-tural refinement is based on this very fundamental mechanism; withoutit, decay and decline would rule. Such basal behaviours as mimetic pro-cesses, surrogacy, rapprochement to the representatives of power andempowerment are the strategies of the subaltern, in order to move imper-ceptibly but consistently into ever more influential positions. With eachnew step up the ladder, however small, the subject becomes somewhatmore master than servant. Therein lies his own literal progress.This relatedness and arrangement into hierarchies, the constant reassign-ment of one’s own position as well as that of others, is a technique of

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culture that the subaltern make use of. Thus, one must count as a culturaltechnique of service not least positioning oneself (as favourably as pos-sible), in a broad sense, in order to participate in the control of thetotality through those countless hand gestures of power and infinitesimalacts. Just as (nearly) every targeted advancement at the forefront has thenecessary insinuations, so the practices of service can’t get by without acertain measure of servility.

As well as the focus on the obvious techniques that a culture requiresin order to develop vital concepts and thus knowledge of itself, whichcertainly include writing as well as reading, calculating as well as orga-nizing as ‘eminent cultural techniques’ (Siegert, 2005), it is also importantto shift the perspective a bit toward the margins, in order to take intoaccount the more imperceptible practices such as service in its physical,mental and manual activities, obstructing and closing as well as selectingand working invisibly. For out of these small actions of decision, thetrivial routine work of the underlings, which in and of themselveswould certainly be considered marginal, there emerges during service asometimes tremendous wealth of opportunities to regulate the lordship.With the everyday hand movements and differentiations that invisibleassistants carry out, those medial practices of mastery and constructioncome into use. Only an analysis decidedly dedicated to these small ges-tures is capable of achieving a comprehensive notion of culture and itstechniques. However, in that such cultural techniques carry out symbolicwork, they remain reliant upon media as agents (Macho, 2005: 77;Schuttpelz, 2006: 88). And in the realm of such infinitesimal but never-theless culture-generating acts, the servant embodies this medium.

How is it that this marginal man position can have any epistemologicalrelevance? The subaltern’s principal area of activity, acting as inconspicu-ously as possible in the background amid the paradoxical imperative ofpersistent invisibility despite physical presence, brings a particular obser-ver’s perspective which is extremely helpful in potentially gaining know-ledge. Who pays attention to the man serving the cognac? The valet’sperspective reviled by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit ([1807] 1988:437) offers a lasting advantage over those entangled in their chief-and-state plays. While the table talk revolves around important discus-sion points, the attendant domestic can assimilate vital information notintended for his ears. In his function as medium on the margins, theservant proves to be involved while simultaneously unnoticed, presentand forgotten. According to plan, he assumes the position of the unseenthird party, hardly distinguishing him from a house pet. ‘The servant isthe eternal “third man” in the private life [. . .] People are as little embar-rassed in a servant’s presence as they are in the presence of an ass’(Bakhtin, cited in Robbins, 1986: 108).

The domestic who is responsible for the personal needs of the powerfuloccupies a similarly advantageous position of knowledge. The medial


functions of the indirect beings, who regulate informational access to thelordship, also enable these kinds of advantages in insight within thisposition of trust. Like the waiter at official events, the valet, who controlsthe direct corridor to power, the last few metres to the royal bedchamber,occupies a privileged perspective. Once again, the valet proves his prox-imity to the sovereign in that he is not merely available to his lordship asan advisor at any time in matters of personal care or other concerns.Rather, he is the unfiltered, unmediated connection to the ruler, whoprovides the valet with an exclusive position from which he can observewhile remaining unobserved, and make use of varied opportunities toinfluence decisions. The servant who shaves the captain controls the ship,as it goes in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno of 1857. It is not fornothing that contemporaries especially fear those people in such pos-itions of trust, like the influence of the flautist Michael GabrielFredersdorf on Frederick II, hardly legitimized in any official capacity.It is not by chance that an inscrutable figure like John Brown, QueenVictoria’s favourite valet, maintains a political factor that is difficult toassess (see Lamont-Brown, 2000; Marshall, 1949: 26). Its actual historicaleffect proves to be hard to measure in hindsight, inasmuch as the ser-vant’s position of trust moves between two extremes: the position of anactual potentate on the one hand, and on the other hand a relationshipwith his master that renders him closer to a lapdog: ‘many [masters]wished to use such upper servants as footmen and lady’s maids as con-fidantes, accomplices, go-betweens, and pets’ (Porter, 1990: 104).Regardless of the distance to their master, this position is distinguishedprimarily by an epistemologically favourable position of observation.This is the privileged point of observation par excellence from which aspecial knowledge of power can be attained imperceptibly. Valets andwaiters, butlers and footmen can assume this position, because they oper-ate studiously in the background. This demonstrates a technique ofrefined culture when someone can work in secret while also being infull view. In a certain sense, the servant acts analogously to EdgarAllen Poe’s Purloined Letter: he is in the room, constitutes the secretheart of the action, and yet no one takes notice of him.

In small gestures, with inconspicuous actions like attending and clean-ing up, coughing and signalling, opening and closing, permitting andobstructing, in short: in attending to people and things, a servant con-nects and bundles various techniques that become cultural techniquesthrough his interlacing actions. The seven characteristics mentioned con-tribute to the servant’s heterogeneous actions being associated with cul-tural efficacy: (1) the interweaving of service in recursive patterns ofaction, (2) the connection of the individual servants into a collectiveand the associated delegation of activities, (3) the resulting dispersedagency passed from the individual to the hybrid collective of peopleand media, (4) the local knowledge of the subaltern, the familiarity

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with the contexts of their activities, (5) the tendency of the servant towardrepositioning through his respective activity, which fuels the innovativepower of a cultural technique, not least (6) the aesthetic component of acultural technique, which furnishes the subaltern actions with stylebeyond pure functionality, and finally (7) the epistemological compo-nent, which makes the marginal man position into a powerful one withthe help of indirect control.

Particularly with the bundling of these characteristics, the subaltern’sability to act accumulates to form a power structure. It is true what thelowest of Kafka’s doorkeepers says: ‘But note that I am powerful. And Iam only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall, keepers stand at everydoor, one more powerful than the other’ (Kafka, [1915] 1995: 23). Servicemay be based on small gestures that obstruct or enable, permit or exclude.In their interconnection and catenation, in their bundling and accumula-tion, the various practices by which a servant organizes the life of hismaster generate power (to act) that is by no means minor. This enablesthe servant to contribute to the refinement of culture from below, so tospeak, from the valet’s perspective, with inconspicuous technical manipu-lations, in infinitesimal gestures. It is the cultural technique of service withits specific characteristics that endows the servomechanism of our things,the servant, with a relevant, highly influential form of action.

Translated by Charles Marcrum

Note

1. ‘[T]he domestic servant class has a special significance. It was an importantagent in the process of cultural change’ (Hecht, 1956: 200).

References

Bebel, A. ([1892] 1996) Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Die Frau in derVergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft), Vol. 10/2. Munchen: K.G. Saur.

Foucault, M. ([1982] 2002) ‘The Subject and Power’, pp. 326–348 in Power:Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Volume 3, ed. J. Faubion. London:Penguin.

Hacklander, F.W. ([1854] 1875) Europaisches Sklavenleben. F. W. HacklandersWerke. Erste Gesammt-Ausgabe. Stuttgart: U. Kroner.

Hecht, J.J. (1956) The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-century England.London: Routledge & Paul.

Hegel, G.W.F. ([1807] 1988) Phanomenologie des Geistes, ed. H. Wessels and H.Clairmont. Vol. 414. Philosophische Bibliothek. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.

Kafka, F. ([1915] 1995) ‘Before the Law’, trans. W. and E. Muir, in Franz Kafka:The Complete Stories, ed. N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books.

Kafka, F. ([1917] 2011) ‘A Message from the Emperor’, trans. M. Harman, TheNew York Review of Books 58(14): 41.


Lamont-Brown, R. (2000) John Brown: Queen Victoria’s Highland Servant.Stroud: Sutton.

Macho, T. (2005) ‘Die Baume des Alphabets’, Neue Rundschau 116(2): 66–80.Marshall, D. (1949) The English Domestic Servant in History, Vol. G 13. General

series. London: Philip.Maye, H. (2010) ‘Was ist eine Kulturtechnik?’, Zeitschrift fur Medien- und

Kulturforschung 1(1): 121–135.McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York:

McGraw-Hill.Porter, R. (1990) English Society in the Eighteenth Century. The Penguin Social

History of Britain. London: Penguin.Robbins, B. (1986) The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below. New York:

Columbia University Press.Schmitt, C. ([1954] 2008) Gesprach uber die Macht und den Zugang zum

Machthaber. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.Schuttpelz, E. (2006) ‘Die medienanthropologische Kehre der Kulturtechniken’,

Archiv fur Mediengeschichte 6: 87–110.Siegert, B. (2005) ‘Was sind Kulturtechniken?’, Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar.

URL: http://www.uni-weimar.de/medien/kulturtechniken/kultek.htmlSkrine, P. (1985) ‘Das Bild des Dieners in der deutschen Literatur des 17.

Jahrhunderts’, pp. 245–257 in W. Bruckner, P. Blickle, and D. Breuer (eds)Literatur und Volk im 17. Jahrhundert. Probleme popularer Kultur inDeutschland. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.

Treitschke, H. (1875) Der Socialismus und seine Gonner. Berlin: Georg Reimer.

Markus Krajewski is Associate Professor of Media History of Science atthe Bauhaus University Weimar. Among his most recent publicationsare Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548–1929 (MIT,2011), Der Diener. Mediengeschichte einer Figur zwischen Konig undKlient (Fischer, 2010) and Restlosigkeit. Weltprojekte um 1900 (Fischer,2006). He is a co-editor of the History and Foundations of InformationScience book series (MIT) and the creator of the hypertextual card indexsynapsen (www.verzetteln.de/synapsen).

Charles Marcrum is a translator of non-fiction and literary works.Following language study at Vanderbilt University and the UniversitatRegensburg, he completed graduate studies in German literature and filmat Harvard University. Since then, he has been active in the fields of arthistory, Jewish studies, history of science and media theory. He is amember of ALTA.

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30(6) 110–131




DOI: 10.1177/0263276413488959

tcs.sagepub.com

Article

Zootechnologies:Swarming as a CulturalTechnique

Sebastian VehlkenLeuphana University, Germany

Abstract

This contribution examines the media history of swarm research and the significance

of swarming techniques to current socio-technological processes. It explores how

the procedures of swarm intelligence should be understood in relation to the con-

cept of cultural techniques. This brings the concept into proximity with recent

debates in posthuman (media) theory, animal studies and software studies. Swarms

are conceptualized as zootechnologies that resist methods of analytical investigation.

Synthetic swarms first emerged as operational collective structures by means of the

reciprocal computerization of biology and biologization of computer science. In a

recursive loop, swarms inspired agent-based modelling, which in turn provided bio-

logical researchers with enduring knowledge about dynamic collectives. This con-

glomerate led to the development of advanced, software-based ‘particle systems’.

Swarm intelligence has become a fundamental cultural technique related to dynamic

processes and an effective metaphor for the collaborative efforts of society.

Keywords

agents, computer simulation, cultural techniques, media, scientific visualization, social

swarming, swarms

I. Fish and Chips

In his Guide to the Study of Fishes, an expansive reference work publishedin 1905, the ichthyologist David Starr Jordan posed the following ques-tion: ‘What is a fish?’ A fish, he answered, ‘is a back-boned animal whichlives in the water and cannot ever live very long anywhere else. Its ances-tors have always dwelt in the water, and most likely its descendants willforever follow their example’ (1905: 3). At first glance it would be difficulteven today to refute this definition, so long as a few obscure exceptions


Sebastian Vehlken, mecs – Institute for Advanced Study in Media Cultures of Computer Simulation,

Leuphana University, Luneburg 21355, Germany.



are set aside. The ambitions of the seemingly hydrophobic mudskipperperiophthalmus barbarus, an amphibious goby, come to mind in thisregard. A second glance, however, reveals that fish have been seizingdry territory rather energetically for some time. Such land grabs, ofcourse, have not been the result of baffling leaps in evolutionary biology.They rather owe their occurrence to a co-evolution that has taken placein the fields of biology and computer science. Fish, or more preciselyschools of fish, have been a source of inspiration to a branch of computerscience since the middle of the 1990s. Along with other biological col-lectives, such as flocks of birds and colonies of insects, schools of fishhave inspired a field of research that has come to be known as compu-tational swarm intelligence.

Computer applications of swarm intelligence make use of the effectsthat are observable in animal collectives. On a global level, the multipleand localized interactions among large numbers of relatively simply con-structed ‘agents’ have yielded interesting potentialities of self-organization. Collectives possess certain abilities that are lacking intheir component parts. Whereas an individual member of a swarm com-mands only a limited understanding of its environment, the collective as awhole is able to adapt nearly flawlessly to the changing conditions of itssurroundings. Without recourse to an overriding authority or hierarchy,such collectives organize themselves quickly, adaptively, and uniquelywith the help of their distributed control logic. Within swarms, the quan-tity of local data transmission is converted into new collective qualities.

It is thus possible to conceive of an initial way in which swarming hasdeveloped into a novel cultural technique. Swarm intelligence helps toconfigure an environment that is increasingly confronted with the task oforganizing highly engineered and interconnected systems and also withthe task of modelling complex correlations. It can be applied whereverthere are ‘disturbed conditions’, wherever imprecisely defined problemspresent themselves, wherever system parameters are constantly in flux,and wherever solution strategies become blindingly complex. Swarmintelligence, according to one standard work, ‘offers an alternative wayof designing “intelligent” systems, in which autonomy, emergence, anddistributed functioning replace control, preprogramming, and centraliza-tion’ (Bonabeau et al., 1999: xi). To borrow an often-repeated notionfrom bionics, humans would do well in this case to learn something fromthe ‘inventiveness’ of nature.

There is yet another way in which swarming can be viewed as a bur-geoning cultural technique. Since the year 2000, swarms have entered agrowing discourse in the form of such expressions as ‘smart majorities’(Fisher, 2010; Miller, 2010), ‘smart mobs’ (Rheingold, 2002), ‘swarmingin the battlefield’ (Arquila and Ronfeldt, 2000), ‘the wisdom of crowds’(Surowiecki, 2004), and simply ‘multitude’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004) – andthis is not to mention their role in recent thrillers by Michael Crichton

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(2002) and Frank Schatzing (2006). They have become a metaphor forthe coordination processes of an engineered present, a present in whichthe flexible adaptation to ever-changing conditions can be associatedwith the alleged potential for freedom inherent in ‘autonomousindividuals’.

With the help of ever more dynamic forms of interconnectedness, asthe swarm metaphor suggests, we are able to use an instantaneous infra-structure of decision-making to our own advantage. To achieve certaingoals, it is thought, we are thereby able to coordinate temporarily withthose of the same mind. This ephemeral and apparently ‘grass-rootsdemocratic’ conception of collectivity has promised to uncouple political,economic, and social behaviour from the structures of entrenched sys-tems and social organizations such as nations, political parties, andlabour unions. Swarming, as a sort of ‘network 2.0’, has come to beused as a celebrated catchword – for political demonstrations arrangedby means of mobile media, for the type of communication that takesplace in online collectives, and for the organization and availability ofinformation or ‘knowledge’. Over the last 15 years, it seems, swarminghas established itself both technologically and socially as a means ofcollaboration that is far superior to traditional forms of collectiveorganization.

These recent developments are complicated, however, by a closerinvestigation into the genealogy of swarming intelligence. When, inwhat follows, I describe swarming as a cultural technique, I will attemptto approach the phenomenon by means of exemplary scenes from themedia history of swarm research. It is worth clarifying, in general, theconditions under which swarms had been able to develop into product-ively deployable figures of knowledge, for traditionally they were asso-ciated either with an aura of the chaotic, escalatory, and uncanny (Tarde,1901; Le Bon, 1896), or with a ‘miraculous’ and ‘divine’ power to fas-cinate (Maeterlinck, 1901). My approach below rests upon three theses,each of which problematizes and adjusts the paths of development, out-lined above, that the concept of the swarm has undergone to become acultural technique.

First, it can be maintained that the media history of swarm researchhas been based on a fundamental and gradual withdrawal from natural-ness that has taken place within engineered environments of observationand experimentation. Analytic approaches and (media-technological)methods of observation have, for decades, been mired in a ‘technologicalmorass’ (Parrish et al., 1997: 9), because swarms are problematic objectsof knowledge: they disrupt the scientific processes of objectification bymeans of their dynamics in space and time. The only way to overcomethis obstacle is to resort to synthetic methods of acquiring knowledge.Such methods are based on the recursive intertwinement of certain pro-cesses, namely those of the biologization of computer science, on the one


hand, and those of the computerization of biological research on theother. In this way, swarm-inspired agent-based computer simulationmodels and the applications of computer graphic imaging, which origi-nated in different places for different purposes, have ultimately gainedentry into the field of biological swarm research. Over the course of thisdevelopment, swarms have become both an object and a principle ofagent-based models and their methods of computer graphic imaging.A sociobiological understanding of animal swarms, or of bionic trans-ferences, falls short in its description of the dynamic relations amonghumans, animals, and machines.

In the case of swarms, it is no longer animals that serve as a model formankind and its techn �e. What is noteworthy is rather the reciprocalinterference of biological principles and the processes of informationtechnology. Swarms should be understood as zootechnologies. In contrastto biotechnologies or biomedia (Thacker, 2004a), they derive less frombios, the concept of ‘animated’ life, than they do from zo �e, the unani-mated life of the swarm. Zo �e manifests itself as a particular type of‘vivacity’, for instance as the dynamic flurry of swarming individuals.It is a vivacity that lends itself to technological implementation, for itcan be rendered just as well into ordered or disorderly movement. Thiscapacity, in turn, is based on rules of motion and interaction that, onceprogrammed and processed by computer technology, can produce seem-ingly lifelike behaviour among artificial agents. And thus the conditionsof knowledge overlap and entangle as well. Swarm research combinesthis zo �e with the experimental epistemology of computer simulation.

A sound understanding of swarms will ultimately emerge whereself-organizing processes are applied to processes of self-organization.In such a ‘media-emergence’, or ‘becoming-media’ (Vogl, 2007),swarms therefore co-create our knowledge of swarms. Without the spe-cific media technologies of swarm research, ‘swarms’ do not exist asobjects of knowledge, and swarming cannot be regarded as a culturaltechnique. In the media history of swarm research, the concept of media-emergence and that of cultural techniques intertwine; the development ofswarming into a cultural technique could not have taken place outside ofspecific media cultures.

The second thesis concerns a perspective on the relationship amongman, animal, and machine that has redirected the discourse of research-ers concerned with cultural techniques. It is no longer a matter ofdebate whether (human) body techniques can be subsumed under theconcept of (human) cultural techniques, or whether cultural techniquesderive from the body (Maye, 2010: 122). Likewise, the perspective inquestion avoids the recent call in the field to make a ‘media-anthropological turn’ (Schuttpelz, 2006). Nor is it restricted to the rep-resentation of reciprocal, recursive, and cyclical mediations amongsigns, persons, and things (and to their significance to the medial

Vehlken 113

extension of humans into their environment). Rather, swarming is thoughtto include animals into the discourse – here as a multitude, as a collective –and thus to address a zootechnological relation. Produced between thefields of biology and computer science, a systems knowledge of self-organizing collectives assists us, in a way that anthropology cannot, inour treatment of certain problems and regulatory issues that are normallyregarded as opaque. To the question concerning the operative intercon-nections between body techniques and media techniques, swarms contrib-ute an element of ‘dynamic collective bodies’.

In this light, a third thesis can be formulated that is of interest to thestudy of cultural techniques. For, although descriptions of swarms haveexisted since antiquity, swarming in the sense of a cultural technique didnot originate until the media-emergence of swarms as ‘intelligent’ zoo-technologies. Around the year 1900, swarms were thematized in works ofmass psychology to lament the debased treatment of humans as animals.Around the year 2000, however, animal swarms were suddenly serving asmodels for human ‘smart mobs’. What occurred in the meantime is thetransformation, based on biological swarm research and new develop-ments in computer science, of swarms into operatively deployable appli-cations. Along with this transformation, however, the concept ofswarming was also fundamentally transformed – namely as a conse-quence of media-technological processes. Only a media-emergencecould enable swarming to appear as a cultural technique. As much aspossible, moreover, this media-emergence delegated the fundamental cul-tural techniques of image-making, writing, and calculation to automatedand mechanized processes, be it in the form of new object-oriented pro-gramming languages or for the sake of presenting transactional data ongraphical user interfaces, for example.

Thus, within recursive chains of operation, swarm principles not onlyparticipate in their self-description within the field of swarm research butrather they co-author processes within our knowledge culture (Vehlken,2012). They appear in economic simulations and models of financialmarkets, in simulations of social behaviour, in simulations of crowdevacuations, and in the field of panic studies. They have become essentialto epidemiology, to the optimization of logical systems, and to transpor-tation planning. They are used to improve telecommunications and net-work protocols and to improve image and pattern recognition. They area component of certain climate models and multi-robot systems, and theyplay a role in the field of mathematical optimization. What swarming, inits technologized and radicalized form, brings to the field of culture (orcultural techniques) is a fundamental element of culture in general. It is adynamic structure, a topological system of inter-individual communica-tion, which has deeply permeated the governmentality of the present.

Related below, within the context of these three theses, are scenes fromthe media history of swarm research that depict the production of


swarms as zootechnologies. In light of these scenes I will examine how ithas been possible for swarming to evolve from clouds of data drifts into aconcept that is essential to social and cultural techniques.

II. Data Drifts

At the beginning of medial relationships, according to Michel Serres,there is noise (1982: 18–19), and thus noise can be understood to markthe beginning of all media theory (Siegert, 2007: 7). It is not an unhin-dered exchange between two parties that stands at the onset of everysocietal and cultural relationship, because a third party is alwaysinvolved. With the concept of the parasite, Serres has identified phenom-ena of interference and interruption that precede any such interaction.It is therefore characteristic of medial relationships, he notes, that theirchannels of communication have to be constructed and optimized underthe assumption that they will be distorted and interrupted by certainfactors. In our efforts to exclude parasitic phenomena, the latter arethereby made a part of our every interaction. It is only through the actof suppressing noise, in other words, that mediality comes into being.The result is a tripartite model in which interference is not accidentallygrafted onto existing relationships, but rather in which it is constitutiveto the formation of the relationships themselves (Serres, 1982: 73).Serres’s concept of the parasite is interesting for the study of culturaltechniques because it augments this media-theoretical insight with twoadditional considerations. First, it contributes a cultural-anthropologicaldimension that arises from the semantics of the concept itself, based as itis on transcending the difference between humans and animals. Second, itcontributes an aspect associated with cultural techniques in the oldersense of the term, which was laced with economic and agricultural sig-nificance (Siegert, 2011: 102).

With respect to swarming, however, the media-theoretical aspectshould be pursued even further, for swarms represent an instructiveobject of Serres’s concept as well as a particular exception to it. Theyoperate simultaneously as agents of the materialization of noise andinterference, on the one hand, and as processes of the productive revalu-ation of noise on the other. Animal swarms oscillate on the field of ten-sion between interference and organization.1 From a distance, whatappears to be the precise and coherent macro-dynamic of an admittedlydiffuse collective begins to look quite different when examined up close,namely like a seemingly unorganized flurry of innumerable micro-inter-actions. These interactions surpass not only the capacities of humanperception but also the analytic capabilities of technological recordingdevices. As an event, swarming defies perceptual or medial transferenceby means of its own transformative properties (Vogl, 2004: 147). Thevery swarming of swarms baffles our view of the ‘swarm’ as an object

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of knowledge; as a chaos of spatial, temporal, and interactional infor-mation, swarming introduces an ‘inability to experience objects empiric-ally’, something which was captured so well in Alfred Hitchcock’s TheBirds (Vogl, 2004: 145). At the heart of biological swarm research lies thesearch for adequate media-technological means of studying the inter-actions and functions of these dynamic animal collectives.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the first attempts to observeswarms of birds in the wild coincided with the emergence of a newfield of research known as behavioural biology (Nyhart, 1996). Longbefore the establishment of professional scientific research practices,amateur ornithologists such as William J. Long and Edmund Seloussimply ‘went out into the field’. There they attempted to trace the secretsof certain flocks of birds that swarmed together in the air like a singlebeing. Equipped with an ornithological recording system – which con-sisted of little more than their eyes, a telescope, a pen and some paper, agreat deal of patience, and some crude shelters for observation – theyassiduously took note of everything they could see (Selous, 1901: 173).Yet the speed of the interactions defied the perceptive capabilities of theobservers to such an extent that they were forced to base their findings onsuper-perceptual ‘waves of thought’. For the recording of the latter,unfortunately, no appropriate technology had yet been invented(Selous, 1931). Of course, such ideas have to be situated within theircontemporary context. First, they should be evaluated in terms of thepopular theories that circulated about the ‘psychic lives’ of animals andhumans (Bouvier, 1922); second, they must be seen in light of new wire-less media such as radio and radar, and also in light of the various wavetheories that were hotly debated among the physicists of the time (Vines,2004: 48).

Although short-lived, such swarm theories – along with an intensivebiological-philosophical discourse concerning emergent evolution andsuperorganisms (Morgan, 1923; Wheeler, 1911) – smoothed the wayfor other avenues of explanation. Whereas decades would pass beforetechnological innovations facilitated the study of flocking birds, thosestudying schools of fish profited from more accessible experimental con-ditions and from an elaborate infrastructure of aquaria. The latter infra-structure was supported quite substantially – mirabile dictu – by theinterests of the fishing industry. And yet these developments resulted innew epistemic fissures, which the biologist William Bateson had identifiedeven before the turn of the century. Although it was now possible,Bateson noted, to enjoy the advantages of ‘artificial conditions’ withinthe laboratory, the abiotic influences of such conditions must always bekept in mind (Bateson, 1890: 225–6). Artificial environments representedthe best means of approximating the living conditions of the animalsunder investigation, but only to the extent that new laboratory findingswere informed by a sophisticated understanding of aquaria and their


effects (Allen and Harvey, 1928). Even then, however, it remained ques-tionable whether the behaviour observed in aquaria was transferable toschools of fish swimming freely and unobserved in the sea. In addition topeculiar sleeping behaviour – ‘[a]t night they lie on the surface of thewater’ – Bateson identified three main characteristics of a school of cap-tive grey mullet, namely a tightly-formed collective body (at least duringthe day), the lack of an explicit leader, and the parallel alignment ofindividuals in one direction (1890: 249–50).

A good three decades later, researchers such as Albert Parr, Karl vonFrisch, and Guy Spooner developed these early observations further,although they conveniently failed to address the issue of sleepinghabits. In 1927, Parr conceived of a psycho-mechanical model for schoolsof fish, according to which the social behaviour of such swarms wasneither complicated nor mysterious. According to his theory, this behav-iour is rather the result of multiple psycho-mechanical and physio-mechanical reactions within a simple set of rules: an instantaneous attrac-tion among the individuals upon eye contact, a parallel alignment, andthe maintenance of equal distance among the individual fish (Parr, 1927).By means of experiments with partitions and mirrors inside aquaria,Spooner (1931) systematically evaluated the extent to which these factorsactually came into play during the formations of schools. Frisch investi-gated the ability of minnows to react to certain repellents and signs ofdanger. Whereas he boasted of the ‘good overview’ provided by hisaquarium, which allowed for an ‘objective execution of protocol [. . .]with a stopwatch in hand’ (Frisch, 1938: 603), Spooner acknowledgedthe fundamental limitations encountered when dealing with swarms: ‘Forany given fish it is impossible to predict definitely how it will behave, butit is possible to say how it will most probably behave [. . .]. But it is notpossible to measure this probability [. . .] accurately’ (1931: 444). ToSpooner’s mind, unambiguous correlations between the reactions offish and the methods of experimentation were lacking. Yet another dif-ficulty in determining the relevant factors of swarm formation, in otherwords, involved a level of predictability that could only yield probablecorrelations. Researchers had to distance themselves from the determinedand linear principles of cause and effect. For it was not only the impre-cision of physical observation – but also that of the data produced byexperimental fumblings, imaginings, and especially processing – that ledto certain pitfalls.

After the Second World War, the research concerned with schoolingfish underwent a media-technological upgrade. D.V. Radakov endeav-oured to observe swarms consisting of approximately one hundred indi-viduals, for only swarms of such a critical size could be said to demonstrateany universal patterns of behaviour (1973: 54). To this end he installeda camera above an aquarium, the bottom of which was equipped witha measuring grid. His method also enabled such techniques as replay

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and slow motion. Radakov determined the interactions of swarming indi-viduals by examining the changes of their position in frame-by-frame pro-jections or stills – adjusting, of course, for changes of scale. Thus werecreated maps of the activity of fish schools in two dimensions plus time.Yet this method also entailed certain obscurities, especially because itfailed to account for the third dimension of space. The fish overlappedone another from the perspective of the camera, so that it was hardlypossible to track them with accuracy throughout the sequences of film.Accordingly, all of the data had to be tediously and manually generatedand ‘saved’ in a tabular form. This process was further complicated, more-over, because school formations would often break apart upon reachingthe wall of the aquarium and having to turn around.

In anticipation of this problem, doughnut-shaped aquaria were devel-oped during the 1960s (Shaw, 1962: 130); in these, the polarized individ-uals of a school can swim constantly in one direction. To thisdevelopment can be added the so-called ‘shadow method’, which allowedfor schools of fish to be studied in three dimensions. The method requireda camera to be flanked by a spotlight, and for the latter to be aimed at aparticular angle. By such means, each of the fish under observation cast aclear shadow onto the bottom of the aquarium, and the differences in sizebetween the actual fish and their projected shadows, given the angle ofthe light and the depth of the water, yielded information about the coord-inates of the individuals in three-dimensional space (Cullen et al., 1965).Thus it was possible to map the activity of a moving swarm over a longperiod of time, though the swarms in question were typically restricted tobetween 20 and 30 individuals.

A comprehensive analysis of this type was undertaken in the middle ofthe 1970s by a team under the direction of Brian Partridge (Partridgeet al., 1980), and the data accumulated by their four-dimensional meas-urements remained the standard for many years. Even in the presentmillennium, according to Julia Parrish, their findings have provided ametric of swarming activity that has influenced the design of certaincomputer simulations (Parrish and Viscido, 2005: 67). However, eventhough Partridge was able to implement a partially automated recordingsystem – so that positional data could be read by means of a computerprogram along with graphical user interfaces, optical fuzziness could befiltered out, and the paths of individual fish could be plotted on coord-inates – researchers were still left in despair on account of the immenseamount of data at their disposal. Even in the case of small schoolsobserved in laboratory settings, there were ‘[m]ethod sections from sev-eral fish schooling papers [. . .] full of agonizing descriptions of thenumber of frames analyzed [. . .]. The endless hours of data collectionwere enough to turn anyone away’ (Parrish et al., 1997: 10).

Similar observations can be made about the study of flocking birds.In this field, for instance, Peter Major and Laurence Dill conducted


experiments in the 1970s with stereo-photographic recordings. In orderto ensure a stabile camera perspective and uniform photographic details,however, their experiments were only possible in the case of flocks pas-sing above at a leisurely pace, such as those heading to a feeding ground.Even an attack by a predatory bird, which might itself lead to interestingcollective dynamics, would overtax the system of observation (Major andDill, 1978: 122). Ironically enough, these researchers had their best luckat the Vancouver airport, ‘where flocks are a particular hazard to tur-bine-powered aircraft’. This conflict between technology and swarms islikewise valid in the case of their empirical, optical analysis. The media-technologies of swarm research have encountered the greatest difficultieswhen trying to dissolve the inter-individual movements of individualsfrom the collective movement of the whole in efforts to reach conclusionsabout the dynamics of large collectives in time. Attempts to examineindividual details, that is, can obscure our understanding of the whole.

The stubbornness of swarms in the face of media-technological pattern-ing processes also manifests itself in complementary fields of research.With the help of radar (in the case of birds) and sonar (in the case offish), for instance, attempts have been made to analyse the global activityof animal collectives (Heppner, 1997; Gerlotto et al., 1999; Simmonds andMacLennan, 2005; Paramo et al., 2007). These investigations havebrought to light another side of medial ‘uncertainty principles’, namelywhere technological media are confronted with ‘bodies without surfaces’.The act of (electro-) acoustic scanning – and the visualization processesassociated with it – must contend with multiple interferences that frustrateits ability to draw accurate conclusions about the inter-individual relationswithin a given collective. Far more problematic, however, is the failure ofsuch methods to create reproducible testing conditions and to generatedata of long-standing significance. The Cartesian procedure of dissolvingproblems into sub-problems, and thus of analysing collective movement asthe sum of segmented individual movements, necessarily fails to explicatescale-variant phenomena such as swarms.

III. Simple Rules

Because of the complications surveyed above, certain researchers soughtother approaches to the problem. In connection with Parr’s thesis,namely that the dynamics of fish schools can be ascribed to a fewsimple rules of interaction, efforts were made to ‘calculate’ swarms,that is, to develop abstract mathematical models of their activity inspace and time. This process did not aim to solve, in an analyticmanner, the non-linear dynamics of swarms and the factors responsiblefor their ability to self-organize, but rather to approximate them numer-ically. In response to an Aristotelian platitude that is often cited in thiscontext, Heinz von Foerster has related a fitting riposte: ‘The whole is

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greater than the sum of its parts. As one of my colleagues once remarked:“Can’t the numbskulls even add?”’ (Foerster, 2003: 319). For this is notat all a matter of the summation of parts, but rather of the dynamicrelations among the component parts of a system. Swarms engender aspecific relational being, the nature of which has been summarized well byEugene Thacker: ‘The parts are not subservient to the whole – both existsimultaneously and because of each other. [. . .] [A] swarm does not existat a local or global level, but at a third level, where multiplicity andrelation intersect’ (Thacker, 2004b).

However, before computer technology enabled the viability of elabor-ate synthetic approaches, which circumvented the analytic problem of‘fuzzy relations’, models of swarming behaviour were at first only pos-sible if the number of variables involved was severely reduced. In theearly 1950s, Charles Breder began to calculate the internal relations ofswarms by conceptualizing each of its individuals as a physical point ofmass with specific powers of attraction and repulsion (Breder, 1954).As far as biology is concerned, models of this sort have been criticizedas having little predictive value; however, they do have the advantage ofrelying on established physical laws and formulas. Geometric modelswere also developed, the concern of which was either the optimal util-ization of space (Breder, 1976) or the formation of aggregates in general(Hamilton, 1971).

Breder and Radakov gradually formulated new concepts, based oninformation theory, that would supplant the older psychological andpsycho-mechanical terminology. They directed their attention, forinstance, to the phenomenon of so-called ‘waves of agitation’.Radakov described such waves, which are also observable in flocks ofbirds, as ‘a rapidly shifting zone in which the fish react to the actions oftheir neighbors by changing their position [. . .]. The speed of propagation[. . .] is much higher than the maximum (spurt) speed of forward move-ment of individual specimens’ (Radakov, 1973: 82). They introducedadditional environmental factors into their models, which had been over-looked elsewhere, and also filtered out what they considered to be ‘unim-portant’ interference. These adjustments led to significant structuralchanges and to the optimal reaction of their theoretical swarms to envir-onmental influences. Measured under such influences, swarms came to beunderstood more and more as infrastructures of information or, moregenerally, as ‘social media’ (Schilt and Norris, 1997: 231).

The conceptual informatization and mathematical modelling of bio-logical research may have stimulated the first attempts at individual-based simulation, which were ventured in the 1970s and early 1980s(Kay, 2000). In an article from 1973, Sumiko Sakai provided a mathem-atical model, based on internal rules, for the behaviour of schooling fish.The novelty of this study was that the paths of motion were calculated by acomputer and then, much like the plotted diagrams of empirical


laboratory reports, recorded graphically. Tadashi Inagaki et al. (1976)investigated the coherence of fish schools over long periods of time anddeveloped amathematical model with the following five variables: ‘mutualattractive or repulsive force, mean swimming force, random force, forceexerted by the change of circumstances and frictional force of swimmingmotion’. According to their results, the coherence of a given swarm couldonly be maintained so long as certain combinations of these parameterswere in effect.

Of special interest to the potential of computer simulation was thework of Ko Matuda and Nobuo Sannomiya (1980), which enhancedSakai’s model into an application for modelling fish behaviour in relationto fishing nets. Theirs was the first study to address the reciprocal effectsof computer simulation and swarm research. Whereas traditional tech-nologies such as underwater cameras and hydro-acoustic sensors weresubject to certain restrictions – underwater visibility, marine conditions,and so on – and were only capable of recording small excerpts of data,computer simulations could be relied upon to compensate for these defi-ciencies (Matuda and Sannomiya, 1980: 689). Increasingly, swarmresearch began to distance itself from the influences of psychology andbehavioural biology, and ‘natural behaviour’ came to manifest itself aslittle more than a function of physical, quantified variables. Swarms weremodelled as technical systems of multiple components, each with a set ofpredetermined characteristics. Models of this sort enabled biologicalswarm research to expand into an operational and far more generalmeans of describing multitudes composed of homogeneous elements.As a result of this development, the actual ‘nature’ of these collectivesystems ultimately became a subordinate issue.

The latter authors conducted computer experiments with virtualschools of fish in which they tested, for instance, their behaviour inresponse to certain obstacles. However, it was Ichiro Aoki’s simulationmodel of schooling fish, published in 1982, that would become founda-tional to later research in the field of agent-based modelling. Aoki inte-grated motion parameters into a zone-based model, composed ofconcentric circles surrounding individuals, that governed the activationof certain behavioural parameters. The model generated reciprocaldynamics among individuals, and these dynamics depended on the pres-ence of such forces as attraction, repulsion, or alignment, on the velocityof the individuals, and on their trajectories in relation to one another.For some time, this understanding of the organization of swarm dynam-ics remained inapplicable to other disciplines. The realization of its inter-disciplinary potential would require another media-emergence ofswarms. What had been lacking, to be precise, was the ability to animatethis activity with visualization processes, based on the principles ofswarming, in which swarms could ultimately appear to be ‘written intheir own medium’.

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More than half a decade passed before the processes of computergraphic imaging, in the form of Craig Reynolds’s boids model (1987),would come into play. Ironically, the latter model has often been cited asan urtext of computer-assisted biological swarm research. Building uponWilliam Reeves’s particle system for the animation of fuzzy objects suchas dust, clouds, or fire (Reeves, 1983), Reynolds was not at all interestedin realistic variables of behaviour but rather in a performance that wasonly somewhat true to nature. To some extent, his program was born oflaziness, for he wanted to avoid the error-prone and Sisyphean task ofseparately programming the path of each individual boid within a largecollective. Such a program was inflexible, too, for the alteration of asingle flight path would entail a commensurate alteration in the flightpaths of the other swarming individuals. This difficulty was remedied bythe application of object-oriented programming methods. For each boid,Reynolds generated a customized geometric orientation and, much likeAoki, he created an individualized and locally applicable algorithm onthe basis of three ‘traffic rules’.

In test runs, which Reynolds was (innovatively) able to track on acomputer monitor, it came to light that realistic swarm activity wouldonly be produced when the boids oriented themselves toward the locallyperceived centre of the flock. Spatially limited knowledge, according tothe model, was thus fundamental to the universal operation of a collect-ive. Moreover, each individual boid’s capacity for decision-making wasalso temporally limited, such that changes in their course did not becomemore time-consuming in response to an increase in neighbouring boids,and the coordinate system did not become increasingly complex as thesize of a given flock enlarged. The result was a highly realistic represen-tation of collective movement, along with a few surprises for the anima-tor himself. The boids, for instance, were able to negotiate obstaclesindependently without the addition of further parameters to the model,and they would also change direction suddenly and abruptly. On accountof its simplicity and flexibility, the boid model would soon be employedin the field of special effects, especially for the animation of crowd scenes.Swarms, therefore, were reintroduced to the medium of film not simplyas a way of distorting images, as in Hitchcock’s Birds, but also as anorganizational principle of image production.

The use of swarming in scientific simulations represents a culminationpoint in the media history of the concept. Swarms themselves came to beused as a model, as a potential condition. In computer simulations,experiments were conducted with distributed behaviour parameters,which were then regarded as the simple behavioural rules of biologyitself. In short:

The ‘bio’ is transformatively mediated by the ‘tech’ so that the ‘bio’reemerges more fully biological. [. . .] The biological and the digital


domains are no longer rendered ontologically distinct, but insteadare seen to inhere in each other; the biological ‘informs’ the digital,as the digital ‘corporealizes’ the biological. (Thacker, 2004a: 6–7)

Reynolds’s dynamic, computer-graphic visualizations evidenced a newepistemic strategy. They introduced a way of understanding accordingto which swarming individuals localize, organize, and synchronize them-selves independently. The misleading view of observational media with acentral perspective was replaced by a topological system that creates itsown space for itself. Swarms have to be understood as projects of timeand space. They function as a self-organizing swarm-space on the basis oflocal interactions conducted in parallel and en masse. By adapting toexternal influences, this swarm-space also provides information aboutthe nature of the environment surrounding it. And a constitutive elementin this regard is the fourth dimension of time, for it is only in time thatswarms come to be. With the help of agent-based modelling and itsprocesses of visualization, swarms could finally be understood in fourdimensions.

IV. Cultural Techniques, Opaque Spaces, andAgent-based Modelling

Biological swarm research did not begin to implement agent-basedmodels on a broad scale until the 1990s, that is, until advances in ani-mation technology were made in Hollywood (Macavinta, 2002). In cor-relation with rapidly increasing data processing speeds, larger and largerswarms could be modelled and more and more variables could be intro-duced (Reuter and Breckling, 1994; Couzin and Krause, 2003). Thusphenomena such as currents, predatory attacks, different body types,and the variant speeds of individuals could be taken into consideration,while integrated stochastic errors could account for imprecise movementsand coincidental environmental disturbances. At first, all of this wascarried out graphically, for example with two-dimensional cellular auto-mata (Vabø and Nøttestad, 1997), but soon, and to an increasing extent,such models were designed in real-time 3D with the help of suitablevisualization software (Couzin et al., 2002).

Computer experiments conducted with agent-based models are notconstrained by the physical interferences encountered by researchers inthe sea and in the laboratory. They are rather spaces of potential, inwhich multiple scenarios can be tested and brought into contact withone another. Thus, agent-based models have established an immaterialculture within the sciences – embedded, of course, in the facticity of thehardware and software on which they run. In such representations,swarms lose their optical and acoustic stubbornness, even while theycan be simulated as facets of material culture under the most diverse

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conditions. Intermediary steps and spaces for epistemic and techno-logical things or for the capacity of objects to operate in actor-networks,which have been central ideas in the work of Hans-Jorg Rheinberger(1997, 2010) and Bruno Latour (1987, 2005), shrink or disappearwithin the spacio-temporality of virtual scenarios. In plain terms, theapplication of agent-based modelling has led to a simultaneous explosionand implosion of epistemic things, something which is characteristic ofcomputer applications in general: an explosion, because more and morenew scenarios are allowed to multiply; an implosion, because thus theylose their solidifying character and become fluid, that is, processable.

To some extent, swarms contain a concentration of certain problemsthat, when addressed by the experimental epistemology of computer sci-ence, expand into something like a culture of intransparency or opacity.Computer graphics enable a visual comparison of various universalstructures, both with respect to parameter adjustments within the rulesets of agent-based modelling and also in terms of the sporadic, empiricaldata collected about schooling fish in laboratories and in the open water.Thus it can be determined ‘intuitively’ whether a chosen combination ofparameters produces results that resemble the behaviour of a biologicalswarm. The base function of this knowledge is the act of ‘seeing in time’.In its state of temporal ‘thrownness’ (Zeitgeworfenheit) – or, better, in itsstate of having been designed in time (Zeitentworfenheit) – computerscience is able to animate mathematical models, that is, endow themwith life in ‘run time’. In this way, it does not exhaust itself into amere expansion of existing epistemological strategies.

Computer science represents more than simply an improvement ofnumerical calculation methods by means of the processing speed of com-puters. It can rather be attributed an entirely unique epistemological statusof theoretical experimentation. It is here that pragmatic operationality hassupplanted the need for precise theoretical foundations. It is here thatcategorical truth-claims are replaced by provisional knowledge. Here, inother words, ‘the performance on the computer is more important than themodel’s derivation and its accuracy of calculation’ (Kuppers and Lenhard,2004: 271). Unlike the case of theories, computer science is less concernedwith what is true or false than it is with pragmatic utility (Sigismundo,1999: 247). The hypothetical character of knowledge in this field is under-scored by the different and competing models of swarm simulation;instead of confirming one another’s findings and producing certainties,they have instead generated a spectrum of opinions and viewpoints.

Where computer science focuses its attention is on the relations thatexist within systems. At this point, swarming as an object of knowledgeencounters the epistemology of simulation. The relational being ofswarms, with its intersections of the microscopic and macroscopic, canonly be adequately captured by a technology that itself bisects the distinc-tion between the epistemic and the technological thing, that is, by a


technology that focuses on knowledge relations. The knowledge of swarmsand that of computer simulation go hand in hand. That which cannot beaddressed adequately in vivo and in vitro can be recorded in silico.

The recursive coupling of swarm-inspired agent-based modellingand swarm research, however, entails an even graver consideration.Agent-based models were first implemented by means of object-orientedprogramming. Both agent-based modelling and object-oriented program-ming can thus be assigned to the same paradigm, one that FrederickBrooks (1987) subsumed under the concept of ‘growing’ (in its doublesense of ‘increase’ and ‘cultivate’). To a certain extent, control and ‘intel-ligence’ are here delegated to a self-regulating system (Parikka, 2010).And within the paradigm of growing, which inclines toward self-organization and procedurality, swarms appear as a digital cultural tech-nique par excellence, one that enriches the study of cultural techniqueswith a zootechnological dimension.

Casey Alt (2011) is even more radical in this regard, for he has identi-fied object-oriented programming to be the material foundation of ourentire understanding of computers as media. Alt conceptualizes thismedial relation as a ‘society of objects’ within a computer, the commu-nication of which takes place both among the objects themselves, at theprogram level, as well as with human users by means of interfaces. Thusthe user is likewise conceived of as a programming process, and object-oriented programming begins to structure, more than just metaphoric-ally, our daily lives: ‘Object orientation increasingly mediates how wework, play, fight and love’ (Alt, 2011: 298) – from video game commu-nities to social networks to the flow of information in modern businesses.

To this list, agent-based modelling contributes the realm of knowledgeand science. For, from the media-historical threshold where the epistemicconflation of fish and chips yielded an extensive and novel understandingof the principles of regulation and self-organization that govern swarms,these principles became operable as figures of knowledge in various fieldsof implementation and for various technological applications. Towardthe end of the 1980s, for instance, when experiments were conducted withrobot collectives composed of simply designed individuals, the research-ers operated according to the following motto: ‘[U]sing swarms is thesame as “getting a bunch of small cheap dumb things to do the same jobas an expensive smart thing”’ (Corner and Lamont, 2004: 355).

The logic of swarms introduced a new type of economy to techno-logical processes, an economy based on the flexibility of model environ-ments, on a distributed mechanism of control and regulation, on theindependent creation of unpredictable solutions, and on high levels offault tolerance and reliability. Swarms integrated themselves as compo-nents of the evolutionary software designs with which mathematical opti-mizations could be executed – in the form, for instance, of particle swarmoptimization (Kennedy and Eberhart, 1995). The latter designs were in

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turn implemented for problems of multi-objective optimization, that is,for processes involving multitudes of reciprocal and mutually constrain-ing variables. Their field of application has extended from industrialproduction processes to logistics planning to the optimization of networkprotocols (Engelbrecht, 2005). Moreover, the interactional intelligence ofswarms can play a role wherever there are time-sensitive problems ofcoordination and transference between numerous particles; such prob-lems present themselves, for instance, in traffic simulations, social simu-lations, panic simulations, consumer simulations, epidemic simulations,simulations of animal collectives, in the behaviour of aerosol in climatemodels, and even in the case of organizing building materials. Swarmscreate information by means of formation.

Swarms and the algorithmics of their relational being can be called‘intelligent’ whenever a matter concerns the (independent) governmentand planning of interactions in space and time. Their applicability toagent-based computer modelling and to distributed technological collect-ives is indicative of their effectiveness as a novel cultural technique.As such, swarming is characterized by the fact that it was produced inthe area of tension between biology and computer science. Originallyregarded as mere interference phenomena, swarms emerged as oper-ational media technologies. As an addressee of this cultural technique,humans were at first only an unintentional part of the equation. Strictlyspeaking, swarming did not exist as a cultural technique before its media-technological manifestation, that is, before it became applicable in thefield of computer science as a novel epistemic process and as a solutionconfiguration for a multitude of complex problems.2 Moreover, the influ-ence of the cultural technique expanded even further when the ‘crowdlogic’ of its behaviour came to be employed as imitable particles in socialsimulations. Around the year 2000, at the latest, swarm intelligenceand agent-based modelling emerged as a powerful and irreversible elem-ent of the current media culture. It is as zootechnologies that they havedeveloped into a relevant cultural technique, and as such they haveenabled and initiated novel engagements with opaque areas of know-ledge, with interference phenomena, and with technological and systemiccorrelations that otherwise would have been difficult to ascertain.

At the same time, they produce and even demand – like the paradigmof object-oriented programming – a zeitgeist and world view in whichcultural processes are characterized more and more by the multiple anddynamic interactions of autonomous and self-optimizing ‘agents’. Onceaware of the lasting effects of swarming as a cultural technique on ourcurrent media and knowledge cultures, at least as described here, oneshould be quick to distrust the highly touted potential of social swarmingand the grass-roots-democratic ‘nature’ of human techno-collectives.This holds true even despite the elevation of the discourse, in the pastfew years, to sophisticated media-theoretical levels (see in this regard the


work of Tiziana Terranova, Luciana Parisi, Olga Gurionova, HowardSlater, and the recent issue of Limn devoted to ‘crowds and clouds’).

Ultimately, whoever belittles recent revolutions with the journalisticbanalities of swarm logic – ‘Facebook revolution’, ‘Twitter revolution’,and so on – deliberately overlooks the extent to which the cultural tech-nique of swarming has come to define our situation. Swarms should nolonger be understood simply as advanced manifestations of older formsof collective behaviour. It is much rather the case that they have gainedrelevance as structures of organization and coordination. These struc-tures have become effective against a backdrop of an opaque culture –one defined by the permanent flexibility of various domains of life – andthey have become effective namely as optimization strategies and zoo-technological solutions within these very domains. At the heart of swarm-ing, as a cultural technique, is thus the governmental constitution(Verfasstheit) of the present itself, in which operationalized and opti-mized multitudes have emerged from the uncontrollable data drift ofdynamic collectives. From this there can be no escape.

Translated by Valentine A. Pakis

Notes

1. Here I am limiting myself to ‘decentralized’ animal collectives such as swarmsof birds and schools of fish, the dynamics of which are created in threedimensions of space and by constant motion in time. Insect collectives thusremain beyond the scope of the present discussion.

2. As a term used in mass psychology, or as an obsolete element of militarytactics, the concept of swarming was chiefly employed to signify the dissol-ution of order, that is, the act of ‘swarming all over’. It was not then conceivedof as representing the relational, procedural, and structural intermediarydomain between the individual and the collective, namely the very domainthat, according to Eugene Thacker, defines the dynamics of swarms.

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Sebastian Vehlken is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at theLeuphana University in Luneburg, Germany. He is the author ofZootechnologien: Eine Mediengeschichte der Schwarmforschung and theco-editor, with Claus Pias and Thomas Brandstetter, of Think Tanks: DieBeratung der Gesellschaft. His current interests include the media historyand epistemology of agent-based modelling and simulation, poetologiesof the ocean, and supercomputing.

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30(6) 132–146




DOI: 10.1177/0263276413496286

tcs.sagepub.com

Article

From Media History toZeitkritik

Wolfgang ErnstHumboldt University, Germany

Abstract

Wolfgang Ernst, Professor of Media Theories at the Humboldt University in Berlin,

has become known through his work on media archaeology. Hence the inclusion of

this translation represents an alternative take on cultural techniques. It places the

legacy of cultural studies, or Kulturwissenschaften, in an interesting tension with the

different epistemological demands that technical media impose. After Vico and

Dilthey, argues Ernst, we need to investigate the specific modes of knowledge that

technical media propose to cultural techniques. Ernst’s media archaeology and the

slightly different approach to cultural techniques found in some other contributions

in this issue can be seen as two of the most intriguing ways in which current German

media studies has been developing in relation to Friedrich Kittler’s impact. For Ernst,

this has resulted in a more technical focus and also in the development of critiques of

temporality that go beyond media history. Ernst argues that media temporality is not

to be understood only through the cultural history of media technologies, but also

how media technologies produce time. Machines have their own specific temporality,

Eigenzeit. It is in this context that the article discusses the different approaches to

cultural techniques, taking into consideration the specific time-critical and epistemic

implications of technical media.

Keywords

cultural history, cultural techniques, epistemology, media, media archaeology, media

theory, temporality

The present article does not primarily focus on the alliances and distinc-tions between cultural theory [Kulturwissenschaft] and media studies[Medienwissenschaft] as academic disciplines, but rather questions thediscursive mode that spans both subjects: the historical inquiry into thethings that shape culture.1 Technical media are neither the apex northe driving force of culture, but rather a constitutive element of its


Wolfgang Ernst, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Georgenstraße 47, R. 2.23, 10117 Berlin, Germany.



history. Consequently, the history of media must be written as a historyof cultural techniques. Media are a part of cultural history and culturecan be read as a function of media history. Both forms of history share acommon focus in the concept of ‘cultural techniques’. Epistemologicallyspeaking, this is a rather harmless claim: after all, the humanities havelearned to look at matters historically and render them as history(ies)ever since Vico and Dilthey. As long as there is agreement on this point,defining media history in terms of cultural history and cultural history asa media effect will always be mutually implicit. The question still remainswhether there is anything about technical media that eludes the realm ofhistory, its narrative model or even, ultimately, culture itself. To a certainextent, it seems obvious that all media innovations are culturally deter-mined – a premise culminating in the new historicist view that affirmsboth the textuality of history and the historicity of texts. But this chiastichistorical model calls for a supplement: the assumption of an inner logicof media development that literally introduces a third element to thePromethean dichotomy of culture and nature.

Anything and everything associated with the term ‘media’ can, ofcourse, be included in the discursive framework of cultural history. Thatinclusion, however, would jeopardize the accuracy of a term that refuses tolabel anything and everything as media, but rather seeks to account fordiscontinuities, in order to grasp media-epistemological escalations(Bachelard, 1974; Canguilhem, 1979).Michel Serres distinguishes betweentechniques and technologies – a distinction which also applies to the dif-ference between cultural techniques and media technologies. He contraststhe ‘hard’ machinery of the Industrial Revolution, functioning on the basisof thermodynamics, with the ‘soft’ negentropy of information technology:‘I therefore reserve the term “technology” for those types of artefacts thatnegotiate signs – and thus the logos – and contrast them with “tech-niques”, whose energetic scope is 1016 times higher’ (Serres, 2002: 194).

Speaking of the frequent confusion between the stroboscope and theafterimage effect in the transmission of visual perception, BernhardSiegert stresses ‘how fundamentally the media-theoretical discourse isin need of a media-historical framework of analysis to match media’sinherently high physical and mathematical standards’ (Siegert, 1996: 8).And, indeed, the history of knowledge and technology serves as a neces-sary test for all media theories. But media archaeology does not merelyreconstruct historical media practices; it also reflects on their time-building, chronopoetic processes – thereby raising a challenge to history.

Cultural History with Media History – A Liaison Dangereuse

The field of Medienwissenschaft also fulfils, at many universities, thefunction of Kulturwissenschaft, or else works in close cooperation withit (Dotzler, 2005). This privileged proximity is rooted in the fact that both

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disciplines (in contrast, for instance, to what is known as ‘cultural stu-dies’) deal not merely with the discursive software of culture, but alsowith its material hardware. But while Kulturwissenschaft prefers to readmedia techniques as a function of historical processes, media archaeologytakes the opposite perspective: here the model of history itself appears asa function of cultural (symbolic and signal-based) operations.

To this day, the field of Medienwissenschaft draws on the resources ofcultural history, which emerged in the 19th century both as an academicpractice and a research dispositif. This is precisely why it is vital to ana-lyse the media-based conditions of such a large-scale, worldwide labourof collecting, archiving or museumizing. So, for example, the postalsystem (transmission) and the archive (storage) became conjoined whenErich Moritz von Hornbostel ordered Edison cylinders with musicalrecordings from all over the world for his Berlin phonographic archive,with the idea of developing the field of comparative ethnomusicology(Klotz, 1998). The notion of culture that governed the projects involvedin collecting knowledge around 1900 had become identical to the storagemedia it generated. In its materiality, culture thus reveals itself as anobject of research for the study of storage and transmission techniques.Chronology, diplomacy, epigraphy, genealogy, heraldry, numismatics,palaeography, sphragistics, historical cartography: these so-called ancil-lary disciplines of history, which identify and analyse their objects withregard to their usability as cultural data storage devices, acquire thestatus of media archaeology avant la lettre and are intimately connectedwith the category of Kulturwissenschaft. As a result, culture becomescalculable; it is a function of mnemonic strategies and transmission tech-niques, as well as their respective institutions.

The analysis of media techniques and material culture is a jointendeavour of Kulturwissenschaft and Medienwissenschaft. MarshallMcLuhan famously analysed the psycho-technical effects of media asoperators in the cultural matrix. But what happens if such mediatechnologies no longer operate in the familiar context of culture butform a world in their own right? A notable difference betweenKulturwissenschaft, on the one hand, and Medienwissenschaft, on theother, lies in the fact that the former is primarily interested in discourses,while the latter places a much stronger focus on non-discursive aspects.In contrast to the field of Kulturwissenschaft, which tends to interpretexperimental arrangements as semantic spaces, media archaeology (muchlike Gaston Bachelard’s epistemology) seeks to maintain spaces of con-tingency (see also Rheinberger, 2001). The cultural techniques that gen-erate discourses are precisely those that are not already discursive effects.The inquiry into what constitutes ‘existential’ historical differences – soto speak – sets the study of cultural techniques apart from the kind ofcultural research that not only carries ‘media’ in its name but alsoengages with media’s intrinsic perspective and specific inner temporality


[Eigenzeit] in a kind of reverse hermeneutical move. On the one hand, thismeans programmatically positioning media theories within concretespaces of cultural practices. However, media archaeology is not to beconfused with Kulturwissenschaft. Writing, reading, counting, network-ing and representing are symbolic techniques which generate culture as arecurring and normative formation. They transform a priori concepts ofspace and time into an analysis of concrete spatial and temporal systems.Media archaeology does not conduct this analysis on the level of macro-cultural production, but rather on the level of micro-technical operativ-ity. In contrast to Kulturwissenschaft, which starts from grand narratives(histories of culture, science or even knowledge) to arrive at concreteparticulars, media archaeology operates on the assumption that techno-logical media systems can be understood primarily and conclusively onthe basis of their elementary, sub-semantic procedures. This type of ana-lysis, which understands material, symbolic and signal-based operatorsas escalations of classical cultural techniques, requires a theory of genu-ine media-temporal processes.

Traditional media history and cultural history are in agreement onhow ‘organ projections’ and the extensions of men (Ernst Kapp,Marshall McLuhan) have developed into culture’s servomechanism.Anthropocentricity thereby turns into a perspective which increasinglyviews man as codified (or even programmed) by cultural techniques andmedia technology. To paraphrase Gunter Anders, media theory activelypursues the ‘antiquation’ of man by distancing the subject-centred per-spective through apparatus-based theorıa, that is, through the algorith-mic processes of technological media themselves. In traditional culturalhistory, culture appears as a process of progressive semantification,which produces and reproduces resources of meaning, but which alsoundermines and destroys them. In this sense, it combines media researchwith cultural semiotics, which understands culture as a form of poetics(Bohme, 2004: 23). Cultural history thus remains on the symbolic andsemantic level. In contrast, media archaeology stresses the syntacticaspect: the processing of signals rather than the signs themselves. Theso-calledMedienkulturwissenschaft (a hybrid of media studies and culturestudies) develops theoretical models that understand aesthetic andtechnological changes as semantic shifts. A study of media time[Medienzeit] that is grounded in communications theory, on the otherhand, intentionally keeps its distance vis-a-vis historical formations ofmeaning.

Cultural History with Vico

Media theory tacitly becomes Kulturwissenschaft when it is translatedinto the discourse of history: in other words, when all temporal signsare translated into the kind of history that Giambattista Vico defined as

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the realm of humanity – and thus the realm of culture – in his ScienzaNuova (Vico, 1948). According to Vico, all historical products are com-prehensible to humans precisely because they were produced by humans.Vico’s foundation for all studies of culture was written ‘in explicit oppos-ition to modern (natural) science’ (Kittler, 2000: 16). The new disciplinedealing with the common nature of all people contested Rene Descartes’attempt to elevate the principles of modern mathematics and science toall-encompassing philosophical principles – the attempt to extract thealgorithm of the historical development of culture. Vico critiques a math-ematical analysis, which increasingly deprives its objects of their embo-died corporeality. Yet disembodiment characterizes the current state ofinformation technology. Following the principle of mechanics accordingto which the geometrical representation of any phenomenon enables itsmechanical reconstruction, mechanical physics is called upon to describenatural phenomena based on their mode of production (Fellmann, 1976:185). In contrast, Vico (1948: 93) assigns human affairs a greater degreeof reality than geometrical points, lines, areas and shapes can represent.According to Vico, we can prove geometry, because we produce it. Whenwe can prove the physical realm, we will produce that as well. The basisof modern media is precisely this kind of mathematics, which alreadyconstitutes an epistemological step beyond traditional cultural tech-niques. The Turing machine thus became the first strictly theory-bornmedium. Engineered as a von Neumann model, this diagrammatic mediatheory has advanced to an omnipotent medium. Its logic, however, doesnot belong to this, that is to say, to the historical world.

The question of cultural history literally brings forth its media-archae-ological alternative. According to Vico’s Scienzia Nova, the realm ofhistory is the autopoiesis of culture: since the historical world is man-made, its essence can also be found at the level of our own mental trans-formation. Here, the creator is also the narrator. At first glance, thisreads like an argument for rendering media time in terms of culturalhistory. But upon a closer look, Vico’s opposition to Cartesian mathem-atics no longer applies to those things that can only be counted, ratherthan recounted, or those that are themselves limited to the act of counting(the computer). The category of cultural techniques bridges this divide.Ernst Kapp’s treatise Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik. ZurEntstehungsgeschichte der Cultur aus neuen Gesichtspunkten (1877) pro-vides a response to Vico’s axiom, by aiming to submit technology to aprocess of ‘reflective analysis’. At first glance, with his notion of ‘organprojection’ Kapp seems to embrace the perspective of cultural anthro-pology, and yet he ends up calling the steam engine the ‘machine ofmachines’. This is the point that marks the closing of the technologicalfeedback loop: the autopoietic emancipation of technical media fromtheir direct link to a cultural environment. Max Bense calls this cyber-netic revolution ‘machine metatechnics’ (1998: 429) – something that


detaches itself from cultural history on its own terms. Thus media tech-nology gains autonomy from culture. The technological feedback loop(the cybernetic marriage of machine and mathematics) puts forth a modeof knowledge that is no longer subject-centred and therefore also defieshistoricization. But knowledge that is no longer subject-centred becomesinformation. Today, information belongs to the sphere of electronic cir-culation and the coupling of one piece of information to another nolonger relies on the guidance of cultural knowledge (Schulte-Sasse,1988: 451).

Media Time Processes and Their Break from

Cultural History

Media archaeology employs an analysis of media communications that isfar removed from cultural semantics and concerns itself not only withcultural techniques, but also particularly with technology and techno-logical mathematics; it therefore places an additional focus on non-cultural input. In a segment titled ‘Movement and Time’, GustavDeutsch’s film Film ist [Film Is] (made in Austria 1998) shows medicalX-ray footage of a speaking larynx. In this case, the medium speaks foritself, producing the same effect as the invention of the vocal alphabet inancient Greece, which not only created the possibility to record – andthus store and transfer – oral poetry as a stream of phonetic utterances,but also allowed objects like drinking vessels and tombstones to speak tothe reader in the first person via their inscriptions (Ernst and Kittler,2006). The scientific observation of a speaking larynx in sets of 12 to24 X-ray images per second is no longer conditioned by the human eyebut by the eye of the camera or even that of the X-ray cathode. Onlytechnical media are capable of manipulating, decelerating and accelerat-ing moments such as this in a time-critical manner.

This also explains the title of the film: it announces the media-archae-ological level in the existence of the apparatus, which – to paraphraseFoucault – corresponds to a monumental, discrete aesthetic, distinctfrom the documentary perspective of cultural history. As functions ofa process of transmission, technologically generated signals are the mes-sengers of other things; at the same time, however, every electronicimage, every electronically (re)produced sound is always also a monu-ment to itself, to its technology and – even more radically – to the com-puter program which created it. This amounts to media self-reference.Media technology thus emerges from culture as an autonomous entity – aprocess that manifests itself via the technical feedback loop (the cyber-netic paradigm of machine and mathematics). The development of feed-back routes – as James Clerk Maxwell’s On Governors (1868) had alreadyshown prior to all explicit formulations of cybernetics – increasinglyseparates media systems from the discursive streams of culture. Thus,

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automation is defined precisely by the fact that ‘human controls havebeen disabled’ (Szameitat, 1959: 316). When in contrast to Vico’s self-referentiality of culture and history the field of electronic media isaccessed in terms of the electromagnetic field, this distinction placestechnological media in opposition to traditional cultural practice. Toremain within the terminology of electromagnetism: with media, thereis only mutual induction. The discovery of electromagnetism – theoret-ically posited by Faraday, mathematically calculated by Maxwell andultimately empirically proven by Hertz – overcame the search for a rep-resentation of humanity in nature, and instead defined it as a set ofprocesses that open up a new field between physics and culture. ‘Wemust therefore understand the knowledge of electrical phenomena andtheir application as an exclusive product of the human intellect’(Liesegang, 1891: X). By using electricity, man has surpassed nature,and not simply performed an act of organ projection. ‘Once it is possibleto animate an automaton that is better constructed than man himself, theworld has reached its ultimate purpose’ (1891: X). The media processesthat are thereby set in motion no longer exclusively belong to eithernature or culture. The Greek term nomos already implies a departurefrom physis, from nature itself (Vretska, 2001: 503). Faraday taught usto understand this field as a form of independent reality with an intrinsicdynamic, detached from the corporeal realm (Weizsacker, 1974: 147). Indoing so, he opened up a space for temporal and spatial free play (in thesense of Schiller’s ‘Spielraum’). If we are destined to face the advent oftechno-mathematics and live by its rules, we will certainly find that itderives not from cultural history, but rather from Riemann spaces, wheretime and space become conflated. The Michelson-Morley experimentfrom 1887, which famously failed to prove the existence of ‘etherwind’, was followed by the provocative Lorentz contraction theorem:instruments of measurement expand or contract along with the ether.Although this explanation is considered obsolete today, it still holdsthe appeal of an alternate model of conceptualizing non-historical timein what is called culture.

There are numerous pleas for media culture studies and for culturallyoriented Medienwissenschaften. But this inclusion of media knowledgeunder a cultural horizon proves to be a Trojan horse. When culture nolonger operates with primary natural ‘media’ (air, water) alone and alsoposits no imaginary substances (‘ether’), but rather – as in the case ofelectromagnetic carrier waves – forms its own media channels that can beboth artistically and artificially modulated, the combination of mediaproduced by cultural techniques and human speech acts generates theuncanny, siren-like attraction of media technology. Precisely because ‘theSirens, who were only animals . . . could sing as men sing, they madethe song so strange that they gave birth in anyone who heard it to asuspicion of the inhumanity of every human song’ (Blanchot, 2003: 3).


The temporality of media transmissions induces a similar discomfort. Weobviously know that Hitchcock’s Psycho is a historical film documentevery time it airs. But in the technical moment of transmission, it isactively present (unlike a painting in a museum) as an electromagnetic-ally induced process that shoots through our sense of time like an electricsurge. The result is cognitive dissonance: the subliminal perception of thepresent, but with the cognitive awareness of an alternate perspective,namely that of the past.

What happens when waves are no longer oceanic matter (as in theOdyssey), but rather a matter of high-frequency technology? A studylaunched at Berlin’s Humboldt University in April 2004 proposed toexamine Homer’s siren motif from the perspective of acoustic mediaarchaeology (see Ernst, 2004: 256–66). Only through the technologicalact of measuring can the sonic element, as the most fleeting of all culturalgoods, re-enter cultural memory. But by the same token, historical rec-ollection is de-historicized and the cultural-historical model is replacedwith technical parameters of measurement. On the one hand, mediaarchaeology is an ancillary discipline of cultural memory; yet, on theother hand, in terms of its media-epistemological focus, it is a technologycapable of training the visual and acoustic senses for non-culturalobjects. Technology is thus no longer an organ projection of nature.As the result of a technological culture, products of nature ‘effectivelybecome technological artefacts’ (Bohme, 1992: 118) Speaking of themagic produced by the nightingale’s song, Kant points out that, in theabsence of a bird, it has not been unusual for men ‘who knew how toproduce this sound exactly like nature’ to hide themselves in a bushinstead (quoted in Bohme, 1992: 119). Once analytical media have mea-sured the frequencies of sounds, they are able to synthetically subvert thesonic difference between humans and machines. Eduard Rhein (1939)illustrates this point with a radio broadcast of a singing nightingale rec-orded in nature. When nature itself becomes reproducible, it alsobecomes technically legible. The age of the baroque cabinets of curiositieshad an impartial view on these matters. ‘Nature is . . . an infinite resourcefor artificial machines that surpass all human inventions’ (Sulzer, 1750:39). Radio waves are not unnatural (para physin – according toAristotle’s Physics); rather, they reproduce the secret of their own wavemovement in a generative kind of mimesis (Koller, 1954). Artificialnature is media culture: ‘The spoon has no original other than the ideain our mind’, argues Nicholas of Cusa’s treatise De mente (quoted inBlumenberg, 1999: 534). ‘One can conceive of life forms which onlyreproduce in constant symbiosis with machines. Under such circum-stances, the term “artificial nature” indeed denotes an interstitial phe-nomenon, a boundary or perhaps even the point of an evolutionarydecision’ (Bohme, 1992: 196). This is the media-archaeological perspec-tive of the trans-classical machine. According to Siegfried J. Schmidt

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(1999), no form of culture can exist devoid of meaning, because cultureitself creates meaning. But ‘the secondary logic is neither the logic ofnature, nor that of the subject . . . . It produces what it describes’(Holling and Kempin, 1989: 138). Culture has not only created epistem-ology, but indeed also signal-processing machines, which are then bydefinition detached from culture: they do not ‘count’ semantic aspects;they do not view images as icons; they do not perceive sound as music;and they read texts with the aesthetics of a scanner, by Optical CharacterRecognition (see Pias, 2013).

The Autonomization of Culture and History: The

Micro-time of Technical Media

The autonomization of technological processes of media temporality canbe illustrated by the emancipation of mechanical time from astronomicaltime in the early modern age. Mechanical clocks were more than justthat: due to the micro-mechanism of escapement they became oscillators,bringing the previously celestially oriented time down to earth (see Ernst,2012). When the late scholasticist Nicolas d’Oresme compared the move-ments of the celestial bodies to the rhythms of the mechanical escapementdevice of a clock in Le livre du ciel et du monde, he modelled nature ontechnical mechanisms instead of modelling technology on organic arche-types. Since ‘clockwork rhythms more appropriately define time unitsthan the original rhythms of the heavens’ (Taschner, 2005: 56), the mech-anical media of time measurement dictate their non-discursive internaltemporality to culture and turn the observer himself into their ownmedium. Galileo suggested that Christiaan Huygens should not use thehuman heartbeat, but rather mechanical oscillations to measure time.The end result is the atomic clock, which is based on the oscillations ofa Caesium isotope. ‘Atomic clocks are so precise that they are the onesdefining chronological units now, rather than celestial phenomena’(Taschner, 2005: 56). This moment marks the emancipation of themedia of measurement from nature within the medium of nature. Iftime is that which is measured with a clock (the Aristotelian definitionof time), then that is media time. Yet the historical temporality of chron-ology and calendars is nothing but a scaled clock and thus becomes afunction of the media of measurement. From this perspective, the cat-egory of media history is turned inside out: it becomes a temporal fold.

The autonomization of the technological media sphere from trad-itional cultural techniques becomes apparent in the detachment of engin-eering from classical techne during the Renaissance: ‘The foremostachievement of engineers is the complete detachment of technical con-structions from the model of nature and from organic modes of oper-ation’ (Krohn, 1976: 25). Mathematical instruments and clockworkmechanisms are no longer viewed as human organ extensions, but


rather as ‘organisms in their own right or, rather, machines whose oper-ation is only guaranteed by their compliance with their own internal lawsand rules that can be verified and controlled’ (Moscovici, 1969: 200) – aview that even extends to the algorithm as the literal method, the orderedprogression, of the machine environment. Humanity perceives its ownproducts as reality (McLuhan and Powers, 1989). This other reality is theobject of a media-archaeological aesthetics. The intrinsic perspective(Eigenblick) and the intrinsic temporality (Eigenzeit) of media technologysucceed, in their difference from human perception, in telling humanitysomething about itself. Since the advent of the mechanical clock, thetemporal specificities of western society in particular must be analysedas a function of such techniques (Elias, 1991).

A central question for media studies concerns the manner in which thepresent organizes its knowledge around the media of the past. Its commonmodel is called history; that is, the more or less linear progression ofthings and the narrative account of their development, their creationand their demise, regardless of how disjointed it may appear. Since the19th century, historical discourse has borrowed the concept of time’sarrow from physical thermodynamics (the theorem of entropy). In con-trast, media archaeology views the same collected materials and symbolicarchives from a different perspective and chooses a different model todescribe the past of media in concrete miniatures. At least temporarily,this kind of media archaeology shrugs off the supremacy of historicaldiscourse, which – disguised as a history of science – tends to absorb allof its epistemological alternatives. The premature inclusion of the analysisof technological media processes in the category of cultural studies robs itof its explosive potential. Like the material-oriented Kulturwissenschaftand classical archaeology, media archaeology deals with artefacts, par-ticularly with those that are created only in the process of technologicalexecution; for instance, when a radio receives a broadcast. Regardless ofwhether this radio is an old or a recent model, the broadcast always takesplace in the present. In contrast to media history – that is, the humanvantage point (Vico) – media archaeology tentatively adopts the temporalperspective of the apparatus itself – the aesthetics of micro-temporal pro-cesses. A different kind of temporality is represented here. The oscillatingstring of an instrument still forces its sound – and with it its (intrinsicmedia) temporality – upon our ears. But these ears hear different harmo-nies in the same sound; they are culturally predetermined. A differenti-ation of the acoustic (physics), the sonic (cultural conditioning) and themusical (cultural semantics) is in order here. Does the vibrating stringsound the history of being to us? Any discovery of string-based octavesalways short-circuits historical time (Kittler, 2006: 282). This also meansthat the human senses not only conform to a seemingly immediate historyof being, but also to the instrumental medium itself. These instruments areproducts of cultural techniques; that is, of a negentropic desire, such as the

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repeated acoustic experiment. This, in turn, is inscribed with a ‘historical’index (to paraphrase Walter Benjamin), which combines with our percep-tion into a fulgurous constellation – media time, not history, is at workhere. What is the relationship between the verisimilitude of a lab experi-ment and the contingency of discovery? The contingencies in the successof technical discoveries defy narrative logic. The relationship cannot beplausibly described within a classical causal model of history. Oerstedtcame upon the effect of electromagnetic induction rather by accident,during a lecture in which the magnetic needle began to twitch in thevicinity of an electrified wire. Here, a micro-temporal process forms thefoundation for a media-technological event and thus produces a new formof temporality in competition to the historical event. Sparks producewaves. Heinrich Hertz, a student of Helmholtz, realized accidentallythat parallel to a spark, another one forms – a remote effect of electricbeams. Hertz describes this phenomenon with the very theory of electro-magnetic waves that Faraday and Maxwell contributed to epistemology.Maxwell arrived at the theory of light as electromagnetic waves throughpure mathematics; heuristically, however, his very concrete starting pointis the media channel of electromagnetic beams. The end point is fixedmedia – electromagnetic waves (radio): a realm with its own, no longercultural, laws; media effects that literally exist between nature and culture.

Is the category of resonance between two temporal objects merelytaken from acoustics as a metaphor or is it modelled on it directly?Resonance is produced when two tuning forks oscillate in perfect har-mony. The vibrations of one fork – even if interrupted – cause the secondone to vibrate as well – producing a kind of wireless information transfer(Kullmer, 1986). Does something similar occur in the actual reading of a‘historical’ text? If it resonates in the moment of reading, it is no longerhistorical. Can the ear hear this type of oscillating event? ‘What kind ofreality is produced in the act of listening to a loudspeaker is a question ofcognition’ (Supper, 1997: 32). From the perspective of biological com-puting, Heinz von Foerster describes cognition – analogous to the neuro-biological category of memory – as the ‘calculation of reality’. Or, moreprecisely: cognition is the calculation of one description of reality(Foerster, cited by Supper, 1997: 32). This results in contractions of(cultural-)historical time.

How Not to Write Media History?

Media time can be written as cultural history, but it is not identical to it.Media also demand another mode of representation of their occurrencein time – a fact which ex-historians understand, even if its positive for-mulation is for now nothing but a stammer. For cultural and mediahistory, the pressing revolution of knowledge that unsettled theNewtonian world view around 1900, in the form of the physics of Max


Planck and Albert Einstein, is yet to come. When historiography is nolonger viewed as the simple relationship between an object and its per-ception, but rather as mathematically mediated (statistics) and – in termsof a concise media archaeology – as a combination of measured object,measuring apparatus and perception, then historical time will be trans-formed into an observable in the sense of quantum physics. It is the act ofregistration (recording) that inscribes this time with a quality of irrever-sibility. The act of writing – that is, the transition between the continualflow of signals and their discrete recording – thus becomes comprehen-sible as a strictly media-archaeological moment, based not on its seman-tics, but on its operative execution. It is only this execution that producesthe distinction between the past (factuality) and the future (potentiality).Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge questions statements on thelevel of their existence, their formation and the conditions of their pos-sibility (the a priori, the archive). Media which do not merely refer to theaxis of time (time-based media), but which are capable of manipulating it(time-critical media), represent a new type of temporal statement whichmedia archaeology strives to account for. In contrast, for instance, tohistoriography and historical monuments, for which time is the object,technical discourse networks are capable of writing time itself. Thisintrinsic temporality demands another kind of temporal aesthetic – ‘thetemporality of ergodic art’ (Aarseth, 1999). Espen Aarseth aptly pro-poses this perspective, but does not consider it in accordance with thestringent probability mathematics of Norbert Wiener (see Furtwangler,2007). Media archaeology (as opposed to media historiography) consti-tutes an attempt to account for this alternate temporality of media. Thelinear prediction code – developed in the context of anti-aircraft defenceand fire control during the Second World War, but used today as aprobability indicator in all aspects of life – provides the model here. Itrepresents the calculations that form the basis of Wiener’s time-criticalresearch. Herein lies an analogy to current micro-temporal economies –such as computer games – insofar as their operativity is equally as time-critical as it is (seemingly) infinite in its combinatorics. In essence, thisquestion had already been raised by Leibniz in his fantasy ‘Apokatastasispanton’, an early version of Poincare’s return on the basis of the com-binatorics of all letters in a library. The difference between this and theinfinite but static space of ‘The Library of Babel’ (Jorge Luis Borges’short story from 1942) is the coupling of this thought experiment withmedia-operative and thus time-critical processes.

While it may not necessarily lead to writer’s block, the engagementwith time-critical media processes does entail a reluctance to write themodes of execution of media in time simply as media history. This pro-vides a convenient model that can be practised with ease by trainedscholars of the humanities, cultural studies and media studies. Still, anepistemological turn is taking place in this case as well – one that, in

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terms of its ambiguity and uncertainty, can be compared to what quan-tum physics represented for classical mechanics. At the level of a techno-logically induced media temporality that can neither be written ascultural nor as media history, media time has long reigned on its ownterms. Once more: written as history, media history and cultural historyare connected. But wherever non-preconceivable media time processesare concerned – that is, processes which themselves subvert this historicalmodel – the past of media must be written differently as well. It is nothistory, but at most the incidental nature of cultural existence as affectedby the temporal modes of technology. To draw on a concept fromHeidegger’s ‘Kehre’ (turn), it is true that no historical existence(Dasein) could have invented the radio, but that – conversely – techno-logical media, such as the radio, determine historical ways of being(dazusein). In contrast to Heidegger, however, media archaeology tenta-tively shrugs off the confines of the historical; not for the sake of apostmodern questioning of temporal processes as such, but in order toapproach them from the vantage point of the media operations them-selves, rather than allowing itself to be entrapped by musings on originsand metaphysics. Let us try for a moment to suspend the voluntary self-restriction of the human temporal horizon by means of the category ofhistory. Thus, the face of the historical human being does not disappearlike a figure drawn in sand at the edge of the sea, but rather like the sandin an hourglass.

Translated by Guido Schenkel

Note

1. This article was previously published as ‘Von der Mediengeschichte zurZeitkritik’ in Kulturgeschichte als Mediengeschichte (oder vice versa?),Archiv fur Mediengeschichte 6. Edited by Engell L, Siegert B and Vogl J.Weimar: Universitatsverlag, pp. 23–32.

References

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Bachelard G (1974) Epistemologie: Ausgewahlte Texte. Frankfurt: Ullstein.Bense M (1998) Kybernetik oder Die Metatechnik einer Maschine. In:

Ausgewahlte Schriften, vol. 2. Stuttgart: Metzler.Blanchot M (2003) The Book to Come. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Blumenberg H (1999) The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT

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Canguilhem G (1979) Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Epistemologie. Frankfurt:Suhrkamp.

Dotzler B (2005) Medienwissenschaft ist eine sichtbar machende Wissenschaft.Telepolis (27 November). Available at: http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/21/21366/1.html (accessed July 2013).

Elias N (1991) Time: An Essay. Oxford: Blackwell.Ernst W (2004) Lokaltermin Sirenen oder Der Anfang eines gewissen Gesangs in

Europa. In: Felderer B (ed.) Phonorama. Eine Kulturgeschichte der STIMMEals Medium. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz.

Ernst W (2012) Ticking clock, vibrating string: how time sense oscillates betweenreligion and machine. In: Stolow J (ed.) Deus in Machina: Religion,Technology and the Things in Between. New York: Fordham University Press.

Ernst W and Kittler F (eds) (2006) Die Geburt des Vokalalphabets aus dem Geistder Poesie. Schrift – Ton – Zahl im Medienverbund. Munchen: Fink.

Fellmann F (1976)Das Vico-Axiom: Der Mensch macht die Geschichte. Freiburg:Alber.

Foucault M (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Tavistock.Furtwangler F (2007) Human practice: how the problem of ergodicity demands

a re-animation of anthropological perspectives in game studies. In: GendollaP and Schafer J (eds) The Aesthetics of Net Literature: Writing, Reading andPlaying in Programmable Media. Bielefeld: transcript.

Holling E and Kempin P (1989) Identitat, Geist und Maschine. Auf dem Weg zurtechnologischen Gesellschaft. Hamburg: Rowohlt.

Kapp E (1877) Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik. ZurEntstehungsgeschichte der Cultur aus neuen Gesichtspunkten. Braunschweig:Westermann.

Kittler F (2000) Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaft. Munchen: Fink.Kittler F (2006) Muski und Mathematik I. Hellas 1: Aphrodite. Munchen: Fink.Klotz S (ed.) (1998) Vom tonenden Wirbel menschlichen Tuns: Erich M. von

Hornbostel als Gestaltpsychologe, Archivar und Musikwissenschaftler. Berlin:Schibri.

Koller H (1954) Die Mimesis in der Antike. Nachahmung, Darstellung, Ausdruck.Berne: Francke.

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Sulzer JG (1745) Versuch einiger moralischer Betrachtungen uber die Werke derNatur. Berlin: Haude.

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Wolfgang Ernst is Professor for Media Theories at the Institute forMusicology and Media Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin. Hisbooks include Das Rumoren der Archive: Ordnung aus Unordnung(2002), Im Namen von Geschichte: Sammeln, Speichern, (Er)zahlen(2003) and Das Gesetz des Gedachtnisses (2007). The first book of hiswritings in English has just been published by the University ofMinnesota Press: Digital Memory and the Archive, edited and with aforeword by Jussi Parikka (2012).

Guido Schenkel holds MAs in German and English literature and culturefrom the Free University Berlin (2006) as well as a PhD in GermanStudies from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (2012).His areas of specialization include identity politics, post-war Germanand Austrian literature, media studies and contemporary pop culture.He has worked as a freelance translator on a wide variety of academictexts since 2002.



30(6) 147–159




DOI: 10.1177/0263276413501206

tcs.sagepub.com

Article

Afterword: CulturalTechniques andMedia Studies

Jussi ParikkaUniversity of Southampton, UK

Abstract

This text reflects cultural techniques in relation to other concepts in cultural and

media studies by addressing their relation to selected Anglo-American and French

discussions. It also investigates the relation of cultural techniques to more recent

material and speculative turns. Suggesting that the cultural techniques approaches

introduce their own important material dimension to media-specific analysis of cul-

ture, the article argues that cultural techniques should be read in relation to recent

post-Fordist political theory and explorations of the post-human in order to develop

conceptual hybrids that are able to inject politics into media theoretical accounts, as

well as excavate histories of cultural techniques of cognitive capitalism.

Keywords

cognitive capitalism, cultural techniques, Foucault, German cultural studies, Kittler,

materiality, media studies, media theory, new materialism

I

What are cultural techniques? The texts in this collection offer severalresponses, ranging from detailed historical accounts to discussions of theontological span of the concept. Some address how cultural techniquesteach bodies to behave, others are more concerned with the links betweenhuman and non-human agencies. In these concluding remarks I wouldlike to tackle cultural techniques from the other end. I am less interestedin what went into the concept than what could – potentially – come outof it. That is, in these afterwords I will focus on connectivity rather thangenealogy. I want to offer some speculations as to the directions wherethe notion might theoretically guide us and how we can make productiveuse of certain similarities between this – in many regards – rather


Jussi Parikka, University of Southampton, Park Avenue, Winchester, SO23 8DL, UK.



German intellectual product and related strands in Anglo-American andFrench theory habitats. As mentioned at the very beginning of the intro-duction, this issue itself is meant to be both an archive and a toolbox; inthat spirit, we should open up the agenda to some past and contemporarydiscussions concerning technology, materiality and, for instance, culturalcritique of capitalism.

But to start with a point that was highlighted in several contributions:to understand the concept of cultural techniques requires a certain famil-iarity with the role played by media technologies. Despite the fact thatthe focus on cultural techniques appears to indicate a move beyond theearlier focus on media, technologies are still part of the picture, though inrather unusual ways. What cultural techniques scholars talk about –doors, servants, animals, law, swarms – are not really media in thesense understood in Anglo-American media studies. The detailedresearch undertaken by the contributors reframes the question ‘whatare media studies?’. This is a task that Friedrich A. Kittler (2009)mapped out in his own particular way, though despite its obvious indebt-edness to his work, cultural techniques research cannot be reduced to anafterglow of Kittler.

What then are media? There is no direct answer to this. Instead,German media studies has been more about expanding the limits ofwhat we understand as media. Such perspectives have wanted toexpand the range of disciplinary formations included in media analysisand the areas media studies can tap into. To quote one of the key writers,Bernhard Siegert, much of the early generation of German media theorywas guided by a prolonged exercise in carefree trespassing – digging up‘sources that had remained out of bounds to the humanities withoutworrying about any underlying “concept of media” (an issue nowadaysraised by every wiseacre)’ (2008a: 28).

Siegert continues with a more warlike metaphor by referring to aninvasion of walled and enclosed disciplinary gardens:

Confronted with insights into the medial conditions of literature,truth, education, human beings, and souls – insights that werebeyond the reach of the hermeneutic study of texts – scholars ofliterature, philosophers, pedagogues, and psychologists were toooffended by the sudden invasion of their nicely cultivated gardensto ask for an orderly theoretical justification for the onslaught.(2008a: 28)

The various articles in this issue offer good insights into how culturaltechniques relate to the current state of media studies in Germany, whichlost one of its internationally most finely tuned pieces of wetware withKittler’s passing in 2011, preceded by Cornelia Vismann’s death in 2010.Several scholars have been smuggling in new media analysis


methodologies, but they also offer ideas that resonate with a range ofcross-disciplinary approaches that the Anglo-American academic worldis interested in: posthumanities, the non-human, questions of materialityand objects, the affective turn, media archaeology, historical methodsand archives, as well as the role of anthropology (see Schuttpelz, 2006)in media studies. Theory can be said to have acted as a transatlanticbridge of sorts (Ernst, 2013: 23–31) from French theory to Germanmedia studies. This bridging also reminds us of the multiple versions ofmateriality mobilized in current media and technology theory debatesacross both sides of the Atlantic (for some recent North American dis-cussions in cultural and media studies see Packer and Wiley, 2011).

However, we can expect the following reaction from cultural studiesand cultural history scholars: what is so new about cultural techniques?The texts by Geoghegan and Siegert as well as the introduction byWinthrop-Young outline in more detail the relation Kulturtechnikenhave to concepts of culture and civilization, some of which no doubtwill be familiar to Anglo-American scholars. As readers of MichelFoucault (technologies of the self), Marcel Mauss (techniques of thebody), and British cultural studies (Raymond Williams et al.), we alreadyknew about the close relation between bodily habits, modes of perceptionand (media) technologies. Foucauldian-inspired governmentality studieshave shown a methodology to move from analyses of textuality to insti-tutions and procedures of governance. Besides, we learned from PierreBourdieu that the habitus is a ‘matrix of perceptions, appreciations, andactions’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 83). In short, aren’t (German) cultural tech-niques just like (Anglo-American) cultural practices?1

To be sure, there are moments when some of the ideas put forward byour contributors seem almost too familiar. Much of the language and theaccompanying conceptual apparatus appear to resemble British culturalstudies, recent American contributions to science and technology studies,the cultural histories of the French school (for instance, the massive seriesHistory of Private Life edited by Philippe Aries and Georges Duby), andwriters such as Bruno Latour. History of the philosophy of technologyhas long discussions concerning the relations of culture and technology.From Karl Marx’s various texts to early 20th-century sociology such asMax Weber (2005), the relations of economy, culture and technologyhave been debated with differing positions. Instead of just talkingabout the ways in which Ernst Kapp or Marshall McLuhan influentiallymodeled the interacting relations between humans and machines, wecould turn to Siegfried Giedion’s (1969 [1948]) inventive cultural histor-ical take. It is engaged in mapping cultural techniques of modernity, andhas been recognized in media archaeology (Huhtamo and Parikka, 2011;see also Darroch, 2010) too. Giedion maps the effects of mechanizationin various fields of cultural techniques from crafts to techniques of spaceto ‘comfort’ and to agriculture – the same terrain where the earlier

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version of ‘cultural techniques’ comes from. ‘Technique’ becomes a bind-ing concept across fields of culture from interior design to slaughter-houses. Through techniques we can talk about the material practicesthat sustain and enable ‘culture’, which necessarily involves humansand non-humans. Cultural techniques forge links between cultivationof environmental things and cultural realms.

When talking of ‘techniques’, one cannot bypass the significance ofJacques Ellul. While Ellul is not an essential part of the internal lineageof this particular German intellectual tradition, his work raises additionalquestions about the perceived novelty of the cultural techniques approach.Ellul, too, tends to emphasize the central role played by techniques andtechnology at the expense of social and economic forces. He is not happy toadmit capitalism as the driving force behind modern social organizations.Instead, what drives culture are techniques becoming machines.

[T[he machine is deeply symptomatic: it represents the ideal towardwhich technique strives. The machine is solely, exclusively, tech-nique; it is pure technique, one might say. For, wherever a technicalfactor exists, it results, almost inevitably, in mechanization: tech-nique transforms everything it touches into a machine. (Ellul,1964: 4)

Ellul’s point forces a reconsideration of what we mean by ‘technique’.Indeed, it pays attention to the interaction between machine and tech-nique without conflating the two. Ellul also wants to distance himselffrom Marcel Mauss’s notion of bodily techniques, which Mauss haddescribed as a ‘group of movements, of actions generally and mostlymanual, organized, and traditional, all of which unite to reach aknown end, for example, physical, chemical or organic’ (1964: 13).

Ellul argues that in the context of technological societies such anattachment to the body produces a theoretical shortcoming. Thismeans that techniques are not only about manual (labor) but alsoincreasingly about intellectual skills and organization. Indeed, despitedifferences Ellul is after such cultural techniques of the symbolic thatare also of interest to various writers in this collection. But Ellul insiststhat these are especially prevalent in modern organized, rationalized andtechnological society. Interestingly, he is not dismissing the fact that theemphasis on intellectual labor increases the need for ‘secondary manuallabor and, furthermore, that the volume of manual operations increasesfaster than the volume of mechanical operations’ (1964: 13). Such a per-ception – which is of great relevance to a range of current debates oncognitive capitalism to which I will return near the end of this text – isfurthermore connected to Ellul’s critique of ‘tradition’ in Mauss’s defin-ition. For Ellul, we are experiencing a change in our relation to tech-niques: we are not solely inheriting habitual modes of behaving and


techniques, but technology has created its own autonomous spheres ofactions and expectations that are paralleled by these new techniques. Theexample of the simple technique of stepping on the pedal to make the cargo faster is developed by Ellul, who discusses servo-mechanisms and thenotion of feedback. Technology upsets and forces us to continuously beon the lookout and learn new habits and techniques (1964: 14). We donot always clearly perceive the role of techniques as simple causal actionsthat can be traced back to visible bodies like the foot on the pedal.

The German media-theoretical cultural techniques scholars wouldprobably agree with a lot of this critique of Mauss. Siegert, in fact,raises similar points when discussing Mauss: counting, for instance, isa technique that ‘always presupposes technical objects (be it one’s ownfingers), that predetermine the performance of the operation and thus theconcepts derived from that operation’ (Siegert, 2011: 15). Not all tech-niques involve the human body; one has to account for the abstract andmathematical realms as well. This approach is important for recognitionof the mixed nature of the media cultural assemblages: when scrutinizedmore closely they appear to be meshes of human and non-human actors –an important dimension that brings a bit of Latour into German mediatheory (see Siegert, 2012).

II

The sustained focus on non-human actors in cultural theory is related tothe rise of new materialist analyses as well as to methodologies emergingacross the social sciences and humanities. For sure, over the last coupleof years there has been no shortage of calls for a material and affectiveturn within cultural theory. New materialism emerged from various dir-ections, including Manuel Delanda’s work and feminist theory(Braidotti, 2006; Barad, 2007; Dolphjin and van der Tuin, 2012).Obviously, object-oriented ontology/philosophy (of Graham Harman,Levi Bryant, Ian Bogost and Timothy Morton) has received its shareof attention in the past years. It has provided its own way of understand-ing the ontology of the non-human. In terms of the ‘speculative turn’,this has been described as follows:

[In] ‘The Speculative Turn’, one can detect the hints of somethingnew. By contrast with the repetitive continental focus on texts, dis-courses, social practices, and human finitude, the new breed ofthinkers is turning once more towards reality itself. While it is dif-ficult to find explicit positions common to all the thinkers . . . allhave certainly rejected the traditional focus on textual critique . . . allof them, in one way or another, have begun speculating once moreabout the nature of reality independently of thought and of humansmore generally. (Bryant et al., 2011: 3)

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Such new perspectives have generated fresh approaches as well as positedtheir own newness with rhetorical skill. Whereas much of such scholarlycreativity accepts the necessity to move beyond the well-established text-ual paradigm that branded much of cultural studies and media studies,some of the ‘speculative turn’ neglects the alternative theories and meth-odologies that early on attended to the materiality of the world and thenon-discursive. Indeed, a turn away from signifying practices not onlyresonates with the 1980s cultural studies discourse advocated, forinstance, by Lawrence Grossberg (Wiley, 2005), it also prompts us toinvestigate whether there are other ways of dealing with the relationshipbetween the textual and the non-discursive. Instead of neglecting theearlier histories of cultural studies, they might be able to provide someimportant clues to feminist and post-colonial themes. These are some-thing that might provide an additional new direction to cultural tech-niques too.

Scholars in media studies and cultural techniques have continued theline of thought inherited from the likes of Kittler, who brought a differ-ent sort of ‘materialism’ into play than that on display in some of thecurrent speculative philosophical discussions. This materialism takes intoaccount the historically contingent nature of media technologies in thenon-human assemblages. This may turn out to be an important contri-bution to philosophical discussions that lack sufficient insight into theconstitutive role cultural techniques play in their theory formation.

In contrast to some recent philosophical discussions, German media-theoretical accounts start their material investigations from more con-crete historical assemblages rather than from an ontological position. Asargued in the introduction to this special issue, their approach consists inpart of an anti-Platonic move designed to reverse the priority of theontological to favour the ontic – a move inspired by Heidegger’s ontic-ontological distinction. This point was underlined already in Winthrop-Young’s introduction and accurately defined as follows: ‘the study ofcultural techniques provides a kind of flanking manoeuvre by relatingthe thinking of Sein (Being) to the processing and operating of bits andpieces of Seiendes (beings)’.

Furthermore, there is a commitment to closely scrutinize the specificityof the material. Sybille Kramer and Horst Bredekamp start their article(originally from 2003) with the following statement: ‘For a long time,perhaps for too long, culture was seen only as text’. What then if nottext? Kramer and Bredekamp provide meticulous insights into the medialconditions of knowledge and the entanglement of aesthetics and epis-temologies of the image. Indeed, while identifying the proximity of cul-tural techniques to certain cultural practices approaches, we can say thatthe willingness to fully engage technical cultures and mathematical for-malisms is what specifies this as a very ‘German’ approach. It seems thatcultural techniques are cultural practices enriched with mathematics and


a head-on engagement with technical and scientific cultural realitythrown in for good measure.

A similar move from textuality to materiality is visible in BernhardSiegert’s writings (e.g. Siegert, 2011). Cultural techniques scholars articu-late materialities as historically changing sets of practices. This relates toa materialization of the textual, the discursive, social practices andhuman finitude in relation to non-human agencies. This approach isnot interested in ‘pure’ ontology: that is, in an ontological domain ofBeing cleansed from any accidental features like weight, colour and otherempirical, material facts.2 In media-oriented cultural techniques there is apersistent interest in the materiality of the world, in which media relate‘to ontological and aesthetic operations that process distinctions (and theblurring of distinctions) which are basic to the sense production of anyspecific culture’ (Siegert, 2011: 14).

Cultural, aesthetic and mediatic operations are approached as histor-ically situated. This also means that textuality is not discarded as ananalytical approach but refined in relation to its material conditions.Indeed, for various generations of German media studies, ‘writing’never exclusively referred to a signifying and semantic practice but tosomething altogether different that also connects to computational cul-tures. It starts with mathematics and programming.

For theorists such as Siegert, the work of Foucault (and, to a certainextent, that of Derrida) is taken only as a starting point rather than aframe of reference. Siegert is striving for much more detailed analysesthat reveal an interest in materialities such as paper as well as biblio-graphic and typographic details like the point/full stop (Punkt). His(2003) Passage des Digitalen (‘Passage of the Digital’) is exemplary inproviding a rich historical mapping of techniques of inscription. Itsapproach is both theoretically refined and sensitive to material differ-ences that make a difference without being reduced to representationsand signifying chains. This perspective forces us to broaden our under-standing of the very notions of meaning and signification. Siegert articu-lates his cultural techniques approach as historical ontology:

There is no ‘man’ independent from cultural techniques of homini-zation, or anthropotechnics; there is no time independent from thecultural techniques of calendars, time measurement and synchron-ization; there is no space independent from cultural techniques ofruling spaces and so forth. This does not imply, however, thatwriting the history of cultural techniques is meant to be an anti-ontological project. On the contrary, it implies more than it excludesa historical ontology, which however does not base that which existsin ideas, adequate reasons or an eidos, as was common in the trad-ition of metaphysics, but in media operations, which work as

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conditions of possibility for artefacts, knowledge, the production ofpolitical or aesthetic or religious actants. (2011: 15)

In other words, we are dealing with a media-ontological set of toolsdesigned to unravel cultural techniques as material actions, skills, per-ceptions, and representations. Histories of knowledge, science and mediaare understood not through semiotic reading of texts but as complexspatial and temporal knowledge systems. The epistemological is entwinedwith the ontological. Cultural techniques are completely material: under-standing them requires that we pay attention to everything from thecharacteristics of the inscription surface (what kind of paper used) tothe wider spatial and temporal infrastructures.

In Passage des Digitalen, this task is articulated through a threefoldmaterialization of techniques of the sign:

1. instead of semiotics, a focus on cultural techniques of reading, writing, signs,and counting

2. signs are actually in the world as res extensa. They have a material existenceand are not ideal objects

3. sign practices are specific to certain institutional spaces.

Siegert is especially interested in the office, the ship, the atelier, thelaboratory, and academia. (Siegert, 2003: 14).

Such an approach acknowledges the material and temporal nature oftechniques. A reference to media archaeology would be tempting but weneed to also pay attention to the differences between Siegert’s approachand that of, for instance, Wolfgang Ernst (see Ernst, 2013, and Siegert,2008b: 9). Siegert argues that the point of difference lies in their relationto signs/signals: for him, the Berlin situated media archaeology of Ernstdesires to replace an analysis of signs with that of signals. For sure,Ernst’s way of differentiating Medienwissenschaft – media sciences –from those of Kulturwissenschaften lies in the resolute demand that ifwe study media, we really need to study their modes of technical epis-temology and how they process signals in a channel. Siegert’s stance doesnot neglect the materiality of signals but adds to it a slight modification:we analyse signs as signals3 and our cultural accounts are embedded inunderstanding of the physical, engineering and technical aspects of mediaas techniques.

In terms of signal analysis, Shannon and Weaver’s information theoryis a constant reference point in these discussions. Siegert and a lot ofcultural techniques scholars do not want to replace a cultural-basedmedia analysis with information theory, even if they insist on the needto take into account the constitutive, technically engineered parts of real-ity. This approach resonates with recent discussions elsewhere, includingUS-based media studies. Duke University Press’s new book series ‘Sign,Storage, Transmission’ is dedicated to exploring this material field of


media culture that still stems from a cultural studies understanding. Forinstance, Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2012) worksits way towards a similar argument to that of cultural techniques scholarsby focusing on the entanglement of bodily techniques (such as hearingand movement) with engineering, psychoacoustics and what Sterne calls‘perceptual technics’. When culture itself is conditioned by the engineeredscientific, we need to be able to take into account such expansions ofwhat we mean by culture in the age of high technology and science.

As the papers in this collection indicate, the genealogy of culturaltechniques leads back through media pedagogy of the 1970s to agricul-ture in a way that almost parallels the evolution of media ecology sincethe 1970s and 1980s. In his introduction, Winthrop-Young speaks of thetriple entry of cultural techniques. The way in which the concept derivesfrom earlier material agricultural techniques of cultivation combinesboth the cultural and the natural domain (see for instanceGeoghegan’s as well as Kramer and Bredekamp’s articles). Perhapsthere is an interesting connection between the original sense of theterm, which connected it closely to environmental engineering, withmore recent media-related understanding and use.

It is in this wake where some of the recent animal studies and post-humanities discussions can find ‘cultural techniques’ a useful way to diginto the soil. In other words, if part of the modern media theory versionof cultural techniques, represented for instance in the work of theHermann von Helmholtz Center for Cultural Techniques in Berlin, wasactually taking distance from the agricultural roots of the concept andgearing it towards more directly mediatic forms (see Geoghegan’s art-icle), perhaps we can and should reclaim some of those early connota-tions. In other words: could we envision a media-ecological twist tocultural techniques, which is partly already represented in SebastianVehlken’s work? Would such an approach be able to talk about suchmedia techniques that have to do with the alternative materialities of, forinstance, electronic waste and related to animal studies (see Parikka,2010, 2011). This does not necessitate going so far as to reinstatemedia theory as part of the Petzenkirchen Institute for Land andWater Management Research (Institut fur Kulturtechnik undBodenwasserhaushalt), but considers the fact that issues of soil, water,waste and pollution are increasingly what we should take into account ina renewed sense of materiality of media theory of technological culture.

III

However, all these links and connections, convergences and divergencesdo not mean that the cultural techniques approach is without its short-comings. The most obvious issue is ‘the political’ (or lack thereof). Whileit was at times overly – and at times maybe naively – emphasized in

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cultural studies, it seemed noticeably absent – and at times deliberatelyexcluded – from German media theory. With its politically rather con-servative stance and (especially in the case of the older Kittler) Euro- orHellenocentric bias, the latter made sure it would not be mistaken forMarxist materialism or its more refined Frankfurt derivative. However,the German media studies approach might prove fertile when it comes toinvestigating the current practices of advanced capitalism as culturaltechniques. The intellectual fertilization could work both ways:German media theory could incorporate recent analyses of post-Fordist production and enculturation techniques, while post-Marxisttheories would profit from the historically detailed accounts of how cul-tural techniques process our aesthetic and ontological distinctions. Couldwe use the work done in Weimar, Berlin, Luneburg and Siegen on tech-nical media and image cultures to investigate how they consolidate cer-tain operations and enforced habits of action/perception/memory inrelation to capitalism?

Italian scholars such as Maurizio Lazzarato (2004, 2007) have beentracking the relation of forces of contemporary capitalism in relation tocognitive and affective capacities, yet their approach still lacks a nuancedview of the role of media. The elements are there, including the referencesto contributions by Bergson and Deleuze on media technologies fromfilm to the digital, but they fall short of the accounts of German analysts.More broadly, this emphasis on the political also stems from GillesDeleuze’s notion of control societies, which has had its now well-recog-nized impact on theories of digital culture. However, Deleuze’s initial textwas very vague on details and the same vagueness has at times beentransported to the subsequent elaborations of the concept, begging thequestion what exactly are the specific cultural techniques of control in theDeleuzian concept.

Indeed, a range of the approaches in this collection can be read inrelation to some discussions concerning the politics of digital culture anddevices that are increasingly mediating our relation to ourselves andothers via third-party corporations or security mechanisms. Culturaltechniques of tracking, mapping and mining are among such examplesof cultural techniques of securitized cognitive capitalism. Tracking ofgestures becomes a crucial part of the digital surveillance mechanismsin contemporary societies of security; identity mapping (cf. Macho’s art-icle in this collection) provides a new mode of inscription for securityindustries and can easily be monetized through data-mining of the algo-rithmic identity production of social media. Indeed, such seemingly wornout cultural studies concepts as ‘identity’ are still actively mobilized, butin a very instrumental way as part of data-based marketing and compos-ition of algorithmic identities (Cheney-Lippold, 2011: 167–8).

Besides the potential for analysing cultural techniques of cognitivecapitalism and control societies, we can perhaps find a further radical


side to new cross-breedings of theoretical traditions. Marx’s Grundrisse(1973) and ‘The Fragment on Machines’ have become a canonized ref-erence point for recent political theory interested in technological cultureand the General Intellect (see for instance Berardi, 2009), but perhapsthere is potential in more combinations of media theory and politicalconcepts. Besides analysis of capitalism, there are potentials for the his-tories of counter-techniques too. How can we map ‘minor techniques’ inthe manner Deleuze and Guattari wrote about minor languages? Perhapsthere is more potential for a radical version of cultural techniques whichmay expand on the mentioned ‘triple entry’ of cultural techniques inways that multiply its potentials.4

Notes

1. Siegfried Zielinski (2010) used the notion of cultural technique in his exten-sive history of the video recorder, which was first published in the mid-1980s.Zielinski’s media-theoretical writings have often been perceived as mediaarchaeology, but we can see an interesting early link here already, influencedby the 1970s discussions of cultural techniques of new media ecologies (seeWinthrop-Young in this collection). Furthermore, Zielinski represents a linkto British cultural studies and the discourse of cultural practices through histheoretical debt to Raymond Williams et al. In general, there would be a lotto be highlighted about the connections of ideas between cultural techniquesand even Foucauldian-influenced governmentality studies – and similarly, forinstance, to excavate more on this link to Williams as well as Tony Bennett’swork in cultural studies. I will also leave out of this essay the bigger questionconcerning the relations of German media studies and North Americanmedia studies (see for example Peters, 2009).

2. Scholars such as Sterne (2006) have reminded us that we need to understandcommunication as techne – where technique and technology are irrevocablytied together. There is no communication situation that does not involvecrafts and materials: this sort of simple starting point can be seen as a his-torical, anthropological and theoretical guideline for humanities research.Such ideas bring situated materiality into theoretical play. Communicationstudies itself originates in the Aristotelian notion of techne: practical as wellas embodied art and knowledge.

3. ‘Also nicht Signal statt Zeichenanalyse, sondern Zeichenanalyse alsSignalanalyse’ (Siegert, 2008b: 9).

4. A thank you to Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and the reviewers for their feed-back in revising this text.

References

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Bryant, L., Srnicek, N. and Harman, G. (eds) (2011) The Speculative Turn:Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: Re.Press.

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Darroch, M. (2010) ‘Giedion and explorations: Transatlantic influences on theToronto School’, a presentation at the Media Transatlantic Conference, 8–10April 2010, UBC Vancouver. Available at: http://www.mediatrans.ca/(accessed 7 June 2013).

Dolphjin, R. and van der Tuin, I. (2012) New Materialism: Interviews &Cartographies. Open Humanities Press.

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Ernst, W. (2013) Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. and intro. Parikka J.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Giedion, S. (1969 [1948]) Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution toAnonymous History. New York: W.W. Norton.

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Approaches to Media, Mobility, and Networks. London/New York:Routledge.

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Peters, J.D. (2009) Strange Sympathies: Horizons of Media Theory in Americaand Germany. electronic book review, 2009/06/04. Available at: http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/myopic (accessed 19 July2013).

Schuttpelz, E. (2006) ‘Die medienanthropologische Kehre der Kulturtechniken’.In: L. Engell, B. Siegert and J. Vogl (eds) Kulturgeschichichte alsMediengeschichte (oder vice versa?). Weimar: Universitatsverlag, 87–110.

Siegert, B. (2003) Passage des Digitalen. Zeichenpraktiken der neuzeitlichenWissenschaften 1500–1900. Berlin: Brinkman & Bose.


Siegert, B. (2008a) ‘Cacography or communication? Cultural techniques inGerman media studies, trans. Winthrop-Young G’, Grey Room 29: 26–47.

Siegert, B. (2008b) ‘Erzklang’ oder ‘missing fundamental’: Kulturgeschichte alsSignalanalyse’. In: J. Kursell (ed.) Sounds of Science – Schall im Labor (1800–1930). Berlin: Max-Planck Institut fur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 7–20.

Siegert, B. (2011) The map is the territory. Radical Philosophy 169 (September/October): 13–16.

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Jussi Parikka is Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art,University of Southampton. He has authored several books and articleson topics such as media archaeology, network culture and its accidents aswell as animals, ecology and technology. Recently he has publishedInsect Media (2010) and What Is Media Archaeology? (2012) and hasedited the collection of Wolfgang Ernst’s writings, Digital Memory andthe Archive (2013). He blogs at Machinology, http://jussiparikka.net.

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30(6) 160–172




DOI: 10.1177/0263276413484942

tcs.sagepub.com

Review Article

Files, Lists, and theMaterial History ofthe Law

Liam Cole YoungUniversity of Western Ontario, Canada

Files: Law and Media Technology

Cornelia Vismann, translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008, 187 pp. ISBN:

978-0-8047-5151-3

Abstract

This article reviews Cornelia Vismann’s 2008 book Files: Law and Media Technology. In

addition to an overview of Vismann’s media materialist approach to the study of the

law, it provides both a consideration of her relationship to Friedrich Kittler’s media

theory and a more focused examination of certain functional writing entities that

might extend Vismann’s genealogical approach. It is suggested that a closer analysis

of one such entity, the list, can offer further insight into the epistemological and

ontological questions the book provokes.

Keywords

archive, documentation, law, legal theory, media archaeology, media theory

Cornelia Vismann’s magisterial book Files: Law and Media Technologyoffers English readers a wonderful entry point into the challenging andambitious intellectual project of a scholar whose life was cut tragicallyshort in 2010. The book seeks to rethink the history of the law through amedia materialist perspective and is an impressive and stimulating syn-thesis of media and cultural theory, historiography, philosophy, and legalscholarship. This approach offers an unconventional trajectory for writ-ing the history of the law, focusing not on specific legal case studies noron the meaning or content of the western legal tradition’s documentaryapparatus, but rather on the apparatus itself. Files are for Vismann the


Liam Cole Young, University of Western Ontario, North Campus Bldg., Rm. 240, London ON, N6A 5B7,

Canada.



privileged unit or entity of this apparatus, and she follows these entitiesthrough an intriguing series of functional histories: from the ancientwriting systems to modern literature; from Roman chanceries (andtheir study in the Renaissance) through the spectacle of traveling archivesand registries of imminent monarchical power in the Middle Ages, to theproto-bureaucracy of Maximilian I’s imperial court chancery; from thebizarre world of baroque secretaries to the self-administration of thePrussian proto-state; from Goethe’s personal archive to Nazi govern-mentality; from vertical files and binder technology to the Stasi surveil-lance state and the reclamation by its former subjects of their ‘owndossier’. Both the rigour with which each epoch is treated and the generalerudition of the book are exceptional.

Files is a book ostensibly about analog and pre-digital technologies,with Vismann devoting only one very brief final chapter to files in thedigital world. However, a deeper engagement with the project revealsthat by recasting certain oft-elided entities from the world of writing –namely files, but also lists, registries, and archives – in functional, non-representational terms, Vismann is able to tease out their algorithmicdimensions. Her intervention thereby amounts to nothing less than aprehistory of the digital computer, which ultimately shows that ‘admin-istrative techniques of bygone centuries are inscribed as stacks, files,compiler or registers in a digital hardware that remains unaware of itshistorical dimension’ (Vismann, 2008: 164). Such a project is one ofmedia archaeology; in the seemingly innocuous administrative writingand documentary practices of earlier historical epochs Vismann unearthscertain ontological (pre)conditions of the digital age. These conditionsare most observable in the (nonhuman) life-world of files. Thus, while thedisappearance of paper files and the emergence of ‘files as stylized iconson computer screens’ (2008: 163) may appear to be ushering in an entirelynew immaterial ontology, Vismann shows that such a conclusion wouldbe a misdiagnosis. We may be exiting the time of paper files, but this doesnot entail a clean ontological rupture. Digitization should be seen as bothreconfiguration of media-technological conditions and as an extension ofcertain pre-existing tendencies in the processing, transmission, and stor-age of data.

The range of sources drawn upon and general erudition of the workmake Files of interest for readers from a vast array of disciplines, includ-ing not just media studies and law but also history, sociology, informa-tion science, and communication, to name a few. My hope is that thisreview essay will serve to expose readers unfamiliar with Vismann to herwork, and might help to parse some of the tools that she has bequeathedto those scholars and thinkers interested in the study of the law, thehistory of writing, and media technology more generally. The essay isorganized in three parts: first, I will offer a brief overview of Files, focus-ing in particular on Vismann’s unique theoretical framework. Second,

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I will explore some of the (dis)connections between Vismann and theGerman Media Theory tradition out of which she emerged, attemptingto situate her in relation to what Geoffrey Winthrop-Young calls the‘Kittler effect’ (2011: 143). Finally, a third section will focus on oneparticular inscription entity that is ever-present throughout the varioushistorical epochs Vismann traverses: the list. It will be argued that thereare crucial, functional dimensions of forms such as the list provoked byVismann’s work which themselves prefigure or have a structuring func-tion upon files. The further pursuit of such entities can offer scholars ofmedia technology unique epistemological and ontological insightsregarding the constitution of power/knowledge networks, and the mater-ial forms through which these are articulated and transmitted.

Overview

Files, for Vismann, resist easy definition. Her concern is not limited tothose files most familiar in the contemporary situation, vertical files.Instead she takes a more generative approach that conceptualizes filesas non-discrete entities that can ‘appear in all shapes and forms: as loosepages, lying in little boxes, wrapped in packing paper, or enclosed incapsules; they may present themselves as bundles tied with a string orassume the shape of vertical folders ready to enfold anything that can fitbetween two paper covers’ (2008: xi). Because a concrete definition offiles is both elusive and limiting (to say nothing about translationissues1), Vismann’s focus remains trained throughout the book on thefunctional and process-based dimensions of files – that is, on the media-technological conditions in which they exist and by which they are con-stituted. The specific lens through which this functional dimension isprobed is that of ‘their largest area of application, the law’ (2008: xii).She sees a constitutive dimension of files on the law, and because ‘[f]ilesare the variables in the universe of writing and the law’, her approach caninvestigate ‘how files control the formalization and differentiation of thelaw’ (2008: xi–xii). The law, too, is defined broadly, ‘not as an instrumentor medium for the arbitration of conflicts but as a repository of forms ofauthoritarian and administrative acts that assume concrete shape in files’(2008: xiii). The law is not an a priori constant or singular tradition that ispassed from generation to generation unabated, but is a historically spe-cific constellation that is not just conditioned by the media-technologicalconditions in which it is called to act, but only finds its articulation in andthrough the corresponding or dominant media forms of these conditions.Therefore, Vismann argues, ‘files and the law mutually determine oneanother’ (2008: xiii).

Such a media materialist approach allows Vismann to construct aconvincing argument that locates the origins of the law not in a conven-tional orality/literacy binary but rather within what she calls ‘pragmatic’


or administrative forms of writing – files, registers, and records. Theorality/literacy binary elides these forms (and others such as tables,charts, lists, diagrams, etc.2) because it has no capacity to account forany form of writing that is not simply a duplication or representation ofspeech.3 In contrast, Vismann is concerned exclusively ‘with how theseadministrative forms of writing function precisely insofar as they are notsubject to the logic of speech’ (2008: 4). By circumventing the orality/literacy polarity and re-emphasizing such administrative forms, she isable to show that the functional logic of various incarnations and alter-ations in the documentary apparatus of the law has been formative onthe trajectory of the western legal tradition, ‘contribut[ing] to the forma-tion of the three major entities on which the law is based: truth, state, andsubject’ (2008: xii).

The theoretical framework of such an approach is laid out in Chapter1, in which she intervenes in the famous Levi-Strauss/Derrida debateregarding the ‘writing lesson’ in the former’s Tristes Tropiques.4

Vismann casts the debate between Levi-Strauss and Derrida about howto read the situation in familiar terms: the former’s privileging of the‘innocent state of pure orality’ of the Nambikwara tribe that is invadedby the writing of the white man (2008: 2) is deconstructed by the latter asa ‘parable’ about the origin and power of writing (2008: 1). She contends,however, that the power of writing grasped by the chief has nothing to dowith its ability to transcend oral communication, nor with its capacity forthe transmission of meaning or content, but in fact has everything to dowith what writing allows the chief to do, and what writing does itself – itsability to administer or to act. That is to say, because the chief of theNambikwara writes lists that regulate the exchange ritual, and which ‘donot communicate, but control transfer operations’ (2008: 5–6), the writ-ing lesson ‘is not about empowerment through an act of writing or theconcurrence of meaning, speech, and writing, nor is it about what lan-guage philosophy calls a performative act. It is about administration’(2008: 5). What Vismann shows is that neither Levi-Strauss norDerrida can account for these administrative forms and acts of writingthat are neither communicative nor performative but functional. Thus, byrecasting the ‘so-called’ writing lesson as an encounter between writingand the law that exists outside of the conventional orality/literacy polar-ity, Vismann is able to illuminate dimensions of the relations betweenwriting, power, the law, and information processing that are missed inconventional accounts.

This intervention is the springboard off of which Vismann recasts thehistory of the law through a grammatological approach to files that is notat all interested with their content or meaning but rather with theirmediality, materiality, and functionality; with the acts of transmission,storage, cancellation, modification, and deletion that write the historyof the law. She laments the retreat of a minor, media-technological

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tradition of studying documents and information processes in such text-ual terms (including disciplines such as paleography, codicology, anddiplomatics), and seeks to resurrect them. Around 1900 these sciencesbecame merely ancillary to factual or narrative historiography – a pos-ition from which they have never recovered, despite the fact that theystudy documents according to ‘the material on which they were written,the size of the letters, the composition of the ink, the appearance of sealsand stamps, the history of their transmission through time and space – inshort, everything that is of interest to present-day media studies’ (2008:39). Vismann resuscitates and redeploys some of the tools from this de-emphasized, minor tradition of media studies (or perhaps better, ‘mediasciences’) to buttress her materialism. Drawing from such traditions alsoallows her approach to move beyond simply repurposing the theoreticaltools developed by the so-called ‘father’ of German media theory,Friedrich Kittler. Though there is much implicit in Vismann’s workthat borrows from Kittler, there are also important breaks. Someremarks – admittedly preliminary – about these intersections withKittler are worth making, not just because Vismann’s work is oftencategorized within the ‘Kittlerian’ school of medientechnik but alsobecause the two enjoyed a close working relationship before Vismann’suntimely passing.5

The Kittler Effect

Aside from Vismann’s at least tacit acceptance of his most famousdictum, that ‘media determine our situation’ (Kittler, 1999: xxxix),Kittler’s influence is most evident on two planes: literature and Lacan.For Kittler, encoded within literature are the characteristics of the dis-course network in which it is produced; that is, literary texts express andembody the transmission, processing, and storage capacities of the dom-inant media-technologies of any epoch. By extension, literature is alsoexpressive of the conditions of thought, imagination, and subjectivitymade available to human beings via these media technologies. Forinstance, during the monopoly enjoyed by writing in the historicalperiod Kittler refers to as ‘Discourse Network 1800’, language is theonly means available for the expression and exploration of humansense perceptions and imaginings. As a result, literature was the onlymeans by which the reader could access proto-phantasmagoric sensorydata by means of an inner hallucination generated by text.6 With theadvent of analog storage media, however (namely gramophone, film, andtypewriter), new means are made available through which to articulate,process and transmit the imaginings and sense perceptions of humanbeings. Such tendencies and changes can be uncovered by the astutemedia archaeologist in the literature of any epoch, as Kittler is oftenwont to do in his own texts.7 And so literature has a crucial


methodological function for Kittler’s media theory – at least in his‘middle period’, the best known to English readers.

Literary texts function for Vismann in a very similar manner. Sheargues ‘literary fictions that deal with administrations highlight thosemedia and realities of the law that nonfictional, scholarly self-presenta-tions of the law and its history tend to overlook or even suppress’ (2008:xiii). Readings of two such texts, Kafka’s Before the Law and Melville’sBartleby the Scrivener, are offered early in Files to conceptually frame thework. These readings function as a kind of preamble to the historicalaccount of files Vismann develops in subsequent chapters – they are notoften explicitly referenced in later chapters but are ever-present ghoststhat haunt the text. To elaborate, Vismann shows that legal preamblesdemonstrate the concerns and historical contexts of a given law, theycontain colloquial stories that are not allowed to enter into officiallegal discourse, and are usually typographically differentiated from thedocument to which they are appended (2008: 21). Preambles are expres-sions of the moment in which the legal text is called to act. So too areKafka’s and Melville’s stories expressions of the ‘world of files’ underVismann’s study: Kafka ‘offers an access to the world of files, to theworld before institutionalizations, to the world before the law’ (2008:15), while Melville’s Bartleby ‘epitomizes the transition to clerical workdevoid of any human factor, that is to say, no chancery in the face of amechanized bureau’ (2008: 33, emphasis in original). Bureaucracy is seenas a machine, and chanceries as the relays of the law. Gates, such as thosein Before the Law, ‘facilitate or deny access, establish or interrupt con-tact, attract and exclude, mediate, regulate, allow entry, subdivide, trans-form, block, seduce, bar, ensure transfer . . . [can be] overrun and torndown’ (2008: 19). The entree into such an understanding of files andthe law is literature. These texts mark the two poles of the field of func-tions performed by files in relation to the law: on the one hand secrecy,cancellation, caesura, and power (evident in Kafka), on the other handthe machine-like, antihuman, algorithmic dimensions of recording pro-cesses (on display in Melville).

As legal preambles have an annunciatory function, granting hermen-eutical access to legal texts, so these stories serve to grant the reader ofFiles access into Vismann’s conceptualization of the law as a ‘repositoryof acts that assume concrete shape in files’ (2008: xiii) and which has nomemory of itself (2008: 12). Further, such fictions ‘do not merely illus-trate the machines and apparatuses of the law, or the logic of bureau-cracy driven to its extreme. As narrative residues discarded by the grandtales of the origin and evolution of the law, they stand at the end of aprocess of differentiation that also entailed a removal of literature fromthe law’ (2008: xiii). They are works of literature, a realm that is barredfrom entering conventional legal discourse, and their invocation herereminds us this was not always so. Finally, their stylistic or formal

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attributes are as differentiated from legalese as a preamble’s typographicdifferentiation is from a legal document. Therefore, as in Kittler’s work,literary texts function for Vismann as both historical evidence (as expres-sions of certain historically specific media-technological conditions) andas important elements of the theoretical armature she constructs in orderto explore the law primarily according to its documentary apparatus andprocesses.

A second plane on which Vismann intersects with Kittler is regardingthe latter’s importation of the Lacanian concepts of the real, the imagin-ary, and the symbolic into the study of media technology. Briefly, Kittlerunderstands these concepts as follows: the symbolic is the dimension ofcode, the syntax through which is constituted and transmitted the com-munications and information that make up the world. The symbolic forKittler is ‘a syntax purified of all semantics, meaning, degrees of figur-ation, and thus also every conceivability’ which, Kittler proposes, ‘couldin the end coincide with the concept of information in telecommunica-tions’ (2010: 40–1). The imaginary is the realm of figure recognition, theprocesses of which are ‘just as automatic as they are deceitful’ (Kittler,2010: 39), while the real – which cannot be accessed by combinatorialsystems and processes of visual perception – is stored, processed, andtransmitted (by the symbolic) because it ‘has neither a figure, like theimaginary, nor a syntax, like the symbolic’ (Kittler, 2010: 40).Importantly – and this is where Vismann follows Kittler in understand-ing Lacan – the processes or phenomena associated with each categoryare not understood as primarily (or even fundamentally) psychological,but rather are probed in their material and technical dimensions. ForVismann, conventional understandings of files from disciplines such aslinguistics, sociology, and history8 misunderstand their crucial functionaland constitutive dimensions because of an assumption that files capturethe real. ‘From this phonocentric perspective, files capture everythingthat other forms of writing no longer contain – all the life, the strugglesand speeches that surround decisions’ (2008: 10). Vismann shows, how-ever, that what is captured or embodied in files (when viewed in this way)is not the real but a projection of the imaginary, and such conventionalapproaches to files and archive say more about their practitioners andassociated disciplines than the actual entities themselves. In contrast, inthe legal world, files are not objects unto themselves, subject to the gazeof the archivist or archaeologist. They are ‘the basis for legal work. Theirvalidity resides in their truth value and their everyday operations’(Vismann, 2008: 11). Files stand before the law that is made bythem. As such, while the law has no memory of itself (for it couldnot acknowledge its contingency and hope to be authoritative), itsmaterial history exists not in but as files. Approaching files not asfetishized capturers of the real but rather as procedural entities of thesymbolic (which come to be (mis)interpreted by the imaginary),


Vismann’s genealogy offers a comprehensive account of the media-tech-nological history of the law.

Lacanian concepts are also crucial to Vismann’s reading of FranzKafka’s Before the Law. What she teases out of this story of barriers,thresholds, guardians, time, and the law is nothing less than the archivefever of a modernity obsessed with the search for origin. Kafka’s centralcharacter, the man, is barred from entry to the door of the law. He isassured by the doorkeeper that beyond this door lays another, similarlyguarded, and beyond that door is another, and so on. The man is toldthis but also catches a glimpse of what lies beyond the door. Though he‘sees’ only the nothingness of empty space, this glimpse fuels the man’scuriosity for what lies beyond the door and, Vismann suggests, binds himto its secret (2008: 15). That is to say, this reading of the story suggeststhat the modern subject is both barred from and obsessed with the secretof the elusive, endlessly deferred origin – whether of the law, of existence,of history, and so on.

But the story also makes clear that we cannot know the law in suchterms precisely because such an essence or origin is an endlessly deferredimpossibility. Indeed, only the imaginary resides behind the door, whilethe infinite series of doors suggests a symbolic order ‘made up of gatesthat refer to gates’ (Vismann, 2008: 16). Ultimately, ‘the legal order con-sists of nothing other than this chain of references’ (2008: 16), and thestory’s ‘whole architecture of entries and barriers testifies above all to thetechnologies of reference adopted by the law’ (2008: 17, emphasis in ori-ginal). Thus all that remains is a received tradition of the law, and ‘thevery existence of these laws . . . is at most a matter of presumption’(Kafka in Vismann, 2008: 16). Deconstruction and archaeology attemptto uncover the conditions by which these presumptions operate.Vismann’s highly original contribution to this tradition is to use it toopen up a space in which to think about a law that is governed not bymen or by history but by self-regulating, machinic entities such as files.When literature is parsed and Lacan is incorporated to describe the lawas a system of relays, signal processing and transfer operations, we are inthe realm of Kittler. Vismann offers a rationale for such an approachwhen she suggests that, regarding 19th-century scholars dedicated totracing Roman law back to an undisguised ur-text, ‘[w]hether (toallude to Lacan) [their] gaze opens into the real or the imaginary remainsundecidable. Both are involved when Roman law emerges from thereconstruction of its transmission. But it is possible to decide upon, spe-cify, and elaborate the media-technological conditions of its transmis-sion’ (2008: 41). This is as succinct an encapsulation of the Vismannianproject as exists in Files.

These brief remarks regarding the relation between Vismann andKittler are preliminary and exploratory. They are meant to suggestlines of inquiry that may prove fruitful for situating Vismann in relation

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to the ‘Kittler effect’ in media studies. Vismann’s reading of Kafka’sBefore the Law is a particularly good example of the two main planeson which the thinkers intersect, literature and Lacan. If we followVismann’s reading of Before the Law as a story about the documentaryapparatus of the law a little further, it will also throw into relief animportant series of double functions of the law and the files that standbefore it. In the story, the law is endlessly announced but continuouslydeferred. Similarly, files control the formalization and differentiation ofthe law, processing its separation into authority and administration(2008: xxi); files first perform the law, and eventually come to service it– that is, files both administer and are administered; files also functionboth to transmit the law and store its processes, acts, and traces (2008:xiv). Such a discussion of double-functions of files and information pro-cesses echoes Derrida’s similar pronouncement regarding the archive asboth commencement and commandment (Derrida, 1995: 1–5).Additionally, Vismann shows that the writing down of a file’s historyand movement through space and time in the form of a list also has adouble function: such a list is both imperative (i.e. generating the nextcommand) and informational (i.e. noting its own execution) (2008: 8). Inthe latter example we find an issue with Vismann’s definition of files,specifically regarding the relationship she sketches out between files asauthorless, process-generated entities and the process generators them-selves. One of the latter will be explored specifically in the next section:the list.

Lists

With the advent of writing came the list. Some of the earliest survivingforms of writing, c. 3000 BCE, are the administrative lists of the ancientSumerians, scrawled on the walls of caves and on pieces of birch bark(Goody, 1977: 78, 82). Such early lists are purely administrative – theydocument economic transactions, inventories, and other minutiae of day-to-day life in Mesopotamia in this period. As such, they exist betweenorality and literacy. Not surprisingly, as a functional entity that is presentthrough each of the epochs traversed by Files, lists are isolated byVismann as one of the administrative forms that can allow for the writingof a new history of the law. She maintains that ‘[l]ists do not communi-cate, they control transfer operations . . . individual items are not putdown in writing for the sake of memorizing spoken words, but inorder to regulate goods, things, or people. Lists sort and engender cir-culation’ (2008: 6). She conceptualizes the list as strictly a medium oftransfer (as in the Levi-Strauss writing lesson); its storage capacity is onlyever temporary because there is no need, nor any desire, to preserve a listonce the act or event that it facilitates has occurred. Therefore the orien-tation of the list, for Vismann, is always toward the present.


However, there is something of a contradiction, or at least a tension inthis view of lists, in that she notes that they are not only important in theworld of files but actually prefigure files themselves: ‘files are governed bylists . . .Lists with tasks to be performed govern the inside of the fileworld, from their initial compilation to their final storage’ (2008: 7).

Files are process-generated algorithmic entities, and the process gener-ators are ‘list-shaped control signs’ (2008: 7). That is to say, lists prescribeany file’s movement through space and time. File notes issue commandsfor the next movement or event of a file’s existence – to where or towhom the file should travel, at what time, by which means, etc. Eachexecuted command triggers the next. Over time these notes accumulate,one after the other, to form a list. They preserve a record of a file’s ‘life’.In Vismann’s own words: ‘when, against all intentions, records multiplyand chart their own course through official corridors, when they starttaking on a life of their own in filing rooms, this is an indication that listsor programs are at work’ (2008: 8).

Though she spends considerable time discussing lists (particularly inChapter 1), their actual importance to the kind of ontological conditionsshe seeks to map out in Files is underemphasized. This is primarilybecause she does not draw clearly a distinction between registries, lists,and files. A registry (see pp. 79–85) is obviously conceptualized as somekind of list, but what kind? Is a registry also categorized as a file? Doesthis imply that every list is a file? If so, does that not complicate the ideaof lists as purely processed-based entities with no archival capacity?Since, as she notes, lists program the movement of files through spaceand time (and are therefore different from files at some level), more timecould be devoted to parsing these questions and making a sharper dif-ferentiation between the three forms, which are often conflated by thecategory of ‘recording device’.

Such a differentiation is important because if lists program the move-ment and ‘life’ of files, they in some way prefigure files themselves, andthus must be seen to play an integral role in the emergence of truth,subject, state and the law. As an example, much of the materialexplored in Chapter 3 focuses on registries as a technology of power:‘[t]he rule of kings around 1200 was the rule of registries’ (2008: 77).Registries are shown to be lists of items or inventories of mobile imper-ial archives that serve important double functions for the control bymonarchical power over space and time – the registry in this period isabout both index and affect, communication and transmission, storageand administration. The registry itself is filled in with information andbecomes a template that frames the empire. Further, this ‘new writingeconomy’ reduces noise on the page and allows for a system of retrievalthat is not sequential but grid-based. As such, a new economy of read-ing emerges that is left-to-right, top-to-bottom (2008: 80). Meanwhile,single entries can have multiple units – a corresponding date, location,

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or other attribute can be noted beside any given entry. Things can thusbecome ranked or organized according to various other criteria.Vismann shows these developments affect space, time and power –for instance, dates in margins decompose time into discrete, countableunits, linking acts to time, and ‘the coincidence of the two produces anevent’ (2008: 81). While these factors or tendencies are not all neces-sarily new in this period, the extent to which they were deployed astechnologies of power/knowledge was unprecedented. ‘Registries weremore than nifty administrative techniques designed to economize onreading and writing; they were nothing less than the media technologyfor a state as a permanent entity’ (Vismann, 2008: 81–2). Importantlyfor our consideration of the list, Vismann herself shows that theseregistries actually prefigure the world of files that elsewhere are attrib-uted to be constitutive of the power over time required for the state tocome into existence. ‘On the basis of this comprehensive chronologicalregister, the state as institutionalized during the reign of Frederick II,became an apparatus of repetitions, a file machine’ (Vismann, 2008:82). It may very well be that Vismann considers registries to be files(and vice versa), but this is unclear (even her earlier open definitionimplies that files are collections of spatially and materially discrete unitsrather than simply discrete units in writing). A clearer differentiation isneeded precisely because lists and registries are shown to control themovement of files in space and time, and so are obviously at some levelontologically distinct from them.

Vismann’s description of lists shows us that they can take on amachine-like character. They streamline, standardize, and help acceleratethe processing of information in whatever media-technological networkthey are functioning (and because of its malleability, the list can functionin many such networks). She is correct in emphasizing this administrativeand facilitative capacity of the list. But her insistence that the list can onlyever be present-based results in an explicit rejection of its capacity as astorage device that is also problematic. Surely the list’s indexicality tosuch file activity as described above – its keeping a record of this activity– is demonstrative of an archival capacity that pushes the functionality ofthe list beyond simply present-based administration? We may not intendor wish to archive our lists, but often they become so preserved.9

Vismann misses this aspect of lists because, to use the language ofInnis (2002), her focus remains trained on the list’s space-bias – its abilityto facilitate the movement of files in the spaces of administration – at theexpense of the important fact that a list can also in its archival capacitiesexpress a time-bias, which in this case preserves the records of the life-world of files. Fine-tuning Vismann’s analysis of forms that prefigure filessuch as lists can build off of her contributions and offer further insightinto the kinds of ontological and epistemological questions her workprovokes.


Conclusion

Files is a rich text that has much to contribute to the contemporaryintellectual landscape. It is an important book, and the intellectualtools Vismann develops in it will only prove more influential as itbecomes more widely read. I hope to have suggested some potentiallines of inquiry provoked by the book, while exploring some connectionsto other thinkers that may prove fruitful. In the wake of her tragic death,one is left only to wonder about what further intellectual projects mighthave emerged out of Vismann’s brilliant erudition and scholarship.English readers can only hope that translation efforts of her existingworks currently underway continue and expand. Her intellectual legacyremains to be written, but Files will undoubtedly prove to be the essentialVismannian text.

Notes

1. She notes that the German word for files, Akten, does not differentiatebetween materiality and function. In English the former is denoted by files,the latter by the term ‘records’ (corresponding to their function as recordingdevices) (2008: xii).

2. See Latour (1987) and Rotman (2008).3. As, for instance, in Ong (1982).4. Briefly, this episode occurred during a journey of Levi-Strauss’ through the

Brazilian jungle with the Nambikwara tribe, and involved the anthropologistpresenting members of the tribe with writing utensils and paper. He describeshow most Nambikwara quickly lose interest in the materials (not knowinghow to use them) with the exception of the chief, who begins to mimic Levi-Strauss’ own writing activity. The chief then proceeds to insert this ‘writing’(the wavy lines he draws which bear no communicative function in and ofthemselves) into a series of complex exchange rituals within the tribe,and between the tribe and Levi-Strauss’ anthropological team(see Vismann, 2008: 2–6).

5. The fruits of which are unfortunately (as yet) unavailable to English readers.See, for instance, Kittler and Vismann (2001).

6. See Kittler (2010: 47–9) and Winthrop-Young (2011: 29–51).7. For two examples chosen at random, see Kittler’s brilliant use of Jean-Marie

Guyau to illuminate the effects of the phonograph (1999: 30–3), or his use ofFlaubert to discuss the repercussions of infinitely reproducible lithographs inOptical Media (2010: 138).

8. Typified by Leopold von Ranke, for whom ‘[a]rchived records revealed . . . thetotality of a present past, and with it the possibility of venturing behind statehistory to retrieve the life that had been deposited in files’ (2008: 8).

9. The Morgan Museum in New York recently devoted an entire exhibitto the lists of famous artists. Over 80 lists with a variety of functionswere displayed: practical, aesthetic, archival, autobiographical, etc.(Kerwin, 2011).

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References

Derrida, J. (1995) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Prenowitz E.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Goody, J. (1977) The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Innis, H.A. (2002) The Bias of Communication, 2nd edn. Toronto: University ofToronto Press.

Kerwin, L. (cur.) (2011) Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, CollectedThoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archivesof American Art. New York: The Morgan Library and Museum.

Kittler, F. (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Winthrop-Young G andWutz M. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Kittler, F. (2010) Optical Media, trans. Enns A. Cambridge: Polity.Kittler, F. and Vismann, C. (2001) Vom Griechenland. Berlin: Merve.Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers

through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Ong, W. (1982) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London:

Routledge.Rotman, B. (2008) Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and

Distributed Human Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Vismann, C. (2008) Files: Law and Media Technology, trans. Winthrop-Young

G. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Winthrop-Young, G. (2011) Kittler and the Media. Cambridge: Polity.

Liam Young is a PhD candidate in Media Studies at The University ofWestern Ontario. His research is located broadly in media materialismand communication, and more specifically in the history of inscriptionsystems (including but not limited to writing). His current doctoralresearch explores the list as a material form, un-black boxing its variousmaterial functions throughout history in a variety of contexts – political,cultural, communicative, aesthetic, technical, etc.


Theory, Culture & Society November 2013 Volume 30

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