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 Geoffrey Winthrop-Young Culture, Technology, Cultural Techniques Moving Beyond Text Sybille Kra mer and Horst Bredekamp Second-Order Animals: Cultural Techniques of Identity and Identification Thomas Macho Cultural Techniques: Or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German Media Theory Bernhard Siegert After Kittler: On the Cultural Techniques of Recent German Media Theory Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty Cornelia Vismann The Power of Small Gestures: On the Cultural Technique of Service Markus Krajewski Zootechnologies: Swarming as a Cultural Technique Sebastian Vehlken From Media History to Zeitkritik Wolfgang Ernst Afterword: Cultural Techniques and Media Studies Jussi Parikka Review Article Files, Lists, and the Material History of the Law Liam Cole Young 3 20 30

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Article

Cultural Techniques: Preliminary Remarks

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
University of British Columbia, Canada

Theory, Culture & Society 30(6) 319 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263276413500828 tcs.sagepub.com

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 overcome 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 to Kulturtechniken (cultural techniques), one of the most interesting and fertile concepts to have emerged in German cultural theory over the last decades.1 Our goal was to compile a collection that can serve as both archive and toolbox. For readers with a more historically-oriented interest in the multilayered past of the concept, we included important earlier proposals to dene Kulturtechniken as well as more recent attempts to (re)write the history of the concept in light of current theory debates. For those more concerned with possible applications and implications, we encouraged contributors to apply their particular understanding of Kulturtechniken to new, sometimes unexpected, domains from servants and swarms all the way to the basic reconguration of our understanding of 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: winthrop@interchange.ubc.ca http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

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unfolding the concept and probing its use value. Our two guiding questions are: What are cultural techniques? And what can be done with the concept? These questions, however, are as easy to pose as they are dicult to answer. Although several contributions especially those by Bernard Geoghegan and Bernhard Siegert will provide in-depth historical overviews, it is necessary to add a couple of preliminary observations. These remarks will not answer the question posed in our title; they will at best serve to trace the obstacles that stand in the way of a satisfactory response. The basic diculties arise from four closely related points to be elaborated below. (i) The term Kulturtechniken entered the German language on three separate occasions with three dierent conceptual inections. (ii) Matters would be easier if more recent employments of the term had retired older meanings, but unfortunately all three are still in use. (iii) It is not always clear which meaning theorists have in mind (if indeed they have any particular one in mind); moreover, some theorists like to play the meanings o against each other. (iv) This conceptual jousting is related to attempts to deploy the term in line with particular theory agendas. In other words, cultural techniques is a multi-layered term that is often shoehorned into fairly specic approaches. Rather than tackling the question What are cultural techniques?, it makes more sense to ask: What is the question to which the concept of cultural techniques claims to be an answer? With this in mind, the following observations will oer a mixture of signposts and side planks designed to provide some orientation in the maze of possible denitions and to prevent the reader from being thrown o balance by the sudden changes in direction between the papers. We will proceed in two steps. First, we will review the three dierent meanings of Kulturtechniken. In each case it will be necessary to foreground ramications and implications of the particular way in which the term is used. Second, the emergence of the terms third and theoretically most sophisticated meaning will be related to a specic juncture in recent German cultural theory. To anticipate one of our principal conclusions, the most important issues addressed by the culture-technical approach are related to problems arising from the development of so-called German media theory. While Jussi Parikkas Afterword will survey what has come out of the lively German discussions achievements, shortcomings and promising points of contact across the Channel and the Atlantic these preliminary observations will focus on what went into the concept, and why on occasion it did not go in peacefully.

Triple Entry
The term Kulturtechniken rst gained prominence in the late 19th century, at which point it referred to large-scale amelioration procedures

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such as irrigating and draining arable tracts of land, straightening river beds, or constructing water reservoirs. It also included the study and practice of hydrology and geodesy. K., the hapless surveyor unable to gain entrance to Franz Kafkas Castle, is a Kulturtechniker. This rst instantiation of Kulturtechnik, usually translated into English as rural or environmental engineering, is still very much in use. But more importantly (and irritatingly), it is at times tactically put to use by some who have a very dierent meaning in mind. It is crucial to highlight some of the implications and ramications of this rst emergence. If Kulturtechnik refers to rural engineering, then the Kultur in question is far removed from more rened notions of Kultur or culture as the best that has been thought and said. Matthew Arnold was concerned with culture and anarchy, not with ploughing and draining. In this particular context Kultur/culture is rst and foremost a matter of agriculture. As many of our contributors would point out, this particular inection of the term appeals to its etymological roots: culture, Latin cultura, derives from colere (tend, guard, cultivate, till), but the initial meaning was soon overrun by a sequence of semantic tribal migrations which turned culture that damned word Raymond Williams wished he had never heard (Williams, 1979: 154) into a concept as overloaded as it is indispensable (for an overview see Williams, 1983: 97103). To rephrase the initial reference to husbandry on a more abstract level, culture is that which is ameliorated, nurtured, rendered habitable and, as a consequence, structurally opposed to nature, which is seen as either actively resistant (the hoarding dragon that must be killed to release the powers of circulation) or indierent (the swamp that must be drained, the plains that must be settled). But now a question arises that will haunt Kulturtechnik throughout its conceptual metamorphoses: which of the two domains does this act of creation by means of separation belong to? Is using a plough to draw a line in the ground in order to create a future city space set o from the surrounding land itself already part of that city? In that case matters would be easy: culture creates itself in an act of immaculate self-conception that is always already cultural. Culture would be culture all the way down. Or do the operations involved in drawing this line belong to neither side? A proper understanding of culture may require that the latter be dissolved into cultural techniques that are neither cultural nor natural in any originary sense because they generate this distinction in the rst place. The second emergence of Kulturtechniken around the 1970s is linked to the growing awareness of modern that is, analog and increasingly digital media as the dubious shapers of society. To speak of cultural techniques in this context is to acknowledge the skills and aptitudes necessary to master the new media ecology. Watching television, for instance, requires specic technological know-how (identifying the on/o button, mastering the remote, programming the VCR) as well as

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equally medium-specic mental and conceptual skills such as understanding audiovisual referentiality structures, assessing the ctionality status of dierent programs, interacting with media-specic narrative formats, or the ability to distinguish between intended and unintended messages. All these skills, aptitudes and abilities are part of the Kulturtechniken des Fernsehens, the cultural techniques of television. At this point, Kulturtechnik comes close to what in English is referred to as media competence. Very soon, however, this focus on modern media technologies was expanded and basic skills such as counting and writing came to be labelled elementare Kulturtechniken (elementary cultural techniques). Once again we must unravel the implications. If the rst, agricultural instantiation of the term aimed at techniques that transformed nature into culture, this second usage of Kulturtechniken implies a very similar operation: it indicates a culturalization of technology, in particular, of those media technologies frequently denounced as inimical to culture. First we enculture what allegedly preceded culture, now we enculture what threatens to erode it. This latter move, however, is highly ambivalent, and its thrust or bias depends on which part of the compound noun Kulturtechnik you choose to privilege. Does Kultur rule over Technik, or is Kultur subsumed under Technik? If you opt for the former, you are extending the sovereignty of culture into the domain of technology. You are, as it were, treating media technologies like the barbarians on the other side of wall who may enter and become part of the empire of culture once it is assured that they support established cultural paradigms. If they submit to Roman rule, they will gain Roman citizenship. Bernhard Siegert, who spent his intellectual novitiate in the antihumanist red-light district of Freiburg of the early 1980s, is quick to discern a retrograde agenda at work here. Methodological procedures and hermeneutic paradigms developed in the high typographic age of humanist literacy are striving to co-opt technological domains they do not understand to support an anthropocentrism they have not thought through. On the other hand, if you grant priority to the Technik in Kulturtechnik, the thrust is reversed. Rather than projecting notions of culture into (future) technology, technology is retrojected into (past) culture. The materiality and technicity so obviously on display in modern media technologies is now recognized to already have permeated their allegedly untechnical, more natural predecessors including the socalled elementary cultural techniques like writing, drawing and counting. Cultural techniques reveal that there never was a document of culture that was not also one of technology. A second important ambiguity concerns the question whether acquiring the skills and aptitudes required to handle a given technology or procedure conrms our traditional role as the masters of our tools and protocols, or whether we are in fact dealing with the reverse process in

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the course of which we are inscribed by things and routines. We can detect the faint outlines of Hegels master/slave dialectic: Are we really the masters of our domain, or is the feeling of mastery a delusion created and sustained by those we believe we have mastered? Are we duped by the cunning of our tools? In her contribution Cornelia Vismann recasts this question in a legal light by introducing the question of sovereignty. How sovereign are we when we interact with tools that prescribe their own usage, have an inbuilt purpose, and constrain our actions with their material properties? One must therefore draw a distinction between persons, who de jure act autonomously, and cultural techniques, which de facto determine the entire course of action. To inquire about cultural techniques is not to ask about the feasibility, success, chances and risks of certain innovations and inventions in the domain of the subject. Instead, it is to ask about the self-management or autopraxis [Eigenpraxis] of media and things, which determine the scope of the subjects eld of action. This formulation would in theory still allow for the notion of a preexisting sovereign subject that by engaging with media or things forfeits some of its sovereignty but that reasserts it once it withdraws into an unsullied state of non-intervention (for instance, Cartesian contemplation). But we know better (as does Vismann). We can see the next, more radical conclusion rapidly approaching: namely, that the very subject whose sovereignty is under debate was created by the operations which are then said to limit its eld of action. At this point we have crossed over into the third meaning of Kulturtechnik, which emerged around the turn of the millennium within the newly established domain of institutionalized Kulturwissenschaften. While this theoretically most informed instantiation draws on the preceding two, it is also fuelled by philosophical and anthropological considerations. More precisely: it radicalizes the key points of the rst two meanings to such a degree that cultural techniques come to transcend the connes of literary studies, media theory and cultural studies and enter the domain of philosophy and anthropology. In order to understand the latter the best point of entry is to return to the ambiguities of the second meaning and unfold their radical implications.

Dressing down Man and Being

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

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increasingly complex technical, social, and administrative mediation processes that characterize life in modern society. So extensive are these processes that it was only a matter of time before observers started to question the precarious status of its three core entities: (i) the subject performing these operations; (ii) the basic concepts, ideas and notions that appear to guide these operations; and (iii) the object manipulated by these operations. To put it in a nutshell: so much is happening between here and there, so dicult has it become to get a grip on the procedures that lead from here to there, that we are forced to confront the possibility that there was never a here or there to begin with; both are a product of the between. Let us start with (iii), that is, the notion that tools, operations protocols and/or procedures create the object. In his contribution to this issue Sebastian Vehlken oers a media archaeology of swarm research. Historically, the analysis of swarming and emergent behaviour is not merely assisted by, it fundamentally depends on storage and computing technologies superior to the processing speeds of the human sensorium. Whether or not media determine political swarms is up to debate; they certainly determine our ability to think of swarms in the rst place (Vehlken, 2012: 413). On the object as well as the meta-level, then, swarms are the ultimate performance (and product) of cultural techniques: they would not be without media, and their emergent behaviour illustrates the way in which so many other, ontologically seemingly far more secure objects emerge from culture-technical operations. This leads us directly to (ii) the emergence of basic concepts and guiding notions from cultural techniques. It is at this point in the debate that students will inevitably encounter a now canonical passage by Thomas 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 generated from them. People wrote long before they conceptualized writing or alphabets; millennia passed before pictures and statues gave rise to the concept of the image; and until today, people sing or make music without knowing anything about tones or musical notation systems. Counting, too, is older than the notion of numbers. To be sure, most cultures counted or performed certain mathematical operations; but they did not necessarily derive from this a concept of number. (Macho, 2003: 179) We did not start out with the idea or concept of the number and then derive from it our quotidian counting operations; rather, early counting practices in time generated the notion of the number. Think, for instance, of Denise Schmandt-Besserats (1996) acclaimed history of writing. Writing may have turned into the visible representation of spoken

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language, but that is not how it began. Rather, there was a sequence of exaptations in the course of which humans came to reect on language and communication in terms of the sign systems they employed. Writing emerged from early accounting practices involving tokens; the tokens were gradually abstracted into signs; and nally, the resulting sign value was used to approximate names for taxation purposes. Counting and accounting precede writing. It is at this point that the idea of writing as supplement to the spoken word can take hold. Procedural chains and connecting operations give rise to notions and concepts that are then endowed with a certain ontological distinctiveness and which are therefore in need of a techno-material deconstruction. Finally, point (i), the subject. If ideas, concepts and in some cases the objects themselves emerge from basic operations, then it is only logical to assume that this also applies to the agent performing these operations. Once again, the recourse to elementary cultural techniques provides the best example. (Indeed, it is highly instructive to observe how in discussing elementary cultural techniques theorists like Siegert and Vismann will not without a certain polemical panache invoke the rst, agricultural meaning of Kulturtechnik, enrich it with the theoretical sophistication of the third meaning, and then deploy it to both encircle and challenge the humanist overtones of the second.) After introducing the notion of limited and transferred sovereignty mentioned above, Vismann arrives at a more radical diagnosis: To start with an elementary and archaic cultural technique, a plough drawing a line in the ground: the agricultural tool determines the political act; and the operation itself produces the subject, who will then claim mastery over both the tool and the action associated with it. Thus, the Imperium Romanum is the result of drawing a line a gesture which, not accidentally, was held sacred in Roman law. Someone advances to the position of legal owner in a similar fashion, by drawing a line, marking ones territory ownership does not exist prior to that act. Macho stresses how guiding notions many of which are the subsequent beneciaries of philosophical ennoblement arise from as yet nonconceptualized quotidian practices; Vismann, in turn, stresses how culture-technical operations coalesce into entities that are subsequently viewed as the agents or subjects running these operations (and who receive similar philosophical blessings). Students of German philosophy will realize that we have moved from the idealist pastures of the Hegelian master/slave into the more arduous Heideggerian territory of onticontological distinctions. Indeed, one pithy way to describe the rise of Kulturtechniken in German cultural theory is to label it part of a largescale, albeit largely uncoordinated, Heidegger update. As the resolutely

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anti- or counter-Platonic stance of the Macho quote above indicates, the study of cultural techniques aims at revealing the ontic operations that underlie and give rise to ontological distinctions which are then liable to take over thought. The older Heidegger came to oppose philosophy to Denken (thinking); the study of cultural techniques provides a kind of anking manoeuvre by relating the thinking of Sein (Being) to the processing and operating of bits and pieces of Seiendes (beings). The anthropological implications are arguably a great deal more important and interesting. They are closely related to the philosophical implications, which comes as no surprise given that in the German intellectual tradition Anthropologie is as closely related to philosophy as Anglo-American anthropology is to ethnology. To understand what is at stake it is crucial to point out that, from the point of view of the culture-technical approach, the human body is no less of an inscription surface than any other storage medium, including the human mind. Cultural techniques therefore include what Marcel Mauss termed body techniques (techniques du corps). Indeed, Mausss famous 1934 lecture on body techniques is indispensable for an expanded understanding of cultural techniques. After briey addressing swimming, marching and trench digging (the initial focus on athletic and military activities is no coincidence), Mauss provides a more peaceful but no less revealing example: I was ill in New York. I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked . . . . At last I realised that it was at the cinema. Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Paris; the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over 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 between nature and culture in favour of the latter, but to redene it as a zone of constant exchange that has no predetermined location. Walking is not just a matter of physiology, gravity and kinetics, it involves chains of operations that link ambulatory abilities to cultural protocols. It is not just a species marker or biological given, it is always already the interaction between the fact that you can walk and the expectation that you could or should walk in particular ways. The basic anthropological implication consists in the retrojection backwards into the dawn of species developments: what we call the human is always already an emergent product arising from the processual interaction of domains that in time are all too neatly divided up into the technical and the human, with the former relegated to a secondary, supplementary status. Once again, one of the most elementary techniques

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oers one the most illuminating examples: doors. In a recent essay, Siegert taking his cue from Georg Simmels beautiful 1909 essay on Bridge and Door (Simmel, 1994) describes doors as thresholds that create and process the distinction between inside and outside. Here we are back to the question raised at the outset: Is the door a part of the inside or the outside? Is that which draws the boundary between nature and culture itself part of nature or culture? It is of course possible to summon the eager spectre of Carl Schmitt and invoke a sovereignty that is of a dierent order than the distinctions it imposes. But it is more promising to follow the lead of theorists like Siegert (2007: 315) and Erhard Schu ttpelz (2006) and employ the fertile concept of the parasite as developed by Michel Serres. A parasite is not something that comes to prey on already existing structures (like pirates congregating on busy shipping lanes). Rather, the structures as well as what it connects come into being as a result of operations involving the always already present third party. Any act of communication is an act of excluding the third party which thereby both is and is not part of the communication. In the culture-technical approach, this act of excluding the parasitical third has its analogue in the way structures and entities tend to render invisible the constitutive technical operations they arise from. But to return to immediate anthropological implications. Once you move from doors, gates and portals to fences, pens and corrals that is, once you consider the elementary cultural techniques of creating enclosed spaces for catching, keeping, and breeding animals you are creating operative thresholds that eectively generate dierent species confronting each other across that divide. Humans did not come about on their own; we are not a Mu nchhausen species able to pull ourselves out of our prehominid swamp by our own hair. The human is not human all the way down. Instead we emerged, quite literally, from doors and gates while domesticated animals in opposition to which we were able to identify ourselves as a species emerged on the other side: Thus the dierence between human beings and animals is one that could 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 rst form was presumably the gate [Gatter] . . . The door appears much more as a medium of coevolutionary domestication of animals and human beings. (Siegert, 2012: 8) Once again, cultural techniques refer to processing operations that frequently coalesce into entities which are subsequently viewed as the agents or sources running these operations. Procedural chains and connecting techniques give rise to notions and objects that are then endowed with essentialized identities. Underneath our ontological distinctions (if not even our own

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evolution) are constitutive, media-dependent ontic operations that need to be teased out by means of techno-material deconstruction. But with quotes like the one above, the German study of the cultural techniques of hominization is targeting an area of research that is also of crucial interest to concurrent development in the North American posthumanities: the co-evolution of humans and technology. Cultural techniques are also anthropotechnics. Leaving aside the conspicuous Heidegger-based similarities to Bernard Stiegler, it is possible and, above all, very interesting to draw connections between the work of Siegert, Schu ttpelz and Vismann on the one hand and that of David Wills, Cary Wolfe, Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway on the other (further see Winthrop-Young, 2009). Yet once again, Siegert is quick to draw a dividing line: While the American side pursues a deconstruction of the anthropological dierence with a strong ethical focus, the Germans are more concerned with technological or medial fabrications or artices. From the point of view of the cultural techniques approach, anthropological dierences are less the eect of a stubborn anthropo-phallo-carno-centric metaphysics than the result of culture-technical and media-technological practices . . . Human and non-human animals are always already recursively intertwined because the irreducible multiplicity and historicity of the anthropological is always already processed by cultural techniques and media technologies. . . . Without this technologically oriented decentering there is the danger of confusing ethics with sentimentality: the human/animal dierence remains caught in a mirror stage, and the humanity that is exorcised from humans is simply transferred onto animals which now appear as the better humans. Others may want to debate the validity of this distinction or try their hand at reconciling the competitive enterprises; we are more concerned with 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 deconstruction that do not include an informed technological focus where does this come from? Where have we heard similar appeals? There are several sources (Heidegger inevitably comes to mind), but it is not dicult to pinpoint the most obvious one.

Kittler Determines Our Situation

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

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frame thus largely coincides with a decade that witnessed not only the rapid institutional rise of cultural techniques research in Germany, but also the internationalization of so-called German media theory a cluster of work commonly associated with the late Friedrich Kittler. Kittler, no doubt, casts a long shadow over this issue, which in many respects is a sequel to the 2007 Theory, Culture & Society special issue dedicated to his work. It is no coincidence that several of our contributors were at one point or another his students or collaborators. The title of Bernard Geoghegans contribution, After Kittler, is particularly apposite. In German it would be Nach Kittler nach means both after and according to. But nach or according to Kittler, what should come nach or after him? Furthermore, to speak of a time after Kittler implies the drawing of a line beyond which he did not venture. Is there such a line? Or is it maybe more of a moving frontier? However, we should not overrate Kittler. As Parikka points out, you cannot lay all of the recent cultural techniques scholarship at Kittlers doorstep. Much of it has little to do with him; a lot would meet with his disapproval. Nonetheless, to netune our opening question: cultural techniques can be better understood when viewed as the response to questions or quandaries that arose from media-theoretical work best represented by Kittlers contributions. One of the more peculiar qualities of Kittlers media-theoretical work is the uneasy juxtaposition of a wealth of detailed case studies and the ongoing insistence on the impact of historically changing discourse networks on the one hand, and a reluctance to dene medium and/or media on the other. Students learn a lot about the operations and eects of media but less so what media are. This feature is related to the fact that in Kittlers theory the term media appears to operate in at least three dierent registers. First, it denotes a new object of study. Those who once interpreted texts are now scrutinizing phonographs, typewriters, and computers. Second, as Siegert will discuss in greater detail, it denotes a new approach to old objects of study: the usual repository of established disciplinary phantoms body, mind, sense, senses, meaning, truth, communication, consciousness, etc. are now dissected as thoroughly mediated constructs. Third, it is a rhetorical device itching for a good ght. Especially in the anti-humanist heyday from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, it is a polemically deployed counter-term carrying a volatile anti-hermeneutic charge. Media, then, is many things, ranging from a verbal club liberally applied to those stuck in old meaning-seeking paradigms to a kind of conceptual defamiliarization tool designed to break the narcotic spell deviantly servile technologies cast on their users. Such conceptual fracturing has its consequences. With the spread and institutionalization of media theory its ability to shake up minds and disciplines was bound to diminish. Prolonged provocation inevitably devolves into nonproductive tedium, especially if recycled within the safety of established academic programs. Not coincidentally, the last

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couple of years have witnessed a small but signicant deployment of titles in 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 a reection of the technological issue that, as Kittler would have it, the digitization of channels and information will erase the very concept of medium (Kittler, 1999: 2); it also signals the abdication of media as a cutting-edge conceptual shibboleth. Unfortunately, this has not prevented some of Kittlers more dedicated and hence less original disciples to continue to write like its 1999 and indulge in ever more detailed readings of ever more arcane technologies. Media theory can forfeit its relevance in many ways; one of the safest is to engage in increasingly stale artifactualism. But how to escape the narrowing tunnel? One response and one which deserves greater attention in the Anglosphere has been the rise of Medienphilosophie or media philosophy. In contributions by scholars such as Sybille Kra mer or Dieter Mersch, the basic gesture is to move from media (and all the overly artifactual, instrumental and/or determinist connotations the term has accumulated) to mediality, though without abandoning the crucial Kittlerian lessons gained from scrutinizing the former. Media philosophy reects on the generalizations derived from the preceding medium-specic studies and attempts a denition of mediality, yet it refuses to reacquire the instrumental naivety or techno-centric assumptions of bygone theory decades. One of the core points is to provide an account of mediality as something that belongs neither to the perceiving subject nor the perceived object and which, as a third, enables perception by removing itself from perception (for a short introduction see Mersch, 2006: 21928). This is very similar to an understanding of cultural techniques as a third obscured by what emerges from its operations. As Geoghegan will discuss in greater detail, the ascendancy of Kulturtechniken may be seen as a response to some of the problems and potential cul-de-sacs of Kittlers media theory. The pronounced anti-humanism in combination with the scorn Kittler heaped on nebulous constructs like society may have been a necessary inoculation against the instrumentalist, anthropocentric or technically uninformed ways of dealing with the materialities of storage and communication, but by the mid-1990s, when Kittlers own apocalyptic anti-humanism had passed its peak, it too had run its course. Here the culture-technical approach oers a viable alternative or escape route. To speak of operations and connections allows those inspired by the Kittler eect to speak of practices without saying society; to readmit human actors allows them to speak of agency without saying subjects; and to speak of recursions allows them to speak of history without implying narratives of continuity or social teleology. Among other things the third meaning of cultural techniques is an answer to questions raised by Kittlers work.

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Of course there is an alternative, which, to put it bluntly, comes with an interesting bid to out-Kittler Kittler. As Parikka has emphasized, this is most clearly on display in the media-archaeological work of Wolfgang Ernst (further see Parikka, 2011). While Markus Krajewskis contribution on service as a cultural technique combines human servants (Jeeves) and electronic servers (AskJeeves.com) by establishing recursive connections between the two, Ernst discusses the more radical perspective that these recursive operations are exclusively composed of inter-machinic processes 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 historiography (further see Winthrop-Young, 2013). Here, the Technik in Kulturtechnik clearly gains the upper hand. To oer one of those irresponsible generalizations that come easily to outside observers, it appears that, like Hegel, to whom he is occasionally compared, Kittler has inspired a bifurcation into right and left Kittlerians. Nothing, we suggest, reveals this division more than applying the concept of cultural techniques to his work. Scholars like Siegert, Vismann and Krajewski would qualify as left Kittlerians: his anti-hermeneutic stance is transformed by them into a less intransigent post-hermeneutic approach involving certain notions of praxis and limited human agency that Kittler was prone to eschew. Ernst, on the other hand, would be a right Kittlerian by subordinating whatever human element may be involved in cultural techniques to the closed times and circuits of technological recursions.

Overview
To reect the issues sketched above, we have divided the collection into two parts made up of four papers each (excluding these preliminary remarks and Parikkas Afterword). The rst part contains introductions and historical accounts. It leads o with a short paper by Sybille Kra mer and Horst Bredekamp, Culture, Technology, Cultural Techniques: Moving beyond Text, originally published in 2003. It represents the rst systematic attempt to provide, in point form, a concise summary of the new concept of cultural techniques, and it comes with the appeal that the use of the concept should result in moving the study of culture beyond established textual domains, thereby debunking the myth of culture as discourse. Thomas Machos contribution seeks to ne-tune the concept by restricting cultural techniques to symbolic technologies that allow for self-referential recursion. These recursions, in turn, are crucial for the generation of humans as to quote the title of the paper Second-Order Animals. Cultural techniques, in short, are rst and foremost techniques of identity. The following papers by Bernhard Siegert (who will take issue with Machos restriction) and Bernard Geoghegan are more retrospective and historical in scope. In his paper Cultural

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Techniques, or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German Media Theory, Siegert relates the (re)emergence of the concept to recent changes in both the political and intellectual domain and then proceeds to outline his post-hermeneutic account of Kulturtechniken as chains of operations that link humans, things and media. Geoghegans paper, After Kittler: On the Cultural Techniques of Recent German Media Theory, addresses some of the specic moments in German post-war theory outlined above, but it presents a much wider and more detailed view of the diverse meanings and Kittlerian origins of Kulturtechnik than was oered here. The second part contains papers primarily concerned with applications and implications. As already mentioned, Cornelia Vismanns contribution, Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty, probes the implications of cultural techniques for the eld of legal philosophy. If cultural techniques connect and thereby dene the agency of humans and objects (which in Vismanns famous formulation are objects and subjects, respectively, connected to cultural techniques acting as verbs), it becomes the analysts task to reverse-engineer this wiring: from the emergent ction of human sovereignty back to the techniques that enabled it in the rst place. Markus Krajewskis contribution, The Power of Small Gestures: On the Cultural Technique of Service, oers an intriguing case study that conceptualizes the history of servants and servers as a cultural technique revolving around an increasingly technologized interplay of bodily gestures on the one hand and tools and instruments on the other. Sebastian Vehlkens Zootechnologies: Swarming as a Cultural Technique addresses the way in which cultural techniques are involved in the exploration of swarming, both in the biological and political domain. Finally, Wolfgang Ernsts From Media History to Zeitkritik discusses the implications imposed on cultural techniques by the ways in which technical media produce and process their own distinct time. Ernsts discussion has the added bonus of tying together cultural techniques 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 to explore.

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

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media techniques, but Korpertechniken are body techniques rather than body technologies. The corresponding difficulty on the English side is the comparatively narrow range of technology which, ironically, is in part a result of the flattening of the term that occurred in the early 20th century in the course of the Anglophone processing of imported German social theories, especially Marxism (further see Schatzberg). We have decided in favour of cultural techniques. This is not an ideal solution; in some instances it may well be the inferior choice. However, a full understanding of Kulturtechniken involves drills, routines, skills, habituations or techniques as much as tools, gadgets, artefacts or technologies. At rock bottom, techniques covers more of technologies than vice versa.

References
Ebeling K. (2012) Wilde Archaologien 1: Theorien der materiellen Kultur von Kant 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) Editors introduction: There are no media, Grey Room 29: 613. Kittler F. (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. and intro. WinthropYoung G and Wutz M. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Macho, T. (2003) Zeit und Zahl. Kalender- und Zeitrechnung als Kulturtechniken. In: Kra mer S and Bredekamp H (eds) Bild Schrift Zahl. Mu nchen: Wilhelm Fink, 179192. Mauss M. (1973) Techniques of the body, Economy and Society 2(1): 7088. Mersch D. (2006) Medientheorien zur Einfuhrung. Hamburg: Junius. Parikka J. (2011) Operative media archaeology: Wolfgang Ernsts materialist media diagrammatics, Theory, Culture & Society 28(5): 5274. 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, 730. Schatzberg E. (2006) Technik comes to America: Changing meanings of technology before 1930, Technology and Culture 47(3): 486512. Schmandt-Besserat D (1996) How Writing Came About. Austin: University of Texas Press. Schu ttpelz, E. (2006) Die medienanthropologische Kehre der Kulturtechniken. In: Engell L, Siegert B and Vogl J (eds) Kulturgeschichte als Mediengeschichte (oder vice versa?). Weimar: Universita tsverlag, 87110. Siegert, B. (2003) There are no mass media. In: Gumbrecht HU and Marrinan M (eds) Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 3038. Siegert B. (2007) Cacography or communication? Cultural techniques in German media studies, Grey Room 29: 2747. Siegert B. (2012) Doors: On the materiality of the symbolic, Grey Room 42: 623. Simmel G. (1994) Bridge and door, Theory, Culture and Society 11(1): 510.

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Vehlken S. (2012) Zootechnologien. Eine Mediengeschichte der Schwarmforschung. 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, Ko rper, Kehre: Zum posthumanistischen Immerschon, Philosophische Rundschau 56(1): 116. Winthrop-Young G. (2011) Krautrock, Heidegger, Bogeyman: Kittler in the Anglosphere, Thesis Eleven 107(1): 620. 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 to thank the authors as well as the translators (Charles Marcrum, Valentine Pakis, Guido Schenkel and Michael Wutz) for their participation. The essays by Bernard Geoghegan, Markus Krajewski and Sebastian Vehlken were written specically for this issue; the others 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: Universita tsverlag, 2332. Kra mer S and Bredekamp H (2003) Kultur, Technik, Kulturtechnik: Wider die Diskursivierung der Kultur. In: Kra mer S and Bredekamp H (eds) Bild, Schrift, Zahl. Munich: Fink, 1122. Macho T (2008) Tiere zweiter Ordnung. Kulturtechniken der Identita t. In: Baecker ber Kultur. Theorie und Praxis der D, Kettner M and Rustemeyer D (eds) U Kulturreexion. Bielefeld: Transcript, 99117. Vismann C (2010) Kulturtechniken und Souvera nita t. Zeitschrift fur Medien- und Kulturforschung 1: 171181. Bernhard Siegerts paper, Cultural Techniques, or the End of the Intellectual Postwar in German Media Theory, is the introductory essay in a volume on cultural techniques forthcoming from Fordham University Press. We thank the authors and the associated publishers for the rights to translate the essays. We are especially grateful to Balthasar Haussmann for the permission to include Cornelia Vismanns text. It is very tting that this collection concludes with Liam Youngs review essay of her groundbreaking study, Files: Law and Media Technology. We wish to dedicate this issue to her memory. As a legal historian, 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 Georey Winthrop-Young

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Georey Winthrop-Young is Professor of German at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Among his publications are Kittler and the Media (Cambridge, 2011) and Friedrich Kittler zur Einfuhrung (Hamburg, 2005), as well as translations of works by Friedrich Kittler, Cornelia Vismann and Eva Horn.

Article

Culture, Technology, Cultural Techniques Moving Beyond Text1

mer Sybille Kra
Free University, Berlin

Theory, Culture & Society 30(6) 2029 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263276413496287 tcs.sagepub.com

Horst Bredekamp
Humboldt 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 investigations of meaning. On the other hand, cultural techniques also comprise sign systems 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 (see Lenk, 1996). Hardly any other trope has had as formative an impact on the culture-theoretical debates of the last decades as this semiotic and structuralist baseline. The metaphor of text dominated until the 1980s,
Corresponding author: mer, Freie Universita t, Institut fu Prof. Dr. Sybille Kra r Philosophie, Habelschwerdter Allee 30, D-14195 Berlin, Germany. Email: sybkram@zedat.fu-berlin.de http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

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transforming the world of culture into a world of discursive signs and referents. In that way, it helped deepen the rift between the natural sciences and the humanities and cultural sciences. Isnt it odd, however, that the historical semantics of culture (see Bo hme, 1996) refers back to agrarian methods and operations and to hand-based crafts? Culture has its largely prosaic origins in the tilling of a eld (cultura agri) and in gardening work (cultura horti); it is rst and foremost the work with things their cultivation that surround us on a daily basis. Indeed, Latin words such as colere, culture, and cultura harbor the etymological traces of a conception of culture centering around techniques and rites, skills and practices that provide for the stability of lived-in space and the continuity of time, and have thus made our world into a human world by cultivating (or de-primitivizing) it (Bo hme, 1996: 54). Culture contains an impulse toward action: it is what 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 further and further into the background, as the term is rened into a cultura animi with the intention of spiritualizing it. This spiritualization expresses 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) to facilitate the congruence of culture and the symbolic, that is, the identication of culture with all that is semiotically given and interpretable. And so it came to pass that the procedures of textual analysis and hermeneutics advanced to become the favorite model for the understanding of cultural orders.

2. This discursivization of culture has at least three notable eects: a. Misjudging the epistemic power of the image. The hierarchy between language and image, in terms of priority and import, has become indirectly proportional to the facility with which images of all kinds photographs, lm, and television have usurped our everyday world. Practices that create images are cultural property, as long as they can be assigned to the realm of art, which is to say, as long as they are suciently removed from science and knowledge. Understood as the silent stepsister of language, without the potential for argumentation or, even more important, knowledge-generation, the world of pictures accrues cultural signicance in the form of paintings and the mass media. The rest are illustrations . . . b. The disavowal of mathematical formalisms. Those who insist on an intimate relationship with western culture acknowledge without shame that they dont want to have any truck with formulas. The fear of

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formulas is almost a cultural property in and of itself, and formalism is often suspected of entailing self-alienation. When Edmund Husserl described the mathematization and formalization of the modern sciences as a crisis in the experience-ability of life, he echoed the anxieties of the European tradition of culture (see Husserl, 1970). One common view holds that where letters morph into formulas, content and interpretation go out the window; the manipulation of alphabetic and numerical signs is blocking sense and understanding. Language surrenders its symbolic power in its pact with numbers and becomes a quasi-diabolic technique. c. The lopsided concentration of media-historical and media-theoretical research on the relationship between orality and literacy. Media are assigned a role in cultural history whenever they appear as intralinguistic phenomena, that is, during the transition from speech to writing. In that way, the relationship between orality and literacy could easily be promoted to a special branch within the humanities, with the implication that writing could be understood as a purely discursive phenomenon, that is, as phonographic writing. Musical notation, the operative languages of algebraic and arithmetical formulas, logical calculus, and program languages are all characterized by a graphism independent of sound, and thus remain outside the boundaries of the traditional concept of language-based literacy. This Abc of a discursive concept of culture can be reduced to a polemical formula: the direction of our changing meaning of culture goes from technique to text, from things to symbols, from processing to interpreting. And where things are the other way round where texts function as techniques (as in the computing protocols of mathematics), where symbols reveal their manipulable materiality, and where dierences in interpretation become secondary to the algorithms of operative sets they will inevitably be suspected of being a retreat of the discoursebased concept of culture in the face of the advancing technomathematical mechanics of civilization.

3. In 1936, when Alan Turing formulated the intuitive concept of computable functions with the help of his model of a Turing machine (Turing, 1937), it was no more than a further proposition in a series of mathematically equivalent propositions coming from Go del, Church, Kleene, Post, and Markov (see Kra mer, 1988: 157). Nonetheless, his model diered from those of his mathematical rivals: it is no coincidence that Turing lent his name to the shift from the Gutenberg Galaxy to the Turing Galaxy. Three elements of his Turing machine are central to this shift (see Kra mer, 1991: 4). Turing opens up a cognitive dimension with his claim that his mathematical formalism renders explicit what a human calculator does when working with paper and pencil, which is to say,

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when writing. Second, he further develops the convertibility between the symbolic and the technical already surmised by Leibniz, and along with it the convertibility between the semiotic and the physical, and, by extension, between software and hardware. And he nally projects the Turing machine as a universal medium by showing that there are universal Turing machines capable of imitating every special Turing machine because 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 simultaneously be machines, and vice versa. The Turing machine marks the point when mind and machine are no longer at odds with one another, but acknowledge their relationship (their family resemblance, as it were). At the same time, Turings inspirations proved incapable of softening the hardened structures of modern culture, perhaps precisely because of his use of mathematical language. In order for that to happen a discourse was 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 of culture-as-text is eroding. At the moment, we can identify at least four frontlines of this process of erosion: a. The recognition that culture-creating practices are uid. Culture is no longer conned to what is enshrined in works, monuments, and documents in stable and statutory form. Originating in the eld of language theory, the debate on performance and performativity has spilled over and into the social and culture sciences as well as aesthetic and art history, in the process relativizing the focus on text and representations by emphasizing the signicance of cultures through acts, implementations, rituals and routines (Wirth, 2002). The English term cultural studies has made everyday practices into a legitimate object of study (Bo hme et al., 2000: 12). The demarcation between high and low culture has lost its sharply polarized distinction. b. Uncovering silent processes of knowledge. For a long time, science has been seen as the embodiment of theory and the search for evidence centered around a propositional and language-based form of knowledge. But recently the history of science has discovered the technical and symbolic practices (Bredekamp, 2001) housed in labs, studios, and lecture halls, which are responsible for communicating and exhibiting objects of knowledge in the rst place (see Bredekamp, 2003; Latour, 1989). Theories of knowledge, in turn, have shifted attention to nonpropositional forms of knowledge, that is, implied and embodied knowledge manifesting and legitimating itself through the handling of objects and instruments.

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c. A willingness to de-hermeneuticize the notions of mind and sense. Philologists explore the material and medial foundations of literature cultures; they reconstruct the emergence of sense out of non-sense (see Gumbrecht, 1996). The social sciences investigate communication as a social operation. Media theory, which transformed the linguistic turn into a medial turn, reconstructs the technological dimension of media by showing that media not only communicate, they also produce what they communicate (see Kittler, 1997). The formative eects of mathematics on culture and the prehistory of the computer and computer science furthermore suggest (as envisaged by Turing) that the symbolic and the machinic relate to one another like two sides of the same coin (Kra mer, 1988). d. The epistemological dimension of imagery. The eye of the mind is anything but blind (see Heintz and Huber, 2001). Rather, for both the history of cognition and our practices of knowledge, visuality is anything but a merely illustrative sideshow it constitutes the irreducible center for the research and evidentiary context of the sciences. In the emerging discipline of imagology, the iconology of the present (a term coined by Horst Bredekamp and Gottfried Boehm [e.g. Boehm, 2001]), technical images are investigated precisely on the basis of their aesthetic potential as the indispensable element for the formation of scientic objectivity. While Husserl in his crisis statement lamented de-sensualization and abstraction as the residue of scientic development, it on the contrary becomes clear now that it is precisely the sensualization the aestheticization of invisible processes and theoretical objects that are the fuel of scientic change.2 To summarize: the textualization of culture has reached its limits. By transgressing those boundaries, the concept of culture assumes new contours. Culture is no longer a matter of monolithic immobility congealed in works, documents or monuments, but liquees into our everyday practices with objects, symbols, instruments and machines. The right of exclusivity, which language used to claim for itself (with regard to representing culture), is no longer unchallenged. It is in the (inter)play with language, images, writing, and machines in the reciprocity between the symbolic and the technical, between discourse and the iconic that cultures emerge and reproduce.

5. Is it a coincidence that the technological phenomenon of the networked computer emerges at the intersection of the four tendencies we have just described? The computer regulates almost all productive processes; it coordinates the social communication of our society and intervenes in the production of knowledge. It manages all that precisely by having fully permeated the routines and practices of our everyday world.

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It is the everyday technology for us all. As a Turing machine made real, it reveals and enacts how formalism and machine, symbol and technology, interpenetrate and how their functional processes can mutually substitute for one another. Both medium and machine, it demonstrates that the transfer of signs fundamentally depends on the technical processing as data. And the binary system as a universal digital code reminds us that the computer does not just squash the potential of writing in the ood of digitized images, but that, on the contrary, it gives it a new lease on life by bringing it back into play as the elementary vision of the technological and the machinic. Numerical simulation ushers in a form of writing which makes possible new forms of scientic visualization that, in turn, are establishing themselves as a third form of scientic practice side by side with lab work and theorization. The use of computers has hence advanced to the level of a cultural technique. If, however, the long-term eects of computerization are in the nature of a cultural technique, is it not advisable to subsume the varying discourses undermining a text-based notion of culture under the heading of cultural technique and thus to endow them with a focused and programmatic direction? Cultural techniques are the hotbed of any culture. Analyzing the physiognomy of a culture means investigating its cultural techniques. The history of culture always already is the history of its cultural techniques, just as the history of science cannot be decoupled from the changes in the everyday techniques of perception, communication, representation, archiving, counting, measuring . . .

6. What, then, does cultural technique signify? The agricultural origins of the term may be signicant, but further elaboration is necessary. Terms that fertilize the work of various disciplines and establish relationships among them are allowed to retain a certain level of non-specicity. And yet, any analysis from the point of view of cultural techniques shares some characteristic features. As a concrete example, let us take a look at the written computations in the decimal system, a cultural technique of foundational importance for the Gutenberg era that had become canonical by the 15th century following the introduction of Indo-Arabic numbers in Europe. Paralleling the dissemination of Indo-Arabic numbers in Europe, and their corresponding algorithms, object-based computation, as in the case of a computation board (or an abacus), gave way to computation with graphic signs on paper. However: what counts with the numbers is that they can be manipulated following schematic rules. Computing with numbers can be realized as the operation of the sequencing of signs. The signs function as sensorial or visual markers, or as texture; they embody a structure of signication that needs to be physically produced

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and manipulated in the space between the eye and the hand. For that reason, the algorithms of computation, which are not subject to interpretation, share such great anities with technical-material practices: a computer not to be confused with a human mathematician! will be calculating 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 of operative signs removes the burden and complexities of interpretation. Calculus is always already a kind of mechanism of forgetting. In order to calculate correctly, we dont need to be able to provide an answer to the question, What is a zero? Calculating correctly does not require a theory of numbers or algorithms, and for that very reason ushers in an unforeseen explosion of mathematical competence in daily life: computing with Indian numbers is no longer the exclusive privilege of ecclesiastical and academic circles but enters the world of merchants and the curricula 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 practices of everyday life and change what everybody can do. Almost all the major mathematical breakthroughs in the 16th and 17th centuries bear witness to the ingenuity of the decimal calculus, which is grounded in the algorithmic operations of signs for numbers. That is true for the intro` te, who preduction of letter-based computation through Franc ois Vie pared the way for symbolic algebra by transferring computation with numbers to alphabetic signs and hence generalized algebraic rules in ` te, 1970). That is true of Rene Descartes, who by writable form (Vie recoding geometrical gures into arithmetical sequences of numbers founded analytical geometry (Descartes, 1981). And it is true for Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnizs innitesimal calculus, which translates the eciency of the decimal calculus with nite numbers into the range of numbers innitely large and small (Leibniz, 1846). In so doing, he rendered mute the vexing question of whether or not innitely large and small numbers exist in actuality in executing correct calculations about these numbers. And it was Leibniz who, with the invention of the binary alphabet, spelled out the spirit of calculus as the eect of a symbolic machine (Leibniz, 1966). Moreover, the physical manipulation with calculable signs also gives birth to new, that is, theoretical, objects: the evolution of the number zero is a case in point, as are such mathematical objects as dierential equations or imaginary numbers. On the one hand, the aesthetic of calculus is such that it feeds entities into the register of sensory perception that would otherwise be cognitively invisible; at the same time, however, such an aesthetic produces and constitutes these kinds of objects at the moment of their visualization in the rst place. In conclusion, cultural techniques are promoting the achievements of intelligence through the senses and the externalizing operationalization

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of thought processes. Cognition does not remain locked up in any invisible interiority; on the contrary, intelligence and spirit advance to become a kind of distributive, and hence collective, phenomenon that is determined by the hands-on contact humans have with things and symbolic and technical artifacts.

7. Lets recapitulate the outlines of the cultural-technical perspective: cultural techniques are (a) operative processes that enable work with things and symbols; (b) they are based on a separation between an implied know how and an explicit know that; (c) they can be understood as skills that habituate and regularize the bodys movements and that express themselves in everyday uid practices; (d) at the same time, such techniques can provide the aesthetic and material-technical foundation for scientic innovation and new theoretical objects; (e) the media innovations accruing in the wake of changing cultural techniques are located in a reciprocity of print and image, sound and number, which, in turn; (f) opens up new exploratory spaces for perception, communication, and cognition; and (g) these exploratory spaces come into view where disciplinary boundaries become permeable and lay bare phenomena and relationships whose prole precisely does not coincide with the boundaries of specic disciplines. Translated by Michael Wutz

Notes
1. This article was previously published as: Kultur, Technik, Kulturtechnik: Wider die Diskursivierung der Kultur, in Kra mer S and Bredekamp H (eds) Bild, Schrift, Zahl. Munich: Fink, 2003, pp. 1122. 2. . . . we must make clear to ourselves the strangeness . . . that everything which manifests itself as real through the specific sense qualities must have its mathematical index. . . . The whole of infinite nature, taken as a concrete universe 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 der Erkenntnis. In: Heintz, B. and Huber, J. (eds) Mit dem Auge denken. Strategien der Sichtbarmachung in wissenschaftlichen und virtuellen Welten. Zu rich: Voldemmeer, pp. 4354. Bo hme, H. (1996) Vom Cultus zur Kultur(wissenschaft). Zur historischen Semantik des Kulturbegriffs. In: Glaser, R. and Luserke, M. (eds) Literaturwissenschaft Kulturwissenschaft. Positionen, Theorien, Perspektiven. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, pp. 4868.

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Bo hme, H., Matussek, P. and Mu ller, 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. 153192. Bredekamp, H. (2003) Antikensehnsucht und Maschinenglauben. Die Geschichte der Kunstkammer und die Zukunft der Kunstgeschichte, 4th edn. Berlin: Wagenbach. Busche, H. (2000) Was ist Kultur?, Dialektik 1: 6990. Descartes, R. (1981) Geometrie, ed. Schlesinger L. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Gumbrecht, H.-U. (1996) Das Nicht-Hermeneutische: Skizze einer Genealogie. In: Huber, J. and Mu ller, A. (eds) Die Wiederkehr des Anderen. Basel: Stroemfeld und Museum fu r Gestaltung, pp. 1736. Heintz, B. and Huber, J. (eds) (2001) Mit dem Auge denken. Strategien der Sichtbarmachung in wissenschaftlichen und virtuellen Welten. Zu rich: Voldemmeer. Husserl, E. (1970) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, ed. and trans. Carr D. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kittler, F. (1997) Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. Johnston J. Amsterdam: G+B Arts. Kra mer, S. (1988) Symbolische Maschinen. Die Idee der Formalisierung in geschichtlichem Abriss. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Kra mer, S. (1991) Denken as Rechenprozedur: Zur Genese eines kognitionswissenschaftlichen Paradigmas, Kognitionswissenschaft 2: 110. couverte. Latour, B. (1989) La Science en action. Paris: Editions La De 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. berlegungen zu einer Interpretationsfigur. In: Lenk, C. (1996) Kultur als Text. U Glaser R and Luserke M (eds) Literaturwissenschaft Kulturwissenschaft. Positionen, Theorien, Perspektiven. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, pp. 116128. Menninger, K. (1979) Zahlwort und Ziffer. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Zahl, 2 vols, 3rd edn. Go ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Ries, A. (1892) Adam Riese, sein Leben, seine Rechenbucher und seine Art zu rechnen. Die Co von Adam Riese, ed. Berlet B. Leipzig: Kesselring. Turing, A. (1937) On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungproblem, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 2(4243): 544546. Vieta, F. (1970) Opera Mathematica, ed. Schooten F v. Hildesheim: Olms (reproduction of the Leiden edition 1646). Wirth, U. (ed.) (2002) Performanz. Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

mer studied history, philosophy and political science in Sybille Kra Hamburg and Marburg. She received her PhD in 1976, completed her Habilitation in Du sseldorf in 1988 and was appointed Professor of

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Theoretical Philosophy at the Freie Universita t Berlin in 1989. Among her most important publications are Technik, Gesellschaft und Natur. Versuch uber ihren Zusammenhang (Frankfurt, 1982), Symbolische Maschinen. Die Idee der Formalisierung in geschichtlichem Abri bertragung. Kleine Metaphysik (Darmstadt, 1988) and Medium, Bote, U der Medialitat (Frankfurt, 2008). Horst Bredekamp studied philosophy and sociology in Munich, Berlin and Hamburg. After teaching at the University of Hamburg he was appointed Professor of Art History at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He has published widely on the art of the Renaissance, Mannerism, art and technology, and political iconography. In 2001 he received the Sigmund-Freud Prize for scientic prose. Michael Wutz (PhD, Emory University) is Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Weber State University, in Ogden, Utah, and the editor of Weber The Contemporary West. He is the co-editor of Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology (Cornell University Press, 1997), the co-translator of Friedrich Kittlers Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford University Press, 1999, with Georey Winthrop-Young), and the author of Enduring Words: Narrative in a Changing Media Ecology (University of Alabama Press, 2009).

Article

Second-Order Animals: Cultural Techniques of Identity and Identification

Thomas Macho
Humboldt University, Germany

Theory, Culture & Society 30(6) 3047 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263276413499189 tcs.sagepub.com

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 papers 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 speaking and inventing, ordering and manipulating signs. In contrast to most other animals, they make use of alphabets, number sequences, notation systems or codes: they practice cultural techniques. The term does not encompass all the techniques a culture has at its disposal, but strictly those techniques that make symbolic work possible. Every culture is

Corresponding author: t zu Berlin, Institut fu Thomas Macho, Humboldt-Universita r Kulturwissenschaft, Georgenstr. 47, Raum 4.29, Berlin, 10117, Germany. Email: thomas.macho@cms.hu-berlin.de http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

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grounded in numerous techniques that guarantee its survival, such as the techniques of re use, hunting, the making of clothes and tools, nutrition and cooking, agriculture, economy, or social organization. Primates, too, are in possession of some of those techniques, which is why Frans de Waal (2001) rightly assigns the term cultures to them. Human cultures, however, are not simply composites of these multiple techniques, but evolve out of their symbolic concentration. This symbolic work endows all other activities with their specic meaning; it gives order to the world and enables cultures to develop self-reexive concepts. Symbolic work requires specic cultural techniques, such as speaking, translating and understanding, forming and representing, calculating and measuring, writing and reading, singing and making music. Cultural techniques dier from all other techniques through their potential self-referentiality, a pragmatics of recursion. From their very beginnings, speaking can be spoken about and communication be communicated. We can produce paintings that depict paintings or painters; lms often feature other lms. One can only calculate and measure with reference to calculation and measurement. And one can of course write about writing, sing about singing, and read about reading. On the other hand, it is impossible to thematize re while making a re, just as it is impossible to thematize eld tilling while tilling a eld, cooking while cooking, and hunting while hunting. We may talk about recipes or hunting practices, represent a re in pictorial or dramatic form, or sketch a new building, but in order to do so we need to avail ourselves of the techniques of symbolic work, which is to say, we are not making a re, hunting, cooking, or building at that very moment. Using a phrase coming out of systems theory, we could say that cultural techniques are second-order techniques. As second-order techniques, cultural techniques have from their very beginning been operating as techniques of self-reection, identity formation and identication. Even today, the majority of cultural techniques serve as vehicles of self-description, self-legitimation, and authentication, whether in the form of pictures, writings or numbers: be they portraits and passport photos, signs of the body (such as ngerprints), seals, stamps, coats of arms or logos, signatures and signs, or numerical codes (ranging from ones personal and social security number to the PIN-code at the ATM). Cultural techniques have always been practiced as technologies of the self (in the sense of Michel Foucault, 1988). They constitute subjects that have evolved out of a multiplicity of recursions and media, not simply a singular mirror stage, as with Lacan (2002 [1977]).

2. Body Signs
The history of these technologies of the self begins in prehistorical darkness. When the Paleolithic cult caves in France and Spain were

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rst explored, scientists did not only see the impressive and realistic representations of numerous animals, but also spotted occasional hand prints. These prints were either positives, whereby a painted hand was pressed onto the rock, or negatives, meaning that the artists traced the contour 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, El Castillo, Tibiran, Bayron, La Baume-Latrone, Rocamadour, Bernifal, Font-de-Gaume, Le Portel [cf. Leroi-Gourhan, 1982], or in Chauvet in ` che Valley, which was not discovered until 1994 [cf. Chauvet the Arde et al., 1995: 30, 112]). Sometimes these prints would appear in isolation, other times they appeared in clusters. In Gargas, for example, scientists identied 150 red and black hands, 50 in El Castillo, and 12 in Tibiran and Pech-Merle. Originally, the prehistorian Henri Breuil assumed that virtually all of the impressions were those of left hands; later, scientists recognized that those impressions contained some made of right hands (with the back). Most of the hands are so small that they were rst thought to be impressions of women and children (which was given fur` ne or Pech-Merle ther credence by the fact that the caves of Niaux, Alde contained numerous impressions of the feet of children in the loamy soil). Most puzzling were the hand impressions in Gargas: a substantial number of hands appeared to have mutilated or twisted ngers, which was originally assumed to be evidence of archaic practices of ritualized amputations. Only later as is so often the case with prehistoric research were scientists able to correct their dramatic observations: upon closer scrutiny, it became evident that the ngers of those hands that had been placed with their back against the rock were bent inward and, in some instances, retouched and shortened afterwards. The meaning of these hand prints and their performative practices remains unclear. Are they connected to the abstract symbols, sticks or Leroi-Gourhan classied as gender indications? Were spirals, that Andre they produced in the course of magic rituals of rebirth of animals or humans, as was surmised by Max Raphael (1979) or Hans Peter Duerr (1984)? Or were these hand prints indeed the rst signs of origination, as Martin Schaub assumes: The artists of the prehistoric caves have exempted themselves almost completely out of their works. Yet the imprint of their hand is everywhere: as greeting, memory, signature? . . . Did the artists in these caves write, or sign their artworks? What is the signicance of the mutilated hands one can see every once in a while? Are they hunting inscriptions, priestly signs, the commemoration of a visit, a communication with the dead and descendants, signs of remembrance, traces of rituals, signs of magical empowerment, grave inscriptions? Many theories have been advanced, but nothing

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

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Already in antiquity it was common to sign contracts with an impression of ngers, but as a medium of crime detection as a modern technique of identication by the police ngerprints were not popularized until the late 19th century (Galton, 1965 [1892]). At that point, they no longer operated as active but passive signs of the body they had been used for thousands of years, when it came to branding cattle or marking slaves or prisoners.

3. Seals, Stamps and Coats of Arms

From a technical perspective, the history of body signs can be seen as a chapter in the history of impressions, which always predate expressions. What is being impressed are either parts of the body (such as hands or ngers), or objects onto a surface (such as plaster, clay, or wax). The technique of imprinting does not dierentiate between bodies and artifacts, between practices of embodiment and the use of objects extending the body. Every imprint requires a carrier or a material substrate, a gesture producing that very imprint (usually a gesture of impression, or at least of touch), and a mechanical result, that is, an indented or protruding mark (Didi-Huberman, 1999: 14, emphasis in original). This imprint, however, is not tied to specic objects. In the case of an authentication, the imprint should produce a mark that points to its maker a sign that should not be mistaken for an unintended trace, but rather be decipherable and legible as a specic and individual signature. While humans often take care not to leave any detectable traces, these imprints, on the contrary, should by their very denition indicate who made them. Perhaps it was this strategic intention which served to discredit body signs, for it is dicult to discern whether the trace of a body, a hand, a nger, or a foot was produced by accident or by design. Who knows whether it was not for that very reason that Paleolithic hand prints had to be retouched after the fact? The history of pictures and of writing can, hence, be told as the history of instruments necessary for making impressions: stencils, pencils, brushes, quills. The rst signs of authentication were imprinted onto clay tablets or urns with seals and stamps as early as 4000 BC. At rst people used carved bones or stones to leave specic patterns, ornaments, or marks in the clay; only later did they use metal or precious stones. The seals left individual, unmistakable imprints; if they served as a personal emblem, they were often worn like ornaments: stable and reliable elements on a body whose organic extensions were capable of producing eeting and ambiguous traces only. In the Orient, for example, 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 of their wearers became popular in Greek antiquity. (We, too, by the way, are fond of wearing our preferred writing instruments close to us, in chest pockets or purses.) The ecclesiastical and secular authorities of the Middle Ages, for their part, developed dierentiated systems of signs as an index of status and aliation. Royal dynasties, noble families, knights, but also popes, cardinals, bishops and later the guilds used colors and signs that had to be composed into coats of arms, following the art of heraldry. The code of heraldry 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 of arms were assembled in accordance with the rule to alternate lacquer colors with metals. They were used not only in the service of representation, but also identied friends and enemies during battle.

4. Speaking Objects
Seals, pin seals and stamps were (and are) objects giving voice to other objects. Until today, their most important function has consisted in combining texts, pictures, or objects with an I or a person into a speech act. With the help of a seal or stamp, a speech act is transferred onto an object; the resultant artifact proclaims, for example, who has made or authorized it, or who owns it (aside from the motifs that it represents in its image, text, or materiality). Basically, seals function the 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 the externally materialized voice of authority or the author. Thats why the charge of safekeeping a seal in the advanced civilizations of old was entrusted to the highest-ranking civil servants, because the custodian of the seal, in a sense, exercised control over the voice of the king, his second body. Todays English Lord Chancellor, formerly the presiding ocer 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 for their minister of justice as well. In the Holy Roman Empire, the Margrave of Mainz served as Arch-Chancellor and sigilli custos until 1806, and even in the bureaucracies of today stamps bearing a so-called ocial seal are kept under lock and key. The history of seals (and later of signets in Greek antiquity) can also be associated with the development of inscribed objects i.e. vases or statues which have of late become of interest to archaeologists. The Italian epigraphy expert Mario Burzachechi described these artifacts as speaking objects or oggetti parlanti to account for the curious fact that most of their inscriptions were in the rst person and because of words running together make sense only when read aloud (1962: 354).

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Reading in such an arrangement can be understood as a kind of overwhelming of the reader by the speaking statue or artifact, as Jesper Svenbro has argued. The object of inscription is named in the rst person, the writer, by contrast, in the third. (Objects naming the writer in the third person have only been found dating back to about 550 BC, and they do so, in part, to hide the real authority identied by the I.) A 6th century amphora may serve as an example: I have been made by Kleimachos and I belong to him (ekenou eim). When you read this Kleimachos will no longer be here; he will be gone, which is communicated well by the demonstrative pronoun ekenos. (Ekei-nos is the demonstrative pronoun of the third person pointing to the fact that the person is not here, but there, away from here (eke).) The amphora itself, by contrast, is here. Nobody can claim the I in the inscription. Kleimachos cannot do that. He writes onto his own 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 techniques of self-reection. What is unclear is when precisely humans began to depict their own faces. The Paleolithic caves contained few representations of humans, let alone portraits. For a couple of millennia artisans painted animals almost exclusively, but virtually no humans; and if human representations were etched into the rock they were typically not given facial features. The artisans of the Old Stone Age had a variety of materials at their disposal and an arsenal of powerful images from everyday life, with which they transformed caves into holy places, but they did not make portraits of members of their own species. The repertoire of images was to nd its apex in the magnicent, richly rendered galleries at Lascaux in the southwestern part of France. Lascaux has been called the Sistine Chapel of the Stone Age. It is a holy place where spiritual thinking has been externalized, where the drama of the imaginative life is depicted. And yet in this cave, among hundreds of images, there is not a single example of a human face (Landau, 1989: 189). In the 1960s, during her excavations at the site of the Neolithic town of Jericho, the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon discovered a series of human skulls that were artfully decorated. Through the retrospective application of layers of lime and plaster, those faces were given a face lift, as it were, to counter the eects of facial decomposition. Terry Landau writes that each face is distinct and strongly individual. Each is made with a purpose. That purpose was to perpetuate life beyond

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death by replacing the transient esh 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 such as stone, metal, wood, clay, plaster or wax correspond to these dierences, and these qualities determine how and in what way the materiality of a corpse can be transmuted into the form of a picture or statue. Georges Didi-Huberman, for example, points out that the famed golden masks of the royal graves of Mycenae, dating back to the 16th century BC, were apparently made directly from a face and meant to represent the three-dimensionality of the head; they reproduced the suggestion of resemblance through touch. At the same time, the attention to modeling and the hammer work evident in these masks also points to a solid schematism which testies to the predominance of ornamental thinking in the representation of the human form. What has to be factored in is that the dialectical treatment of physical touch and ornament would be unthinkable if the gold plate as carrier metal were not as extraordinarily pliable as it is, and if the imprinting process were not inherently 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 the visual and plastic arts. The real meaning of the picture is in its representation of something that is absent, and can only be present in pictorial form. It makes visible, 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 the ur-meaning of what a picture is in the rst place. The deceased is always already an absence and death itself an unbearable absence whose void the picture served to ll and make bearable. But this second picture is only a response to the rst picture, as Belting notes (pace Maurice Blanchot): Death itself is already present in the very picture because the corpse has already morphed into an image that merely resembles the body of the living person . . . The living person is no longer a body, but only 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 breathing body transforms, at one fell swoop and in front of everybody, into a mute image . . . Humans were helplessly exposed to the experience of

Macho life commuting into its own image upon death. They lost the deceased, who had participated in the life of the community, to a mere image.

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Belting argues that it was only this contingent experience of becoming an image that prompted humans to make pictures or statues on their own. Now it was an articial image that countered the other image, the corpse. Through the act of making images humans became active in their 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 the deceased. The Latin term larva designates an actors mask as well as the ghost of a dead person. This double meaning is not coincidental; it refers to the well-known custom of letting the dead reappear as bearers of masks. The Romans routinely made waxen imprints and masks of prominent gures in public life, which were preserved as egies and displayed during various parades. According to the historian Polybius (2nd century BC), such waxen imprints were rst used during burial ceremonies, later mounted in ancestral portrait galleries, and publicly displayed (and decorated) for appropriate occasions. At funerals or sacricial ceremonies, powerful ancestors were represented either through dressed-up egies or actors wearing the respective death masks. Romulus and Pompey participated in this way at the funeral of Emperor Augustus, aside from the Emperor himself (Von Schlosser, 1993: 21).

6. Mirror Images and Shadows

Humans and animals change into their image not just in death, but also with each reection and in every shadow. It is certainly true that reections and shadows dont produce lasting signs, as Umberto Eco has emphasized (cf. Eco, 1995: 937). Maybe it was for that very reason that both were viewed with suspicion in antiquity. Back then most mirrors were construed not as at surfaces but as convex or concave mirrors suitable for optical experiments. Reections were given legitimate status neither in everyday life nor in scientic experiments, which may well have been attributable to materials from which mirrors were constructed. The mirrors of Archimedes, like many other mirrors dating from the 4th century BC, were presumably made from bronze; later, almost every other conceivable metal was used for the making of mirrors, provided it was suitable for scraping and polishing. Greece had its rst school for mirror makers about a century following the birth of Plato, where artisans were taught how to smooth and polish a metal plate with sand without scratching it. Romans and Etruscans had a preference for silver mirrors. Beginning with the rst

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century BC, gold mirrors became part of a preferred medium of payment for servants among the upper classes. As a general rule, metal mirrors were not particularly large; they were mostly conceived as hand mirrors (including a handle) or fold-out mirrors (with a stand). The depth of eld and color delity of metal mirrors can hardly be compared to the quality standards of mirrors today. It was only in the 14th century that the rst glass-based mirrors were made in Venice, the center of European glass blowing. The reasons for this delay, especially given that glasses, glass containers and windows had been made for centuries, are evident: much in contrast to metal, glass cannot be rendered smooth and polished. Glass planes have to be cast perfectly, usually as hollow cylinders that have to be pried apart afterwards. The rst glass mirrors did not come close to an undistorted reection. Nevertheless, glass mirrors almost instantaneously held a triumphant entry into European households. In 14th-century Venice, wealthy men and women took to ostentatiously wearing glass mirrors about the neck on gold chains as pendant jewelry. While the image in the glass might be disappointingly poor, the image of a mirror-wearer in the eyes of others was one of unmistakable auence. Men carried swords with small mirrors set in the hilt. Royalty collected sets of glass mirrors framed in ivory, silver, and gold, which were displayed more than they were used. Early mirrors had more ash than function, and given their poor reective quality, they probably served best as bric` -brac. (Panati, 1989: 230) a The breakthrough into the modern production of mirrors did not occur until the 17th century. In 1687 the French glassmaker Bernard Perrot secured the patent for a uniform rolling process of glass planes. Since then, it has become possible to produce not only optical mirrors or cosmetic hand-held or fold-out mirrors but also life-sized mirrors for walls and stands. Thanks to that technology, spaces could quite literally be representative, such as the Great Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, which was built in 1686. Thanks to the new technology for mirror production, the magic of mirrors could be dened anew. Previously, that magic had fascinated luminaries in such forms as Archimedes concave mirror, Lorrain-Glas, the medieval magia naturalis, and the catoptric theater of illusions in the Baroque: if the old mirrors produced a magic of transformation, distortion, refraction, transmission, combustion, reduction and magnication, the new mirrors (beginning in the second half of the 17th century) made possible a magic of doubling, deceptive resemblance, reproduction and representation. If the deception in the case of an old mirror produced the appearance of an object in distorted form and at the wrong place, the deceptive eect of a new mirror yielded an

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object in its natural form and at the right place, except that it appeared in a symmetrically reciprocal, that is, inverted, space. Simply put: the cabinet of mirrors, a disorienting labyrinth that is still a feature at some carnivals, was surpassed by the hall of mirrors, which demonstrates the serial reproduction of the king (as can be seen on the title page of Thomas Hobbes Leviathan of 1651). The magic of transformation took a back seat to the magic of repetition, just as the magic of craftsmanship took a backseat to the miraculous machines of industrial consumption. Ovids monsters in the Metamorphoses (from werewolves to sirens) were surpassed by the doppelga nger of the Romantic period. The history of shadows proceeded dierently. While a reection could, in essence, be made into a real and stable representation only with the advent of photography, xing a shadow was possible as early as in antiquity. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder tells the following, wellknown myth of the origin of painting: We have no certain knowledge as to the commencement of the art of painting . . . The Egyptians assert that it was invented among themselves, six thousand years before it passed into Greece; a vain boast, it is very evident. As to the Greeks, some say that it was invented at Sicyon, others at Corinth; but they all agree that it originated in tracing lines round the human shadow. The rst stage of the art, they say, was this, the second stage being the employment of single colours; a process known as monochromaton, after it had become more complicated, and which is still in use at the present day . . . On painting we have now said enough, and more than enough; but it will be only proper to append some accounts of the plastic art. Butades, a potter of Sicyon, was the rst who invented, at Corinth, the art of modelling portraits in the earth which he used in his trade. It was through his daughter that he made the discovery; who, being deeply in love with a young man about to depart on a long journey, traced the prole of his face, as thrown upon the wall by the light of the lamp. Upon seeing this, her father lled in the outline, by compressing clay upon the surface, and so made a face in relief, which he then hardened by re along with other articles of pottery. (Book 35, chs. 5, 43) It might be appropriate to mention that the young man went to war and did not return, but his shadow (which was said to travel into the underworld) was captured and xed as an image before his death. The technique of shadow painting (skiagraphy) was very popular in Greece. This technique is intimately linked with the cultural techniques of geometry and astronomy, where the shadow cast by a shadow shaft

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(gnomon) was retraced and used for measurement (of temporal and spatial relations): A shaft of the sundial or gnomon casts shadows on the ground or on the face of the dial according to the positions of the stars and the Sun throughout the year. From Anaximander on, apparently, Greek physicists knew that these readings indicated certain occurrences in the sky. The light from above describes on the earth or on the page a pattern which imitates or represents the forms and real positions of the universe, through the intermediary of the stylus. As nobody in those days really needed a clock, and as the hours varied enormously since summer and winter days, whatever their length or brevity, were always divided into twelve, the sundial was rarely used for telling the time. Thus it was not replaced by the timepiece but was used as an instrument of scientic research in its own right, demonstrating a model of the world, giving the length of shadows at midday on the longest and shortest days, and indicating the equinoxes, solstices and latitude of place, for example. It was more of an observatory than a clock. We do not really know why the shaft or pin is called a gnomon, but we do know that this word designates that which understands, decides, judges, interprets or distinguishes the rule which makes knowledge possible. The construction of the sundial brings natural light and shadow into play, intercepted by this ruler, a tool of knowledge. To this end, [astronomers] were able to construct a rule as precise as the stylus which writes. The black ink on the white page reects the ancient shadows cast by the sun via the pointer or sundial. This point writes unaided on the marble or the sand as if the world knew itself. (Serres, 1995: 7980) Cultural techniques as technologies of the self: even the physiognomic tables of Johann Caspar Lavater work with shadowy outlines to represent individual (and yet typological) facial features.

7. Signs and Signatures

Seals and stamps produced speaking objects long before epigraphics came onto the scene, and they served as precursors not only of signs but trademarks as well. Already, by 50 BC, Roman ceramics circulated as terra sigillata through the civilized world. Imprints of seals conveyed information about the manufacturer and the craftsman making the product. Individual pieces received a signature, in that sense: a name

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functioned as testimony of the manufacturer, and later the owner. At that time, of course, hardly anybody signed anything. In Roman antiquity, with its highly dierentiated contractual laws, the imprint of a thumb was frequently sucient. In the Middle Ages, people marked contracts with three crosses. And yet, as early as 439, a Roman law stipulated that a will could be signed if its content should be kept secret from witnesses present at the signing; sales contracts too were signed by name every once in a while. In royal communications, seals were well into the Middle Ages favored over hand signatures, which were relatively rare, or three crosses, which certainly made possible the famous forgeries of numerous Merovingian documents or the Donation of Constantine. The modern system of a personal signature in ones own hand presupposed not only comprehensive literacy (at least of the elite) but also a judicial system including personal and civil rights and, above all, an acute awareness of the meaning of proper names as a marker of individuality and distinction. During the Middle Ages it was more often clothing, jewelry, a coat of arms or related attributes that indicated ones social status and rank, less so ones proper name. For that reason, any history of signatures is more directly connected to the techniques of cataloguing and systematizing personal names than to any social and historical investigation into the evolution of the European naming system (the way margraves, lieges, or saints were given their titles). As impressive as the evolution of personal identity may strike us in some medieval sources, the written identication of a single person was not just the triumph of the individual, but rst 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 by lists of lawbreakers (both sentenced and at large), heretics and people burned at stakes and eventually by a list of taxpayers in the 15th century. The word signature, in fact, does not appear until 1536; the English legal system anchored the principle of signature in its statutes in the 17th century. The gradual popularization of the signature in early modernity is also attributable to the invention of print, which (following centuries of perfected calligraphy) facilitated the gradual process of 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 personality and identity, seals and stamps were replaced once more by signs of the body: signatures, after all (unlike seals and stamps), have to be made manually, in ones own hand. They endow handwriting generally with an

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iconic quality, not just the signatures of artists that accrued exponentially beginning in the 15th century: a typeface that is not only legally binding, but can also be understood as an individuals trace, a sign of character. In 1622, the Italian doctor and professor of medicine Camillo Baldi published the rst treatise on the meaning of handwriting at the University of Bologna, with the following title: Come da un lettera missiva si conoscano la natura e qualita` dello scrittore (1992). It would of course be a while for these rst steps in the direction of graphology to be developed. More immediately, knowledge of character a kind of proto-psychology ushered in physiognomy, the study of faces. In the third volume of Physiognomic Fragments (1777), Lavater illustrated ve tables in his study with corresponding handwriting samples, but he remained skeptical with regard to handwritings range of interpretations. Before handwriting could be associated with the interiority of the subject, the peoples of Europe had to be alphabetized. Hegel in The Phenomenology of Mind compared ones handwriting with ones voice: The simple lines of the hand, then, the ring and compass of the voice, as also the individual peculiarity of the language used: or again this idiosyncrasy of language, as expressed where the hand gives it more durable existence than the voice can do, viz., in writing, especially in the particular style of handwriting all this is an expression of the inner. (1949: 343) The many representations (and expressions) of this interiority, however, had to be rst registered and decoded. One year before The Phenomenology of Mind rst appeared, Moreau de la Sarthe, a doctor and professor of medicine in Paris, published a translation of Lavaters Physiognomic Fragments; his developments of Lavaters ideas inuenced a number of French clerics who were subsequently preoccupied with the Jean-Hippolyte Michons Syste`me interpretation of handwriting. Abbe de graphologie appeared in 1875, precisely one hundred years after the publication of the rst volume of Lavaters Fragments. This work, which rst introduced the term graphology, was followed by Methode pratique de graphologie in 1878. Michons system was based on a semiotic relationship of graphological signs of chirographic idiosyncrasies that were associated with signes xes with corresponding dispositions of character. The publications coming out of Michons school of thinking, such pieux-Jamin, as the Traite pratique de Graphologie in 1885 by Jules Cre the son of a watch maker, were quickly translated into German. The German Graphological Society was founded in 1896 by Ludwig Klages, Laura von Albertini, and Hans Heinrich Busse. Between 1900 and 1908, the society published the Graphologische Monatshefte. In 1917, Klages published the treatise Handwriting and Character. Hardly any other work by a German philosopher and psychologist has remained

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as popular as this one: it is still in print as Gemeinverstandliche Abri der graphologischen Technik (An accessible sketch of graphological techniques), and, as of 1989, has gone through 29 editions, including numerous examples and handwriting samples.

9. Digital Signature and Numerical Codes

The technological revolutions of the computer age have caused a disempowerment of images and handwriting. These days, hardly anybody practices personal handwriting, which raties what Georg Simmel (in The Philosophy of Money, 1990 [1900]) noted on the typewriter: Writing, an external concrete activity but one that still has a typically individual form, is counteracted in favor of [the typewriters] mechanical uniformity. On the other hand, this has a dual advantage: rst, the written page now only conveys its pure content without any support or disturbance from its written form, and second, it avoids revealing the most personal element, which is so often true of handwriting, in supercial and unimportant as well in the most intimate communications. (1990 [1900]: 509) In the meantime, the ubiquity and strategic rationalization of the various forms of electronic writing have pushed handwriting even further to the sidelines than Simmel ever anticipated. For that very reason, the precious traces of the most personal element were reframed as antiques and rarities and (as with autographs) became highly desired collectors items at auctions triggering bidding wars. For the photos and autographs of stars, computer data and emails are as yet no match. Photographic portraits and signatures have become rare documents today, fetishes of VIPs. Even in the everyday world, by the way, people sign less and less. Physical signs of ones own manual dexterity are increasingly replaced by a new type of seal and stamp: the digital signature. Financial transactions are processed and authorized by PIN codes and routing numbers; numerical codes facilitate all imaginable orders, purchases, and sales. Accounts, insurances, personal data, phone lines and identities are all expressed in sequences of numbers. Numerical codes have pushed names into the background. Digital signatures evolved from (military) cryptology and were introduced in the early 1980s. For the past couple of years they have enjoyed virtually the same legal status as a handwritten signature. Such laws were rst passed in the United States, as with the Utah Digital Signature Act of 1995, and then in Germany (the Digital Signature Act of 1997). Digital signatures are increasingly serving as signatures in global knowledge societies. They fulll 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. Whoever forgets his code gets disconnected because a code must be remembered and never be written down (as banks and telecommunications companies remind us time and again). To put it bluntly: if you want to be an individual today, you have to be able to memorize numerical sequences.

10. Identity and Identification

As I have tried to illustrate in the preceding examples, the epistemological framework for this paper assumes that cultural techniques such as speaking, translating, writing, reading, picturing, calculating, or measuring can reect upon themselves: in speaking about speaking, in writing about writing, in pictures about pictures, in various number or measure-based recursions. Only by being recursive can cultural techniques rotate and refer to one another. A writing person can be pictured, and a picture or a mathematical operation can be written about. 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 water meter), or picture it (with a caption), or simply write it down. Understood as recursive techniques of symbolic work, cultural techniques can be described and practiced as technologies of self in a Foucauldian sense, or, more precisely, as techniques of identity. In a certain sense, they generate the subjects that, retrospectively, come to understand themselves as the preconditions and nodal points of their very operations. However, the structure of the sentences articulating a self-reective identity the aporetic self-consciousness of idealist philosophy, so to speak is not a self-identical I I. Instead, they encode the proposition I know that I p, as Ernst Tugendhat (1979) has demonstrated in his linguistic lectures on self-consciousness and self-determination. Thirty years ago, Tugendhat (together with Wittgenstein) assumed a linguistic turn. This paradigm shift has, in the past 30 years, not only been replaced or complemented by a series of other turns, such as the pictorial turn or the sonic turn, but has been elevated to the level of cultural-technical generality. The possible recursions of cultural techniques are what generate questions of identity and identication in the rst place; they produce recursive relationships, which dier from tautologies in that they require media: screens and mirrors, paper and books, instruments of measurement and calculation, sound and visual storage equipment, computer. Cultural techniques cannot be practiced without media, but they cannot simply be reduced to media technologies either. Even if it is unclear which cultural technique should be considered the rst, it is safe to argue that cultural techniques are always already older than their media and that they are certainly older than the terms which emerged from them. People wrote long before any notions of writing or the

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alphabet were conceived; pictures and statues did not inspire the idea of a picture until thousands of years later; to date, some people still sing and make music without any conception of tone or a system of notes. Counting, too, is older than numbers. Most known cultures did, no doubt, count or perform certain mathematical operations, but they did not necessarily derive the notion of a number from such operations. As early 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 moonrise, menstruation cycles (cf. Leroi-Gourhan, 1993: 370; Marshack, 1991; Barrow, 1992: 3133; De Mause, 1982: 2723)? It was quite possible to count without corresponding words or signs, such as with the aid of notches in bones, ngers, or stones that were meant to represent the object to be counted: animals in a herd, soldiers, or distances (as with the Greek hodometer). The cultural technique of counting does not necessarily force abstract systems of numbers into being. Some languages, for example, use dierent numerals for dierent classes of objects. In 1881, Franz Boas published a table of numerals used by native peoples in Canada, in which he documented the systems of numerals for at, round and long objects, and for humans, canoes and measurements. In his catalogue, he makes it clear that any hypothesis about the evolution of mathematical abstractions should be approached with caution; the Canadian natives, after all, were familiar with plain numerals and measuring terms as well. The history of cuneiform writing, in fact, even suggests that plain numerals may be older than numerals attached to concrete objects. This leads to the conclusion that the use of plain numerals is independent of the denition of any abstract notion of numbers. Codes, it appears, may not need any systematic foundations to function precisely. Translated by Michael Wutz

Note
This article was previously published as Tiere zweiter Ordnung. ber Kultur. Theorie und Praxis der Kulturtechniken der Identita t in U Kulturreflexion, ed. Dirk Baecker, Matthias Kettner and Dirk Rustemeyer (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008): 99117.

References
Baldi C (1992) Come da una lettera missiva si conoscano la natura e qualita` dello scrittore, ed. Antonucci L. Pordenone: Studio Tesi. Baltrus aitis J (1996) Der Spiegel. Entdeckungen, Tauschungen, Phantasien, trans. R. Gieen: Anabas. Ricke G and Voullie Barrow JD (1992) Pi in the Sky: Counting, Thinking, and Being. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Belting H (1996) Aus dem Schatten des Todes. Bild und Ko rper in den Anfa ngen. In: C von Barloewen (ed.) Der Tod in den Weltkulturen und Weltreligionen. Mu nchen: Eugen Diederichs. Burzachechi M (1962) Oggetti parlanti nelle epigrafi greche. Epigraphica (The International Journal of Epigraphy) 24: 354. Chauvet J-M, Brunel E and Hillaire C (1995) Grotte Chauvet bei VallonPont-dArc. Altsteinliche Ho hlenkunst im Tal der Arde`che, trans. Wu st 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. hnlichkeit und Beruhrung. Archaologie, Anachronismus Didi-Huberman G (1999) A und Modernitat des Abdrucks, trans. Hollender C. Ko ln: 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 rappresentazione, lillusione, limmagine. 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 Massachusetts Press. Galton F (1965 [1892]) Fingerprints. New York: Da Capo Press. Groebner V (2004) Der Schein der Person. Steckbrief, Ausweis und Kontrolle im Mittelalter. Mu nchen: C. H. Beck. Hegel GWF (1949) The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. Baillie JM. London: Allen & Unwin. crits: A Selection. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan J (2002 [1977]) E 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: Cambridge University 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 Mans First Art, Symbol and Notation. Kingston, RI: Moyer Bell Ltd. Panati C (1989) Panatis 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?docPerseus:text:1999. 02.0137 (accessed 16 August 2012). Polybios (1984) Historia VI, 53. Qtd. in Reinle A, Das stellvertretende Bildnis. Plastiken und Gemalde von der Antike bis ins 19. Jahrhundert. Zu rich/ Mu nchen: Artemis. Raphael M (1979) Wiedergeburtsmagie in der Altsteinzeit. Zur Geschichte der Religion 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, 73123. Simmel G (1990) The Philosophy of Money, 2nd edn, ed. Frisby D, trans. Bottomore T and Frisby D. London: Routledge.

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Svenbro J (1999) Archaisches und klassisches Griechenland: Die Erfindung des stillen Lesens, trans. Schwibs B. In: G Cavallo and R Chartier (eds) Die Welt des Lesens. Von der Schriftrolle zum Bildschirm. Frankfurt/Paris: Campus/ ditions de la Maison des Sciences de lHomme. E Tugendhat E (1989) Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination (Studies in Contemporary German Thought), trans. Stern P. Boston: MIT Press. Von Schlosser J (1993) Tote Blicke [191011]. Geschichte der Portratbildnerei in Wachs. Ein Versuch, ed. Medicus T. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

Thomas Macho received his PhD from the University of Vienna in 1976 and completed his Habilitation at the University of Klagenfurt in 1983. In 1993 he was appointed Professor of Cultural History at Humboldt University 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 Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Weber State University and the editor of Weber: The Contemporary West. He is the co-editor of Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology (Cornell University Press, 1997), the co-translator of Friedrich Kittlers Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford University Press, 1999, with Georey Winthrop-Young), and the author of Enduring Words: Narrative in a Changing Media Ecology (University of Alabama Press, 2009).

Article

Cultural Techniques: Or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German Media Theory1
Bernhard Siegert
t Weimar, Germany Bauhaus-Universita

Theory, Culture & Society 30(6) 4865 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263276413488963 tcs.sagepub.com

Abstract This paper seeks to introduce cultural techniques to an Anglophone readership. Specifically geared towards an Anglophone readership, the paper relates the reemergence 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 antihumanist current of thought frequently associated with the work of Friedrich Kittler. Post-hermeneutic rather than anti-hermeneutic in its outlook, the reconceptualization 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 Cassirers Philosophy of Symbolic Forms proclaimed that the critique of reason had become the critique of culture (see Cassirer, 1955: 80). Over half a century and one world war later, so-called
Corresponding author: t Weimar, Cranachstr. 47, 99421 Weimar, Germany. Bernhard Siegert, IKKM, Bauhaus-Universita Email: bernhard.siegert@uni-weimar.de http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

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German media theory suggested an alternative formula: The critique of reason becomes the critique of media. The two axioms are dicult to reconcile; it therefore comes as no surprise that in the wake of German reunication and the subsequent country-wide reconstitution of cultural studies (Kulturwissenschaften), a war has been waging that pits culture against media. The stakes are considerable. Both parties are striving to inherit nothing less than the throne of the transcendental that has remained vacant since the abdication of the critique of reason. The struggle has been concealed by a rapid succession of turns and repeated attempts at pacifying the combatants by introducing ecumenical monikers like cultural media studies (kulturwissenschaftliche Medienforschung). Around the turn of the century the war of and over German cultural studies witnessed the re-emergence of the old concept of cultural techniques. Since this particular term covers a lot of what Anglophone regions like to label German Media Theory, it is necessary to step back and take another look at the latter in order to explain to the other side of the Channel and the Atlantic how the notion of cultural techniques development aects and diers from so-called German Media Theory (for more on this observer construct see Winthrop-Young, 2006; Horn, 2007; Peters, 2008). The dicult reception of German Media Theory in Britain and North America is linked to its marked recalcitrance: it never aspired to join the Humanities in their usual playground. What arose in the 1980s in Freiburg and has come to be associated with names such as Friedrich Kittler, Klaus Theweleit, Manfred Schneider, Norbert Bolz, Raimar Zons, Georg-Christoph Tholen, Jochen Ho risch, Wolfgang Hagen, Avital Ronell (and maybe also my own) was never able to give itself an appropriate name. It denitely wasnt media theory. One of the early candidates was media analysis (Medienanalyse), a term designed to indicate a paradigmatic replacement of both psychoanalysis and discourse analysis (thus arming both an indebtedness to and a technologically informed distancing from Lacan and Foucault). The media and literature analysis to invoke another short-lived label that emerged in the 1980s was not overly concerned with the theory or history of individual media. It had no intention of competing with lm studies, television studies, computer science, or other such disciplines. Instead it focused primarily on literature in order to explore new histories of the mind, of the soul and of the senses. These were removed from the grasp of literary studies, philosophy, and psychoanalysis and instead transferred to a dierent domain: media. Media analysis as a frame of reference for other things, I read in the minutes of a 1992 meeting of the pioneers of the nameless science convened to sketch the future shape of media research in Germany. However, the term media did not identify a focus or a clearly dened set of objects ripe for investigation; instead it indicated a change of the frame of reference for the

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analysis of phenomena hitherto under the purview of the established humanities. In Kittlers (in)famous words, it was a matter of expelling the spirit from the humanities (see Kittler, 1980). To repeat, the objects of research that dened communication studies (press, lm, television, radio that is, primarily mass media) were never of great interest. Literature and media analysis replaced the emphasis on authors or styles with a sustained attention to inconspicuous technologies of knowledge (e.g., index cards, writing tools and typewriters), discourse operators (e.g., quotation marks), pedagogical media (e.g., blackboards), unclassiable media such as phonographs or stamps, instruments like the piano, and disciplining techniques (e.g., language acquisition and alphabetization). 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 Gumbrechts famous catchphrase, this reorientation aimed to replace the hegemony of understanding, which inevitably tied meaning to a variant of subjectivity or self-presence, with the materialities of communication (Gumbrecht and Pfeier, 1988) the non-hermeneutic non-sense as the base and abyss of meaning. As a result, little attention was paid to the question of what was represented in the media, or how and why it was represented in one way and not in another. In contrast to content analysis or the semantics of representation, German media theory shifted the focus from the representation of meaning to the conditions of representation, from semantics to the exterior and material conditions that constitute semantics. Media therefore was not only an alternative frame of reference for philosophy and literature but also an attempt to overcome French theorys xation on discourse by turning it from its philosophical or archaeological head on to its historical and technological feet. While Derridas (1998) diagnosis of Rousseaus orality remained stuck in a thoroughly ahistorical phonocentrism, this orality was now referred to historico-empirical cultural techniques of maternally centred 18th-century oral pedagogy (Kittler, 1990: 2753). Derridas (1987) postal principle, in turn, was no longer a metaphor for dierance but a marked reminder that dierence always already comes about by means of the operating principles of technical media (Siegert, 1999; Winthrop-Young, 2002). The exteriority of Lacans signier now also involved its implementation according to the dierent ways in which the real was technologically implemented. Last but not least, the focus on the materiality and technicality of meaning constitution prompted German media theorists to turn Foucaults concept of the historical apriori into a technical apriori by referring the Foucauldian archive to media technologies. This archaeology of cultural systems of meaning, which some chose to vilify by axing the ridiculous label of media or techno-determinism, was (in Nietzsches sense of the word) a gay science. It did not write media

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history but extracted it from arcane sources (arcane, that is, from the point of view of the traditional humanities) at a time when nobody had yet seriously addressed the concept of media. Moreover, it was not passion for theory that made renegade humanities scholars focus their attention on media as the material substrate of culture but archival obsession. And the many literature scholars, philosophers, anthropologists and communication experts, who were suddenly forced to realize how much there was beyond the hermeneutic reading of texts when it came to understanding the medial conditions of literature and truth or the formation of humans and their souls, were much too oended by this sudden invasion into their academic habitat to ask what theoretical justication lay behind this forced entry. In other words, what set German media theory on a collision course with Anglo-American media studies as well as with communication studies and sociology, all of which appeared bewitched by the grand directive of social enlightenment to exclusively ponder the role of media within the public sphere, was the act of abandoning mass media and the history of communication in favour of those insignicant, unprepossessing technologies that underlie the constitution of meaning and tend to escape our usual methods of understanding. And here we come face to face with a decisive feature of this post-hermeneutic turn towards the exteriority/ materiality of the signier: there is no subject area, no ontologically identiable domain that could be called media. Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan already emphasized that the decision taken by communication studies, sociology and economics to speak of media only in terms of mass media is woefully insucient. Any approach to communication that places media exclusively within the public sphere (which is itself a ctional construct bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment) will systematically misconstrue the abyss of non-meaning in and from which media operate. For those eager to disentangle themselves from the grip of Critical Theory, according to which media were responsible for eroding the growth of autonomous individuality and the alienation from authentic experiences (a diagnosis preached to postwar West Germany by an opinionated conglomerate composed of the Frankfurt School, the Suhrkamp publishing house, newspapers like Die Zeit, social sciences and philosophy departments, and bourgeois feuilletons), this abyss was referred to as war. If the telegraph, the telephone or the radio were analysed as mass media at all, then it was with a view towards uncovering their military origin and exposing the negative horizon of war of mass media and their alleged public status. Hence the enthusiasm with which the 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 historians of science who in the 1980s abandoned the history of theory in lieu of a non-teleological history of practices and technologies enacted

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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 under which German media theory of the 1980s assumed its distinct shape. To invoke the public sphere was to invoke ideas such as enlightened consciousness, self-determination, freedom and so on, whereas to speak of war implied an unconscious processed by symbolic media and the notion that freedom was a kind of narcissism associated with the Lacanian mirror stage. Against the communicative reason as an alleged telos of mass media, and against the technophobe obsession with semantic depth, the partisans of the unmoored signier embraced the history of communication engineering that had been blocked out by humanist historiography. However, the history of communication was not simply denied; continuing Heideggers history of being (Seinsgeschichte), it now appeared as an epoch of media rather than a horizon of meaning (see Heidegger, 2002). The goal was to reconceptualize media by moving away from the established logocentric narrative that starts out with the immediacy of oral communication, passes through a dierentiation into scriptographic and typographic media and then leads to the secondary orality of radio. But if media are no longer embedded in a horizon of meaning, if they no longer constitute an ontological object, how can they be approached and observed? Answer: by reconstructing the discourse networks in which the real, the imaginary and the symbolic are stored, transmitted and processed. Is every history of paper already a media history? Is every history of the telescope a media history? Or every history of the postal system? Clearly, no. The history of paper only turns into a media history if it serves as a reference system for the analysis of bureaucratic or scientic data processing. When the chancelleries of Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen replaced parchment with paper, this act decisively changed the meaning of power (Vismann, 2008: 79, 84). The history of the telescope, in turn, becomes a media history if it is taken as a system of reference for an analysis of seeing (Vogl, 2007). Finally, a history of the postal system is a media history if it serves as the system of reference for a history of communication (Siegert, 1999). That is to say, media do not emerge independently and outside of specic historical practices. Yet at the same time history is itself a system of meaning that operates across a media-technological abyss of non-meaning that must remain hidden. The insistence on these media reference systems, designed as an attack on the reason- or mind-based humanist reference systems, was guided by a deeply anti-humanist rejection of the tradition of the Enlightenment and the established discursive rules of hermeneutic interpretation. This constitutes both a similarity and a dierence between German media theory and that prominent portion of American posthumanist discourse

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which is rooted in the history of cybernetics. Within the US, the notion of the posthuman emerged from a framework dened by the blurring of the boundaries between man and machine. However, while US postcybernetic media studies are tied to thinking about bodies and organisms, German media theory is linked to a shift in the history of meaning arising from a revolt against the hermeneutical tradition of textual interpretation and the sociological tradition of communication. As a result there is a discernible dierence between the cybernetically grounded American posthuman and the continental posthumanism rooted in Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and Lacan. Within the framework of cybernetics, the notion of becoming human had as its point of departure an anthropologically stable humanity of the human that endured until increasing feedback systems subjected the human to increasing hybridizations, in the course of which the human turned either into a servomechanism attached to machines and networks, or into a machine programmed by alien software (see Hayles, 1999, 2010). By contrast, French (and German) posthumanism signalled that the humanities had awakened from their anthropological slumber. This awakening, in turn, called for an anti-hermeneutic posthumanism able to deconstruct humanism as an occidental transcendental system of meaning production. For the Germans, the means to achieve this goal were media. The guiding question for German media theory, therefore, was not How did we become posthuman? but How was the human always already historically mixed with the non-human? But it was not until the new understanding of media led to the focus on cultural techniques that this variant of posthumanism was able to discern anities with the actor-network ideas of Bruno Latour and others. Now German observers were able to discern that something similar had happened in the early 2000s in the United States, when the advent and merging of Critical Animal Studies and post-cybernetic studies brought about a new understanding of media as well as a reconceptualization of the posthuman as always already intertwined between human and nonhuman.

Media after the Postwar Era: Cultural Techniques

If the rst phase of German media theory (from the early 1980s to the late 1990s) can be labelled anti-hermeneutic, the second phase (from the late 1990s to the present), which witnessed the conceptual transformation of media into cultural techniques, may be labelled post-hermeneutic. Underneath this change, which served to relieve media and technology of the burden of having to play the bogeyman of hermeneutics and Critical Theory, there was a second rupture that only gradually came to light. The new conceptual career of cultural techniques was linked to nothing 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 manipulation of the masses by the media all of this arose from the experiences of the Second World War and came to be part and parcel of the moral duty of ` ge the German postwar intellectual. (At a lecture at the Colle International de Philosophie in 1984, addressing among others Ju rgen Habermas and Dieter Henrich, Werner Hamacher polemically characterized German postwar philosophy after Heidegger and Adorno as reparation payments to Anglo-Saxon common-sense rationalism and philosophies of norms and normativity.) But it was also precisely that against which the anti-hermeneutic techno-euphoria of media analysis and the media-materialist readings of French theory rebelled. To polemically confront the public sphere with war, to oppose the technophobia of Critical Theory with Foucauldian discourse analysis, the machinic thinking of Deleuze and Guattari, or the posthumanist Lacanian logic of the signier, was no less a symptom of the German postwar. Not surprisingly, US intellectuals who had received poststructuralism as a kind of negative New Criticism had diculties coming to grips with the polemical tone that permeated Kittlers writings (Winthrop-Young, 2011). It was, ironically, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the GDR that helped re-direct German postwar media theory. Cultural Studies (Kulturwissenschaften), which in 1990 no longer existed in West Germany but had been practised in the GDR, now became one of the few 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 polemically deployed against long-standing hermeneutic aspirations and Critical Theorys yearning for a non-alienated existence, could now be designated as cultural techniques. The war was over and all the index cards, quotation marks, pedagogies of reading and writing, Hindu-Arabic numerals, diagrammatic writing operators, slates, pianofortes, and so on were given a new home. This implied, rst, that on both a personal and an institutional level media history and research came to abandon the shelter granted by literature departments. I myself left the institutional spaces of Germanistik (the study of German language and literature) in 1993 to become an assistant professor of the History and Aesthetics of Media in the re-established Institut fu r Kultur- und Kunstwissenschaft at the Humboldt University in the former East Berlin. Second, by virtue of their promotion to the status of cultural techniques, media were now more than merely a dierent frame of reference for the analysis of literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Third, given their new conceptual status it now became possible to endow media with their own history and lay the groundwork for more systematic theoretical denitions. Fourth, critical attention no longer focused on revealing which media technologies provided the hard base of the chimeras known as

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spirit (Geist), understanding, or the public sphere. The focus is now culture itself. Nowhere is this reorientation of German media theory more noticeable than in the changed attitude towards anthropology. During the postwar phase anthropology was as ostracized as man himself whom Kittler famously kept debunking as so-called man (der sogenannte Mensch). With the shift to cultural techniques, German media theory adopted a considerably more relaxed attitude towards an historical anthropology that relates cultural communication to technologies rather than to anthropological constants. By latching on to the old concept of cultural techniques, it signals its interest in anthropotechnics (e.g., see Schu ttpelz, 2006) though it remains doubtful whether this indicates an anthropological turn (Siegert, 2007). As indicated above, this postwar turn from anti-humanism to posthumanism appears to resemble the US turn from a somewhat restricted understanding of posthumanism as a form of transhumanism (i.e., the biotechnological hybridization of human beings) to a more complex programme of posthumanities eager to put some distance between itself and old notions of the posthuman (see Wolfe, 2010). To be sure, what both turns have in common is a reluctance to interpret the post in posthuman in an historical sense, as something that comes after the human. Rather, in both cases the post implies a sense of always already, an ontological entanglement of human and non-human. However, the non-human of the cultural techniques approach is related in the rst instance to matters of technique and technology, that of the American posthumanities to biology and the biological. In North America the turn from the posthuman to the posthumanities is indebted to deconstruction; more to the point, it follows from the older Derridas questioning of the animal. In short, the German focus on the relationship between humans and machines nds its American counterpart in the questioning of the equally precarious relationship between humans and animals (WinthropYoung, 2009). But although the discussion of the manmachineanimal dierence (i.e., the anthropological dierence) also plays an important part in German discussions, and despite the links between German notions of cultural techniques and the French conuence of anthropology and technology that is now of such great importance to the American debate, critical trans-Atlantic dierences remain. While the American side pursues a deconstruction of the anthropological dierence with a strong ethical focus, the Germans are more concerned with technological or medial fabrications or artices. From the point of view of the cultural techniques approach, anthropological dierences are less the eect of a stubborn anthropo-phallo-carno-centric metaphysics than the result of culture-technical and media-technological practices. The dierence is especially apparent in the zoological works of German cultural sciences that tend to be less concerned with discussions of Heidegger, Nietzsche,

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Agamben and Derrida than with the medial functions of animals that is, with the way in which cultural techniques like domestication, breeding, or sacricial practices in connection with the emblematization of certain medial virtues and capabilities of animals, serve to create, shift, erode and blur the anthropological dierence (e.g., Schneider, 2007). The study of cultural techniques, however, is not aimed at removing the anthropological dierence between human and non-human animals by means of subtle deconstructivist refutations of the many attempts to distinguish between that which calls itself human and that which is called animal. Its goal is not to grant rights to animals, or deprive humans of certain privileges. Nor is it bent on critiquing the dogma of pure ontological dierence. Rather, it is concerned with decentring the distinction between human and non-human by insisting on the radical technicity of this distinction something, incidentally, that Cary Wolfe and David Wills come close to in their recent exploration of Animal Dasein and the deep-seated technicity of the human (Wills, 2008; Wolfe, 2012). Human and non-human animals are always already recursively intertwined because the irreducible multiplicity and historicity of the anthropological is always already processed by cultural techniques and media technologies. Ahabs becoming-whale is not rooted in Herman Melvilles bioethics but in the cultural technique of whale hunting. Without this technologically oriented decentring there is the danger of confusing ethics with sentimentality: the human/animal dierence remains caught in a mirror stage, and the humanity that is exorcized from humans is simply transferred on to animals which now appear as the better humans. But what, then, were and are cultural techniques? Conceptually we may distinguish three phases. Ever since antiquity the European understanding of culture implies that it is technologically constituted. The very word culture, derived from the Latin colere and cultura, refers to the development and practical usage of means of cultivating and settling the soil with homesteads and cities. As an engineering term, Kulturtechnik, usually translated as agricultural or rural engineering, has been around since the late 19th century. As dened by the sixth edition of Meyers Groes Konversationslexikon (1904), cultural techniques comprise all agricultural technical procedures informed by the engineering sciences that serve to improve soil conditions, such as irrigation, drainage, enclosure and river regulation. To a certain extent the post (cold) war turn of German media theory builds on this tradition. The corrals, pens and enclosures that separate hunter from prey (and that in the course of co-evolutionary domestication accentuate the anthropological dierence between 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. Thus the concept of cultural techniques clearly and unequivocally repudiates

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the ontology of philosophical concepts. Humans as such do not exist independently of cultural techniques of hominization, time as such does not exist independently of cultural techniques of time measurement, and space as such does not exist independently of cultural techniques of spatial control. This does not mean that the theory of cultural techniques is anti-ontological; rather, it moves ontology into the domain of ontic operations. Similar ideas relating to the production of ontological distinctions by means of ontic cultural techniques are to be found in American posthumanities, for instance, with regard to houses and the cultural techniques of dwelling (e.g., Wills, 2008: 56). This discourse, however, remains tied to the level of philosophical universals. There is no such thing as the house, or the house as such, there are only historically and culturally contingent cultural techniques of shielding oneself o and processing the distinction between inside and outside. What (still) separates the theory of cultural techniques from those of the posthumanities, then, is that the former focuses on empirical historical objects while the latter prefer philosophical idealizations. Starting in the 1970s, basic skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic were referred to as elementary Kulturtechniken; television and information and communications technology were added in the 1980s. What separates this particular usage of the term from its more recent application is that it still reveals a traditional middle-class understanding of culture that links culture to humanist educational imperatives. Culture still serves to conjure up the sphere of art, good taste and education (Bildung) in a Goethean sense in other words, culture is still seen as the repository of indispensable ingredients for the formation of a whole human. With this background in mind, the reference to television or the internet as cultural techniques aims at subjecting these new media to the sovereignty of the book as opposed to a more popcultural usage that challenged the monopoly of the alphabetise (Lacan) over our senses. By establishing a link with the older, technologically oriented understanding of culture, cultural techniques research breaks with the 19th-century middle-class tradition that conceived of culture exclusively in terms of the book reigning over all the other arts. To be sure, within the new media-theoretical and culturalist context cultural techniques do refer to the so-called elementary cultural techniques, but they now also encompass the domains of graphe exceeding the alpha-numerical code. Operative forms of writing such as calculus, cards and catalogues, whose particular eectiveness rests on their intrinsic relationship to their material carrier (which serves to endow them with a certain degree of autonomy), are of considerable interest to those studying cultural techniques. By ascending to the status of a new media-theoretical and cultural studies paradigm, cultural techniques now also include means of time measurement, legal procedures, and the 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 of images, ethnology, ne arts, and the histories of science and law inasmuch as these disciplines became subject to the cultural turn themselves. In hindsight, the notion of cultural techniques was received maybe all too willingly by posthumanist cultural studies because it subverted the nonsensical war of succession between media and culture over the vacant throne of the transcendental by subjecting the two combatants to further investigation (Schu ttpelz, 2006: 90). That is to say, media are scrutinized with a view toward their technicity, technology is scrutinized with a view toward its instrumental and anthropological determination, and culture is scrutinized with a view toward its boundaries, its other and its idealized notion of bourgeois Bildung. Against this background, and drawing upon the most recent discussions, we can add ve further features that characterize the theoretical prole of cultural techniques. (i) Essentially, cultural techniques are conceived as operative chains that precede the media concepts they generate: Cultural techniques such as writing, reading, painting, counting, making music are always older than the concepts that are generated from them. People wrote long before they conceptualized writing or alphabets; millennia passed before pictures and statues gave rise to the concept of the image; and until today, people sing or make music without knowing anything about tones or musical notation systems. Counting, too, is older than the notion of numbers. To be sure, most cultures counted or performed certain mathematical operations; but they did not necessarily derive from this a concept of number. (Macho, 2003: 179) However, operations such as counting or writing always presuppose technical objects capable of performing and to a considerable extent, determining these operations. As an historically given micro-network of technologies and techniques, cultural techniques are the exteriority and/or materiality of the signier. An abacus allows for dierent calculations than ten ngers; a computer, in turn, allows for dierent calculations than an abacus. When we speak of cultural techniques, therefore, we envisage a more or less complex actor network that comprises technological objects as well as the operative chains they are part of and that congure or constitute them. (ii) To speak of cultural techniques presupposes a notion of plural cultures. This is not only in deference to notions of multi-culturality, it also implies a posthumanist understanding of culture that no longer posits man as the exclusive subject of culture. To quote a beautiful formulation by Cornelia Vismann: If media theory were or had a grammar, that agency would nd its expression in objects claiming the grammatical

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subject position and cultural techniques standing in for verbs (2010: 171).2 Objects are tied into practices in order to produce something that within a given culture is addressed as a person. In accordance with Philippe Descolas (2013) dierent dispositives of being (naturalism, animism, totemism, analogism), natural things, animals, images or technological objects may also appear as persons. (iii) In order to dierentiate cultural techniques from other technologies, Thomas Macho has argued that only those techniques should be labelled cultural techniques that involve symbolic work. Symbolic work requires specic cultural techniques, such as speaking, translating and understanding, forming and representing, calculating and measuring, writing and reading, singing and making music (Macho, 2008: 99).3 Machos suggestion is certainly very helpful when it comes to countering a detrimental ination: nowadays planning, transparency, yoga, gaming, and even forgetting have been promoted to cultural techniques. What separates cultural techniques from all others is their potential self-reference or pragmatics of recursion: From their very beginnings, speaking can be spoken about and communication be communicated. We can produce paintings that depict paintings or painters; lms often feature other lms. One can only calculate and measure with reference to calculation and measurement. And one can of course write about writing, sing about singing, and read about reading. On the other hand, its impossible to thematize re while making a re, just as it is impossible to thematize eld tilling while tilling a eld, cooking while cooking, and hunting while hunting. We may talk about recipes or hunting practices, represent a re in pictorial or dramatic form, or sketch a new building, but in order to do so we need to avail ourselves of the techniques of symbolic work, which is to say, we are not making a re, hunting, cooking, or building at that very moment. Building on a phrase coming out of systems theory, we could say that cultural techniques are second-order techniques. (Macho, 2008: 100, emphasis in original) It is no doubt very tempting to follow a proposal of such alluring simplicity, but unfortunately it suers from an overly reductive notion of the symbolic in combination with a too static distinction between rst- and second-order techniques. Granted, you cannot thematize the making of re while making re, but this certainly does not apply to cooking, at vi-Strausss structuralist analysis. least not if you pay heed to Claude Le Cooking, a dierentiated set of activities linked to food preparation, is both a technical procedure that brings about a transformation of the real and a symbolic act distinct from other possible acts. For instance, as part of the culinary triangle underlying the symbolic order of food

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preparation, the act of boiling something means to neither roast nor vi-Strauss, 1978: 478490). Hence every instance of boiling, smoke it (Le roasting or smoking is always already an act of communication because it communicates to both the inside and the outside that within a certain culture certain animals are boiled, roasted and smoked like (or unlike) in other cultures, be they near or far. Because it is constituted by structural dierences cooking does indeed thematize cooking in the act of cooking. Furthermore, ploughing too can be a symbolic act. If, as ancient sources attest, ploughs were used to draw a sacred furrow to demarcate the limits of a new city, then this constitutes an act of writing in the sense of Greek graphe. To plough is in this case to engage in symbolic work because the graphein serves to mark the distinction between inside and outside, civilization and barbarism, an inside domain in which the law prevails and one outside in which it does not. Hence doors, as well, are a fundamental cultural technique, given that the operations of opening and closing them process and render visible the distinction between inside and outside. A door, then, is both material object and symbolic thing, a rst- as well as a second-order technique. This, precisely, is the source of its distinctive power. The door is a machine by which humans are subjected to the law of the signier. It makes a dierence, Macho writes, whether you whittle and adorn an arrow or whether you shoot it at an animal (2011: 45). But does this not ontologize and universalize an occidental rationality that always already separates two dierent types of knowledge: culture on the one hand and technology on the other? What if the arrow can be used only after it has been decorated? What if said decoration is part of the arrows technical make-up? Machos view of the symbolic still implies some kind of tool-making animal that employs media to perform symbolic work and thus appears as the master or manipulator of the symbolic. As a result the analysis elides both those techniques that enable the symbolic to enter the real and the anthropotechniques that generate the anthropological dierence in the rst place. In short, it is problematic to base an understanding of cultural techniques on static concepts of technologies and symbolic work, that is, on an ontologically operating dierentiation between rst- and second-order techniques. Separating the two must be replaced by chains of operations and techniques. In order to situate cultural techniques before the grand epistemic distinction between culture and technology, sense and nonsense, code and thing, it is necessary to elaborate a processual (rather than ontological) denition of rst- and second-order techniques. We need to focus on how recursive operative chains bring about a switch from rst- to second-order techniques (and back), on how nonsense generates sense, how the symbolic is ltered out of the real or how, conversely, the symbolic is incorporated into the real, and how the material signier is present in the signied and manages to create a physical presence eect.

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Macho himself alludes to the possibility of such a processual denition by speaking of potential self-reference. One prime example is the art of weaving. If you adhere to the rigid distinction between rst- and secondorder techniques, weaving will not qualify as a cultural technique because it does not exhibit any self-referential qualities. The term only makes sense once a piece of tapestry depicts a piece of tapestry, or a garment appears on a garment. Yet the very technique, the ongoing combination of weave and pattern, always already produces an ornamental pattern that by virtue of its technical repetition refers to itself and therefore (according to Derrida) displays sign character (see Derrida, 1985). We may also distinguish Marcel Mausss so-called techniques of the body (Mauss, 1992) from cultural techniques, that is, from the dierent ways in which cultures make use of bodily activities such as swimming, running, giving birth (Maye, 2010: 135). On the other hand, the recursive chains of operation that constitute cultural techniques always already contain bodily techniques. According to Mauss, writing, reading and calculating, too, are techniques of the body (rather than exclusively mental techniques); they are the results of teaching docile bodies that today are in competition with the performance of interactive navigational instruments. (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 that make up these distinctions are recursive, that is, any given distinction may 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 domestic and wild animals. Or the distinction sacred/profane can be introduced on the speech side of the speech/absence of speech distinction resulting in a split between sacred and profane languages. The constitutive force of these distinctions and recursions is the reason why the contingent culture in which we live is frequently taken to be the real, natural order of things. Researching cultural techniques therefore also amounts to an epistemological engagement with the medial conditions of whatever lays claim to reality. However, it is crucial to keep in mind that the distinctions in question are processed by media in the broadest sense of the word (for instance, doors process the distinctions between inside/ outside), which therefore cannot be restricted to one or the other side of the distinction. Rather, they assume the position of a mediating third preceding rst and second (see Serres, 1982: 53). These media are basal cultural techniques. In other words, the analysis of cultural techniques observes and describes techniques involved in operationalizing distinctions in the real. They generate the forms in the shape of perceptible unities of distinctions. Operating a door by closing and opening it allows us to

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perform, observe, encode, address and ultimately wire the dierence between inside and outside (see Siegert, 2012). Concrete actions serve to distinguish them from the preceding non-dierentiatedness. In more general terms, all cultural techniques are based on the transition from non-distinction to distinction and back. Yet we always have to bear in mind that the distinction between nature and culture itself is based on a contingent, culturally processed distinction. Cultural techniques precede the distinction of nature and culture. They initiate acculturation, yet their transgressive use may just as well lead to deculturalization; inevitably they partake in determining whether vi-Strauss something belongs to the cultural domain or not. What Le wrote about the art of cooking applies to all cultural techniques: [T]he system demonstrates that the art of cooking [. . .] being situated between nature and culture, has as its function to ensure their articulation one vi-Strauss, 1978: 489). with the other (Le (v) Cultural techniques are not only media that sustain, disseminate, internalize and institutionalize sign systems, they also destabilize cultural codes, erase signs and deterritorialize sounds and images. As well as cultures of distinction we also have cultures of de-dierentiation (what once was labelled savage and placed in direct opposition to culture). Cultural techniques do not only colonize bodies. Tied to specic practices and chains of operation, they also serve to de-colonize bodies, images, text and music (see Holl, 2011). Media appear as code-generating or code-destroying interfaces between cultural orders and a real that cannot be symbolized. Resorting to a dierent terminology, we can refer to the nature/culture framework in terms of the real and the symbolic. By assuming the position of the third, an interface between the real and the symbolic, basal cultural techniques always already imply an unmarked space. By necessarily including the unmarked space that is excluded by the processed distinctions, cultural techniques always contain the possibility of liquidating the latter. In other words, cultural techniques always have to take account of what they exclude. For instance, upon closer scrutiny it becomes apparent that musical notational systems operate against a background of what elides representation and symbolization the sounds and noise of the real. Any state-of-the-art account of cultural techniques more precisely, any account mindful of the technological state of the art must be based on an historically informed understanding of electric and electronic media as part of the technical and mathematical operationalization of the real. It will therefore by necessity have to include what under Old European conditions had been relegated to the other side of culture: the erasure of distinctions as well as the deterritorialization and disguration of representations the fall of the signier from the height of the symbolic to the depths of the real. Translated by Georey Winthrop-Young.

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Notes
1. This article is also the introductory essay in a volume on cultural techniques forthcoming 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).

References
Cassirer, E. (1955) The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1: Language, trans. R. Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press. Derrida, J. (1985) Signature Event Context, pp. 307330 in Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1987) The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. A. Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1998) Of Grammatology, trans. G.C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Descola, P. (2013) Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. J. Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gumbrecht, H.U. and Pfeiffer, K.L. (eds) (1988) Materialities of Communication. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N.K. (2010) Cybernetics, pp. 145156 in W.J.T. Mitchell and M.B.N. Hansen (eds) Critical Terms for Media Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, M. (2002) Time and Being, pp. 125 in On Time and Being, trans. J. Stambaugh. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holl, U. (2011) Postkoloniale Resonanzen, Archiv fur Mediengeschichte 11: 115128. Horn, E. (2007) Editors Introduction: There Are No Media, Grey Room 29: 613. Kittler, F. (ed.) (1980) Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften. Programme des Poststrukturalismus. Paderborn: Ferdinand Scho ningh. Kittler, F. (1990) Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. M. Meteer and C. Cullens. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1986) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. vi-Strauss, C. (1978) The Origin of Table Manners: Introduction to a Science of Le Mythology: 3, trans. J. and D. Weightmann. New York: Harper and Row. Macho, T. (2003) Zeit und Zahl. Kalender- und Zeitrechnung als Kulturtechniken, pp. 179192 in S. Kra mer and H. Bredekamp (eds) Bild Schrift Zahl. Mu nchen: Wilhelm Fink. Macho, T. (2008) Tiere zweiter Ordnung. Kulturtechniken der Identita t und Identifikation, pp. 99117 in D. Baecker, M. Kettner, and D. Rustemeyer ber Kultur: Theorie und Praxis der Kulturreflexion. Bielefeld: (eds) U Transcript. Macho, T. (2011) Vorbilder. Munich: Wilhelm Fink.

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Mauss, M. (1992) Techniques of the Body, pp. 454477 in J. Carey and S. Kwinter. Incorporations. New York: Zone Books. Maye, H. (2010) Was ist eine Kulturtechnik?, Zeitschrift fur Medien- und Kulturforschung 1: 121135. Peters, J. (2008) Strange Sympathies: Horizons of German and American Media Theory, pp. 323 in F. Kelleter and D. Stein (eds) American Studies as Media Studies. American Studies Monograph Series, Band 167. Heidelberg: Winter. Rheinberger, H.-J. (1997) Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Schmidgen, H. (forthcoming) Hirn und Zeit: Geschichte eines Experiments 18001950. Schneider, M. (2007) Das Notariat der Hunde. Eine literaturwissenschaftliche Kynologie, Zeitschrift fur deutsche Philologie 126: 427. Schu ttpelz, E. (2006) Die medienanthropologische Kehre der Kulturtechniken, Archiv fur Mediengeschichte 6: 87110. Serres, M. (1982) The Parasite, trans. L.R. Schehr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University 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 in German Media Studies, Grey Room 29: 2647. Siegert, B. (2012) Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic, Grey Room 47: 623. 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: Princeton Architectural Press. Vismann, C. (2008) Files: Law and Media Technology, trans. G. WinthropYoung. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Vismann, C. (2010) Kulturtechniken und Souvera nita t, Zeitschrift fur Medienund Kulturforschung 1: 171181. Vogl, J. (2007) Becoming-Media: Galileos Telescope, Grey Room 29: 1425. 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): 143158. Winthrop-Young, G. (2006) Cultural Studies and German Media Theory, pp. 88104 in G. Hall and C. Birchall (eds) New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Winthrop-Young, G. (2009) Mensch, Medien, Ko rper, Kehre: Zum posthumanistischen Immerschon, Philosophische Rundschau 56(1): 116. Winthrop-Young, G. (2011) Krautrock, Heidegger, Bogeyman: Kittler in the Anglosphere, Thesis Eleven 107(1): 620. Wolfe, C. (2010) What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wolfe, C. (2012) Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Bernhard Siegert received his PhD from the Ruhr University Bochum in 1991 and completed his Habilitation at the Humboldt University in Berlin in 2001. He holds a Chair in the History and Theory of Cultural Techniques at the Bauhaus University of Weimar. Among his major publications are Relays (Stanford University Press, 1999), Passage des Digitalen (Brinkmann und Bose, 2003) and Passagiere und Papiere (Fink, 2006). A volume of essays on cultural techniques is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. Georey Winthrop-Young is Professor of German at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Among his publications are Kittler and the Media (Polity Press, 2011) and Friedrich Kittler zur Einfuhrung (Junius, 2005) as well as translations of works by Friedrich Kittler, Cornelia Vismann and Eva Horn.

Article

After Kittler: On the Cultural Techniques of Recent German Media Theory

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan
Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany

Theory, Culture & Society 30(6) 6682 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263276413488962 tcs.sagepub.com

Abstract This paper offers a brief introduction and interpretation of recent research on cultural 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 praxeological 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 these were the methodological orientations that divided the anthropocentrism of Anglo-American cultural studies from the technophilia of German media theory. In the past decade an emerging eld of research known as Kulturtechniken has deconstructed these oppositions. Proponents of cultural techniques reread Friedrich Kittlers media theoretical approach of the 1980s and 1990s known for its presupposition that a technological a priori denes the scope and logic of distinct cultural formations and epistemes with a closer focus on the local practices, series, and techniques that congure medial and technological arrangements.

Corresponding author: Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Humboldt University of Berlin, Georgenstrae 47 10117 Berlin, Germany. Email: bernard.geoghegan@hu-berlin.de (www.bernardg.com) http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

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The absence of a rigorous consensus about the scope and purview of Kulturtechnik speaks, in a sense, to its conceptual fertility. The diculty starts with the term Kulturtechniken itself, which may be rendered in English as cultural techniques, cultural technologies, cultural technics, or even culturing techniques. Cultural theorists at the Humboldt University of Berlin (e.g. Christian Kassung, Sybille Kra mer and Thomas Macho) Identify cultural techniques with rigorous and formalized symbolic systems, such as reading, writing, mathematics, music, and imagery (see Kassung and Macho, 2013; Kra mer and Bredekamp, 2008; Macho, 2013). Researchers in Weimar, Siegen, and Lu neberg tend towards a more catholic denition that recognizes a broader range of formalizable cultural practices, including tacit knowledge, the class-laden rituals of Victorian servants, and the law as cultural techniques (see Schu ttpelz, 2006; Engell and Siegert, 2010; Krajeswki, 2013; Vismann, 2013). Binding together these varied denitions and understandings of Kulturtechniken is a shared interest in describing and analysing how signs, instruments, and human practices consolidate into durable symbolic systems capable of articulating distinctions within and between cultures. In this paper I oer a brief introduction and interpretation of research on cultural techniques by way of three conceptual dislocations. First, I consider how and why the situation of Germanophone media theory in the 1980s and 1990s was displaced and redirected towards a more praxeological style of analysis in the early 2000s; second, I examine how and why an antiquated Germanophone appellation for agricultural engineering, Kulturtechniken, morphed into a philosophically and conceptually charged term in media and cultural studies; and third, I conclude with reections on how this conceptual redistribution enabled by the term Kulturtechniken facilitates genealogical approaches to media research and inquiry.

Towards the a priori of the Technological a priori

Were nally allowed to talk about people! Thats how one Germanophone media theorist explained the signicance of research in cultural techniques to me.1 Of course, German media theory2 as it was developed by Kittler and his associates was full of people: mothers, madmen, artists, authors, inventors, bureaucrats, and the occasional weapons designer abound. But Kittlers media analysis maintained that these gures were at best proxies or avatars for Aufschreibesysteme or discourse networks composed of machinery, institutions, instruments, mathematical regimes, and inscriptions. Kittler maintained that the task of a true science of media was to drive the human out of the humanities (Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften) (Kittler, 1980) and reorient analysis towards a description of this discursive and instrumental infrastructure.

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This assault on anthropocentrism ew in the face of contemporaneous approaches, such as that of Ju rgen Habermas in West Germany or the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, which argued for recovering and restoring the human interests waylaid by technical communications. Yet even for theorists harbouring such humanist and culturalist sympathies, Kittlers argument for discarding human interests and intentions in favor of analysing how medial, technical, and institutional arrangements shaped cultural forms proved remarkably fruitful. It established a style of media analysis that could transversally join together the themes and methods of literary criticism, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and electrical engineering (see Kittler, 1990, 1999). But a certain planned obsolescence countermanded the power of this burgeoning media science. Correlating cultural form and historical change with the material specicities of distinct media platforms implied an impending denouement of both. As Kittler put it in an oft-cited passage from his tome Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, rst published in German in 1986: Before the end, something is coming to an end. The general digitization of channels and information erases the dierences among individual media. Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface eects, known to consumers as interface. Sense and the senses turn into eyewash. Their media-produced glamour will survive for an interim as a by-product of strategic programs. (Kittler, 1999: 1) The problem with end of history arguments is they dont leave you with much to talk about once history has come and gone. For all their apocalyptic poetry about Alan Turings universal machine and Claude Shannons schematic account of communication, Kittler and his most fervent disciples never had much to say about media after the mid-1980s, when personal computers became a common presence in the domestic home. This seems decidedly untting for a theorist eulogized as the Derrida of the digital age (Jeries, 2011). A troubling ethnocentricism further constrained the agenda of classic German media theory. For the Kittlerian media archaeologist, cultures and societies that did not rely on Western technological media could only be ignored or shoehorned into ill-suited analytical categories, such as information theorys sender-receiver model of communication.3 In this way Kittlerian analysis suggested that the products of the North American and Western European military-industrial complex coincided with an elusive baseline or measuring stick that made sense of human cultures in general. These two shortcomings (the inability to speak to present technological media conditions combined with the inability or refusal to look beyond Western contexts), along with a conspicuous

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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 problematics, such as European cultural history and mathematics in ancient Greece, might suggest his own recognition of these diminishing returns of his earlier methods. More likely, that shift in focus serves as a reminder that Friedrich Kittler was never Kittlerian, per se (indeed, few discursive founders methods square with their eponymous schools), and that he was most at home when challenging platitudinous orthodoxies even those assigned to his own name. Even so, this shift seemingly left his most dedicated disciples alone in the end, writing technical histories of dead media and dead theorists. But as Nietzsche observed, true delity demands the courage of apostasy.4 In the early 2000s, adepts and admirers of the Kittlerian approach turned their attention towards the more elastic concept of Kulturtechniken. Bernhard Siegert concisely summarizes the emerging program this way: The concept of cultural techniques highlights the operations or sequences of operations that historically and logically precede the media concepts generated by them (Siegert, 2011: 15). For example, counting historically and logically precedes numbers, singing precedes formalized scales, and casual farming precedes the invention of rationalized agriculture. This observation suggests a technical and practical a priori to the discourse networks of classic German media theory. The task for the theorist of cultural techniques is to determine by what processes numbers, scales, or a ploughshare reciprocally and recursively modify and formalize the practices of counting, singing, and farming that generated them. The study of such recursive processes constitutes the topological core of research on cultural technique. Put in terms familiar to German media theory of the 1980s and 1990s, cultural techniques concern the rules of selection, storage, and transmission that characterize a given system of mediation, including the formal structures that compose and constrict this process. The fact that this process comprehends both the emergence of a new symbolic system and the recursive formalization of this system accounts in some part for the ambiguity introduced in English translations. Every cultural technique (Kulturtechnik) tends towards becoming a cultural technology (Kulturtechnik). Where English sharply distinguishes and opposes these meanings, colloquial German designates their intimate and ontologically elusive conjunction. This conceptual shift so easily likened to the formal operations of a Turing machine or cybernetic servomechanism (see Krajewski, 2013) masks a more profound dislocation in the foundations of the Kittlerian program. The rift concerns the seemingly innocuous phrase operations or sequences of operations that historically and logically precede. Rather than starting with an already-organized technology,

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research on cultural techniques commences with an inchoate mixture of techniques, practices, instruments, and institutional procedures that give rise to a technological set-up. The methodological specicity of research on Kulturtechniken is its emphasis on the congurations of instruments, practices, and signs that comprise the a priori of a given technical and cultural system. This is not media archaeology but rather an archaeology of media. This eort to isolate and dene symbolic sequences, and situate their specicity, almost inevitably involves recourse to aspects of anthropology with an emphasis on human practice and, more importantly, explicitly or implicitly, some element of cross-cultural analysis. Every cultural technique always already implies cultural diversity, either within or between cultures. The Kittlerian privilege assigned to European culture and technologies of Western derivation no longer suces 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 interlopers and alterity become necessary (but not sucient) conditions, rather than eects, of media-technological congurations. It is the very undecidability over whether such methodological reorientations constitute violent ruptures or deep-seated revelations for media theoretical analysis that allow for the qualication of Kulturtechnikforschung as apostasy.

Body Techniques
An example drawn from the work of Erhard Schu ttpelz (2010) illustrates certain hallmarks of cultural-technical research. His special interest in comparative and cross-cultural anthropology distinguishes him among contemporary theorists of cultural techniques but also coincides with a broader anthropological orientation that dierentiates research on cultural techniques from that of classic German media theory. In his essay Body Techniques, Schu ttpelz recounts a story told by the French ethnographer Marcel Mauss in the 1935 essay Techniques of the Body. Mauss argued that distinct cultures have systematic ways of organizing everyday bodily activities, such as walking, swimming, and running. He traced the genesis of this theoretical concept to his extended stay at an American hospital in the 1920s. According to Mauss: A kind of revelation came to me in hospital. . . . I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked. I had the time to think about it. At last I realised that it was at the cinema. Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Paris; the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema. This was an idea I could generalise. (Mauss, 1973: 72)

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Two aspects of this story interest Schu ttpelz. There is the fact of a specic technique, walking, which is disseminated and conditioned by a new technical medium, the cinema. Equally important is that the cinema itself by breaking the actions of the human body down into a series of discrete, serial movements makes Mausss concept, techniques of the body, thinkable. Thus far we see the hallmark elements of classical German media theory, with its emphasis on the technological a priori. By emphasizing the role of a technological determinant in Mausss concept, Schu ttpelz is halfway to redening techniques of the body as a cultural technology. Schu ttpelz embarks on a cultural-technical analysis by situating Mausss techniques of the body within a heterogeneous set-up of techniques, technologies, and signs co-articulated by power and politics that, in turn, have implications for cultural dierence and distinction. He locates the genesis of Mausss cultural techniques of the body in Etienne Jules-Mareys famous motion studies, pointing out that these studies were allied with the late-19th-century racist and classist ethnography that sought to inventory types, such as the gait of Africans, Europeans, workers, and soldiers. Through motion photography, movement itself became a symbolic system characterizable by discrete series that could be quoted and recursively modied. These series could articulate dierence between cultures (European and African) and within a culture (upper and lower classes), and they also rened existing cultural distinctions. In this way motion studies rened techniques of the body into a cultural technology of racist and classist dierentiation. Subsequent interventions by cinema, Taylorism, industrialization, and colonialism enabled the French ethnographer Mauss to develop a concept that identied these new cultural formations as techniques of the body. Although constructed and contingent, these techniques of the body also designated a real, historical, and obdurate phenomenon whose biological underpinnings closely approximate natural life forces. To exploit a certain semantic ambiguity unavailable to German, we may say that Schu ttpelzs history demonstrates how a variety of cultural techniques [Kulturtechniken] were strategically bound together into a potent cultural technology [Kulturtechnik]. On their own, concepts, bodies, lmstrips, and politics are techniques; but as components of an integrated symbolic system, they become a cultural technology. Although such symbolic systems may be integrated into a single technology or dispositif, such arrangements are at best temporary consolidations until emergent practices and technologies displace and rearrange the constituent parts.

The Techniques of Kultur

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

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cultural techniques of recent German media theory. To penetrate to the core of the problematic, however, it is necessary to zero in on the term itself, Kulturtechnik, and its economic conjunction of pleonasm, paradox, and neologism. This combination of connotations derives from the peculiar associations of the three terms it brings together, namely: Kultur, derived from Latin colere and introduced into German in the 17th and 18th centuries to designate culture; the term Technik, derived from ancient Greek and introduced into German in the 18th century, signifying technique, technology, or technics; and Kulturtechnik, a 19th-century term for agricultural engineering that was appropriated in the 1970s and 1980s by theorists of pedagogy to designate basic competencies in reading, writing, and arithmetic. It is in the bridges and joints among these terms which are themselves moving and dynamic, like a drawbridge mounted on buoyant piles rather than an isthmus or xed overpass that we nd the features that dene Kulturtechnik as a media theoretical concept.5 Take the term Kultur. Even if the term admitted easy translation, this would hardly x or determine its semantic scope. As Raymond Williams once noted, [c]ulture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language (Williams, 1983: 87). Everyday contemporary usage in both languages (but especially in English) often implies an opposition among the terms culture, technology, and nature. Yet these oppositions are partial and historical, the result of gradual dislocations in meaning that are, in turn, reanimated and called into question by the agricultural term Kulturtechnik. For example, the Latin term colere that furnishes the basis for the word culture grafts these three meanings together. The Latin Agri cultura (agriculture) did not break with nature but instead furnished a stable and enduring second nature. In ancient conceptions of colere, then, techniques proved constitutive to realizing the interwoven potential of nature and culture alike. Well into the 17th century, Cultur designated techniques of farming and husbandry.6 Modern English and German usages retain these connotations, but typically in the specialized elds of practice that are divorced from everyday practice. In German supermarkets mushrooms farmed under controlled conditions are marketed as Kulturchampignon, or cultured mushrooms. Kultur in this context refers to a controlled mechanism for bringing forth and grooming a natural potential, whereby technique and nature work in concert. But a peculiar transposition complicates this meaning and speaks directly to the concepts later appropriation in cultural studies. In the course of the 18th and 19th centuries a metaphorical understanding of culture as the maintenance and cultivation of human development appeared. This creeping bourgeois conception identied culture with competency in reading, writing, arithmetic, and the arts. Much as a xed agri-culture cultivated a more rened and productive crop, proper culturing regimes

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could make for a more rened and productive human subject. In these budding, blooming matrices of associations rich resources for future cultural sciences (as the German language designates the eld of cultural studies) take root. This ethnocentric identication of culture with a matrix of Western European attainments was contradicted by an alternate Germanophone denition of culture as the specic and relative characteristics of a given people. Herder, for example, proposed the term culture to designate the specic ways of life characteristic of dierent peoples. This usage recalled the earlier, more agricultural sensibility of culture as second nature. To cite one passage from Herders 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 that at the end of time your posterity should be made happy by European culture. The very thought of a superior European culture is a blatant insult to the majesty of Nature. (cited in Williams, 1983: 89) This conception combines increasingly fraught reactionary and progressive elements. On the one hand, there is an allusion to traditional and agricultural meanings: European culture springs up from a well-manured earth. On the other hand, Herder labels the self-conceptions of this highly rened and technical culture as an insult to the glory of nature. This conception grants recognition to the would-be nomads and barbarians outside the Greco-Roman sphere but also furnishes resources for the later racist conception that links organic culture with the blood and soil of a people. Compounding the contradictory associations accruing around concepts of culture, Herders usage also adduces an emerging understanding of culture as something opposed to technical or mechanical civilization. It is tempting to see a return to primeval meaning free from technical artice. Yet this return, based on an opposition between the cultural and the technical, is the quintessence of a specically modern set of oppositions. As noted by Hartmut Bo hme, the Latin term colere was remarkable for its ability to use artice to bring us closer to nature. Emerging 19th-century usage, by contrast, introduced the imaginary notion of a primeval culture purged of technique and technology. This conception is quintessentially modern and marks out a profound schism in the meaning of culture and technique that continues to trouble present-day Germanophone and Anglophone thought.

The Culture of Technik

This parsing of Kultur from technique set the stage for philosophical and vernacular reections on the term Technik. Consider Heideggers

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well-known essay Die Frage nach der Technik. Although it is typically translated as The Question Concerning Technology, such a designation tends to obscure a major theme of the essay, namely the relation of ancient techniques [Technik] to modern technics [Technik] and modern technology [Technik] (Weber, 1989). Heideggers denition of Technik as a general mode of bringing forth or revealing closely overlaps with notions of colere and Kultur, and his central example is drawn from agricultural practice: [In traditional technics t]he work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the eld. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile [in modern technics] even the cultivation of the eld has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. (Heidegger, 1977: 1415, emphasis in original) Heideggers comparison between traditional and modern technics rests upon this ability of the word Technik to refer to ancient and modern, as well as human and machinic, styles of production, which stages his inquiry into the chasm that separates technique and technology in the modern era. The standard English translation suggests that Heidegger simply rejects technology. A more faithful translation and reading suggests that the use of the term Technik allows Heidegger to reject the late19th-century de-technicization of culture in order to reclaim a fundamental relation between technique and technology, as well as techne and colere. Heideggers eorts to reunite technology, technique, and culture within techne speak directly to the crises surrounding technology and culture in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. Historian Jerey Herf characterizes the battle over Technik und Kultur as a centrepiece of philosophy and politics in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, arguing that Heidegger believed that the Germans had a special mission to combine Technik and Kultur (Herf, 1984: 109). While Heideggers conservative contemporaries often embraced a synthesis of technics and culture, in the end Heidegger remained ambivalent. Enamored of techne but unable to reconcile himself with modern technics, he retreated to the Greeks and Gelassenheit for philosophical solace. To what extent Kittlers own work was constrained by his indebtedness to the reactionary modernist tradition remains an open question. That he rejected crude interwar nationalistic and biological racisms is clear. That he raided the works of interwar conservatives such as Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Ju nger for a critique of West German philosophical and anti-technicist humanisms is also evident.

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Yet scholars have asked whether Kittler ultimately appropriated the modernist reactionary binary of Kultur and Technik only to give a postmodern and ludic privilege to the term Technik (Winthrop-Young and Wutz, 1999: xxxviixxxviii; Berger, 2006). Dissatisfaction with such a possibly simplistic inversion points towards the peculiar appeal of Kulturtechnik as a concept. Binding the terms Kultur and Technik together, it elaborates an old and established debate that casts a long shadow over contemporary Germanophone scholarship. Moreover, the very joining of these terms without explicitly surrendering, banishing, or privileging either also suggests a heterogeneous composite of culture and technology absent from reactionary modernisms and postmodernisms. And lastly, the agricultural connotations of Kultur and Kulturtechnik allow for an introduction of those questions of life and bios that the likes of Heidegger and Kittler scrupulously avoided (probably due to their racist connotations in twentieth century German and European thought) but which have recently reaserted themselves as problematics for critical reection in 21st centruy philosophy and media theory.

Of Provinces and People (The Rise of Culturing Techniques)

The introduction of the word Kulturtechnik into German in the 19th century to designate agricultural engineering marks the fracturing of , technique, Technik, and technology colere, culture, Cultur, Kultur, techne in the modern era. Once overlapping terms associated with colere and techne had, in the modern era, grown so raried and reied that it was easier to join them together as juxtaposed terms than resolve them into a full and originary meaning. But rather like the terms Kultur and Technik, which seem to consistently waiver between relations of opposition and composition, the term Kulturtechnik also designates the partial consolidation and reconciliation of these terms during the 19th century. As historian John Tresch notes, 19th-century German thought gave rise to a neglected tradition of mechanical romanticism that sought to reconcile and re-imagine the relationships among mechanism and organicism (Tresch, 2012). Scientists such as Alexander von Humboldt saw in instruments and technology resources for getting closer to nature and mediating the achievement of a more harmonious even organic state. The name Tresch gives to this movement is mechanical romanticism. Kulturtechnik could be another. In 1871 the Royal Prussian Agricultural Academy established a professorship for Kulturtechnik at the University of Bonn (Strecker, 1908: 3). Although agricultural engineering is perhaps the most apposite English equivalent, a more literal translation such as culturing techniques better captures this new elds position within an emerging 19th-century ethos that saw in rationalism techniques for realizing the power and potentials of nature. Charles August Voglers Introduction to Agricultural

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Engineering (Grundlehren der Kulturtechnik rst volume published in 1898) counted chemistry, mineralogy, botany, mechanics, hydraulics, economics, water management, manufacturing, and law among this new elds constituents. This rational series of interlocking distinctions for cultivating the land were supplemented by a new set of distinctions between and among lands. The volumes introduction detailed the culturing techniques peculiar to Bavaria, Saxony, Baden, Hessen, Austria, and Switzerland and exhorted the reader to recognize and celebrate the power of culturing techniques to serve the Fatherland and elevate national prosperity (Strecker, 1908: 7). This conception underscores how the term Kulturtechnik is no neutral engineering term. Like Kultur and Technik, from its inception it is inscribed within cultural and technological conicts of Germanophone politics and power. To cultivate any of the three entails the delineation and reproduction of a way of life, be it reactionary or revolutionary. This continues today, as the Bonn professorship for Kulturtechnik advertises its commitment to incorporating environmentally sensitive (umweltrelevanten) concerns into its eld of study. This focus on the Umwelt coincides with the wider reorientation across contemporary German scientic and political life toward the interpenetration of nature, technique, and human culture.

Cultural Techniques as Media Theory

Cultural techniques did not come to German media theory as a direct import from agricultural engineering. Their entry was much more mundane, as part of education and the states concern with pedagogy and instruction. According to Schu ttpelz, Kittler encountered the term as a student and instructor at the University of Freiburg in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the term Kulturtechniken was resurfacing in German as a designation for competencies in reading, writing, and arithmetic (see Fritz, 1986; Schu ttpelz, pers. comm.). This denition recalled the 18th- and 19th-century denition of culture as liberal arts. Characteristic of many cultural techniques, it owed its legibility to new media technologies. Theorists of pedagogy argued that these skills demanded a reassessment and redenition in the age of media and communication technologies (Heynmann, 2008). Culture was no longer something to be taken for granted but rather a set Heynmann, 2008 NIR of techniques and a process, whereby the human subject itself was material for cultivation. Culturing techniques, then, demanded a strategic and coherent articulation of humans, techniques, and signs, which itself was adapted to the technical (and pedagogical) regimes of the epoch. Although Kittler does not seem to have developed the term in any focused way, he appears to have brought this denition with him to Berlin in the 1990s, which in turn laid the foundation for the Berlin

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Schools 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 and begin to identify the associations among agricultural engineering, elementary pedagogy, and media theoretical analysis that endow the term Kulturtechnik with such provocative interest and intrigue in recent German media theory. The rst two meanings (agricultural engineering and pedagogy) are alternate iterations of a shared tradition. The former sense nds its roots in the traditions of culture as agriculture while the latter can be traced to Enlightenment notions of culture as the acquisition of literacy and numeracy. Both recall the fundamental relationship between culture and techne, or the process of bringing forth that must be learned and routinized. To term literacy a culturing technique is to underscore that reading and culture are cultivated and bring forth a certain kind of subject and a certain kind of society through the learning of rote procedures of selection, processing, and reproduction. This problem may be distinct from agricultural engineering but it is not wholly independent. In a sense, the pedagogical meanings extend the symbolic and Lacanian preoccupations of classic Kittlerian media theory (i.e. the world of the symbolic is the world of the machine) (Kittler, 1997), while the agricultural associations provide the agitation necessary to graft alternate problematics into this line of analysis. Already in the 19th century the problem of Kulturtechnik broaches questions of national and cultural identity, the establishment and maintenance of experimental systems, the interweaving of nature and technics, the imbrication of practices and technology, and the routinizing of culturing procedures. The practice of rational and systematic farming entails a holistic matrix of techniques and practices that establish a logic within the soil and an order among the humans and machines tilling the soil. Farming procedures indexed to the seasons introduce a semiotic system that helps found a new order among things, practices, and signs. The results are cultural distinctions, both as an innity of distinctions in the land and distinctions between lands. Introduced into media theoretical analysis, this overturns the anti-biologism that prevailed in nearly all Kittlerian analysis and points towards a genealogical complement or alternative to media archeology. In contemporary usage the connotations of Kulturtechnik vastly exceed its designations, but this does not make the etymology any less signicant. As Hans-Georg Gadamer observed: When you take a word in your mouth you must realize that you have not taken a tool that can be thrown aside if it will not do the job, but you are xed in a direction of thought that comes from afar and stretches beyond you. (cited in Peters, 1988: 9)

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It is this long linguistic, semantic, and conceptual itinerary that gives the term its peculiar power what I earlier designated as a combination of pleonasm, paradox, and neologism. Pleonasm, for the redundancy between Kultur and Technik in etymological origins; paradox, for the uncomfortable conjunction they articulate between two phenomena painfully wrenched apart in the rise of European modernity; and neologism, for the way that a contemporary theorist of Kulturtechnik seems to coin a new word while reanimating a host of older associations that comes from afar and stretches beyond. A cursory overview of the recent research on cultural techniques reveals how this rich history of associations returns in the present, media theoretical usage. When Schu ttpelz describes techniques of the body rendered legible and rational in the age of motion photography, he also presents us with an inventory of techniques for taking a body with life and potential and endowing it with a more stable, rational form that articulates a family of distinctions within and between cultures (Schu ttpelz, 2010). When Bernhard Siegert argues that the map is the territory, and describes the rise of modern cartographic methods as a method of rationalizing instruments, signs, and bodies around the denition and demarcation of a new territory, we cannot help but feel some sense of Latin colere with its emphasis on inhabiting and cultivating the land while displacing the nomads stirring again in our age (Siegert, 2011). When Thomas Macho and Christian Kassung argue that calendars and clocks are cultural techniques, they are also calling attention to the ways we interweave technologies, signs, and practices with the rhythms of earth, in order to consolidate a common way of life (Kassung and Macho, 2013). When Markus Krajewski details the cultural techniques by which Victorian servants selected, stored, and transmitted messages in their masters house, he reminds us that even culture itself as second nature must submit to cultural-technical processes that curate and cultivate (and occasionally de-realize) its potential (Krajewski, 2013). Implicit in each of these usages is also a slinking assimilation of concepts of life, practice, and bios that is fundamentally lacking from the classic, Kittlerian approach to media. This also throws open analysis to a wider eld of contemporary inquiry into themes such as biopolitics, ecology, and animal studies as media theoretical problems that can and should be approached by a focus on the cultural-technical systems that produce specic forms of life, environment, and species relations. This is not achieved by jettisoning the modern quarrel over Kultur and Technik but rather by reframing it with a historically grounded concept that redistributes the associations among these terms. Putting these terms together as a composite Kulturtechnik or cultural technique reminds us that they are mutually constitutive terms while also reminding us that they cannot resolve back into the holism implied by colere or techne.

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This constitutive hybridity of cultural techniques, as well as their emphasis on situated and local congurations of instruments, practices, and signs, traces out the emerging status of media and cultural studies in the 21st century. Once, gramophones, lm, and typewriters seemed to exhaust the dominant media forms of the epoch. Departments of Film Studies, Radio/Television/Film and Cultural Studies suggest a delineated eld of study that pivoted around platforms and practices. Yet the tendency towards digitization that organized and undermined the framework of Kittlerian analysis also gutted the carefully cultivated distinction among media as well as cultural, technical, and life sciences (Jenkins, 2006; Thacker, 2005). No media archaeology oers a resolution to this dilemma. Instead, media genealogists must ask how, and under what conditions, cultural techniques strategically and temporarily consolidate these forces into coherent technologies.
Acknowledgements
I thank audiences at the University of Tulsa, the University of Chicago New Media Working Group, and Christian Kassungs research colloquium for their thoughtful com kervall, Bridget Hanna, mentaries on presentations of this research. I also thank Lisa A Micaela Morrissette, Ben Peters, and Erhard Schu ttpelz; the editors of this issue (Jussi Parikka, Georey Winthrop-Young, and Ilinca Iurascu); and four anonymous reviewers for 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 Kittlers research can be found in Winthrop-Young and Gane (2006). Although authored too early to address Kittlers late turn towards mathematics and cultural techniques, see also Winthrop-Young and Wutz (1999). My own, very compact survey of his work can be found online at Geoghegan (2011). 2. The question of whats so German about German media theory is addressed in Horn (2008). The term media archaeology is often used to loosely designate Kittlerian media theory. For a discriminating discussion of this term, see Huhtamo and Parikka (2011, esp. 812) and Parikka (2011). 3. Friedrich Kittlers former research assistant Paul Feigelfeld, currently of the Humboldt University of Berlin, is now redressing this problem with a dissertation dedicated to the role of Chinese and Arabic analytical techniques in shaping Western cryptographical procedures. The successful completion of this project may yet open new chapters and new avenues in Kittlerian media archaeology. 4. See Friedrich Nietzsche (Book I, aphorism 32; in Nietzsche, 2001: 53). See also 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 Bo hme.

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Kra mer, S. and Bredekamp, H. (2013) Culture, technology, cultural techniques: Moving beyond text. Theory, Culture & Society 30(6). Macho, T. (2008) Zeit und Zahl: Kalender- und Zeitrechnung als Kulturtechniken. In: Kra mer, S. and Bredekamp, H. (eds) Bild, Schrift, Zahl. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 179192. Macho, T. (2013) Second order animals: Cultural techniques of identity and identification. Theory, Culture & Society 30(6). Mauss, M. (1973) Techniques of the body. Economy and Society 2(1): 7088. Nietzsche, F. (1989) On the genealogy of morals. In: Kaufmann, W. (ed.) On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Kaufmann, W. and Hollingdale, R.J. New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, F. (2001) The gay science. In: Williams, B. (ed.) The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Nauckhoff, J. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2008) Human, All Too Human. London: Wordsworth Classics. Parikka, J. (2011) Operative media archaeology: Wolfgang Ernsts materialist media diagrammatics. Theory, Culture & Society 28(5): 5274. Peters, J.D. (1988) Information: Notes toward a critical history. Journal of Communication Inquiry 12(2): 923. Peters, J.D. (2007) Strange sympathies: Horizons of German and American media theory. Media and Society 15: 131152. Schu ttpelz, E. (2006) Die Medienanthropologische Kehre der Kulturtechniken. Archiv fur Mediengeschichte: 87110. Schu rpertechniken. Zeitschrift Fur Medien- Und ttpelz, E. (2010) Ko Kulturforschung: 101120. Siegert, B. (2008) Cacography or communication? Cultural techniques in German media studies. Grey Room 29: 2647. Siegert, B. (2011) The map is the territory. Radical Philosophy 169: 1316. Strecker, W. (1908) Das Wesen der Kulturtechnik. In: Vogler, C.A. (ed.) Grundlehren der Kulturtechnik (Zweiter Band). Berlin: Paul Parey, 312. 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 Heideggers questing after technics. MLN 104(5): 977992. Williams, R. (1983) Culture. In: Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 8793. Winthrop-Young, G. and Gane, N. (2006) Friedrich Kittler: An introduction. Theory, Culture & Society 23(7/8): 516. Winthrop-Young, G. and Wutz, M. (1999) Translators introduction: Friedrich Kittler and media discourse analysis. In: Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, xixxxiix.

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a media theorist and historian of technology. He works as a Wissenchaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Institut fu r Kulturwissenschaft at the Humboldt-Universita t zu Berlin. In 2012 he received a dual-PhD from the Fakulta t Medien of Bauhaus-Universita t Weimar and the Screen Cultures program of Northwestern University.

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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 fellowships at the American University of Paris, Harvard University, MIT, the Pompidou Center, Northwestern University, and the Childrens Media Project. His essays appear in journals including Critical Inquiry, The IEEE Annals on the History of Computing, and Interaction Studies. He may be reached online at www.bernardg.com.

Article

Cultural Techniques and Sovereignty

Cornelia Vismann

Theory, Culture & Society 30(6) 8393 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263276413496851 tcs.sagepub.com

Abstract First published in 2010, Cornelia Vismanns 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 what kinds of actions they prompt.1 Cultural techniques dene the agency of media and things. If media theory were, or had, a grammar, that agency would nd its expression in objects claiming the grammatical subject position and cultural techniques standing in for verbs. Grammatical persons (and human beings alike) would then assume the place assigned for objects in a given sentence. From the perspective of media, such a reversal of positions may well be the most prominent feature of a theory of cultural techniques. Nevertheless, positions cannot be arbitrarily combined. In each case, there are specic things and media entailing specic techniques. Tools prescribe their own usage, and objects have their own operators.
Corresponding author: Email: iurascu@mail.ubc.ca http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

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To start with an elementary and archaic cultural technique, a plough drawing a line in the ground: the agricultural tool determines the political act; and the operation itself produces the subject, who will then claim mastery over both the tool and the action associated with it. Thus, the Imperium Romanum is the result of drawing a line a gesture which, not accidentally, was held sacred in Roman law. Someone advances to the position of legal owner in a similar fashion, by drawing a line, marking ones territory ownership does not exist prior to that act. The default positions of media and things that set cultural techniques into motion contradict a legally sanctioned, and thereby particularly widespread, notion: namely, the claim that only the subject can carry out actions and rule over things. Nevertheless, a pre-existing relation between media and cultural techniques already determines the way things are to be handled, even before they submit to the subjects will. One could very well argue that this default position, common to all media and things, has its origin with those who have conceived and designed them. Thus so the argument goes even if a tool dictates its 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 manufacturer does not merely execute the order of things. Still and this is precisely what sets the study of cultural techniques apart none of the tools inbuilt purposes is ever independent from the given conditions of production, its material properties or spatial circumstances. One must therefore draw a distinction between persons, who de jure act autonomously, and cultural techniques, which de facto determine the entire course of action. To inquire about cultural techniques is not to ask about the feasibility, success, chances and risks of certain innovations and inventions in the domain of the subject. Instead, it is to ask about the selfmanagement or auto-praxis [Eigenpraxis] of media and things, which determines the scope of the subjects eld of action. Once again, the notion of auto-praxis can be understood via a grammatical reformulation of the theory of cultural techniques. Its equivalent is a specic type of verbal construction, which describes the relation between things, media and cultural techniques as mutually interdependent: the so-called medium voice from Greek. Unlike active and passive constructions, that particular verb form signals that the acting subject is, grammatically speaking, dependent upon a third element. In the medium voice, an action doesnt derive from someone and encounter something; nor does it work the other way around. Even though the grammatical concept 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 agents that do not act in a syntactical-juridical sense. Certain actions cannot be attributed to a person; and yet, they are somehow still performed. That situation is reected by the medium. The issue of legal accountability is

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the dening feature of the medium verb form. The medium suspends the norm of clear assignations, which satises legal requirements as well. Perpetrators and victims, those who give orders and those who suer them, no longer coincide with grammatical subjects and objects. The medium creates a relational middle ground here, which does not simply amount to a reversal of the two positions. Wolfgang Schadewaldt gives the example of law-making in order to explain the medium verb form in Greek. Law-making is an operation or, to put it dierently, a cultural technique executed by a popular assembly. Schadewaldt points out that assemblies have limited agency. They reach their own decisions only to the extent to which the pre-existing laws allow it. Law-making is therefore not an autocratic, unrestricted activity, but rather one that is conditioned by the law. That condition, however, drawn from the very legal domain as the operation that ensues from it, is not the only restriction applied to law-making. The place of assembly, the object of disputation, and the rules of decision also play a part in the production of the actual law. The word Ding, or thing, signals precisely the kind of fusion of place and matter that characterizes an assembly. The medium of Greek grammar does away with an issue which subsequently becomes the fundamental legal paradox of the sovereign ruler, simultaneously placed above and beneath the law. The medium guarantees that certain operations continue to be bound to their performer (Schadewaldt, 1978: 145). To illustrate such operations, Schadewaldt gives the example of the verb for bathing, which is used in the medium voice in Greek to suggest that the bather is carried by the water. As opposed to a spear, which is released from the hand of its thrower, the trajectory of bathing remains bound to the medium of water. The grammatical form of the medium indicates that very relational quality. Spear-throwing, on the other hand, represents a classic case of active verb formation. The dierence between the spear and the water, between that which only initiates, and that which continues to determine a process, is one that dictates the form of the verb. Implicitly, that distinction presupposes two dierent ways of looking at things. The focus is either on the goal (its achievement, its failure and the suitability, or, respectively, the unsuitability of its means) or the supporting agent. The ballistic perspective (the active voice, the spear) corresponds to the logic of the law, which continuously associates means with their ends. Moreover, it also partakes of a legal narrative according to which an operation may be attributed to an agent as the source of a conict or a legal matter. The medium-based perspective (the medium, the water) is consistent with the method of study of cultural techniques. Instead of an investigation of causes, which presupposes a search for an individual culprit in the matter, here the doer is deduced from the instrumentalities of the action and the agent is derived from the medium itself.

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Consequently, as far as the study of cultural techniques is concerned, it makes no dierence whether the object of inquiry is spear-throwing or bathing. A spear that is thrown and a body of water that carries a bather do not occupy dierent positions. Neither does law-making. Thus, things and media will always function as carriers of operations, irrespective of what is at stake in their execution: contexts, instruments or texts, everything that is and continues to be. The question that follows from here concerns the relationship between the two perspectives: the ballistic view of the law and the medium-based approach of cultural techniques. Clearly, from the vantage point of cultural techniques, the sovereign subject becomes disempowered, and it is things that are invested with agency instead. Does that amount to the end of the western idea of sovereignty? Have responsibility and accountability become useless categories? Some voices insist that the law should treat media and things in accordance with their media-theoretical importance. They propose that automata may be held criminally liable, computers close a contract and the internet assume authorial functions. Others regard such thingoriented legal notions as nothing but a re-enactment of a great comedy of innocence, in which guilt is passed on to the blade used to commit the crime; those latter rather stick to the narrative according to which every action is assigned to an acting subject. What are the consequences of a media-theoretical perspective that views things and media as performers? Can they be granted subjective rights equal to human rights? Would legal gures be required to explain how media and things dethrone the sovereign subject, or, at least, come to share that throne with him? Such questions remain open. The fact that we ask them shows that both media and things are leaving behind, or, may even have been liberated from, their passive existence as servile objects or serviceable means. The turn against framing things in strictly passive terms partly derives from an ecological impulse, demanding that non-humans be treated equally with humans and their specic rights. To a certain extent, things have had their own share in ensuring that the instrumental perspective may not be used to adequately describe their case. In their resistance against serving specic purposes, they lay a claim to a dierent kind of perception, which not accidentally coincides with a stage of heightened attention to media and things. The study of cultural techniques has taken up the task of examining that very stage. What remains to be done is to nd distinctions among objects (that is, among media and things) that correspond to those that law has long set in place for the subject, by working with dierent degrees of intentionality that range from premeditated acts to acts of negligence. When it comes to objects, however, the quest for a similar distinction in terms of degrees of action remains futile. As far as agency is concerned, the law holds that things and media are strictly passive. The domain of the object remains outside the scope of legal investigations. Not so in the case of

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cultural techniques, where research foregrounds it as a mode of operation neither entirely detached from the acting subject nor fully independent from objects (i.e. things and media).

Execution and Procedural Rules

The above-quoted passage from Schadewaldt states that certain operations, when executed in the medium voice, continue to be bound to their performer. What stands out here is the notion of execution a concept of central importance to the approach of cultural techniques. As soon as the focus of observation shifts from ideas to techniques, from nouns to the specic steps in the operation, the attention is geared towards the execution of a particular act. To execute generally means to proceed in a structured manner. Something is executed according to plan. An operation follows a pre-established scheme, even when it appears to be an original act that has not yet been mapped out. Even acts that are seemingly new and unique do not proceed without a plan. That almost algorithmic dimension of operations becomes fully apparent when 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 the least contradict the spontaneity of the gesture, is already inscribed within the things and media that partake of any given operation. To derive the operational script from the resulting operation, to extract the rules of execution from the executed act itself: that is what characterizes the approach of cultural techniques. Whether the matter at hand is a body of water or a spear, a computer or an architectural object like a door or a table, all media and things supply their own rules of execution. Such material instructions of operation come from a place that is not under the agents control. Acting independently from individual performers, and thus maintaining their potential reproducibility, they steer processes into dierent directions, towards dierent opportunities, and dierent persons. Such operations are sustained by a certain operational know-how, which can be learned and passed on to others. Reproducibility and learnability are among the key features of cultural techniques. All disciplines grounded in transferable praxis therefore deal with cultural techniques. That is clearly the case with the classical dogmatic disciplines of theology, medicine and law, where dogmas ensure that operations are performed independently of persons. Dogmas are therefore nothing else but the linguistic expression of particular acts of execution. They account for a certain kind of practical knowledge, which thus becomes learnable and reproducible. Not surprisingly, the Greek term techne is synonymous with dogma designates the (see Herberger, 1981: 11). Not unlike dogma, techne body of rules and regulations that circumscribe a particular mode of

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praxis. In cases where cultural techniques are performed and mediated independently of persons, they take on a specic form, which nds its expression in written directions, notations, codes of procedure, rules of application, annotations, and other systems of signs. Such technical instructions are essential for the study of cultural techniques. This is particularly the case for historical studies, where the rules of execution allow cultural techniques to rst assert themselves. What would we know about the powerful cultural technique of record-keeping, about its emergence, or discursive eld, without the specic instructions stipulated in chancery court orders? Instructions represent a laymans ultimate form of access to implicit or tacit knowledge, as Bruno Latour has dened this kind of practical expertise. Instructions are akin to, but not identical with, laws. Whereas laws can be transgressed and reinforced by punishment, the rules regarding proper usage cannot be ignored without also risking ones position or job. Those who dont go by the norms, who dont follow the rules of the trade, will be relieved of their right to exercise their activity. Technical regulations are vital for art. The procedural rules reect its current state of aairs. Thus, when making a statement about cultural techniques, one need not speculate whether the operational instructions have been followed or not. Their presence calls attention to a particular kind of praxis. Whenever rules are implicitly stored in a machine or explicitly contained in the form of written instructions, they establish a connection between certain operations and their performers: that is to say, the agents commonly known as subjects and objects. Agents stand for both, as shown by the medium verb form in Greek. That is the premise upon which the theory of cultural techniques is built: namely, a theory of medium-based operations, which in the hands of logic, grammar and the law is split into a subject who acts and an object that serves. In the eyes of the law, the relation of mediation becomes a question of attribution. Operations are strictly attributed to personal subjects. From the perspective of cultural techniques, the category of personal subjecthood is the object of an act of assignation, and that act, in its turn, is itself a technique, one that occupies a central place in our legally dened culture. The study of cultural techniques raises questions about how things and media operate. Thereby, it traces the ction of sovereign subjectivity, the myth of the subject as legislator, instigator or perpetrator, back to the techniques that make it possible in the rst place.

Cultural Techniques Cultural Heritage

The term cultural techniques suggests there may be other kinds of techniques as well. But can anything ever be produced outside of culture (Schu ttpelz, 2006: 90)? After all, techniques always wrest something away from nature, whether by fencing in an area, building a house

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or setting up a system of irrigation. The opposite of cultural techniques are not culture-less techniques. There is no such thing as barbarian tech , and colere implies the niques. Culture is already implicit in techne archaic techniques of irrigation, planting and taming, which turn nature into culture (Nanz and Siegert, 2006: 8). The counterpart of cultural techniques, therefore, is a world where techniques do not exist at all, a notion which cannot even be mentioned without using yet another cultural technique: the act of naming, which allows things to be used and studied in the rst place. If culture were nothing but a cipher for the symbolic order, which cultural techniques intervene in, or even produce, any further attempt at dening culture would be rendered superuous. That is quite possibly the reason why cultural studies [Kulturwissenschaften] gave up on dening their subject matter from the very start. Beyond the scientic-institutional context, where culture meant spirit and society, the term was left potentially and necessarily open. Only the study of cultural techniques has taken it literally, and derived its meaning from colere, which comprises the archaic techniques of culture (in the sense of cultivation). And yet, its scope is thereby not exhausted. Newer techniques, too, fall under the semantic eld of colere, as illustrated by the decision of the Federal Constitutional Court regarding the Treaty of Lisbon. There is no proper denition of culture in that case either. Rather, the court derives its meaning from the techniques contained within the term colere. To what extent can a state lose its sovereignty without losing its identity? Called upon to answer that question, the court invoked the notion of democratic self-determination, guaranteed by the state, and justied its decision by stressing the importance of cultural specicity for democratic development. Implicitly, then, the court assumes the task of dening the terms of what is culturally specic. Quite surprisingly, what follows is not a concrete list of German cultural trademarks. Instead, the court names institutions supposed to safeguard culture, with particular emphasis on the system of schools and education, the family, language, several sectors of the media landscape and the church (Articles 240 and 260 of the Federal Constitutional Court). Ultimately, that inventory is not a far cry from the cultural techniques of education, alphabetization, reading, writing, praying, confessing, playing, as well as those techniques dictated by computers and the internet. Thus, the institutions listed by the law as guardians of culture correspond in a denite and dening way to the cultural techniques that are the object of scientic inquiry. The juridical involvement of cultural techniques is always to be expected when legal means are deployed to prevent imminent loss. Just as cultural identity is dened against the threat of danger (in this case, the danger of the loss of sovereignty), cultural techniques, too, enter the legal discourse only when they threaten to disappear. An international agreement 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 intangible cultural heritage needs safeguarding a formulation that could easily refer to cultural techniques. The UNESCO agreement concerning the preservation of the intangible cultural heritage denes its subject as follows: oral traditions and means of expression, social practices, rituals and celebrations, the knowledge and customs related to the interaction with nature and the universe, as well as any forms of specialized knowledge 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 respective instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces. The connections between things, media and operations established through the study of cultural techniques are thereby also applied to the domain of international law. The spaces, gures and objects that manage the sequence of steps containing default operational settings are granted legal protection. The initiative to safeguard the intangible cultural heritage was launched around the same time as the rst 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 be said to have outgrown their operational habits. The voiceless, inconspicuous, concrete things turn into problem cases. Practices, representations, forms of expression, knowledge and skills are no longer passed on. Their transmission stalls; their reproducibility is threatened and the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated with them are at risk of disappearing. They become variables. But they do not merely attract the attention of the law-maker as the guardian of media and things. Their separation from praxis brings them into the focus of research as well. Obviously, there is no direct relation between the scientic and the legal scope of inquiry. But the coincidence between the academic institutionalization of cultural techniques and the legal move to safeguard fairy tales, dialects, popular celebrations and crafts is not altogether accidental. That coincidence results from the shared latency of their object of focus, be it classied under cultural heritage or cultural techniques. The loss of use value makes room for the application of both conservative measures and theoretical constructions. If the former preserve what the latter observe, then cultural techniques denitely carry with them a historical index. They have been co-opted into the academic eld of knowledge around the turn of the millennium, concomitantly with the measures introduced to safeguard the endangered cultural heritage. And thus, the present from where this very text is written signals the moment when the basic operations of cultural techniques begin to disappear. But their disappearance is not caused by the states self-imposed loss of sovereignty, as is the case with the process of Europeanization.

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The initial impulse for both the study of cultural techniques and the safeguarding of culture comes not from parting with the complacent and conceited vision of the sovereign state, as the Lisbon Treaty states (Articles 223 and 260 of the Federal Constitutional Court), but rather from the disempowerment suered by the acting subject. The dissolution of certain fundamental distinctions underpinning the operations of the law, such as the dierence between subject and object, entails a demand for new settings, for drawing new demarcation lines. A case in point is the debate concerning the question of copyright (the issue of Open Access). If writing on and with the help of the internet has, indeed, become common practice, then the image of a two-step process of writing as artistic creation and economic valuation, as the product of sovereign creators and serviceable media becomes inappropriate. From the perspective of cultural techniques, the alternative would be to conceive of writing as a continuous series of acts of transfer. The real challenge now is to accommodate the idea of the non-sovereign subject to the medias own logic, that is, rst and foremost, to nd 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 of decline, led in by a series of archival processes and archae-ological projects. Nevertheless, its concern is not with saving any endangered capital from the new ood of globalization or commercialization. Rather, it seeks to describe the chain of substitutions activated by the replacement of media and things. That chain is built along axes of analogy and displacement, succession and kinship. A case in point is the axis of digitalization, which allows for a diachronic perspective on writing diary writing, for instance, which evolves into blogging, or the autograph, which nds its extension in the electronic signature. The axis of secularization goes back even further in time. Its religious roots can still be traced in a series of cultural techniques of the law. Such, for instance, is the technique of confession, which Michel Foucault has brought to bear upon the practices of interrogation and examination. Psychoanalysis and the police thus reveal a connection to each other that does not ocially 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 cultural techniques that organize notions of space and time, those that Harold Innis associates with the production of states and empires. The cultural techniques that organize spatial categories comprise border regimes and surveying techniques, in short, everything that denes the act of drawing a 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 concrete operation performed with the help of a knife. That taxonomy calls for a further distinction between alphabetic and non-alphabetic cultural techniques. After all, the technique of irrigation is quite dierent from paperbased counting. Still, making can also imply text-based operations. Even without being written on paper, the founding act of drawing a line in the ground is a cartographic type of marking. It belongs to the symbolic order, irrespective of how concretely grounded the act itself may turn out to be. Similarly, the scion used in the cultural technique of grafting is the carrier of particular features; implicitly then, the act of grafting may be seen as a textual operation, with no paperwork involved (see Vismann, 2010). Thus, all cultural techniques maintain or establish some form of connection to the symbolic order; the distinction between alphabetic and non-alphabetic techniques therefore only accounts for one type of classication. The cultural techniques of space and of time (i.e. genealogical techniques) make for a more fundamental distinction. Everything else is assigned to a list in which cultural techniques are grouped according to their dierences and similarities, their precursors and successors. Such lists are never nite. Moreover, the making of lists is itself a cultural technique, serving as a reminder that the study of cultural techniques is folded within itself, eternally recurring and ready to be continued. Translated by Ilinca Iurascu

Note
1. This article was previously published as Kulturtechniken und Souvera nita t, Zeitschrift fur Medien- und Kulturforschung 1 (2010): 171181.

References
Articles of the Federal Constitutional Court. Available at: http:// www.bverfg.de/entscheidungen/es20090630_2bve000208.html (accessed 9 January 2010). Herberger, M. (1981) Dogmatik. Zur Geschichte von Begriff und Methode in Medizin und Jurisprudenz. Frankfurt am Main: Klosterman. Nanz, T. and Siegert, B. (eds) (2006) Ex machina. Beitrage zur Geschichte der Kulturtechniken. Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank fu r Geisteswissenschaft (VDG). Schadewaldt, W. (1978) Die Anfange der Philosophie bei den Griechen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Schu ttpelz, E. (2006) Die medienanthropologische Kehre der Kulturtechniken, Archiv fur Mediengeschichte 6: 87110.

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bereinkommen zur Erhaltung des immateriellen Kulturerbes. UNESCO (2003) U Available at: http://unesco.de/ike-konvention.html?&L0 (accessed 9 January 2010). Vismann, C. (2010) Kaiser Justinian, Kultivierer des Textes. In: Wirth, U. (ed.) Pfropfen, Impfen, Transplantieren. Wege der Kulturforschung 2. Berlin: Kadmos.

Cornelia Vismann (19612010) was a legal historian and media theorist who last held a position as Professor for the History and Theory of Cultural Techniques at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Her main publications include Files: Law and Media Technology (Stanford, 2008), Medien der Rechtsprechung (Frankfurt, 2011) and collections on Jacques Derrida and Pierre Legendre. Ilinca Iurascu is Assistant Professor of German at the University of British Columbia. A former postdoctoral fellow of the Media of History History of Media Program at the Bauhaus University Weimar, she specializes in nineteenth-century German and comparative literature, media theory and early lm studies.

Article

The Power of Small Gestures: On the Cultural Technique of Service

Markus Krajewski
t Weimar, Germany Bauhaus-Universita

Theory, Culture & Society 30(6) 94109 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263276413488961 tcs.sagepub.com

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 servomechanism. The analysis follows three distinct scenarios that highlight, via different channels 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 operational 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 society look like without mathematics and music? Can there be cultural progress without services? Without question, reading and writing produce cultural eects just like calculating and music-making do. But service? If cultural techniques are designed to carry out an action that develops cultural ecacy in a specic way through the interplay of purposeful bodily gestures and the use of aids such as tools, instruments or other medial objects, then service undoubtedly belongs to this category. However, while it is immediately evident in the case of writing how this elementary
Corresponding author: t Weimar, Bauhausstrae 11, #226, D-99421 Markus Krajewski, Faculty of Media, Bauhaus-Universita Weimar, Germany. Email: markus.krajewski@uni-weimar.de http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

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cultural technique of precisely applied nger and hand movements works in cooperation with a writing utensil (pencil, typewriter, fountain pen, etc.), the interaction in more varied processes such as service remains in need of explanation. By way of three exemplary scenarios which will be briey outlined, the cultural technique of service will be explained and subsequently situated within a broader context of cultural productivity and its eects. The history of service is extraordinarily diverse, complex and nearly boundless. As the subordinates service of his master is based on one of the fundamental social relations between lord and servant, this cultural technique pervades the entirety of history, in time and space, from the earliest records to the present day, and not merely in todays form of Portuguese cleaning women in the industrial nations, but rather extending to the most remote human populations in the Amazon. That being said, the three scenarios all arise from a courtly context and cast their own respective spotlights on the acoustics (A Courtly Cough), the optics (Signals in Sight), and the haptics (Regulating Rooms) of service. In this way, each will bring a channel of perception into focus on to which the servant grafts himself, in the sense of a servomechanism, in order to perform his prescribed actions in careful observation. By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servo-mechanisms (McLuhan, 1964: 46). Just as the clerk is a underling to his clock, and the Native American to his canoe, according to McLuhan, the servant appears literally as the service mechanism of his respective technique, which manifests itself in the form of the dinner tray, the door to be attended, the message to be relayed (by way of a ag signal, for instance) or through another technical gesture. In the discussion of these scenarios, more fundamental questions will be touched upon in passing, so to speak; namely, what exactly is meant by a cultural technique? Erhard Schu ttpelz provides a brilliant analysis of the concept (2006: 88). But rst, 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 courtiers are made recognizable through nely dierentiated practices of signication in the form of uniforms, liveries and badges of all kinds (honour key, marshals baton, etc.), but also in the acoustic realm, the various people are accompanied by corresponding signals that ensure the desired attention. Subaltern communications and their associated actions begin, . . . ahem . . . , with a cough. To descend a few more levels, old senior footmen, meal attendants and valets know how to nuance their coughing perfectly. The

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footman who closes the carriages door clears his throat delicately when a lady-in-waiting who is deep in thought doesnt specify where she wants to go, after which he jumps on the back and often directs the coachman with loud coughing. The valet in the masters chamber looks at the clock, coughing when a certain hour has arrived, and wakes the porter from his reverie with a loud cough, who almost forgot to have the coach brought around. Finally, at the table, the court quartermaster directs the entire dinner with an extravagance of the nest and softest coughs, the attendant calls the footmans attention to his foolishness in the same way with expressive coughs, a broken plate or an empty glass, and a young servant recoils with a start and coughs gently before the terrible abyss into which he nearly fell, as he was prepared to present the rst chamberlain with a wild pigs head from the right side. (Hackla nder, [1854] 1875: 176) In these scenarios, the servants carry out a variety of instructions and activities, most in direct relation to a technical object like a clock, a coach, a door or a (broken) plate. Sometimes, however, their action takes place without an additional object, as when their task is simply that of waiting for instructions. While all of these actions already contribute to a modest degree to the genesis of a cultural action, for instance through compliance with a courtly code of obedience and rule enforcement, on another more abstract level, they also bear witness to a core characteristic of cultural techniques, namely that the same operation is applied to results of the operation (Schu ttpelz, 2006: 95). On the one hand, this means that the respective activities of door service, housekeeping, and chaueuring arise as an eect of a cough and thus as a result of a subtly expressed instruction from a superior. Instruction reacts to service. On the other hand, this constellation shows that a servant, as executor of this cultural technique, does not act merely in relation to a supreme master but is always integrated into a hierarchically established operational chain of immediately superior servants, who simultaneously act as his surrogate masters, just as he himself can act as advisor to inferior servants. The interweaving of service in recursive patterns proves to be an important criterion of a cultural technique. Courtly coughing already suggests symptomatically that an act of service rarely stands alone, but instead remains engaged in a recursive network of services which relate to services. Every such action connects with subsequent communications in the form of arriving lordships or plates being served incorrectly (the right, instead of correctly the left side). The

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coughing itself fulls a primarily phatic function, in that it announces or initiates the occurrence of something else. But a signal can also elicit similar signals, like a cough continually passed onward, even over long distances. 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, didnt lack money or goods. Instead, he lacked ships, needed to transport the many slaves that he hoarded in his fort on the West African coast to Brazil. In his predicament, da Silva telegraphed his blood brother in Abomey, in the interior of the country, to obtain his Prince Kankpe support. Werner Herzogs not particularly realistic 1987 lm Cobra Verde, based on the novel by Bruce Chatwin, with Klaus Kinski in the lead role, re-enacts this scene in a remarkable way. One scene shows a young slave in a traditional get-up (bamboo skirt), who is on standby, initially in a kind of break-dance the lm appeared in 1987 awaiting a signal in consultation with a technical medium, the white signal ag, 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 attention to carry the signal forth. The command is nally given after the people in uniforms convince themselves that the chain is intact: the messenger raises up and waves his ag, after which the nearest messenger likewise waves his ag, after which the nearest messenger likewise waves his ag, after which . . .. The spectators then sees how the signal comes from below, following the coastline, spreading toward the horizon. The sign traverses the messenger chain like a transverse wave, whereby the signal presumably encompasses more than a single prolooooooonged sign. Rather, the messengers do not simply wave once; instead, they seem to use a whole set of signals through dierent ag positions, like the French dial telegraph invented a few years before by the Chappe brothers under Napoleon. The individual messengers or slaves, respectively, stand shoulder to shoulder, their faces directed toward the sea with its own waves, in order to keep the actions of both of their neighbours to either side in view. This messenger chain is duplicated by a second, more loosely staggered sequence seen to the right of the image. These are the servants who control the servants, armed with a rie and with a handful of slaves in view, watching over the proper transmission of the communication. The message to be sent seems to get quite long; or at least the entire messenger chain wags its ags eagerly from the foreground of the image across the savannah to the horizon, while the guards crouch in the grass, 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 ies, indeed in the same form, only in reverse order. Tightly packed, the individual messengers stand and wave their ags again, until the small slave behind the battlement receives the signal and waves armatively. Meanwhile, the servant dressed like a footman in a red uniform decodes the message for da Silva: The King sends his brother the great leopards greeting. End of message. Even if the content of the message a brief leopards greeting rather than assurance of a few ships may have been cause for irritation for da Silva, the transmission of the message seems to work smoothly. Apart from its (perhaps involuntary) comedy, this scene illustrates at least three fundamental aspects of a cultural technique. First, and quite conspicuously in its beginning with the ag-break-dance of the young slave, it demonstrates how strongly dependent a cultural technique is on a fusion of bodily techniques and technical media. Without artefacts, whether they be tools, instruments, technical or even human media in a clearly subservient function, no cultural technical action could come about (Maye, 2010: 135). And conversely, every technical medium necessitates a servant as servomechanism. No directed canoe journey without Native Americans, no regulated progress without clerks who ensure the operation of the clock, no culture without servants and their functions. Thus, cultural techniques like the data transmission undertaken here by the servants function exclusively in the context of a hybrid arrangement or collective of bodily techniques and media utilization. Communication can only ensue amid the interplay of a slaves waving motion and a ag (hybrid of man and technical medium), or of a slave and his voice, directed at his neighbour (hybrid of the voice of the knowing messenger and the ear of the subaltern, still-unknowing messenger, acting as an ancillary medium). Second, this scene illustrates directly what constitutes an operational chain. A slave on foot, out on a limb in the hot savannah, could hardly pass along a message. Only the interconnection of the many messengers into a relay, including its control dispositive through the second row of guards, guarantees the correct transmission of the message. Thus, the operational chain consists to a certain extent of a horizontal component, the row of waving slaves, and of a vertical component, the row of watching slaves, which exercise a recursive function similar to coughing at court, insofar as they apply the same operation of relay formation to the results of this operation. Thus, here it is not the individual servant who constitutes the medium of transmission, but rather the collective, that is to say, the entirety of the slaves and supervisors interconnected into the relay. And nally, it is not only the pure cultural technical action that is relevant, the what of the event, but also the how. The opulent image of

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the messenger series begs the question of why there are so many slaves integrated into this operational chain. Why is such eort expended, when the servants could just as easily have been positioned comfortably within sight of one another three instead of three hundred in the rst shot from the battlement to the next cli or even a single reliable messenger could have been sent on horseback to the capital 100 km away, entirely without the recursive chain of guards? Without question, this transmission process feeds on an excess of human agents, on slaves in their function as servile, ag-bearing elements of transmission, which can claim greater signicance in their aesthetic arrangement and their optical overpowering logic than mere functional necessity would require. The power of the ruler is duplicated in his footmen, who ostentatiously aunt their idleness for him in vicarious inoccupation. In other words, a cultural technique like service also always comprises an aesthetic component, which observes aspects of style beyond pure functionality. Thus, the question would be whether even an eminent cultural technique like writing is a cultural technique per se, or if it is only in linguistic renement, with its necessarily gradual increments, that a cultural added value comes to light that has yet to be produced. In this case, aesthetics and its qualitative classications gain particular signicance. Or, to choose a simpler example: just as you can theoretically criss-cross a eld, ploughing through it entirely unsystematically, a farmer nevertheless usually follows a particular pattern of linearity, prescribed by expediency, but also by a certain aesthetics of the continuing, parallel line. Likewise, these aesthetic standards can be transferred to the messenger chain above, led by the thesis that the mere functionality of the transmission could also have been accomplished with far fewer personnel.

Regulating Rooms
In Franz Kafkas short prose work A Message from the Emperor of 1917, originating four months after the death of the penultimate Habsburg 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. The messenger on the way to his recipient, thrusting forward now this arm, now the other, he cleared a path through the crowd; [. . .] he moves forward easily, like no other. But the crowds are so vast; their dwellings know no bounds. [. . .] he is still forcing his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he overcome them; and were he to succeed at this, nothing would be gained: he would have to ght his way down the steps; and were he to succeed at this, nothing would be gained: he would have to cross the courtyard and, after the courtyard, the second enclosing

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outer palace, and again stairways and courtyards, and again a palace, and so on through thousands of years. (Kafka, [1917] 2011: 41) This largely subjunctive parable, which may also be understood as a companion piece with a reversed direction of motion to the doorkeeper parable Before the Law, initially raises a simple question: why doesnt the messenger run away? What actually prevents him from leaving the palace? Even if the text doesnt give any explicit information about this, it seems sensible to relate it to the doorkeeper parable simply because of its architectural arrangement. Both texts work with tiered spatial arrangements, typical of courts and their sophisticated ceremony, determined by the question of how and to whom access to certain rooms is granted. The reason for the imperial messengers failed attempts to escape the innermost palace lies in the court ceremony and its limitation of access to the individual rooms: the messenger cant exit the palace because he comes across a relay which does not consist of simple messenger servants as in the previous scenario and which doesnt work with him, but is actually directed against him. Within a palace, everyone, including the messenger, is set against a cascade of courtiers who oppose them in order to prevent the delivery of the message. The messenger cannot get through, because he is ensnared in the system of power, between the other sta and their stooges. Why is it then that a strong, an indefatigable man (Kafka, [1917] 2011: 41) cannot manage to overcome these hurdles? Because in each of the chambers he is delivered over to another doorkeeper and his respective control of access, who in turn stubbornly adheres to the provisions of his own chain of command or is guided by (excessively high?) bribes. Thus, what are primarily of interest here are the spatial relations, and their respective regulation of access, with which the imperial messenger had to contend. How are the chambers and the architecture of the palaces constituted, through which the messenger must force his way for thousands of years, before he could reach the outermost door (but never, never can this happen)? The classic architecture of authority knows the representative corridor of power, also called enlade thanks to its origin in the Vaux-le-Vicomte palace (see Figure 1), that suite of chambers, antechambers and ante-antechambers into which a normal supplicant would arrive before the law, or an envoy overcoming doorkeeper after doorkeeper would ultimately arrive before the sovereign, moving in the opposite direction of Kafkas imperial messenger. With the enlade, the emperor had a system of signs that he could use to administer the labile system of his grace and of his subordinates access to power, and project them on to a spatial order and logic of access. In this enlade (see Figure 2), a courtier passes through various instances of power, each controlled by the indirect beings at the doors

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Figure 1. Ground-plan of Vaux-le-Vicomte palace (16561658) with suite of rooms.

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

(to borrow from Carl Schmitt, [1954] 2008), that is to say, the palace guards and doorkeepers, who have an abundance of power due to their specic knowledge and thanks to their precise familiarity with the place. In this inverted version of Kafkas other cascade of servants in Before the Law, where the way in goes through a series of ever more nely tiered doorkeepers who those seeking entry are able to see just as little as K. got to see the castle in close proximity, the movement is sucient to shift from the internal to the external. From the centre of power, where the emperor lies wasting away, a view opens up on to an immensely

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intricate spatial ensemble of suites, thresholds and detours that one must not just negotiate but even be acquainted with in the rst place. A particular local knowledge is necessary to make ones way through a palace. By what logic are these paths constructed, in what way do they reect courtly ceremony and the associated practices of service and of relations with subordinates? What role does architecture play when it comes to carrying out tasks ociously or giving underlings space for their service activities, whether in a limiting respect or in the form of a particular privilege or secret enabling? The nesting of the palaces makes the penetration of the rooms nearly impossible for the imperial messenger there seems to be no outside for him to ultimately reach. What rst sounds like ction has its structural counterparts both historically as well as quite objectively in Kafkas time, for instance in the capital of the Habsburg monarchy, in Viennas Hofburg palace, a conglomerate of various palaces from dierent periods and styles from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, which in addition to nearly endless suites of rooms (see Figure 2), is also complemented behind the scenes by a labyrinthine array of service architecture with its service corridors and backstairs, by which the imperceptible accommodation of the lordship by the subordinates is guaranteed. But where does the much-touted power of the indirect being manifest itself concretely? In what tasks and gestures are the mechanisms of a cultural technique of service to be found? The subaltern is not generally permitted to enter into his eld of activity with such ostentatious visibility as his lordships; rather, he nds himself in a relationship to them that demands servility, obedience and modesty. However, this dictum only relates to the front side, as it were, of that intricate relationship between master and servant, which counts among the basic constants of history. In fact, in the cultural technique of service one must incorporate an extremely important aspect, namely that reverse side of the grand stage, accompanied by a sometimes equally great abundance of power, even if its not always easy to grasp or to describe. Ultimately, one of the rst requirements of the servant consists of remaining invisible, despite physical presence. Thus, a general virtue of the servant lies in controlling the background inconspicuously. These very concrete practices of power express themselves not only in small gestures like opening doors or repelling intruders, attending table, assigning or tacitly taking places, in (self) situating or articial diminution (through bowing) before the displayed power of the sovereign. Rather, these optimally hidden practices of the subaltern are also based on medial arrangements prescribed and determined by architecture. In addition, this optimally hidden practice of servility encompasses the ability to nd passages without being seen and manage arcane knowledge. The highways of power, stretching in the enlade, are lled with careerists of all sorts and lined by indirect beings like the doorkeepers,

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and are always doubled by the secret corridors of the underlings, of the lowest of the servants, who attain unforeseen power through their knowledge of hidden interconnections. Because, in the end, a palace does not simply have the ocial enlade, but always also a vast collection of secret passages, hidden doors and special servants stairs, through the knowledge of which only the servants maintain true control. Just as the enlade proves to be an indicator of power, with a metreby-metre advance constituting the primary endeavour of the courtiers (or a departure, that of the imperial messenger), the supposed goal of this round dance seems to be the royal chambers (or the recipient of the imperial message), long-since abandoned and robbed of its centrality, because power itself is by no means concentrated directly in one person. Rather, it shows itself to be decentralized and distributed to such inconspicuous locations as thresholds with gatekeepers, concealed doors and hidden corridors. Power is splintered, its centre long-since dissolved, and strewn across various stations, delegated to underlings spread across long suites of rooms who each regulate the day-to-day balance of power at court in their own way by opening or closing doors, heating, traversing arcane paths, clearing out closets (and thereby having practical control of things), or more simply by talking or remaining silent at the right time.

Cultural Technique of Service

At the height of Victorianism, in an age when a large portion of the lowly and slightly less lowly tasks rested on the shoulders of domestics and subalterns of all sorts, an insight emerged from an unexpected source that was as modest as it was true: No culture without servants, as a Saxon nobleman and member of parliament, otherwise better known for his crude anti-Semitism, announced in 1875 (Treitschke, 1875: 17). What may at rst seem to be a thoroughly chauvinistic remark coming from the mouth of Prussias nationalist court historian Heinrich von Treitschke, professor of history at Berlin University, that he could imagine society without servants just as little as Aristotle could picture his age without slaves, nevertheless proves undoubtedly to be a lucid insight for his time in its simple logic (Bebel, [1892] 1996: 649). What may be seen as commonplace in the mid-20th century1 could by no means be seen as a selfevident, openly reected fact shortly after the establishment of the empire. Even if Treitschke hardly intended for his comment to unduly elevate the subaltern class, to outspokenly grant them a signicant share in the well-being of the ruling class, it nevertheless expresses unmistakably that it is ultimately the practices of the servants without which no cultural progress can be made. Here, it is above all the small everyday gestures, the minimal movements, which contribute decisively to the success of the whole.

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The practised hand movements of the underlings possess far more potential which evolves nearly imperceptibly. If service doesnt simply mean serving soup and clearing the plates, or organizing the household in every detail and providing for all possible comforts, but rather also consists not only of transmitting messages but ltering them, opening doors to then shut them again (sometimes on their own authority), not only following orders but anticipating them, if service not only means representing the prosperity of the lordship in glamorous liveries or standing in a row nearly naked with a ag in your hand but also carrying out special missions hidden from view in secret passages and hidden doors, then the agents of these trivial acts have more than a (modest) cultural educational function. They have nothing less than a specic agency. The servants are positioned strategically at the hubs of action, for instance at doorways, at which they control access. At the same time, they nd themselves at the interfaces of communication, waiting discreetly in the background at dinner or waiting inconspicuously with a silver platter in the study, while policy is made over drinks and cigars. They alone regulate access to the enlade, just as they have exclusive access to the supply channels of the royal residence. Apart from lovesick princes and fugitive queens, it is only the subaltern and no special imperial envoy who rush through the hidden corridors and passageways in the castle and the great houses, which form the backbone of the residences. Aside from their knowledge of arcane paths and their control of these real connecting corridors, the domestics contribute with each imperceptible action to the establishment of a symbolic corridor which houses the real power. The process of corridor building which were discussing here plays out on a daily basis in minimal, innitesimal approaches, on a large and small scale, wherever people exercise power over one another (Schmitt, [1954] 2008: 25). Through their actions, such as granting or denying entry, waiting and listening, both in the moments of decision that are wholly within the discretion of the servant, as well as through secret bribery and corruption on all levels of the hierarchy, the subaltern exercise a specic power, even if this power may seem marginal to outsiders. However, their strength lies precisely in this marginality, when unnoticed monitoring of conversations or unobserved observation open up new options for action not covered under their original mandate i.e. serving as a representative according to the will of their master. It is in these eeting intermediate stages, which momentarily open up a space for the subaltern to manoeuvre, that their inuence lies, elevating them for the moment to free agents. Rejecting an unwanted supplicant at the threshold or letting him in always has consequences for the doorkeeper. Taking good news from a messenger in order to present it to the lordship oneself increases ones own esteem. The innitesimal act on the periphery, the unassuming, almost imperceptible gesture, gradually adds power to the one who carries it out, becoming a distinct factor of inuence

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over time. In short, those medial basic operations that a subaltern routinely performs in small gestures are accompanied by a technique of power and domination that turns service into a basal cultural technique. If one cannot possess power, but rather only exercise it momentarily, then it is above all agents like the indirect beings that exercise a conduct of conducts (cf. Foucault, [1982] 2002: 341) in their control of access to the sovereign and to the ocial representatives of the ruler, in their knowledge of the paths to knowledge and in their marginal dominion over the corridors. By way of their unassuming gestures, with the help of their marginal actions that lter and disseminate information, select and redistribute decisive tips as an everyday medial base operation, the servants regulate and control the corridors of power and thereby power itself. On the one hand according to the semi-ocial reading the servant is a representative or proxy of his master, which degrades him to a subject in the literal sense of the subjugated, or as with the footman to a nely outtted persona with no will of his own. The task of the underling consists of fullling the desires of his lord without question and straightforwardly 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 constant throughout history. On the other hand, through his servile practices like regulating access at the doorway or transmitting, ltering and selecting information, the subaltern possesses an abundance of power, the scope of which he learns to gauge and use to his advantage at his job. Where does the servants technique of domination lead if one may allow such a seemingly paradoxical formulation? A possible intent behind extending his scope of action may be improving his own position through self-empowerment and increasingly becoming a master in his own right. It contributes to the consistent increase in inuence of the marginal agents. In contrast to others who are searching for work in general, servants are continually looking for a place made for them the annual change in duty station sets the rhythm and not least within the social hierarchy (see Robbins, 1986: 53). Thus, a component of the cultural technique of service consists of continually renegotiating ones current place in the hierarchy and moving it a little further up if possible: repositioning oneself. Improving ones standing. Climbing up. Every cultural renement is based on this very fundamental mechanism; without it, decay and decline would rule. Such basal behaviours as mimetic processes, surrogacy, rapprochement to the representatives of power and empowerment are the strategies of the subaltern, in order to move imperceptibly but consistently into ever more inuential positions. With each new step up the ladder, however small, the subject becomes somewhat more master than servant. Therein lies his own literal progress. This relatedness and arrangement into hierarchies, the constant reassignment of ones 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 cultural technique of service not least positioning oneself (as favourably as possible), in a broad sense, in order to participate in the control of the totality through those countless hand gestures of power and innitesimal acts. Just as (nearly) every targeted advancement at the forefront has the necessary insinuations, so the practices of service cant get by without a certain measure of servility. As well as the focus on the obvious techniques that a culture requires in order to develop vital concepts and thus knowledge of itself, which certainly include writing as well as reading, calculating as well as organizing as eminent cultural techniques (Siegert, 2005), it is also important to shift the perspective a bit toward the margins, in order to take into account the more imperceptible practices such as service in its physical, mental and manual activities, obstructing and closing as well as selecting and working invisibly. For out of these small actions of decision, the trivial routine work of the underlings, which in and of themselves would certainly be considered marginal, there emerges during service a sometimes tremendous wealth of opportunities to regulate the lordship. With the everyday hand movements and dierentiations that invisible assistants carry out, those medial practices of mastery and construction come into use. Only an analysis decidedly dedicated to these small gestures is capable of achieving a comprehensive notion of culture and its techniques. However, in that such cultural techniques carry out symbolic work, they remain reliant upon media as agents (Macho, 2005: 77; Schu ttpelz, 2006: 88). And in the realm of such innitesimal but nevertheless culture-generating acts, the servant embodies this medium. How is it that this marginal man position can have any epistemological relevance? The subalterns principal area of activity, acting as inconspicuously as possible in the background amid the paradoxical imperative of persistent invisibility despite physical presence, brings a particular observers perspective which is extremely helpful in potentially gaining knowledge. Who pays attention to the man serving the cognac? The valets perspective reviled by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit ([1807] 1988: 437) oers a lasting advantage over those entangled in their chiefand-state plays. While the table talk revolves around important discussion points, the attendant domestic can assimilate vital information not intended for his ears. In his function as medium on the margins, the servant proves to be involved while simultaneously unnoticed, present and forgotten. According to plan, he assumes the position of the unseen third party, hardly distinguishing him from a house pet. The servant is the eternal third man in the private life [. . .] People are as little embarrassed in a servants 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 powerful occupies a similarly advantageous position of knowledge. The medial

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functions of the indirect beings, who regulate informational access to the lordship, also enable these kinds of advantages in insight within this position of trust. Like the waiter at ocial events, the valet, who controls the direct corridor to power, the last few metres to the royal bedchamber, occupies a privileged perspective. Once again, the valet proves his proximity to the sovereign in that he is not merely available to his lordship as an advisor at any time in matters of personal care or other concerns. Rather, he is the unltered, unmediated connection to the ruler, who provides the valet with an exclusive position from which he can observe while remaining unobserved, and make use of varied opportunities to inuence decisions. The servant who shaves the captain controls the ship, as it goes in Herman Melvilles Benito Cereno of 1857. It is not for nothing that contemporaries especially fear those people in such positions of trust, like the inuence of the autist Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf on Frederick II, hardly legitimized in any ocial capacity. It is not by chance that an inscrutable gure like John Brown, Queen Victorias favourite valet, maintains a political factor that is dicult to assess (see Lamont-Brown, 2000; Marshall, 1949: 26). Its actual historical eect proves to be hard to measure in hindsight, inasmuch as the servants position of trust moves between two extremes: the position of an actual potentate on the one hand, and on the other hand a relationship with his master that renders him closer to a lapdog: many [masters] wished to use such upper servants as footmen and ladys maids as condantes, accomplices, go-betweens, and pets (Porter, 1990: 104). Regardless of the distance to their master, this position is distinguished primarily by an epistemologically favourable position of observation. This is the privileged point of observation par excellence from which a special knowledge of power can be attained imperceptibly. Valets and waiters, butlers and footmen can assume this position, because they operate studiously in the background. This demonstrates a technique of rened culture when someone can work in secret while also being in full view. In a certain sense, the servant acts analogously to Edgar Allen Poes Purloined Letter: he is in the room, constitutes the secret heart of the action, and yet no one takes notice of him. In small gestures, with inconspicuous actions like attending and cleaning up, coughing and signalling, opening and closing, permitting and obstructing, in short: in attending to people and things, a servant connects and bundles various techniques that become cultural techniques through his interlacing actions. The seven characteristics mentioned contribute to the servants heterogeneous actions being associated with cultural ecacy: (1) the interweaving of service in recursive patterns of action, (2) the connection of the individual servants into a collective and the associated delegation of activities, (3) the resulting dispersed agency passed from the individual to the hybrid collective of people and 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 toward repositioning through his respective activity, which fuels the innovative power of a cultural technique, not least (6) the aesthetic component of a cultural technique, which furnishes the subaltern actions with style beyond pure functionality, and nally (7) the epistemological component, which makes the marginal man position into a powerful one with the help of indirect control. Particularly with the bundling of these characteristics, the subalterns ability to act accumulates to form a power structure. It is true what the lowest of Kafkas doorkeepers says: But note that I am powerful. And I am only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall, keepers stand at every door, one more powerful than the other (Kafka, [1915] 1995: 23). Service may be based on small gestures that obstruct or enable, permit or exclude. In their interconnection and catenation, in their bundling and accumulation, the various practices by which a servant organizes the life of his master generate power (to act) that is by no means minor. This enables the servant to contribute to the renement of culture from below, so to speak, from the valets perspective, with inconspicuous technical manipulations, in innitesimal gestures. It is the cultural technique of service with its specic characteristics that endows the servomechanism of our things, the servant, with a relevant, highly inuential form of action. Translated by Charles Marcrum

Note
1. [T]he domestic servant class has a special significance. It was an important agent in the process of cultural change (Hecht, 1956: 200).

References
Bebel, A. ([1892] 1996) Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Die Frau in der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft), Vol. 10/2. Mu nchen: K.G. Saur. Foucault, M. ([1982] 2002) The Subject and Power, pp. 326348 in Power: Essential Works of Foucault 19541984, Volume 3, ed. J. Faubion. London: Penguin. Hackla nder, F.W. ([1854] 1875) Europa isches Sklavenleben. F. W. Hacklanders Werke. Erste Gesammt-Ausgabe. Stuttgart: U. Kro ner. 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, The New York Review of Books 58(14): 41.

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Lamont-Brown, R. (2000) John Brown: Queen Victorias Highland Servant. Stroud: Sutton. Macho, T. (2005) Die Ba ume des Alphabets, Neue Rundschau 116(2): 6680. 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): 121135. 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 Servants 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. Schu ttpelz, E. (2006) Die medienanthropologische Kehre der Kulturtechniken, Archiv fur Mediengeschichte 6: 87110. Siegert, B. (2005) Was sind Kulturtechniken?, Bauhaus-Universita t Weimar. URL: http://www.uni-weimar.de/medien/kulturtechniken/kultek.html Skrine, P. (1985) Das Bild des Dieners in der deutschen Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts, pp. 245257 in W. Bru ckner, P. Blickle, and D. Breuer (eds) Literatur und Volk im 17. Jahrhundert. Probleme popularer Kultur in Deutschland. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. Treitschke, H. (1875) Der Socialismus und seine Gonner. Berlin: Georg Reimer.

Markus Krajewski is Associate Professor of Media History of Science at the Bauhaus University Weimar. Among his most recent publications are Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 15481929 (MIT, 2011), Der Diener. Mediengeschichte einer Figur zwischen Konig und Klient (Fischer, 2010) and Restlosigkeit. Weltprojekte um 1900 (Fischer, 2006). He is a co-editor of the History and Foundations of Information Science book series (MIT) and the creator of the hypertextual card index synapsen (www.verzetteln.de/synapsen). Charles Marcrum is a translator of non-ction and literary works. Following language study at Vanderbilt University and the Universita t Regensburg, he completed graduate studies in German literature and lm at Harvard University. Since then, he has been active in the elds of art history, Jewish studies, history of science and media theory. He is a member of ALTA.

Article

Zootechnologies: Swarming as a Cultural Technique

Sebastian Vehlken
Leuphana University, Germany

Theory, Culture & Society 30(6) 110131 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263276413488959 tcs.sagepub.com

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 concept 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 biological researchers with enduring knowledge about dynamic collectives. This conglomerate 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 published in 1905, the ichthyologist David Starr Jordan posed the following question: What is a sh? A sh, he answered, is a back-boned animal which lives in the water and cannot ever live very long anywhere else. Its ancestors have always dwelt in the water, and most likely its descendants will forever follow their example (1905: 3). At rst glance it would be dicult even today to refute this denition, so long as a few obscure exceptions
Corresponding author: Sebastian Vehlken, mecs Institute for Advanced Study in Media Cultures of Computer Simulation, Leuphana University, Luneburg 21355, Germany. Email: sebastian.vehlken@leuphana.de http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

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are set aside. The ambitions of the seemingly hydrophobic mudskipper periophthalmus barbarus, an amphibious goby, come to mind in this regard. A second glance, however, reveals that sh have been seizing dry territory rather energetically for some time. Such land grabs, of course, have not been the result of baing leaps in evolutionary biology. They rather owe their occurrence to a co-evolution that has taken place in the elds of biology and computer science. Fish, or more precisely schools of sh, have been a source of inspiration to a branch of computer science since the middle of the 1990s. Along with other biological collectives, such as ocks of birds and colonies of insects, schools of sh have inspired a eld of research that has come to be known as computational swarm intelligence. Computer applications of swarm intelligence make use of the eects that are observable in animal collectives. On a global level, the multiple and localized interactions among large numbers of relatively simply constructed agents have yielded interesting potentialities of selforganization. Collectives possess certain abilities that are lacking in their component parts. Whereas an individual member of a swarm commands only a limited understanding of its environment, the collective as a whole is able to adapt nearly awlessly to the changing conditions of its surroundings. Without recourse to an overriding authority or hierarchy, such collectives organize themselves quickly, adaptively, and uniquely with the help of their distributed control logic. Within swarms, the quantity of local data transmission is converted into new collective qualities. It is thus possible to conceive of an initial way in which swarming has developed into a novel cultural technique. Swarm intelligence helps to congure an environment that is increasingly confronted with the task of organizing highly engineered and interconnected systems and also with the task of modelling complex correlations. It can be applied wherever there are disturbed conditions, wherever imprecisely dened problems present themselves, wherever system parameters are constantly in ux, and wherever solution strategies become blindingly complex. Swarm intelligence, according to one standard work, oers an alternative way of designing intelligent systems, in which autonomy, emergence, and distributed functioning replace control, preprogramming, and centralization (Bonabeau et al., 1999: xi). To borrow an often-repeated notion from bionics, humans would do well in this case to learn something from the inventiveness of nature. There is yet another way in which swarming can be viewed as a burgeoning cultural technique. Since the year 2000, swarms have entered a growing discourse in the form of such expressions as smart majorities (Fisher, 2010; Miller, 2010), smart mobs (Rheingold, 2002), swarming in the battleeld (Arquila and Ronfeldt, 2000), the wisdom of crowds (Surowiecki, 2004), and simply multitude (Hardt and Negri, 2004) and this is not to mention their role in recent thrillers by Michael Crichton

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(2002) and Frank Scha tzing (2006). They have become a metaphor for the coordination processes of an engineered present, a present in which the exible adaptation to ever-changing conditions can be associated with the alleged potential for freedom inherent in autonomous individuals. With the help of ever more dynamic forms of interconnectedness, as the swarm metaphor suggests, we are able to use an instantaneous infrastructure of decision-making to our own advantage. To achieve certain goals, it is thought, we are thereby able to coordinate temporarily with those of the same mind. This ephemeral and apparently grass-roots democratic conception of collectivity has promised to uncouple political, economic, and social behaviour from the structures of entrenched systems and social organizations such as nations, political parties, and labour unions. Swarming, as a sort of network 2.0, has come to be used as a celebrated catchword for political demonstrations arranged by means of mobile media, for the type of communication that takes place in online collectives, and for the organization and availability of information or knowledge. Over the last 15 years, it seems, swarming has established itself both technologically and socially as a means of collaboration that is far superior to traditional forms of collective organization. These recent developments are complicated, however, by a closer investigation into the genealogy of swarming intelligence. When, in what follows, I describe swarming as a cultural technique, I will attempt to approach the phenomenon by means of exemplary scenes from the media history of swarm research. It is worth clarifying, in general, the conditions under which swarms had been able to develop into productively deployable gures of knowledge, for traditionally they were associated either with an aura of the chaotic, escalatory, and uncanny (Tarde, 1901; Le Bon, 1896), or with a miraculous and divine power to fascinate (Maeterlinck, 1901). My approach below rests upon three theses, each of which problematizes and adjusts the paths of development, outlined above, that the concept of the swarm has undergone to become a cultural technique. First, it can be maintained that the media history of swarm research has been based on a fundamental and gradual withdrawal from naturalness that has taken place within engineered environments of observation and experimentation. Analytic approaches and (media-technological) methods of observation have, for decades, been mired in a technological morass (Parrish et al., 1997: 9), because swarms are problematic objects of knowledge: they disrupt the scientic processes of objectication by means of their dynamics in space and time. The only way to overcome this obstacle is to resort to synthetic methods of acquiring knowledge. Such methods are based on the recursive intertwinement of certain processes, namely those of the biologization of computer science, on the one

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hand, and those of the computerization of biological research on the other. In this way, swarm-inspired agent-based computer simulation models and the applications of computer graphic imaging, which originated in dierent places for dierent purposes, have ultimately gained entry into the eld of biological swarm research. Over the course of this development, swarms have become both an object and a principle of agent-based models and their methods of computer graphic imaging. A sociobiological understanding of animal swarms, or of bionic transferences, falls short in its description of the dynamic relations among humans, animals, and machines. In the case of swarms, it is no longer animals that serve as a model for . What is noteworthy is rather the reciprocal mankind and its techne interference of biological principles and the processes of information technology. Swarms should be understood as zootechnologies. In contrast to biotechnologies or biomedia (Thacker, 2004a), they derive less from , the unanibios, the concept of animated life, than they do from zoe  mated life of the swarm. Zoe manifests itself as a particular type of vivacity, for instance as the dynamic urry of swarming individuals. It is a vivacity that lends itself to technological implementation, for it can be rendered just as well into ordered or disorderly movement. This capacity, in turn, is based on rules of motion and interaction that, once programmed and processed by computer technology, can produce seemingly lifelike behaviour among articial agents. And thus the conditions of knowledge overlap and entangle as well. Swarm research combines  with the experimental epistemology of computer simulation. this zoe A sound understanding of swarms will ultimately emerge where self-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 specic media technologies of swarm research, swarms do not exist as objects of knowledge, and swarming cannot be regarded as a cultural technique. In the media history of swarm research, the concept of mediaemergence and that of cultural techniques intertwine; the development of swarming into a cultural technique could not have taken place outside of specic media cultures. The second thesis concerns a perspective on the relationship among man, animal, and machine that has redirected the discourse of researchers concerned with cultural techniques. It is no longer a matter of debate whether (human) body techniques can be subsumed under the concept of (human) cultural techniques, or whether cultural techniques derive from the body (Maye, 2010: 122). Likewise, the perspective in question avoids the recent call in the eld to make a mediaanthropological turn (Schu ttpelz, 2006). Nor is it restricted to the representation of reciprocal, recursive, and cyclical mediations among signs, persons, and things (and to their signicance to the medial

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extension of humans into their environment). Rather, swarming is thought to include animals into the discourse here as a multitude, as a collective and thus to address a zootechnological relation. Produced between the elds of biology and computer science, a systems knowledge of selforganizing collectives assists us, in a way that anthropology cannot, in our treatment of certain problems and regulatory issues that are normally regarded as opaque. To the question concerning the operative interconnections between body techniques and media techniques, swarms contribute an element of dynamic collective bodies. In this light, a third thesis can be formulated that is of interest to the study of cultural techniques. For, although descriptions of swarms have existed since antiquity, swarming in the sense of a cultural technique did not originate until the media-emergence of swarms as intelligent zootechnologies. Around the year 1900, swarms were thematized in works of mass psychology to lament the debased treatment of humans as animals. Around the year 2000, however, animal swarms were suddenly serving as models for human smart mobs. What occurred in the meantime is the transformation, based on biological swarm research and new developments in computer science, of swarms into operatively deployable applications. Along with this transformation, however, the concept of swarming was also fundamentally transformed namely as a consequence of media-technological processes. Only a media-emergence could enable swarming to appear as a cultural technique. As much as possible, moreover, this media-emergence delegated the fundamental cultural techniques of image-making, writing, and calculation to automated and mechanized processes, be it in the form of new object-oriented programming languages or for the sake of presenting transactional data on graphical user interfaces, for example. Thus, within recursive chains of operation, swarm principles not only participate in their self-description within the eld of swarm research but rather they co-author processes within our knowledge culture (Vehlken, 2012). They appear in economic simulations and models of nancial markets, in simulations of social behaviour, in simulations of crowd evacuations, and in the eld of panic studies. They have become essential to epidemiology, to the optimization of logical systems, and to transportation planning. They are used to improve telecommunications and network protocols and to improve image and pattern recognition. They are a component of certain climate models and multi-robot systems, and they play a role in the eld of mathematical optimization. What swarming, in its technologized and radicalized form, brings to the eld of culture (or cultural techniques) is a fundamental element of culture in general. It is a dynamic structure, a topological system of inter-individual communication, which has deeply permeated the governmentality of the present. Related below, within the context of these three theses, are scenes from the media history of swarm research that depict the production of

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swarms as zootechnologies. In light of these scenes I will examine how it has been possible for swarming to evolve from clouds of data drifts into a concept 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: 1819), and thus noise can be understood to mark the beginning of all media theory (Siegert, 2007: 7). It is not an unhindered exchange between two parties that stands at the onset of every societal and cultural relationship, because a third party is always involved. With the concept of the parasite, Serres has identied phenomena of interference and interruption that precede any such interaction. It is therefore characteristic of medial relationships, he notes, that their channels of communication have to be constructed and optimized under the assumption that they will be distorted and interrupted by certain factors. In our eorts to exclude parasitic phenomena, the latter are thereby made a part of our every interaction. It is only through the act of suppressing noise, in other words, that mediality comes into being. The result is a tripartite model in which interference is not accidentally grafted onto existing relationships, but rather in which it is constitutive to the formation of the relationships themselves (Serres, 1982: 73). Serress concept of the parasite is interesting for the study of cultural techniques because it augments this media-theoretical insight with two additional considerations. First, it contributes a cultural-anthropological dimension that arises from the semantics of the concept itself, based as it is on transcending the dierence between humans and animals. Second, it contributes an aspect associated with cultural techniques in the older sense of the term, which was laced with economic and agricultural signicance (Siegert, 2011: 102). With respect to swarming, however, the media-theoretical aspect should be pursued even further, for swarms represent an instructive object of Serress concept as well as a particular exception to it. They operate simultaneously as agents of the materialization of noise and interference, on the one hand, and as processes of the productive revaluation of noise on the other. Animal swarms oscillate on the eld of tension between interference and organization.1 From a distance, what appears to be the precise and coherent macro-dynamic of an admittedly diuse collective begins to look quite dierent when examined up close, namely like a seemingly unorganized urry of innumerable micro-interactions. These interactions surpass not only the capacities of human perception but also the analytic capabilities of technological recording devices. As an event, swarming dees perceptual or medial transference by means of its own transformative properties (Vogl, 2004: 147). The very swarming of swarms baes our view of the swarm as an object

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of knowledge; as a chaos of spatial, temporal, and interactional information, swarming introduces an inability to experience objects empirically, something which was captured so well in Alfred Hitchcocks The Birds (Vogl, 2004: 145). At the heart of biological swarm research lies the search for adequate media-technological means of studying the interactions and functions of these dynamic animal collectives. At the beginning of the 20th century, the rst attempts to observe swarms of birds in the wild coincided with the emergence of a new eld of research known as behavioural biology (Nyhart, 1996). Long before the establishment of professional scientic research practices, amateur ornithologists such as William J. Long and Edmund Selous simply went out into the eld. There they attempted to trace the secrets of certain ocks of birds that swarmed together in the air like a single being. Equipped with an ornithological recording system which consisted of little more than their eyes, a telescope, a pen and some paper, a great deal of patience, and some crude shelters for observation they assiduously took note of everything they could see (Selous, 1901: 173). Yet the speed of the interactions deed the perceptive capabilities of the observers to such an extent that they were forced to base their ndings on super-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 their contemporary context. First, they should be evaluated in terms of the popular theories that circulated about the psychic lives of animals and humans (Bouvier, 1922); second, they must be seen in light of new wireless media such as radio and radar, and also in light of the various wave theories that were hotly debated among the physicists of the time (Vines, 2004: 48). Although short-lived, such swarm theories along with an intensive biological-philosophical discourse concerning emergent evolution and superorganisms (Morgan, 1923; Wheeler, 1911) smoothed the way for other avenues of explanation. Whereas decades would pass before technological innovations facilitated the study of ocking birds, those studying schools of sh proted from more accessible experimental conditions and from an elaborate infrastructure of aquaria. The latter infrastructure was supported quite substantially mirabile dictu by the interests of the shing industry. And yet these developments resulted in new epistemic ssures, which the biologist William Bateson had identied even before the turn of the century. Although it was now possible, Bateson noted, to enjoy the advantages of articial conditions within the laboratory, the abiotic inuences of such conditions must always be kept in mind (Bateson, 1890: 2256). Articial environments represented the best means of approximating the living conditions of the animals under investigation, but only to the extent that new laboratory ndings were informed by a sophisticated understanding of aquaria and their

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eects (Allen and Harvey, 1928). Even then, however, it remained questionable whether the behaviour observed in aquaria was transferable to schools of sh swimming freely and unobserved in the sea. In addition to peculiar sleeping behaviour [a]t night they lie on the surface of the water Bateson identied three main characteristics of a school of captive grey mullet, namely a tightly-formed collective body (at least during the day), the lack of an explicit leader, and the parallel alignment of individuals in one direction (1890: 24950). A good three decades later, researchers such as Albert Parr, Karl von Frisch, and Guy Spooner developed these early observations further, although they conveniently failed to address the issue of sleeping habits. In 1927, Parr conceived of a psycho-mechanical model for schools of sh, according to which the social behaviour of such swarms was neither complicated nor mysterious. According to his theory, this behaviour is rather the result of multiple psycho-mechanical and physiomechanical reactions within a simple set of rules: an instantaneous attraction among the individuals upon eye contact, a parallel alignment, and the maintenance of equal distance among the individual sh (Parr, 1927). By means of experiments with partitions and mirrors inside aquaria, Spooner (1931) systematically evaluated the extent to which these factors actually came into play during the formations of schools. Frisch investigated the ability of minnows to react to certain repellents and signs of danger. Whereas he boasted of the good overview provided by his aquarium, which allowed for an objective execution of protocol [. . .] with a stopwatch in hand (Frisch, 1938: 603), Spooner acknowledged the fundamental limitations encountered when dealing with swarms: For any given sh it is impossible to predict denitely how it will behave, but it is possible to say how it will most probably behave [. . .]. But it is not possible to measure this probability [. . .] accurately (1931: 444). To Spooners mind, unambiguous correlations between the reactions of sh and the methods of experimentation were lacking. Yet another difculty in determining the relevant factors of swarm formation, in other words, involved a level of predictability that could only yield probable correlations. Researchers had to distance themselves from the determined and linear principles of cause and eect. For it was not only the imprecision of physical observation but also that of the data produced by experimental fumblings, imaginings, and especially processing that led to certain pitfalls. After the Second World War, the research concerned with schooling sh underwent a media-technological upgrade. D.V. Radakov endeavoured to observe swarms consisting of approximately one hundred individuals, for only swarms of such a critical size could be said to demonstrate any universal patterns of behaviour (1973: 54). To this end he installed a camera above an aquarium, the bottom of which was equipped with a measuring grid. His method also enabled such techniques as replay

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and slow motion. Radakov determined the interactions of swarming individuals by examining the changes of their position in frame-by-frame projections or stills adjusting, of course, for changes of scale. Thus were created maps of the activity of sh schools in two dimensions plus time. Yet this method also entailed certain obscurities, especially because it failed to account for the third dimension of space. The sh overlapped one another from the perspective of the camera, so that it was hardly possible to track them with accuracy throughout the sequences of lm. Accordingly, all of the data had to be tediously and manually generated and saved in a tabular form. This process was further complicated, moreover, because school formations would often break apart upon reaching the wall of the aquarium and having to turn around. In anticipation of this problem, doughnut-shaped aquaria were developed during the 1960s (Shaw, 1962: 130); in these, the polarized individuals of a school can swim constantly in one direction. To this development can be added the so-called shadow method, which allowed for schools of sh to be studied in three dimensions. The method required a camera to be anked by a spotlight, and for the latter to be aimed at a particular angle. By such means, each of the sh under observation cast a clear shadow onto the bottom of the aquarium, and the dierences in size between the actual sh and their projected shadows, given the angle of the light and the depth of the water, yielded information about the coordinates 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 long period of time, though the swarms in question were typically restricted to between 20 and 30 individuals. A comprehensive analysis of this type was undertaken in the middle of the 1970s by a team under the direction of Brian Partridge (Partridge et al., 1980), and the data accumulated by their four-dimensional measurements remained the standard for many years. Even in the present millennium, according to Julia Parrish, their ndings have provided a metric of swarming activity that has inuenced the design of certain computer simulations (Parrish and Viscido, 2005: 67). However, even though Partridge was able to implement a partially automated recording system so that positional data could be read by means of a computer program along with graphical user interfaces, optical fuzziness could be ltered out, and the paths of individual sh could be plotted on coordinates researchers were still left in despair on account of the immense amount of data at their disposal. Even in the case of small schools observed in laboratory settings, there were [m]ethod sections from several sh schooling papers [. . .] full of agonizing descriptions of the number of frames analyzed [. . .]. The endless hours of data collection were enough to turn anyone away (Parrish et al., 1997: 10). Similar observations can be made about the study of ocking birds. In this eld, for instance, Peter Major and Laurence Dill conducted

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experiments in the 1970s with stereo-photographic recordings. In order to ensure a stabile camera perspective and uniform photographic details, however, their experiments were only possible in the case of ocks passing 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 interesting collective dynamics, would overtax the system of observation (Major and Dill, 1978: 122). Ironically enough, these researchers had their best luck at the Vancouver airport, where ocks are a particular hazard to turbine-powered aircraft. This conict between technology and swarms is likewise valid in the case of their empirical, optical analysis. The mediatechnologies of swarm research have encountered the greatest diculties when trying to dissolve the inter-individual movements of individuals from the collective movement of the whole in eorts to reach conclusions about the dynamics of large collectives in time. Attempts to examine individual details, that is, can obscure our understanding of the whole. The stubbornness of swarms in the face of media-technological patterning processes also manifests itself in complementary elds of research. With the help of radar (in the case of birds) and sonar (in the case of sh), for instance, attempts have been made to analyse the global activity of animal collectives (Heppner, 1997; Gerlotto et al., 1999; Simmonds and MacLennan, 2005; Paramo et al., 2007). These investigations have brought to light another side of medial uncertainty principles, namely where technological media are confronted with bodies without surfaces. The act of (electro-) acoustic scanning and the visualization processes associated with it must contend with multiple interferences that frustrate its ability to draw accurate conclusions about the inter-individual relations within a given collective. Far more problematic, however, is the failure of such methods to create reproducible testing conditions and to generate data of long-standing signicance. The Cartesian procedure of dissolving problems into sub-problems, and thus of analysing collective movement as the sum of segmented individual movements, necessarily fails to explicate scale-variant phenomena such as swarms.

III. Simple Rules

Because of the complications surveyed above, certain researchers sought other approaches to the problem. In connection with Parrs thesis, namely that the dynamics of sh schools can be ascribed to a few simple rules of interaction, eorts were made to calculate swarms, that is, to develop abstract mathematical models of their activity in space and time. This process did not aim to solve, in an analytic manner, the non-linear dynamics of swarms and the factors responsible for their ability to self-organize, but rather to approximate them numerically. In response to an Aristotelian platitude that is often cited in this context, Heinz von Foerster has related a tting riposte: The whole is

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greater than the sum of its parts. As one of my colleagues once remarked: Cant the numbskulls even add? (Foerster, 2003: 319). For this is not at all a matter of the summation of parts, but rather of the dynamic relations among the component parts of a system. Swarms engender a specic relational being, the nature of which has been summarized well by Eugene Thacker: The parts are not subservient to the whole both exist simultaneously and because of each other. [. . .] [A] swarm does not exist at a local or global level, but at a third level, where multiplicity and relation intersect (Thacker, 2004b). However, before computer technology enabled the viability of elaborate synthetic approaches, which circumvented the analytic problem of fuzzy relations, models of swarming behaviour were at rst only possible if the number of variables involved was severely reduced. In the early 1950s, Charles Breder began to calculate the internal relations of swarms by conceptualizing each of its individuals as a physical point of mass with specic powers of attraction and repulsion (Breder, 1954). As far as biology is concerned, models of this sort have been criticized as having little predictive value; however, they do have the advantage of relying on established physical laws and formulas. Geometric models were also developed, the concern of which was either the optimal utilization of space (Breder, 1976) or the formation of aggregates in general (Hamilton, 1971). Breder and Radakov gradually formulated new concepts, based on information theory, that would supplant the older psychological and psycho-mechanical terminology. They directed their attention, for instance, to the phenomenon of so-called waves of agitation. Radakov described such waves, which are also observable in ocks of birds, as a rapidly shifting zone in which the sh react to the actions of their neighbors by changing their position [. . .]. The speed of propagation [. . .] is much higher than the maximum (spurt) speed of forward movement of individual specimens (Radakov, 1973: 82). They introduced additional environmental factors into their models, which had been overlooked elsewhere, and also ltered out what they considered to be unimportant interference. These adjustments led to signicant structural changes and to the optimal reaction of their theoretical swarms to environmental inuences. Measured under such inuences, swarms came to be understood more and more as infrastructures of information or, more generally, as social media (Schilt and Norris, 1997: 231). The conceptual informatization and mathematical modelling of biological research may have stimulated the rst attempts at individualbased simulation, which were ventured in the 1970s and early 1980s (Kay, 2000). In an article from 1973, Sumiko Sakai provided a mathematical model, based on internal rules, for the behaviour of schooling sh. The novelty of this study was that the paths of motion were calculated by a computer and then, much like the plotted diagrams of empirical

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laboratory reports, recorded graphically. Tadashi Inagaki et al. (1976) investigated the coherence of sh schools over long periods of time and developed a mathematical model with the following ve variables: mutual attractive or repulsive force, mean swimming force, random force, force exerted by the change of circumstances and frictional force of swimming motion. According to their results, the coherence of a given swarm could only be maintained so long as certain combinations of these parameters were in eect. Of special interest to the potential of computer simulation was the work of Ko Matuda and Nobuo Sannomiya (1980), which enhanced Sakais model into an application for modelling sh behaviour in relation to shing nets. Theirs was the rst study to address the reciprocal eects of computer simulation and swarm research. Whereas traditional technologies such as underwater cameras and hydro-acoustic sensors were subject 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 deciencies (Matuda and Sannomiya, 1980: 689). Increasingly, swarm research began to distance itself from the inuences of psychology and behavioural biology, and natural behaviour came to manifest itself as little more than a function of physical, quantied variables. Swarms were modelled as technical systems of multiple components, each with a set of predetermined characteristics. Models of this sort enabled biological swarm research to expand into an operational and far more general means of describing multitudes composed of homogeneous elements. As a result of this development, the actual nature of these collective systems ultimately became a subordinate issue. The latter authors conducted computer experiments with virtual schools of sh in which they tested, for instance, their behaviour in response to certain obstacles. However, it was Ichiro Aokis simulation model of schooling sh, published in 1982, that would become foundational to later research in the eld of agent-based modelling. Aoki integrated motion parameters into a zone-based model, composed of concentric circles surrounding individuals, that governed the activation of certain behavioural parameters. The model generated reciprocal dynamics among individuals, and these dynamics depended on the presence of such forces as attraction, repulsion, or alignment, on the velocity of the individuals, and on their trajectories in relation to one another. For some time, this understanding of the organization of swarm dynamics remained inapplicable to other disciplines. The realization of its interdisciplinary potential would require another media-emergence of swarms. What had been lacking, to be precise, was the ability to animate this activity with visualization processes, based on the principles of swarming, in which swarms could ultimately appear to be written in their own medium.

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More than half a decade passed before the processes of computer graphic imaging, in the form of Craig Reynoldss boids model (1987), would come into play. Ironically, the latter model has often been cited as an urtext of computer-assisted biological swarm research. Building upon William Reevess particle system for the animation of fuzzy objects such as dust, clouds, or re (Reeves, 1983), Reynolds was not at all interested in realistic variables of behaviour but rather in a performance that was only somewhat true to nature. To some extent, his program was born of laziness, for he wanted to avoid the error-prone and Sisyphean task of separately programming the path of each individual boid within a large collective. Such a program was inexible, too, for the alteration of a single ight path would entail a commensurate alteration in the ight paths of the other swarming individuals. This diculty was remedied by the application of object-oriented programming methods. For each boid, Reynolds generated a customized geometric orientation and, much like Aoki, he created an individualized and locally applicable algorithm on the basis of three trac rules. In test runs, which Reynolds was (innovatively) able to track on a computer monitor, it came to light that realistic swarm activity would only be produced when the boids oriented themselves toward the locally perceived centre of the ock. Spatially limited knowledge, according to the model, was thus fundamental to the universal operation of a collective. Moreover, each individual boids capacity for decision-making was also temporally limited, such that changes in their course did not become more time-consuming in response to an increase in neighbouring boids, and the coordinate system did not become increasingly complex as the size of a given ock enlarged. The result was a highly realistic representation of collective movement, along with a few surprises for the animator himself. The boids, for instance, were able to negotiate obstacles independently without the addition of further parameters to the model, and they would also change direction suddenly and abruptly. On account of its simplicity and exibility, the boid model would soon be employed in the eld of special eects, especially for the animation of crowd scenes. Swarms, therefore, were reintroduced to the medium of lm not simply as a way of distorting images, as in Hitchcocks Birds, but also as an organizational principle of image production. The use of swarming in scientic simulations represents a culmination point in the media history of the concept. Swarms themselves came to be used 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 biology itself. In short: The bio is transformatively mediated by the tech so that the bio reemerges more fully biological. [. . .] The biological and the digital

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domains are no longer rendered ontologically distinct, but instead are seen to inhere in each other; the biological informs the digital, as the digital corporealizes the biological. (Thacker, 2004a: 67) Reynoldss dynamic, computer-graphic visualizations evidenced a new epistemic strategy. They introduced a way of understanding according to which swarming individuals localize, organize, and synchronize themselves independently. The misleading view of observational media with a central perspective was replaced by a topological system that creates its own space for itself. Swarms have to be understood as projects of time and space. They function as a self-organizing swarm-space on the basis of local interactions conducted in parallel and en masse. By adapting to external inuences, this swarm-space also provides information about the nature of the environment surrounding it. And a constitutive element in this regard is the fourth dimension of time, for it is only in time that swarms come to be. With the help of agent-based modelling and its processes of visualization, swarms could nally be understood in four dimensions.

IV. Cultural Techniques, Opaque Spaces, and Agent-based Modelling

Biological swarm research did not begin to implement agent-based models on a broad scale until the 1990s, that is, until advances in animation technology were made in Hollywood (Macavinta, 2002). In correlation with rapidly increasing data processing speeds, larger and larger swarms could be modelled and more and more variables could be introduced (Reuter and Breckling, 1994; Couzin and Krause, 2003). Thus phenomena such as currents, predatory attacks, dierent body types, and the variant speeds of individuals could be taken into consideration, while integrated stochastic errors could account for imprecise movements and coincidental environmental disturbances. At rst, all of this was carried out graphically, for example with two-dimensional cellular automata (Vab and Nttestad, 1997), but soon, and to an increasing extent, such models were designed in real-time 3D with the help of suitable visualization software (Couzin et al., 2002). Computer experiments conducted with agent-based models are not constrained by the physical interferences encountered by researchers in the sea and in the laboratory. They are rather spaces of potential, in which multiple scenarios can be tested and brought into contact with one another. Thus, agent-based models have established an immaterial culture within the sciences embedded, of course, in the facticity of the hardware and software on which they run. In such representations, swarms lose their optical and acoustic stubbornness, even while they can be simulated as facets of material culture under the most diverse

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conditions. Intermediary steps and spaces for epistemic and technological things or for the capacity of objects to operate in actor-networks, which have been central ideas in the work of Hans-Jo rg Rheinberger (1997, 2010) and Bruno Latour (1987, 2005), shrink or disappear within the spacio-temporality of virtual scenarios. In plain terms, the application of agent-based modelling has led to a simultaneous explosion and implosion of epistemic things, something which is characteristic of computer applications in general: an explosion, because more and more new scenarios are allowed to multiply; an implosion, because thus they lose their solidifying character and become uid, that is, processable. To some extent, swarms contain a concentration of certain problems that, when addressed by the experimental epistemology of computer science, expand into something like a culture of intransparency or opacity. Computer graphics enable a visual comparison of various universal structures, both with respect to parameter adjustments within the rule sets of agent-based modelling and also in terms of the sporadic, empirical data collected about schooling sh in laboratories and in the open water. Thus it can be determined intuitively whether a chosen combination of parameters produces results that resemble the behaviour of a biological swarm. The base function of this knowledge is the act of seeing in time. In its state of temporal thrownness (Zeitgeworfenheit) or, better, in its state of having been designed in time (Zeitentworfenheit) computer science is able to animate mathematical models, that is, endow them with life in run time. In this way, it does not exhaust itself into a mere expansion of existing epistemological strategies. Computer science represents more than simply an improvement of numerical calculation methods by means of the processing speed of computers. It can rather be attributed an entirely unique epistemological status of theoretical experimentation. It is here that pragmatic operationality has supplanted the need for precise theoretical foundations. It is here that categorical truth-claims are replaced by provisional knowledge. Here, in other words, the performance on the computer is more important than the models derivation and its accuracy of calculation (Ku ppers and Lenhard, 2004: 271). Unlike the case of theories, computer science is less concerned with what is true or false than it is with pragmatic utility (Sigismundo, 1999: 247). The hypothetical character of knowledge in this eld is underscored by the dierent and competing models of swarm simulation; instead of conrming one anothers ndings and producing certainties, they have instead generated a spectrum of opinions and viewpoints. Where computer science focuses its attention is on the relations that exist within systems. At this point, swarming as an object of knowledge encounters the epistemology of simulation. The relational being of swarms, with its intersections of the microscopic and macroscopic, can only be adequately captured by a technology that itself bisects the distinction between the epistemic and the technological thing, that is, by a

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technology that focuses on knowledge relations. The knowledge of swarms and that of computer simulation go hand in hand. That which cannot be addressed adequately in vivo and in vitro can be recorded in silico. The recursive coupling of swarm-inspired agent-based modelling and swarm research, however, entails an even graver consideration. Agent-based models were rst implemented by means of object-oriented programming. Both agent-based modelling and object-oriented programming can thus be assigned to the same paradigm, one that Frederick Brooks (1987) subsumed under the concept of growing (in its double sense of increase and cultivate). To a certain extent, control and intelligence are here delegated to a self-regulating system (Parikka, 2010). And within the paradigm of growing, which inclines toward selforganization and procedurality, swarms appear as a digital cultural technique par excellence, one that enriches the study of cultural techniques with a zootechnological dimension. Casey Alt (2011) is even more radical in this regard, for he has identied object-oriented programming to be the material foundation of our entire understanding of computers as media. Alt conceptualizes this medial relation as a society of objects within a computer, the communication of which takes place both among the objects themselves, at the program level, as well as with human users by means of interfaces. Thus the user is likewise conceived of as a programming process, and objectoriented programming begins to structure, more than just metaphorically, our daily lives: Object orientation increasingly mediates how we work, play, ght and love (Alt, 2011: 298) from video game communities to social networks to the ow of information in modern businesses. To this list, agent-based modelling contributes the realm of knowledge and science. For, from the media-historical threshold where the epistemic conation of sh and chips yielded an extensive and novel understanding of the principles of regulation and self-organization that govern swarms, these principles became operable as gures of knowledge in various elds of implementation and for various technological applications. Toward the end of the 1980s, for instance, when experiments were conducted with robot collectives composed of simply designed individuals, the researchers operated according to the following motto: [U]sing swarms is the same as getting a bunch of small cheap dumb things to do the same job as an expensive smart thing (Corner and Lamont, 2004: 355). The logic of swarms introduced a new type of economy to technological processes, an economy based on the exibility of model environments, on a distributed mechanism of control and regulation, on the independent creation of unpredictable solutions, and on high levels of fault tolerance and reliability. Swarms integrated themselves as components of the evolutionary software designs with which mathematical optimizations could be executed in the form, for instance, of particle swarm optimization (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 constraining variables. Their eld of application has extended from industrial production processes to logistics planning to the optimization of network protocols (Engelbrecht, 2005). Moreover, the interactional intelligence of swarms can play a role wherever there are time-sensitive problems of coordination and transference between numerous particles; such problems present themselves, for instance, in trac simulations, social simulations, panic simulations, consumer simulations, epidemic simulations, simulations of animal collectives, in the behaviour of aerosol in climate models, and even in the case of organizing building materials. Swarms create information by means of formation. Swarms and the algorithmics of their relational being can be called intelligent whenever a matter concerns the (independent) government and planning of interactions in space and time. Their applicability to agent-based computer modelling and to distributed technological collectives is indicative of their eectiveness as a novel cultural technique. As such, swarming is characterized by the fact that it was produced in the area of tension between biology and computer science. Originally regarded as mere interference phenomena, swarms emerged as operational media technologies. As an addressee of this cultural technique, humans were at rst only an unintentional part of the equation. Strictly speaking, swarming did not exist as a cultural technique before its mediatechnological manifestation, that is, before it became applicable in the eld of computer science as a novel epistemic process and as a solution conguration for a multitude of complex problems.2 Moreover, the inuence of the cultural technique expanded even further when the crowd logic of its behaviour came to be employed as imitable particles in social simulations. Around the year 2000, at the latest, swarm intelligence and agent-based modelling emerged as a powerful and irreversible element of the current media culture. It is as zootechnologies that they have developed into a relevant cultural technique, and as such they have enabled and initiated novel engagements with opaque areas of knowledge, with interference phenomena, and with technological and systemic correlations that otherwise would have been dicult to ascertain. At the same time, they produce and even demand like the paradigm of object-oriented programming a zeitgeist and world view in which cultural processes are characterized more and more by the multiple and dynamic interactions of autonomous and self-optimizing agents. Once aware of the lasting eects of swarming as a cultural technique on our current media and knowledge cultures, at least as described here, one should be quick to distrust the highly touted potential of social swarming and the grass-roots-democratic nature of human techno-collectives. This holds true even despite the elevation of the discourse, in the past few years, to sophisticated media-theoretical levels (see in this regard the

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work of Tiziana Terranova, Luciana Parisi, Olga Gurionova, Howard Slater, and the recent issue of Limn devoted to crowds and clouds). Ultimately, whoever belittles recent revolutions with the journalistic banalities of swarm logic Facebook revolution, Twitter revolution, and so on deliberately overlooks the extent to which the cultural technique of swarming has come to dene our situation. Swarms should no longer be understood simply as advanced manifestations of older forms of collective behaviour. It is much rather the case that they have gained relevance as structures of organization and coordination. These structures have become eective against a backdrop of an opaque culture one dened by the permanent exibility of various domains of life and they have become eective namely as optimization strategies and zootechnological solutions within these very domains. At the heart of swarming, as a cultural technique, is thus the governmental constitution (Verfasstheit) of the present itself, in which operationalized and optimized multitudes have emerged from the uncontrollable data drift of dynamic 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 swarms of birds and schools of fish, the dynamics of which are created in three dimensions of space and by constant motion in time. Insect collectives thus remain beyond the scope of the present discussion. 2. As a term used in mass psychology, or as an obsolete element of military tactics, the concept of swarming was chiefly employed to signify the dissolution of order, that is, the act of swarming all over. It was not then conceived of as representing the relational, procedural, and structural intermediary domain between the individual and the collective, namely the very domain that, according to Eugene Thacker, defines the dynamics of swarms.

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Sebastian Vehlken is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the Leuphana University in Lu neburg, Germany. He is the author of Zootechnologien: Eine Mediengeschichte der Schwarmforschung and the co-editor, with Claus Pias and Thomas Brandstetter, of Think Tanks: Die Beratung der Gesellschaft. His current interests include the media history and epistemology of agent-based modelling and simulation, poetologies of the ocean, and supercomputing.

Article

From Media History to Zeitkritik

Wolfgang Ernst
Humboldt University, Germany

Theory, Culture & Society 30(6) 132146 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263276413496286 tcs.sagepub.com

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. Ernsts 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 Kittlers 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 distinctions between cultural theory [Kulturwissenschaft] and media studies [Medienwissenschaft] as academic disciplines, but rather questions the discursive mode that spans both subjects: the historical inquiry into the things that shape culture.1 Technical media are neither the apex nor the driving force of culture, but rather a constitutive element of its
Corresponding author: t zu Berlin, Georgenstrae 47, R. 2.23, 10117 Berlin, Germany. Wolfgang Ernst, Humboldt-Universita Email: wolfgang.ernst@hu-berlin.de http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

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history. Consequently, the history of media must be written as a history of cultural techniques. Media are a part of cultural history and culture can be read as a function of media history. Both forms of history share a common focus in the concept of cultural techniques. Epistemologically speaking, this is a rather harmless claim: after all, the humanities have learned 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, dening media history in terms of cultural history and cultural history as a media eect will always be mutually implicit. The question still remains whether there is anything about technical media that eludes the realm of history, its narrative model or even, ultimately, culture itself. To a certain extent, it seems obvious that all media innovations are culturally determined a premise culminating in the new historicist view that arms both the textuality of history and the historicity of texts. But this chiastic historical model calls for a supplement: the assumption of an inner logic of media development that literally introduces a third element to the Promethean dichotomy of culture and nature. Anything and everything associated with the term media can, of course, be included in the discursive framework of cultural history. That inclusion, however, would jeopardize the accuracy of a term that refuses to label anything and everything as media, but rather seeks to account for discontinuities, in order to grasp media-epistemological escalations (Bachelard, 1974; Canguilhem, 1979). Michel Serres distinguishes between techniques and technologies a distinction which also applies to the difference between cultural techniques and media technologies. He contrasts the hard machinery of the Industrial Revolution, functioning on the basis of thermodynamics, with the soft negentropy of information technology: I therefore reserve the term technology for those types of artefacts that negotiate signs and thus the logos and contrast them with techniques, whose energetic scope is 1016 times higher (Serres, 2002: 194). Speaking of the frequent confusion between the stroboscope and the afterimage eect in the transmission of visual perception, Bernhard Siegert stresses how fundamentally the media-theoretical discourse is in need of a media-historical framework of analysis to match medias inherently high physical and mathematical standards (Siegert, 1996: 8). And, indeed, the history of knowledge and technology serves as a necessary test for all media theories. But media archaeology does not merely reconstruct historical media practices; it also reects on their timebuilding, chronopoetic processes thereby raising a challenge to history.

Cultural History with Media History A Liaison Dangereuse

The eld of Medienwissenschaft also fulls, at many universities, the function of Kulturwissenschaft, or else works in close cooperation with it (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 studies) deal not merely with the discursive software of culture, but also with its material hardware. But while Kulturwissenschaft prefers to read media techniques as a function of historical processes, media archaeology takes the opposite perspective: here the model of history itself appears as a function of cultural (symbolic and signal-based) operations. To this day, the eld of Medienwissenschaft draws on the resources of cultural history, which emerged in the 19th century both as an academic practice and a research dispositif. This is precisely why it is vital to analyse the media-based conditions of such a large-scale, worldwide labour of collecting, archiving or museumizing. So, for example, the postal system (transmission) and the archive (storage) became conjoined when Erich Moritz von Hornbostel ordered Edison cylinders with musical recordings from all over the world for his Berlin phonographic archive, with the idea of developing the eld of comparative ethnomusicology (Klotz, 1998). The notion of culture that governed the projects involved in collecting knowledge around 1900 had become identical to the storage media it generated. In its materiality, culture thus reveals itself as an object of research for the study of storage and transmission techniques. Chronology, diplomacy, epigraphy, genealogy, heraldry, numismatics, palaeography, sphragistics, historical cartography: these so-called ancillary disciplines of history, which identify and analyse their objects with regard to their usability as cultural data storage devices, acquire the status of media archaeology avant la lettre and are intimately connected with the category of Kulturwissenschaft. As a result, culture becomes calculable; it is a function of mnemonic strategies and transmission techniques, as well as their respective institutions. The analysis of media techniques and material culture is a joint endeavour of Kulturwissenschaft and Medienwissenschaft. Marshall McLuhan famously analysed the psycho-technical eects of media as operators in the cultural matrix. But what happens if such media technologies no longer operate in the familiar context of culture but form a world in their own right? A notable dierence between Kulturwissenschaft, on the one hand, and Medienwissenschaft, on the other, 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 eld of Kulturwissenschaft, which tends to interpret experimental arrangements as semantic spaces, media archaeology (much like Gaston Bachelards epistemology) seeks to maintain spaces of contingency (see also Rheinberger, 2001). The cultural techniques that generate discourses are precisely those that are not already discursive eects. The inquiry into what constitutes existential historical dierences so to speak sets the study of cultural techniques apart from the kind of cultural research that not only carries media in its name but also engages with medias intrinsic perspective and specic inner temporality

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[Eigenzeit] in a kind of reverse hermeneutical move. On the one hand, this means programmatically positioning media theories within concrete spaces of cultural practices. However, media archaeology is not to be confused with Kulturwissenschaft. Writing, reading, counting, networking and representing are symbolic techniques which generate culture as a recurring and normative formation. They transform a priori concepts of space and time into an analysis of concrete spatial and temporal systems. Media archaeology does not conduct this analysis on the level of macrocultural production, but rather on the level of micro-technical operativity. In contrast to Kulturwissenschaft, which starts from grand narratives (histories of culture, science or even knowledge) to arrive at concrete particulars, media archaeology operates on the assumption that technological media systems can be understood primarily and conclusively on the basis of their elementary, sub-semantic procedures. This type of analysis, which understands material, symbolic and signal-based operators as escalations of classical cultural techniques, requires a theory of genuine media-temporal processes. Traditional media history and cultural history are in agreement on how organ projections and the extensions of men (Ernst Kapp, Marshall McLuhan) have developed into cultures servomechanism. Anthropocentricity thereby turns into a perspective which increasingly views man as codied (or even programmed) by cultural techniques and media technology. To paraphrase Gu nter Anders, media theory actively pursues the antiquation of man by distancing the subject-centred perspective through apparatus-based theora, that is, through the algorithmic processes of technological media themselves. In traditional cultural history, culture appears as a process of progressive semantication, which produces and reproduces resources of meaning, but which also undermines and destroys them. In this sense, it combines media research with cultural semiotics, which understands culture as a form of poetics (Bo hme, 2004: 23). Cultural history thus remains on the symbolic and semantic level. In contrast, media archaeology stresses the syntactic aspect: the processing of signals rather than the signs themselves. The so-called Medienkulturwissenschaft (a hybrid of media studies and culture studies) develops theoretical models that understand aesthetic and technological changes as semantic shifts. A study of media time [Medienzeit] that is grounded in communications theory, on the other ` -vis historical formations of hand, intentionally keeps its distance vis-a meaning.

Cultural History with Vico

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

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the realm of humanity and thus the realm of culture in his Scienza Nuova (Vico, 1948). According to Vico, all historical products are comprehensible to humans precisely because they were produced by humans. Vicos foundation for all studies of culture was written in explicit opposition to modern (natural) science (Kittler, 2000: 16). The new discipline Descartes dealing with the common nature of all people contested Rene attempt to elevate the principles of modern mathematics and science to all-encompassing philosophical principles the attempt to extract the algorithm of the historical development of culture. Vico critiques a mathematical analysis, which increasingly deprives its objects of their embodied corporeality. Yet disembodiment characterizes the current state of information technology. Following the principle of mechanics according to which the geometrical representation of any phenomenon enables its mechanical reconstruction, mechanical physics is called upon to describe natural phenomena based on their mode of production (Fellmann, 1976: 185). In contrast, Vico (1948: 93) assigns human aairs a greater degree of reality than geometrical points, lines, areas and shapes can represent. According to Vico, we can prove geometry, because we produce it. When we can prove the physical realm, we will produce that as well. The basis of modern media is precisely this kind of mathematics, which already constitutes an epistemological step beyond traditional cultural techniques. The Turing machine thus became the rst strictly theory-born medium. Engineered as a von Neumann model, this diagrammatic media theory has advanced to an omnipotent medium. Its logic, however, does not belong to this, that is to say, to the historical world. The question of cultural history literally brings forth its media-archaeological alternative. According to Vicos Scienzia Nova, the realm of history is the autopoiesis of culture: since the historical world is manmade, its essence can also be found at the level of our own mental transformation. Here, the creator is also the narrator. At rst glance, this reads like an argument for rendering media time in terms of cultural history. But upon a closer look, Vicos opposition to Cartesian mathematics no longer applies to those things that can only be counted, rather than recounted, or those that are themselves limited to the act of counting (the computer). The category of cultural techniques bridges this divide. Ernst Kapps treatise Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik. Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Cultur aus neuen Gesichtspunkten (1877) provides a response to Vicos axiom, by aiming to submit technology to a process of reective analysis. At rst glance, with his notion of organ projection Kapp seems to embrace the perspective of cultural anthropology, and yet he ends up calling the steam engine the machine of machines. This is the point that marks the closing of the technological feedback loop: the autopoietic emancipation of technical media from their direct link to a cultural environment. Max Bense calls this cybernetic revolution machine metatechnics (1998: 429) something that

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detaches itself from cultural history on its own terms. Thus media technology gains autonomy from culture. The technological feedback loop (the cybernetic marriage of machine and mathematics) puts forth a mode of knowledge that is no longer subject-centred and therefore also dees historicization. But knowledge that is no longer subject-centred becomes information. Today, information belongs to the sphere of electronic circulation and the coupling of one piece of information to another no longer 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 is far removed from cultural semantics and concerns itself not only with cultural techniques, but also particularly with technology and technological mathematics; it therefore places an additional focus on noncultural input. In a segment titled Movement and Time, Gustav Deutschs lm Film ist [Film Is] (made in Austria 1998) shows medical X-ray footage of a speaking larynx. In this case, the medium speaks for itself, producing the same eect as the invention of the vocal alphabet in ancient Greece, which not only created the possibility to record and thus store and transfer oral poetry as a stream of phonetic utterances, but also allowed objects like drinking vessels and tombstones to speak to the reader in the rst person via their inscriptions (Ernst and Kittler, 2006). The scientic observation of a speaking larynx in sets of 12 to 24 X-ray images per second is no longer conditioned by the human eye but by the eye of the camera or even that of the X-ray cathode. Only technical media are capable of manipulating, decelerating and accelerating moments such as this in a time-critical manner. This also explains the title of the lm: it announces the media-archaeological level in the existence of the apparatus, which to paraphrase Foucault corresponds to a monumental, discrete aesthetic, distinct from the documentary perspective of cultural history. As functions of a process of transmission, technologically generated signals are the messengers of other things; at the same time, however, every electronic image, every electronically (re)produced sound is always also a monument to itself, to its technology and even more radically to the computer program which created it. This amounts to media self-reference. Media technology thus emerges from culture as an autonomous entity a process that manifests itself via the technical feedback loop (the cybernetic paradigm of machine and mathematics). The development of feedback routes as James Clerk Maxwells On Governors (1868) had already shown prior to all explicit formulations of cybernetics increasingly separates media systems from the discursive streams of culture. Thus,

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automation is dened precisely by the fact that human controls have been disabled (Szameitat, 1959: 316). When in contrast to Vicos selfreferentiality of culture and history the eld of electronic media is accessed in terms of the electromagnetic eld, this distinction places technological media in opposition to traditional cultural practice. To remain within the terminology of electromagnetism: with media, there is only mutual induction. The discovery of electromagnetism theoretically posited by Faraday, mathematically calculated by Maxwell and ultimately empirically proven by Hertz overcame the search for a representation of humanity in nature, and instead dened it as a set of processes that open up a new eld between physics and culture. We must therefore understand the knowledge of electrical phenomena and their 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 possible to animate an automaton that is better constructed than man himself, the world has reached its ultimate purpose (1891: X). The media processes that are thereby set in motion no longer exclusively belong to either nature or culture. The Greek term nomos already implies a departure from physis, from nature itself (Vretska, 2001: 503). Faraday taught us to understand this eld as a form of independent reality with an intrinsic dynamic, detached from the corporeal realm (Weizsa cker, 1974: 147). In doing so, he opened up a space for temporal and spatial free play (in the sense of Schillers Spielraum). If we are destined to face the advent of techno-mathematics and live by its rules, we will certainly nd that it derives not from cultural history, but rather from Riemann spaces, where time and space become conated. The Michelson-Morley experiment from 1887, which famously failed to prove the existence of ether wind, 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 holds the appeal of an alternate model of conceptualizing non-historical time in what is called culture. There are numerous pleas for media culture studies and for culturally oriented Medienwissenschaften. But this inclusion of media knowledge under a cultural horizon proves to be a Trojan horse. When culture no longer operates with primary natural media (air, water) alone and also posits no imaginary substances (ether), but rather as in the case of electromagnetic carrier waves forms its own media channels that can be both artistically and articially modulated, the combination of media produced by cultural techniques and human speech acts generates the uncanny, siren-like attraction of media technology. Precisely because the Sirens, who were only animals . . . could sing as men sing, they made the song so strange that they gave birth in anyone who heard it to a suspicion of the inhumanity of every human song (Blanchot, 2003: 3).

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The temporality of media transmissions induces a similar discomfort. We obviously know that Hitchcocks Psycho is a historical lm document every time it airs. But in the technical moment of transmission, it is actively present (unlike a painting in a museum) as an electromagnetically induced process that shoots through our sense of time like an electric surge. The result is cognitive dissonance: the subliminal perception of the present, 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 the Odyssey), but rather a matter of high-frequency technology? A study launched at Berlins Humboldt University in April 2004 proposed to examine Homers siren motif from the perspective of acoustic media archaeology (see Ernst, 2004: 25666). Only through the technological act of measuring can the sonic element, as the most eeting of all cultural goods, re-enter cultural memory. But by the same token, historical recollection is de-historicized and the cultural-historical model is replaced with technical parameters of measurement. On the one hand, media archaeology is an ancillary discipline of cultural memory; yet, on the other hand, in terms of its media-epistemological focus, it is a technology capable of training the visual and acoustic senses for non-cultural objects. Technology is thus no longer an organ projection of nature. As the result of a technological culture, products of nature eectively become technological artefacts (Bo hme, 1992: 118) Speaking of the magic produced by the nightingales song, Kant points out that, in the absence of a bird, it has not been unusual for men who knew how to produce this sound exactly like nature to hide themselves in a bush instead (quoted in Bo hme, 1992: 119). Once analytical media have measured the frequencies of sounds, they are able to synthetically subvert the sonic dierence between humans and machines. Eduard Rhein (1939) illustrates this point with a radio broadcast of a singing nightingale recorded in nature. When nature itself becomes reproducible, it also becomes technically legible. The age of the baroque cabinets of curiosities had an impartial view on these matters. Nature is . . . an innite resource for articial machines that surpass all human inventions (Sulzer, 1750: 39). Radio waves are not unnatural (para physin according to Aristotles Physics); rather, they reproduce the secret of their own wave movement in a generative kind of mimesis (Koller, 1954). Articial nature is media culture: The spoon has no original other than the idea in our mind, argues Nicholas of Cusas treatise De mente (quoted in Blumenberg, 1999: 534). One can conceive of life forms which only reproduce in constant symbiosis with machines. Under such circumstances, the term articial nature indeed denotes an interstitial phenomenon, a boundary or perhaps even the point of an evolutionary decision (Bo hme, 1992: 196). This is the media-archaeological perspective 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 culture itself creates meaning. But the secondary logic is neither the logic of nature, nor that of the subject . . . . It produces what it describes (Holling and Kempin, 1989: 138). Culture has not only created epistemology, but indeed also signal-processing machines, which are then by denition 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 Character Recognition (see Pias, 2013).

The Autonomization of Culture and History: The Micro-time of Technical Media

The autonomization of technological processes of media temporality can be illustrated by the emancipation of mechanical time from astronomical time in the early modern age. Mechanical clocks were more than just that: 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 dOresme compared the movements of the celestial bodies to the rhythms of the mechanical escapement device of a clock in Le livre du ciel et du monde, he modelled nature on technical mechanisms instead of modelling technology on organic archetypes. Since clockwork rhythms more appropriately dene time units than the original rhythms of the heavens (Taschner, 2005: 56), the mechanical media of time measurement dictate their non-discursive internal temporality to culture and turn the observer himself into their own medium. Galileo suggested that Christiaan Huygens should not use the human heartbeat, but rather mechanical oscillations to measure time. The end result is the atomic clock, which is based on the oscillations of a Caesium isotope. Atomic clocks are so precise that they are the ones dening chronological units now, rather than celestial phenomena (Taschner, 2005: 56). This moment marks the emancipation of the media of measurement from nature within the medium of nature. If time is that which is measured with a clock (the Aristotelian denition of time), then that is media time. Yet the historical temporality of chronology and calendars is nothing but a scaled clock and thus becomes a function of the media of measurement. From this perspective, the category of media history is turned inside out: it becomes a temporal fold. The autonomization of the technological media sphere from traditional cultural techniques becomes apparent in the detachment of engineering from classical techne during the Renaissance: The foremost achievement of engineers is the complete detachment of technical constructions from the model of nature and from organic modes of operation (Krohn, 1976: 25). Mathematical instruments and clockwork mechanisms are no longer viewed as human organ extensions, but

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rather as organisms in their own right or, rather, machines whose operation is only guaranteed by their compliance with their own internal laws and rules that can be veried and controlled (Moscovici, 1969: 200) a view that even extends to the algorithm as the literal method, the ordered progression, of the machine environment. Humanity perceives its own products as reality (McLuhan and Powers, 1989). This other reality is the object of a media-archaeological aesthetics. The intrinsic perspective (Eigenblick) and the intrinsic temporality (Eigenzeit) of media technology succeed, in their dierence from human perception, in telling humanity something about itself. Since the advent of the mechanical clock, the temporal specicities of western society in particular must be analysed as a function of such techniques (Elias, 1991). A central question for media studies concerns the manner in which the present organizes its knowledge around the media of the past. Its common model is called history; that is, the more or less linear progression of things and the narrative account of their development, their creation and their demise, regardless of how disjointed it may appear. Since the 19th century, historical discourse has borrowed the concept of times arrow from physical thermodynamics (the theorem of entropy). In contrast, media archaeology views the same collected materials and symbolic archives from a dierent perspective and chooses a dierent model to describe the past of media in concrete miniatures. At least temporarily, this kind of media archaeology shrugs o the supremacy of historical discourse, which disguised as a history of science tends to absorb all of its epistemological alternatives. The premature inclusion of the analysis of technological media processes in the category of cultural studies robs it of its explosive potential. Like the material-oriented Kulturwissenschaft and classical archaeology, media archaeology deals with artefacts, particularly with those that are created only in the process of technological execution; for instance, when a radio receives a broadcast. Regardless of whether this radio is an old or a recent model, the broadcast always takes place in the present. In contrast to media history that is, the human vantage point (Vico) media archaeology tentatively adopts the temporal perspective of the apparatus itself the aesthetics of micro-temporal processes. A dierent kind of temporality is represented here. The oscillating string of an instrument still forces its sound and with it its (intrinsic media) temporality upon our ears. But these ears hear dierent harmonies in the same sound; they are culturally predetermined. A dierentiation of the acoustic (physics), the sonic (cultural conditioning) and the musical (cultural semantics) is in order here. Does the vibrating string sound the history of being to us? Any discovery of string-based octaves always short-circuits historical time (Kittler, 2006: 282). This also means that the human senses not only conform to a seemingly immediate history of being, but also to the instrumental medium itself. These instruments are products 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 perception into a fulgurous constellation media time, not history, is at work here. What is the relationship between the verisimilitude of a lab experiment and the contingency of discovery? The contingencies in the success of technical discoveries defy narrative logic. The relationship cannot be plausibly described within a classical causal model of history. Oerstedt came upon the eect of electromagnetic induction rather by accident, during a lecture in which the magnetic needle began to twitch in the vicinity of an electried wire. Here, a micro-temporal process forms the foundation for a media-technological event and thus produces a new form of temporality in competition to the historical event. Sparks produce waves. Heinrich Hertz, a student of Helmholtz, realized accidentally that parallel to a spark, another one forms a remote eect of electric beams. Hertz describes this phenomenon with the very theory of electromagnetic waves that Faraday and Maxwell contributed to epistemology. Maxwell arrived at the theory of light as electromagnetic waves through pure mathematics; heuristically, however, his very concrete starting point is the media channel of electromagnetic beams. The end point is xed media electromagnetic waves (radio): a realm with its own, no longer cultural, laws; media eects that literally exist between nature and culture. Is the category of resonance between two temporal objects merely taken from acoustics as a metaphor or is it modelled on it directly? Resonance is produced when two tuning forks oscillate in perfect harmony. The vibrations of one fork even if interrupted cause the second one to vibrate as well producing a kind of wireless information transfer (Ku llmer, 1986). Does something similar occur in the actual reading of a historical text? If it resonates in the moment of reading, it is no longer historical. Can the ear hear this type of oscillating event? What kind of reality is produced in the act of listening to a loudspeaker is a question of cognition (Supper, 1997: 32). From the perspective of biological computing, Heinz von Foerster describes cognition analogous to the neurobiological category of memory as the calculation of reality. Or, more precisely: 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 occurrence in time a fact which ex-historians understand, even if its positive formulation is for now nothing but a stammer. For cultural and media history, the pressing revolution of knowledge that unsettled the Newtonian world view around 1900, in the form of the physics of Max

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Planck and Albert Einstein, is yet to come. When historiography is no longer viewed as the simple relationship between an object and its perception, but rather as mathematically mediated (statistics) and in terms of a concise media archaeology as a combination of measured object, measuring apparatus and perception, then historical time will be transformed into an observable in the sense of quantum physics. It is the act of registration (recording) that inscribes this time with a quality of irreversibility. The act of writing that is, the transition between the continual ow of signals and their discrete recording thus becomes comprehensible as a strictly media-archaeological moment, based not on its semantics, but on its operative execution. It is only this execution that produces the distinction between the past (factuality) and the future (potentiality). Michel Foucaults Archaeology of Knowledge questions statements on the level of their existence, their formation and the conditions of their possibility (the a priori, the archive). Media which do not merely refer to the axis of time (time-based media), but which are capable of manipulating it (time-critical media), represent a new type of temporal statement which media archaeology strives to account for. In contrast, for instance, to historiography and historical monuments, for which time is the object, technical discourse networks are capable of writing time itself. This intrinsic temporality demands another kind of temporal aesthetic the temporality of ergodic art (Aarseth, 1999). Espen Aarseth aptly proposes this perspective, but does not consider it in accordance with the stringent probability mathematics of Norbert Wiener (see Furtwa ngler, 2007). Media archaeology (as opposed to media historiography) constitutes an attempt to account for this alternate temporality of media. The linear prediction code developed in the context of anti-aircraft defence and re control during the Second World War, but used today as a probability indicator in all aspects of life provides the model here. It represents the calculations that form the basis of Wieners time-critical research. Herein lies an analogy to current micro-temporal economies such as computer games insofar as their operativity is equally as timecritical as it is (seemingly) innite in its combinatorics. In essence, this question had already been raised by Leibniz in his fantasy Apokatastasis s return on the basis of the companton, an early version of Poincare binatorics of all letters in a library. The dierence between this and the innite but static space of The Library of Babel (Jorge Luis Borges short story from 1942) is the coupling of this thought experiment with media-operative and thus time-critical processes. While it may not necessarily lead to writers block, the engagement with time-critical media processes does entail a reluctance to write the modes of execution of media in time simply as media history. This provides a convenient model that can be practised with ease by trained scholars of the humanities, cultural studies and media studies. Still, an epistemological 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 quantum physics represented for classical mechanics. At the level of a technologically induced media temporality that can neither be written as cultural nor as media history, media time has long reigned on its own terms. Once more: written as history, media history and cultural history are connected. But wherever non-preconceivable media time processes are concerned that is, processes which themselves subvert this historical model the past of media must be written dierently as well. It is not history, but at most the incidental nature of cultural existence as aected by the temporal modes of technology. To draw on a concept from Heideggers Kehre (turn), it is true that no historical existence (Dasein) could have invented the radio, but that conversely technological media, such as the radio, determine historical ways of being (dazusein). In contrast to Heidegger, however, media archaeology tentatively shrugs o the connes of the historical; not for the sake of a postmodern questioning of temporal processes as such, but in order to approach them from the vantage point of the media operations themselves, rather than allowing itself to be entrapped by musings on origins and metaphysics. Let us try for a moment to suspend the voluntary selfrestriction of the human temporal horizon by means of the category of history. Thus, the face of the historical human being does not disappear like a gure drawn in sand at the edge of the sea, but rather like the sand in an hourglass. Translated by Guido Schenkel

Note
1. This article was previously published as Von der Mediengeschichte zur Zeitkritik in Kulturgeschichte als Mediengeschichte (oder vice versa?), Archiv fu r Mediengeschichte 6. Edited by Engell L, Siegert B and Vogl J. Weimar: Universita tsverlag, pp. 2332.

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Pias C (ed.) (2013) Kulturfreie Bilder. Erfindungen der Voraussetzungslosigkeit. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos. Rhein E (1939) Wunder der Wellen. Rundfunk und Fernsehen dargestellt fu r jedermann. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag. Rheinberger H-J (2001) Experimentalsysteme und epistemische Dinge. Go ttingen: Wallstein. Schmidt SJ (1999) Medien Kultur Wissenschaft. In: Pias C (ed.) Dreizehn Vortrage zur Medienkultur. Weimar: VDG. Schulte-Sasse J (1988) Von der schriftlichen zur elektronischen Kultur: ber neuere Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Mediengeschichte und U Kulturgeschichte. In: Gumbrecht HU and Pfeiffer KL (eds) Materialitat der Kommunikation. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Serres M (2002) Der Mensch ohne Fa higkeiten. Die neuen Technologien und die konomie des Vergessens. Transit 22: 193206. O Siegert B (1996) Good vibrations: Faradays Experimente 1830/31. Kaleidoskopien 1: 616. Sulzer JG (1745) Versuch einiger moralischer Betrachtungen uber die Werke der Natur. Berlin: Haude. Supper M (1997) Elektroakustische Musik und Computermusik. Geschichte sthetik Methoden Systeme. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche A Buchgesellschaft. Szameitat K (1959) Mo glichkeiten und Grenzen der Automatisierung in der Statistik. Allgemeines Stastistisches Archiv 43: 316. Taschner R (2005) Der Zahlen gigantische Schatten. Mathematik im Zeichen der Zeit. Wiesbaden: Vieweg. Vico G (1948) The New Science, 3rd edn, trans. Goddard Bergin T and Fisch MH. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vretska K (2001) Editors note. In: Plato, Book II. Stuttgart: Reclam. Weizsa cker CF (1974) Die Einheit der Natur. Mu nchen: dtv.

Wolfgang Ernst is Professor for Media Theories at the Institute for Musicology and Media Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin. His books 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 rst book of his writings in English has just been published by the University of Minnesota Press: Digital Memory and the Archive, edited and with a foreword by Jussi Parikka (2012). Guido Schenkel holds MAs in German and English literature and culture from the Free University Berlin (2006) as well as a PhD in German Studies from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (2012). His areas of specialization include identity politics, post-war German and Austrian literature, media studies and contemporary pop culture. He has worked as a freelance translator on a wide variety of academic texts since 2002.

Article

Afterword: Cultural Techniques and Media Studies

Jussi Parikka
University of Southampton, UK

Theory, Culture & Society 30(6) 147159 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263276413501206 tcs.sagepub.com

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 culture, 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 oer several responses, ranging from detailed historical accounts to discussions of the ontological span of the concept. Some address how cultural techniques teach bodies to behave, others are more concerned with the links between human and non-human agencies. In these concluding remarks I would like to tackle cultural techniques from the other end. I am less interested in what went into the concept than what could potentially come out of it. That is, in these afterwords I will focus on connectivity rather than genealogy. I want to oer some speculations as to the directions where the notion might theoretically guide us and how we can make productive use of certain similarities between this in many regards rather

Corresponding author: Jussi Parikka, University of Southampton, Park Avenue, Winchester, SO23 8DL, UK. Email: jussi.parikka1976@gmail.com http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

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German intellectual product and related strands in Anglo-American and French theory habitats. As mentioned at the very beginning of the introduction, this issue itself is meant to be both an archive and a toolbox; in that spirit, we should open up the agenda to some past and contemporary discussions concerning technology, materiality and, for instance, cultural critique of capitalism. But to start with a point that was highlighted in several contributions: to understand the concept of cultural techniques requires a certain familiarity with the role played by media technologies. Despite the fact that the focus on cultural techniques appears to indicate a move beyond the earlier focus on media, technologies are still part of the picture, though in rather unusual ways. What cultural techniques scholars talk about doors, servants, animals, law, swarms are not really media in the sense understood in Anglo-American media studies. The detailed research undertaken by the contributors reframes the question what are media studies?. This is a task that Friedrich A. Kittler (2009) mapped out in his own particular way, though despite its obvious indebtedness to his work, cultural techniques research cannot be reduced to an afterglow of Kittler. What then are media? There is no direct answer to this. Instead, German media studies has been more about expanding the limits of what we understand as media. Such perspectives have wanted to expand the range of disciplinary formations included in media analysis and the areas media studies can tap into. To quote one of the key writers, Bernhard Siegert, much of the early generation of German media theory was guided by a prolonged exercise in carefree trespassing digging up sources that had remained out of bounds to the humanities without worrying about any underlying concept of media (an issue nowadays raised by every wiseacre) (2008a: 28). Siegert continues with a more warlike metaphor by referring to an invasion of walled and enclosed disciplinary gardens: Confronted with insights into the medial conditions of literature, truth, education, human beings, and souls insights that were beyond the reach of the hermeneutic study of texts scholars of literature, philosophers, pedagogues, and psychologists were too oended by the sudden invasion of their nicely cultivated gardens to ask for an orderly theoretical justication for the onslaught. (2008a: 28) The various articles in this issue oer good insights into how cultural techniques relate to the current state of media studies in Germany, which lost one of its internationally most nely tuned pieces of wetware with Kittlers passing in 2011, preceded by Cornelia Vismanns death in 2010. Several scholars have been smuggling in new media analysis

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methodologies, but they also oer ideas that resonate with a range of cross-disciplinary approaches that the Anglo-American academic world is interested in: posthumanities, the non-human, questions of materiality and objects, the aective turn, media archaeology, historical methods and archives, as well as the role of anthropology (see Schu ttpelz, 2006) in media studies. Theory can be said to have acted as a transatlantic bridge of sorts (Ernst, 2013: 2331) from French theory to German media studies. This bridging also reminds us of the multiple versions of materiality mobilized in current media and technology theory debates across both sides of the Atlantic (for some recent North American discussions in cultural and media studies see Packer and Wiley, 2011). However, we can expect the following reaction from cultural studies and cultural history scholars: what is so new about cultural techniques? The texts by Geoghegan and Siegert as well as the introduction by Winthrop-Young outline in more detail the relation Kulturtechniken have to concepts of culture and civilization, some of which no doubt will be familiar to Anglo-American scholars. As readers of Michel Foucault (technologies of the self), Marcel Mauss (techniques of the body), and British cultural studies (Raymond Williams et al.), we already knew about the close relation between bodily habits, modes of perception and (media) technologies. Foucauldian-inspired governmentality studies have shown a methodology to move from analyses of textuality to institutions and procedures of governance. Besides, we learned from Pierre Bourdieu that the habitus is a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions (Bourdieu, 1977: 83). In short, arent (German) cultural techniques just like (Anglo-American) cultural practices?1 To be sure, there are moments when some of the ideas put forward by our contributors seem almost too familiar. Much of the language and the accompanying conceptual apparatus appear to resemble British cultural studies, recent American contributions to science and technology studies, the cultural histories of the French school (for instance, the massive series ` s and Georges Duby), and History of Private Life edited by Philippe Arie writers such as Bruno Latour. History of the philosophy of technology has long discussions concerning the relations of culture and technology. From Karl Marxs various texts to early 20th-century sociology such as Max Weber (2005), the relations of economy, culture and technology have been debated with diering positions. Instead of just talking about the ways in which Ernst Kapp or Marshall McLuhan inuentially modeled the interacting relations between humans and machines, we could turn to Siegfried Giedions (1969 [1948]) inventive cultural historical take. It is engaged in mapping cultural techniques of modernity, and has been recognized in media archaeology (Huhtamo and Parikka, 2011; see also Darroch, 2010) too. Giedion maps the eects of mechanization in various elds of cultural techniques from crafts to techniques of space to comfort and to agriculture the same terrain where the earlier

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version of cultural techniques comes from. Technique becomes a binding concept across elds of culture from interior design to slaughterhouses. Through techniques we can talk about the material practices that sustain and enable culture, which necessarily involves humans and non-humans. Cultural techniques forge links between cultivation of environmental things and cultural realms. When talking of techniques, one cannot bypass the signicance of Jacques Ellul. While Ellul is not an essential part of the internal lineage of this particular German intellectual tradition, his work raises additional questions about the perceived novelty of the cultural techniques approach. Ellul, too, tends to emphasize the central role played by techniques and technology at the expense of social and economic forces. He is not happy to admit 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 toward which technique strives. The machine is solely, exclusively, technique; it is pure technique, one might say. For, wherever a technical factor exists, it results, almost inevitably, in mechanization: technique transforms everything it touches into a machine. (Ellul, 1964: 4) Elluls point forces a reconsideration of what we mean by technique. Indeed, it pays attention to the interaction between machine and technique without conating the two. Ellul also wants to distance himself from Marcel Mausss notion of bodily techniques, which Mauss had described as a group of movements, of actions generally and mostly manual, organized, and traditional, all of which unite to reach a known end, for example, physical, chemical or organic (1964: 13). Ellul argues that in the context of technological societies such an attachment to the body produces a theoretical shortcoming. This means that techniques are not only about manual (labor) but also increasingly about intellectual skills and organization. Indeed, despite dierences Ellul is after such cultural techniques of the symbolic that are also of interest to various writers in this collection. But Ellul insists that these are especially prevalent in modern organized, rationalized and technological society. Interestingly, he is not dismissing the fact that the emphasis on intellectual labor increases the need for secondary manual labor and, furthermore, that the volume of manual operations increases faster than the volume of mechanical operations (1964: 13). Such a perception which is of great relevance to a range of current debates on cognitive capitalism to which I will return near the end of this text is furthermore connected to Elluls critique of tradition in Mausss denition. For Ellul, we are experiencing a change in our relation to techniques: we are not solely inheriting habitual modes of behaving and

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techniques, but technology has created its own autonomous spheres of actions and expectations that are paralleled by these new techniques. The example of the simple technique of stepping on the pedal to make the car go faster is developed by Ellul, who discusses servo-mechanisms and the notion of feedback. Technology upsets and forces us to continuously be on the lookout and learn new habits and techniques (1964: 14). We do not always clearly perceive the role of techniques as simple causal actions that can be traced back to visible bodies like the foot on the pedal. The German media-theoretical cultural techniques scholars would probably agree with a lot of this critique of Mauss. Siegert, in fact, raises similar points when discussing Mauss: counting, for instance, is a technique that always presupposes technical objects (be it ones own ngers), that predetermine the performance of the operation and thus the concepts derived from that operation (Siegert, 2011: 15). Not all techniques involve the human body; one has to account for the abstract and mathematical realms as well. This approach is important for recognition of the mixed nature of the media cultural assemblages: when scrutinized more closely they appear to be meshes of human and non-human actors an important dimension that brings a bit of Latour into German media theory (see Siegert, 2012).

II
The sustained focus on non-human actors in cultural theory is related to the rise of new materialist analyses as well as to methodologies emerging across the social sciences and humanities. For sure, over the last couple of years there has been no shortage of calls for a material and aective turn within cultural theory. New materialism emerged from various directions, including Manuel Delandas 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 share of attention in the past years. It has provided its own way of understanding 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 something new. By contrast with the repetitive continental focus on texts, discourses, social practices, and human nitude, the new breed of thinkers is turning once more towards reality itself. While it is difcult to nd explicit positions common to all the thinkers . . . all have certainly rejected the traditional focus on textual critique . . . all of them, in one way or another, have begun speculating once more about the nature of reality independently of thought and of humans more generally. (Bryant et al., 2011: 3)

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Such new perspectives have generated fresh approaches as well as posited their own newness with rhetorical skill. Whereas much of such scholarly creativity accepts the necessity to move beyond the well-established textual paradigm that branded much of cultural studies and media studies, some of the speculative turn neglects the alternative theories and methodologies that early on attended to the materiality of the world and the non-discursive. Indeed, a turn away from signifying practices not only resonates with the 1980s cultural studies discourse advocated, for instance, by Lawrence Grossberg (Wiley, 2005), it also prompts us to investigate whether there are other ways of dealing with the relationship between the textual and the non-discursive. Instead of neglecting the earlier histories of cultural studies, they might be able to provide some important clues to feminist and post-colonial themes. These are something that might provide an additional new direction to cultural techniques too. Scholars in media studies and cultural techniques have continued the line of thought inherited from the likes of Kittler, who brought a dierent sort of materialism into play than that on display in some of the current speculative philosophical discussions. This materialism takes into account the historically contingent nature of media technologies in the non-human assemblages. This may turn out to be an important contribution to philosophical discussions that lack sucient insight into the constitutive role cultural techniques play in their theory formation. In contrast to some recent philosophical discussions, German mediatheoretical accounts start their material investigations from more concrete historical assemblages rather than from an ontological position. As argued in the introduction to this special issue, their approach consists in part of an anti-Platonic move designed to reverse the priority of the ontological to favour the ontic a move inspired by Heideggers onticontological distinction. This point was underlined already in WinthropYoungs introduction and accurately dened as follows: the study of cultural techniques provides a kind of anking manoeuvre by relating the thinking of Sein (Being) to the processing and operating of bits and pieces of Seiendes (beings). Furthermore, there is a commitment to closely scrutinize the specicity of the material. Sybille Kra mer 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 not text? Kra mer and Bredekamp provide meticulous insights into the medial conditions of knowledge and the entanglement of aesthetics and epistemologies of the image. Indeed, while identifying the proximity of cultural techniques to certain cultural practices approaches, we can say that the willingness to fully engage technical cultures and mathematical formalisms is what species this as a very German approach. It seems that cultural techniques are cultural practices enriched with mathematics and

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a head-on engagement with technical and scientic cultural reality thrown in for good measure. A similar move from textuality to materiality is visible in Bernhard Siegerts writings (e.g. Siegert, 2011). Cultural techniques scholars articulate materialities as historically changing sets of practices. This relates to a materialization of the textual, the discursive, social practices and human nitude in relation to non-human agencies. This approach is not interested in pure ontology: that is, in an ontological domain of Being cleansed from any accidental features like weight, colour and other empirical, material facts.2 In media-oriented cultural techniques there is a persistent interest in the materiality of the world, in which media relate to ontological and aesthetic operations that process distinctions (and the blurring of distinctions) which are basic to the sense production of any specic culture (Siegert, 2011: 14). Cultural, aesthetic and mediatic operations are approached as historically situated. This also means that textuality is not discarded as an analytical approach but rened 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 to something altogether dierent that also connects to computational cultures. It starts with mathematics and programming. For theorists such as Siegert, the work of Foucault (and, to a certain extent, that of Derrida) is taken only as a starting point rather than a frame of reference. Siegert is striving for much more detailed analyses that reveal an interest in materialities such as paper as well as bibliographic and typographic details like the point/full stop (Punkt). His (2003) Passage des Digitalen (Passage of the Digital) is exemplary in providing a rich historical mapping of techniques of inscription. Its approach is both theoretically rened and sensitive to material dierences that make a dierence without being reduced to representations and signifying chains. This perspective forces us to broaden our understanding of the very notions of meaning and signication. Siegert articulates his cultural techniques approach as historical ontology: There is no man independent from cultural techniques of hominization, or anthropotechnics; there is no time independent from the cultural techniques of calendars, time measurement and synchronization; there is no space independent from cultural techniques of ruling spaces and so forth. This does not imply, however, that writing the history of cultural techniques is meant to be an antiontological project. On the contrary, it implies more than it excludes a historical ontology, which however does not base that which exists in ideas, adequate reasons or an eidos, as was common in the tradition of metaphysics, but in media operations, which work as

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conditions of possibility for artefacts, knowledge, the production of political or aesthetic or religious actants. (2011: 15) In other words, we are dealing with a media-ontological set of tools designed to unravel cultural techniques as material actions, skills, perceptions, and representations. Histories of knowledge, science and media are understood not through semiotic reading of texts but as complex spatial and temporal knowledge systems. The epistemological is entwined with the ontological. Cultural techniques are completely material: understanding them requires that we pay attention to everything from the characteristics of the inscription surface (what kind of paper used) to the wider spatial and temporal infrastructures. In Passage des Digitalen, this task is articulated through a threefold materialization 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 existence and are not ideal objects 3. sign practices are specic to certain institutional spaces.

Siegert is especially interested in the oce, the ship, the atelier, the laboratory, and academia. (Siegert, 2003: 14). Such an approach acknowledges the material and temporal nature of techniques. A reference to media archaeology would be tempting but we need to also pay attention to the dierences between Siegerts approach and that of, for instance, Wolfgang Ernst (see Ernst, 2013, and Siegert, 2008b: 9). Siegert argues that the point of dierence lies in their relation to signs/signals: for him, the Berlin situated media archaeology of Ernst desires to replace an analysis of signs with that of signals. For sure, Ernsts way of dierentiating Medienwissenschaft media sciences from those of Kulturwissenschaften lies in the resolute demand that if we study media, we really need to study their modes of technical epistemology and how they process signals in a channel. Siegerts stance does not neglect the materiality of signals but adds to it a slight modication: we analyse signs as signals3 and our cultural accounts are embedded in understanding of the physical, engineering and technical aspects of media as techniques. In terms of signal analysis, Shannon and Weavers information theory is a constant reference point in these discussions. Siegert and a lot of cultural techniques scholars do not want to replace a cultural-based media analysis with information theory, even if they insist on the need to take into account the constitutive, technically engineered parts of reality. This approach resonates with recent discussions elsewhere, including US-based media studies. Duke University Presss new book series Sign, Storage, Transmission is dedicated to exploring this material eld of

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media culture that still stems from a cultural studies understanding. For instance, Jonathan Sternes MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2012) works its way towards a similar argument to that of cultural techniques scholars by focusing on the entanglement of bodily techniques (such as hearing and movement) with engineering, psychoacoustics and what Sterne calls perceptual technics. When culture itself is conditioned by the engineered scientic, we need to be able to take into account such expansions of what we mean by culture in the age of high technology and science. As the papers in this collection indicate, the genealogy of cultural techniques leads back through media pedagogy of the 1970s to agriculture in a way that almost parallels the evolution of media ecology since the 1970s and 1980s. In his introduction, Winthrop-Young speaks of the triple entry of cultural techniques. The way in which the concept derives from earlier material agricultural techniques of cultivation combines both the cultural and the natural domain (see for instance Geoghegans as well as Kra mer and Bredekamps articles). Perhaps there is an interesting connection between the original sense of the term, which connected it closely to environmental engineering, with more recent media-related understanding and use. It is in this wake where some of the recent animal studies and posthumanities discussions can nd cultural techniques a useful way to dig into the soil. In other words, if part of the modern media theory version of cultural techniques, represented for instance in the work of the Hermann von Helmholtz Center for Cultural Techniques in Berlin, was actually taking distance from the agricultural roots of the concept and gearing it towards more directly mediatic forms (see Geoghegans article), perhaps we can and should reclaim some of those early connotations. In other words: could we envision a media-ecological twist to cultural techniques, which is partly already represented in Sebastian Vehlkens work? Would such an approach be able to talk about such media techniques that have to do with the alternative materialities of, for instance, electronic waste and related to animal studies (see Parikka, 2010, 2011). This does not necessitate going so far as to reinstate media theory as part of the Petzenkirchen Institute for Land and Water Management Research (Institut fur Kulturtechnik und Bodenwasserhaushalt), but considers the fact that issues of soil, water, waste and pollution are increasingly what we should take into account in a renewed sense of materiality of media theory of technological culture.

III
However, all these links and connections, convergences and divergences do not mean that the cultural techniques approach is without its shortcomings. The most obvious issue is the political (or lack thereof). While it was at times overly and at times maybe naively emphasized in

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cultural studies, it seemed noticeably absent and at times deliberately excluded from German media theory. With its politically rather conservative stance and (especially in the case of the older Kittler) Euro- or Hellenocentric bias, the latter made sure it would not be mistaken for Marxist materialism or its more rened Frankfurt derivative. However, the German media studies approach might prove fertile when it comes to investigating the current practices of advanced capitalism as cultural techniques. The intellectual fertilization could work both ways: German media theory could incorporate recent analyses of postFordist production and enculturation techniques, while post-Marxist theories would prot from the historically detailed accounts of how cultural techniques process our aesthetic and ontological distinctions. Could we use the work done in Weimar, Berlin, Lu neburg and Siegen on technical media and image cultures to investigate how they consolidate certain operations and enforced habits of action/perception/memory in relation to capitalism? Italian scholars such as Maurizio Lazzarato (2004, 2007) have been tracking the relation of forces of contemporary capitalism in relation to cognitive and aective capacities, yet their approach still lacks a nuanced view of the role of media. The elements are there, including the references to contributions by Bergson and Deleuze on media technologies from lm to the digital, but they fall short of the accounts of German analysts. More broadly, this emphasis on the political also stems from Gilles Deleuzes notion of control societies, which has had its now well-recognized impact on theories of digital culture. However, Deleuzes initial text was very vague on details and the same vagueness has at times been transported to the subsequent elaborations of the concept, begging the question what exactly are the specic cultural techniques of control in the Deleuzian concept. Indeed, a range of the approaches in this collection can be read in relation to some discussions concerning the politics of digital culture and devices that are increasingly mediating our relation to ourselves and others via third-party corporations or security mechanisms. Cultural techniques of tracking, mapping and mining are among such examples of cultural techniques of securitized cognitive capitalism. Tracking of gestures becomes a crucial part of the digital surveillance mechanisms in contemporary societies of security; identity mapping (cf. Machos article in this collection) provides a new mode of inscription for security industries and can easily be monetized through data-mining of the algorithmic identity production of social media. Indeed, such seemingly worn out cultural studies concepts as identity are still actively mobilized, but in a very instrumental way as part of data-based marketing and composition of algorithmic identities (Cheney-Lippold, 2011: 1678). Besides the potential for analysing cultural techniques of cognitive capitalism and control societies, we can perhaps nd a further radical

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side to new cross-breedings of theoretical traditions. Marxs Grundrisse (1973) and The Fragment on Machines have become a canonized reference point for recent political theory interested in technological culture and the General Intellect (see for instance Berardi, 2009), but perhaps there is potential in more combinations of media theory and political concepts. Besides analysis of capitalism, there are potentials for the histories of counter-techniques too. How can we map minor techniques in the manner Deleuze and Guattari wrote about minor languages? Perhaps there is more potential for a radical version of cultural techniques which may expand on the mentioned triple entry of cultural techniques in ways that multiply its potentials.4

Notes
1. Siegfried Zielinski (2010) used the notion of cultural technique in his extensive history of the video recorder, which was first published in the mid-1980s. Zielinskis media-theoretical writings have often been perceived as media archaeology, but we can see an interesting early link here already, influenced by the 1970s discussions of cultural techniques of new media ecologies (see Winthrop-Young in this collection). Furthermore, Zielinski represents a link to British cultural studies and the discourse of cultural practices through his theoretical debt to Raymond Williams et al. In general, there would be a lot to be highlighted about the connections of ideas between cultural techniques and even Foucauldian-influenced governmentality studies and similarly, for instance, to excavate more on this link to Williams as well as Tony Bennetts work in cultural studies. I will also leave out of this essay the bigger question concerning the relations of German media studies and North American media studies (see for example Peters, 2009). 2. Scholars such as Sterne (2006) have reminded us that we need to understand communication as techne where technique and technology are irrevocably tied together. There is no communication situation that does not involve crafts and materials: this sort of simple starting point can be seen as a historical, anthropological and theoretical guideline for humanities research. Such ideas bring situated materiality into theoretical play. Communication studies itself originates in the Aristotelian notion of techne: practical as well as embodied art and knowledge. 3. Also nicht Signal statt Zeichenanalyse, sondern Zeichenanalyse als Signalanalyse (Siegert, 2008b: 9). 4. A thank you to Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and the reviewers for their feedback in revising this text.

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Siegert, B. (2008a) Cacography or communication? Cultural techniques in German media studies, trans. Winthrop-Young G, Grey Room 29: 2647. Siegert, B. (2008b) Erzklang oder missing fundamental: Kulturgeschichte als Signalanalyse. In: J. Kursell (ed.) Sounds of Science Schall im Labor (1800 1930). Berlin: Max-Planck Institut fu r Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 720. Siegert, B. (2011) The map is the territory. Radical Philosophy 169 (September/ October): 1316. Siegert, B. (2012) Doors: On the materiality of the symbolic, trans. Peters JD, Grey Room 47 (Spring) 623. . In: G.J. Shepherd, J. St. John and Sterne, J. (2006) Communication as techne T. Striphas (eds) Communication As . . . Perspectives on Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 9198. Sterne, J. (2012) MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham: Duke University Press. Weber, M. (2005) Remarks on technology and culture, Theory, Culture & Society 22(4): 2338. Wiley, SBC. (2005) Spatial materialism: Grossbergs Deleuzan cultural studies, Cultural Studies 19(1): 6399. Winthrop-Young, G. (forthcoming) Siren recursions. In: S. Sale and L. Salisbury (eds) Kittler Now: Current Perspectives in Kittler Studies. Cambridge: Polity. Zielinski, S. (2010) Zur Geschichte des Videorecorders. Zehnte Ausgabe. Potsdam: Polzer.

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

Review Article

Files, Lists, and the Material History of the Law

Liam Cole Young
University 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

Theory, Culture & Society 30(6) 160172 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263276413484942 tcs.sagepub.com

Abstract This article reviews Cornelia Vismanns 2008 book Files: Law and Media Technology. In addition to an overview of Vismanns media materialist approach to the study of the law, it provides both a consideration of her relationship to Friedrich Kittlers media theory and a more focused examination of certain functional writing entities that might extend Vismanns 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 Vismanns magisterial book Files: Law and Media Technology oers English readers a wonderful entry point into the challenging and ambitious intellectual project of a scholar whose life was cut tragically short in 2010. The book seeks to rethink the history of the law through a media materialist perspective and is an impressive and stimulating synthesis of media and cultural theory, historiography, philosophy, and legal scholarship. This approach oers an unconventional trajectory for writing the history of the law, focusing not on specic legal case studies nor on the meaning or content of the western legal traditions documentary apparatus, but rather on the apparatus itself. Files are for Vismann the
Corresponding author: Liam Cole Young, University of Western Ontario, North Campus Bldg., Rm. 240, London ON, N6A 5B7, Canada. Email: lc.young22@gmail.com http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

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privileged unit or entity of this apparatus, and she follows these entities through an intriguing series of functional histories: from the ancient writing systems to modern literature; from Roman chanceries (and their study in the Renaissance) through the spectacle of traveling archives and registries of imminent monarchical power in the Middle Ages, to the proto-bureaucracy of Maximilian Is imperial court chancery; from the bizarre world of baroque secretaries to the self-administration of the Prussian proto-state; from Goethes personal archive to Nazi governmentality; from vertical les and binder technology to the Stasi surveillance state and the reclamation by its former subjects of their own dossier. Both the rigour with which each epoch is treated and the general erudition of the book are exceptional. Files is a book ostensibly about analog and pre-digital technologies, with Vismann devoting only one very brief nal chapter to les in the digital world. However, a deeper engagement with the project reveals that by recasting certain oft-elided entities from the world of writing namely les, but also lists, registries, and archives in functional, nonrepresentational terms, Vismann is able to tease out their algorithmic dimensions. Her intervention thereby amounts to nothing less than a prehistory of the digital computer, which ultimately shows that administrative techniques of bygone centuries are inscribed as stacks, les, compiler or registers in a digital hardware that remains unaware of its historical dimension (Vismann, 2008: 164). Such a project is one of media archaeology; in the seemingly innocuous administrative writing and documentary practices of earlier historical epochs Vismann unearths certain ontological (pre)conditions of the digital age. These conditions are most observable in the (nonhuman) life-world of les. Thus, while the disappearance of paper les and the emergence of les as stylized icons on computer screens (2008: 163) may appear to be ushering in an entirely new immaterial ontology, Vismann shows that such a conclusion would be a misdiagnosis. We may be exiting the time of paper les, but this does not entail a clean ontological rupture. Digitization should be seen as both reconguration of media-technological conditions and as an extension of certain pre-existing tendencies in the processing, transmission, and storage of data. The range of sources drawn upon and general erudition of the work make Files of interest for readers from a vast array of disciplines, including not just media studies and law but also history, sociology, information science, and communication, to name a few. My hope is that this review essay will serve to expose readers unfamiliar with Vismann to her work, and might help to parse some of the tools that she has bequeathed to those scholars and thinkers interested in the study of the law, the history of writing, and media technology more generally. The essay is organized in three parts: rst, I will oer a brief overview of Files, focusing in particular on Vismanns unique theoretical framework. Second,

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I will explore some of the (dis)connections between Vismann and the German Media Theory tradition out of which she emerged, attempting to situate her in relation to what Georey Winthrop-Young calls the Kittler eect (2011: 143). Finally, a third section will focus on one particular inscription entity that is ever-present throughout the various historical epochs Vismann traverses: the list. It will be argued that there are crucial, functional dimensions of forms such as the list provoked by Vismanns work which themselves pregure or have a structuring function upon les. The further pursuit of such entities can oer scholars of media technology unique epistemological and ontological insights regarding the constitution of power/knowledge networks, and the material forms through which these are articulated and transmitted.

Overview
Files, for Vismann, resist easy denition. Her concern is not limited to those les most familiar in the contemporary situation, vertical les. Instead she takes a more generative approach that conceptualizes les as non-discrete entities that can appear in all shapes and forms: as loose pages, lying in little boxes, wrapped in packing paper, or enclosed in capsules; they may present themselves as bundles tied with a string or assume the shape of vertical folders ready to enfold anything that can t between two paper covers (2008: xi). Because a concrete denition of les is both elusive and limiting (to say nothing about translation issues1), Vismanns focus remains trained throughout the book on the functional and process-based dimensions of les that is, on the mediatechnological conditions in which they exist and by which they are constituted. The specic lens through which this functional dimension is probed is that of their largest area of application, the law (2008: xii). She sees a constitutive dimension of les on the law, and because [f]iles are the variables in the universe of writing and the law, her approach can investigate how les control the formalization and dierentiation of the law (2008: xixii). The law, too, is dened broadly, not as an instrument or medium for the arbitration of conicts but as a repository of forms of authoritarian and administrative acts that assume concrete shape in les (2008: xiii). The law is not an a priori constant or singular tradition that is passed from generation to generation unabated, but is a historically specic constellation that is not just conditioned by the media-technological conditions in which it is called to act, but only nds its articulation in and through the corresponding or dominant media forms of these conditions. Therefore, Vismann argues, les and the law mutually determine one another (2008: xiii). Such a media materialist approach allows Vismann to construct a convincing argument that locates the origins of the law not in a conventional orality/literacy binary but rather within what she calls pragmatic

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or administrative forms of writing les, registers, and records. The orality/literacy binary elides these forms (and others such as tables, charts, lists, diagrams, etc.2) because it has no capacity to account for any form of writing that is not simply a duplication or representation of speech.3 In contrast, Vismann is concerned exclusively with how these administrative forms of writing function precisely insofar as they are not subject to the logic of speech (2008: 4). By circumventing the orality/ literacy polarity and re-emphasizing such administrative forms, she is able to show that the functional logic of various incarnations and alterations in the documentary apparatus of the law has been formative on the trajectory of the western legal tradition, contribut[ing] to the formation of the three major entities on which the law is based: truth, state, and subject (2008: xii). The theoretical framework of such an approach is laid out in Chapter vi-Strauss/Derrida debate 1, in which she intervenes in the famous Le regarding the writing lesson in the formers Tristes Tropiques.4 vi-Strauss and Derrida about how Vismann casts the debate between Le to read the situation in familiar terms: the formers privileging of the innocent state of pure orality of the Nambikwara tribe that is invaded by the writing of the white man (2008: 2) is deconstructed by the latter as a 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 do with its ability to transcend oral communication, nor with its capacity for the transmission of meaning or content, but in fact has everything to do with what writing allows the chief to do, and what writing does itself its ability to administer or to act. That is to say, because the chief of the Nambikwara writes lists that regulate the exchange ritual, and which do not communicate, but control transfer operations (2008: 56), the writing lesson is not about empowerment through an act of writing or the concurrence of meaning, speech, and writing, nor is it about what language philosophy calls a performative act. It is about administration vi-Strauss nor (2008: 5). What Vismann shows is that neither Le Derrida can account for these administrative forms and acts of writing that are neither communicative nor performative but functional. Thus, by recasting the so-called writing lesson as an encounter between writing and the law that exists outside of the conventional orality/literacy polarity, Vismann is able to illuminate dimensions of the relations between writing, power, the law, and information processing that are missed in conventional accounts. This intervention is the springboard o of which Vismann recasts the history of the law through a grammatological approach to les that is not at all interested with their content or meaning but rather with their mediality, materiality, and functionality; with the acts of transmission, storage, cancellation, modication, and deletion that write the history of the law. She laments the retreat of a minor, media-technological

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tradition of studying documents and information processes in such textual terms (including disciplines such as paleography, codicology, and diplomatics), and seeks to resurrect them. Around 1900 these sciences became merely ancillary to factual or narrative historiography a position from which they have never recovered, despite the fact that they study documents according to the material on which they were written, the size of the letters, the composition of the ink, the appearance of seals and stamps, the history of their transmission through time and space in short, everything that is of interest to present-day media studies (2008: 39). Vismann resuscitates and redeploys some of the tools from this deemphasized, minor tradition of media studies (or perhaps better, media sciences) to buttress her materialism. Drawing from such traditions also allows her approach to move beyond simply repurposing the theoretical tools developed by the so-called father of German media theory, Friedrich Kittler. Though there is much implicit in Vismanns work that borrows from Kittler, there are also important breaks. Some remarks admittedly preliminary about these intersections with Kittler are worth making, not just because Vismanns work is often categorized within the Kittlerian school of medientechnik but also because the two enjoyed a close working relationship before Vismanns untimely passing.5

The Kittler Effect

Aside from Vismanns at least tacit acceptance of his most famous dictum, that media determine our situation (Kittler, 1999: xxxix), Kittlers inuence is most evident on two planes: literature and Lacan. For Kittler, encoded within literature are the characteristics of the discourse network in which it is produced; that is, literary texts express and embody the transmission, processing, and storage capacities of the dominant media-technologies of any epoch. By extension, literature is also expressive of the conditions of thought, imagination, and subjectivity made available to human beings via these media technologies. For instance, during the monopoly enjoyed by writing in the historical period Kittler refers to as Discourse Network 1800, language is the only means available for the expression and exploration of human sense perceptions and imaginings. As a result, literature was the only means by which the reader could access proto-phantasmagoric sensory data by means of an inner hallucination generated by text.6 With the advent of analog storage media, however (namely gramophone, lm, and typewriter), new means are made available through which to articulate, process and transmit the imaginings and sense perceptions of human beings. Such tendencies and changes can be uncovered by the astute media archaeologist in the literature of any epoch, as Kittler is often wont to do in his own texts.7 And so literature has a crucial

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methodological function for Kittlers media theory at least in his middle period, the best known to English readers. Literary texts function for Vismann in a very similar manner. She argues literary ctions that deal with administrations highlight those media and realities of the law that nonctional, scholarly self-presentations of the law and its history tend to overlook or even suppress (2008: xiii). Readings of two such texts, Kafkas Before the Law and Melvilles Bartleby the Scrivener, are oered early in Files to conceptually frame the work. These readings function as a kind of preamble to the historical account of les Vismann develops in subsequent chapters they are not often explicitly referenced in later chapters but are ever-present ghosts that haunt the text. To elaborate, Vismann shows that legal preambles demonstrate the concerns and historical contexts of a given law, they contain colloquial stories that are not allowed to enter into ocial legal discourse, and are usually typographically dierentiated from the document to which they are appended (2008: 21). Preambles are expressions of the moment in which the legal text is called to act. So too are Kafkas and Melvilles stories expressions of the world of les under Vismanns study: Kafka oers an access to the world of les, to the world before institutionalizations, to the world before the law (2008: 15), while Melvilles Bartleby epitomizes the transition to clerical work devoid of any human factor, that is to say, no chancery in the face of a mechanized bureau (2008: 33, emphasis in original). Bureaucracy is seen as a machine, and chanceries as the relays of the law. Gates, such as those in Before the Law, facilitate or deny access, establish or interrupt contact, attract and exclude, mediate, regulate, allow entry, subdivide, transform, block, seduce, bar, ensure transfer . . . [can be] overrun and torn e into such an understanding of les and down (2008: 19). The entre the law is literature. These texts mark the two poles of the eld of functions performed by les in relation to the law: on the one hand secrecy, cancellation, caesura, and power (evident in Kafka), on the other hand the machine-like, antihuman, algorithmic dimensions of recording processes (on display in Melville). As legal preambles have an annunciatory function, granting hermeneutical access to legal texts, so these stories serve to grant the reader of Files access into Vismanns conceptualization of the law as a repository of acts that assume concrete shape in les (2008: xiii) and which has no memory of itself (2008: 12). Further, such ctions do not merely illustrate the machines and apparatuses of the law, or the logic of bureaucracy driven to its extreme. As narrative residues discarded by the grand tales of the origin and evolution of the law, they stand at the end of a process of dierentiation that also entailed a removal of literature from the law (2008: xiii). They are works of literature, a realm that is barred from entering conventional legal discourse, and their invocation here reminds us this was not always so. Finally, their stylistic or formal

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attributes are as dierentiated from legalese as a preambles typographic dierentiation is from a legal document. Therefore, as in Kittlers work, literary texts function for Vismann as both historical evidence (as expressions of certain historically specic media-technological conditions) and as important elements of the theoretical armature she constructs in order to explore the law primarily according to its documentary apparatus and processes. A second plane on which Vismann intersects with Kittler is regarding the latters importation of the Lacanian concepts of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic into the study of media technology. Briey, Kittler understands these concepts as follows: the symbolic is the dimension of code, the syntax through which is constituted and transmitted the communications and information that make up the world. The symbolic for Kittler is a syntax puried of all semantics, meaning, degrees of guration, and thus also every conceivability which, Kittler proposes, could in the end coincide with the concept of information in telecommunications (2010: 401). The imaginary is the realm of gure recognition, the processes of which are just as automatic as they are deceitful (Kittler, 2010: 39), while the real which cannot be accessed by combinatorial systems and processes of visual perception is stored, processed, and transmitted (by the symbolic) because it has neither a gure, like the imaginary, nor a syntax, like the symbolic (Kittler, 2010: 40). Importantly and this is where Vismann follows Kittler in understanding Lacan the processes or phenomena associated with each category are not understood as primarily (or even fundamentally) psychological, but rather are probed in their material and technical dimensions. For Vismann, conventional understandings of les from disciplines such as linguistics, sociology, and history8 misunderstand their crucial functional and constitutive dimensions because of an assumption that les capture the real. From this phonocentric perspective, les capture everything that other forms of writing no longer contain all the life, the struggles and speeches that surround decisions (2008: 10). Vismann shows, however, that what is captured or embodied in les (when viewed in this way) is not the real but a projection of the imaginary, and such conventional approaches to les and archive say more about their practitioners and associated disciplines than the actual entities themselves. In contrast, in the legal world, les are not objects unto themselves, subject to the gaze of the archivist or archaeologist. They are the basis for legal work. Their validity resides in their truth value and their everyday operations (Vismann, 2008: 11). Files stand before the law that is made by them. As such, while the law has no memory of itself (for it could not acknowledge its contingency and hope to be authoritative), its material history exists not in but as les. Approaching les not as fetishized capturers of the real but rather as procedural entities of the symbolic (which come to be (mis)interpreted by the imaginary),

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Vismanns genealogy oers a comprehensive account of the media-technological history of the law. Lacanian concepts are also crucial to Vismanns reading of Franz Kafkas Before the Law. What she teases out of this story of barriers, thresholds, guardians, time, and the law is nothing less than the archive fever of a modernity obsessed with the search for origin. Kafkas central character, the man, is barred from entry to the door of the law. He is assured by the doorkeeper that beyond this door lays another, similarly guarded, and beyond that door is another, and so on. The man is told this but also catches a glimpse of what lies beyond the door. Though he sees only the nothingness of empty space, this glimpse fuels the mans curiosity for what lies beyond the door and, Vismann suggests, binds him to its secret (2008: 15). That is to say, this reading of the story suggests that the modern subject is both barred from and obsessed with the secret of 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 such terms precisely because such an essence or origin is an endlessly deferred impossibility. Indeed, only the imaginary resides behind the door, while the innite series of doors suggests a symbolic order made up of gates that refer to gates (Vismann, 2008: 16). Ultimately, the legal order consists of nothing other than this chain of references (2008: 16), and the storys whole architecture of entries and barriers testies above all to the technologies of reference adopted by the law (2008: 17, emphasis in original). Thus all that remains is a received tradition of the law, and the very existence of these laws . . . is at most a matter of presumption (Kafka in Vismann, 2008: 16). Deconstruction and archaeology attempt to uncover the conditions by which these presumptions operate. Vismanns highly original contribution to this tradition is to use it to open up a space in which to think about a law that is governed not by men or by history but by self-regulating, machinic entities such as les. When literature is parsed and Lacan is incorporated to describe the law as a system of relays, signal processing and transfer operations, we are in the realm of Kittler. Vismann oers a rationale for such an approach when she suggests that, regarding 19th-century scholars dedicated to tracing Roman law back to an undisguised ur-text, [w]hether (to allude to Lacan) [their] gaze opens into the real or the imaginary remains undecidable. Both are involved when Roman law emerges from the reconstruction of its transmission. But it is possible to decide upon, specify, and elaborate the media-technological conditions of its transmission (2008: 41). This is as succinct an encapsulation of the Vismannian project as exists in Files. These brief remarks regarding the relation between Vismann and Kittler are preliminary and exploratory. They are meant to suggest lines of inquiry that may prove fruitful for situating Vismann in relation

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to the Kittler eect in media studies. Vismanns reading of Kafkas Before the Law is a particularly good example of the two main planes on which the thinkers intersect, literature and Lacan. If we follow Vismanns reading of Before the Law as a story about the documentary apparatus of the law a little further, it will also throw into relief an important series of double functions of the law and the les that stand before it. In the story, the law is endlessly announced but continuously deferred. Similarly, les control the formalization and dierentiation of the law, processing its separation into authority and administration (2008: xxi); les rst perform the law, and eventually come to service it that is, les both administer and are administered; les also function both to transmit the law and store its processes, acts, and traces (2008: xiv). Such a discussion of double-functions of les and information processes echoes Derridas similar pronouncement regarding the archive as both commencement and commandment (Derrida, 1995: 15). Additionally, Vismann shows that the writing down of a les history and movement through space and time in the form of a list also has a double function: such a list is both imperative (i.e. generating the next command) and informational (i.e. noting its own execution) (2008: 8). In the latter example we nd an issue with Vismanns denition of les, specically regarding the relationship she sketches out between les as authorless, process-generated entities and the process generators themselves. One of the latter will be explored specically in the next section: the list.

Lists
With the advent of writing came the list. Some of the earliest surviving forms of writing, c. 3000 BCE, are the administrative lists of the ancient Sumerians, scrawled on the walls of caves and on pieces of birch bark (Goody, 1977: 78, 82). Such early lists are purely administrative they document economic transactions, inventories, and other minutiae of dayto-day life in Mesopotamia in this period. As such, they exist between orality and literacy. Not surprisingly, as a functional entity that is present through each of the epochs traversed by Files, lists are isolated by Vismann as one of the administrative forms that can allow for the writing of a new history of the law. She maintains that [l]ists do not communicate, they control transfer operations . . . individual items are not put down in writing for the sake of memorizing spoken words, but in order to regulate goods, things, or people. Lists sort and engender circulation (2008: 6). She conceptualizes the list as strictly a medium of vi-Strauss writing lesson); its storage capacity is only transfer (as in the Le ever temporary because there is no need, nor any desire, to preserve a list once the act or event that it facilitates has occurred. Therefore the orientation of the list, for Vismann, is always toward the present.

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However, there is something of a contradiction, or at least a tension in this view of lists, in that she notes that they are not only important in the world of les but actually pregure les themselves: les are governed by lists . . . Lists with tasks to be performed govern the inside of the le world, from their initial compilation to their nal storage (2008: 7). Files are process-generated algorithmic entities, and the process generators are list-shaped control signs (2008: 7). That is to say, lists prescribe any les movement through space and time. File notes issue commands for the next movement or event of a les existence to where or to whom the le should travel, at what time, by which means, etc. Each executed command triggers the next. Over time these notes accumulate, one after the other, to form a list. They preserve a record of a les life. In Vismanns own words: when, against all intentions, records multiply and chart their own course through ocial corridors, when they start taking on a life of their own in ling rooms, this is an indication that lists or programs are at work (2008: 8). Though she spends considerable time discussing lists (particularly in Chapter 1), their actual importance to the kind of ontological conditions she seeks to map out in Files is underemphasized. This is primarily because she does not draw clearly a distinction between registries, lists, and les. A registry (see pp. 7985) is obviously conceptualized as some kind of list, but what kind? Is a registry also categorized as a le? Does this imply that every list is a le? If so, does that not complicate the idea of lists as purely processed-based entities with no archival capacity? Since, as she notes, lists program the movement of les through space and time (and are therefore dierent from les at some level), more time could be devoted to parsing these questions and making a sharper differentiation between the three forms, which are often conated by the category of recording device. Such a dierentiation is important because if lists program the movement and life of les, they in some way pregure les themselves, and thus must be seen to play an integral role in the emergence of truth, subject, state and the law. As an example, much of the material explored 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 imperial archives that serve important double functions for the control by monarchical power over space and time the registry in this period is about both index and aect, communication and transmission, storage and administration. The registry itself is lled in with information and becomes a template that frames the empire. Further, this new writing economy reduces noise on the page and allows for a system of retrieval that is not sequential but grid-based. As such, a new economy of reading 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 thus become ranked or organized according to various other criteria. Vismann shows these developments aect space, time and power for instance, dates in margins decompose time into discrete, countable units, linking acts to time, and the coincidence of the two produces an event (2008: 81). While these factors or tendencies are not all necessarily new in this period, the extent to which they were deployed as technologies of power/knowledge was unprecedented. Registries were more than nifty administrative techniques designed to economize on reading and writing; they were nothing less than the media technology for a state as a permanent entity (Vismann, 2008: 812). Importantly for our consideration of the list, Vismann herself shows that these registries actually pregure the world of les that elsewhere are attributed to be constitutive of the power over time required for the state to come into existence. On the basis of this comprehensive chronological register, the state as institutionalized during the reign of Frederick II, became an apparatus of repetitions, a le machine (Vismann, 2008: 82). It may very well be that Vismann considers registries to be les (and vice versa), but this is unclear (even her earlier open denition implies that les are collections of spatially and materially discrete units rather than simply discrete units in writing). A clearer dierentiation is needed precisely because lists and registries are shown to control the movement of les in space and time, and so are obviously at some level ontologically distinct from them. Vismanns description of lists shows us that they can take on a machine-like character. They streamline, standardize, and help accelerate the processing of information in whatever media-technological network they are functioning (and because of its malleability, the list can function in many such networks). She is correct in emphasizing this administrative and facilitative capacity of the list. But her insistence that the list can only ever be present-based results in an explicit rejection of its capacity as a storage device that is also problematic. Surely the lists indexicality to such le activity as described above its keeping a record of this activity is demonstrative of an archival capacity that pushes the functionality of the list beyond simply present-based administration? We may not intend or wish to archive our lists, but often they become so preserved.9 Vismann misses this aspect of lists because, to use the language of Innis (2002), her focus remains trained on the lists space-bias its ability to facilitate the movement of les in the spaces of administration at the expense of the important fact that a list can also in its archival capacities express a time-bias, which in this case preserves the records of the lifeworld of les. Fine-tuning Vismanns analysis of forms that pregure les such as lists can build o of her contributions and oer further insight into the kinds of ontological and epistemological questions her work provokes.

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Conclusion
Files is a rich text that has much to contribute to the contemporary intellectual landscape. It is an important book, and the intellectual tools Vismann develops in it will only prove more inuential as it becomes more widely read. I hope to have suggested some potential lines of inquiry provoked by the book, while exploring some connections to other thinkers that may prove fruitful. In the wake of her tragic death, one is left only to wonder about what further intellectual projects might have emerged out of Vismanns brilliant erudition and scholarship. English readers can only hope that translation eorts of her existing works currently underway continue and expand. Her intellectual legacy remains to be written, but Files will undoubtedly prove to be the essential Vismannian text.

Notes
1. She notes that the German word for files, Akten, does not differentiate between materiality and function. In English the former is denoted by files, the latter by the term records (corresponding to their function as recording devices) (2008: xii). 2. See Latour (1987) and Rotman (2008). 3. As, for instance, in Ong (1982). vi-Strauss through the 4. Briefly, this episode occurred during a journey of Le Brazilian jungle with the Nambikwara tribe, and involved the anthropologist presenting members of the tribe with writing utensils and paper. He describes how most Nambikwara quickly lose interest in the materials (not knowing vihow to use them) with the exception of the chief, who begins to mimic Le Strauss own writing activity. The chief then proceeds to insert this writing (the wavy lines he draws which bear no communicative function in and of themselves) into a series of complex exchange rituals within the tribe, vi-Strauss anthropological team and between the tribe and Le (see Vismann, 2008: 26). 5. The fruits of which are unfortunately (as yet) unavailable to English readers. See, for instance, Kittler and Vismann (2001). 6. See Kittler (2010: 479) and Winthrop-Young (2011: 2951). 7. For two examples chosen at random, see Kittlers brilliant use of Jean-Marie Guyau to illuminate the effects of the phonograph (1999: 303), or his use of Flaubert to discuss the repercussions of infinitely reproducible lithographs in Optical Media (2010: 138). 8. Typified by Leopold von Ranke, for whom [a]rchived records revealed . . . the totality of a present past, and with it the possibility of venturing behind state history to retrieve the life that had been deposited in files (2008: 8). 9. The Morgan Museum in New York recently devoted an entire exhibit to the lists of famous artists. Over 80 lists with a variety of functions were 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: Cambridge University Press. Innis, H.A. (2002) The Bias of Communication, 2nd edn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kerwin, L. (cur.) (2011) Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists Enumerations from the Smithsonians Archives of American Art. New York: The Morgan Library and Museum. Kittler, F. (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Winthrop-Young G and Wutz 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 of Western Ontario. His research is located broadly in media materialism and communication, and more specically in the history of inscription systems (including but not limited to writing). His current doctoral research explores the list as a material form, un-black boxing its various material functions throughout history in a variety of contexts political, cultural, communicative, aesthetic, technical, etc.