Description
Book SynopsisThis volume designates a shift within posthumanistic media studies, that dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations, that reproduce, process and reflect the distinctions that are fundamental for a given culture, e.g. the anthropological difference, the distinctions between natural object and cultural sign, noise and information, eye and gaze.
Trade Review"Cultural Techniques displays a stunning amount of historical knowledge, exploring texts and technological innovations that fall into fields such as the history of science, art history, architecture, cultural anthropology, ethnology, literary studies, and philosophy... Highly important." -- -Edgar Landgraf Bowling Green State University "Siegert's case studies suggest that human being (Dasein) articulates itself through a strife inherent in the play of ontological difference. This strife demands the construction of distinctions that produce human identity and cultural differences. Siegert assigns the name 'cultural techniques' to this production and maintenance of difference... Cultural Techniques suggests that every technical advance consolidates and reproduces new ensembles of cultural difference. Here, life itself is lodged within a system of differences that defy resolution and remain perpetually open to strategic redistribution." -Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Paragraph "An excellent collection of essays from one of the most widely known and respected scholars of media, media theory, and cultural techniques working in Germany. The scholarship is erudite, sophisticated, and impressively wide-ranging." -- -Michael Wutz Weber State University "Siegert's idea of cultural techniques extents the definition of media almost well beyond even its broadest common interpretations." -Digital Passage
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 000 Translator's Note 000 Introduction: Cultural techniques, or, The end of the intellectual postwar in German media theory 1. Cacography or Communication? Cultural techniques of sign-signal-distinction 2. Eating Animals-Eating God-Eating Man: Variations on the Last Supper, or, The cultural techniques of communion 3. Parletres: The cultural techniques of anthropological difference 4. Medusas of the western Pacific: The cultural techniques of seafaring 5. Pasajeros a Indias: Registers and biographical writing as cultural techniques of subject constitution (Spain, 16th century) 6. (Not) in Place: The grid, or, cultural techniques of ruling spaces 7. White spots and hearts of darkness: Drafting, projecting and designing as cultural techniques 8. Waterlines: Striated and smooth spaces as techniques of ship design 9. Figures of self-reference: A media genealogy of the trompe-l'Doeil in 17th-century Dutch still life 10. Door Logic, or, The materiality of the symbolic: From cultural techniques to cybernetic machines Notes Bibliography Index
