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Abstract
TheoriesofKulturtechniken(culturaltechniques)havebeenvigorouslydebatedintheGermanmediatheorymilieusincetheturnofthemillennium.Multiple,often
competing conceptualizations of this slippery term (and its exemplars) have emerged as Kulturtechniken morphed into its current, most theoretically sophisticated
incarnation (see Geoghegan WinthropYoung, Kultur). Though only now beginning to percolate in AngloAmerican media studies, these debates have been
transformative for research in Germany. Bernhard Siegert has gone so far as to pronounce the conceptual transformation of media into cultural techniques
complete(Siegert,End53).
ThedissolutionofmediaasaconceptifnottheentiredisciplineofmediastudieslikelyreadsasashocktoEnglishspeakingscholarsandstudentsforwhomthe
concept remains a powerful institutional and intellectual frame. But can Siegerts claim serve as a catalyst for rethinking some of the foundational concepts and
categoriesofAngloAmericanmediaandculturalstudies?Toaddressthisquestion,IofferanoverviewofGermandebatesthatintroduceskeythinkersandconcepts
to English readers. I then consider recent AngloAmerican work that resonates with German discussionsspecifically, work by Jonathan Sterne on media formats
(e.g.MP3)andbyJohnDurhamPetersandNedRossiteronlogisticalmedia.IconcludewithafewnotestowardsynthesizingthesetraditionsbyreturningtoHarold
Inniss early theorization of media. I argue that such a synthesis produces theoretical and methodological tools well suited to account for contemporary issues in
digitalculturesuchasBigDataandstatesurveillance.
Kulturtechniken
German debates around cultural techniques began in the wake of Friedrich Kittlers controversial establishment of media as the technical a priori of the human
sciences. Kittlers media ontology sought to correct and displace Foucaults conception of the archive as historical a priori. To sum up this move in one sentence:
KittlerwentalayerdeeperthanFoucaultsarchaeologiesdidorcould,showingthearchiveanddiscoursetobethemselvesalwaysstructuredbymediatechnologies:
nodiscoursewithoutpens,paper,andtypewriters,noarchiveswithoutrecordingmediaandaddresssystems,nogovernmentalitywithoutfiles.AccordingtoKittler,
Foucaults understanding did not go far enough because hethe last historian or first archaeologist (5)was unable to think beyond conventional alphanumeric
writingsystems.Kittlershowedthatbeforeitcaneverconditionsubjects,orevenbearticulatedaslanguage,power/knowledgeisforgedviatheprocessing,storage,
andtransmissionofsignals.
InKittlerswake,theconceptofmediaproliferated,eventuallybecomingoverextendedandtotalizing.Manyweretroubledthatimportantconsiderationsaboutwhat
precedes media devices and networks had been pushed aside in the fevered dream of 1980s media analysis, with its proclivity for lost media stories, devices, and
engineers. Their claim was that too much baby had been thrown out with the bathwater in the rush to, in Siegerts words, replace the critique of reason with a
critique of media (End 49). So Siegert, Cornelia Vismann, and others like Thomas Macho, Sybille Krmereven Kittler himselfsought a way to unloosen the
problematicknottheconceptofmediahadbecome.Theydidsobyrediscoveringanoldagriculturalconcept,Kulturtechniken.
Cultural techniques first emerged in the late 19th century to describe agricultural procedures like irrigation and draining, straightening riverbeds, or constructing
waterreservoirs(WinthropYoung,Preliminary45Kultur38081alsodescribedbyWilliams8789).AlreadywecanseetheKulturinKulturtechnikenisavery
farcryfromcultureintheAngloAmericantradition,whichdescribestouseacrudeheuristicbinaryeitherthebestthathasbeenthoughtandsaid(Arnold)ora
whole way of life (Williams). The culture in cultural techniques originally had to do with cultivation, nurturing, or rendering habitable. These are, after all, the
etymologicalrootsoftheword(theLatincoleremeans:totend,guard,cultivate,ortill).Thisiscultureinthesenseofdoing,handling,workingitinvolveshands,
bodies,andtools,whichconvergetodrawbordersandprocessdistinctions.
Imported from agricultural science into media theoryafter a brief stopover in mass media studies (see WinthropYoung Kultur 38182)cultural techniques are
conceived as operative chains that precede the media concepts they generate (Siegert, End58). This approach starts not with totalizing concepts like media,
network,orpower,butinstead
places at the basis of changes in cultural and intellectual history
inconspicuous techniques of knowledge like card indexes, media of
pedagogy like the slate, discourse operators like quotation marks,
uses of the phonograph in phonetics, or techniques of forming the
individual like practices of teaching to read and write. (Siegert,
Map14)
TheoriesofKulturtechnikenholdthatsuchtechniquesdelineateandassemblethebroaderspatiotemporalinfrastructuresofsocieties(seeParikka154).Thereisless
emphasis on the devices, objects, or systems privileged by early German media analysis than on ontic operations that reproduce, displace, process or reflect the
distinctionsatthecoreofanysociety,e.g.insideandoutside,subjectandobject,natureandculture,matterandform,etc.(Siegert,CacographyEndGrids).
Atthelevelofonticsweobservethemeansbywhichhumansandtoolsassemblebasiccategoriesofspace,timeandbeing.
The concept of cultural techniques clearly and unequivocally
repudiates the ontology of philosophical concepts. Humans as such
do not exist independently of cultural techniques of hominisation,
time as such does not exist independently of cultural techniques of
time measurement, and space as such does not exist independently
ofculturaltechniquesofspatialcontrol.(Siegert,End5657)
Byshiftingtheanalyticgazefromtheontologicaltotheonticweareabletoobservecrucialdistinctionsinaprocessofbecoming,ratherthanasapriori.Vismann
putsitanotherway:culturaltechniquesdefinetheagencyofmediaandthings.Ifmediatheorywere,orhad,agrammar,thatagencywouldfinditsexpressionin
objectsclaimingthegrammaticalsubjectpositionandculturaltechniquesstandinginforverbs(Sovereignty83).
Thestudyofculturaltechniquesholdsthatmediaandthingsarenotsimplypassiveobjectstobeactivatedatthewhimofanintentional(human)subject.Mediaand
things supply their own rules of executionwe do not choose how to open or close a door, to take one of Siegerts favourite examples (see Doors). A door does
notpresentuswithanopenhorizonofpossibility.Wemustactaccordingtotherulesitsetsoutforus:pushorpull,openorclose.Adoorhasagencyinthesense
thatitstructureswhatispossibleforpraxis.Thinkingofadoorinthiswayshowsthepictureofagencyweusuallyworkwith,asreservedforactinghumansubjects,
to be insufficient. As Vismann reminds us, in an echo of Latour, certain actions cannot be attributed to a person and yet they are somehow still performed
(Sovereignty84).
Anotherfamousexamplefromliteratureonculturaltechniquesistheploughthatdrawsafurrowintheearthtomarkthethresholdofacitythatwillbebuilt.Inside
thisspacetherewillbeorder,law,custom,exchangeoutsidewillbechaosandbarbarism.Thefurrow,andthedoororgatethatreplacesit,isaculturaltechnique
ofhominisation:insideisthespaceofthehuman,outsidethespaceofthebeast(seeVismann,SovereigntySiegert,DoorsEnd).Entiremoral,political,and
ethicalworldviewsarebuiltuponsuchdistinctionstheyarethefabricwithwhichsocialordersarewoven.AccordingtoVismann,
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,washeldsacredinRomanLaw.(Sovereignty84)
Property still works like this. Ownership only comes to exist after the drawing of a boundary: a line on a map. In this way Vismann can claim the drawing of the
furrowasaculturaltechniquenotjustofpropertyandownership,butsovereigntyitself.
This tradition is not interested in the content or meaning of media or things, historically the focus of AngloAmerican media and cultural studies, only in ways of
doingcounting,measuring,collecting,observing,playing,confessing,listingbecausetheseengendersystemsofknowingandmodesofsocialorganization.Media
asweunderstandthem(e.g.gramophones,telegraphs,andcomputers)communicateandorderbyencodingnonsenseintosense(andviceversa).Thisisdonevia
the recording or transmission of signals, or the translating of data into alphanumeric characters. Cultural techniques are the parasitic third: neither sense nor non
sense,butthatwhichengendersthedistinctionsandoperationsrequiredformediatodotheircommunicativeandorderingwork(Siegert,End6162Serres).
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Listing, for instance, is a cultural technique that precedes a whole host of media networks, from Ancient Sumerian clay tablets to contemporary computer code
(YoungseealsoVismannFiles510).Alistdrawsaborderaroundcertainitems,inscribingorderonafieldofpossibledata.Whenplacedinalist,persons,words,
or things become dynamic units available for processing, storage, or transmission. Listing is the cultural technique by which things from the world (or from
imagination)becomeencodedintothesymbolicorderandtherebysubjecttomanipulation,revision,erasure,orreversibility(seeKrmerWinkler).Whatisincluded
inalistvs.excludedisabasicdistinctionuponwhichrestsallkindsofsecondorderoperations,speculations,andactionsthatcomprisemedianetworksoftradeand
circulation, whether in Ancient Sumeria (Goody), early modern Europe (Poovey Vismann Files) or Wall Street in 2008. There are major political stakes in such
operations:theformofprotocoldetermineshowcomputationunfoldshowapersonislistedcandeterminehisorherfate.
Similar conceptual innovations are being pursued across the Atlantic, though they have not yet coalesced as a movement. Geoffrey WinthropYoung highlights
connections between cultural techniques and the posthumanism of Haraway, Wills, Wolfe and Hayles (Kultur 386), while Jussi Parikka maps resonances "with a
range of crossdisciplinary approaches that the AngloAmerican academic world is interested in: posthumanities, the nonhuman, questions of materiality and
objects, the affective turn, media archaeology, historical methods and archives, as well as the role of anthropology in media studies" (149). There is a French
connection, as well affinities with Bruno Latour's workhighly influential in AngloAmericaare receiving similar attention (Siegert, Grids). To contribute to such
efforts, I turn now to research from the Anglosphere that focuses on those points at which media concepts, devices and networks are still information, having not
yettakentheirfinalinstitutionalorepistemologicalforms.
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In Innis we can also anachronistically observe a convergence of the original terrainbased definition of Kulturtechniken and its more recent media theoretical
incarnation.Theconcept,asnotedabove,originallydescribedengineeringprocessesaimedatcultivatinglandandrenderingithabitable.Innissearlydirtresearch
ofthe1920sand30shasasimilaremphasisonterrain.TheFurTradeofCanada(1927),forinstance,showsthatcolonialtradenetworksareshapedbyhabitation
patterns of nonhuman actors like the beaver. The books famous opening gambit was that it is impossible to understand the characteristic developments of the
[fur] trade or of Canadian history without some knowledge of [the beavers] life and habits (3). A detailed description follows of certain biological, geographical,
material and even social characteristics of the beaver. These remarks grant context to the later discussion of temporary trade routes, sites of exchange, and
navigational patterns established by colonial and indigenous fur trappers in the 16th and 17th centuries. Innis highlights, for instance, that alterations to hunting
techniques(arisingfromencountersbetweenthesecultures),combinedwiththeimmobilityofthebeaver(itsheavyfixedcapital),playedacrucialroleinpushing
tradeandsettlementfurtherwest.
In the language of the economists, the heavy fixed capital of the beaver became a serious handicap with the improved technique of Indian hunting methods,
incidental to the borrowing of iron from Europeans [] With [beaver] destruction in the easterly part of North America came the necessity of pushing to the
westward and northwestward to tap new areas of the more valuable furs. The problem of the fur trade became one of organizing the transport of supplies and furs
overincreasinglygreaterdistances(Innis,FurTrade56).
The organization of economic activity around fur, a staple good relatively abundant in a peripheral colony (Canada) but highly desired in a central empire (France,
later Britain), established techniques, infrastructure and fixed capital that would orient Canadas emergent economy toward other staples in subsequent centuries,
suchaslumber,cod,grain,andoil(seeInnis,StaplesandCodWatkins).InnissdescriptionframesthefurtradeandCanadianeconomichistoryintermsofcultural
techniquesandlogistics:themovementofthings,people,anddata.Heusesthelanguageofhisintellectualtrainingground,Economics,buttheearlystudieswent
farbeyondconventionaleconomichistories.Theytraceboththeculturaltechniquesofcultivatinglandforextractionofstaplegoods,andtheprocessbywhichsuch
techniques draw distinctions (in maps, settlements, trade routes, fixed capital, etc.). In later works, Innis extrapolated, seeking to understand the way such
techniquesanddistinctionsproducedifferentcivilizationalbiasestowardspaceandtime(EmpireBias).
Inniss early studies were archaeologies of trade and infrastructure that showed how nation states, economies, cycles of accumulation and circulation, and even
national identities arise from encounters between humans, terrain, waterways, and fauna, and in response to problems of transportation and navigation, i.e.
logistics. This was a radically new approach to understanding economic and civilizational history that emerged from Inniss commitment to what he called dirt
research. From 1924 Innis traveled hundreds of miles by Canoe across Canada in order to gather firsthand observations about staples. He learned about the
conditions of extraction and production, transportation, exchange, and so on (Creighton 6164). Innis paid careful attention to terrain and what happens on its
surface.Hemappedtheebbsandflowsnotjustofrivers,butalsosocialencounters(conductinginterviewswiththoseinvolvedinstapleeconomies).Hedeveloped
tools to understand what precedes not only networks of circulation and communication but also the cultural, political and institutional life built on such networks.
Suchworkstandsasatheoryofculturaltechniquesavantlalettre.
Conclusion
Innissfourth,civilizationalstreamofmediaandculturalstudiesgrappleswithissuesofinfrastructureandlogistics,whichiswhereculturaltechniques,formattheory
and logistical media brush up against one another. In conversation, what kind of advantages do these approaches offer in thinking through the dissolution of mass
media into digital computation? And how might they help us to connect new modes of data organization and processinganalytics, algorithmic trading, state
surveillance, etc.with older modes, bringing seemingly divergent historical periods into contact? Big Data, for instance, is an orienting principle not just for state
surveillance and corporate business plans, but everything from city planning (smart cities) and political campaigning (data consultants) to counterterrorism
(predictive policing). How do the cultural techniques of Big Data compare with those of modernitys earlier datascapestechniques of surveillance and
administration like the state census, or private sector efficiency, e.g. Taylorism? Furthermore, does Innis, the great political superego of the civilizational tradition
(with his insistence that the key to peace and prosperity is balance amongst the biases of communication), offer a more productive political orientation than
currentlyonofferintheapproachessketchedabove?Suchquestionsremainforfuturedirtresearch.
ThemodestaimsofthispaperaretointroducetheemergentconceptofculturaltechniquestoEnglishreadersandconnectitwithsimilarresearchhappeningsinthe
Anglosphere. More ambitiously, I suggest that synthesizing these traditions produces conceptual and methodological tools that are well equipped to account for
contemporary developments in digital or algorithmic culture. A benefit of these approaches is that they bring to light what precedes foundational concepts like
network, system, nation, identity, even media and culture themselves. They also enable us to more clearly understand that justice in the age of algorithmic
capital is as much an engineering problem as a political or philosophical one. Cultural techniques are means by which extant systems enframe life and labour, yet
theyarealsomeansbywhichnew,morejustsystemsmightbebuilt.
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