Bernhard Siegert
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823263752
- eISBN:
- 9780823268962
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823263752.003.0001
- Subject:
- Information Science, Communications
The chapter relates the re-emergence of cultural techniques (a concept first employed in the 19th century in an agricultural context) to the changing intellectual constellation of postwar Germany. ...
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The chapter relates the re-emergence of cultural techniques (a concept first employed in the 19th century in an agricultural context) to the changing intellectual constellation of postwar Germany. More specifically, it traces how the concept evolved from – and reacted against – so-called German media theory, a decidedly anti-hermeneutic and anti-humanist current of thought frequently associated with the work of Friedrich Kittler. Post-hermeneutic rather than anti-hermeneutic in its outlook, the 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. The chapter also includes a discussion of the similarities and differences between German and North American posthumanism.Less
The chapter relates the re-emergence of cultural techniques (a concept first employed in the 19th century in an agricultural context) to the changing intellectual constellation of postwar Germany. More specifically, it traces how the concept evolved from – and reacted against – so-called German media theory, a decidedly anti-hermeneutic and anti-humanist current of thought frequently associated with the work of Friedrich Kittler. Post-hermeneutic rather than anti-hermeneutic in its outlook, the 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. The chapter also includes a discussion of the similarities and differences between German and North American posthumanism.
Kyle Devine and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780190932633
- eISBN:
- 9780190932671
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190932633.003.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Popular
The editorial introduction to this book offers an intellectual and political proposition for studying the media infrastructures of music and sound. It provides a summary of existing infrastructural ...
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The editorial introduction to this book offers an intellectual and political proposition for studying the media infrastructures of music and sound. It provides a summary of existing infrastructural scholarship across media studies, anthropology, science and technology studies, and other fields. It also describes the work of infrastructural analysis in relation to music and sound studies. Key concepts and approaches include examining supporting casts and operating in a deflationary mode, as well as adopting a mediatic perspective on the infrastructures of music and sound in order to understand the broad technosocial conditions that give rise to these cultural forms in the first place. Certain aspects of musical culture are described in terms of cultural techniques. There is also a section on the histories of notation, paper, ink, and publishing as media infrastructures of music and sound. Ultimately, the introduction lays the groundwork for a book that is about humble things and ordinary people—deeply hidden, plainly obvious, and everywhere powerful infrastructures of music and sound. The goal is to make infrastructures audible. For it is at this level—the level of supply chains, circulatory systems, and waste streams—where scholars can confront some of the most pressing dilemmas regarding the conditions of music, and the human condition more generally.Less
The editorial introduction to this book offers an intellectual and political proposition for studying the media infrastructures of music and sound. It provides a summary of existing infrastructural scholarship across media studies, anthropology, science and technology studies, and other fields. It also describes the work of infrastructural analysis in relation to music and sound studies. Key concepts and approaches include examining supporting casts and operating in a deflationary mode, as well as adopting a mediatic perspective on the infrastructures of music and sound in order to understand the broad technosocial conditions that give rise to these cultural forms in the first place. Certain aspects of musical culture are described in terms of cultural techniques. There is also a section on the histories of notation, paper, ink, and publishing as media infrastructures of music and sound. Ultimately, the introduction lays the groundwork for a book that is about humble things and ordinary people—deeply hidden, plainly obvious, and everywhere powerful infrastructures of music and sound. The goal is to make infrastructures audible. For it is at this level—the level of supply chains, circulatory systems, and waste streams—where scholars can confront some of the most pressing dilemmas regarding the conditions of music, and the human condition more generally.
Bernhard Siegert
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823263752
- eISBN:
- 9780823268962
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823263752.001.0001
- Subject:
- Information Science, Communications
In a crucial shift within posthumanistic media studies, Bernhard Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions ...
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In a crucial shift within posthumanistic media studies, Bernhard Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions fundamental for a given culture. Siegert seeks to re-locate media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and non-human, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real, are still in the process of becoming. The result is to turn ontology into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur. Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic practices like reading, writing, counting or image-making. The analysis of “media” as cultural techniques emphasizes the practices in which they are embedded, shifting from first-order to second-order techniques, from the technical to the artistic, from object to sign, from the natural to the cultural, from the operational to the representational. Cultural Techniques ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating, to the production of the sign-signal-distinction in old and new media, to the reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of trompe-l’oeils, grids, registers, and doors. All chapters address the fundamental question of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic.Less
In a crucial shift within posthumanistic media studies, Bernhard Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions fundamental for a given culture. Siegert seeks to re-locate media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and non-human, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real, are still in the process of becoming. The result is to turn ontology into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur. Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic practices like reading, writing, counting or image-making. The analysis of “media” as cultural techniques emphasizes the practices in which they are embedded, shifting from first-order to second-order techniques, from the technical to the artistic, from object to sign, from the natural to the cultural, from the operational to the representational. Cultural Techniques ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating, to the production of the sign-signal-distinction in old and new media, to the reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of trompe-l’oeils, grids, registers, and doors. All chapters address the fundamental question of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic.
Ido Ramati
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- August 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780197516485
- eISBN:
- 9780197516515
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0008
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism, Religious Studies
In The Land of Promise, a Zionist propaganda film directed by Yehuda Leman and produced in 1935, there is a sequence depicting a prominent cultural phenomenon in the life of the Yishuv (the Jewish ...
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In The Land of Promise, a Zionist propaganda film directed by Yehuda Leman and produced in 1935, there is a sequence depicting a prominent cultural phenomenon in the life of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) in the early 20th century—the community sing-along....Less
In The Land of Promise, a Zionist propaganda film directed by Yehuda Leman and produced in 1935, there is a sequence depicting a prominent cultural phenomenon in the life of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) in the early 20th century—the community sing-along....
