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. Cultural Techniques aims to forget our traditional understanding of media so as to redefine the concept through something more fundamental than the empiricist study of a medium’s individual or collective uses or of its cultural semantics or aesthetics. Rather, Siegert seeks to relocate media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and nonhuman, 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 artifacts as cultural techniques emphasizes their ontological status as “in-betweens,” shifting from firstorder 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-signaldistinction in old and new media, to the reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of trompe-l’oeils, grids, registers, and doors. Throughout, Siegert addresses fundamental questions of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic.
Grounding posthumanist theory both historically and technically, this book opens up a crucial dialogue between new German media theory and American postcybernetic discourses.
1 有用 Manchild 2017-03-09 05:52:17
德国媒介研究的后基特勒时代,有塞尔以及信息理论。
0 有用 谷龙龙快学习 2025-09-10 03:01:01 江苏
一本极具颠覆性意味的书
0 有用 不啦叽 2016-03-14 04:42:54
German media theory after Kittler
0 有用 一棵苹果树 2024-08-03 21:10:11 重庆
intro非常好看,定位清晰,回头再看其他文献会更加清楚。案例挑读了第1、6、10章。略有疑问,第10章貌似不太符合他语境下的文化技术研究范式?第1章对话传播模型,第6章从绘画到地图到城市规划到GPS、单元房,完全可以当故事书看。感觉这套倒是和人类学比较近,但还没读席格尔写卡夫卡。
0 有用 Adanta 2025-08-26 00:17:44 湖南
神书。 选读了一部分,涉及到具体的历史材料真的读得有点困难....... 西格特这套阐释真的太吃史料功底了,而且到底如何借鉴和运用”文化技艺”本身也是一个问题。按我的理解,文化技艺强调操作链相对于媒介和概念的优先性(在有书写概念前我们已经开始书写),这包括身体技术(烹饪)和符号操作(书写),而更为重要的是,这些技艺一定制造了象征层面上的区分与转化(如门制造了内与外的区分,又如velum实现了事物向... 神书。 选读了一部分,涉及到具体的历史材料真的读得有点困难....... 西格特这套阐释真的太吃史料功底了,而且到底如何借鉴和运用”文化技艺”本身也是一个问题。按我的理解,文化技艺强调操作链相对于媒介和概念的优先性(在有书写概念前我们已经开始书写),这包括身体技术(烹饪)和符号操作(书写),而更为重要的是,这些技艺一定制造了象征层面上的区分与转化(如门制造了内与外的区分,又如velum实现了事物向再现的转化方式)。又或者说,文化技艺强调的是物质性实践如何影响了认识论结构或者社会结构。当然,甚至可以说文化技艺本身就是一种文化技艺,它让原本作为背景与边缘的物质性实践重新走进了阐释学的视野。 (展开)