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Article
Afterword: Cultural
Techniques and
Media Studies
Jussi Parikka
University of Southampton, UK
Theory, Culture & Society
30(6) 147–159
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The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276413501206
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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 cul-
ture, 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 offer 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 offer 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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Theory, Culture & Society 30(6)
German intellectual product and related strands in Anglo-American and
French theory habitats. As mentioned at the very beginning of the intro-
duction, 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 famil-
iarity 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 indebt-
edness 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
offended by the sudden invasion of their nicely cultivated gardens
to ask for an orderly theoretical justification for the onslaught.
(2008a: 28)
The various articles in this issue offer good insights into how cultural
techniques relate to the current state of media studies in Germany, which
lost one of its internationally most finely tuned pieces of wetware with
Kittler’s passing in 2011, preceded by Cornelia Vismann’s death in 2010.
Several scholars have been smuggling in new media analysis
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149
methodologies, but they also offer 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 affective turn, media archaeology, historical methods
and archives, as well as the role of anthropology (see Schuttpelz, 2006)
¨
in media studies. Theory can be said to have acted as a transatlantic
bridge of sorts (Ernst, 2013: 23–31) 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 dis-
cussions 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 insti-
tutions 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, aren’t (German) cultural tech-
niques 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
`
History of Private Life
edited by Philippe Aries and Georges Duby), and
writers such as Bruno Latour. History of the philosophy of technology
has long discussions concerning the relations of culture and technology.
From Karl Marx’s various texts to early 20th-century sociology such as
Max Weber (2005), the relations of economy, culture and technology
have been debated with differing positions. Instead of just talking
about the ways in which Ernst Kapp or Marshall McLuhan influentially
modeled the interacting relations between humans and machines, we
could turn to Siegfried Giedion’s (1969 [1948]) inventive cultural histor-
ical 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 effects of mechanization
in various fields of cultural techniques from crafts to techniques of space
to ‘comfort’ and to agriculture – the same terrain where the earlier
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Theory, Culture & Society 30(6)
version of ‘cultural techniques’ comes from. ‘Technique’ becomes a bind-
ing concept across fields of culture from interior design to slaughter-
houses. 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 significance 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, tech-
nique; it is pure technique, one might say. For, wherever a technical
factor exists, it results, almost inevitably, in mechanization: tech-
nique transforms everything it touches into a machine. (Ellul,
1964: 4)
Ellul’s point forces a reconsideration of what we mean by ‘technique’.
Indeed, it pays attention to the interaction between machine and tech-
nique without conflating the two. Ellul also wants to distance himself
from Marcel Mauss’s 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
differences 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 per-
ception – 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 Ellul’s critique of ‘tradition’ in Mauss’s defin-
ition. For Ellul, we are experiencing a change in our relation to tech-
niques: we are not solely inheriting habitual modes of behaving and
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151
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 one’s own
fingers), that predetermine the performance of the operation and thus the
concepts derived from that operation’ (Siegert, 2011: 15). Not all tech-
niques 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 affective
turn within cultural theory. New materialism emerged from various dir-
ections, including Manuel Delanda’s 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 understand-
ing 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, dis-
courses, social practices, and human finitude, the new breed of
thinkers is turning once more towards reality itself. While it is dif-
ficult to find 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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