This is the fifth blog post of a multi-part series making sense of THE VOID’s online video practices in the context of cybernetic participatory culture, the legacies of tactical media, stagnating platformization, encroaching AI, and the nascent Stream Art Studio Network. Read part one, part two, part three, and part four.
🟢 🟢 🟢 Matteo Pasquinelli’s The Eye of the Master introduced me to a concept that I have found particularly productive in recent months: that of ‘cultural techniques’ (Kulturtechniken) from the German media theory tradition. Like many philosophic/historic/anthropologic concepts, and especially those coming from Germany (see the Hegelian Aufhebung), the notion of cultural techniques has multiple meanings, operates in diverse disciplinary domains, has a complex evolution rooted in the specificities of German intellectual history[1], and is overall just fun to play around with. In some ways, the notion of cultural techniques is a replacement of another hyper-semantic term: media. As Bernhard Siegert explains, the switch from media to cultural techniques in German media theory was a way to solve that very issue of ‘everything being media’[2]. Once every material trace of culture –every act of symbolic manipulation– can be analyzed under the framework of media, media stops being a concrete object of study (print, television, the internet) and becomes something closer to a meta-narrative to understand a plurality of phenomena as wide spanning as history, culture, consciousness, humanity, and society. For the authors writing in the German media theory tradition after Friedrich Kittler in the late 90s and early 00s, the more materially-bounded and practice-oriented notion of cultural techniques better accounts for that narrative than that of media, understood as meaning-bearing artifacts (that, again, could be absolutely anything). With the notion of cultural techniques it is possible to: first, juxtapose the often-contraposed domains of culture and technology, but also nature, since the German Kulturtechniken originally referred to 19th century agricultural engineering and the acculturation of the land. Second, and this is what piqued my interest, it allows for a material history of concepts as fundamental as the human, time, space, interiority, and exteriority, that is bound to socially performed routines or operations. In a very German fashion, for the narrative of cultural techniques reality is not merely empirical (of course, that’s an anglo-french thing!), but a transcendental/spiritual/symbolic affair.[3] The real is always mediated by its conditions of possibility, whether the transcendental categories of thinking or their non-scientific manifestations as dialectically-evolving symbolic forms (to give Erwin Panofsky’s famed example, renaissance linear perspective[4]). But, in a materialist turn of events, for German media theory the symbolic is not produced by concepts, ideas, or even symbols and images, but co-produced with the mundane operation of tools. As Siegert recounts, if the Kantian transcendental critique of reason (the throne of German high philosophy) became the critique of culture with Cassirer, then early German media theory made it into the critique of media.[5] Media and culture were then both fighting for the throne to be the most elevated object of the most elevated form of thinking (a fight that only has these high stakes in Germany). The abandonment of media in favor of cultural techniques is a way to end this battle in a truce–media theory stops being the analysis of authors, styles, and to a certain extent media objects, to focus on operations (techniques) of knowledge or, more broadly, cultural production, transfer, and conservation. While this sounds highly theoretical, the techniques German media theorists favored seem quite innocuous and bland: from library index cards to typewriters and pedagogical techniques of alphabetization, from algebraic formulas and mathematical techniques for simple calculation to schedules and clocks[6]. With this shift, as Winthrop-Young puts it, cultural techniques transforms the question of ontology, that of reality and its production, into one of "media dependent ontic operations".[7] The concepts, ideas, tropes, and narratives that give sense to the ways in which we exist in the world are the product of literal techniques that create routines for finding our way in time and space, that are later reflected upon using the very concepts they generated. To quote Thomas Macho's famous and often-quoted examples:
"Cultural techniques—such as writing, reading, painting, counting, making music—are always older than the concepts that are generated from them. People wrote long before they conceptualized writing or alphabets; millennia passed before pictures and statues gave rise to the concept of the image; and until today, people sing or make music without knowing anything about tones or musical notation systems. Counting, too, is older than the notion of numbers. To be sure, most cultures counted or performed certain mathematical operations; but they did not necessarily derive from this a concept of number."[8]
I found this quote particularly stimulating as it forces us to stop and look at numbers, alphabets, notations, and images –objects of my affection and obsession as a part-time media scholar– as social practices that emerged without any prior conceptual direction. Practices that might have helped people do stuff, but that weren't tied to a "deeper" meaning guiding their emergence and development. So, whenever we do math, we're not inquiring in the platonic idea of number, but performing operations to account for and distribute items that simultaneously constitute those items in their very organizing. If we partake in the platonic idea of number, it’s only because it helps us to reflect on our counting practices by abstracting them from its material operations. A separation that might come handy to optimize an operation, skip some steps and accelerate or scale up the processes. Consider how multiplication with pencil and paper abstracts processes of addition with literal digits or abacuses. Or, to give an example closer to computing, and following Bernhard Rieder's account of technical knowledge in software-making, high-level programming languages (such as Python or JavaScript) abstract the task of directly manipulating registers of binary code into a syntax more understandable to humans.[9] In computer programming abstraction thus refers "to layering and to the idea that many ‘worlds’ can be modeled upon computation in one way or another".[10] In both cases, abstraction drastically changes a process: it engages with different material tools than those of the original operation, consequently entailing different procedures that can perform a greater number of tasks with less resources in an allegedly more convenient way. In a nutshell, abstraction allows for automation. More precisely, automation is a process of abstraction through the use of machines. And, moreover, using a Marxian term from the Grundisse’s Fragment on Machines, automation is a form of real subsumption. That is, the complete transformation of labor processes and relations through capitalist machines. This is not a solely technological process, but a political one: it is the implementation of managerial strategies to organize the workplace with machines. The conditions in which social relations take place are subsumed to whatever the manager deems as proper machine use to fulfill capitalist accumulation. The eye of the master. So, not only does the notion of cultural techniques helps us rethink the anthropological origins of concepts and processes of abstraction, but it also allows us to see the concepts and processes of abstraction of today's digital technologies as social and material operations. What Pasquinelli proposes in his book is a counter-history of AI, one that uses German media theory's narrative of cultural techniques and Marxian labor theories of automation to articulate a sociotechnical history and ontology of artificial intelligence. Casting aside narrations of super machines, pattern-recognition, and superhuman intelligence, if AI is division of labor, the relation between AI and society is not that of a new technology external to society coming to disrupt (for better or for worse) the ways in which the latter is organized. Instead, AI part of a history of the institutions that manage, measure, operate, and abstract labor relations and the forces of production. While straying away of commonplace narratives of machine intelligence, the story of AI as labor relations doesn't completely exclude the issue knowledge and intelligence. Pasquinelli approaches this by offering a re-reading of the Marxian debate between the notions of ‘general intellect’ and ‘collective worker’ (Gesamtarbeiter).[11] The general intellect is an idea originally found in William Thompson's book An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth asserting that human knowledge can be objectified in machines, leading to its virtuous accumulation and transmission. Therefore, it is through machines, through the externalization of knowledge in artifacts, that collective knowledge can be achieved. Knowledge's collective life, that is, knowledge as something that happens outside the individual mind to become a social relation, happens through its technical objectification and abstraction. Abstraction via technology is then key to the history of progress and emancipation through knowledge. The juxtaposition of the terms 'artificial' and 'intelligence' does not refer to the human-like intelligence of machines, but the necessary moment of externalization and collectivization of intelligence through the design and deployment of technical objects. Nevertheless, according to Pasquinelli, the risk of capturing and alienating knowledge from workers to turn it against them is still present in the notion of general intellect.[12] Externalization does not happen in the vacuum; technological development is embedded in a society in which powerful actors effectively capture the know-how of the powerless through machines. Abstraction is capitalist. Once again, this is the figure of the eye of the master. But let's compare for a moment this figure, the nightmarish, alienated collective knowledge (that can also include mainstream imaginaries of AI as an intelligent big other), to Bernhard Rieder's considerations on the objectual dimensions of knowledge. In his thorough analysis of algorithms, specifically information sorting algorithms, Rieder devotes a great part of his book, Engines of Order: A Mechanology of Algorithmic Techniques, to articulating the concept of 'algorithmic techniques'. Algorithmic techniques derives from the notion of ‘cultural techniques’ and, like the latter, can be defined in multiple ways and refers to a combination of social practices and technical objects, but cannot be reduced to either of them. For the time being, I want to address algorithmic techniques as units and carriers of technical knowledge in software-making.[13] Like cultural techniques, they are stabilized methods to perform an operation, but in this case, specifically in the domain of software. A welcome update to a mode of analysis bearing the weight of Kittler’s dictum “There is no software”.[14] And that, following Rieder, “reduces computing to [hardware] computation and thereby risks failing to adequately recognize the immense reservoirs of technicity and knowledge that have been formulated over the last 70 years”.[15] For a discourse attempting to bridge practices as far apart as electrical engineering, literary criticism, and philosophy, and that has been proclaimed as the deconstruction of the computer age,[16] it is almost ridiculous how little the foundational texts on cultural techniques talk about digital technologies.[17] I admire Rieder’s addition to this discourse as well as his ambition[18], inspired by Simondon, to produce a technical culture with a deeper understanding of software-making and use that doesn’t reduce it to a singular practice like reading, writing or calculating as early writings on cultural techniques did.[19] This has the consequence that, unlike Pasquinelli and the German media theory tradition, Rieder moves away from millennia-spanning anthropogenic histories of technology.[20] Rieder is not interested in talking, for example, about computation as a wide-spanning historical narration, but about the smaller knowledge trajectories produced since the advent of computation. In this sense, he restrains from using philosophic/historical metaphors such as the 'computation era', the 'information society', 'algorithmic culture', or even 'the eye of the master', and concentrates his attention on the different tactics and strategies a software-maker has at their disposal to carry out certain tasks.[21] In this sense, an algorithmic technique is not the algorithm or the code itself nor the social or ideological conditions that make possible that sort of technical utterance, but the aforementioned tactics or strategies: the passed-down routines and operations used to solve specific problems, such as information ordering, that are technically limited by the affordances of hardware and algorithms. Rieder refers to Donald Knuth's list of sorting methods in his classic programming manual The Art of Programming to provide the reader with clarifying examples of what he means with algorithmic techniques. In this list, Knuth gives seven known ways to sort a set of items in ascending or descending order: insertion sort; exchange sort; selection sort, enumeration sort; special-purpose sort; a lazy attitude; a new and unknown super sorting technique. Anyone who was taken a coding crash course[22] should be acquainted with the first four. The last three are jokes to the reader for Knuth to make the point that, while programming is a practice that can be improvised with and wiggled through by proud and/or lazy amateurs, it is nonetheless a discipline (an art?) with a baggage of knowledge that might come handy for anybody who would want to do things with software. As spotted by Rieder, this is not a list of algorithms but of approaches to solve the problem of sorting.[23] Each approach leading to a variety of specific algorithms (i.e. Quicksort or Google’s PageRank). Algorithmic techniques are then "[the] larger principles or strategies for solving a specific type of problem".[24] Algorithmic techniques are knowing your algorithms like you know your ABC’s or multiplication tables – not only drilling them in your mind, but also knowing how to use them and, crucially, to be able to judge under which conditions they are relevant. They are tactics and strategies to access the knowledge contained and abstracted in algorithms. This brings us back to the idea of the objectual dimension of knowledge or its externalization in technical objects. While I overall find the rhetoric figure of the eye of the master appealing (after all I tend to be suspicious of methods of disembodied reification and its cooption by power), it is true that knowledge needs to be delegated away from human minds and even social practices in order to be shared and maintained through time. Rieder’s more "down to earth" account of the relation between technology and knowledge is useful to imagine this objectual dimension might take place as externalization without alienation or abstraction without subsumption. Rather than focusing on broader narratives on the social conditions and effects of algorithms and computation as a large-scale process alienating practical know-how from workers, Rieder goes into detail on the ways know-how is produced and maintained through techniques of externalization. Knowing is, therefore, not only the simple acquisition or internalization of a list of algorithms, but the acculturation into communities of practitioners who have developed more or less stable and shareable ways of operating.[25] The academic discipline of computer science is one of these efforts to create a formalized community of practice within the university milieu, but it is not the only one. Tech companies, boot camps, specialized social media platforms such as Stack Overflow or GitHub, YouTube video tutorials–all these are spaces where communities of practice share algorithmic solutions to common informational problems.[26] This is where the eye of the master becomes relevant again to complement Rieder’s position. Computer engineering education, bootcamps, online forums, repositories, and tutorials don’t exist in the vacuum. The spaces and communities of technological design practice where algorithmic techniques are deployed are not equal and have specific histories and interests. I haven’t done the research, but I would love to read a critical history on engineering education and computer science. Pasquinelli’s book offers something of the sort: a critical history of AI linking it to historical developments such as algorithmic thinking, 19th century workers’ debates on automation, cold war cybernetic military research agendas, and the connectionist neoliberal economics of Friedrich Hayek. It is true that Rieder centers a different aspect of software than Pasquinelli: while Rieder is writing about the design and creation of software from the developer's point of view,[27] Pasquinelli is mostly writing about the broader intellectual trajectories that generated this landscape. Regardless this distinction, both address the conditions that produce machine learning sorting algorithms and, in my opinion, some sort of continuous dialectical jumping from one position to another is needed to give an account of computer algorithms as cultural techniques for the externalization of know-how. Marc Kohlbry's review of The Eye of the Master notices the limitations of Pasquinelli’s focus on large-spanning intellectual histories and characters. Against Kohlbry's review, however, while intellectual histories might not provide empirical or ethnographic examples of how AI is built from below or might not have the working class as a literal central character, they do offer a narrative to reassess the working classes' position in history and collective intelligence. In this case, its place in the history of technological development. This is the central issue in Pasquinelli's retelling of the Marxian debate between the notions of general intellect and collective worker (Gesamtarbeiter).[28] What is at stake in this seemingly scholarly debate (as well as in the current debate around the ontology and history of AI at large) is the role of the working classes and non-intellectual labor in the historical unfolding of intelligence and its material counterpart, technology. Or, even more broadly, these debates are ultimately about how technological development embodies power relations: is the working class an underclass whose movements, gestures, and routines are bound to be subsumed (analyzed, identified, classified, and reproduced) into abstract, interchangeable labor by a capitalist master with the help machines? Or is technological design a result of social cooperation? The necessary externalization and collectivization of knowledge by and from an extended social actor? An actor, the collective worker, that is not the aggregation of individual workers, but one that is inherently social and machinical and who is constituted by cultural techniques reconfiguring time, space, and social relations such as the factory plant. Technological development might be an emancipatory project, not because it provides us with good old deductive knowledge, but because it produces "material abstractions" from practices of self-organization. As Pasquinelli noted in his response to the aforementioned review of his book, the emancipatory potential of technology doesn't lie in technology itself but in resurfacing its foundations in social cooperation and autonomy. While metaphors such as the general intellect and the information society may allow us to think about the progress of intelligence through technology, they nevertheless envision collective knowledge as the accumulation of information, concepts, and meanings in bits and bytes. This is basically the image of, both, the internet and AI in mainstream culture: a compendium of dematerialized ‘knowing-that's’ rather than localized ‘knowing-how's’.[29] Intellectual narratives like general intellect or information society give too much importance to internalist and communicational notions such as mind, mental labor, or information. They describe a history in which technology, invented by and for the ingenuity of the mind (geist, if you will) to do mental things (communicating), unidirectionally shapes the course of society. The general intellect doesn’t really fulfill Marx’s and Kittler’s material mission of once and for all getting rid of geist.[30] At the end of the day, this Marxian debate is all about where and how we imagine intelligence taking place. Is intelligence simply in the individual mind of the scientist and engineer? Is it an external megamachine with human features? Or is it the social and labor relations of cooperation distributed and abstracted via machines?
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As in Rieder, at the core of Pasquinelli’s argument we found an attention to what historian Simon Schaffer calls mundane places of intelligence.[31] Quoting Schaffer: “To make machines look intelligent it was necessary that the sources of their power, the labour force which surrounded and ran them, be rendered invisible”.[32] To understand why machines are intelligent, our gaze should be directed to the communities of practice where algorithmic techniques are produced and shared, as Rieder would put it. Today’s algorithmic factory plant could just as well be found in the network of online tutorials and user-created repositories as much as in engineering labs that Pasquinelli writes about. In other words, part of the distributed machine learning factory plant or collective worker are online participatory communities. Amateur, self-made media is not only a source of data to train algorithms, but also a shared heritage of practical knowledge that directly informs the computer people coding and tinkering with machine learning models. In my opinion, Pasquinelli and Rieder offer two different visions of the same story of material abstractions. I found that both books are at their most fascinating when distinctions between concrete and abstract, praxis and logic, are dialectically blurred. Rieder sketches an acute image illustrating Pasquinelli's dialectical articulations between mental and manual labor: that of software-making practices or operations abstracted in algorithmic techniques. In this sense, Pasquinelli and Rieder carry out analogous deconstructions of common conceptions of digital labor. On the one side, by reading machine learning's connectionist logics as those of social cooperation. On the other, by positioning algorithmic techniques as the bearers of intellectual content in the always contextualized and materially limited practices of software making. In a nutshell, they both provide a different picture of artificial intelligence, technical knowledge, and labor relations as abstract notions requiring of dialectical articulation to connect them to concrete histories and practices. In a way, Rieder's book offers what Kohlbry was missing from Pasquinelli's; a main, relatable character. But instead of finding the "voices of those immiserated by these technologies", we encounter what might seem like the enemy: the software-maker. The tech bro. White. Anglo-american. Cis-gendered. And very straight. I am without a doubt a proponent of listening to the voices of the immiserated. Especially when it comes to AI and other de-skilling, data-intensive and extractive technologies for real subsumption. The perspectives of data and click workers, the precarized dividuals with no other choice than making a living in platformized environments, as well as all those affected by the expropriation of resources for hyper scale data centers, should be put front and center. Yet, the picture Rieder paints of the tech bro doesn't stray too far away from the precarious data worker. The tech petit-elite is not comprised of Sam Altman's or Frank Rosenblatt's, but of tutorial watchers, repository scavengers, and online forum helping hands, uploading their know-how to YouTube tutorials and Stack Overflow threads from their rooms somewhere in India or Latin America. All of these are tactics bound to the platformized environments they themselves help to create and maintain. Rieder's central character is also one affected by technologies of abstraction. However, his story is not one of immiseration only. Indeed, the deployers of algorithmic techniques are inserted in networks of collective labor tied to modes of action they are not fully in control of. My point here is that Rieder’s depiction of the software-maker, like Marx’s collective worker (Gesamratbeiter) is completely embedded in the cooperative logics of participatory online culture. He is part of networked social mechanism that has other histories and trajectories that neither Pasquinelli nor Rieder fully account for, those of participatory online cultures (a topic that I will more thoroughly delve into in my next essay). Today, there is no computer engineer without user-generated content, in the same way that there is no way to train an AI without it. Neither consumers, nor users of commodities, nor data-subjects alienated from their own agency, software-makers inhabit the same social category as Twitch streamers. Both can meaningfully yet limitedly deploy reified units of technical knowledge circulating online to actively engage with a shared praxis. Regardless, Pasquinelli's and Reider’s main theses are pointing towards the same direction. As the former puts it, if machine learning is the material abstraction of everyday life actions and relations, then:
"[digital] technologies can be judged, contested, reappropriated, and reinvented only by moving into the matrix of the social relations that originally constituted them. Alternative technologies should be situated in these social relations, in a way not dissimilar to what cooperative movements have done in past centuries."[33]
And, if this movement to the matrix of social relations is not a return to a moment before abstraction, our frenemy the tech bro or, more precisely, the types of knowledge he (yes, still very much but not necessarily a he) practices may guide us in our path "to transmute the historical forms of abstract thinking (mathematical, mechanical, algorithmic, and statistical)"[34] into common(ized) know-how. To my view, Rieder's software-maker is not qualitatively different from other makers: from meme-makers to hybrid-event-makers like ourselves, and barricade-makers; we all dispose received elements to produce precarious orders and the collective behaviors that come with them.
I would like to conclude this essay with one final character: the tech support worker. Often as THE VOID, but also as a PhD navigating academia, we found ourselves “merely” providing tech support for hybrid events and online meetings. The academic tasks of coming together and making knowledge public is more often than not materially relegated to “back-end” characters without the salary or the cultural capital of a researcher or professor. They, like students, are apparently not fully part of the academic community. Meanwhile, many academics don’t even know how to get a projector working. Tech support workers possess the contextualized know-how to operate the proprietary equipment we use to produce knowledge and, especially, they are experts in navigating the bureaucratic labyrinths of academic institutions. This essay has mostly discussed in high-philosophical terms (very German of me) the question of subjectivation through tools. The working class, the engineer, the streamer, and the machinic collective worker, they all cannot be separated from their manipulation of tools. They inhabit in undisclosed ways the figure of the tech support worker. THE VOID is a project that wishes to acknowledge this figure. However, more important than the question of subjectivation, that can be easily de-politicized and transformed into the neoliberal question of self-help and improvement, framing our practice as tech support reminds us that maybe the question of knowledge and that of political change is perhaps not about finding the right subject, but of (re)producing and reclaiming mundane places of intelligence.
🟢 🟢 🟢 [1] See Winthrop-Young 2014; Siegert 2013; Geoghegan, B.D. 2013. [2]For a discussion on the German specificietes of the notion of culutral techniques see Siegert 2013. [3] See German Idealism, specifically Ernst Cassirer's branch of Neo-Kantianism and his philosophy of symbolic forms. [4] Panofsky and Wood 1991. [5] Siegert 2013, 48–49. [6] Ibidem, 50. [7] Winthrop-Young 2014, 387. [8] Macho 2003, 179. Translation by B. Siegert. [9] Rieder 2020, 108–9. [10] Ibidem, 108. [11] See Pasquinelli 2023b, 95–120. [12] See Ibidem 2023, 108–12. [13] See Rieder 2020, 17, 65, 108, 110. [14] Kittler and Johnston 1997. [15] Rieder 2020, 86. [16] Geoghegan, B.D. 2013. [17] Ibidem 2013, 67–68; Rieder 2020, 86–87 [18] An ambition that I also found in the writings of Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan. See Geoghegan, B.D. 2013; Geoghegan 2019. [19] See Krämer and Bredekamp 2013. [20] Rieder 2020, 86–89/ [21] Ibidem 2020, 95) [22] Such as many humanities students who are increasingly forced to do so, lest them not be absorbed by the labor market. [23] Rieder 2020, 100. [24] Ibid. [25] Ibidem 2020, 106. [26] Ibidem 2020, 107. [27] As he describes it, "the sprawling landscape of imagination and operation that informs technical enunciations in the first place". Ibidem 2020, 87. [28] Pasquinelli 2023b, 108–18. [29] Krämer and Bredekamp 2013, 26. [30] See Kittler, F. 1980. [31] Pasquinelli 2023b, 104. [32] Schaffer 1994, 278. [33] Pasquinelli, 2023a, 10. [34] Ibid. 🟢 🟢 🟢 References Geoghegan, B.D. 2013. “After Kittler: On the Cultural Techniques of Recent German Media Theory.” Theory, Culture & Society 30 (6): 66–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413488962. Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius. 2019. “An Ecology of Operations: Vigilance, Radar, and the Birth of the Computer Screen.” Representations 147 (1): 59–95. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2019.147.1.59. Kittler, F. 1980. Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften. Programme des Poststrukturalismus. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh. Kittler, Friedrich A., and John Johnston. 1997. “There Is No Software.” In Literature, Media, Information Systems. Routledge. Krämer, Sybille, and Horst Bredekamp. 2013. “Culture, Technology, Cultural Techniques ? Moving Beyond Text1.” Theory, Culture and Society 30 (6): 20–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413496287. Macho, Thomas. 2003. “Zeit und Zahl. Kalender- und Zeitrechnung als Kulturtechniken.” In Bild – Schrift – Zahl, edited by Krämer, S. and Bredekamp, H., 179–92. München: Wilhelm Fink. Panofsky, Erwin, and Christopher S. Wood. 1991. Perspective as Symbolic Form. Zone Books. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1453m48. Pasquinelli, Matteo. 2023a. “The Automation of General Intelligence,” no. 141 (December). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/141/577253/the-automation-of-general-intelligence/. Pasquinelli, Matteo. 2023b. The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence. London ; New York: Verso. Rieder, Bernhard. 2020. Engines of Order: A Mechanology of Algorithmic Techniques. Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789462986190. Schaffer, Simon. 1994. “Babbage’s Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System.” Critical Inquiry 21 (1): 203–27. Siegert, Bernhard. 2013. “Cultural Techniques: Or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German Media Theory.” Theory, Culture & Society 30 (6): 48–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413488963. Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. 2014. “The Kultur of Cultural Techniques: Conceptual Inertia and the Parasitic Materialities of Ontologization.” Cultural Politics 10 (3): 376–88. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-2795741 🟢 🟢 🟢
Part 6 coming soon…