Kulturtechnik

An Introduction to Kulturtechnik: American Liberalism as a Cultural Technology

Humans or machines? Discourse or hardware? Since the mid-1980s these were the methodological questions that divided the anthropocentrism of Anglo-American cultural studies from the technophilia of German media theory. However in the past decade an emerging field of research known as Kulturtechnik—which may be translated as cultural technologies or cultural techniques—has deconstructed these oppositions. By rereading the media theoretical approach associated with Friedrich Kittler through the analytic frameworks of actor-network theory and the ethnographic methodology of Marcel Mauss, theorists of Kulturtechnik have developed a non-anthropocentric epistemology that is equally attentive to the role of human techniques and material technologies in constituting cultural form and practice. Despite the successful institutionalization of Kulturtechnik in Germanophone universities' departments and curricula, and its complementarity to a host of non-humanisms developing in Europe and North America, this methodology remains largely unknown outside the German-speaking world.

 

This paper introduces the conceptual and methodological frameworks of Kulturtechnik through a re-interpretation of American liberalism (ca. 1790-1900). Classical theories classified liberalism as a style of economic and political association founded upon the reason and consent of autonomous, self-possessing individuals. This emphasis on the rights and autonomy of human individuals furnished opponents of state tyranny and coercion with a powerful device for rhetorical critique. However it also tended to produce a vision of society as what William James once termed a "congeries of solipsisms," wherein each mind was aimlessly adrift from the next.

 

Drawing on recent research in Kulturtechnik, I argue for a reconceptualization of liberalism as a "cultural technology of synchronization." According to this interpretation, American liberalism shifted the task of binding and regulating the body politic from the sovereign and the state to private networks of communication including the press, interstate commerce, and political meeting. A strategic assembly of instruments, techniques, and rights ordered individuals' associations. Through considerations of the essential role played by the printing press, canals, and railways, I demonstrate how technical media were coextensive with the form of liberal politics and content of liberal reason. The resulting analysis offers an historical and ethnographic account of liberalism as a hybrid form of political life based on the strategic association of human and non-human actors.

Gilles Deleuze on "Voyage"

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NIC global trends 2030 report

Global trends 2030 report

http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/GlobalTrends_2030.pdf

Old jews telling jokes

http://youtu.be/7GXI40bi9Ps

The Accursed Share

http://www.scribd.com/doc/36590974/Georges-Bataille-The-Accursed-Share-An-Essay-On-General-Economy-Volume-I-Consumption#download

Thus according to Bataille's theory of consumption, the accursed share is that excessive and non-recuperable part of any economy which is destined to one of two modes of economic and social expenditure. This must either be spent luxuriously and knowingly without gain in the arts, in non-procreative sexuality, in spectacles and sumptuous monuments, or it is obliviously destined to an outrageous and catastrophic outpouring, in the contemporary age most often in war, or in former ages as destructive and ruinous acts of giving or sacrifice, but always in a manner that threatens the prevailing system.

The notion of "excess" energy is central to Bataille's thinking. Bataille's inquiry takes the superabundance of energy, beginning from the infinite outpouring of solar energy or the surpluses produced by life's basic chemical reactions, as the norm for organisms. In other words, an organism in Bataille's general economy, unlike the rational actors of classical economy who are motivated by scarcity, normally has an "excess" of energy available to it. This extra energy can be used productively for the organism's growth or it can be lavishly expended. Bataille insists that an organism's growth or expansion always runs up against limits and becomes impossible. The wasting of this energy is "luxury". The form and role luxury assumes in a society are characteristic of that society. "The accursed share" refers to this excess, destined for waste.

Crucial to the formulation of the theory was Bataille's reflection upon the phenomenon of potlatch. It is influenced by Marcel Mauss's The Gift, as well as by Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals.

Volume 1 introduces the theory and provides historical examples of the functioning of general economy: human sacrifice in Aztec society, the monastic institutions of Tibetan Lamaism, the Marshall Plan, and many others. Volumes 2 and 3 extend the argument to eroticism and sovereignty, respectively.

The book was first published by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1949, but was re-edited in 1967. It is collected in volume seven of Bataille's complete works.

While on the subject

"Generally speaking, the misfit's story is easier to tell," Abrahamson says. "I've done it myself – twice. Richard is a good guy, but good guys are complex, too. I was thinking about those boys and the pressure they're under, their inability to deal with fractures in that perfect sphere of life. It's the kind of situation we all know, where we disappoint ourselves, and we have to deal with the disjunction between what we would like to be and what we are. I was interested in the narrative of how we nurture our elite in this society: all that stuff about believing in yourself and not accepting second best. Our inner world is at odds with that. What's fascinating about a boy of Richard's age is that he still believes his own bullshit. If you meet an adult who believes his own schtick to that extent, you're talking about someone like Simon Cowell – you know, a monster. But at 18 or 19, it's naively-held and it can be attractive."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jan/03/what-richard-did-lenny-abrahamson

Was Einsteinian physics the Neo-Liberalism of Science?

'In fact, according to them, it is something worse. Modern physics as we understand it, as has been explained to the public by science-spokesmen like Kaku, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Brian Greene, is almost entirely a product of mathematical modeling which decades ago unmoored itself from any responsibility to make deductions based upon observed data coming from nature. And the universe they describe looks quite different from the universe with which we have come to be familiar.'

http://guardianlv.com/2012/12/the-higgs-fiasco-and-the-electric-sun-w-videos/