Grey Room

[…] In the following, I will present six heuristic principles from which a media-anthropological theory in harmony with a universal history of cultural techniques may emerge. Two of these principles have their roots in French technique theory and anthropology of techniques; two principles are taken from ethnological theories and serve as a corrective to ethnocentric biases in the treatment of media; and two are of a historiographical nature, corresponding to practices in more recent universal history. The first of these principles (already addressed at some length above) has in the meantime become firmly established within the German discussion of media and techniques; I include it here nonetheless, because it has undergone other, at times more radical applications outside of the German-speaking world. The heuristic principles can be summarized as:

1. The priority of operational chains
2. The priority of recursive over simple operations
3. The cyclical approach to the technical transitions of signs, persons, and artifacts
4. The equal status of artificial worlds
5. The asymmetry of universal and accumulative history
6. The historical explanation of discontinuity from continuity

Clarifying these principles requires engaging with a wide range of different research literatures, which on closer inspection converge in only a few international alliances and in French intellectual gen ealogies. My presentation is by no means intended to deal with these principles exhaustively, but on the contrary to reduce them to their respective commonplace, in order to formulate new and still open questions surrounding the concept of cultural techniques. […]

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