Theory, Culture & Society
30(6) 20–29
! The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276413496287
tcs.sagepub.com
Article
Culture, Technology,
Cultural Techniques –
Moving Beyond Text
1
Sybille Kra
¨
mer
Free University, Berlin
Horst Bredekamp
Humboldt University, Berlin
Abstract
Originally published in 2003, this article presents one of the first attempts to provide a
systematic summary of the new concept of cultural technique. It is, in essence, an
extended checklist aimed at overcoming the textualist bias of traditional cultural
theory by highlighting what is elided by this bias. On the one hand, to speak of cultural
techniques redirects our attention to material and physical practices that all too often
assume the shape of inconspicuous quotidian practices resistant to accustomed inves-
tigations of meaning. On the other hand, cultural techniques also comprise sign sys-
tems such as musical notation or arithmetical formulas located outside the domain of
the hegemony of alphabetical literacy. The rise of the latter in particular is indebted to
the impact of the digital – both as a domain of technology and a source of theoretical
reorientation. Together, these aspects require a paradigmatic change that challenges
and supersedes the traditional ‘discursivism’ of cultural theory.
Keywords
culture and discourse, cultural studies, cultural techniques, digitization, mathematics,
textuality
1. For a long time, perhaps for too long, culture was seen only as text (see
Lenk, 1996). Hardly any other trope has had as formative an impact on
the culture-theoretical debates of the last decades as this semiotic and
structuralist baseline. The metaphor of text dominated until the 1980s,
Corresponding author:
Prof. Dr. Sybille Kra
¨
mer, Freie Universita
¨
t, Institut fu¨r Philosophie, Habelschwerdter Allee 30, D-14195
Berlin, Germany.
Email: sybkram@zedat.fu-berlin.de
http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/
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transforming the world of culture into a world of discursive signs and
referents. In that way, it helped deepen the rift between the natural sci-
ences and the humanities and cultural sciences.
Isn’t it odd, however, that the historical semantics of ‘culture’ (see
Bo
¨
hme, 1996) refers back to agrarian methods and operations and to
hand-based crafts? ‘Culture’ has its largely prosaic origins in the tilling of
a field (cultura agri) and in gardening work (cultura horti); it is first and
foremost the work with things – their cultivation – that surround us on a
daily basis. Indeed, Latin words such as colere, culture, and cultura
harbor the etymological traces of a conception of culture centering
around techniques and rites, skills and practices that provide for the
stability of lived-in space and the continuity of time, and have thus
made our world into a human world by ‘cultivating’ (or de-primitivizing)
it (Bo
¨
hme, 1996: 54). Culture contains an impulse toward action: it is
what is ‘done and practiced’ (Busche, 2000: 70).
The evolution of the concept of culture, however, ‘forgets’ its genesis.
Over time, the material and technical elements of culture recede further
and further into the background, as the term is ‘refined’ into a cultura
animi with the intention of ‘spiritualizing’ it. This spiritualization
expresses itself in the educational values of science, art, and philosophy.
All it required in the 20th century was a ‘linguistic turn’ (the ‘discovery’
of language as the pivot for the conception of ourselves and the world) to
facilitate the congruence of culture and the symbolic, that is, the identi-
fication of culture with all that is semiotically given and interpretable.
And so it came to pass that the procedures of textual analysis and her-
meneutics advanced to become the favorite model for the understanding
of cultural orders.
2. This discursivization of culture has – at least – three notable effects:
a. Misjudging the epistemic power of the image. The hierarchy between
language and image, in terms of priority and import, has become indir-
ectly proportional to the facility with which images of all kinds – photo-
graphs, film, and television – have usurped our everyday world. Practices
that create images are cultural property, as long as they can be assigned
to the realm of art, which is to say, as long as they are sufficiently
removed from science and knowledge. Understood as the silent step-
sister of language, without the potential for argumentation or, even
more important, knowledge-generation, the world of pictures accrues
cultural significance in the form of paintings and the mass media. The
rest are illustrations ...
b. The disavowal of mathematical formalisms. Those who insist on an
intimate relationship with western culture acknowledge without shame
that they don’t want to have any truck with formulas. The fear of
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formulas is almost a cultural property in and of itself, and formalism is
often suspected of entailing self-alienation. When Edmund Husserl
described the mathematization and formalization of the modern sciences
as a crisis in the experience-ability of life, he echoed the anxieties of the
European tradition of culture (see Husserl, 1970). One common view
holds that where letters morph into formulas, content and interpretation
go out the window; the manipulation of alphabetic and numerical signs is
blocking sense and understanding. Language surrenders its symbolic
power in its pact with numbers and becomes a quasi-diabolic technique.
c. The lopsided concentration of media-historical and media-theoretical
research on the relationship between orality and literacy. Media are
assigned a role in cultural history whenever they appear as ‘intralin-
guistic’ phenomena, that is, during the transition from speech to writing.
In that way, the relationship between orality and literacy could easily be
promoted to a special branch within the humanities, with the implication
that writing could be understood as a purely discursive phenomenon,
that is, as phonographic writing. Musical notation, the operative lan-
guages of algebraic and arithmetical formulas, logical calculus, and pro-
gram ‘languages’ are all characterized by a graphism independent of
sound, and thus remain outside the boundaries of the traditional concept
of language-based literacy.
This ‘Abc’ of a discursive concept of culture can be reduced to a
polemical formula: the direction of our changing meaning of culture
goes from technique to text, from things to symbols, from processing
to interpreting. And where things are the other way round – where texts
function as techniques (as in the computing protocols of mathematics),
where symbols reveal their manipulable materiality, and where differ-
ences in interpretation become secondary to the algorithms of operative
sets – they will inevitably be suspected of being a retreat of the discourse-
based concept of culture in the face of the advancing techno-
mathematical mechanics of civilization.
3. In 1936, when Alan Turing formulated the intuitive concept of com-
putable functions with the help of his model of a Turing machine
(Turing, 1937), it was no more than a further proposition in a series of
mathematically equivalent propositions coming from Go
¨
del, Church,
Kleene, Post, and Markov (see Kra
¨
mer, 1988: 157). Nonetheless, his
model differed from those of his mathematical rivals: it is no coincidence
that Turing lent his name to the shift from the ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’ to the
‘Turing Galaxy’. Three elements of his Turing machine are central to this
shift (see Kra
¨
mer, 1991: 4). Turing opens up a cognitive dimension with
his claim that his mathematical formalism renders explicit what a human
calculator does when working with paper and pencil, which is to say,
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when writing. Second, he further develops the convertibility between the
symbolic and the technical already surmised by Leibniz, and along with it
the convertibility between the semiotic and the physical, and, by exten-
sion, between software and hardware. And he finally projects the Turing
machine as a universal medium by showing that there are universal
Turing machines capable of imitating every special Turing machine
because the codes of the latter can be inscribed – that is, programmed
– onto the strip of the universal machine.
Thus Turing demonstrates to what degree (formal) texts can simultan-
eously be machines, and vice versa. The Turing machine marks the point
when mind and machine are no longer at odds with one another, but
acknowledge their relationship (their family resemblance, as it were). At
the same time, Turing’s inspirations proved incapable of softening the
hardened structures of modern culture, perhaps precisely because of his
use of mathematical language. In order for that to happen a discourse
was required that could claim to follow in the tradition of the humanities,
albeit in a culturalist guise.
4. It is indeed no longer possible to ignore the signs that the idea of
culture-as-text is eroding. At the moment, we can identify at least four
frontlines of this process of ‘erosion’:
a. The recognition that culture-creating practices are fluid. ‘Culture’ is no
longer confined to what is enshrined in works, monuments, and docu-
ments in stable and statutory form. Originating in the field of language
theory, the debate on ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ has spilled over
and into the social and culture sciences as well as aesthetic and art his-
tory, in the process relativizing the focus on text and representations by
emphasizing the significance of cultures through acts, implementations,
rituals and routines (Wirth, 2002). The English term ‘cultural studies’ has
made everyday practices into a legitimate object of study (Bo
¨
hme et al.,
2000: 12). The demarcation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture has lost its
sharply polarized distinction.
b. Uncovering ‘silent processes’ of knowledge. For a long time, science has
been seen as the embodiment of theory and the search for evidence cen-
tered around a propositional and language-based form of knowledge.
But recently the history of science has discovered the technical and sym-
bolic practices (Bredekamp, 2001) housed in labs, studios, and lecture
halls, which are responsible for communicating and exhibiting ‘objects of
knowledge’ in the first place (see Bredekamp, 2003; Latour, 1989).
Theories of knowledge, in turn, have shifted attention to non-
propositional forms of knowledge, that is, implied and embodied know-
ledge manifesting and legitimating itself through the handling of objects
and instruments.
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c. A willingness to de-hermeneuticize the notions of ‘mind’ and ‘sense.’
Philologists explore the material and medial foundations of literature
cultures; they reconstruct the emergence of sense out of non-sense (see
Gumbrecht, 1996). The social sciences investigate communication as a
social operation. Media theory, which transformed the ‘linguistic turn’
into a ‘medial turn’, reconstructs the technological dimension of media
by showing that media not only communicate, they also produce what
they communicate (see Kittler, 1997). The formative effects of mathem-
atics on culture and the prehistory of the computer and computer science
furthermore suggest (as envisaged by Turing) that the symbolic and the
machinic relate to one another like two sides of the same coin (Kra
¨
mer,
1988).
d. The epistemological dimension of imagery. The eye of the mind is any-
thing but blind (see Heintz and Huber, 2001). Rather, for both the his-
tory of cognition and our practices of knowledge, visuality is anything
but a merely illustrative sideshow – it constitutes the irreducible center
for the research and evidentiary context of the sciences. In the emerging
discipline of imagology, ‘the iconology of the present’ (a term coined by
Horst Bredekamp and Gottfried Boehm [e.g. Boehm, 2001]), technical
images are investigated precisely on the basis of their aesthetic potential
as the indispensable element for the formation of scientific objectivity.
While Husserl in his ‘crisis statement’ lamented de-sensualization and
abstraction as the residue of scientific development, it on the contrary
becomes clear now that it is precisely the sensualization – the aesthetici-
zation – of invisible processes and theoretical objects that are the fuel of
scientific change.
2
To summarize: the ‘textualization’ of culture has reached its limits. By
transgressing those boundaries, the concept of culture assumes new con-
tours. Culture is no longer a matter of monolithic immobility congealed
in works, documents or monuments, but liquefies into our everyday prac-
tices with objects, symbols, instruments and machines. The right of exclu-
sivity, which language used to claim for itself (with regard to representing
culture), is no longer unchallenged. It is in the (inter)play with language,
images, writing, and machines – in the reciprocity between the symbolic
and the technical, between discourse and the iconic – that cultures emerge
and reproduce.
5. Is it a coincidence that the technological phenomenon of the net-
worked computer emerges at the intersection of the four tendencies we
have just described? The computer regulates almost all productive pro-
cesses; it coordinates the social communication of our society and inter-
venes in the production of knowledge. It manages all that precisely by
having fully permeated the routines and practices of our everyday world.
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