Out Now: Volume about Cultural Techniques in History, Literary and Media Studies

This volume presents the preliminary results of the work carried out by the interdisciplinary Cultural Techniques Research Lab. Taking up an impulse from media studies, its contributions examine —from a variety of disciplinary perspectives— the interplay between the formative processes of knowledge and action outlined within the conceptual framework of cultural techniques. Case studies in the fields of history, literary and media studies, and the history of science reconstruct fundamental demarcations such as nature and culture, the human and the nonhuman, and materiality and the symbolical order as the result of concrete practices and operations. These studies reveal that particularly basic operations of spatialization form the very conditions that determine emergence within any cultural order. Ranging from manual and philological “paper work” to practices of opening up and closing off spaces and collective techniques of assembly, these case studies replace the grand narratives of cultural history focusing on micrological examinations of specific constellations between human and nonhuman actors.

Cultural Techniques. Assembling Spaces, Texts & Collectives.
Ed. Jörg Dünne, Kathrin Fehringer, Kristina Kuhn, and Wolfgang Struck.
Berlin: De Gruyter 2020.
346 p.
ISBN 978-3-11-064456-2 (book version).
Open Access: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110647044