TA L  

OF CONT NT
PRINT  UMM R 2015

MAT RIAL WORLD: AN
INT RVI W WITH
RNHARD  I G RT
IF ANYON  could  ring the art world down to earth, it would  e  RNHARD  I G RT.
The pioneering thinker ha  made hi  name   relentle l  grounding philo ophical
idealization , in i ting in tead on under coring the empirical hi torical o ject  and
operation  that make up the mean  through which we make meaning. If  uch  u ject
were formerl  the province of media theor  and media  tudie ,  iegert ha  redefined
and expanded the concept of media into the  roader notion of “cultural technique .”
He ha  revealed the va t network —the conduit , channel , and intermediarie —that
underlie the formation of culture, from the invention of the po tal  tem and it
impact on literature to practice  and device   uch a  trompe l’oeil painting, eating,
eafaring, and map . Here,  cholar G OFFR Y WINTHROP-YOUNG, who tran lated
iegert’  new  ook, Cultural Technique : Grid , Filter , Door , and Other Articulation
of the Real (Fordham, 2014), talk  to the German theori t a out the tool —and their
infinitel  varied application —that make culture po i le.
Jori  Hoefnagel, Malte e cro , mu el, and lad ird (detail), 1591–96, watercolor, gold and  ilver paint, and ink
on parchment, 6 5/8 x 4 7/8". Ver o of a page from Mira calligraphiae monumenta, 1561–96. Photo: The Gett
Center, Lo  Angele /Open Content Program.

G OFFR Y WINTHROP-YOUNG: Why don’t we start with the Old Man himself: Friedrich
Kittler, father of so-called German media theory, the ornery paterfamilias one has to talk
about before one can talk about studies in media, culture, and technology today.One
formulaic way of assessing Kittler’s heritage would be to describe it as the switch from
materialism to materialities. In other words, from the depths of philosophy to the shallows
of operations; from a focus on the representation of meaning to the conditions of
representation themselves; from the myth of the weightlessness of information, wherein
concepts float above and beyond any material substrate, to an insistence on the
materialities that make information possible. All of which was captured by Hans Ulrich
Gumbrecht’s famous phrase, the “materialities of communication.” The great problem is
that within this term materialities, there are very different inflections.
So how do you see Kittler’s concept of materiality? What did he have in mind?

RNHARD  I G RT: That’s an important question, because if you don’t clear up his
concept of materiality, you might easily confuse it with more recent discourses of new
materialisms.

Kittler was skeptical about any kind of Marxist notion of materialism. There is definitely
a historical materialism in Kittler, but one that subscribes much more to the idealistic
tradition of Hegel, of which he was a great admirer.

Materiality, for Kittler, first of all, means an abyss of non-sense: that which has no
meaning. That is the most important definition of what materiality means for Kittler. It is
a polemical word: It has to do with his never-ending fight against sense-making systems
like hermeneutics and philosophy and pedagogy and psychology—a battle guided by a
deeply antihumanist rejection of the tradition of Enlightenment and of hermeneutic
interpretation, of discourse systems. He wanted to show that these sense-making
machines, these sense-making dispositifs or apparatuses, all are based on materialities that
themselves do not make sense, are blind, dumb—but are all the more powerful for it.

And these are: storage media, transmission media, processing media, and so on. They have
no spirit. They are geistlos, Kittler would have said; the spirit is processed, produced, by a
hardware that is completely free of spirit, of meaning. Media technology is a huge abyss
below ideal systems of making meaning.

GWY: And would you go so far as to say that one of the main features of this materiality is
that it actually creates, in the first place, the distinction between meaning and
nonmeaning? The difference between sense and nonsense? So that media materiality lies in
a kind of third position, outside of (1) meaning and (2) nonmeaning, just as media function
as actors that create the positions of sender and receiver in the first place? In the same way,
one could say that media materialities create the conditions of possibility—in any given
historical moment, which is determined by a specific state of media technology—for
distinguishing meaning from nonmeaning.
 : This is something I could have said, but I think that is too sophisticated for Kittler. He
would have seen it much more brutally.

Kittler simply showed with all his strength that the transcendental signified, the origin of
all meaning, has a place in the empirical world. That is his discovery of the “mother’s
mouth” as a very concrete, historical equivalent to what Derrida called the transcendental
signified. For Kittler, the mother’s mouth is the place from which all meaning—via literacy
and alphabetization and so on—originates. So I think it’s no more sophisticated than that.

GWY: Icebreakers are by necessity very tough ships. They are not subtle, and that is one of
the problems with Kittler’s work.

GWY: ON  OF TH basic differences between your work and Kittler’s is that, in your first
book—Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System [1993]—you actually brought a
very factual gestalt, a factual framework, to Derrida’s theory of difference. So already as a
younger scholar you were trying to negotiate Derrida and Kittler, bringing them together.

: Yes. That was the ambition: to read Derrida in a materialist way. But some of the
motivation to do that came from Derrida himself, because in his La Carte Postale [1980],
he says, “Someone should write the history of the postal systems.” [Laughter.]

GWY: For me, the best way to explain the main idea of Relays is the Christmas movie
Miracle on 34th Street [1947]. You’ve got Kris Kringle, Macy’s in-store Santa, with his
uncanny expertise in child psychology and reindeer management, who is put on trial to
prove that he is indeed Santa Claus. He can’t and won’t. But in comes a parade of mail
carriers who dump all the letters addressed to Santa that have piled up in the dead-letter
office on the desk of Kris Kringle. And his lawyer says, “Your honor, every one of these
letters is addressed to Santa Claus. The post office has delivered them. Therefore the Post
Office Department, a branch of the federal government, recognizes this man, Kris Kringle,
to be the one and only Santa Claus.”

So you are not a preexisting identity. You are brought about by the delivery structure. And
that was one of the crucial points of Relays. You have a broad model of a delivery
apparatus that, in a way, creates what is later said to preexist the apparatus itself.
And this examination of the postal system in Relays is part of the move away from the
Pavlovian identification of “media” with mass media: Instead, we have to include
everything down to index cards, typewriters, the blackboard, the piano, and other
inconspicuous technologies or instruments of knowledge. This is one of the broad
contributions of German media theory. (Even if, in North America, related work was
already being done, interestingly, in other fields, such as the history of science.)

GWY: KITTL R’   T ANALY , from his reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Golden

Pot” to his take on Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage,” are all about texts or songs that perform
their own medium.

: Kittler had a beautiful systems-theoretical formalization for that. He once said: “Self-
reference is always a way to enable external reference.” By referring to itself, the system
opens up reference to the outside, makes itself observable from the outside. And this is a
crucially important point. The system can make reference to the outside only by dealing
with its own aesthetic properties.

GWY: And in your more recent work, you’ve got a number of brilliant examples of this.
One is your analysis of the bureaucratic travails people in sixteenth-century Spain had to
go through to emigrate to the New World.

Let me just run this synopsis by you, and you can correct it. I am, for instance, the wife of
a Spanish peasant and I want to join my spouse in the New World. I now have to go
through an immense, labyrinthine bureaucratic apparatus by stating who I am, by
producing witnesses, getting documents, parroting standard phrases, obtaining signatures,
and so on and so on.

At first glance, it looks as if we’re dealing with a fairly straightforward Foucauldian grid
that is slowly lowered onto the great unlettered masses. And that would presuppose that
you and I are preexisting identities that enter into a system of records. But we are actually
brought about by the recording itself.

And now comes your special point. This recording is a self-enclosed procedure. You have
written about the Kafkaesque fact that you have scribes attesting to scribes attesting to
scribes, each trying to establish the authenticity of the one who came before. So the
bureaucratic system closes in on itself, and this closure of the apparatus produces the
individuals that it then processes.

: Right. And it is not only the subject—that is, the legal Spanish emigrant as a subject—
that is produced or constituted by these procedures of writing. What is also produced is
the flip side of the legal subject: the vagabond, the idler, all these figures that are denied
access to the New World.

And this whole bureaucratic machine runs on paranoia. On the one hand, there is this
paranoid conviction that Spain was rife with secretly practicing Muslims and Jews—that
the Moriscos and Marranos, the descendants of Muslims and Jews who had converted to
Christianity, so-called nuevo cristianos or reconciliados, had never really converted at all,
and so even the expulsion of Jews and Moors from Spain had not really purified the
kingdoms. On the other hand, there was suspicion that all these people who are willing to
leave Spain are mere adventurers with nothing on their minds but gold and war—and that
is a depressing prospect for an already bad economy. According to economic theories of
the day, the emigration weakened agricultural production at home by depopulation and
prevented the production of profit abroad because laboring farmers were supposedly
turned into idle adventurers. So the truth procedures of bureaucracy produce, on one side,
identities and biographies of normal, mostly illiterate individuals, and on the flip side, a
vast discourse about how all identities and biographies are false; that everyone could be
someone else, that everything is faked.

While researching this, I found, to my surprise, a very wrinkled piece of paper overwritten
many times by different hands, hard to decipher. It turned out to have been issued by the
king of Spain, Philip II, and what he is saying is that he thinks that everything that is
produced in this huge bureaucratic machine is fraud. All the witnesses are lying. All the
documents are wrong, false. Everything is fiction. So this is a moment in which literature is
born in a very different way than historians of literature have imagined.

At the same time that this huge writing machine produces facts, it also produces fiction.
Fact and fiction are of the same origin. You have a material procedure consisting of the
materialities of reading, writing, hearing witnesses, issuing licenses, registering people:
discursive practices, as Foucault would have called them. And they are neither on the side
of the facts nor on the side of the fiction. They are, at that moment, producing a difference
between fact and fiction.

GWY: The system is so incredibly productive precisely because it’s closed in on itself. So in
a way, Philip II is already Derrida. He already suspects that identity arises from a form of
citation that cries out for deconstruction.

: It was never necessary to invent deconstruction. It was always with us. [Laughter.]

: OF COUR , there are also examples closer to art history, of a self-referentiality that
allows a text or an image to make itself visible as part of a media apparatus.

Part of my current research concerns the very early Dutch still life, and I’m working on
this with an art historian, Helga Lutz, focusing on trompe l’oeil. It all started with a theory
that I call the “Two-Fly Theorem.” It concerns the little fly, the ever-present fly that sits in
the Dutch still life. The theorem says that when you have a trompe l’oeil fly, you will
always have a second fly. Perhaps more. There is never just one.

You have one diegetic fly that is sitting somewhere on a table, clearly within the fictive
space of the image, and then you have another fly, the partner, which produces the illusion
that it sits on the image support itself. There is a constant oscillation between the
transparency of the illusionary pictorial space and the material opacity of the support.

Normally, trompe l’oeil is seen as an effect added to the still life to enhance its illusionary
qualities. But what we are trying to show is that the trompe l’oeil is not added as
manneristic embellishment to the still life. Rather, both trompe l’oeil painting and still-life
painting are the precipitate of an unfinished—and never successfully completed—rejection
of the trompe l’oeil from another medium: the illuminated book.

Still-life trompe l’oeil paintings retain a form of self-reference that we can trace back to
late medieval Netherlandish book painting, where, since roughly 1470, you have an
abundance of trompe l’oeils. When you study these book illuminations, which are
traditionally seen as part of the Ghent-Bruges style from the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries, you encounter various stages of a process in which miniature, text,
and border are differentiated, in order to establish a new “ontology” of the elements found
on a book page—like letters, border decorations, perspectival images, grounds. And in the
course of this process, the trompe l’oeil begins to disappear, to get pushed out from the
page. Yet trompe l’oeil persists in another form: still-life paintings. These later
manifestations of trompe l’oeil in paintings are evidence that the process of disappearance
was never completed.

The argument, in short, is that in the last thirty years of the fifteenth century, book
painting comes under pressure from two sides. First, panel painting is increasingly
becoming the medium for artists. It is no longer restricted to altarpieces. Second, you have
the printing press. The book becomes a different medium: It is no longer handwritten or
handpainted. So you have a divide between writing and image, between the two-
dimensionality of the printed text and the three-dimensional space of the picture, and you
have the distribution of writing and image into new media—which does not produce, as
one might think, the vanishing of the illuminated manuscript, but instead a very rapid
development of certain elements of high self-referentiality. It is as if the illuminated book
page becomes aware of its own mediality.

And you can see that everywhere. You have these interesting phenomena where the
ground of the borders looks as if it were doubled. On the one hand, it is what it is: for
instance, gold-covered parchment. On the other hand, it presents itself as a substance that
is represented on that page.

You have the image ground, illuminated in gold or in green as the support for objects
rendered in trompe l’oeil: flowers, insects, shells, plant tendrils. And at the same time the
ground may show folds, may be curved instead of flat, may recede into some kind of
imaginary depth and so appear as a depicted object itself.

So you have this doubling of the image support: the actual ground, on the one hand, and
its representation, on the other. And the border occasionally develops into a niche
structure, in which objects that formerly appeared as trompe l’oeil—seeming to sit on top
of the image support, in “actual” space—now appear as part of the depicted fictive space.
Hence the niche, which you encounter so often in early still lifes—think of Hans Memling
—can be explained as a strategy to integrate the diverging medialities of the border and
the miniature. In other words, the niche reconciles the orientation toward the material
image support and the orientation toward the fictive image space.

So something that is usually thought of as a matter of style, a history of style, can instead
be ascribed to a history of the differentiation of a medium. And with this, we arrive at the
possibility of describing painted things like the niche as a reentry of the material side of
one medium into the content side of another medium, or as the result of compromises
between contradictory aspects of a medium that is in the process of differentiation.

GWY: You can, of course, have endless discussions about the way in which the trompe
l’oeil both confirms and deconstructs the ideas of mimesis and of representation. But all
these discussions, subtle as they are, presuppose the very idea of representation. And
you’re replacing that more synchronic analysis with a diachronic analysis of what in
American scholarship would be called remediation.

What I find so beautiful here is the idea that a certain way down the road, a media type
refunctionalizes something that was already present in its history, or to a certain degree
even reacts to the fact that there is something still there that it no longer needs. So the
medium turning on itself, to put it bluntly, allows precisely for the effect of representation.
It is via self-referentiality that the closed system becomes lucid, for looking through.

And that is one of the core ideas of what you could call cultural techniques.

GWY: I THINK, at this point, we should actually say what a cultural technique is.
[Laughter.] Or, rather, what components it involves.

: I wouldn’t want to give a mathematical, axiomatic definition. And we should mention

that not everything we’re talking about is consensus among scholars.

GWY: Well, let’s rephrase the question. What are your components for cultural techniques?

: One dimension of cultural techniques is already rather old. Starting in the 1970s,
“cultural techniques” referred to all kinds of symbolic work: reading, writing, and
arithmetic; later, television and other communications technologies. And traditionally,
these cultural techniques were still linked to a rather limited, upper-middle-class concept
of culture.

GWY: Capital-C culture.

: It expanded the role of the book in nineteenth-century middle-class notions of culture

to other, newer media.

And so it was a concept that also focused on the dangers of new technologies, technical
media like television—

GWY: If I may interject here, we should stress that this particular instantiation of the term
Kulturtechniken is very ambivalent. It seeks to inscribe notions of high culture: “These are
important cultural things and activities.” But it also, of course, admits the importance of
technology. This was, not coincidentally, in the days when the PC industry was starting to
take off and with it the ubiquity of electronic media. So the very term itself shows a
resistance to the new but also a fascination with it.

: Absolutely. Now, however, cultural techniques may be seen to encompass everything

from gadgets, artifacts, and infrastructures all the way to skills, procedures, technologies.
Not only machines but legal procedures, sacred rituals, and so on. And we might say that
if Kittler’s version of media theory was antihermeneutic, cultural techniques may be called
posthermeneutic. Media and technology are no longer playing the bogeyman to meaning.
Instead, we can look at a door, for example, as both a material object and a symbolic
thing.

And the concept links up with other disciplines, for instance anthropology, or the history
of religion, or legal history, or ethnology. Take the example of legal history: For
thousands of years, there have been written histories of law, from the Romans to the
British Empire. And if you look at this as a legal historian, what do you do? You study the
institutions. You study the written wording of the laws and the commentaries, and you
connect it to the development of these institutions.
But if you looked at this from the side of cultural techniques, you would do nothing of the
kind. Instead, you would study the concrete techniques by which law is processed, and
then you would see that law is not an institution. It is not in the institutional text. It is in
the files—the processing of files. One of the earliest scholars who contributed to the field
of cultural techniques, Cornelia Vismann, demonstrated precisely this in her beautiful
book Files: Law and Media Technology [2000]. It’s a great example of what cultural
techniques do differently.

GWY: The materialities of jurisprudence.

: The law is always bound to certain spaces. Law is not everywhere. It cannot be here in
this restaurant. It can only be produced in certain spaces, and these spaces are clearly
marked by instruments, by techniques.

GWY: And in a later book, Vismann says that a court of law is almost identical to
theatrical space. You’ve got a stage. You’ve got opponents. You’ve got people cordoned
off.

: Yes, and then she voices her great concern with the dissolution of these spaces today.
Especially with regard to evidence, in the traditional sense of producing the law and
producing justice, evidence only becomes evidence in the space of the court. It is only
evidence when it’s produced there.

Now we have a completely different scenario. We have evidence that is produced long
before a trial starts by circulating information, via taped sounds and taped images from all
kinds of surveillance cameras or witnesses. You have recordings in the media long before a
trial can start. So the evidence is always globalized and seen by millions, and millions have
already made their judgment about this evidence before it can be produced in court.

That was a great concern of Vismann’s work. What is happening to the production of the
law if evidence is already everywhere produced? And so what we have here since the turn
of the century, I would say, is a broadening of the concept of cultural techniques. It’s no
longer limited to reading, writing, calculating; now it concerns the production of
differences.
And there are elementary differences by which one culture in a basic way can be
distinguished from other cultures. Take rules of eating, which since Lévi-Strauss have been
one of the prominent ways to differentiate between cultures. One tribe boils the opossum,
and the other one roasts it, and it’s a way to communicate, because you know that by
roasting the opossum—this is a funny example, because nobody eats opossums, by the
way.

GWY: The fatal flaw of Lévi-Strauss’s argument.

: The hare is a better example. By boiling the hare, you distinguish yourself from the
neighboring village where the hare is roasted. Cultural techniques are concerned with
those techniques that create differences by which cultures can refer to themselves, and
therefore identify themselves and distinguish themselves from other cultures.

But you usually speak of these differences and therefore of culture as something that is
given. You presuppose a culture to explain something about it. And that is not our
approach.

Our approach is concerned with how these differences are brought about in the first place.
How do these differences, or this making of differences, change us over time—and what
are the means and operations by which differences can be raised?

In a way, you can describe the business of cultural techniques as the opening up of black
boxes. If you think of concepts or even symbols as black boxes, when you open them up,
what comes out are cultural techniques. One of the things I’ve been studying recently is the
discussion of the digital that took place in this country during the ’50s at the very famous
Macy Conferences. All these star thinkers there—Norbert Wiener, Margaret Mead,
Gregory Bateson, Warren McCulloch—had no clear concept of what the digital was.

And a group of neurologists wants to describe the nervous system as a digital machine.
That is what McCulloch and Walter Pitts already had in mind in the ’40s: They were
interested in a concept of the digital that lies in the real, in the natural. They really thought
that nerves, synapses, work digitally. And so there is great confusion.
Then Wiener says that the digital is actually produced by artificially excluding certain
phenomena from reality, from nature. He speaks of “times of non-reality” that lie between
two stable states, like on or off, zero or one. Because nothing in nature makes this binary
switch from zero to one—not in the nervous system or anywhere else. Natural phenomena
are always continuous. So to define the digital, the transitional moment in the
intermediate state between two discrete states has to be deemed not real, or “forbidden
ground,” in Julian Bigelow’s words.

And the study of cultural techniques is interested in precisely these medial conditions of
whatever lays claim to reality. Because what divides analog media and digital media is not
ontologically given, not even on the level of concepts or on the level of a history of ideas.
Instead, this difference has to be produced by people who actively declare that the
transition states between discrete states “do not exist,” as the psychologist John Stroud
did.

So, in the ’50s, the digital appeared in scientific discourse as something that had to be
created by a verdict, a declaration. It is something like a pseudolegal speech act. And that
speech act is then translated into technology. Later, you have scanning/OCR mechanisms
that do this conversion for you, converting text into bits, binary values, one or zero.

GWY: A kind of a performative, linguistic perforation of the continuity of the analog takes
place.
Jori  Hoefnagel, Malte e cro , mu el, and lad ird, 1591–96, watercolor, gold and  ilver paint, and ink on
parchment, 6 5/8 x 4 7/8". Page from Mira calligraphiae monumenta, 1561–96. Calligraph    Georg  oc ka .
Photo: The Gett  Center, Lo  Angele /Open Content Program.

GWY: I HAV  ON  R LAT D QU TION, which you’re not going to like that much, but I
think it might be of interest to some of the more philosophically inclined readers. To what
extent is everything you’ve been explaining a modern update of the fundamental
ontological differentiation by Martin Heidegger? Because what the approach of cultural
techniques criticizes is very much what Heidegger criticized, namely the illegitimate
confusion of beings and being.

: Answering your question means taking into account the discussion of cultural
techniques that links up with certain kinds of new ontological thinking, which ranges
across different fields—

GWY: Across continents.

 : In many places, a new discourse of ontology, or ontologies in the plural, has arisen.
You have speculative realism. You have OOO [object-oriented ontology], you have
agential realism, and you have ontologies in anthropological perspectivism.

Of course, these depart from the way ontology was once thought or done or operated, and
then rightly condemned. The interesting thing is that, for these new materialisms,
ontology no longer occupies the role of philosophia prima.

Ontologies are, instead, produced. Within the context of cultural techniques, the
production occurs via what we call ontic operations, or chains of operations. This goes
back to a concept that was first brought up by André Leroi-Gourhan. Bruno Latour and
others then extended this into the idea of recursive chains of operations.

We use the concept of recursive chains of operations that are completely ontic. So the
operation of a door or a switch—these are all techniques that are producing a difference
and thereby creating what they differentiate. It’s not given before, but it’s created by these
techniques.

Through these operations, an ontology is produced: the ontology of the digital, for
instance, which is produced by declaring parts of the analog continuum of the world as
nonreal. So ontic operations produce ontology. In terms of Heidegger, one would say that
we have the ontic/ontological difference, and systems-theoretically speaking, we have a
reentry of that difference into the ontic. So we have a difference and a reentry. And the
reentry concerns one side of the difference, the ontic side.

That is a bit abstract, but a fair way to describe what cultural techniques are doing is
reinscribing the ontic/ontological difference onto the side of the ontic. This difference itself
is produced in the immanence of the world. So this is a theory of immanence. It does not
know any transcendences.

GWY: And what about the relation of cultural techniques to Latour’s actor-network theory
[ANT] and his notion of symmetry between objects and subjects?

: Indeed, an interesting application of cultural techniques or even a further development

of the theory of cultural techniques would take into account what Latour called
symmetrical anthropology.

In the initial ANT work of Latour, long before he started to speak about this kind of
symmetry, he developed the concept of the “immutable mobile.” There you see a clear
convergence between the perspectives of ANT and cultural techniques, because what
Latour calls immutable mobiles, we could call cultural techniques—maps, diagrams,
perspectival representations, but also other systems and tools. Latour later defined
immutable mobiles in a way that fits even better with the rubric of cultural techniques: as
“hybrid objects” that connect matter and form via a discontinuity (a gap). Thus the world
is not divided between material objects on the one hand and language on the other, as
Platonic philosophy and modern science have often claimed. Rather, language and objects,
signs and referents, are connected by chains of hybrid elements, which produce the
articulation between matter and form. These hybrid elements, which generate the world of
distinctions and which Latour calls immutable mobiles, are cultural techniques.

But let’s go one step further, to this renewed interest in objects. Symmetrical anthropology
is concerned not only with human actors but also with nonhuman actors. Cultural
techniques also attempt to rethink the relationship between subjects and objects. And here
we have the same approach coming from ANT and post-ANT: We are not interested in
the difference between subject and object. We are interested in the operations that first
create this distinction and see it as an unstable process.

The question of stability is, in fact, something to which the study of cultural techniques
can contribute greatly. And it’s even, I think, one of the most interesting new
developments of this kind of research—finding out how something is stabilized in the first
place.

In classical philosophy since Aristotle, it was always the question: How can something
change? How is the new produced? How is it possible that something becomes different?
So—speaking again in ontological terms—being is always considered as something stable,
solid, unchangeable, eternal.

Now we have a completely different picture. The question now is not how something can
become different and change, but how we can have something stable. Because nothing is
stable by itself; it has to be stabilized.

This is why, in recent discussions, the distinction between objects and things has become
so prominent. Everyone who is talking about the agency of objects now quotes
Heidegger’s essay “Das Ding,” even if it’s the only text of Heidegger they’ve ever read.
They can use that text to produce this difference between the object as an assemblage, an
aggregation of processes that have been black-boxed, and the thing as an open object, as a
very unstable, constantly growing and changing network of operations and practices.

So one wonderful example is pots. What is a pot or a vessel in the broadest sense? It is a
cultural technique because it produces a difference. And that difference is only produced in
an ontic way.

With a pot, the difference between empty and full comes into the world. You need a pot to
have this difference. So the pot is an ontic technique or technology that produces the
ontological difference between emptiness and plenitude. And this is extremely interesting
for archaeology. How do pots produce a reality in which all kinds of cultural differences
related to “empty” and “full” are produced?

In the Moche culture in northern Peru, for example, you have incredible pots—and now
there is a very interesting theory about them. For a long time, people did not know what to
do with these pots. They are theriomorphic, anthropomorphic, theomorphic vessels, some
with very explicit sexual forms, some depicting extremely violent scenes of killing (for
instance, a man falling prey to a huge animal). Some of these pots are modeled after body
parts that are open, that you can drink from, and so on. We can now relate these forms to
a theory that has to do with symmetrical anthropology, namely, anthropological
perspectivism.

This theory says that these vessels are not carriers of meaning. They are not symbolic
objects. They are actors. These pots are stabilizing an unstable reality by exhibiting the
connection between different realities, between humans and spirits, for example—but also
by letting liquids flow from one part of a pot into another. In order to be closed, the body
has to be open with respect to the other. Something can be a whole only by having a
hole.These pots are not closed objects; instead, they show that all things, including
humans and pots, are ontologically ambiguous things that can exist in two forms and in
two realities, as the archaeologist Benjamin Alberti puts it. Animals, human beings, and
demons constantly have to figure out—

GWY: Who they are.

: And the main concern is keeping these different realms of reality apart, to prevent
ontological predation of one reality by another. You do not want to see your fellow
humans like a puma, or like some evil spirit sees them.

The interesting thing is, again, that this is not an ontological given. This is not a cultural
given. These vessels are technologies that produce a stable reality. You can see that a
material object and practice are connected via filling and pouring, and using the pot is a
means by which difference is produced. So this is, in a nutshell, everything that cultural
techniques are about.

GWY: But it seems like the danger of some of these other new ontologies is that they often
become the very thing that they are supposedly trying to suppress or deny: another kind of
humanism or anthropomorphism. The chicken lays the egg from which it then says it
hatched.

: Exactly, yes.

GWY: It’s a fascinating idea, because things—not objects—in the realm of cultural
techniques are akin to conceptual attractors. They stabilize highly unstable processes by
creating certain stable behavior patterns.

The other closely related question is: How do things actually change? Do they rework
themselves, as it were, by going back, looking at themselves, and reprocessing their
properties?

I think this is, on a very abstract level, the core of cultural techniques—and this also
clearly sets that approach off from those it challenges, which presume a pregiven existence
that would then deny such a form of change. The cultural-techniques approach also sets
itself off from the idea that change automatically involves the addition of something new,
or that change involves some kind of system that already maps out the change beforehand.
Both no longer apply.

: And that counters the assumption of change as always being inherent to technology. In
traditional histories of technology, technologies will always be inscribed into a larger
context of explanation, be it social history or—

GWY: Edison’s brain or something.

: The genius of inventors, Edison’s brain, social history or economic history or even
anthropologic evolution. With cultural techniques, at least there is the attempt to see a
much more complex field in which you can hardly ever say what is preceding what, which
is also very similar in ANT. And this throws overboard the idea—an idea that is very dear
to the field of science and technology studies in the United Kingdom—that the social
constitutes everything else.

So we have this much more complex and networked concept of how different factors link
into one another, but we also still have, as the heritage of French theory and German
media theory, an insistence on the agency of the object, which is constituted by chains of
other objects, practices, techniques, and technologies.

GWY: And actors.

: And actors, but not necessarily human actors. We can consider all kinds of different
actors. Images can be actors, microbes can be actors, and so on.

GWY: WHAT KIND  OF O J CT of inquiry might you look at next?

: The book I’m writing right now focuses on the ship. The basic idea is that seafaring is
an even more fundamental cultural technique than the phonetic alphabet, which the Old
Man loved so much.

GWY: The Old Man and—or next to—the sea.

: One of the earliest texts that we have in Western culture is Sophocles’s Antigone. In
their famous first song, the choir sings about the uncanniest being in the world, which is
man. And why is man the uncanniest being that walks on the surface of the earth? Because
man is inventing techniques that tame and discipline and control beasts, but most of all
because man has devised a way of using ships to go out into the frothing waters of winter
storms.

This original figure of man has been widely interpreted in terms of anthropology: man as a
land-bound animal that transgresses its own definition as a species by leaving the ground
to which it is fundamentally bound by nature or by God.

So this can be used as an initial way to speak about cultural techniques: the difference
between land and sea, which brings in another problematic figure.

GWY: Uncle Carl.

: Yes, Carl Schmitt, who wrote widely about the difference between land and sea as a
fundamental difference for the history of the world. But again, from the point of view of
cultural techniques, this difference has to be produced. Neither land nor sea is given by
nature or by God. They have been produced and thereby are historically contingent on
techniques and technologies. And seafaring is the technique that divides the sea from the
land.

From this Sophoclean concept, you can right away jump over thousands of years to, let’s
say, the invention of the container ship. The modern invention of the container redefined
the difference between land and sea in an absolutely radical way, because it was invented
to bridge infrastructures that are land-bound and infrastructures that are sea-bound. So
the same container travels over land and is transferred smoothly onto a ship and then back
onto land, and so on. It’s an American invention and, not by chance, the first container
company was named Sea-Land. The brand name tells you everything.

The history of the ship is also, as Foucault once said, one of the greatest cultural archives
of metaphors—ideas—that mankind has. What has not been described in terms of
seafaring? The church, the state, but also madness. The journey of life and the afterlife.
Just think of Dante. And even, of course, the Internet has been largely described in terms
of the sea and techniques of navigation. We speak of surfing; Netscape’s early browser
was called Navigator. You remember the ubiquitous ship’s-wheel icon. So from the
earliest antiquity until today, our culture has described itself in terms of concepts that can
be anthropologically explained by this original act of leaving the land. And that act is also
our great fear—because leaving the land is the original sin. This belief pervades our
culture. In this way, we can write a different kind of art history, a different kind of history
of technology, a different kind of history of literature, and even conceive of a different way
of looking at representation in the political sense.

A couple of years ago, the Getty [Research Institute] in Los Angeles announced a new
research focus on seafaring. And they had in mind topics such as the communication
between the West Coast and Japan: how the first ships came over the Pacific to the West
Coast and how images thereby began to migrate to and fro.

But the Getty did not have in mind a project like mine. They were not so much interested
in the ships but in the “meaning”—again, this content problem. I’m not interested in the
content as such. I’m only interested in the content if it relates to the condition of
possibility of content.

So I’m extremely interested, as you might imagine, in the work of J. M. W. Turner.

Because of the work of Turner, art itself is schematized as something that has to go
through changes with respect to the ocean. Think of his incredible painting in the Tate,
where the legend says that you see a steamboat in a snowstorm [Snow Storm—Steam-Boat
off a Harbour’s Mouth, ca. 1842].

And the famous story is that Turner was allegedly on board that ship. His greatest
admirer, John Ruskin, had a lot of problems trying to explain to his contemporaries that
there was a ship on this canvas at all. [Laughter.] The others could only see blotches of
paint.

The criticism was that there is no ship. We cannot figure out where the ship is. And the
interesting thing—back to self-referentiality—is that somewhere in this chaos of elements
you actually see a flag, and you realize that that is where the ship is. And nearby, you see a
signal rocket. One of the clear-cut white blotches in the image is a shooting signal. It’s so
beautiful. What is a flag? A flag is a sign. And what is a rocket? It’s a signal. So you have
here, at the beginning of the information age, the switch from literacy, from signs that you
can read, that you have to interpret in symbolic terms, to signals.

What’s more, you are entering a completely new dimension in which the image is no
longer a question of iconography, but a question of the distinction between signal and
noise. That change is what the painting is about.

And therefore it is hard to identify the steamboat, because the steamboat itself becomes an
object that first of all has to be produced within the image by distinguishing between
signal and noise. You have noise, a chaos of colors, and you have a rocket that is saying,
“Hey, the image is a signal.” If you can recognize anything in the image, it is because
there’s a ratio between signal and noise.

GWY: It seems to me that there were two phenomena that in Turner’s career were
extremely important for explaining this low signal-to-noise ratio. One, as you’re saying, is
his connection to the sea and water. The other is war.

Think of Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps [ca. 1812], but think
also of his depiction of The Battle of Trafalgar [as seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds
of Victory, 1906–08]; these are documentary snapshots that no longer allow you any
overview of what the hell is happening there. It’s just this little moment in time and it
demonstrates that you’re dealing with chaotic phenomena, that you have to extract certain
signals to make meaning of the noise behind it. As Victor Hugo once put it, to depict a
battle we need a painter with chaos in his brush.

: Absolutely. And part of this new book looks at the modern seascape and the
turbulence of modernity, starting from Turner and dealing with painters like Delacroix,
Monet, [Holger] Drachmann, and even Mondrian.

I mean, Mondrian started as a marine painter. And then in 1911 he goes to Paris and
becomes infatuated with Cubism, then goes back to the Netherlands and continues to
paint the sea, now in a Cubist way—which is extraordinarily funny, because the idea of
Cubism was to deconstruct three-dimensional objects into surfaces. The favorite subject of
Cubism was therefore the human figure or still life. Think of Picasso. But how can you
apply the method of Cubism to surfaces? The sea is already a surface. It cannot be
deconstructed as—

GWY: Figure and ground. That’s the problem.

: So in Mondrian, these surfaces, these seascapes, consist only of vertical and horizontal
lines. But they still have a reference: a pier and an ocean, the ripples of the waves, the light
reflections. These are the horizontals and the verticals. So you still have a small, very faint
reference before it becomes completely abstract.

GWY: Again, it’s the fly, remembering where it came from. [Laughter.]

: Here the sea is, again, the starting point of a story, of the movement of art out of
referentiality into abstraction. As Rosalind Krauss says in the beginning of The Optical
Unconscious [1993], “The sea is a special kind of medium for modernism, because of its
perfect isolation . . . its opening onto a visual plenitude that is somehow heightened and
pure, both a limitless expanse and a sameness, flattening it into nothing, into the no-space
of sensory deprivation.”

GWY: Well, I think it’s not by chance that Yve-Alain Bois actually describes the Pier and
Ocean paintings [1914–15] as the moment that Mondrian “digitizes” the painterly mark
into a binary system.

: Absolutely. And take, for example, Ellsworth Kelly’s Seine [1951]. This is an
incredible work in which the visual effect of the water surface is combined with a digital
process: The piece consists only of binary elements, black and white, that are arrayed
according to an algorithm of chance, which determines the distribution and placement of
squares within each column. And an early study of the work is not even painted. Kelly
simply uses little pieces of black and white paper—bits.

So here again, the sea—or the River Seine—is a pretext for a momentous move: the move
from signs to information. Because Kelly is literally following the rules of how information
theory describes a message: He works with bits. It’s amazing. The motif of the sea is the
starting point for a new dimension, a new conceptualization in art.
GWY: There’s a famous interview with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, which was also
taped in a restaurant, and at the end they say, “OK. Let’s plug the charisma leak.”
[Laughter.]

— Geoffrey Winthrop-Young

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