Cultural Techniques and Knowledge

This bibliographic article gives an Introduction to the field of media aesthetics, refers to General Overviews, Journals, and Book Series. It outlines the Background for media aesthetics in terms of History and Theory, explicates Basic Concepts, such as the media aesthetic conceptions of Media and Aesthetics, and presents a map of a variety of media aesthetic Research Interests, such as Media as Environment, Media as Embodied Experience, Media as Matter, Histories of Media Technologies, and Media as System.

The very first introductory paragraph is available here: Media aesthetics is an interdisciplinary arena for research on media technologies, aesthetics (sense perception), and mediation. It does not belong to any one discipline, but is rather a set of perspectives that may inscribe themselves into a great number of disciplines and has done so most notably in media studies, art history, film studies, and to a certain extent, comparative literature and humanistic informatics, as well. Media aesthetics grew out of earlier attempts at theorizing about the reciprocal relations between aesthetics, technology, and media, such as media philosophy (Friedrich Kittler), media ecology (Marshall McLuhan), medium theory (Joshua Meyrowitz), mediology (Régis Debray), and critical theory (most notably Walter Benjamin), and is influenced by current, aesthetic theories of what has been termed new media (Mark Hansen) and visual culture (W. J. T. Mitchell). Media aesthetics emphasizes the importance of understanding sensuous perception as culturally and historically situated and insists on the continuity between so-called old and new media. Media aesthetics ties into what has been called digital humanities and seeks to take into account the high levels of technological mediation of the world today. By redirecting our attention to material and physical practices it also shares some ideas with the largely German tradition of cultural techniques. Media aesthetics also has overlapping interests with the emergence of new materialism (Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti) and seeks to contribute to rethinking the relationship of science and the humanities, approaching the questions of the two cultures through studies of visualization in science and everyday life as well as through studies of the visual arts in relation to the physical and biological sciences. The field of media aesthetics is multidisciplinary and heterogeneous. Consequently, an overview of media aesthetics cannot be limited to academic works where this term has explicitly been used. It is important to recognize work that shares the same research interests even though their authors may have used other terms and the works also can be sorted into areas with overlapping ideas and interests.

This paper explore the possibility of a critical philosophy of the cultural techniques developed by the image, stated in the work of Austrian Thomas Macho. The fundamental power of images lies in their ability to shape the future. The critical political value of the philosophy of culture and philosophical anthropology are renewed, through this interpretation of the power of the image, in the context of cultural processes that give rise to a dispute for the future which decisively affects the transforming capacity of our societies.

En este artículo se investiga la posibilidad de una filosofía crítica de las técnicas culturales que se desarrollan con la imagen, en el trabajo del austriaco Thomas Macho. El poder fundamental de las imágenes se encuentra en su capacidad de modelar el futuro. La filosofía de la cultura y la antropología filosófica se renuevan, en su valor crítico político, por medio de la interpretación de esta potencia de la imagen, de cara a los procesos culturales por los que se establece una disputa del futuro que afecta decisivamente la capacidad transformadora y de transformación de nuestras sociedades.

Mark Fisher argues that “[f]or most people under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable” (8). Fisher observes the inherent acceptance or unquestioning of capitalism in today’s Global North. This acceptance can be observed in the practices of exchange: the way we buy and spend money. This activity has become second nature; it therefore communicates how and what we think of our economic system—if at all. Furthermore this activity is an aggregate of a set of specific gestures  (e.g. holding out our palms, facing up to receive change) and (pass) words (e.g. PIN) that have become etched in our muscle memory and native to our vocabularies; arguably, they constitute what Roland Barthes would call a system of signification and are therefore an expression of capitalist culture.

This paper will present a project in which I worked to render this system visible through “culture jamming”. For two weeks I refused to enact any practices of exchange, instead asking others to perform them in my stead. My attempt to jam the practice of exchange was done for the purpose of inciting conversation with my stand-in consumer about what these gestures represent in today’s culture and the significance of having internalized them. Hence, I relied on  ‘guerilla semiotics’ in order “to decipher the signs and symbols that constitute a culture’s secret language” (Dery 9). My paper will explore the meaning of the gestures that constitute the performance of exchange and what it means to refuse it.