Cacography or Communication? Cultural Techniques in German Media Studies

“The Computer Said So”: On the Ethics, Effectiveness, and Cultural Techniques of Predictive Policing

“…What the cultural techniques approach would argue is that data are only part of the problem. Paraphrasing Siegert (2008) cultural techniques never merely communicate or exchange information, but they are acts that create "order by introducing distinctions" (p. 35). The larger epistemological and ontological problem, then, is related to drawing distinctions between different areas and people living in those areas in the first place, in the Roman Empire with a plow, today with data, and tomorrow who knows how.…”

“…Like the debate, my approach does not focus on particular technologies or service providers, but speaks about the general level of principles according to which the predictive policing is seen to operate. Following Bernhard Siegert (2008), I want to highlight "the operations or operative sequences that historically and logically precede" and help us to generate and understand "media concepts" such as predictive policing (p. 29). The debate itself consists of six brief commentaries.…”

TheKulturof Cultural Techniques

“…At this point, some German theorists invoke the fertile concept of the parasite as developed by Michel Serres (e.g., Schüttpelz 2006;Siegert 2007). In order to understand what is at stake, it is necessary to recall that one of Serres's basic moves was to invert the traditional chrono-conceptual order of the parasite.…”

Un–Black Boxing the List: Knowledge, Materiality, and Form

“…the "cultural techniques" stream of so-called German media analysis is concerned with precisely these matters, and so has been formative in the development of this article. Krämer (2003) and Bernhard Siegert (2008Siegert ( , 2011Siegert ( , 2012 are the most-translated thinkers from this tradition, which takes as its object the operative entities that process the distinctions at the core of any society-such as those between inside/outside, subject/object, nature/culture, matter/form, et cetera. Hence the interest of these thinkers in doors, operative writing, maps, formats, and so on.…”