Volume 66, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Cultural Techniques / Issue Editors: Susanne Bayerlipp, Ralf Haekel, Johannes Schlegel

The article analyses early modern cultural techniques of translation focusing on the example of William Thomas’s Travels to Tana and Persia , one of the first travel accounts of the Middle and Far East in the English language. It argues that cultural techniques of translation are constituted by multiple operative practices, such as writing, reading, and gift making, which provide the aesthetic and material-technical foundation for abstract concepts including the self and the other.

Hamlet stages problems of immanent synchrony that can be described as both motor and product of specific temporalities. By contemplating different timelines and even problematising the notion of linear time itself, Shakespeare’s tragedy illustrates that de/synchronisation relies on cultural techniques, which, in the context of the play, consist of the basic operations of calculating, representing, and commanding. At the same time, however, synchronisation proves to be inevitably recursive as it always already necessitates further operations. As this reading of Hamlet shows, the relevance of cultural techniques becomes apparent when it is understood as a heterogeneous arrangement in which technical-practical, aesthetic, symbolic, and political concepts interact.

This essay argues for exploring sublimity as a cultural technique which is central to processing modern practices of purification and hybridization alike, and which also self-reflexively illuminates the operations and actors of its surrounding human-nonhuman network. The dissection and literal assemblage of a romantic cyborg in “The Man That Was Used Up” serves as an example of how Poe’s self-referential employment of a posthumanist technological sublime counteracts anthropocentric notions of Romantic sublimity which reduce Nature to a means of human arousal and self-elevation.

This article investigates literature from the vantage point of media theory. The text I analyse and use as my example is T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets , a highly philosophical and self-reflexive poem which is, however, not explicitly concerned with new media technology or the transmission, storage, and processing of information. Cultural techniques, media theory, and network theory will serve as the theoretical background against which I will flesh out the non-technological and philosophical implications of mediation as discussed and theorised in the poem itself. Thus, the main aim will be to foreground the work’s own aesthetic foundations as media theory or, more precisely, as a theory of mediation depending on a set of cultural techniques. In order to achieve this, the article looks at literature as a medium that reflects on its dependence on a material entity and on its place within a diachronic and synchronic media network.

My article investigates the manifold interactions between textual and diagrammatic elements. First, it outlines the changes in literary and cultural studies in the wake of the so-called ‘topographical turn,’ which have made possible the identification of certain cartographic practices as cultural techniques. Second, it discusses Friedrich Kittler’s idea of literature as a cultural technique itself, and considers how this concept can be reconciled with the topographical turn. Third, it analyses a handful of cartographic techniques employed in narratives and argues for a field of scriptural operations that provide a common ground for jointly reading maps and novels. Fourth, it carries out a reading of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow which focuses on how the diagrammatic inscription of the V2 rocket and its arc condition both the protagonists’ movement on the novel’s plane and the map-making instances in the narrative. Fifth and finally, it points out why Pynchon’s work might be considered a medial counterpart of a map if the topographical approach, instead of being considered a comparison between fictional and real locations, is understood as a scrutiny into the operations indispensable to creating a fictional territory.

Tom McCarthy’s novels are informed by media theory, and this essay reads his novel Remainder not only with theory in order to highlight parallels to reflections on cultural techniques and sociotechnical networks but also tries to assess its relevance as theory. My essay will, first of all, introduce the media theoretical framework of cultural techniques and show how cultural techniques are described in Remainder. The parallel agendas of the novel and cultural techniques research, I argue, converge in a shared interest in materiality, practices, and the seemingly banal details of everyday life but put them into different perspectives. I will then read Remainder as a contribution to the theoretical debate on cultural techniques and suggest that the novel draws our attention to a politics of detail in theories of practices, the everyday, and cultural techniques.