Kulturtechniken

Cultural techniques are normally considered to be practices of working nature (such as agriculture) and cultural appropriation and production (such as writing, cooking, programming). In a special sense, philosophy can also be understood as a cultural technique. As a way of self-understanding, it is an essential element of human existence. Thanks to its conceptual-argumentative competence, it makes a specific contribution to the cultural life of society.

The essay examines the historical and systematic transformation of the concept of education. It shows how the concept develops from the reproduction of social struc-tures legitimized by the concept of nature into a reflexive cultural technique of freedom following Kant. Based on a critical analysis, especially in Rousseau, the es-say shows that for a long time education was understood as a “natural technique,” characterized by practices of power and their legitimation by predetermined ( divine or natural) orders. It is with Kant that a fundamental break occurs and education is established as a reflective practice, symbolizing the idea of cultural progress whose goal was maturity, autonomy and shaping the future in a shared world. The essay emphasizes that today, education as a cultural technique is indispensable in order to secure democracy, freedom and a future worth living in the face of global chal-lenges, reflecting the sense of political responsibility, as it is also continued in the thoughts of Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno.

The essay examines collecting as a human activity from a cultural-philosophi-cal perspective. Collecting begins as a basic act of power and organization of the non-human and the human world, develops via stockpiling into a cultural tech-nique that secures our existence. Finally, it transforms itself into a self-purposeful cultural practice. Collecting shapes the formation and binding of will.

Research into cultural techniques has so far focussed on cultural operations such as reading, writing, drawing, calculating and music and has neglected painting, which is perhaps the oldest technique. This article presents an analysis of the cul-tural technique of painting and shows that colour concepts as well as graphic and visual operations are based on colouring practices.

This paper examines the technology of bow and arrow as a symbolic and material nexus between Indigenous cultural techniques and colonial projection. Using Jean O’Brian’s framework of ‘firsting’ and ‘lasting,’ it draws a line from depictions of arrows in one of the John White/Theodor de Bry images from late 16th-century Virginia to a 1917 photography from the Standing Rock Reservation in North Da-kota showing a ceremony of ‘the last arrow.’ Both scenes reveal colonial strategies of overwriting Indigenous ontologies and, in doing so, illustrate the visual and ma-terial dimensions of imperialism and colonial violence, and how they endure into the present.

Bodybuilding and freemasonry, although seemingly unrelated, have striking par-allels as modern cultural techniques of self-optimization. The “work on the rough stone” is the metaphorical link between the athlete-aesthetes and the lodge broth-ers or sisters. Both reflect a shift from fate to feasibility and emphasize individ-ual transformation through ritualized practices rooted in specific knowledge and skills.

Cultural techniques are often operational procedures associated with media in-novations to deal with things or symbols that open up new possibilities for per-ception, cognition, and communication. Has contemporary artificial intelligence based on deep learning become a cultural technique? The essay argues that in the transition from alphanumeric to digital literacy, the ‘cultural technique of flattening’ creates the link between print culture and the generative or synthetic data processing of AI. An embryonic form of digitality al-ready existed before the use of computers. However, this presupposes that arti ficial flatness in the form of writing, pictures, diagrams, maps, etc. is recognised as a creative, collective ‘craft of the mind,’ without which complex individual cognition would have been virtually impossible even in earlier eras.