Abstract
In classical media theory, the synaesthetic space of human bodies constituted the invariant conditions for the independent and dependent variables of media, namely, the innovations of technical media and their impact on culturally encoded perception and social organisation. But the invariant was depending upon cultural techniques too: on linguistic skills, body techniques and ritual transformations of signs, things and persons. The article proposes to call these three groups of activities “cold techniques”, because they can neither be accumulated without losing the complexity gained by prior incremental learning, nor can they be reduced to a less complex structure than today or, for that matter, in the Upper Paleolithic. Some of the consequences of the irreducibility of these skills are spelled out; and tentatively, the essay explores the possibility that bundling the three techniques for different purposes is “the medium before media”, and within the incessantly creative destruction and self-destruction of new media, the medium before and after science.
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Notes
- 1.
An interpretation of this passage can only be a beginning, a ‘buginning’, in the insect-ridden hostel with its buzzing opportunities (‘bug’, ‘inn’, ‘innings’). One word must therefore suffice: the ‘woid’ is a misspelled ‘void’. But this beginning takes up both the beginning of Genesis (‘In the beginning the earth was desolate and empty’, ‘innings’ are also ‘washed-up new territory’) and the beginning of the Gospel of John (‘In the beginning was the word’); as hybrids of both and thus as neither: ‘woid’ instead of ‘void’ or ‘word’. This beginning in the eternal present (…is…is…are) is also a condensation of Freud’s dictum: ‘Where id was, there ego shall be’. But with an unclear outcome: where id begins, there is a muddle of dancing sound particles in the middle (with the Indian ‘sundance’ around the initiators’ stake), and after that one is just as clever and in the unproven and the unconscious as before (‘in the unbewised again’).
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Schüttpelz, E. (2023). The Irreducibility of Technical Skills: Before and After Science. In: Gießmann, S., Röhl, T., Trischler, R., Zillinger, M. (eds) Materiality of Cooperation. Medien der Kooperation – Media of Cooperation. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39468-4_14
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