German Media Theory

Last year, at this conference, I discussed how distinctions between nature and culture, and humans and animals, can arise from the technical processes of food production (see "Food as an object of cultural technical study "). Drawing on the work of cultural techniques (e.g. Siegert 2015; Vismann 2013) and Levi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked (1970), I argued that the relationship between humans and food is primary to how the human understands itself and forms part of the ground of human ontological systems. I'd like to take this argument further today, to a system-level perspective of food production and beyond, to a posthuman future where food no longer resembles what we know it as today, and because of this, where the human as such arguably ceases to exist, as the ground upon which it has defined self and species is transcended. I'm responding both to fictional future food visions and aspirations towards technical solutions to our current food-related crises.

Corporate consulting, a one-time seemingly marvelous mixture of bare-knuckle rationalization, esoterica, and visionary futurism, is invariably deployed when business structures threaten to lose their equilibrium. What it actually means to be consulted, the part played by media in consulting, and how the branch of corporate consulting became a system of knowledge with such a socially important role is the object of this book. For the first time, it explores the ways in which the latest media technology, avant-garde aesthetics, economic pressures, and holistic philosophy together constituted the form of consulting dominant today, and which consequences arise from this. Thus it follows the work of early corporate consultants like Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and H. L. Gantt, while analyzing and describing their visual consulting models. The book develops a new, innovative, interdisciplinary approach, situated between media and business history, media archeology, and social theory, and thereby charts the genesis of modern consulting knowledge. It reveals that corporate consulting must be conceptualized in close relation to the visual culture that prevailed during this time, one which drew from nineteenth-century visualization methods and, more particularly, the new medium of film. Consulting is a cultural technique that is markedly characterized by media processes, in which the boundaries of economic logic and legitimacy emerge, and which, at the same time, considerably shapes and stabilizes this modus operandi up to the present day.

Saggio introduttivo alla traduzione (edita nello stesso numero di Kaiak) di un brano di Kittler, tratto da GFT. Il contributo vuole contestualizzare l'estratto kittleriano, chiarificando il quadro teorico dal quale proviene, commentandolo e suggerendone gli sviluppi.

In both european and international forums, models of convergence and newsroom integration have been the main topic of discussion during the last years. What makes media organisations willing to explore these models in order to remain competitive in their field of business? The main focus of this study will be a comparative analysis of various media corporations in Germany (and maybe Switzerland) and their transition to the digital era, based on their new operational models (internal structure, day-to-day process, financial aspects etc), as well as the different forms and level of convergence these corporations apply on distinct platforms (print, tv, internet, mobile first, tablet).

In Transmitted Wounds, Amit Pinchevski explores the ways media technology and logic shape the social life of trauma both clinically and culturally. Bringing media theory to bear on trauma theory, Pinchevski reveals the technical operations that inform the conception and experience of traumatic impact and memory. He offers a bold thesis about the deep association of media and trauma: media bear witness to the human failure to bear witness, making the traumatic technologically transmissible and reproducible.

Taking up a number of case studies--the radio broadcasts of the Eichmann trial; the videotaping of Holocaust testimonies; recent psychiatric debates about trauma through media following the 9/11 attacks; current controversy surrounding drone operators' post-trauma; and digital platforms of algorithmic-holographic witnessing and virtual reality exposure therapy for PTSD--Pinchevski demonstrates how the technological mediation of trauma feeds into the traumatic condition itself. The result is a novel understanding of media as constituting the material conditions for trauma to appear as something that cannot be fully approached and yet somehow must be.

While drawing on contemporary materialist media theory, especially the work of Friedrich Kittler and his followers, Pinchevski goes beyond the anti-humanistic tendency characterizing the materialist approach, discovering media as bearing out the human vulnerability epitomized in trauma, and finding therein a basis for moral concern in the face of violence and atrocity. Transmitted Wounds unfolds the ethical and political stakes involved in the technological transmission of mental wounds across clinical, literary, and cultural contexts.

Abstract: The theoretical paradigms of media theories, which discuss the relationship among human, technology and medium has been shifting during the past 50 years. They changed their focus from the decisive and essential role of techniques to the perspective of media ontology. This article is a review on the media theories of three representative scholars-McLuhan, Kittler and Krämer-from the ontological perspective of narrative theory. McLuhan’s media theory emphasizes the importance of technology in communication. In this mechanized process, the subjectivity of human thus disappear and media becomes the extension of human. While with the notion of “materialities of communication” and the autonomy in technology, Kittler believes that communication channel is only materialistic techniques. He analyzed medium from the perspective of historical context, power and discourse, as well as the structure of communication. Krämer used the "messenger model" metaphor to explain the mediating function of medium as mediality. Machine is the result of the mediating function of symbols or the process of “formalization”. As such, she constructs a theoretical paradigm on a macro level, which neither distinguishes technology and human, nor highlights the power of techniques. These theoretical explorations have important inspiring significance for the current issue "techniques-society", such as ethics, values and the relationship among human, technology and machines in the era of artificial intelligence. (This paper is originally published in Chinese)

Die Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Religion und Medialität, besonders von Religion und Schrift, ist ebenso naheliegend wie verlockend, verführt aber leicht zu vorschnellen, mediendeterministischen Kurzschlüssen und zu einer Mediengeschichtsschreibung auf der Grundlage der Religionsgeschichte. In Abgrenzung zu den mehrheitlich phonozentrischen, aber auch zu konträren grammatozentrischen Entwürfen will mein Beitrag über bislang unterbelichtete Dimensionen der phonetischen Schrift, ihr spezifisches Schweigen („Schriftschweigen“) sowie das Verstummen in der schriftlichen Kommunikation („Schriftverstummen“) eine protomessianische Dimension der phonetischen Schrift („Unschweigen“) erkunden. Die dabei erarbeiteten Begriffe sind, wie am Ende des Beitrags gezeigt wird, geeignet, sowohl das merkwürdig jähe Ende des Markusevangeliums als auch, darüber hinaus, die Frage nach dem Spezifischen der literarischen Gattung „Evangelium“ zu erhellen.

The question about the relation between religion and mediality, especially between religion and writing (scripture) as a medium, appears (self-)evident and alluring. It can all too easily become ensnared in the rash solutions of media determinism, resulting in a history of media understood as parallel to the history of religion. The following paper distances itself from both the predominant phonocentric as well as contrary grammatocentric approaches and chooses another path. It addresses an aspect of phonetic writing neglected until now, namely the silence specific to writing („Schriftschweigen“), together with the possibility of falling silent, the descending hush in written communication („Schriftverstummen“). It investigates the prospect of a proto-messianic dimension of phonetic writing, namely „Unschweigen“, un-silence. As I will argue at the end of my paper, these concepts are helpful for a better understanding of the Gospel of Mark, especially the peculiarity of its abrupt end, and to shed light on the Gospel as a genre.

This article examines the techniques that constitute logistical operation, suggesting the application of the chaîne opératoire to the abstract structure of the supply chain. Building on a German media theoretical approach to “cultural techniques" and the idea of “logistical media,” it argues for assembly as an ur-mediative technique, one produced both before and beside attendant mediative functions of storage and transmission. Long before its instantiation in contemporary logistical systems, assembly emerged as a cultural technique in the ancient storehouse. In time, the abstract forms of mediation it produced made sites accessible as a virtual assembly—a development of critical importance to the instrumental operations of the global supply chain.

In the summer of 1982, Friedrich Kittler submitted his post-doctoral thesis (Habilitationsschrift) to the then four philosophical faculties of the Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg. Entitled Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 – and later known in English as Discourse Networks 1800/1900 – the work amounted to 581 pages in typescript. Its author, mischievous as ever, was perhaps already anticipating that it would test the limits of the entire academic process. Two years passed before the appointed committee, having sought eleven instead of the typical three evaluations, was able to make its final decision and, despite one dissenting opinion, bring the process to a positive conclusion. 

In Kittler’s Habilitation process it is possible to identify, in nuce, many of the aspects that would come to characterize his later academic career. An examination of this historical constellation sheds light, that is, on what Kittler’s writings stand for and what they are directed against; it also does much to explain the antagonistic tone that characterized them for so long.

Die Macy-Konferenzen versammeln von 1946 bis 1953 die technokratische Wissenschaftselite der U.S.A., um die Theorie und Praxis der „Circular Causal, and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems“ zu diskutieren. Neurologen (Frederick A. Mettler, Hans Lukas Teubner u.a.), Psychologen (Howard L. Liddlle, Warren S. McCulloch, u.a.), Mathematiker (John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Walter Pitts, u.a.), Soziologen (Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, u.a.), Physiologen, Philosophen und Ingenieure erörtern in interdisziplinärer Auseinandersetzung die Interaktionspotentiale zwischen biologischen, maschinellen und menschlichen Systemen, deren Steuerung, Regelung und Kontrolle. Die Macy-Konferenzen sind der historisch einmalige Versuch in einer kontrollierten, aber offenen Versuchsanordnung ein neues Theorie-Paradigma zu erschaffen, neue Metaphern und eine neue Sprache zu inaugurieren. 2004 hat Claus Pias die Transkripte von fünf der insgesamt zehn Macy-Konferenzen im diaphanes Verlag publiziert. Diese Dokumente sind Zeitzeugen eines Kontrolltraums, der in vielfacher Umgestaltung im 21. Jahrhundert ebenso virulent und dessen politische Brisanz aktueller denn je ist: „Wieners Zukunftsvision von einer kybernetischen Gesellschaft liefert für den neuen politisch-militärischen Status der USA als Supermacht die wissenschaftliche Legitimation. Kybernetik wird zur neuen globalen Leitwissenschaft, die fortan unter wechselnden Etiketten weiterentwickelt wird. Aus einer Theorie wird weltweite Praxis.“ (Lutz Dammbeck)

Das Verhältnis von Theorie und Praxis der Kybernetik spiegelt sich in der zentralen These der Filmdokumentation „Das Netz“ von Lutz Dammbeck wider, der im Stile einer modernen Wissenschaftsarchäologie den Kontrolltraum technokratischer Wissenschaftseliten in den U.S.A ausleuchtet. Indem Dammbeck die Protagonisten der Information Society - Expanded Cinema-Festival, Whole-Earth-Community, Macy-Conferences, ARPA, MIT u.v.a. – mit dem „Antitechnologischen Manifest“ des Una-Bombers konfrontiert, rekonstruiert er bis heute wirksame Motive und Fluchtlinien der Macy-Konferenzen. Sichtbar werden in den zahlreichen Interviews die verschiedenen Zuflussquellen für die gesteuerte Entwicklung einer Wissenschaft, die – während sie daran ging Computer und Kommunikationstechnologien erst mit Blick auf militärische Abwehrsysteme, dann im Sinne neuer Kommunikationsnetze miteinander zu vernetzen – schließlich auch die „Vorhersage und Kontrolle menschlichen Verhaltens möglich macht“. Denn: „In diesen weltweiten funktionierenden Maschinensystemen sind alle Aussagen richtig.... Weil sich alle von anderen Aussagen ableiten lassen.“, konstatiert Heinz von Foerster, Sekretär der Macy Konferenzen und Begründer des Biological Computer Lab (BCL).

Was ursprünglich mit einfachen Diagrammen geschlossener Schaltkreise begann, mutierte in mehr als sechs Jahrzehnten zu einer multiplen und verschachtelten Mensch-Maschine-Landschaft, die biologische und technische Systeme zur Augmented Reality koppelt, Systemdynamiken in Simulationen berechnet oder Expertensysteme und Roboter in Arbeitsabläufe eingegliedert. "Tatsächlich sind - wie die schönen neuen Welten des Cyberspace - die heutigen Life Sciences der vielleicht deutlichste Beweis dafür, wie anonym oder versteckt das kybernetische Wissen inzwischen reagiert, gerade weil es durchgängig regiert." (Bernhard Dotzler)

Von militärischen Abwehrsystemen zu Kommunikationsnetzen, von geschlossenen zu offenen Systemen, von der Homeostase zur Emergenz, vom einfachen Servomechanismus zu komplexen Multi-Agenten-Systemen – entlang dieser Vektoren, die bis in die Gegenwart (und darüber hinaus) reichen, spannt sich der Bogen der Travestien der Kybernetik auf. Das kybernetische Programm spiegelt dabei nicht zuletzt einen bis heute vorherrschenden Versuch wider, die Rolle menschlicher Akteure in einer zunehmend techno-kulturellen Umwelt zu verorten.

Ist also die Frage nach den »Travestien der Kybernetik« heute aktueller denn je oder als rein nostalgisch zu verbuchen? Welche Rolle spielen die menschlichen Akteure in den mittlerweile globalen und offenen Systemen? Wer ist Steuermann, wer User? Sind komplexe Systeme grundsätzlich „Out of Control“ oder Elemente einer „erweiterten Kontrolle“? Welche Bedeutung hat heute noch ein kybernetisches System-Konzept? Welche Formen kann das kybernetische Denken annehmen – und welche Alternativen schließt das kybernetische Denken aus?

2-Tägiges Event mit
– Film-Event zu Lutz´Dammbeck "Das Netz" (mit Claus Pias)
– Ausstellung mit umfangreichen Video- und Recherche-Material von Lutz Dammbeck
– Workshop an der FU Berlin (Diskussion zahlreicher Input-Papiere; u.a. von Ulrike Bergermann, Peter Bexte Rainer Fischbach, Gabriele Gramelsberger/Oliver Lerone Schultz, Helmut Höge Sybille Krämer, Markus Rautzenberg

Recent developments on informational and digital technologies evince an hindrance in recognizing a physical consistence or a stable presence in technical objects. Virtual imaginary conceives a reality where everything exists in circuits inaccurately and subsists through a nomadic ubiquity and detached from a particular support. Announced the media crisis and the crisis of the object, the problem becomes a concrete one when it is assumed that physical space collapses with the emergence of cybernetic networks, and object hardness gives rise to the evanescence of electricity, optical fiber, frequencies and bits. Among artistic tendencies of dematerialization and theories on virtual, a certain type of contemporary discourse emancipates the immaterial as a category that represents a new technological phase. 
This tendency to the immaterial seems however to be narrow, from the cultural angle, and inaccurate from the technical angle. It is narrow because it denies any materiality unrelated to metaphors of solidity, palpability, opacity, or density, meanings that succeed from the greek ὑλη. It is inaccurate because, although evanescent, indeterminate, or unstable, numerical-digital matter is still a material state. These material states compel, moreover, to new exploitations of materiality and to more sophisticated devices. The ubiquity of informational material and his unceasing circulation on network will demonstrate that instead of being before a regime of immaterial, we are before a regime of multiplication where everything turns into information, through intermediate states of matter and devices. After all, the opened epoch is not one of the immaterial but of the hypermmaterial (Bernard Stiegler). Among the several involvements of this assumption, one begins to recognize a need to overcoming the Aristotelian scheme of hylemorphism, which stands that all the bodies are constituted by shape and matter, to realize that there is an ongoing state of things without things, when is no longer possible to distinguish matter and form – everything will be surface. At this point, suspended the rigid materiality as a constraint to the universal converging of media in a total connection, what Friedrich Kittler called «surface effect» becomes relevant (Oberflächeneffekt), pointing to a generalization of the interface as cultural and technological configuration which gathers the media crossing, the screen logic as experience and a formal regime of digital numeralization whose referent is not in the natural world but in the universe of pure quantitative data, enabling a new morphogenetic of the world in constant taking shape.

Key-words: materiality, surface effect, interface, hylemorphism, objects.

In recent methodological scholarship on digital games, a strong connection is noted between “platform studies” and media archaeology. While platform studies has its critics, who primarily lament the limitations of the project, a recent spate of publications in the field suggests considerable dynamism in platform studies as the concept is further developed. This article argues that by examining platform studies from the perspective of media archaeology, it becomes apparent that platform studies establishes an “epistemic threshold”. Additionally, platform studies is a historical method which both establish continuities and mark breaks with previous platforms and technologies. From the perspective of this threshold, this article explores epistemic questions that arise from how platform studies forms an archive, and how media archaeology can enrich the method’s explicit concerns and engagements with technology and culture.

When German media theory (GMT) took shape in the early 1980s it was influenced
by cybernetic concepts; however, it eventually discovered the history of cybernetics
as an object of research. The article follows the assumption that GMT’s double reference to cybernetics must be characterized as the result of both a shared epistemology and a specific discursive constellation. After contrasting McCulloch’s concept of a synthetic physiological a priori and Kittler’s concept of a technological a priori it examines how GMT adopted concepts from cybernetics, and how its members eventually became fascinated by the history of cybernetics. The article concludes that the double reference to cybernetics explains its special role in GMT, while raising problems for GMT’s current fascination with cybernetics.

Be it in the case of opening a website, sending an email, or high-frequency trading, bits and bytes of information have to cross numerous nodes at which micro-decisions are made. These decisions concern the most efficient path through the network, the processing speed, or the priority of incoming data packets.

Despite their multifaceted nature, micro-decisions are a dimension of control and surveillance in the twenty-first century that has received little critical attention. They represent the smallest unit and the technical precondition of a contemporary network politics – and of our potential opposition to it. The current debates regarding net neutrality and Edward Snowden’s revelation of NSA surveillance are only the tip of the iceberg. What is at stake is nothing less than the future of the Internet as we know it.

Review essay on Wolfgang Ernst, Lorenz Engell and Andreas Hepp, three books on media theory.  In: German Studies Review, Volume 37, Number 2, May 2014, pp. 405-416.  (Note: the journal added a grammar error on page 411: "Again, though, the
appeal of Geertz, as of his New Historicist disciples like Stephen Greenblatt, lays in" - should be "lies in," of course -- which is what I wrote.)

In a prophetic essay from 1991, “Digitaler Schein”(digital appearance) Czec-brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser recognizes the end Modernity as the process of a radical transformation of alphabet into numbers, a process that would create no further difference between “real” and “artificial” (künstleriches) world. According to Flusser, Post-history era – or the era of “alpha-numeric society” – creates a gap between those who think and act in a “formal and numeric” way (the “programmers”) and those who still think and act in a “lettered”(büchstablich) way (the “programmed ones”). This gap could only be overcome through the opening or de-cyphering of the codes that sustain the “black boxes” created by the programmers, which seems nowadays almost a task for Sisyphus, specially for the scholars of the Humanities. However, german ex-”Germanist” and media philosopher Friedrich Kittler creates a literary-tecno-archeological kind of “hardware” hermeneutics that somehow accomplishes Flussers call for a new kind of research vis-à-vis the digital world. My aim is here to understand the heritage of the Flusser-Kittler way of thinking of the digital world in order to look through his dark side.

The concept of 'media' can provide an anchor point for developing organizational theories about information and communication technologies, materiality, communication, and organizational change. However, to date, organizational research often takes the meaning of the term media for granted. This article therefore explores various conceptions of media, outlining how such theories can be used for advancing the conception of media in organizational research. Using three ideal-typical branches of conceptions of media, we explore key concerns regarding media in existing literature outside of organizational research. First, the culture and power branch problematizes how cultural practices and power structures are inscribed through media; second, the technology and infrastructure branch emphasizes the inherent 'eigenlogik' of media technology; and third, the process and change branch explores how existing economic and aesthetic conventions in media persist over time. Using organizational media in general and enterprise social media in particular we discuss how each of these three ideal-typical branches offer pathways for organizational research. Specifically we argue for shifting the use of the term media beyond merely describing tools for communication as media theories offer insights for understanding the long-term consequences of materiality and ontological co-constitution within sociomaterial assemblages.

My paper will argue that our food systems not only sustain life, but serve as a horizon for the understanding of what 'life' is. Food and how it is produced establishes the ontological position of the human visa -vis other beings. Our food systems continually break down, however, and communicable diseases (e.g. the avian flu) break the 'species-barrier.' As Mary Douglas observes, when such " monstrous births occur, the defining lines between humans and animals may be threatened " (Douglas 1980:39). However, the 'monstrous births' of any system are endogenous to them; according to Douglas, what appears to originate outside of the system is a product of the systematization process itself (1980:39). Indeed, humans have continually broken species-barriers in order to guarantee reliable food sources—we drink another animal's milk, for example, calling into question how these species-barriers are defined, and how feeble those definitions can be. Like the technologies of Dr. Frankenstein, appropriations of and interventions in nonhuman biology are intended to overcome the precarity of human life and our bodily shortcomings. This paper was in part inspired by the manga and anime series, Knights of Sidonia, where the human classes of a post-earth civilization are genetically modified to photosynthesize the majority of their energy needs. I ask, if humans are so changed that they no longer procure and eat food as they have done for millennia, will we be human anymore? In this sense, I consider food from a posthuman perspective, not only thinking the human to its endpoint through its relation to food, but also taking up the posthumanist project in decentering the human and considering the complex relationship we have always bore to other species and technology, troubling any essentialist notion of the human.

Die  Kritische  Theorie,  und  insbesondere  Theodor  W.  Adorno,  wird permanent  mit einem naheliegenden Vorwurf konfrontiert: dem des Kulturpessimismus. Was der Vorwurf zumeist unterschlägt, ist die Tatsache, dass er dem Selbstverständnis Kritischer Theorie radikal zuwiderläuft. Denn für Adorno wäre Kritik ohne Utopie als Movens und Telos gar nicht denkbar. Vielmehr setzt Kritik, als bestimmte Negation des Bestehenden, das Vorstellungsvermögen und die Möglichkeit einer anderen, besseren Welt nachgerade voraus. Von einer solchen darf es jedoch kein fixiertes oder fertiges Bild geben, um die utopisch-kritische Dimension zu bewahren. Zudem  steht eben  gerade  nicht  bloß  die  Auseinandersetzung mit Kultur  im Zentrum der Kritik, sondern die Gesellschaft als Ganzes, das System ihrer sozialen Organisation, das gesellschaftliche Handeln ebenso wie die sich in ihr artikulierenden und durch sie bestimmten Denkformen. Die  nachfolgenden  Ausführungen  versuchen,  aus  einer  medienphilosophisch 
interessierten  Perspektive,  die  epistemologischen  Bedingungen  dieser  Denkfigur des Utopischen herauszuarbeiten.

From the medieval epic poem Das Nibelungenlied (c. 1200) to Richard Wagner’s four-part opera Der Ring des Nibelungen (1848-1874) to Fritz Lang’s two-part series Die Nibelungen (1924), the trope of the Nibelungenlied and the myth of Siegfried have endured for centuries and find a home in the German Netflix series Babylon Berlin (2017–) as well. This chapter shows the intermedial and transhistorical dimensions of the Nibelungenlied in Babylon Berlin and reads the first three seasons as a commentary on the myth of the hero in a failing republic. From protagonist Gereon Rath’s sessions as ‘Siegfried’ with the nefarious Dr. Schmidt to the right-wing conspiracy of the Dolchstoßlegende, Babylon Berlin references motifs from the Nibelungenlied that are indicative of the underlying psychological events and trauma of the hero in the Weimar Republic. These central aesthetic and thematic motifs of the series are expressed as screen memories (Sigmund Freud) that both reveal and mask the hero’s underlying trauma and the recognition of his failure that can be extended to the failure of the Weimar Republic as well. As such, Babylon Berlin casts the Nibelungen myth against the collapse of Weimar Germany to create a rendition of Lang’s vision for a German “national document” that is especially relevant in our digital age.

In addressing technology,  Film and media theory- or, more specifically, apparatus theory and Kittlerian media theory - appear to be facing a kind of uncertainty principle, according to which one can either focus on technology or meaning, but never on both simultaneously, thus forever missing out on the meaning of cinema as technology

近年來，德國媒介理論在華語學術圈頗受關注。基德勒、齊林斯基、埃
爾塞瑟、克拉瑪及近期的皮亞斯、恩斯特、西格特、威茲曼等人及其著作受到譯介，媒介考古、媒介技術、文化技藝等概念也得到一定闡述。然而譯介
零散、研究不足，常造成認知混亂和理解困難。本文基於比較和歷史研究的
方法，試圖將「德國媒介研究」置入德國傳播學史及其代際演變之中，在多種媒介體系的參照下，考察與德國媒介學派開創者基德勒有著密切聯繫且影響日盛的三種代表學說：文化技藝、媒介考古和控制論，以此來梳理和探討德國媒介理論從 1980 年代至今所呈現出的反叛、變節和遞歸的變化脈絡。

In Capital, Marx argues that his greatest discovery was the “dual character of labour embodied in commodities” (1976:131). If the commodity has a dual character of use-value and value, then the labour producing the commodity must also have a two-fold character, which Marx conceptualizes as concrete and abstract. While concrete labour produces the use-value of the commodity, such as programming producing software, programming creates value insofar it is labour abstracted from its concrete manifestation. Abstract labour is the substance of value. This abstraction is a process that occurs during the moment of exchange when two qualitatively different commodities are equated quantitatively as values and measured in terms of labour-time. Exchange “consummates the abstraction that underlies abstract labour” (Heinrich 2012:50). The abstraction of labour, however, is not a mental abstraction, but a real one that is “carried out in the actual behavior of humans” (Heinrich 2012:49). Because the abstraction of labour is a human behaviour, this action can be thought of as a cultural technique. Among other things, cultural techniques are “material practices that sustain and enable ‘culture’” (Parikka 2013:4); they process cultural boundaries, such as subject/object (Siegert 2011); and “bring forth a certain kind of subject and… society” through processes of learning and routinizing (Geoghegan 2013:12). Marx initially describes the abstraction of labour as ‘the changing of hands’ of commodities and money, but specifies it as the practices of buying and selling. Thus the technique includes the payment for and transfer of private property, which today occurs through the punching in of a pin number after swiping or inserting a credit card into a payment terminal. These sophisticated payment systems are themselves products of the abstraction of labour and points to how the abstraction of labour is an activity that is continually learned and routinized. This paper will explore the abstraction of labour as a cultural technique, and argue that this activity is the dominant cultural technique of the capitalist mode of production. It will examine how this cultural technique sustains and enables value; how it processes the internal contradiction between value and use-value into the external opposition between money and commodities; and how exchanging is an activity that must be learned, routinized and habituated..

Bibliography
Marx, K. (1976). Capital Vol. 1. London: Penguin Press.

Geoghegan, B. D. (2013). After Kittler: On the Cultural Techniques of recent German Media Theory. Theory, Culture and Society Vol. 30 (6):66-82.

Heinrich, M. (2012). An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.

Parikka, J. (2013). Afterword: Cultural Techniques and Media Studies. Theory, Culture and Society Vol. 30 (6):147-159.

Siegert, B. (2013). Cultural Techniques: Or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German Media Theory. Theory, Culture and Society Vol. 30 (6):48-65.

Based on on overview on the distinction between training and inference in machine learning the article investigates the hidden labour of labelling in large scale data models for AI image recognition. It is shown how labelling infers the presence of human bodies which is analysed as the creating of an indexiality of digital images. The activity of image labelling is hence called indexicality work. English article published in the volume: Fan Jieping / Liu Yongqiang (Ed..): Bildforschung aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive. Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press 2021, p. 314-332.