W. Anthony Sheppard

Bernhard Siegert

Christiane Lewe

Laurette Burgholzer

Joyce Cheng

Sarah Hegenbart

Bethan Hughes

Judith Kemp

Anja Wächter

Eleonore Zapf

This volume looks at masking and unmasking as indivisible aspects of the same process. It gathers articles from a wide range of disciplines and addresses un/masking both as a historical and a contemporary phenomenon. By highlighting the performative dimensions of un/masking, it challenges dichotomies like depth and surface, authenticity and deception, that play a central role in masks being commonly associated with illusion and dissimulation. The contributions explore topics such as the relationship between face, mask, and identity in artistic contexts ranging from Surrealist photography to video installations and from Modernist poetry to fin-de-siècle cabaret theater. They investigate un/masking as a process of transition and transformation – be it in the case of the wooden masks of the First Nations of the American Northwest Coast or of the elaborate costumes and vocal masking of pop icon Lady Gaga. In all of these instances, the act of un/masking has the power to simultaneously hide and reveal. It destabilizes supposedly fixed identities and blurs the lines between the self and the other, the visible and the invisible. The volume offers new perspectives on current debates surrounding issues such as protective masks in public spaces, facial recognition technologies, and colonial legacies in monuments and museums, offering insight into what the act of un/masking can mean today. With contributions by Laurette Burgholzer, Joyce Cheng, Sarah Hegenbart, Bethan Hughes, Judith Kemp, Christiane Lewe, W. Anthony Sheppard, Bernhard Siegert, Anja Wächter, and Eleonore Zapf.

Reflections on a Transformative Process

Un/Masking

Wolfgang Schäffner

Robert Stockhammer

Michael Franz

Schon im 18. Jahrhundert standen die Funktionen der poetischen und künstlerischen Zeichen in einem breiten Kontext verschiedenster Zeichentheorien und -praktiken – dies rekonstruierte der Band "Das Laokoon-Paradigma", an den der vorliegende anschließt. Noch enger knüpfen sich die Verbindungen der Zeichenregime im Laufe des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, in denen die Zeichen in eine große Zahl neuer Medien und Maschinen eingespeist werden und damit ihren Status verändern. "Electric Laokoon" – wie die neue zeichenprozessierende Figur angesichts der zentralen Rolle der Elektrizität in diesem Feld heißen mag – steht emblematisch für eine historische Perspektive auf den Zusammenhang zwischen Semiotik und Sprachtheorie einer-, Medientheorie andererseits, der bisher meist vernachlässigt wurde. Die Lochkarte (ein Zeichen, das buchstäblich Maschinen Befehle gibt) und die Grammatologie (eine Theorie der Zeichen in ihrer irreduziblen Medialität) markieren die historischen Eckpunkte dieses Untersuchungsganges. Zwischen ihnen führt der Weg über maschinelle Notationen für Sprache und Körperbewegungen, künstlerische Partizipationen an Kinematik und Hypnose, filmische Reflexionen von Ethnographie und Kriminalistik sowie literarische Reaktionen auf Telephon und Elektrizität. Mit Beiträgen von Inge Baxmann, Annette Bitsch, Robert Brain, Bernhard J. Dotzler, Michael Franz, Rodolphe Gasché, Hans-Christian von Herrmann, Ute Holl, Anton Kaes, Alexandre Métraux, Wolfgang Schäffner, Bernhard Siegert und Robert Stockhammer

Zeichen und Medien, von der Lochkarte zur Grammatologie

Electric Laokoon

This book examines how one aspect of the social and technological situation of literature--namely, the postal system--determined how literature was produced and what was produced within literature. Language itself has the structure of a relay, where what is transmitted depends on a prior withholding. The social arrangements and technologies for achieving this transmission thus have had a particularly powerful impact on the imagination of literature as a medium. The book has three parts. The first part reconstructs the postal conditions of classic and Romantic literature: the invention of postage in the seventeenth century, which transformed the postal system into a service meant to be used by the population (instead of by the prince alone); the sexualization of letter writing, which was introduced in the middle of the eighteenth century and changed the reading of a letter into an interpretation of intimate confessions of the soul; and Goethes turning of this new ontology of the letter into a logistics of literature whereby literary authorship was constructed by means of postal logistics, with the precision of engineering. The second part analyzes nineteenth-century postal innovations that facilitated communication through letters and examines how literary works were able to live off such communication. These innovations included the reform of the post office; the invention of the postage stamp; the Universal Postal Union, which subjected letter writing to an economy of materials and uniform standards; and the telegraph and the telephone, which surpassed literature in terms of speed, economy, and analog-signal processing. In the third part, on the basis of a close reading of Franz Kafkas letters to his typist-fiancée, the author demonstrates how postal logistics of love and authorship have worked in the era of modern postal systems and technical media. Kafkas correspondence is deciphered as a "war of nerves waged by means of all available techniques and conditions of transmission.

Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System

Relays

In a crucial shift within posthumanistic media studies, Bernhard Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions fundamental for a given culture. Cultural Techniques aims to forget our traditional understanding of media so as to redefine the concept through something more fundamental than the empiricist study of a medium’s individual or collective uses or of its cultural semantics or aesthetics. Rather, Siegert seeks to relocate media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and nonhuman, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real are still in the process of becoming. The result is to turn ontology into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur. Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic practices like reading, writing, counting, or image-making. The analysis of artifacts as cultural techniques emphasizes their ontological status as “in-betweens,” shifting from firstorder to second-order techniques, from the technical to the artistic, from object to sign, from the natural to the cultural, from the operational to the representational. Cultural Techniques ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating to the production of the sign-signaldistinction in old and new media, to the reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of trompe-l’oeils, grids, registers, and doors. Throughout, Siegert addresses fundamental questions of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic. Grounding posthumanist theory both historically and technically, this book opens up a crucial dialogue between new German media theory and American postcybernetic discourses.

Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real

Cultural Techniques

Bernhard Siegert

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