Prototyping/2025-2026/T1

Syllabus (IN PROGRESS) for prototyping during Special Issue 28 (September-December 2025)

Postprint

🔖 Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational, Katherine Hayles (2021) (bootleglibrary)

cognitive assemblages

• the media-archeology approach

In practice, media archeology often focuses on legacy media such as early cinematic devices, telephones, telegraphs, and so forth. The tendency in media archeology is to promote, as Ernst describes it, an “awareness of moments when media themselves, not exclusively humans anymore, become active ‘archaeologists’ of knowledge.” The differences between narrative and media archeology deepen when the devices are cognitive or, as Ernst writes, when “techno-epistemological configurations” underlie the “discursive surfaces”— that is, when software architectures generate the output that humans see. 40 If one focuses only on the (human- centered) display, the machine’s viewpoint is lost, and one consequently has little or no idea of what is actually generating the display and the results it conveys. (page 29)

The latter point has another aspect, too: in focusing only on the technical capabilities of media, salutary as that may be, the media-archeology approach sometimes leaves to the side the historical circumstances in which those devices were created, including why the inventors focused on certain functionalities rather than on others, why some devices were commercially successful and others were not, and how the devices transformed the media ecologies in which they were embedded. (page 30)

• the cultural techniques approach

Bernhard Siegert’s excellent introduction to his book Cultural Techniques articulates the central ideas of this approach and locates it within media theory more generally. Siegert quotes Thomas Macho’s argument that “cultural techniques—such as writing, reading, painting, counting, making music—are always older than the concepts that are generated from them. People wrote long before they conceptualized writing or alphabets; millennia passed before pictures and statues gave rise to the concept of the 32Introducing Postprintimage; and to this day, people may sing or make music without knowing anything about notes or musical notation systems.” (page 31)

Siegert writes that “operations such as counting or writing always presuppose technical objects capable of performing—and to a considerable extent, determining— these operations.”⁴⁷ By focusing on technical objects (construed quite broadly as including doors, filters, and grids, each the subject of one of Siegert’s chapters), the cultural-techniques approach claims to have a view of culture at its source (...). (page 32)

Although sharing with media archeology a focus on objects, the cultural-techniques approach diverges from it in taking a keen interest in how objects are created, used, modified, and discarded, which necessarily expands the scope of the approach to human interactions with technical objects. (page 32)

• the cognitive assemblages approach

The cognitive-assemblage approach travels along the same path as media archeology in affirming that objects may have viewpoints, and it shares with the cultural-techniques approach an intense interest in understanding the chains of connection and causality that enmesh humans and objects together into assemblages. The main point of difference lies in the emphasis on cognitions as processes central to understanding how cognitive assemblages are constituted, function, adapt and evolve, and have become pervasive in contemporary societies. (page 32/33)

Hence, in the cognitive framework the emphasis falls not solely or even primarily on hominization as creating distinctions between humans and nonhuman animals (Siegert’s “humans as such”) but rather on the ways in which humans are now inextricably bound up with networks of intelligent devices, from jet aircraft to underground fiber-optic cables and almost everything else in between. (page 33)

This work builds upon earlier word, published a decade before the Postprint book:

🔖 Writing Machines, Katherine Hayles (2011) (bootleglibrary)

• technotext
  • inscription

(hmm, the entanglement with shadow libraries and our bootleglibrary!)