Cultural Techniques : Assembling Spaces Texts & Collectives Frontmatter Contents Introduction Working on Barricades and Boulevards: Cultural Techniques of Revolution in Nineteenth Century Paris Cultural Techniques and Founding Fictions A Message in a Bottle Waiting: Cultural Techniques Media and Infrastructures Orthopedics by the Roadside: Spikes and Studs as Devices of Social Normalization Ballooning: Aeronautical Techniques from Montgolfier to Google Attached: The Object and the Collective Monturen montures: On Riding Dressing and Wearing. Nomadic Cultural Techniques and (the Marginalization) of Asian Clothing in Europe Self Imprints of Nature Identifying Categorizing and Stigmatizing Fat Bodies Techniques of the Body and Storytelling: From Marcel Mauss to César Aira Writing Out Gathered Up at a Venture from All Four Corners of the Earth: Jean Pauls Techniques and Operations (on Excerpts) Collecting Texts: Miscellaneity in Journals Anthologies and Novels (Jean Paul) Reading by Grouping: Collecting Discipline(s) in Brockhauss Bilder Atlas Patience and Precipitation: Two Figures of Historical Change The Fruit Fly the Vermin and the Prokurist: Operations of Appearing in Kafkas Metamorphosis Collective Likeness: Mimetic Aspects of Liking List of Figures List of Contributors Name Index Subject Index This volume presents the preliminary results of the work carried out by the interdisciplinary cultural techniques research lab at the University of Erfurt. Taking up an impulse from media studies its contributions examine from a variety of disciplinary perspectives the interplay between the formative processes of knowledge and action outlined within the conceptual framework of cultural techniques. Case studies in the fields of history literary (and media) studies and the history of science reconstruct seemingly fundamental demarcations such as nature and culture the human and the nonhuman and materiality and the symbolical order as the result of concrete practices and operations. These studies reveal that particularly basic operations of spatialization form the very conditions that determine emergence within any cultural order. Ranging from manual and philological paper work to practices of opening up and closing off spaces and collective techniques of assembly these case studies replace the grand narratives of cultural history focusing on micrological examinations of specific constellations between human and nonhuman actors