1. 2008/09 Hominization and Anthropotechnologies – the Making of Humans.

The first step aims to formulate the essential positions of the new media-anthropological paradigm in arts and cultural studies. Media anthropology starts from the assumption that there is no such thing as the human being per se; rather, there are a plethora of cultural technolgies of hominization or “anthropo-techniques“ (Sloterdijk), for short. This makes it impossible to adhere to rigid demarcations between humanity and technology, between the human and non-human, or between culture and nature. Instead, cultural techniques are described as networks of distributed power of action in which human and non-human agents are, as it were, enmeshed, creating themselves again and again in recursive interactions. It was thus only possible (to give but one example) to domesticate animals in the course of the co-evolutionary domestication of human beings. The erection of a pen, a fence, allowing the hunter to become a shepherd, results not only in domestication of animal species, but also in the very first break with those human/animal metamorphoses to which the Palaeolithic cave paintings bear witness. If something like effects or (better) agency exists here, it emanates from all three of these agents: the human being with his fence acts on the animal, the fence positions human being and animal in respect of one another, and the animals in this positionedness require the human beings to behave in a certain way, behaviour which, in turn, cannot reckon without the fence. If, against this background, the intention is to discuss the foundations from which positions and limits of a contemporary media anthropology might emerge, such discussion will be grounded in a material epistemology.
Media as relational (symbolic) and material hybrid entities with subject and object parts not only designate crucial initiators of action in these networks, they also form those very locations and instruments at which the anthropo-technical processes are revealed and with the aid of which they are (can be) observed and reflected upon. This applies, for example, to the moving image. It is the product of a highly complex, technically, institutionally and individually functionalized field of action together with its own instances of reflection. When it is presented, it functions in a second, different ensemble, in which devices (cinema, television etc.), viewers and other cultural fields are included. Thirdly, it represents and thematizes agency, agents and agencies in characteristic manner, aesthetically and diegetically, simultaneously creating them itself for the first time. If the moving images put human and non-human agents against one another time and again, this only happens – at the production level of these images – in the inseparable interaction between these agents. It is in moving images that the interconnectedness of human and non-human agents becomes visible, is produced and is reflected upon.