Society & Culture / Culture & Ideas / Cultural Criticism & Analysis

Before Humans, There Were Operations: How Cultural Techniques Create Our World

Cultural Techniques (Kulturtechniken)

Jörg Dünne, Kathrin Fehringer, Kristina Kuhn, Stefan Rieger

This video explores the groundbreaking concept of 'cultural techniques' from the book of the same name. It challenges the traditional view of culture as a set of ideas or symbols, arguing instead that concrete operations and practices—like writing, farming, and building—come first. Discover how these operations create the very categories of space, body, and collective that we take for granted. From the barricades of Paris to the drift of bottles in the ocean, and from the invention of trousers to the algorithms of Facebook, we reveal how the seemingly mundane acts of cutting, measuring, and connecting shape our reality. Author: The book is edited by Jörg Dünne, Kathrin Fehringer, Kristina Kuhn, and Stefan Rieger. This summary provides a deep dive into their core theories, showing how practices precede concepts and how we are all assembled through operational chains.