Xindi Li

"If media theory were or had a grammar, that agency would find its expression in objects claiming the grammatical subject position and cultural techniques standing in for verbs", writes Cornelia Vismann of the prolific subgenre of media theory known as cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken). Cultural techniques attempts to approach media not as ontological objects, but through their conditions of representation as a network of operations—their so-called onticity. Strikingly, it seeks to account for multiple cross-cultural accounts of the making of man, or hominization, in the space between land and sea. Here, the ship emerges as a primary object of analysis: for example, Bernhard Siegert’s claim that in maritime Trobriands society, a myth of flying witches conditions the technological seaworthiness of the canoe. As such, the human emerges from the inhuman. I take up Vismann’s invitation to examine cultural techniques’ "grammar" through a comparative study of another grammar—what Hortense Spillers names an American one. Spillers’ "Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book" provides an alternate formulation of the sea’s foundational potential, locating the symbolic order of America at the scene of the Atlantic slave trade. While the study of cultural techniques often moves from myth to historical analysis, I interrogate what happens when the domestication of human bodies aboard the slave ship results from history—yet never culminates in the human. By this I mean that the slave, made chattel and fungible, never arrives at personhood under landed law. In this comparative study of cases of becoming-inhuman, my cultural-technical engagement with "Mama’s Baby" redirects media philosophy toward non-being, an impossible ontological status not lost but re-articulated in the turn to conditions of representation. In tracing this drift, I draw also on the 20th century land art movement, through two cases that similarly mark the violent, technological infusion of land/sea, inscription/forgetting, and human/inhuman.

There is an animus that comes with the animatronic sparkle of cute things. When an animated character is described as cute, it also becomes carved out as a receptacle for violence and disposability. This article tracks the simultaneous alienation and intimacy that is produced through the animated image, in the context of how it generates a vital force that also marks its life as a commodity. I argue that cinematic animation uniquely captures its own technical develop-ment, in which the image retains and reworks its prior forms. This is what I term the neotenous image. It is through this image that technical and economic alienation are not only captured but magnified, in its shared dimension with the conditions of commodity production. Using the film Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space (dir. t.o.L, 2002) as a parable for this type of image and mode of production, I show how cuteness functions not only as an aesthetic category, but a channel for the reproductive force of animated image-commodities. It is in these commodities that intimacy and alienation are able to reproduce each other dialectically, in their contradiction. Using Bataille, Marx, and Simondon, I show how the cute image-commodity’s perpetual sacrifice and rebirth models a visual economy that exploits and expands the temporality of crisis, rather than simply being a result or representation of it. In this way, the neotenous image names the developmental logic of the technical object in, and as, the historical condition of a capitalism that incessantly thrives on the novel, cute thing.