Ontical Drift: the Amphibious Ruins between Cultural Techniques and Non-Being

«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.