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Attributed to Petrus Christus. Annunciation, ca. 1450. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic BERNHARD SIEGERT TRANSLATED BY JOHN DURHAM PETERS 1. Cultural Techniques We have forgotten how âto close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly.â In his American exile Theodor W. Adorno diagnosed the decline of an elementary cultural technique [Kulturtechnik], something he felt to be nothing less than a prelude to fascism. One has to slam car doors and refrigerator doors, Adorno noted, while other doors snap shut on their own. Doors cease to be cultural media that preserve a âcore of experienceâ and instead change into machines that demand movements in which Adorno, in all seriousness, saw âalready the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist abusesâ at work.1 One can make of this what one will, but Adorno, in understanding the disappearance of the door-handle as of epochal import, must doubtless count as a philosopher of culture who had already confronted the fundamental significance of cultural techniques in the 1940s. Adorno places gesture and mechanism, human and inhuman actors into a relation in which both sides gain âagencyâ2 and in which even the inhuman actor has the power
Grey Room – MIT Press
Published: Apr 1, 2012
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