Cultural Techniques and the Politics of Detail: Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and/as Media Theory

Tom McCarthy’s novels are informed by media theory, and this essay reads his novel Remainder not only with theory in order to highlight parallels to reflections on cultural techniques and sociotechnical networks but also tries to assess its relevance as theory. My essay will, first of all, introduce the media theoretical framework of cultural techniques and show how cultural techniques are described in Remainder. The parallel agendas of the novel and cultural techniques research, I argue, converge in a shared interest in materiality, practices, and the seemingly banal details of everyday life but put them into different perspectives. I will then read Remainder as a contribution to the theoretical debate on cultural techniques and suggest that the novel draws our attention to a politics of detail in theories of practices, the everyday, and cultural techniques.