Summary
A cultural technē is the shared toolkit of social meanings – signs, stock stories, default assumptions, concepts – that people use to interpret things and coordinate with one another. The term is the philosopher Sally Haslanger’s; technē is Greek for craft or skill. Her examples include ‘pink means girl’ and ‘red means stop’. In a 2020 lecture she said the cultural technē “gives us the means for interpreting that then shapes our ways of seeing and thinking and our desires and then guides our behaviour”.
It becomes ideology, in her account, when those meanings hold injustice in place. Privately rejecting it isn’t enough, she argues: everyday coordination depends on it.
Rationale
Part 1 names ‘cultural technē’ among concepts that look beneath conscious belief. It reached us through Wolfgang Wopperer, a studio collaborator. We share Haslanger’s view that we engage in practices “very unconsciously often”.