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Teaching Technics: Three (Re)Arrangements and Relanguagings
Whose words, whose archives?
My work with the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research provides an important context for my thought and action in relation to the ideas of teaching and technics that I will discuss here. I will begin, then, by sharing a brief introduction to it. The Center is an independent research organization that supports artists, social science and humanities scholars, technologists, and scientists to share knowledge regarding the most pressing issues of our times. Those issues are collectively identified via our conversations with each other. We gather in residencies, workshops, symposia, and other convenings, always experimenting, always trying to find new ways of producing knowledge and working to frame the critical questions that we want to answer through our work together. We also have a yearlong fellowship that supports artists and scholars from all over the world to follow their projects and their priorities, which are largely defined in their specific localities and their contexts. We are also thinking and enacting in this work what the Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel would call “a globality” beyond globalization (Dussel, 2002). We ask, how is it that we can reforge our relationships to each other across the planet outside of the constraints of markets, academic institutions, and the art world, and the constraints of science and the structures of funding that determine the questions of science? In these ways, the work of the Center connects to the framework of rearrangements and relanguaging that I want to open here.
The title of my remarks is “Teaching Technics” and, with “teaching,” I want to turn to Brazilian educator and theorist Paulo Freire, and the concepts of literacy he introduced and that so many people have continued working on since their introduction in the 1960s. These are the ideas of pedagogies of the oppressed and pedagogies of liberation. The critical question that emerges in the practice of Freirean pedagogy is the necessity of the creation of decolonizing vocabularies within what could otherwise become the colonizing imperatives of literacy. Literacy is itself a component of the modernization and development imperatives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With the question of literacy, then, we are confronted with the problem of whose language is taught and whose should be learned. If we are to become “literate,” does that mean we learn others’ languages and others’ vocabularies? Do we learn the language of the oppressors, or do we learn an other language? In the production of vocabularies that come from us, from participants gathered in a learning circle, those of us gathered here, and those gathered in the convenings of the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research, there is a proposal for an other kind of knowledge, an other archive, an other genealogy of thought. I want to transpose that question then, of other archives, other genealogies, and other languages more broadly onto technology and education today.
Thinking with the work of the late Immanuel Wallerstein, the world systems theorist, the difference between the 1960s and today is actually very minimal. We are in the late stages of the capitalist world system and, as Wallerstein teaches us, the next system might be better, or it might be worse. There are no guarantees. The legacies of coloniality remain with us. The legacies of modernization and development remain with us. We continue, in the longue durée of the capitalist world-system, in very much the same moment, with education and technology positioned as levers for the modernization and development of the “Global South.”
Both education and technology are hegemonically narrated as levers for modernity. In the ideology of modernity, which emerges with coloniality, human “development” is measured by technology usage. Capitalist society is perfected by its tools. Modernization and development have provided a driving ideology for the work of territorial expansion and cultural imperialism through the establishment, maintenance, and growth of both education and technology systems.1
These concepts lend a moral and missionary character to the projects of transnational expansion of the “Global North” in the “underdeveloped” countries of the “Global South.” These projects reinforce a geopolitics of knowledge that devalue the knowledges, epistemes, and heuristics of the South. Arturo Escobar calls this the “scopic regime” of development: the range of images of the “Global South” depicting it as empty, a receptacle ready for its encounter with infrastructures of development, including not only canals and dams, but also transportation, energy production, and communication (Escobar, 2011).2 The Internet, a military network turned infrastructure for the exchange of digital matter, builds on global infrastructures of development as an information architecture of capitalist commerce. It also, however, becomes a carrier of multiple meanings. Its purposes, and the direction of its flows, are reworked at its multiple sites of access, globally.
In the current moment, there are many urgencies that frame my understanding of the state of both teaching and technics, and my approach, then, to imagining and mobilizing them. These include a recognition of the existing and emerging forms of social inequalities in which both education and technologies are situated. Most importantly, these are legacies of colonialism and the activities of the modern capitalist world-system, on local and global scales, but as we also know, we are living in a renewed moment of nationalist fascisms, undergirding discourses of difference and rationalizing a myriad of forms of inequality and worse, mass incarceration and genocide. We can understand these conditions as long historical shadows, molecular social and economic movements, and under- and over-currents of power that flow through money, governments, and transnational capital both above and below the horizon of visibility and the governable. And creating friction across these different scales, macro and molecular, of transnational capitalism, nationalisms, racisms, sexisms, queerphobia, and heteronormativity, are education and technology. It has been a continuous thread, that education and technology are levers for people to move from underdevelopment to development. Yet, both education and technology create spaces that galvanize impassioned imaginaries and desires for knowledge equality and epistemic diversity. How do we move forward with a renewed commitment, in these times, to a passionate occupation of these spaces for past and future liberation of knowledges and human potential, beyond homo-economicus, and the overrepresentation of “Man” as Sylvia Wynter writes (Wynter, 2000)? Where do we draw the first starting point of this line? Where is our archive? What is our genealogy? Can we rearrange education? Can we relanguage technology?
Three (re)arrangements or relanguaging
1. Sociogeny
The post- and de-colonial thought of Afro-Caribbean theorists Sylvia Wynter and Édouard Glissant informs my understanding of the role of human visual culture and artistic practices as critical and transformative within these urgencies of the present. For Wynter, who understands the ways in which global capitalism has created a hierarchy of forms of knowledge, as well as a geopolitics of knowledge, the term “sociogeny” is key, developed from the work of Frantz Fanon. Wynter proposes sociogeny as visual, cultural, and artistic practices that reconstruct ways of thinking and doing, including how we understand our own bodies and their possibilities. When understood in the context of forms of social and economic domination, the idea of sociogeny becomes a practice of reconstructing bodies and communities so that we can imagine different conditions for them. Sociogenesis is the writing of our existence. And so, our communication is not only a tool for playing a part in the capitalist world, for playing a part in capital, but to construct our own social relations and potential futures. Wynter thinks in this way with, for example, cinema. She theorizes cinema as, first of all, emerging from earliest forms of human picture-making in the caves; globally, where very early humans did that. But, as a space of co-construction, this also echoes the Third Cinema movement and the sense of the screen being an interface. The screen is not to suture or dominate, the screen is to open the possibility of creating new senses of being human, together (Wynter, 2000).
Images from the international research residencies of the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research, 2017-2020; held in Italy, Mexico, and Kenya. Pictured: Fidencio Briceño Chel (right, Mérida); and Otis Cunningham, Claudette Gacutti, Sonia Barrett, Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, Joseph Kamaru, and Bruno Moreschi (Nairobi, far right).
Source: AD+SR archive
The CAD+SR Affecting Technologies group research gatherings in Helsinki, 2019, and Spoleto, 2018. Pictured, Bently Spang (l), Evelyn Eastmond (r).
Source: CAD+SR archive
The CAD+SR Queering Spaces group symposia and performances in London (2018) and Mérida (2019).
Source: CAD+SR archive
An example of sociogeny as praxis is the work of Native American artist Bently Spang, who re/mediates Indigenous knowledges so that he, members of his tribe, and visitors, understand the intersection of historical traditional cultural practices, and how they survive in forms of storytelling and daily life. Further, the work asks a question about the echoes of this work in the archives of the United States, archives that are constructed upon colonial logics of domination.
2. Technics beyond time
If we understand technology, with Bernard Stiegler, as ways of knowing about technics, with technics understood as the global diversity of human tools—then we have rediscovered our capacity to narrate the tools according to an infinity of temporal, cultural, and geographic specificities. In Technics and Time, Volume 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998), Stiegler discusses technics not only as information communication, digital or electronic technologies, but as tools; as all human tools including the voice, the body, and all of the tools and communication forms that humans have produced globally since we have been on the planet. This sense of a very broad technics relativizes the idea of ICT (Information Communication Technologies) as the only or the most important technology. It also interrogates the imperative of the digital archive in the context of the geopolitics of knowledge. As the digital archive has begun to accrue more value, nondigital archives are undervalued or completely devalued. Those archives that might be spoken, sung, felt in our bodies, that might be ephemeral, are considered unimportant for our human development. Stiegler helps us to think beyond this bind of geopolitical dominance towards an embrace of multiple technics occurring globally, with different forms and histories. Building on Stiegler’s work, Yuk Hui, in a recent work, resituates the history of technology in China, renarrating both technology in China and technology generally (Hui, 2019).
How, then, might we resite our understandings of technology? What are the forms of indigeneity, for example, that we want to relanguage, recover, and resite as the starting points for our ways of knowing and the tools we use? How do these resitings renarrate or otherly situate and historicize digital technologies?
3. Commonplaces & entanglements
The ongoing title of the annual research residency that the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research is “Commonplaces and Entanglements,” a phrase from the thinker and poet Édouard Glissant (1997). The suggestion is that we are inevitably entangled in an archipelago of global-cultural flows, structured largely by legacies of the slave trade and coloniality, and our challenge is to find our common places and to be attentive to our entanglements, while not reducing their complexity and the friction that they inevitably cause, in order to co- and re- construct our humanity. On a continuum with this work, our most recent gathering in Nairobi, in collaboration with artist-researcher Syowia Kyambi, was organized on the theme De/Archive East Africa. Our conversations there centered on an overarching commitment to the disruption of the colonial archive through a deliberate engagement with it, one that seeks to create a ghost in the archive and interrupt its solidity and central authority.
Connecting critical race and ethnic studies theory, social theory, women of color/transnational feminist theory, and film theory, the emphasis in my ongoing research is on the cultural, technological, and political spaces that digital media activates across such times and spaces, creating possibilities for reconstructing ourselves and our relations, including identities, global communities, and social futures. I ask, for example: How can we think differently about, and reroute the pathways, homes, and communities of the geopolitics of knowledge and memories? Our knowledge and memories may be in the “official” archive (the first cinema) or not. Knowledge and memories in the “official archive” can be mined; we can be in conversation with them, listening to and reading between the lines of archived memories; to give these new lives, times, and spaces. We can also understand how “official” archives can make absent whole categories of knowledge and memory. We can also imagine and create new spaces for the archiving of knowledge and memory. We can also locate, curate, and materialize memories that lie beyond the purview of existing archives, and imagine and create new homes, communities, and routes of travel for those memories (building, or rerouting, a third cinema).
The shifting line, imaginary and material, between the possible and the impossible, is precisely where I would locate my pedagogy. Pedagogical engagement—as a permanent disposition—emerges from my understanding of digital cinemas and information communication technologies as spaces that hold the promise of the powerful articulation of imagination and agency, formed in tension with the constructions and limitations of gender, race, history and geopolitics, and national identities. This understanding, then, informs my deep commitment to the radical possibility of education and technology for individual and social transformation, with the rearranging and relanguaging offered by the concepts of sociogeny, technics, commonplaces and entanglements, and the de-archive.
1 Armand Mattelart (2000, p.55-56) writes: “The Westernization ideal represented all the qualities characteristic of a “modern attitude” and “cosmopolitan tastes.” Indexes of modernization were calculated in terms of literacy, industrialization, urbanization, and exposure to the media… UNESCO hastened to translate the basic texts of this instrumental sociology into several languages, while its staff established catalogs of minimal standards: to extricate itself from underdevelopment, to “take off,” a country had to have ten copies of newspapers, five wirelesses, two television sets and two cinema seats for every one hundred inhabitants. As vehicles of modern behavior, the media were seen as key agents of innovation. As messengers of the “revolution of rising expectations,” they propagated the models of consumption and aspirations symbolized by those societies that had already attained the higher state of evolution.”
2 See Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
REFERENCES
ESCOBAR, Arturo. Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the Third World. Vol. 1. Princeton University Press, 2011.
GLISSANT, Édouard. Poetics of relation. University of Michigan Press, 1997.
HUI, Yuk. The question concerning technology in China: An essay in Cosmotechnics. Vol. 3. MIT Press, 2019.
MATTELART, Armand. Networking the World, 1794 – 2000. Trans. Liz Carey-Libbrecht and James A. Cohen. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
STIEGLER, Bernard. Technics and time: The fault of Epimetheus. Vol. 1. Stanford University Press, 1998.
WYNTER, Sylvia. “Africa, the West and the Analogy of Culture: The Cinematic Text after Man.” In Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image, pp. 25 – 76, Ed. June Givanni. London: British Film Institute, 2000
