Abstract
Introduction: Techno-colonialism
In the early 19th century, a consul for the British government landed on the shores of Cape Coast in contemporary Ghana. After a long journey through rain forests, Joseph Dupuis finally arrived at the palace of Osei Bonsu, the ruler of Ashanti. Dupuis unpacked a number of mechanical presents which he hoped would win over the ruler. The gifts would, Dupuis expected, help open up the city of Kumasi to new British-Ashanti trade arrangements. Osei Bonsu had the presents laid out for inspection. His eye fell on a lathe, a machinic tool employed for cutting and drilling that was a source of great British pride. But, Dupuis (1824) writes in his
This short fragment offers a glimpse of the ontological exclusions at the heart of contemporary technology’s pre-histories. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to uncover the role played by technology in the colonial designation of colonised populations as, variously, sub-human: as either less-than-human, or as a lesser-human. Theorising subjectivity from the perspective of technology as one vector of ‘onticide’ (Warren, 2018) – ontological murder – it argues that the history of technology is one bound up with the animalisation and thingification of non-European Others. Second, it argues that, in insufficiently engaging this historico-political emergence of the notion of the ‘human’ vis-à-vis technology, contemporary posthumanist theorists of digital subjectivity run the risk of reproducing the very problem of universalism their framings seek to dismantle. In posthumanist scholarship on machine learning, datafied individuals, and other instances of advanced human-technology mediation, technology tends to be understood as irrevocably, and inevitably, co-constitutive of subjectivity. Against the lingering universalism of posthumanism, this paper argues that the ‘human’, as an onto-epistemological category that emerged with the birth of European colonialism, needs to be complicated, rather than simply stretched.
In outlining the limits of posthumanist ontologies, this paper is inspired by Hui’s (2017a, 2017b) critique of the ontological turn apparent in the work of Haraway, Descola, and others. For Hui (2017a), this work celebrates the ontological pluralism that has been endangered by Western technology’s spread throughout the globe by colonisation, but fails to address the question of technology. My own argument offers a divergence from Hui’s claims, arguing that posthumanist scholarship
Within this posthumanist scholarship, there is a partial neglect of those technologies that are in excess of the strictly ‘digital’ (binary computation), both in their past occurrence and in their ongoing contemporary presence. It tends to pay attention to the latest
I begin by examining how technology came to be enrolled in the wider ontological exclusion of the ‘savage’ from the category of humanity across three separate but overlapping discursive-institutional theories. As we will see, it was first theo-centric (human in image of God), then ratio-centric (reasoned human), and later bio-centric (European cranial anatomy) theories of the human that came to create an image of the presumably non-technological Other as sub-human. The section that follows approaches these three strands as collectively adding up to one vector of ontological exclusion, where the sub-human Other functions as a limit-concept capable of constructing, and legitimising, the category of Man. Within the civilisation missions of European colonialism, technology helped secure the permanence of the colonial project by, paradoxically, serving at once as an ontological border and as a promise of transgressing it that is unrealisable because sub-humanity is, here, considered divinely or biologically innate. The fourth section brings the argument into the contemporary context of posthumanist theorisation. It presents the technological sub-humanisation of the colonised Other as a problematic for existing posthumanist theories of subjectivity. It particularly shows how the viewpoint of technological onticide complicates what I call the ‘constitutive correlation thesis’ in which the human and technology are conceptualised as, universally, recursively co-constituted. This universalist thesis, the paper argues, fails to account for the way technology is only selectively co-constitutive of subjectivity, and often ends up radically negating, by way of onticide, access to ‘being’. A decolonial digital scholarship, the final and concluding section argues, requires a deepening hostility towards the figure of the human.
Techno-colonialism and the (dis)Figure of the Human
We begin by returning to Bonsu. His refusal of British technology, and his subsequent condemnation by the British Consul, needs to be understood within the colonial context that started three centuries earlier when Portugal and Spain set sail for the lands of Western and Northern Africa. Europeans hoped colonial endeavours would facilitate the diffusion of their tools and crafts. In the eyes of the colonial powers, the Americas and Africa presented unforeseen markets that could be flooded with European technologies and goods (Adas, 1989). Underlying attempts at technological diffusion was the assumption that, once presented with the coloniser’s technology, local peoples would drop their technological habits and take on the coloniser’s. This strong confidence sparked the ‘quick replacement’ theory at the heart of many histories of technological diffusion (Ehrhardt, 2005). According to this theory, when indigenous communities and societies in Africa and the Americas entered into contact with colonial powers, they encountered superior technologies by which they were so enthralled that they rapidly adopted them, shedding their own technological past and moving into a more ‘civilised’ future.
Theo-centrism
The colonial argument for ‘civilisation through technology’ could, ultimately, only be justified and sustained through a series of conceptual interventions that are, following Wynter (2003: 264), constituted through (theological, philosophical, scientific) discourse, and grounded via colonial institutions. Adapting Wynter’s (2003) terminology, I will call these interventions ‘theo-centric’, ‘ratio-centric’, and ‘bio-centric’.
The first saw European theologians of the 16th century draw an ontological line between divine Self and non-divine Other. Within the monotheistic conception of ‘Man’, the non-European Christians encountered in the Americas and Africa were conceived of as driven by a willing divergence from Man in the image of God. As opposed to the European Christians who occupied the figure of a ‘True Christian Self’ (Wynter, 2003: 265), colonised peoples were sub-human ‘Enemies-of-Christ’ (Wynter, 2003: 293). What Christian theologians took as an absence of technology amongst indigenous populations – which, as historians (Arnold, 2005) have long confirmed, was a deeply flawed assumption – functioned as a particularly important designator of the drawn ontological lines. 1 To these writers, the lack of European technologies signalled a deep attachment to the environment, to the untouched wilderness, a landscape they considered to be ‘the dwelling place of Satan’ (Adas, 1989: 45), and one that the ‘savage’ failed or refused to shape to their needs. Puritan Christians, in particular, considered it to be their divine goal to subvert any contra-technological tendency, by force if necessary. They considered themselves to be on an evangelising mission, ‘heeding God’s injunction for man to turn the earth into his garden’ (Adas, 1989: 45). Technology became one path of redemption: a step in the direction of salvation away from a sub-human existence towards a Christian image of the Human.
Christian missionary centres across the Americas and Africa arose to fulfil this supreme goal, teaching the European arts, sciences and technology in an attempt to root out Devilish ills and open the world to Godly influence. Spanish and English colonisers aimed to restrict nomadic modes of existence and to transform those into sedentary communities based on agriculture. A lifestyle centred on agriculture enabled, Christian Europeans believed, the uptake of superior tools (e.g. mattocks, hoes, and later plows) for working and exploiting, more fully, the rich lands of the Americas. Such a technological injection would elevate the savage not only above nature, but also above their own sub-human nature. Colonisers invoked the notion of
Ratio-centrism
With the conquest of the ‘New World’ in the 16th century, a second set of discourses on the nature of the ‘savage’ Other rapidly emerged. At this point, the purely theo-centric conception of the human determined by divine law began to encounter resistance and slipped into the field of the ratio-centric. What came to be known as the Valladolid debate helps illustrate what was at stake. Shortly after his arrival on American shores, Charles I, the King of Spain, created a jury to settle an important moral score in front of the Spanish court: are the indigenous populations of America capable of self-governance? On one side of the debate sat Bartolomé de las Casas, a leading member of the Christian Humanist movement who supported the theo-centric image of Man and the missionary movement that accompanied it. He argued that, because rationality was part of the Amerindian nature, self-determination was to be pursued. By contrast, for the Spanish philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda it will ‘always be just and in conformity with natural law that these people be subjected to the rule of more cultivated and humane princes and nations’ (quoted in Chamayou, 2012: 32). But what is this ‘natural condition’ which demands that some command while others obey?
With De Sepúlveda, who is generally described as the ‘winner’ of the debate due to the lasting influence of his position, Amerindian populations appear outside of a naturalised, or ‘ratio-centric’, theorisation of the human. De Sepúlveda had effectively re-drawn the ontological demarcations between the human European and sub-human Other. They became, at least partially, secularised, a question no longer of religion/irreligion but one of a binary between rationality and irrationality. In his
Not for all writers was the gap between ‘rational life’ and ‘savage life’ that clear cut. Early critics of Spanish conquest denounced the coloniser’s enactment of brutish immorality through manhunts, torture and slave-taking, their becoming-savage, or, to use Césaire’s (2000) term, their
A defining criterion of this ontological disjunction between the irrational Other and the reasoned European within the writings of many – but not all – writers of the early Enlightenment is, as it had been in the discourse of the Christian theologians, the presence/absence of technology.
2
Writing one century after De Sepúlveda’s In such condition, there is no place for industry; [. . .] and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society. (Hobbes, 1998: 84)
The perceived absence of science and technology, their living in a ‘state of nature’, renders it unimaginable for ‘the savage people of many places of America’ (Hobbes, 1998: 85) to join the ranks of civilisation, unless they were to submit themselves to the authority of an absolute ruler. But the Other is defined not only by the assumed failure to produce advanced technologies, but also by their very incapacity to do so in the first place. For instance, Thomas Harriot, an ethnographer and astronomer tasked with collating information about the New World, wrote that the burning glasses, mathematical instruments, guns, and other tools that the colonisers brought along on their conquest of the Wanchese and Manteo peoples of North America were ‘so straunge unto them, and so farre exceeded their capacities to comprehend the reason and meanes how they should be made and done [sic]’ (Harriot, 1972: 27).
The result is that technology becomes humanism’s very measure, its secure grounding. Without the drive of technology, it seems, the human slips into a register of unreason that is altogether bestial. ‘[S]carcely protected from the wind and rain of [a] tempestuous climate’, writes Darwin (2009), the peoples of the Americas ‘sleep on the wet ground coiled up like animals’ (p. 236). He adds: ‘Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world’ (Darwin, 2009: 235). Without the assumed leverage of technology, the Amerindian suffers a repulsive attachment to nature as a site of both passion and vulnerability.
Bio-centrism
Following the onto-theological circumscriptions of American peoples by way of technology in theo- and ratio-centric discourses, attempts were soon made to provide a more secure footing attuned to the deepening secularisation taking place in parts of Western Europe.
The first push towards the scientification of the discussed discourses can be found in 17th and 18th century social evolutionism, which classified and hierarchised races and regions according to their stage of Savagery, Barbarianism, or Civilisation and, employing polygenetic theories, according to their assumed different origins in the history of humanity. If there was a generalised distinction drawn between people in Europe and colonised peoples, the latter were assigned varying degrees of sub-humanity within the Western classificatory treatment. Black Africans, notably, were less-than-human, and thus assigned to the lowest rank in the Chain of Being, below the Amerindian
The bodies of those inhabiting the bottom ranks of (sub)humanity, phrenologists claimed, were innately anti-technological. Travelling zoologists fixated on and compared the brains and skulls of Africans, apes, and Europeans. In 1830, an anonymous author writing in
James Hunt, a fellow adventurer in the racist science of phrenology and a self-proclaimed ‘anti-abolitionist’, claimed that the biological fault of the ‘savage’ body lay in the ‘premature union of the bones and skull’ (Hunt, 1866: 8). The result: the savage Other is a biological victim of arrested development, their skulls and brain incapable of advancing beyond the age of puberty. In fact, Hunt suggests, contrary to European craniological development, ‘the older [Africans] grow the less intelligent they become’ (Hunt, 1866: 8). The Africans’ biological curvature is that of a collective unconscious regression. It was no surprise, then, phrenologists like Hunt and Virey declared, that the Other lacked the ability to invent or master technical devices beyond their seemingly infantile creations. What the Other reveals in its strong mental capacity for temporal return – ‘showing great powers of memory’ (Hunt, 1866: 16) – it lacks in futurity. Their gaze is biologically directed towards the past. But also towards the ground: unlike the European ‘celestial plant’ of Plato, who stands erect, gazes up at the sky, and lives by the head, that ‘sanctuary of the soul’, the African, with an ape-like gait, ‘stoop[s] humbly towards the earth, to feed and remain on it’, as if falling away from bipedalism, that triumph of anthropogenesis (Virey, 1837: 100–1). In the phrenologist’s hands, the African Other’s assumed technological inferiority thus became less a question of religious or social discourse and instead became one of zoological inscription: anti-technologism as spinal, cranial, cerebral, endocrine, and glandular. The ancient nature of the colonised, once again, resembles a pre-technological animal.
Technological Onticide
The discussed discursive-institutional measures (theo-centric, ratio-centric, bio-centric) each, according to their own particular functionings, instrumentalise technology within the logic of ‘ontological murder’, or ‘onticide’ to use Warren’s (2018) term, of African and Amerindian life. Like Divinity, Reason and Intelligence, technology is weaponised as a violent negation, as the rupture from the existential coordinates and ontological grounds foundational to any claim to humanity, for any relation to Being (Warren, 2018: 130; Jackson, 2020). But unlike this trio, technology has an immediate material form. As a result, it serves a unique contribution to onticide: ‘observable’ via travelogues and ‘measurable’ through lists and taxonomies, technology stands out as materially quantifiable, and this, I argue, helps explain its status as a popular referent for ontological distinctions between the human and its negative Others within colonial writings. In the eyes of the coloniser, technology gave analytical access to the ‘ontological zero’ (Jackson, 2020), the sub-humanity, of a people, giving it a material form that could be observed, noted, mapped, and compared. It is its status as an ostensibly measurable determinant of (sub)humanity that made technology influential in
But more than facilitating this destructive impulse, technological onticide helped solidify the colonised Other as negatively constitutive of the category of the human. As a limit-concept, technology enables the human to be constructed by way of negating what it is not. As such, in defining the limits of an ontological category (‘the human’), technology manifests itself as a ‘prop’ (Jackson, 2020: 4) to erect Man. In tracing the bounds of what it means to be human, technology gives it form. Without its ontological negative, Man would encompass all and any form of existence, and would thereby render itself at once all-encompassing and redundant. In other words, European humanism
Indeed, if its origins and modes of operation are philosophical, the results of technological onticide are profoundly material. Not only does it legitimise and sustain its physical variant – the theft and murder of both land and people, alongside the forced submission to European models of life, technology and commerce. Importantly, it also justifies its status as being without ending. Technological onticide starts from the indigenous community’s obligation to collaborate in the duty to technologise but, at the same time, as we have seen, it is underpinned by the belief that there is a (divine, spiritual, or biological) innate failure to do so. Dupuis’ condemnation of Bonsu’s refusal of European devices, with which we opened this paper, makes this clear. Bonsu was offered a clock and a musical box, but the British Consul seemed already aware that he would lack ‘a degree of care’ required to make use of the tools. Because his presumed anti-technologism is considered to be ingrained, Bonsu would logically fail to appreciate the technical objects. This paradox – of expecting collaboration
Posthumanist Subjectivity and Constitutive Correlation
In underscoring the ontological exclusion of certain humans by way of technology, the notion of technological onticide shows that human-technology relations cannot be taken for granted as simply a matter of ‘usage’, ‘mediation’, ‘domination’, or ‘prosthesis’. As such, I argue, it poses significant questions to contemporary ways of understanding digital subjectivity.
Much contemporary scholarship on digital media, artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithmic cognition, and other digital phenomena tends to approach, more or less explicitly, subjectivity via varying posthumanist framings. While marked by considerable internal differentiation, posthumanist theories of subjectivity each pursue the displacement of liberal humanist figurations of the subject as a unified, sovereign, and exceptional entity (Hayles, 1999). In this universalist figuration, which Hui (2017a) refers to as ‘naturalist’, the human subject exerts rational control over, while maintaining its separation from, technology in order to dominate nature. The subject of liberal humanism is a ‘one’ whose cohesion and autonomy remains intact despite the extensive use of technology (Amoore, 2019b). Against such universalist theorisations, posthumanisms tend to propose their own theories of subjectivity in which the human subject no longer belongs solely to itself. For all their divergences, what particularly binds posthumanist accounts of subjectivity together is an insistence on what I call the ‘constitutive correlation thesis’: the conceptual argument for the human subject and technological nonhumans (including technical objects, interfaces, codes, algorithms) as recursively co-constituted. More than underscoring the deep material connections between human subjects and technical devices (e.g. in practices of infusing or implanting), the thesis foregrounds their inextricable co-emergence on two levels. On a first level, the thesis is granted a transcendental status. For Derrida, it enjoys an originary status: The natural, originary body does not exist: technology has not simply added itself, from outside or after the fact, as a foreign body. Certainly, this foreign or dangerous supplement is ‘originarily’ at work and in place in the supposedly ideal interiority of the ‘body and soul’. (Derrida, quoted in MacKenzie, 2002: 6; cf. Stiegler, 1998)
In this reading, subjectivity can only ever be thought of as always already imbued with technical others that co-constitute it. On a second level, the thesis is historicised. Katherine Hayles, for instance, acknowledges that the constitutive correlation of human-technology is originary, whilst simultaneously positing its contemporary specificity, where ‘the integration of humans with intelligent machines [becomes] more extensive and at the same time more diverse in its implementations, effects, and significance’ (Hayles, 2004: 311). For Hayles (2012), it is particularly the cognitive systems of cybernetic computation that deepen the constitutive correlation of the human and technology. Likewise, in Haraway’s (2003) argument, while none of the human-technological partners ever pre-exist their relational ensemble, cyborg subjectivity announces a renewed dynamism. Subjectivity, in this argument, is engendered increasingly in the interplay of human life, code, software, and hardware (Haraway, 1991). Echoing Haraway, Braidotti (2019) posits subjectivity as a collaborative effort that takes place transversally, in the in-between of nature/technology and sociality/materiality divides, in ways that are both transcendental, and intensified by the digital era of ‘high technological mediation’ (p. 43).
By way of their transcendental-historical accounts of the constitutive correlation thesis, posthumanist theories trouble any liberal humanist theory of the subject as an autonomous self – independent from the technical environment – and propose, instead, a symbiotic theory in which subjectivity is commonly referred to as emergent from the ‘entanglement’ (Hayles, 2004), ‘collaboration’ (Amoore 2019a), ‘coupling’ (Hansen, 2004), and ‘co-operation’ (Braidotti, 2019) of human life and technical objects. Conceptualising subjectivity in terms of the constitutive co-emergence of the human and the technical is presented as a crucial assault on the colonial sub-humanisation described in this paper. For the geographer Gillian Rose, posthumanist theories of subjectivity offer ‘a necessary corrective to centuries of Western philosophizing that attributes agency only to a specific kind of human: the male, white, heterosexual sovereign subject, capable of rational thought unencumbered by material objects, whether tools or his body’ (Rose, 2017: 782). The constitutive correlation thesis, in this argument (Braidotti, 2013), promises to displace the fantasy of the autonomous and sovereign self at the heart of the theo-centric, ratio-centric, and bio-centric separations from, and political domination over, sub-human ‘Others’. Against the liberal humanist theory of the subject that makes possible discursive-institutional practices of sub-humanisation, it promises a radical theory of subject formation centred on ontological co-dependence, one that, in turn, translates into an ethics of mutual interconnectedness and affectivity (Amoore, 2019a; Braidotti, 2013). If subjectivity is constitutively correlational – that is, emerges only in relation with technical others – than our ethics, too, must start from, and seek to promote, the primacy of relations.
The premise of posthumanist theories of subjectivity as engendering a disruptive force at odds with the violence of liberal humanism is appealing but partial. I argue that the ontological and bloody erasure enabled by technological onticide presents a powerful challenge to the universalist impulse behind the constitutive correlation thesis. Underpinning its theory of subjectivity is, as we’ve seen, a conception of relations between the human and technology as
This conceptual lacuna facilitates two universalist tendencies in posthumanist theories of subjectivity. The first tendency pertains to relations amongst humans. Ignoring technological onticide leads to the assumption that, despite subjectivity’s co-constitution, there remains a shared ontological ground for the human. But the human has onto-biological lives: a life can be both onto-epistemologically
Not accounting for the destitution of technological onticide leads to a further universalist tendency in posthumanist theories of subjectivity, one that unfolds with regard to the question of human-nonhuman relations. Posthumanist theories of subjectivity are commonly articulated as an ethical challenge to the liberal humanist theories of the autonomous and rational self, and specifically, their reliance on the Cartesian legacy of human/animal distinctions. Alongside ‘reason’, ‘creativity’ and ‘responsiveness’, ‘tool-making’ is operationalised within the liberal humanist legacy as an external ‘supplement’ to separate the beast from the human (Braun, 2004). The beast, here, is machinic, is ‘animal-machine’, only to the extent that it operates without capacity for thought, consciousness and speech – where it holds
Without a confrontation with the negative ontological labour of technology, we will not only fail to acknowledge and work through the specific technological dimensions of past colonial expansion. We also run the risk of overlooking, and thereby failing to understand and undermine, the
Conclusion: Post-, In-, Counter-, Un-?
The aim of drawing out conceptual challenges has not been to disqualify that posthumanist theories of subjectivity can ever be decolonial in thought, methodology, and epistemology, let alone to re-assert the human as a figure that requires clean delineation, but to force into view some of the complex problems posed by technology as a vector of ontological exclusion. The paper has argued that technology, as a historically and politically situated category, has long helped facilitate the exclusion – what I’ve called the ‘technological onticide’ – of non-European and indigenous populations across the Americas and Africa. Three overlapping modes of such onticide were brought to the fore: a theo-centric theory in which the presumed non-technological Other is taken as a willing divergence from the human in the image of God; a ratio-centric view that takes this Other as the unreasoned antidote to the technological self; and the bio-centric paradigm of scientific phrenology that grounds it in bodily (cranial-spinal-cerebral) deficit. Through these measures, technology fixated the colonised into a position of sub-humanity whilst, at the same time, presenting a manner of escaping this position. This paradox, I have argued, functioned as a foundational limit-concept to the European colonial concept of Man, used as it was to legitimise both its invention and its incessant functioning.
This paper has argued for posthumanist scholars of digitality to take seriously this negative labour of technology. This involves posing a series of conceptual problems for theorisations of subjectivity vis-à-vis technology, emphasising in particular the argument for subjectivity as the constitutive correlation of the human and technology. The paper argued that posthumanist theorisation, in looking to ‘correct’ the liberal humanist idea of Man, ends up producing its own univeralist tendencies. First, it fails to take the idea of ‘differentiation’ amongst human life beyond the experiential and affective into the ontological distinctions between human ‘being’ and human ‘existence’ enabled by technological onticide. Second, it insufficiently considers the way that ‘decentring’ the human is only ever emancipatory as a process of animalisation or thingification for those not at the receiving end of onticide.
Working through these two tendencies offers a way of circumventing the lure of universalism that posthumanist theories of subjectivity claim to work against. If posthumanism is a challenge to humanist Man (white, male, able-bodied), then what remains unclear is how the ‘posthuman’ works through, and more importantly,
First, we could look to the knowledges of the very communities colonised by De Sepúlveda and his armies of soldiers and missionaries to trace the possibility of an
Second, against the theoretical position of more-than-human subjectivity, thinkers within the Black radical tradition propose a
Third, and at odds with both posthumanist framings and the inspiration found within the inhuman or counterhuman, an
Each of these conceptual trajectories are likely to circumvent some of the problematics outlined in this paper, while succumbing to and generating others. The task for thinkers of digitality lies perhaps less in the purist search for a perfect alternative to posthumanist framings, and more with a dedication to the crucial task of offering conceptual tools for working through – theoretically, empirically, politically – the legacies of technological onticide. Within our contemporary digital world, certain populations remain, after all, much more susceptible to the violences of datafication, thingification, and objectification, with their destituent encounters with technology, as labourers and consumers, being at least as material as they are ontological.
Footnotes
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