Black Feminist Tools, Critique, and Techno-poethics – Journal #123 December 2021 – E-Flux

Luciana Parisi

The entry of intelligent technology into all modes of logistics—from drones controlling borders to biotech controlling populations—has made claims about the poverty of critical thinking in relation to automated reasoning become paramount. With this entry, fixed capital—property, plant, machinery, land, installations, and physical infrastructures—acquires the form of interconnected data platforms that correlate property values, bodies, populations, goods, materials, urban infrastructures, and patents, effectively fast-forwarding the extraction and abstraction of value towards new forms of social subjection and the surrogacy of cognitive, affective, and human capital.

Since thinking in this scenario no longer matches truths, but instead follows the efficient causality of sequential algorithms, it is assumed that thinking itself has become impoverished by algorithmic capital, by the normative rules given in data. Even in the case of neural networks or ImageNet, algorithms are said to impose concepts on objects to fit the modern categories of gender, sex, race, class. This claim about the demise of critical thinking led by ubiquitous automation can be found in two main views of technology today; on the one hand, the thesis of the Master Algorithm and Computational Surveillance, and on the other, the thesis of Platform Capitalism and Tools of Resistance. Both theses, I argue, risk safeguarding the philosophical authority of Aristotelian distinctions between episteme or theoria, poiesis or creation, and technics or practical knowledge (skills, procedures, functions). I also argue that these theses operate within what Sylvia Wynter calls Western cosmogony, or the origin story of knowledge.

Importantly, this cosmogony must include the myth of Prometheus, as the autopoietic creator and mythical origin of technology for the modern world. As much as this myth corresponds to the belief in human progress, it also ensures that the technology of fire evolves into the steam engine of the modern bio-economic Man, telling the origin story of humanity as one of freedom from enslavement, from the obscurity of the unknown, and from Man’s own death. With these premises, the Promethean myth preserves the image of Man as possessing a surrogate, servo-mechanic flesh that preserves, records, and transmits the events of a liberation only Man can achieve.

However, one can argue that if Prometheus, as technics, demarcates the progress of modernity and its scientific paradigms forestalling the frailty of Man, the myth is also invested with a dark technics—a space of indistinction beyond life and death—where the racialization of knowledge and the speciation of the human constantly break apart. Since Prometheus enfolds instrumentalized servo-mechanic flesh within himself, his myth remains a project of/for enslavement, justifying the brutal order of colonialism and the world’s subjection to …….

Source: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/123/436929/black-feminist-tools-critique-and-techno-poethics/