Colonial Infrastructures and Techno-social Networks – Journal #123 December 2021 – E-Flux

Tiziana Terranova

The techno-social hypothesis concerns the idea that, over the last three decades or so, the technological and the social have become thoroughly enmeshed with each other. It also poses the question of how this new inseparability should be understood. The techno-social hypothesis is not about how, as Bernard Stiegler claimed, social media have bypassed “the traditional networks of proximity that have defined the social since time immemorial.” Neither is it about how technology has subsumed and colonized social life, and how this process might be reversed to gain access to a more authentic, embodied sociality. It is rather about the fundamental role played by “the social” in the modern age, and how contemporary digital and computational networks as technical beings do not just generate, as Gilbert Simondon suggested, a natural and technical milieu, but also a directly (techno-)social one.

The techno-social hypothesis is thus premised on the idea that the social never possessed an intrinsic or preexisting reality, but rather what, with Michel Foucault, we might call a historical, that is a “transactional” one. Like sexuality, madness, or civil society, the social is real, although it has not always existed. It, too, was born “from the interplay of relations of power and everything which constantly eludes them at the interface … of governors and governed.” As a result of this history, the social assumed its three fundamental properties: a form of abstraction, the territory of government, and a conflictual political domain.

The social thus existed inasmuch as it was a fundamental part of modern Western European epistemologies and eventually also as part of its governmentalities. As a form of abstraction, it grounded the truth claims of the social sciences, which posited that it was possible to scientifically study human societies inasmuch as they presented quantitative and qualitative determinations. As part of what Denise Ferreira da Silva has called the power of the nomos, the social entailed a distinction between transparency and affectability, between the position of observers and observed. This epistemological function of the social (that is, its accounting for human social life as a distinct, measurable, and observable sphere of reality, endowed with its own patterns and regularities) was also indispensable to the other role that the social played. As Nikolas Rose put it, from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the social constituted the “territory of government,” that is, a “novel plane of territorialization [which] existed within, across, in tension with other spatializations (such as blood and territory; race and religion; town, region and nation).” At the same time, the social also had a third inflection, one that Raymond Williams defined as its “emphatic” …….

Source: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/123/437385/colonial-infrastructures-and-techno-social-networks/