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i. Diffusionism and Reading the Shape-Shifter
technology as a shapeshifter Diffusionism
The development of technology and the spread of technological epistemologies has been guided by Eurocentric Diffusionism, which is the belief that knowledge production is intrinsic to the European world, and that any knowledge produced in the Global South is a result of the ideas that emanated from the Global North. 105 Diffusionism is, therefore, produced as logic for the creation of the colonial binary of the civilized and the savage, as it suggests intrinsic connection of these categories to technological development and advancement. 106 The colonial project was to establish a “New” world, and by positioning Eurocentric knowledge as the foundation for the future, it rendered the Indigenous and other Black and Brown communities and their modes of knowledge production as static moments in the past that have to assimilate in the name of modernity. This marked the erasure of the epistemologies that these communities already possessed, which were and are in far more diverse areas than the European colonizers of the same times. The narrative of the New World, coupled with diffusionism established a linear temporality that was associated with ideas of modernity, and consequently invalidated fluid temporalities that Indigneous cultures existed within.
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Technology has, therefore, always existed amongst binaries—old and new, civilized and savage, good or bad. In media, technology is often shown as the intiator of a dystopia that threatens humanity, with an existential nostalgia for pre-technological times at the cusp of destruction. Even in the Anthropocene debate, the blame is being argued between the development of the Steam Engine or Nuclear technology. 107 This binary representation fails to hold the colonial, neo-colonial and capitalist systems that created that binary to profit off of the accumulation of these technologies and the oppression of marginalized groups and nonhumans through them, accountable. The narrative is so deeply engrained, that it is easier to imagine a dystopia with robot overlords, than it is to imagine a technological, decolonized, post-capitalist future. This thesis is an attempt at imagining the latter.
“By 1492, when ‘America’ was ostensibly ‘discovered,’ there were untold numbers of indigenous societies, untold numbers of languages and dialects, architecture to rival any, imperial city states with astronomical observatories and solar calendars, a mathematical concept of zero, an extensive knowledge of natural medicine and the healing arts, highly developed oral traditions, and above all, a spiritual comprehension of the universe, a sense of the natural and supernatural, and a profound sense of the sacred. This was part of humanity’s long, inexorable ascent to civilization, on an earth possessed of honour, dignity, and generosity of spirit. 108
Robert Houle
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105. Daniel Coleman et al., “Different Knowings and the Indigenous Humanities,” ESC: English Studies in Canada 38, no. 1 (2012): pp. 141-159, https://doi. org/10.1353/esc.2012.0009. 106.Julie Nagam, “Deciphering the Refusal of the Digital and Binary Codes of Sovereignty/Self-Determination and Civilized/Savage,” Public 27, no. 54 (January 2016): pp. 78-89, https://doi.org/10.1386/public.27.54.78_1. 107. Yussoff, 24. 108. Nagam, 1.
Alicia Inez Guzmán, in her article Indigenous Futurisms, refers to Indigenous epistemologies that view technology as a shape-shifter, and quotes Stephen Loft—”the “shapeshifter (not unlike the Trickster himself) [is] neither inherently benign nor malevolent, but always acting and active, changing transformative, giving effect to and affecting the world.” 109 Queering technologies then, is regarding them as shape-shifters—accepting their mysterious origins and their undeniable powers of transformation. The nature of those transformations lies in the circumstance, but they are catalysts of change nevertheless. This narrative allows technologies to be fluid, untethered by original instrumentalities.
To observe a post-capitalist world with decentered existences, speculative reality is depicted in a time where the resources the Capitalocene exploited to construct its technology have been depleted and humans live as scavengers. But the built technology of the Capitalocene survives the epoch’s end and exists as ruins waiting to be appropriated by the scavengers. This technology is projectively read by them, similar to Rem Koolhaas’s diagrammatic reading of the cartoon by A.B. Walker of a New York skyscraper. By representing a sort of fractured, somewhat suburban life inside a skyscraper frame, architecture becomes, as Koolhaas mentions “..less an act of foresight than before and planning an act of only limited prediction. It has become impossible to “plot” culture. 110 The image of villas and trees stacked on 82 floors in a frame is strange, and this strangeness allows a disabling of normative imaginations of buildings, skyscrapers and the city and invite a multiplicity of interpretations. Sarah Whiting and Robert Somol discuss Koolhaas’s interpretation in their essay Notes around the Doppler Effect and other Moods of Modernism--“These New York frames exist as instruments of metropolitan plasticity and are not primarily architecture for paying attention to; they are not for reading, but for seducing, becoming, instigating new events and behaviors.” 111
The scavengers therefore read these objects of technology not as a decipherable text, but rather as a projective diagram—capable of giving rise to many possible programmatic and functional realities. A steering wheel becomes a place to rest on, a CD player becomes a method of cooking food, a harness becomes a sleeping device. As Whiting and Somol write,”a more Foucaltian notion of disciplinarity is advanced in which the discipline is not a fixed datum or entity, but rather an active organism or discursive practice, unplanned and ungovernable.” 112 The scavengers do not attempt to reverse-engineer the techno-fossils they find to decipher the original intent of the technology and generate a design that would privilege that origin. They practice what this thesis suggests is a projective version of the practice—Diverse Engineering—one that opens up a plurality of possible interpretations.
109. Alicia Inez Guzmán, “Indigenous Futurisms,” InVisible Culture, March 15, 2015, https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/indigenous-futurisms/. 110. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. New York: The Monacelli Press Inc., 1980. Pg. 85 111. Robert Somol, and Sarah Whiting. “Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism.” Perspecta 33 (2002): 72–77. 112. Somol and Whiting, 74.
