Technical Ontology and Radical Aesthetics in Design
Ngozi Harrison
If we think of design as joining the technical and aesthetics to create something with utility, then in order to radically reimagine design we have to first deconstruct it to a philosophy of the technical and aesthetics. These philosophies are ultimately encoded in the design principles at play and end result of the design process. In the philosophy of the technical, we are considering the way we understand the nature of technical things, systems, digital objects etc. The ontological nature of these abstract things, and thingness/(no)thingness broadly, may seem trivial, however it informs the questions we ask or don't ask during the design process and can contribute to alienation. Aesthetics also encodes cultural values through the design process. For my work I seek to take inspiration from the radical aesthetics of Sylvia Wynter who under/overstands aesthetic practice as always already political and mainstream aesthetic practice as often presupposing and enacting a negation of Black being1.
One thing to think about when it comes to the ontology of the technical is that Heidegger, one of the foundational thinkers is this area, was a Nazi. Now it can be argued how involved or not involved Heidegger was in the party however he never renounced his association publicly. In my view his complicity and compliance with the logics of the Nazi party has implications. As many scholars and historians have pointed out, the ideology of the Third Reich was informed by the western colonialist projects in North America and Africa with the first concentration camps appearing during the Second Boer War in South Africa. These influences contributed to the conceptualization of the Reich's own philosophy/logic of settler colonialism called the Lebensraum2
In the Universal Machine by Fred Moten he engages the radical expressions of phenomenology of Frantz Fanon, Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt to argue for a new kind of what he calls Aesthetic sociality. Moten in the preface calls the book a monograph decomposed. This statement holds in it two ideas that imply a kind of physicality/sensory experience, a temporality and movement. The word monograph speaks of a mono or singular project but this project has been out in the elements a bit too long. It has burst at the seams showing it's internal components and has opened up to exegesis as autopsy. Phenomenology, ontology, and politics come together as a swarm who's movements and improvisations Moten attempts to trouble and trace to have something useful to say about Black social life. He uses Fanon, Levinas, and Arendt’s work as a site for inquiry and point of departure to argue for a social (meta)physics that "violates individuation". Permit me to use a rather long quotation from this preface to begin a conversation about these colonialist/genocidal logics and what they have to tell us about technical ontology in design.
The mechanization of the Shoah and slavery (in this case we are referring to slavery but ultimately pointing to the entire colonial and genocidal project affecting Africans across the diaspora) are cognates, both a same/different kind of genocidal operation with the end result being a convergence of death and utility. The operation seeks the de-individuation of it's subject. For me this brings up two key questions:
Moten argues that (de)individuation operate as the mechanics of the indifference machine. Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Steigler, and Yuk Hui all deal with the process of individuation with the mechanical, technical, and digital and their work may hold something of value to answer the preceeding questions. These genocidal projects show how historically the (de)individuation process has enacted through mechanized logics and the design of these systems were informed by ontologies, aesthetics and philosophies that have not gone away. These logics take the various European projects of racial categorization to their logical conclusion and Ramon Amaro in his recent book The Black Technical Object excavates the origin of Machine Learning from the site of racial categorization[4]. While the end result may not always be death in the physical sense, Black social death continues to be enacted through colonialist/genocidal logics, at play often in more suble ways, hidden in the algorithm.
There's more to say on this topic and I'll have more to say a forthcoming essay on alienation and Artificial Intelligence. This is an ongoing line of inquiry for me as I work through keys texts on technical ontology and radical Black aesthetics. Here are some of the readings I'm working through:
Notes
[1] Sylvia Wynter, Rethinking "Aesthetics": Notes Towards A Deciphering Practice (Africa World Press, 1992)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum
[3] Fred Moten, Preface, The Universal Machine (Duke University Press, 2018), xii.
[4] Ramon Amaro, The Black Technical Object (MIT Press, 2023)
One thing to think about when it comes to the ontology of the technical is that Heidegger, one of the foundational thinkers is this area, was a Nazi. Now it can be argued how involved or not involved Heidegger was in the party however he never renounced his association publicly. In my view his complicity and compliance with the logics of the Nazi party has implications. As many scholars and historians have pointed out, the ideology of the Third Reich was informed by the western colonialist projects in North America and Africa with the first concentration camps appearing during the Second Boer War in South Africa. These influences contributed to the conceptualization of the Reich's own philosophy/logic of settler colonialism called the Lebensraum2
In the Universal Machine by Fred Moten he engages the radical expressions of phenomenology of Frantz Fanon, Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt to argue for a new kind of what he calls Aesthetic sociality. Moten in the preface calls the book a monograph decomposed. This statement holds in it two ideas that imply a kind of physicality/sensory experience, a temporality and movement. The word monograph speaks of a mono or singular project but this project has been out in the elements a bit too long. It has burst at the seams showing it's internal components and has opened up to exegesis as autopsy. Phenomenology, ontology, and politics come together as a swarm who's movements and improvisations Moten attempts to trouble and trace to have something useful to say about Black social life. He uses Fanon, Levinas, and Arendt’s work as a site for inquiry and point of departure to argue for a social (meta)physics that "violates individuation". Permit me to use a rather long quotation from this preface to begin a conversation about these colonialist/genocidal logics and what they have to tell us about technical ontology in design.
So I want to argue, or move in preparation of an argument for the necessity of a social (meta)physics that violates individuation. Critical discourse on the Shoah and on racial slavery, even in their various divergences rightly align mechanization (or a kind of mechanistic rationalization) with de-individuation while also recognizing that individuation—the theft of body—is genocidal operation. Mutually dismissive analytics of gratuitousness notwithstanding the slave ship and the gas chamber are cognate in this regard and, in their separate ways jointly end at the convergence of death and utility (for only one of which either one or the other is supposed to stand)
...At that intersection, individuation and de-individuation orbit one another as mutual conditions of im/possibility operating in and as the frigid mechanics of an indifference machine.2
The mechanization of the Shoah and slavery (in this case we are referring to slavery but ultimately pointing to the entire colonial and genocidal project affecting Africans across the diaspora) are cognates, both a same/different kind of genocidal operation with the end result being a convergence of death and utility. The operation seeks the de-individuation of it's subject. For me this brings up two key questions:
- How does the de-individuation machine individuate itself? What are it's internal logics?
- By what process (algorithm) does the machine de-individuate that which has been denied individuality? How can you kill a person who has been denied humanity/subjectivity?
Moten argues that (de)individuation operate as the mechanics of the indifference machine. Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Steigler, and Yuk Hui all deal with the process of individuation with the mechanical, technical, and digital and their work may hold something of value to answer the preceeding questions. These genocidal projects show how historically the (de)individuation process has enacted through mechanized logics and the design of these systems were informed by ontologies, aesthetics and philosophies that have not gone away. These logics take the various European projects of racial categorization to their logical conclusion and Ramon Amaro in his recent book The Black Technical Object excavates the origin of Machine Learning from the site of racial categorization[4]. While the end result may not always be death in the physical sense, Black social death continues to be enacted through colonialist/genocidal logics, at play often in more suble ways, hidden in the algorithm.
There's more to say on this topic and I'll have more to say a forthcoming essay on alienation and Artificial Intelligence. This is an ongoing line of inquiry for me as I work through keys texts on technical ontology and radical Black aesthetics. Here are some of the readings I'm working through:
Rethinking "Aesthetics": Notes Towards A Deciphering Practice by Sylvia Wynter
The Pope Must Have Been Drunk The King Of Castile A Madman: Culture As Actuality, And The Caribbean Rethinking Modernity by Sylvia Wynter
On the Existence of Digital Objects by Yuk Hui
Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus by Bernard Stiegler
Notes
[1] Sylvia Wynter, Rethinking "Aesthetics": Notes Towards A Deciphering Practice (Africa World Press, 1992)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum
[3] Fred Moten, Preface, The Universal Machine (Duke University Press, 2018), xii.
[4] Ramon Amaro, The Black Technical Object (MIT Press, 2023)