From Capacity to Ability to Automation: "Western" Conceptions of the Figure of Man and Ableist Subjectivities Within Modernity-Colonialism-Racialization

• In Event: Decolonial Theories, Pedagogies, Research Practices

Abstract

This paper anaylzes shifting constructs of ableist subjectivities that lie at the heart of a modernity-colonialism-racialization vortex and that were entangled with humanism’s rise. Drawing on and extending the work of Sylvia Wynter, it examines how a “figure of Man” in three different but related iterations helped shape ontological hierarchies and violent inclusions/exclusions. It illustrates these moves via whitestream scholarship that came to dominate ‘Western’ geopolitical locales from the 1600s, 1800s, and 2000s and that colonialism subsequently spread. From discourses of capacity (tutoring children), to ability (compulsory schooling), to automation (systems theory and computational superintelligence), the figure of Man not only overrepresents for “the human” but unevenly jeopardizes all lives and ways of being as technological innovations redraw onto-epistemological lines.

Author

• Bernadette Baker, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author