Techno-Mediated Worlds, Temporality, Speed, & A Politics of Inquiry

• In Event: The Fire This Time: Toward Dangerous Creativity in Intellectual Leadership

Abstract

The world we inhabit that is mediated by advanced information and communication technologies (i.e., techno-mediated) has demonstrated evermore the ways in which time and the speed of life is not only constituted by various mediums but are also moving at different scales. While the algorithmic mediated condition of our contemporary moment is rapidly speeding up social life at levels of nonconscious perception (Hayles, 2017), we also better understand the more-than-human processes within and outwith the body that are imperceptible to the human eye yet made legible via technologies. These different speeds and temporalities of life are where the social, cultural, and the political shape quotidian processes, including in the educative. It has become increasingly clearer that the production of knowledge is more complex and provisional than once understood by the tenets of logical empiricism or post-positivism. The different speeds and scales of life produce both continuous and discontinuous, and jointed and disjointed processes of the social, cultural and political (Derrida, 1993). How to produce knowledge under such conditions of rapid change at different scales of techno-mediation? As Fred Moten (2023) inquired, how to pause, to arrest, to pursue writing about phenomena that have already slipped the possibility of understanding? How to act, redress, or pursue justice when not only is knowledge and understanding fleeting but so are the strikes of sociopolitical violence that leave the markings of what Hortense Spillers (1987) calls “hieroglyphics of the flesh”? Yet, the pursuit of justice requires us to know, to have a trace of understanding, in order to act.
What is also the case is that the discontinuities and disjointedness of the techno-mediated speeds and scales of life are also a result of the wounded flesh (Ferreira da Silva, 2022) from what happened and the anxieties and anticipations of what might happen, the hauntings of sociopolitical violence and the specters of both the violent speculative expropriation of capital and the struggle for imagined futures. In this complex world, the questions of what can be known, how it can be known, and the uncertainty and provisionality of what’s known are profoundly important and tied to what can be done. Thus, what’s at stake is the very condition for address, redress, and anti-colonial justice. This is a process of inquiry focused on the forces of power and the epistemological processes that constitute such ontological being. This necessitates more than knowing, this necessitates ethico-political practices of inquiry that both traverse the intervals of the boundary-making practices of method while also daring and risking to dwell in the tensions of the disjointed. It is through the simulacra of knowledge from the disjointed where the apparitions of the subjugated, the dispossessed, the uprooted, and the flesh rupture the overrepresentations of Man. It is here where the end of the world as we know it opens the possibility of an inseparable ethics and politics, and an inquiry of abolition

Author

• Ezekiel J. Dixon-Roman, Teachers College, Columbia University