Technocraticisim and the Reinvention of Discovery

• In Event: The Colonial Fantasy of American Futurities

Abstract

In this paper I argue that historically there is an immediate correlation between moments of heightened political and racial tension and Whiteness’s ability to create, imagine, and invent. The recent growth and development of the technocratic order—the integration of technology not as mere tool but as an interactive partner in human life and living—necessitates the use of antiblack and settler colonial violence to reinvent colonial discovery in order to give this new order of politics its coherency and to reorient current technological innovation towards its true colonial and antiblack purpose. The now debunked story of the Canadian boy who “discovered” a “lost Mayan city” using satellite technology represent the way that modern technological innovation is used to reproduce and recreate colonial narratives in present and future contexts. Other recent events such as the droning of Black officer Christopher Droner in the San Bernadino Mountains in 2013, the sonic guns used against Native protestors at Standing Rock in 2016, and the robot that killed veteran Micah Xavier Johnson in Dallas 2016 also seem to indicate as much. In such instances, contemporary practices and principles of antiblack and settler colonial violence broaden the frontier of colonial possibility by facilitating an attempt at white transcendence against the body and the materiality of living through technological innovation and fantasies of intergalactic travel. Taking Jodi Byrd and Hortense Spiller’s cue that chattel slavery and settler colonialism map Black and Native land and body as a way to “map the universe,” I argue that current technological innovation attempts to mediate Black and Native resistance and millennial maturity by expanding the white colonial frontier into the abstract realm of cyber space and the material and conceptual realm of outer space and the cosmos.

Author

• Chad B Infante, Northwestern University