Technology and the limits of cultural critique

ABSTRACT This essay draws on Chen Kuan-Hsing's Asia as Method (2010) to ask what it means to “de-imperialise” technology. Cultural studies have mostly skirted the technology question, even though in colonial and postcolonial times, it has precisely been technology that has hierarchized the world between inventors and imitators, the advanced and the backwards. Beginning with a call to reopen the very concept of technology, the essay suggests that to undo today's technological monotheism, we must historically reconstruct diverse and dispersed technical traditions of the world. However, this cannot be done simply by arguing for different “technological cultures”, a formulation which grants a certain diversity to uses and users of technology while preserving the universality of the concept of technology as such. The principle of cultural difference which thus far anchored postcolonial and decolonial theory, the essay suggests, does not suffice to critically rethink technology; for the techniques which humans use to cognize and navigate the planet are not fully reducible to culture. Techniques thus are by definition planetary (though not universal) in orientation. Hence, diverse technological designs become possible through neither cultural particularity nor scientific universality but the agonistic playing out of competing cosmologies, ontologies and socialities, competing modes of worlding the earth and generating diverse technical imaginaries, though each with a common and shared planetary provenance.