Adaptation and Creativity in Africa -
Technologies and Significations in the
Production of Order and Disorder

SPP 1448 Editorial Workshop: “Technologies and Significations”

Location:
re:work
Humbold Universität zu Berlin
Georgenstraße 23,
10099 Berlin

Date:
13 February 2017

Abstract

The usage of the word “technology” frequently appears to be marked by a semantic confusion — it blurs a category of phenomena with the study of those very phenomena. This confusion is at the same time indicative of what emerges at the heart of “technology”. Namely, the technical equipment of modernity is characterized by being all-encompassing, by infusing all aspects of world-making and by being highly dependent on its own theorization and reflexivity. Hence the logos of technics and the technics themselves merge to become technology. This confluence of practice and theory pertaining to “technology” dates back to debates that emerged at the beginning of the 20^th century and is analogous to the one that is being debated at the beginning of the 21^st century under the term “anthropocene” - encompassing bio and its logos, resulting in man-made nature or nature-culture.

There is a second unease that characterises “technology” as a concept. If it makes sense to speak of technology as infusing all aspects of world-making, it is equally plausible to assume that technology unites material and semiotic elements or more consequentially: that technology is a material-semiotic assemblage. Conventionally, the realm of ideas and sense-making — which can be named differently according to the specific aspect one wants to emphasize, e.g. culture, semantics, web of beliefs, signification, narrative etc. — is dealt with separately from the realm of technology. While there is a long genealogy of challenging the separation of the material from the ideational, recent scholarly work is more radical by assuming so-called material-semiotic assemblages that cannot be disentangled analytically without losing grip of the problem under scrutiny. Taking this position seriously, implies ascribing to the idea that reality, like nature, is not simply “out there”, and ideas “in here” – i.e. in our human minds representing reality more or less accurately. Rather, that reality is permanently in the making, that humans are involved in the enactment of realities, and finally, that they do so under conditions not of their own choosing. They are forced to struggle with an environment that is the sedimentation of previous actions. One of the core points of this claim is that the agents of those actions are not humans but heterogeneous material-semiotic assemblages.

At this workshop we debate inputs of various formats to prepare a book proposal under the working title:  “Adaption and Creativity: the role of technology in the creation of dis/order”

Participants: Aarjun Appadurai (Discussant), Arlena Liggins, Benjamin Beck, Bert Turner, David Kananizadeh, Eva Riedke, Fazil Moradi, Hlonipha Mokoena (Discussant), Lorenz Gosch, René Umlauf, Sandra Calkins, Songi Park, Stefanie Bognitz, Uli Beisel.

Time Schedule for the production of the editied volume:

•     Discussion of the proposal at the workshop on 13 Februar 2017 in Berlin
•      Introduction to be written by mid Mai 2017
•      Chapters to be written by mid July 2017
•      Editorial workshop mid October 2017
•      Final edits by mid November 2017
•    Submission to publisher mid December 2017