Abstract
This short essay explores some of the issues at stake when science and technology studies (STS) are situated within a global frame. Global, in this reading, is both historical and aspirational. As historical, it rejects the East-West dichotomy, insisting instead on one world as the outcome of multiple unequal and uneven world-making processes. As aspirational, to consider what a global STS would look like this essay imagines a world where technology studies were invented in the megacities of the Global South. At once it becomes clear that familiar concepts need revision: illegibility gets added to legibility, repair and dismantling join production and construction, permanence and impermanence occupy the same register of privilege. Making particular what had been considered general forces a reconsideration of the objects, methods, boundaries and histories of our studies. This is further demonstrated by a comparison of hybridity/isation as it is understood respectively in STS and post-colonial studies. What becomes apparent is the relative absence of violence as a core STS concept, notwithstanding its centrality in the making of the modern world. Going global exposes intellectual foundations STS scholars have been unable or unwilling to acknowledge; this alone makes the exercise productive and worthwhile.
In the conclusion to their review essay on ‘STS in the City’ in the most recent edition of the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Ignacio Farías and Anders Blok point to ‘white spots’ or absences in the intersection of STS with urban studies. They note with regret ‘that many [STS scholars] have preferred to stay at home, in a Euro-American metropolis, turning this into their truth spot’ (Farías & Blok, 2017, p. 575). Taking this concern seriously leads to the question: How differently would their chapter read if these white spots were coloured in? In this short note, I propose that the issue goes well beyond the challenge of inclusion, or merely adding a set of cases to the existing ones of New York, London, Paris and other familiar global cities. The larger problem is not just absence or distance but difference (Spivak, 1999).
To engage with this claim, join me in a thought experiment. Let’s imagine for a moment that technology studies emerged not from the historical experience of North America and the sociological and philosophical insights of Europe but rather from the everyday lived experiences of the urban spaces—those ‘big but not powerful’ places as Jennifer Robinson neatly puts it (Robinson, 2002, p. 540)—where the majority of the world’s population lives: the informal sectors of megacities such as Manila, Jakarta, Mumbai, Cairo, Nairobi, Lagos, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. What foundations would technology studies be built on, given such a beginning?
To set the stage, a very brief outline of what I mean by the urban informal sector. This is the ‘non-spectacular’ city, as scholars have termed it (Aceska et al., 2019), a zone of illegibility comprised of places and peoples that the state cannot penetrate or see clearly, where illicitness and illegality define everyday life (van Schendel & Abraham, 2005). The urban slum, which is typically built on land not owned by those who live there, where access to physical infrastructural utilities such as electricity, water and transport is normalised through illicit and illegal connections, is a typical example of what is meant by the urban informal sector. It includes both the informal economy, which comes down to not paying taxes and trafficking in illegal products and services (Hart, 1985), as well as what Partha Chatterjee has termed ‘political society’, migrant and marginal populations whose urban presence is bereft of the rights and entitlements of bourgeois civil society (Chatterjee, 2004). The urban informal is not matched by corresponding ‘rights to the city’.
Before we slip into characterising the urban informal as an othered double or temporary antithesis of a formal, transparent and ordered civil society, critical urbanist Ananya Roy reminds us that the informal sector should be understood as a distinct ‘mode of urbanization’ (Roy, 2012). Rather than an aberration or anomaly to be removed, she sees it as a critical binding force for the city. No hard boundary separates the informal sector from the formal, indeed it cannot: those two spaces are intimately tied together through relationships of labour exploitation, cultural control and economic and political power. The labour power of the informal sector is everywhere, from the private domestic spaces of the above-ground and legible city to its low wage public construction, food preparation, cleaning, maintenance and security industries: sectors the pandemic has reclassified as essential services. The informal settlement may be a factory for global production as well as a living space for urban middle-class professionals. Finally, it must be noted that despite the lack of state legibility and ritualised presence, the urban informal is not a space of chaos and disorder in the spirit of a Robert Kaplan; rather, it is a space whose order is provided by non-state actors, from criminal gangs to informal community organisers, and where possible, made resilient by private social infrastructures (Elyachar, 2010; Simone, 2004).
Now consider Farías and Blok’s summary of Michel Callon’s ‘redescription of the processes of architectural conception’. They highlight Callon’s finding that urban design processes do not create a final object as much as they lead to ‘the creation of a multiplicity of mediators’ from architects to architectural models (Farías & Blok, 2017, p. 564). This may well be true for the spectacular city, but if we take the urban informal as our starting point, we see clearly the methodological limits of Callon’s project. How do we study a process of urban design that has no discrete authors, that does not take place in a bounded setting, that does not use plans or drawings, and that privileges dismantling, repair and maintenance as much as construction? Callon’s assumptions of what may be taken for granted are unduly narrow and restrictive and, in other words, constitute a special case.
Later in the chapter, they discuss Latour’s focus on the hidden ‘control rooms’ that make visible the city in ‘visual, textual and numeric’ forms that permit the accumulation of urban knowledge and shape policy intervention (Farías & Blok, 2017, p. 570). Again, not wrong, but narrow. The informal sector, by definition, marks the limit of the gaze of the control room (or more precisely, becomes incomprehensible noise for control room inputs). It is hidden from the hidden control room because it does not exist according to the official register while remaining in plain sight and a structural necessity for the city to function. This urban ‘absent presence’ does not disagree with as much as it complicates qualitatively Latour’s conclusion that the city is a ‘multiplicity that is simply impossible to totalize or fix’ (Farías & Blok, 2017, p. 570). Starting with the ‘invisible’ megacity does not merely extend existing urban analysis to new empirical conditions, it requires us to think again what is the object of study, its boundaries and histories, and what methods and concepts are appropriate for its understanding (Brenner & Schmid, 2015; Schindler, 2017).
Turning to politics, when the ‘right to the city’ is unavailable and the social collective is perceived as a population rather than a citizenry, the politics of the city must be thought through quite differently. Everyday politics combines the political agencies of legal and physical infrastructures with powerful human actors to exclude and bar the informal sector from official recognition. The informal sector must subject itself to the contradictory conjoining of visibility and invisibility: visibility for the continued maintenance of the private and public city and itself; invisibility engendered by the lack of rights and unenforceable claims to presence to maintain its insecure place in urban margins. Rare moments when the informal sector bursts into view, whether during a pandemic or when marginal workers lay down their tools for a day, do not merely emphasise the dependence of the formal on the informal. It also reformulates what we mean by the political. Inclusion and participation, stock responses in the STS literature to contested claims over public goods, betray uncritical liberal assumptions. These responses cannot be the answers to everyday urban politics when the ‘right to have rights’ is itself in question (Arendt, 1968).
If the urban informal is taken as the starting point for technology studies, what would this field look like? Let me summarise some of the key elements of the informal sector as outlined above. Most obviously, it is characterised by resource and materials scarcity. Not all residents of the informal sector are poor, but many are. Moreover, there may be scarcities and costs built into access to resources and materials due to its location and identity. Second, it is spatially temporary and existentially insecure. The physical locations of the informal settlement range from liminal spaces such as the edge of a railway line and below a bridge or flyover to environmentally fragile locations alongside riverbanks, marshes and swamps. Informal settlements arise on the edges of middle-class gated estates, resting against factory walls and in the physical margins of the city. Access to living space in the informal sector is granted via moral claims and political demands (rather than economic contracts or rights-based claims) negotiated with the city, state and private authorities. Hence, the possibility of forced displacement becomes a permanent condition of being, rather than an exceptional occurrence or rare emergency. Taken together, these conditions imply that the informal sector is characterised by an ontology of deep insecurity and physical precarity. Under these everyday conditions, the foundations of a revised technology studies of urban spaces become impermanence and invisibility.
If there is always a good chance of being displaced from one’s dwelling, impermanence becomes normalised. What this means in practical terms is that a design priority (to go back to Callon) will be to construct a dwelling that can be rebuilt elsewhere at short notice and without excessive loss of habitability. This has immediate implications for the weight of building materials used, and by extension, their protective capacity, and leads to prioritising roofs and exterior walls over floors, kitchens over sleeping spaces, and decisions regarding the purchase of heavy durable goods such as cooking stoves, refrigerators and air-cooling devices such as fans. Windows might be considered too expensive or frivolous. The built outcome is a very different kind of structure than we are used to imagining when we think of a ‘typical’ urban dwelling.
Impermanence as a starting point imposes other challenges on design parameters. It requires that the ease of dismantling and mobility of building materials must be considered alongside their strength and robustness. It revises what is meant by sustainability, and imposes new conditions on meanings of novelty, originality and innovation. By extension, it also requires us to consider cannibalisation, misuse, waste and recycling as everyday forms of resource mobilisation. The normalisation of these conditions can be identified in unexpected ways, for example, as in the passages traced by the colour blue across Kolkata’s informal sector and urban renewal projects (Sur, 2017). ‘Blue’ can be seen as a political force joining the impermanent and fixed spaces of Kolkata’s informal sector, from the heavy plastic tarpaulin used for roofing shacks to the noise-inhibiting curtains bounding construction projects that also temporarily house migrant workers. It thus opens up new considerations for STS aesthetics, from colour to privileging the rough and ready over the smooth and finished; it finds no surprise in the visual collage of the palimpsest over the homogenous and painted surface.
The next step is to take impermanence and invisibility ‘back’ to the legible, formal, fixed, developed city. How differently do we understand the urban formal when these other conditions are taken as starting points (Smith, 2006)?
Hybridity/isation
The starting point for a post-colonial perspective is recognition of the impossibility of East and West as separate and pre-established foundations. To put it in more positive terms, a post-colonial perspective begins from the acknowledgement of the connections and circulations that have made one world, unquestionably unequal and uneven, but kinetically joined since premodern times. The foundation of the post-colonial critique is the inescapable awareness that today’s unequal global structures are the product of multiple world-making encounters under flags of discovery, exploration, slavery, indenture, imperialism, settling, migration, colonialism, war, development, aid, trade, obligation, apology, truth and reconciliation, responsibility to protect and more. If violence was endemic to the foundation of the modern world, how can violence not have a central place in our conceptual toolbox today? To illustrate this point, consider how differently STS and post-colonial studies understand violence in relation to what appears to be a common term shared by both: hybrid/ity/isation.
Hybridisation was famously invoked by Bruno Latour in We Have Never Been Modern as the original or obvious condition of things—a conjoined nature/culture, non-human/human ontology—that modernity reinscribes (though a process of translation) as a ‘possible monster’ and a disturbing ‘mixture of two pure forms’. It then sanctions the original hybrid monster by ‘rendering mixtures unthinkable’, leading to the process of purification (Latour, 1993). Through the reductionism of translation and purification, nature becomes separated from culture, human from non-human, in the process rendering the apparent binary opposition into a hierarchy of difference and domination. Latour reframes the modern as a double act of epistemic rupture and discursive representation of rupture as victory. His intervention becomes one of restoration. There is an uncanny similarity in this formulation with the post-colonial reading of the hybrid; however, what their differences tell us is even more interesting.
Homi K. Bhabha argues that colonial discourse is ambivalent, a master concept for post-colonial studies (Bhabha, 1994). He goes on to explain that ambivalence is an outcome of the working of colonial discourse as it seeks to authorise its power by splitting the object of its power: master and slave. What is crucial for colonial discourse to be effective—and here Bhabha tellingly slides into referring to it as the ‘voice of modernity’—is that its authority must be recognised immediately and without question. Colonial power cannot acknowledge that it has acquired its position through violence (which would be illegitimate based on its liberal self-representation); hence, it must erase its own past and come to be seen as ‘naturally’ superior to its subject populations, a process he terms ‘disavowal’ (of origins). Disavowal works, Bhabha argues not by simply repressing, but by ‘splitting’—in the first instance by producing a hierarchy of value (master/slave; metropolitan/colonial), followed by making the subjected object (slave/colonial) into ‘something different—mutation, a hybrid’.
In both accounts, the hybrid is monstrous and a product of knowledge work. But there is more. In Latour’s account of modernity (that he sometimes names Western), the hybrid is the original condition that is denied in the interest of a reductionist knowledge-seeking purity. For Bhabha, the hybrid mutant emerges from the pursuit of authoritative colonial knowledge-power. It is much more than a disturbing mixture of essences. Restoration cannot be the end point of the intervention, for the hybrid is also productive: it constitutes a strategy of ‘subversion that turns the gaze of the discriminated back up on the eye of power’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 112).
For Bhabha, the hybrid is monstrous because when colonial power is enacted on the object of its knowledge, it finds that the object exceeds the ability of discourse to be fully represented or epistemically contained. Ambivalence is the play of the excess that escapes the control of power-knowledge (or modernity if you prefer), a kind of colonial recalcitrance. That uncontrollable excess becomes the site at which colonial or official authority is always under question, unable to claim its desired ‘natural’ authority without resorting to force or admitting to its history of violence. The post-colonial hybrid ‘breaks down the symmetry and duality of self/other, inside/outside’ (or we could add, nature/culture and non-human/human), by introducing a third space beyond the binary, the site from which modes of resistance to power—mimicry, subversion and more—ensue.
Latour takes an Archimedean standpoint, the discoverer standing outside discourse, to expose the historicity of modernity while in the same instant distancing us from implication in its histories and workings. By contrast, post-colonial studies understand the unravelling of colonial/modern authority as immanent to the working of modernity itself. It argues that the erasure of the violence of modernity is only possible when the ‘co-production’ of the monstrous hybrid that becomes the Global South is written out of the history of modernity. Colonial violence begets epistemic violence. The ‘white spot’ is a spot made white.
Towards a Global Technology Studies
The term post-colonial inevitably carries with it unruly visions of the Global South, of darker places far from the bright lights and nerve centres of Euro-American academe. For this reason, it is easy to think of a post-colonial retooling as primarily an index of inclusion, namely the addition of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific to an existing body of knowledge about science and technology in the Global North (filling in the white spots). While knowing more about the rest of the world is undoubtedly a good given how much more work remains to be done, it is far from enough. For one thing, it does not tell us how we should know those places and their knowledge, how to reinsert and replace what has been excluded by the workings of modern power, how and if we should translate subjugated knowledge into the languages of what is already considered known, and more.
The spectre of alternative modernities invoked by any claim to difference arises here. This is a serious and important problem, regrettably all too often solved by reducing alterity to geopolitics. This is a move that unites scholars as distant as Hegel (who was characteristically dismissive of non-Western knowledge) and Needham (who sought equal participation in the international knowledge Olympics). What joins both figures and their contemporary followers into a single position is their common belief in the essential difference between East and West. From a post-colonial standpoint, by contrast, the idea of Orient and Occident are outcomes of the struggles that made the modern world, not its progenitors.
Finally, and to be clear, this thought experiment does not seek to ‘cancel’ the important and critical work done by generations of STS scholars. What it seeks to do is to place that work in a wider context, beyond liberal-modern assumptions, positioned against and with other theoretical traditions. Exploring the revisions and complications that arise when the informal sector is taken as the starting point for urban analysis proposes that much of what we take for granted constitutes a special case. The general conditions are the norms and material conditions that apply in the megacities of the Global South. To acknowledge this distinction is not to erase what we know but to begin the process of extending those understandings to a much wider and more complicated frame, bearing in mind that to do so might expose foundations that we have been unable to see, due to where we began. This is the first step towards a postcolonial global technology studies.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Lyle Fearnley, Ijlal Naqvi, Rita Padawangi and Chitra Venkataramani for their comments on earlier versions of this essay and also to the editors of this special section for their invitation and feedback.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.