Cosmo-Computation
Discussion
"What we call “cosmo-computation” entails a fully automated recursive system for which there is supposed to be no human-in-the-loop. This term applies Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics (which calls for a technical mediation between metaphysics and cultures that do not conform to the universal standardization of knowledge) to the cognitive paradigm of technology by asking what it would mean to experiment with auto-imaging multiple ontologies and multiple metaphysics through computation. But cosmo-computation still maintains the specter of whiteness and intensified legacies of racial capital within itself. These are legacies whereby computational schema cannot erase anti-blackness or the brutalities and techno-semiotic hieroglyphics marked in flesh. In other words, cosmo-computation must also work on the cyber-mechanics of the machine in relation to slavery, to take on and step outside the dialectic of the human and the thing.
But how to run with cosmo-computational epistemologies without risking a reinforced universal logic or another plea to techno-cultural difference in the name of multiculturalism? What critical space is left to counter-actualize the recursivity of this double pincer that simply conceals the monologic discourse of self-determination through a proliferation of dualities? How can cosmo-computation—as a procedure of existing as techno-flesh—become a way to construct worlds from the heretical rules of what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls “difference without separability”?
Cosmo-computation does not coincide with any reclamation of the modern history of technology that starts from the local, the periphery, or the colonies of the West. Its critical possibility lies in exposing the operative power of the universalism-multiculturalism double pincer in preserving the overrepresentation of Man. This critical moment is undoubtedly haunted by the “continuous present” (Fred Moten) of the brutalities of racial capitalism, colonialisms, and slavery. Thus, it must also become surrounded by practices of fugitivity, by speculative moments, methods, and activities that spring out of the negative negation (da Silva) of the slave, the refugee, the woman, the immigrant, the trans through the existence of otherwise techno-flesh that refuses the saving promise of Promethean Man.
Our proposition is that machine epistemology, as a cosmo-computational affair, must not only challenge the view of techno-capital but also the human form. Within the history of machine epistemology, industrial capital took on the prototype of automation, replacing the archetype of enslaved labor. With the invention of the robot, the enslaved became enfleshed in machines as much as machines became the hosts of already brutally wounded flesh. Even if this modern form of recursive epistemology extended colonial mentalities into the model of global ecologies of extraction and commodity exchange, it had already voraciously incorporated into techno-capital an irreversible contagion that infiltrated the cosmogony of Man and his belief in the bio-economic myth of evolution."