1 Probing a Problematisation
It is generally understood that problems are not found, but need to be constructed. The first question is thus: how and what does this series on Translating Technology in Africa problematise? Together, the volumes in the series offer exercises in problematising the role of science and technology in Africa. In order to do so, the series probes the multiple ways in which science and technology are circulated, translated, and entangled with local practises. The relevant circulations are largely bi-directional and take place between temporalities (past to present), geographical spaces (urban to rural, country to country), and societal spheres. The entanglement of the technoscientific sphere with political, economic, legal, social, and cultural threads sits at the heart of each of the volumes and their chapters, evidencing the resultant particular and ever-changing assemblages (Suchman 2007). The collected case studies each describe concrete empirical events and situations that have manifested across various sites on the African continent. Most are variations and combinations of a few types of practices such as technoscientific solutions of practical problems, experimental innovations, melioristic interventions, creative adaptations, improvisations, and tweaks. Central to each of these practices lies the act of translation.
This problematisation immediately elicits a sceptical question. The practices listed are implicated in the overarching role of science and technology in preparing and supporting European imperialism and colonialism, and in the destruction of the planet’s ecology. They are also implicated in the more hidden ways in which postcolonial forms perpetuate and increase intolerable inequities. This book series proposes an effective way of addressing exactly these disturbing aspects by first identifying a contextualisation and an entry point that circumvents binary juxtapositions between “us” against “them,” “local” against “imported,” or “familiar” versus “alien.” Importantly, the series argues against essentialising and ontologising the characteristics of the juxtaposed entities.
This attempt at evading essentialising binaries follows a tradition that can be traced back to Leopold Sédar Senghor. During the first few decades after the independence of most African countries in the 1960s, the idea that “Europe
Such an approach prioritises two contextualisations: circulation (as opposed to inheritance) and future-orientation (as opposed to past-orientation). In other words, the entry point is not origin but future-making. The question is then how technoscientific knowledge production should be transformed to better serve a sustainable future for the planet—as the most precious common good—instead of serving capital reproduction. In short, how can technoscientific knowledge production be transformed to serve the ongoing search for the commons (Stengers 2015)?
Focused mainly on the highly technicised and industrialised countries of Europe and North America, Science and Technology Studies (STS) emerged in Europe during the 1970s as a distinct academic field with its own agenda. Over twenty years after STS was recognised, gained prominence, and became institutionalised in some of these countries—albeit on a very small scale—its problematisations and approaches were picked up in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa where they were critically translated into postcolonial contexts and in so doing, modified. However, the level of institutionalisation and popularity of the field is lowest at African universities and research institutions. Broadly speaking, on the one side of the general academic campus is a robust quest for the modernist advancement of science, medicine, engineering, mathematics, and computation which is officially celebrated and
STS is an attempt to disturb this conspicuous configuration that can be found around the world by unearthing its inconsistencies and examining the entanglement of the technoscientific sphere with the political, economic, legal, social, and cultural threads. It does not reduce technoscience to power and money, nor power and money to technoscience. STS also rejects the assumption that technoscience is an expression of deep cultural assumptions or hidden laws of history to be revealed by cultural studies and philosophy. Rather, its objects of study are situated somewhere in the middle, in the details of the practices of the interstitial spaces between the two sides of the academic campus.
Another STS attempt to disturb an influential and seemingly stable understanding of science refers to the erroneous conviction that what matters is “high theory” and “breakthrough experiments” conducted by few chosen men of genius. Yet what really matters are the innumerable and often minute practices, their material infrastructures, and the complex ways in which they interweave to form temporary configurations (Elias 1992), with reference to some specific zeitgeist. Indisputably, there are theoretical and conceptual considerations aimed at making predictions that can be corrected (Chalmers 1976), mainly through experiments (including research instruments), measurements and statistical calculations (including digital technology). However, framing narratives such as progress and apocalypse, or equality and justice, and unpredictable intricacies of concrete situational practices also play an important role in shaping the production of technoscience. The latter often remain largely invisible.
The problem with this invisibility is that it significantly distorts public understanding of what scientific knowledge means. Invisibilising the contingency of the research process and the probabilistic nature of any scientific finding within the political discourse invokes a false notion of certainty. This invocation of certainty ultimately feeds either a dangerously naïve belief in science or an equally hazardously disbelief. The fact that things notoriously remain uncertain and often turn out rather differently than predicted does not justify any of these convictions. It rather proves that science is open to correction.
The authors of this series aim to critically explore technoscientific practises by holding these contextualisations in mind, as mentioned, and focusing on
This endeavour is important since contemporary governance around the world, including in African countries, often centres on regulating various technoscientific measures. The current COVID-19 pandemic underscores a configuration of social, economic, and environmental problems that were in fact glaringly obvious long before the pandemic. Most critical social problems of government—like equality, justice, health, education, and employment—relate to inequalities that are systematically engendered by capitalism. Simultaneously, these universal sociopolitical and juridical problems of capitalism relate to issues of the environment such as climate change, energy resources, and toxic residues. Both types of problems and their entanglement—and this is what the series is interested in—are framed and addressed by evidence that is produced within the technoscientific field. A comprehensive understanding of how this field works is therefore crucial for democratic participation, government, and corporate decision-making processes. Without a sufficient level of lay expertise, democracy is in danger of falling prey to flawed understandings of the technosciences and how they shape the world and are shaped by it.
It is equally important that technoscientific experts have an adequate understanding of the presuppositions within which their practices are enfolded, of the assemblages that their practices and material objects are unavoidably part of, and last but not least, of the popular understandings of what it is that they actually do. Considering this background, the series aims to trigger a vivid curiosity towards this field of inquiry. It intends to demonstrate that the different settings in which technoscientific solutions are developed and deployed require different approaches to examine them. It thus does not import STS to Africa but offer inspiration on how to rewrite STS in and from Africa—not only for students of the humanities, social sciences, and law, but also for students of the sciences, engineering, and medicine.
All these goals cannot be achieved without the active involvement of technoscience. Modernist technoscience emerged in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by translating diverse knowledges first from Europe and then from most parts of the world into a new assemblage. During this translation process a lot was lost and sacrificed for the sake of
Modernist technoscience did not prevent but rather amplified the mechanisms of self-devouring growth and ruination by the reckless industrial production not only of growing inequalities, but also of toxic residues that now threaten to terminate human life on the planet. Twenty-first century technosciences need to create new forms of sustainable future-making that will have to be measured against their ability to contribute to healing the planet. Achieving this goal presupposes that locally situated methodologies and technoscientific archives need to be recognised, represented, and included into the making of technosciences that can guide humanity out of the catastrophic times we are living through.
2 Probing Concepts
Against this backdrop, each volume in the series inquires into the multiple ways in which science and technology are translated so that they circulate and entwine with various other threads of concrete practices that result in ever-changing assemblages. Although the case studies examine different empirical events and situations, they all pay attention to the emergence and unfolding of ever-changing yet patterned assemblages, while simultaneously critically probing the analytical concepts they deploy.
The concept assemblage as used in much of STS literature is translated from the French word agencement which has no exact English counterpart. Agencement—the word agency is recognisable within it—refers to an arrangement or a combination of heterogeneous elements adjusted to one another, without the understanding that a human agent has arranged a number of passive things according to a human plan to expand human agency. Quite the contrary, agencements are endowed with their own capacity of acting. In the original understanding by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), there is nothing outside of an agencement because its description and the construction of its meaning is also part of it. This is to say that a sociotechnical agencement includes the language that describes it. To argue this way, Deleuze and Guattari need to contradict their own proposition as they claim to critically look through the recursive loop while maintaining that this is impossible.
One can, however, reasonably maintain that human sensemaking is able to self-reflectively include this loop into its operation as a way to inspect
Assemblages, as we have emphasized above, are the result of combinations of heterogenous elements adapted to each other. Some of these elements are human and others non-human, some are material and others immaterial. One can first think of simple examples like a library, a hospital, or an airline. At the same time and on a different level of classification, these combinations relate to differentiated fields of praxis—social, political, economic, legal, and cultural—with their distinct logics, codes, valuations, and normativities. One can easily imagine how the latter shape libraries, hospitals, or airlines. To employ a different vocabulary, we can speak of an entanglement of all the enumerated threads to form material-semiotic assemblages with their own agency. This agency is not situated in any of the threads themselves, but rather lies right in-between them. So far, we have seen how assemblages and practices are co-constituted. The assertion has been that they are eternally unfolding and never result in permanent patterns.
The one main cause for this perpetual change is prefigured in the fact that assemblages exist only as far as they are enacted in practices. Practices are patterned and thus imply repetition—otherwise one would not distinguish them from random activities and behaviours. Repetitions necessarily engender differences. What is repeated is being changed. As practices are therefore necessarily changing, they are—in the context of modernity—related to a horizon of changes for the better (Arendt 1998). One main route for trying out better possibilities for the future is to observe other peoples’ practices in search of improvements of one’s own practices. It is here that the notion of circulation gains importance for the approach that the authors of this series adopt. It is also here that it becomes clear why a search for origins fails to understand how assemblages unfold.
Assemblages and institutions cannot easily travel in their entirety and as such. This is due to the fact that they exist only as webs of relations between heterogeneous elements that constitute each other in the space between them. It is only some of the elements that can travel quite well. Think again of the three exemplar assemblages: a library, a hospital, an airline—none of which can travel. But books, medication and spare parts can easily be circulated. Librarians, doctors, and pilots can easily travel. Also techniques of cataloguing, diagnostic apparatuses, and repair and maintenance protocols can circulate. In order to depart, travel, and arrive,—in other words, to circulate—these elements disconnect from their assemblages and must be translated into
In this sense the central operation in the constitution of an assemblage is translation. This argument thus seems to imply that there is an immutable kernel to the mutable material-semiotic form that justifies the logic of translation. To reify the point, it helps to remember one of oldest meanings of the word translation as referring to the fundamental question of how far it was possible to “translate” from earth to heaven without death (Hebrews 11:5, Bible, King James Version of 1611). Notwithstanding its religious indexicality and implicit ontology—we are here speaking of the soul—this means that after long travels and many translations even an immutable kernel of a phenomenon will most likely get lost in translation. In the best case it will not die but transmorph into another form of existence.
Circulation and translation result in versions of isomorphism (things become similar) and with time of transmorphisms (a new form emerges). Firstly, isomorphism is often achieved through normative regulation like for instance, when all countries around the world agree to use the Gregorian calendar as a metacode for air traffic or stock exchange regulation, while they continue to use other calendars as their own cultural code. Secondly, isomorphism is often achieved through emulation or adaptation to the way others are acting; it is a form of mimetic learning, and hence the concept is also known more specifically as mimetic isomorphism. This happens, for instance, when many libraries, hospitals, and airlines around the world imitate a particular library, hospital, or airline that they believe is outstandingly successful. In such cases, a blueprint circulates and becomes a model through imitation. Without imitation there is no model. Those who imitate a blueprint create the model. Thirdly, isomorphism is often achieved by coercion. But in fact, the three versions of isomorphism (normative, mimetic, coercive) are ideal types, since dimensions of all three are often implicit in any real case. Over time, what once appeared to be isomorphism may turn out to be a case of transmorphism as the circulating form has been translated up to a point that a new form emerged which can start new cycles of imitation.
The European colonisation of great parts of the world including the African continent did not start as project of coercive isomorphism. The intention was not to install any of the political, juridical, and economic structures that were shaping European countries during those times. On the contrary, colonial extraction worked better by avoiding isomorphism and often began with brute force, executed with superior weaponry. However, as the European colonial powers pursued their economic interests, they were dragged into projects that implied coercive and normative forms of isomorphism into the field of for example, education, health, and basic infrastructure. Related projects aiming at normative isomorphism were joined by some forms of mimetic
For the purpose of this series focused on translating technology in Africa, the relation between the circulation of technology and trans- and isomorphism is the main and central focus. Within this problematique, the relevant entry point here is that the travel of technology never completely follows fixed political boundaries of any kind including those of colonial or postcolonial states. Instead it results in differential outcomes that are also shaped by the spatial range of the technologies. The spatial extents of the resulting assemblages vary and do not yield coherent and clearly demarcated political spaces like national territories, regions, or continents. Some infrastructures are designed to integrate a specific territory by way of enclosure, such as policing and border protection for example, with their related technologies of surveillance and control. Other infrastructures are designed to cut across national territories to integrate regions like power grids, telephone systems, river bed management system. And finally, some assemblages are designed to span the globe such as the Gregorian calendar, the base ten numerical system, the decimal standard metric, and the internet and its protocols. In other words, if circulation leads to some form and level of technoscientific isomorphism, this does not coincide with political territories. It also does not coincide with older and historically stabilised technoscientific configurations and their archives which again do not coincide with entities such as “cultures” or “people.” The latter are themselves shaped by changing technoscientific configuration.
To reiterate, a technoscientific archive is a cultural memory that entails many more technoscientific devices and procedures than an individual or a collective at a certain time in history actually uses. However, individuals and collectives who grew up within the range of a certain technoscientific archive would often recognise elements from it when, through some coincidence, they reappear from the hinterlands of their memory. As a test, think for example if you spontaneously know how the electric telegraph works? The key point here is that technoscientific archives do not correspond to territories like countries, regions, or continents, nor do they correspond to the extension of the realms of cultures, religions, languages, literatures, or narratives. Assuming that there were two (north/south), five (continental), or 206 (countries) clearly bounded technoscientific archives means to get the argument of the archive as epistemic space wrong. They are not like separate containers placed adjacent to each other as the territories of sovereign national spaces are. Rather, they cut across them. Archives overlap in various ways and are
The authors of this series identify the ways in which the circulation and translation of technoscientific things—like protocols for experiments, units and formulae of measurements and statistics, methods of approximation, procedures, instruments, data collection models, data analysis, validations, case studies, and narratives—engender isomorphisms and transmorphisms. The hope is to contribute to a body of knowledge interested in future-making by following the principal question: how can technoscientific knowledge production become part of the commons to serve a sustainable future on the planet instead of optimising capital reproduction?
3 Probing Themes
The volumes of this series examine the unfolding of sociotechnical assemblages in different societal fields, in the present as well as in the past. The first volumes foreground different technoscientific equipment as part of various practices. Examples of these more specific themes are metrics and digitalisation; lifeworlds routinised by technoscientific equipment; infrastructures, procedures, and their users; devices and their users; technologies and the making of spatial configurations. Future volumes might include studies of technoscientific equipment related to biodiversity and interspecies relations. Together, the volumes aim to support and add momentum to ongoing and emerging debates about the role of technoscience both on the African continent and in general.
While these debates are characterised by unresolved controversies and open questions, this series gathers related detailed empirical work and theoretical reflections. We do not want to pretend that we can resolve all controversies and answer all open questions. We certainly do not believe that we can create a metaphysical tabula rasa to invoke a new ontology, or unearth an old one. Rather, we keep with Otto Neurath’s interpretation: “There is no tabula rasa. We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from the best components. Only metaphysics can disappear without trace” (Neurath 1983, 92).