Hey, in about an hour at 8pm ET we're going to get together to talk about chapter 4 of Techno-Negative.

I'm still confused about technological onticide lol, but if we can talk about it today, I would be super grateful. I'll put some chips down and stake out an interpretation now to get a conversation started:

Okay, so my reading of the chapter is that Dekeyser wants us to face the fact that humanist boundaries have historically been drawn by colonizers looking at the "savage" and saying that those are lesser or subordinate to human beings by virtue of their relationship to technology (or their non-relationship to technologies, or their relationship with the environment, or etc etc). As I understand it, this is what he's talking about with "technological onticide" - the negative constitution of humanity by way of saying subhumans or less-than-humans don't use (European) tools and technologies. Facing that history doesn't resolve all of our problems or give us an easy ontology to apply; but it does open us up to different ways of thinking about techno-negativity.

There was a part where I thought I understood where he was going, but then I think the thread slipped through my fingers: on page 85 he talked about the primacy of the relational. I'd really like to hear people's thoughts about that section, but for what it's worth I thought he was going to make some kind of point along the lines of "human existence is defined in relation to others" like as if to say that someone who completely isolates themself from other human beings is sort of impossible to distinguish from non-humans because that entity is like... disconnected from the rest of humanity. But I think that point wouldn't make sense in the context of the rest of the chapter, so I'm just going to put that thought down for now.

I was hoping/thinking this all kind of connected to the idea of being constitutively correlated, that all things are recursively co-constituted. But, again, I feel like this doesn't resolve the history of humanism, and risks stumbling into one of the things Dekeyser seems to call out about some posthumanist emancipatory work (see pages 87-88).

I'm still thinking about the last section on "savage ontologies" and the examples Dekeyser gives to think of as inspiration for an unhumanist tendency. Again, if you have a take or a read or a thought on that, I'd love to hear it.

When you're ready to join at 8p ET, you can click on this link or you can go here:

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

See you then.