Richard Rottenburg: Technicization, Colonization, and Decoloniality
Keynote held at the ReCentGlobe Annual Conference 2024
18 April 2024

Modernity's inescapable "question concerning technology" is currently being controversially reframed in light of the high probability of an ecological and social collapse of the planet. The question today is no longer what technology is. Rather, it has become more practical: who, what, when, where, why, and how to change technology's role in shaping the planetary future. In this talk, however, I will propose to revisit the more fundamental question of what technology is in order to gain a different approach to answering the 5W1H questions, which seem simpler than they are. First, I will explain what it means to speak of traveling technology and translating technology. Second, I will explain how the use of technology is part of any form of routinization of action, as implied by the notion of lifeworld, which is characterized by its self-evidently given meanings and their archives. Third, I will introduce the notion of technicization, which serves to show how technology, routinization, lifeworld, and sense-making are intertwined. Fourth, after these clarifications, I will ask how translating technology depends on technological archives and how together they shape meaning-making. This will lead me to my fifth and central point, which is to show that modern meaning-making must navigate an aporia. Technicization pushes toward the infinite, even though the human condition is necessarily understood only within finitude. With this redefinition of technicization as aporetic, I can finally suggest how a planetary decolonial technicization might be conceived.

Richard Rottenburg is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at WiSER at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (SA). His research foregrounds the development of material-semiotic orders and their (de)institutionalization. Methodologically, he seeks to contribute to a post-foundational understanding of empirical research conceived as translation. In this vein, he is currently editing a series of volumes on "Translating Technology in Africa" with Brill Publishers. He has recently completed a collaborative research project on "Technoscapes in Africa" and one on "Vaccine Inequity" and the role of mRNA technology.