“Historically the expansion of colonialism had to do with the broader question, Who is it that the Earth belongs to? That was the key question underlying colonial conquest and imperial expansion since the 15th century…
newframe.com/thoughts-on-th…
newframe.com/thoughts-on-th…
…European powers had decided that the Earth in its entirety belonged to them. They were its true owners, and they could occupy lands that were populated by foreign people…To a large extent, colonial expansion was a planetary project…
…decolonisation is by definition a planetary enterprise, a radical openness of and to the world, a deep breathing for the world as opposed to insulation…Because racism is in the DNA of colonialism. There is no colonialism that doesn’t entail a huge dose of structural racism…
…And there is no colonialism neither that is not driven, let’s say, by some form or another of a genocidal impulse.
This genocidal potential can be actualised or it might not, but it is always there. It is there as Hannah Arendt shows in her own work on race and bureaucracy…
This genocidal potential can be actualised or it might not, but it is always there. It is there as Hannah Arendt shows in her own work on race and bureaucracy…
...This genocidal potential was put to work in the Americas, in Australia. It was put to work by the Germans in Namibia. So it is always there. Because where there is racism, this genocidal potential exists…
…Where there is racism, being-in-the-world is the same thing as being-against-others. The latter are treated as a threat against which one’s own existence must be defended. At all cost, if necessary…Throughout history various paradigms of rules have been designed for human…
…bodies deemed either in excess, unwanted, illegal, dispensable or superfluous. One historical response has consisted in putting in place spatial exclusionary arrangements…Spatial violence…Wars on mobility are wars whose aim is to turn discounted bodies into borders…
…The production at a massive scale of discounted bodies, a residual humanity that is akin to waste...populations will be more and more treated not only in the Darwinian terms of sexual selection, but also within an utilitarian and bio-physiologico-organic framework…
…The amount of work needed in order to create a better life for all is incalculable. But the structure of the economy doesn’t really need us all. Nor does it need our time. It doesn’t really need every single body, all of our muscles or energies or even the bulk of our social…
...and collective intelligence. And this will be more and more the case in the future, as we move to a phase of human history in which only that which is computable counts. As we speak, many bodies already fall beyond the scope of calculation. Unless we reinvent the terms of…
…what counts and in the process resignify what value stands for as well as the procedures of assigning value, of measuring value, of exchanging value, things won’t change. These are some of the key questions any decolonisation project worthy of its name has to address if…
...the injunction to decolonise is to be more than a mere ideological phantasm…The emergence of new varieties of racism in Europe and elsewhere, the reassertion of global white supremacy, of populism and retro-nationalism, the weaponisation of difference and identity are not…
…only symptoms of a deep distrust of the world. They are also fostered by transnational forces capable of making that same world inhospitable, uninhabitable and unbreathable for many of us…what truly frightens me is the recolonisation of various fields of knowledge…
…by all kinds of determinisms. What frightens me is the active confusion between knowledge and data, the reduction of knowledge to information. It’s the idea that the world is a matter of numbers and the task of knowledge is to handle quantities…
…the belief that the best way to generate information is with computers and that which is not computable does not exist. It’s the creeping sense that the computer is our new brain. In such a context, “to decolonise” must start from the assumption that knowledge…cannot be…
…reduced to computational information processing. There is therefore a massive need to recover the ability to think.
…But I cannot possibly see how, without it, we can adequately answer one of the most urgent questions that will haunt the human race in this century – the question of life futures. For a long time, we have been concerned with how life emerges and the conditions of its evolution.
…. The key question today is how it can be repaired, reproduced, sustained and cared for, made durable, preserved and universally shared, and under what conditions it ends.
