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Short abstract:

The «capacity» to speak constitutes our experience of technological life today. Language as technology and technologically determined will be examined in relation to the Haitian Revolution, the foundations of capitalism and co-operation with racism, to refine technology's imaginary and epistemology.

Long abstract:

«Modern logistics is founded with the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak.» (Harney & Moten 2013: 92) Although this speech/capacity to speak was not registered as such, it is precisely this historical configuration whose recursive character emerges in contemporary infrastructures of digital cultures and political action. I want to offer a reformulation of a history of technology rooted in the experience of the trenches of modernity, one that resulted in resistance and liberation: «Since speech was forbidden, slaves camouflaged the word under the provocative intensity of the scream.» writes Édouard Glissant in Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (1989: 123-124). The Revolution in Haiti in 1804 redefined geopolitical and social relations and has long served as the origin story of freedom and liberation. It also, importantly so, yields questions of language, expression and articulation, their conditions and modes of possibility.

When Harney and Moten refined our understanding of the generation of the supply chain, supposedly a mere technical operation, and described «logisticality» as the social capacity emerging from the discrete historical experience of the transatlantic slave trade, they conceptualized logisticality as transcending the pervasive logic of contemporary capitalism. The cargo or commodity «that could speak» is the simple description of the co-operation between what is now deemed to be cognitive, digital, racial capitalism, all of those or neither, and racism and both of their foundations in empire and colonialism. Through this historic lens I want to look at this co-operation today in relation to „our capacity to speak».