techno(genesis)

i. mythology of severance

“...[the West] used the conceptual sleight of hand of the Great Divide to deny the ever-present reality of hybrids, those “sub­ject/objects” that straddle the boundaries between nature and culture, agency and raw material.” (Davis, 16). 

So much of the text this week, Techgnosis, was grounded in an intimate but expansive mythology of Western thought. We moved through geographies and cosmologies, texts and scriptures, divinities and digressions. In these worlds of mythology, I couldn’t help but feel “the hand” of the Great Divide, the Severance of the West. By amputating the complex, interdependent and interactive animations of the “anthropological matrix”, Western society was more easily able to execute capitalistic and colonialist endeavours--the severance between “nature” and “culture” allowed for a socio-spiritual detachment from the web of care and premodern “reality of hybrids”. I, too, am a product of this severance.

To this day, I cannot write my mother tongues--Tamil and Hindi--and I think about the unpronounceable, the breathless, the uncolonized, the uncartographical almanacs of language that will perish with me. Who am I if I don’t have my language? My disconnection from my mother tongue is one of my most glaring sites of shame--how much did I let colonialism devour me? How much did I buy into the myth of Severance? I chose to look at my own mythologies of divinity and technology, ones that paralleled the Western ones, ones that were absent in this reading. 

This week, after a conversation with fellow classmates Ambika and Victoria, I decided to embark on an exercise of un-severance. Of re-remembering what I had forgotten, and failing in the process. I’ve decided to create an alphabet of my own. I recalled the Indian mythology comic books I grew up on, Amar Chitra Katha, its pages engulfed by illustrated gods, goddesses, deities, for some inspiration. With Technognosis in mind, I started to notice how divine technologies were such an embodied part of the myths I read growing up. These Hindu gods and goddesses, several of them sprouting 4, 6, 10, 20, limbs, all had unique technologies that were extensions of their posthuman anatomies. In fact, these technologies were their bodies. Who would Saraswati be without her sitar? What about Lakshmi without her palm that sheds a never ending stream of coins? Shiva without his triton?

And in between my bastardized simulacra, my haphazard creole, I began to fill in the gaps. I was inspired by Davis’ examination of the Torah, laden with hypertextual and post-textual potential, allowing people to “both regulate and debate every facet of their lives” (Davis, 38). Its design allows for potentialities of embedding, expanding, footnoting, connecting across the organic limitations of paper. 

“Abstract form came to rule embodied sense.” (Davis, 34)

The mythologies of my childhood were inseparable from technology. I would love to revisit these mythologies in future assignments and find a way to reconcile the space between the Severance.