Care, Power, Information

From Provincialisation to Decolonial Options: A Methodology of Infrastructural Genealogy

“…Decoloniality/decolonisation (as shown by Anibal Quijano, Maria Lugones, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gathseni, Gurminder Bhambra, Boaventura de Sosa Santos, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and many others; see as an excellent introduction and overview: Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) is important learnings for anyone who sets out to begin the journey to uncover the colonial matrix of power and being, and the cognitive empire that governs their thinking and doing; but at the same time, simply appropriating decolonial writers and their ideas would, actually, no less be problematic: Finding the right balance is important to not end up constantly reopening the 'colonial wound' through, for example, 'good intentions'. 5 Respectively, to have tools at hand that can provincialise from inside, to open one's discourse up for choosing decolonial options in a cooperative, nonappropriative way is, in my view, an important step, or even better, a lateral move, or a move that simultaneously goes before-and-beyond as I proposed, for example, in Care Power Information (Stingl, 2020) on the example of how to 'make trouble for the sociological canon' and to 'stay with' it (Haraway).…”

“…I do believe that one can work with systematicity 1 without there having to be an all-encompassing, one-size-fits-all system (aka a fixed, hard and ambitious economy of relevance). To use an analogy: rather than producing a precisely managed, husbanded (Oikos, Oikein) garden that is ruled by the colonial, 'territorial ambition' (Mukerji, 1997) of pedagogy (the systemic instruction of the masses) of place-making (Mukerji, 2006(Mukerji, , 2010(Mukerji, , 2012 that sheds knowledge practices into 'relevant/permitted' and 'irrelevant and thus disposable' ones (Stingl, 2020), I propose that contributions, realistically, will have to be more like patch-work, tending (in systematicity) to patches of infrastructure aka knowledge and cultural labour, as one does to garden patches (Anna Tsing). 2 In this article, I want to address the form this contribution takes and offer up one particular avenue to attempt teleological suspension methodologically while being mindful of one's positionality (one's patch, so to speak): Infrastructural Genealogy.…”