2019 ~ Roaming Assembly#24 ~ Opaque Justice: A Dialectics of Rerouting ~ On the Engineering of Black Labour by Ramon Amaro

On the Engineering of Black Labour

by Ramon Amaro 

This talk begins with what Alessandra Raengo describes in Reification, Reanimation, and the Money of the Real as the "ontological scandal of slavery", or a logics that presupposes the reification of the black body as commodity. Raengo suggests that the black body's relation to capital is both operational, as well as discursive in that it reifies black alienation with each instance of black labor, 'each time blackness functions as the commodity form.' 

Ramon Amaro wishes to build on this work to think through alienation as a means of production in the digital age, but more so as a process that is fundamentally mental as well as physical. His contribution draws on Gilbert Simondon's notion of psycho-physiological alienation to challenge the notion of black labour as purely economico-social. His ultimate aim is to liberate blackness from the status of psychic inferiority in favour of what he conceives of as the black technical relation.

Roaming Assembly#24 ~ Opaque Justice: A Dialectics of Rerouting