Toward a hauntology on data: On the sociopolitical forces of data assemblages

Abstract

This article engages the philosophy of science of data, with a focus on the extent to which data are always already imbued with racializations.As Alexander Weheliye has argued, racializations are not to be reduced to race but rather is the sociopolitical process that hierarchizes and differentiates bodies producing the entangled by-products of race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability among other formations of difference. The article leans on black literary feminist Sylvia Wynter’s work on science, blackness, and the human. In particular, the article works through her concepts of the cosmogonies of the human and the sociogenics of the fictively constructed models of Man. Cosmogonies, for Wynter, refer to the myths, narratives, and stories of the ontological origin of the human and the way in which this shapes the histor(icit)y of the human, including the later sociogenic formations of Western Man as the exclusive white, male, able-bodied, heterosexual rendering all other bodies as nonhuman. Wynter rejects cultural and biological explanations of race while still accounting for the ways in which the fabrications of race, as sociogenic, become ontogenic via the flesh. With her theories of power, inheritance, and the body, the article examines the ways in which data become haunted by sociopolitical relations of racialization. The article then points toward alternative futures by arguing for Wynter’s proposed Autopoietic Turn/Overturn praxis of science to critically examine the sociogenic codes toward reconstituting the human.