Technology is shaping how we think, remember, and make decisions. Professor Premesh Lalu from the University of the Western Cape (UWC) has been awarded a research chair to explore how humans and technology have evolved together, particularly in the context of South Africa’s history of apartheid. His research will focus on how technology has been used to control and influence society and how we can develop a healthier relationship with it through education and critical thinking.

The time has come for society to build a better relationship with technology by active engagement through education and critical inquiry, rather than passively allowing it to dominate human judgment, overwhelm the senses and stymie imagination.

University of the Western Cape (UWC) academic Prof Premesh Lalu cautioned that the technological systems used for communication and control, which around 1948 became organised under the science of cybernetics, have already evolved in a way that allows emerging technologies to dominate and overwhelm human perception.

Prof Lalu was recently awarded the British Academy/NRF UK-SA Bilateral Digital Humanities Chair in Culture and Technics - a prestigious research position jointly funded by the British Academy and South Africa’s National Research Foundation (NRF). It is part of a collaborative initiative between the UK and South Africa to advance scholarship that explores more deeply the co-evolution of the human and technology. In South Africa, with its history of apartheid, it provides a further opportunity to understand how technology enabled the problem of racial subjection. Prof Lalu is also the former Director of the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) and lead investigator on the DSI-NRF Flagship on Critical Thought in African Humanities at UWC.

He drew on the importance of history, particularly in the shifts brought about by the technological transformations that coincided with the abolition of slavery and the rise of capitalism, to illustrate how human-technology relations have always been evolving. To understand entanglements in race, for example, he said: “It is important to have a longer view of the history of the shifting relations between the human and technology. We need to understand the processes of how the human comes to assume a technical mode of existence, especially as the capacity for memory came to be increasingly exteriorised in machines”.

The abolition of slavery at the Cape in 1834, he explained, coincided with a technological revolution that fundamentally redefined the world and shaped the way capitalism and empire emerged over two hundred years.

“To the extent that the modern university enabled this revolution, the Cambridge Philosophical Breakfast Club at Cambridge University would prove crucial,” he said. A leading figure of this revolution in science, John Herschel, established the astronomical observatory in the year that slavery was abolished. Herschel’s observatory, visited by Charles Darwin as part of his round-the-world Voyage of the Beagle in 1836, symbolically marked the insertion of the southern hemisphere into new forms of capitalist speculation and territorial exploration while simultaneously inaugurating a new relation between human and technology.

Technology is shaping how we think, remember, and make decisions. Professor Premesh Lalu from the University of the Western Cape (UWC) has been awarded a research chair to explore how humans and technology have evolved together, particularly in the context of South Africa’s history of apartheid. His research will focus on how technology has been used to control and influence society and how we can develop a healthier relationship with it through education and critical thinking.

The drift towards machine memory, he said, is an important part of that project. A second effect of this shift has to do with the place of the human in exercising judgment: “I would also say that judgment is an important part of the story of the displacement in the co-evolution of human and technology. As humanistic thought has revealed over a century, the surrender of the human sensorium to the determination of machines has severely affected the capacity for human judgement”.

“A final question that the chair proposes to address is how the unfolding story of technology affects imagination. This is a question that addresses my specific research interests in aesthetics and the sensory order of petty apartheid.”

Through explorations of the effects of machines on memory, judgement, and imagination, the chair will inaugurate a study on how apartheid in South Africa relates to the co-evolution of human and technology. Prof Lalu noted that the most devastating effects of apartheid lie in how it contributed to a sensory order, which was the stock of former South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd's training in psychotechnics during his doctoral work in RW Wilcock’s lab at Stellenbosch University in the early 1900s. Building on his book, Undoing Apartheid (Cambridge, Polity, 2022), Prof Lalu hopes to introduce a more specific focus on technology in the digital age to complement the already well-established research of the Centre for Humanities Research. This is a focus concerned with the consequences of technology on culture, which includes asking whether we can imagine healthier relations to technology than those marked by extraction, subjection and destruction.

“We appear to be developing unhealthy addictive relationships to technology. The problems commonly associated with the so-called Paypal Mafia and anarcho-capitalists in the world have very strong links to the institutional histories of apartheid in South Africa. We have to find ways of steering the evolving relationship of the human and technology to the ends of a liveable life. We are suggesting that this is a matter of education. You have to educate the senses on how best to live with technology, something sorely lacking in the contemporary university in Africa,” Prof Lalu continued.

“Firstly, it’s an acknowledgement of the work of the Centre for Humanities Research at UWC, and particularly the way in which it has constituted a discussion about the humanities that cuts across a range of disciplines (but) also connects the humanities into a discussion on the sciences and the history of the sciences. The Centre has uniquely positioned the experiencing of the expansion of technological resources through its unique approach to aesthetic education and object, cinematic, sonic arts.”

He said the Chair recognises and builds on the ongoing research in three areas for which the CHR has become internationally known: “aesthetic education,” “new ecologies of the subject,” and “becoming technical of the human.”

“Over the past five or six years of the NRF flagship (programme), we have supported close to 300 Doctoral/Master’s and post-doctoral fellows who have collectively helped to build a very substantial intellectual inquiry linking object theatre, moving images, and in sound studies. This definitely helped to shape the proposal that went to the British Academy and the National Research Foundation.”

He reiterated that the grant contributes significantly to the sustainability of the Iyatsiba Lab of the CHR by allowing for the consolidation and extension of the work of the CHR that began in 2006. The prestigious award will be directed at forming a larger research community of faculty, postgraduate fellows and artists.

He concluded: “The awarding of a UK-SA bilateral chair affirms and acknowledges the innovative approach of the Centre and its Iyatsiba Lab in combining research on the co-evolution of the human and technology, the critique of apartheid, and the building a post-apartheid future.”