Topos as critique of the technological modern

This article develops a world-historical spatial analytic that critical machine learning studies have left undertheorized. Recent scholarship contests the a priori automation of machinic decisions by foregrounding a posteriori indeterminacy, yet does so mainly through a temporal-recursive analytic, leaving the spatial angle unaddressed. This oversight has its roots in Heidegger, whose subordination of spatiality to temporality in Being and Time—however changed in his later turn toward topos—continues to shape the tradition of technology critique aimed at recuperating the suppressed potential of techne ontology. Neglecting spatial analysis hampers the investigation of local, socio-historical contingencies, and thus of the world-historical exterior they index, in challenging the restrictive frameworks of technological modernity. Drawing on Cornelius Castoriadis's theory of the social imaginary as a spatial-existential, social-historical a posteriori, the article critiques transcendental metaphysics from the vantage point of world-historical locality. The imaginary's topological dimension, read through Scott Lash's account of its productive figuration, opens onto Fredric Jameson's cognitive mapping, whose geopolitical vantage situates Castoriadis's radical autonomy against the totalising force of capital. A concluding illustration from postsocialist China shows how a non-Western modernity's techne ontology unsettles the Eurocentric narrative of a single neoliberal modernisation and the simple binary of capitalist core and periphery.