The Native Informant

The native informant is a figure Spivak excavates from the margins of the Western philosophical tradition — from Kant's third critique, from Hegel's philosophy of history, from Marx's political economy — to name the specific structural position of those whose existence is necessary to a system but who cannot function as subjects within it. In Kant, the New Hollander and the inhabitant of Tierra del Fuego appear as examples of humanity in its raw, uncultivated state against which the cultivated subject defines itself; they are required for the argument but foreclosed from the position from which arguments can be made. The structure persists across the tradition and, Spivak argues, across the institutions that the tradition produced. Applied to artificial intelligence, the figure describes the content moderators, data labelers, miners, and cultural producers whose labor sustains the system while their subject-position within it remains that of the tool.