Cosmotechnics

For a Renewed Concept of Technology in the Anthropocene

Yuk Hui, Pieter Lemmens, Yuk Hui, Pieter Lemmens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000396362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Globalisation

This volume is initial reflections on the meaning and the implications of Yuk Hui's notion of cosmotechnics, which opens up an anti-universalist and pluralist perspective on technology beyond the West.

Martin Heidegger's famous analysis of the essence of technology as enframing and as rooted in ancient Greek techne has had a crucial influence on the understanding and critique of technological society and culture in the twentieth century. However, it is still unclear to what extent his analysis can also be applied to the development of technology outside of 'the West', e.g. in China, Africa, and Latin America, particularly against the backdrop of receding Western domination and impending global ecological disaster. Acknowledging the planetary expansion of Western technology already observed by Heidegger, yet also recognizing the existence of non-Western origins of technical relationships to the cosmos, Yuk Hui's notion of cosmotechnics calls for a rethinking – in dialogue with decolonial studies and the so-called ontological turn in contemporary anthropology – of the question concerning technology which challenges the universality still present in Heidegger (as well as in Simondon and Stiegler) and proposes a radical technological or rather cosmotechnical pluralism or technodiversity. The contributors to this volume critically engage with this proposal and examine the possible implications of Hui's cosmotechnical turn in thinking about technology as it becomes a planetary force in our current age of the Anthropocene.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

pieter lemmens

Other Turnings

yuk hui’s pluralist cosmotechnics in between heidegger’s ontological and stiegler’s organological understanding of technology

introduction

Yuk Hui’s The Question Concerning Technology in China. An Essay on Cosmotechnics is a rare yet timely attempt in these days of narrow-minded empirically oriented and case-study saturated philosophy of technology to re-consider the question of technology as a truly philosophical question in the most profound and urgent manner, such as it was first posed by Martin Heidegger in 1949 in his notorious Bremen lecture on The Question Concerning Technology, where he famously asked about the essence of technology, which he deemed to be nothing techno-logical, as is well known, but ontological or onto-historical – as having to do with what his own philosophical questioning had been after from the very beginning and that was: Being – and, later, the history of Being.¹

Hui’s project of cosmotechnics seems to a large extent inspired by Heidegger’s ontological or onto-historical understanding of technology as an unfolding essence or Wesung overdetermining all concrete technological invention and innovation, replacing it though with a plurality of culture-specific cosmological or cosmotechnical trajectories that allow for the thinking of a profound technodiversity which has no place within Heidegger’s thought of a singular essence of technology. Yet it is also decisively informed by Bernard Stiegler’s critique of Heidegger’s neglect of the constitutive nature of technology in its concrete factuality for any ontological framework.

In this article I will present Hui’s cosmotechnical understanding of technology as a kind of “critical synthesis” of Heidegger’s and Stiegler’s views on technology,² showing that, on the one hand, it acknowledges Stiegler’s insight into the constitutive technicity – universally valid – of human existence and what Heidegger called “world-formation” [Weltbildung], while on the other it pays tribute to Heidegger’s thesis that all technical evolution is always already conditioned by a non-technical factor, albeit for Hui not a singular ontological factor but a plurality of always particular cosmological factors.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

That is to say: Hui’s cosmotechnics professes both the technicity of the cosmic (understood as the world) and the “cosmicity” of technics. Employing a distinction made by Peter Sloterdijk, I will try to demonstrate how it thus combines Stiegler’s emphasis on the “horizontal” dimension of technology as technical exteriorization with Heidegger’s claim about the “vertical,” in the sense of “spiritual” or “cultural,” determination of technology, pluralizing both these dimensions. In doing so, it opens up these fundamental philosophies of technology to the debate, increasingly urgent in our dire time of the Anthropocene, with contemporary anthropology’s so-called “ontological turn.”³

The Planetary Reign Of Western Technology

Heidegger questioned technology, i.e., its essence, not for the sake of finding a right definition or a correct representation of it but to prepare a free relationship to it (Technology 3). And this free relationship would be attained only when humans stopped focusing – “ontically” – on technical objects and systems or even taking a (critical, evaluative, moralizing, etc.) stance toward them and would instead open themselves to technology’s essence; and this first of all meant to recognize that this essence resided in nothing less than humanity’s overall relation to beings as rooted in a specific understanding of Being – an understanding of Being that they principally inherited, he argued, from the ancient Greeks and that ruled with ever more insistence and exclusivity as a “destiny” [Geschick] over all their encounters with beings or “nature” generally.

Yet opening up to the essence of technology and becoming aware of being destined by it in their own essence – in their very way of being – could “awaken” in humans a “remembrance” of their true, ontological essence of belonging to Being or being open to Being and thereby grant them the possibility of entering into – what Heidegger considered to be – a more original relation to Being and thus to experience a more inceptual truth of Being (Technology 28), one that was first “revealed” to them at the Greek inception but almost immediately “forgotten.” This renewed experience of the truth of Being would reconnect humans with their original openness to Being or what I would like to call their ontological freedom here. It is indeed this free relationship to the essence of technology as Being which Heidegger’s thinking attempted to liberate, and only this freeing oneself to the freedom of Being – as a “re-engagement” of humans with their originary ontological freedom granted by Being – would allow in his view a genuine “overcoming” or “turning” of the dominance of modern technology over our lives.

Heidegger’s questioning of technology in the Bremen lectures was first of all meant as an attempt to render our ingrained and self-evident technical (as well as scientific) relation to beings “worthy of questioning” [fragwürdig] in a radical way – by “dignifying” [würdigen] its essence as being of the highest importance for philosophical thinking and human existence more generally (Insight 57). It is worth repeating here that this essence, for Heidegger, was itself not techno-logical but ontological or even more precisely: aletheio-logical, i.e., a mode of revealing of beings – aletheuein in Greek – in accordance with a certain unconcealment or truth of Being. The question concerning technology for Heidegger was ultimately the question concerning Being or rather the truth of Being and this made it eo ipso the philosophical question par excellence.

It is clear that when Heidegger spoke about the human in his technology essay he first of all had “Western man” in mind and that his analysis of technology concerned Western technology, in particular modern Western technology, but already in the 1930s he emphasized that this modern Western technology had become a “planetary” phenomenon (Mindfulness 13; Geschichte 74) and was adopted by practically all non-Western, i.e., all non-European cultures as well. And in his “Time and Being” lecture from 1962 the late Heidegger enigmatically stated, putatively anticipating the contemporary notion of the “technosphere” (Haff), that:

[n]ow that modern technology has arranged its expansion and rule over the whole earth, it is not just the sputniks and their by-products that are circling around our planet; it is rather Being as presencing in the sense of calculable material that claims all the inhabitants of the earth in a uniform manner without the inhabitants of the non-European continents explicitly knowing this or even being able or wanting to know of the origin of this determination of Being. (Heidegger, On Time 7)

The whole planet had now been seized uniformly by the reign of enframing [Gestell], an imperious, extractive and calculative relation to beings of European provenance increasingly overruling all other “cultural” origins, without these other cultures explicitly being aware of this provenance. And also, we may assume, through the suppression of these other origins, resulting in the techno-cultural uniformization or homogenization of the planet. What the late Heidegger feared yet considered to be inescapable is what he referred to – in his conversation from 1954 with the Japanese scholar Tomio Tezuka – as “the complete Europeanization of the earth and of man” (Language 15), unfolding as the planetarization of modern technology.

It is this concern that also motivates Hui’s cosmotechnics project, which aims to re-open the question concerning technology, first of all in regard to the Chinese situation, in light of the danger of modern technology attaining complete planetary dominance and absorbing all cultural spheres – i.e., the whole ethnosphere to speak with the American anthropologist Wade Davis (2) – within its “homogeneous becoming” (Hui, Cosmotechnics 12), thereby effectively annihilating all cultural difference through a nihilist process of technological indifferentiation. Yet, while Hui fully subscribes to Heidegger’s diagnosis of the planetarization of modern technology and profoundly shares his concern about the danger of this development – this danger having been intensified to an extreme currently in the context of the Anthropocene – he challenges Heidegger’s assumption that there is, ultimately, only one kind of technology and argues that there are other kinds as well.

And with his notion of technology he seems to have something similar in mind, in my opinion, as what Heidegger called the essence of technology, although it is also quite different considering the fact that he proposes to talk about cosmotechnics instead of some “essence” of technology, and indeed of a plurality of cosmotechnics instead of the unitary, monolithic essence of technology identified by Heidegger,⁴ although the latter distinguished Greek techne from die moderne Technik of course, thereby acknowledging a radical cesura within the historical unfolding of technology yet considering this cesura within the continuity of the history of Being as the history of a decline from the inceptive techne toward its conclusive manifestation in die moderne Technik, understood as a progressive and cumulative “decline from the inception” or “perversion of the inception” (Being 9) – and this is precisely what his talk of the danger as the gathering [Ge-] “entrapping” [fahr; being derived from fara, translated as Nachstellen] by the forgetting of Being refers to (Insight 50).

Singular Or Plural Technics?

As Heidegger puts it in the most straightforward manner at the beginning of his 1943 lecture course on Heraclitus: “There is only an Occidental technology. It is the consequence of ‘Philosophy’ and nothing else” (Heraclitus 3). Philosophy for Heidegger is the ground, the only ground, out of which technology has arisen and philosophy is an exclusively Western affair (3). Nonetheless, this Western technology, together with “the sciences,” which for Heidegger share the same essence, has now come to dominate the whole planet and become “international,” as he writes in an entry in one of his Black Notebooks that is also quoted by Hui (Heidegger, Anmerkungen 59–60; Hui, Cosmotechnics 4–5). This implies, and who could deny this given its global dominance, that Western technology “is something detachable from its cultural source” (Hui, Cosmotechnics 5).

However, because of its international presence and penetration into practically all cultures around the globe nowadays the erroneous idea has come to prevail that technology is a universal phenomenon and thus independent of any particular culture – indeed transcultural. Heidegger instead emphasized its unique European origin insofar as it issued from Western philosophical thinking, as can be gathered very clearly for instance from this remark at the end of his first Freiburg lecture on the “Basic Principles of Thinking” from 1957:

[…] if we call upon the fact that in our age everywhere upon the earth a uniform manner of thinking achieves world-historical dominance, then we must just as decisively hold in view that this uniform thinking is only the form, leveled down and rendered useful, of that historical formation of thought that we name the Western-European, the dispensational singularity of which we scarcely even experience and seldom enough acknowledge. (Insight 89–90)

It is indeed true that Heidegger never recognized any other technology besides that of the West, which originated in Greek techne, then evolved into modern technology in the seventeenth century and finally culminated in our age in the single, homogeneous and uniform, planetarized “gigantic force” – as Hui often refers to it (Cosmotechnics 239, 243, 297) – of enframing, or with an earlier term: machination [Machenschaft], turning the whole of the planet into a standing reserve [Bestand] (Hui, “Cosmopolitics” 4). Again, we should emphasize that technology for Heidegger here refers to the ontological–aletheiological essence of technology, i.e., to a mode of revealing of beings. Whether this is true for Hui or not (and we will address this question later), he understands what Heidegger called...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface: Cosmotechnics
• Introduction: Cosmotechnics and the ontological turn in the age of the Anthropocene
• 1 Other turnings. Yuk Hui’s pluralist cosmotechnics in between heidegger’s ontological and stiegler’s organological understanding of technology
• 2 Cosmotechnics from an anthropotechnological perspective
• 3 Neosubstantivism as cosmotechnics: Gilbert Simondon versus the transhumanist synthesis
• 4 Machine and ecology
• 5 Noodiversity, technodiversity. Elements of a new economic foundation based on a new foundation for theoretical computer science
• 6 Technics and agency. The pluralism and diversity of technē
• 7 Philosophy in the light of AI. Hegel or Leibniz
• 8 Towards a fifth ontology for the Anthropocene
• 9 The black angel of history. Afrofuturism’s cosmic techniques
• 10 Equivocations of the body and cosmic arts. An experiment in polyrealism
• Index