[D66] Technē and Cosmotechnics

[R.O.]

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/86/161887/cosmotechnics-as-cosmopolitics/


Journal #86 - November 2017

Yuk Hui


    [...]


    §3. Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics



I propose to go beyond the notion of cosmology; instead, it would be 
more productive to address what I call cosmotechnics. Let me give you a 
preliminary definition of cosmotechnics:_it is the unification of the 
cosmos and the moral through technical activities, whether craft-making 
or art-making._ There hasn’t been one or two technics, but many 
cosmotechnics. What kind of morality, which and whose cosmos, and how to 
unite them vary from one culture to another according to different 
dynamics. I am convinced that in order to confront the crisis that is 
before us—namely, the Anthropocene, or the intrusion of Gaia (Latour and 
Stengers), or the “entropocene” (Stiegler), all presented as the 
inevitable future of humanity—it is necessary to reopen the question of 
technology, in order to envisage the bifurcation of technological 
futures by conceiving different cosmotechnics. I tried to demonstrate 
such a possibility in my recent book /The Question Concerning Technology 
in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics/. As one can gather from the title, 
it is an attempt to respond to Heidegger’s famous 1949 lecture “The 
Question Concerning Technology.” I propose that in order to rethink the 
project of overcoming modernity, we must undo and redo the translations 
of /technē/, /physis/, and /metaphysika/ (not as merely independent 
concepts but also concepts within systems); only by recognizing this 
difference can we arrive at the possibility of a common task of philosophy.

Why, then, do I think it’s necessary to turn to cosmotechnics? For a 
long time now we have operated with a very narrow—in fact, far too 
narrow—concept of technics. By following Heidegger’s essay, we can 
distinguish two notions of technics. First, we have the Greek notion of 
/technē/, which Heidegger develops through his reading of the ancient 
Greeks, notably the Pre-Socratics—more precisely, the three “inceptual” 
(/anfängliche/) thinkers, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaximander.

In the 1949 lecture, Heidegger proposes to distinguish the essence of 
Greek /technē/ from modern technology (/moderne Technik/).

If the essence of /technē/ is /poiesis/, or bringing forth 
(/Hervorbringen/), then modern technology, a product of European 
modernity, no longer possesses the same essence as /technē/ but is 
rather an “enframing” (/Gestell/) apparatus, in the sense that all 
beings become standing reserves (/Bestand/) for it. Heidegger doesn’t 
totalize these two essences of technics, but nor does he give space to 
other technics, as if there is only a single homogenous /Machenschaft 
/after the Greek /technē/, one that is calculable, international, even 
planetary. It is astonishing that in Heidegger’s so-called /Black 
Notebooks/ (/Schwarze Hefte/)—of which four volumes have been published 
so far/—/we find this note: “If communism in China should come to rule, 
one can assume that only in this way will China become ‘free’ for 
technology. What is this process?”

_Heidegger hints at two things here: first, that technology is 
international (not universal); and second, that the Chinese were 
completely unable to resist technology after communism seized power in 
the country. This verdict anticipates technological globalization as a 
form of neocolonization that imposes its rationality through 
instrumentality, like what we observe in transhumanist, neoreactionary 
politics._

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