Modernity and technics
“If you think about the Silk Road in the past, there’s this idea of eastern and western people meeting on some kind of big road and maybe selling and buying things. I think this history repeats itself, and some kind of new and interesting phenomenon is happening.” —Kim Namjoon, member of the group BTS.
Modernity as an historical category or condition still prompts exhausting conflicts and discussions within philosophy. If the nature of its temporality or its “postmodern” phase is debated, at least as a state of critique of the world project that has prevailed since the 18th century, modernity remains at the heart of the question, the domain where the supposed Aufklärung[1] would execute its universalist project. Criticism comes from the most varied sides of macropolitics, or perhaps we could say cosmopolitics.[2] One ongoing convergent encounter is that between the so-called traditionalists[3] – fully denying the progressive, civilizational or “enlightening” character of the time of Enlightenment and technics – with the perspectivists[4], who hold a critical position where they situate modernity as the time of iron and of fire, domination, epistemicide, colonization and the metaphysical and material organization of a single project, kind of subject, epistemology and worldview.
The encounters and disagreements between different macropolitical or cosmopolitical agendas mark a constant throughout modernity. It’s not just the reproval of the traditionalists and Gaians that tunes the constant criticism of modernity, but in another register, this “approximation” between different worldviews can also present itself as aligned on a similar axis. Silvia Federici, for one, in Caliban and the Witch presents a critique of both modernity and capitalism and considers these two processes as reactionary, not composed by an understanding of “progress”. Federici has certain intentions with this project, one being to relate the genesis and history of capitalism through a feminist, bodily and Marxist perspective. The book’s title being inspired by The Tempest by Shakespeare, she focuses on Caliban as the Caribbean and anti-colonial rebel, and the witch embodies a synthesis of the women who were protagonists of persecution and massacres at the end of the Middle Ages.
Federici presents the elementality of gender through an understanding not only of the destructive and exploitative years of capitalism’s genesis, but also of the ongoing logic of domestic work and the role of women.[5] Primitive accumulation, as presented by Marx, appears as this very process of restructuring the means of social and economic production, generating a violent process of familial and corporate expropriation, and separating direct production and the means of production while privatizing previously collectivized lands. It is through a genealogy of modern mechanistic philosophy that Federici traces an interesting perspective on the birth of capitalism and its relation to the project of modernity. Chapter Three “The Great Caliban” quotes and utilizes Michel Foucault’s “discipline of the body” which he excavates between the State and the Church. Federici draws unquestionable webs of relation between this process of mechanization of the body and the philosophies of René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes, representative authors of the birth of modern philosophy. Federici’s work, in general terms, establishes that capitalism and modernity are inseparable:
Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged in the anti-feudal struggle […] We must emphasize this aspect, for the belief that capitalism “evolved” from feudalism and that it represents a higher form of life society has not yet come undone (Federici, 2016, p. 44).
Yet while for Federici capitalism and modernity form a reactionary double-bind attacking communes and collective ways of life, other macropolitical visions would beg to differ. Capitalism emerges as the great way out, perhaps the only one, for what became known as accelerationism[6], more specifically to one of the protagonists of this article: Nick Land.
Land’s thought goes back to the same critical juncture, not positioning capitalism as the origin of the problem, but rather like a boom in the field, the thermonuclear device responsible for the possible outbreak of modernity. Capital itself emerges as a new force (Land is heavily in dialogue here with Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze & Guattari) and is the cultural-symbolic organization of the inherent acceleration of capitalism, projecting futures of unconscious revolutionary forces that for many years were locked by pre-modern culture. Land perceives capital as a contending flux of schizophrenic production; with capitalism, the disinhibition of modern syntheses (at least on the level of collective human experience) are realized by capital itself as this impersonal zone of transcendent subjectivity: the void of capital is the possible portal for shattering the transcendental screen that conditions the senses of human experience (and respectively the socius) in a space-time prison. In “Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest” Land points to a configuration of modernity based on a traumatic repression, where our social history just is a history of confinement. With the influence of Luce Irigaray, Land also does not spare in realizing the unquestionable role race and gender (like Federici) play in the understanding of the genesis of modernity:
This process of displacement, which is the ultimate “base” or “infrastructure” of capital accumulation, depends on the issues of “kinship” or “marriage organization” (the sex economy of gender and race) that Marxists tend to regard as surface features of an underlying mode of production (Land, 2011, p. 59).
Immanuel Kant is a great source for Land, and indeed he must be, being positioned as he is as a progenitor of modernity as we understand it. Land brings together an argument where the history of the West, based on the Kantian paradigm, would ultimately only culminate in a bourgeois civilization comprised of self-reflective minds. The thought of synthesis (and intrinsic otherness), as well as the very tightening of this worldview in its larger metaphysical system, would configure modernity as a problem. Land asserts that the Western tradition is obscurely aligned with a kind of game between culture, population, and the stability of the subject, a subject understood from the constitution of an identity (Ego), placing the masculine as its main representation. Patrilineality and patriarchy are the basic structures of this new form of social organization that underpins a double path: on the one hand, it deterritorializes and completely exonerates “primitive” (pre-modern) forms of social organization and launches them on a new axis; on the other hand, it also reduces, confines and architects an Oedipal and family-planning model that not only encloses desire, but also provides great infrastructural support for the surveillance and mastery of bodies. Enlightenment modernity, Land posits, is the result of the tension of this inhibited synthesis. It is the deep and contrived codification that the system of exploitation executes for its own maintenance, whether through the proletarian or with the “matter” of the third world. Instability and difference become the very source of endless expansion. As the editors write in the introduction to Land’s volume:
When “the exterior must pass through the interior” (correlation), the escape, promised by commerce, from the repressive interiority of the Oedipal patrilineage, is recoded as a transgression of the law, transcendentalizing interiority and familialism and, thus, trapping desire in circuits, oedipally isolated ones, that provide the original source for fascist xenophobia. The potential dissolution of kinship by international trade ends in its containment in the form of nations and ‘races’; according to Land, neocolonialist modernity is the legacy of this failure; and the immanent end and unsurpassed apex of European civilization, as an offshoot of this correlationist compromise formation, is the Holocaust (Land, 2011, p. 9).
Still, technics play a more confused and complex sense in the category of modernity. As accelerationism takes up, much of the history of recent philosophy has made an effort to better understand the technological advances that virulent capitalism has orchestrated in recent decades. Obviously, modernity not only accelerated, but it played a hugely progressive role in the technological and material advancement of societies. What accelerationism has always perceived (as Marx also notes[7]) is the destructively transformative character that markets and productivity assume in social production, and technics by no means escape this phenomenon. Technological progress, universal reason, enlightenment on the so-called treadmill, and the somewhat disastrous intimacies between reason and barbarism: these were topics discussed extensively in the 20th century.
Twentieth-century Germany concentrated a social and political experience that gave fertile ground for, even an exigency for, philosophical thinking. The Weimar Republic, the Nazi-Fascist State, the Second World War and the Holocaust are well-known examples of this turbulent moment. Both the Frankfurt School, and especially that of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as the so-called authors of the Conservative Revolution, are talking about the same process, the same moment: technical progress, the instrumentalization of reason, technical capitalism in modernity. The Dialectic of Enlightenment remains a remarkable assessment of this troubled period, and Adorno would continue his project of critically reading the epistemology of Edmund Husserl while Horkheimer critiqued the logical neopositivism of the Vienna School. We will not delve into Frankfurtian themes here, but what the authors leave behind that is of inestimable value is an awareness of the indefatigable destruction of Enlightenment and the real historical weakness of understanding the theoretical thought of the time:
The enigmatic disposition of the technologically educated masses to allow themselves to be dominated by the fascination of some despotism, their self-destructive affinity with racist paranoia, all this misunderstood absurdity manifests the weakness of the power of understanding of current theoretical thinking (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1985, p. 13).
It is relevant to point out that, for his part, Heidegger does not see technology in an ahistorical way, instead understanding a key difference between Greek techne and modern technology. While this Greek form allowed the unhidden – from something hidden in the original – to be situated within the scope of poiesis, in harmony with an innate dimension, as well as defying natural physis, the modern form of technology for Heidegger is the final climactic result of Western metaphysics itself. Gestell, enframing, consolidates itself as the total arrangement of everything in the world.
Modernity, as the time “of the obscuration of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the Earth, the massification of man, the odious suspicion against all that is free and creative” (Heidegger, 1999, p. 65), launches and installs one of the most important questions for Heidegger’s thought: the question of technics. The history of modernity is also a metaphysical journey in the metaphysicalization of technics: the modern world inaugurates the era of informatization, of the simulated, of the non-world as the final stage of the technological and scientific advances of the industrial revolution. The question of metaphysical disposition is central to Heidegger and comprises much of his perception of technology, and in The Question Concerning Technology from 1953, Heidegger will eternalize himself as a most fearsome omen for present discussions of technology and techne.
The humanism that founds the project of modernity is one of representation, where things are no longer things, but rather objects for a subject, and at worst, devices for the subject to become master of and dominate. Heidegger brings this understanding into his discussion of technology: first, the process of transformation he outlines is one of the relationship between us and the world, where the object can only come into being from the moment it is represented (when it becomes a resource), and second, he extracts a certain ‘will to power’ from Nietzsche, asserting that the technical mastery of the world occurs by way of nihilism, by the transformation of being into valuation, by losing agency and displacing the world.
Ernst Jünger was an author of the so-called Conservative Revolutionary Movement (or Conservative Revolution) in Germany who also made an interesting theoretical contribution to the comparative relation between technology and modernity. Junger makes use of Fronterlebnis (front experience) in the First World War, where he was a combatant, to reconcile his ultra-reactionary political character with modern technology. The historian Jeffrey Herf points out in Reactionary Modernism an incessant desire in German thought of that period to bring together modern technology and the principle of kultur, exorcising Enlightenment reason and dignifying a political project that could be both reactionary (traditionalist, authoritarian) and technologically modern.
In the European context of the time, at least, the question of technology would find itself divided typically into two ideal traditions, according to Herf. The Promethean tradition is linked to the myth of Prometheus, the Greek titan responsible for stealing fire, and it subordinates the domain of nature for mainly human ends, desiring total emancipation. The Faustian tradition unmasks these arguments and inscribes an attempt to overcome this nihilism of technical domination. As Victor Coelho points out:
Thus, in the context of Germany’s crisis after the Great War of 1914-1918, Faustian analyses are favored, opposing faith in the rationality of history (in its supposed laws or dialectics), a ‘destinationist’ vision of technology and history, rejecting ‘any libertarian vision of neutrality or the purely instrumental character of technology […] as well being hostile to Western liberal, democratic and universalist values (Coelho, 2017, p. 6).
For his part, Jünger will differentiate himself precisely because he brings an aspect of vitalism to technology. The type of the worker, as the consummation of the subject’s metaphysical aspect, is a unique element for Jünger, who identifies an explicitly warlike character in technology, preaching a need to exalt this warrior vitalism in a consummation of war. In the Lebenphilosophie war would be a widespread sacrifice, and Jünger brings a glorification of the industrial world, of incessant technology, seeing a new potential for his reactionary ideals. The Gestalt (figure) or “type” (as presented in his work The Worker) he proposes is a purported solution to the incessant modernization and acceleration of the sacrifice of individual subjectivities, in favor of the total mobilization of technicism, industrial production, and war. Enlightenment rationality is entirely replaced by the technical universe, under a certain cultic dimension:
Finally, the ideal totality, as a ‘third instance’ (Humboldt) between citizens and contingency, would give way again to an ontological totality: the totality of work; and the idyllic nature, index of the lost totality and present in the reactionary neo-romantic movements, gives way to the planned nature of the work (Coelho, 2017, p. 8).
Yet, does every criticism of modernity or technology imply reactionarism? How can we carry out a serious discussion of these themes without leaning towards ultra-reactionary positions like Jünger ‘s or technophobic ones like Heidegger’s?
Yuk Hui ‘s recent work The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay on Cosmotechnics concentrates several of the themes discussed here so far and mediates a harmonious understanding between the natural and the artificial. By bringing the history of China and positioning a diversity of technical thought with so-called ‘cosmotechnics’, Hui inaugurates a new moment in the heart of the debate. At the same time, it presents contemporary China as a space for the emptying of ancient cosmotechnics – much more in line with the cosmic and natural dimension. But Nick Land’s departure to China at the beginning of the century also complicates this story, as he has treated the giant red dragon with exquisite exaltation and positivity since the 1990s. Land writes presently on China in an exactly opposite way to Hui: for Land, it is China who will lead this new moment of capitalism that is increasingly detaching itself from the domain of modernity. The second part of this article will focus on more direct comparisons between these two authors, while articulating the different understandings of posthumanism and Sinofuturism in the work of both.
Sinofuturism in the Anthropocene: overcoming modernity
In Technics and Time, 1 Bernard Stiegler recounts the history of Western philosophy from the perspective of technics. Modernity as characterized by Stiegler is wrought by technical unconsciousness, to which he proposes the opposition of technical consciousness, which would be attached to time and the way that finitude and technics are related. Stiegler writes that since Plato, the relationship between technics and anamnesis, or the doctrine of recollection, has converged in the “economy of the soul”. However, it is Hui who points out that this anamnestic character of technics in Western history did not apply to the context of the East, where, despite the calendar devices and other similar technical objects, the technical lineages and interpretations of time in the East determine completely different configurations of technics. Hui is responsible for synthesizing post-Heideggerian debates that are more than relevant contemporarily, but the true key to understanding the pace at which technical modernity operates is at another historical level.
It is well-known that the East is radically distinguished in terms of its development of metaphysics and philosophy. Eastern philosophy did not take time into account, instead establishing another relationship with historicity, that is, the ability to think as a “historical being”. This absence of time and presence of a discourse on historicity in Eastern metaphysics was one of the great themes of Keiji Nishitani, a Japanese philosopher of the Kyoto School and student of Heidegger. In the introduction to The Question Concerning Technology in China, Hui presents not only Nishitani, but also Mou Zongsan, another important oriental thinker for marking the fault lines between metaphysical thought in the West and East. For these thinkers, Geschichtlichkeit (historicity) is established by a relationship with so-called individual time, but Nishitani’s dilemma emerges when he tries to articulate an overcoming of modernity but instead ends up dangerously close to metaphysical fascism. Nishitani understands technology as a gateway to nihility, just as Heidegger thought, and the Buddhism defended by Nishitani proposes sunyata (emptiness) to finally transcend such nihility. But for Hui, in such transcendence, time would lose all meaning. The Weltgeschichtlichkeit (world historicity) would also lose meaning since, as Stiegler puts it, these two historicities are the direct result of technics, and are not possible without a retention system: there is no awareness of the bridges between Dasein and historicity without perceiving Dasein and technics.
Mou Zongsan’s insights into Western philosophy find expression in “Dao and Cosmos: The Principle of The Moral”, where he understands Chinese cosmology as a moral ontology. Zongsan establishes that it is not a philosophy of nature that arises from this cosmology, but a certain moral metaphysics of thought based especially on the Qian[8] and the hexagram.[9] Zongsan was one of the main philosophers of neo-Confucianism, the attempt by Chinese philosophy to further enhance its philosophical history and systems with Western philosophy, which was encroaching more and more at the beginning of the 20th century. In his reading of Kant, Zongsan attests that the division of phenomenon and noumenon marks a fundamental distinction between the way that modernity has spread through world history in the West and East:
According to Kant, intellectual intuition belongs only to God, not to humans. I think this is really surprising. I reflect on Chinese philosophy, and if we follow Kant’s thought, I think Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism all confirm that humans have intellectual intuition; otherwise it would not be possible to become a saint, Buddha or Zhenren (Zongsan, 1991).
In general terms, the reflections of and questions raised by these two philosophers in large part accompany the problem of technics and modernity considered here. Can absolute nothingness create a new world history and purge Western modernity? Can Chinese philosophy possibly reconfigure itself by absorbing modern science and technology? Hui notices the following:
Nishitani’s answer leads to a proposal of total war as a strategy to overcome modernity, something that was taken up again as a slogan of the philosophers of the Kyoto school before the Second World War. This is what I call metaphysical fascism, which arises from a misdiagnosis of the question of modernity, and it is something we must avoid at all costs (Hui, 2016, p. 43).
For Hui, these attempts to overcome modernity especially fail by not taking the issue of technics and technology seriously. Hui asserts that the technological unconscious of modernity as a project will only continue to dominate other cultures and civilizations, and that this process of rampant modernization will even become increasingly inevitable, largely because the technological unconscious is enacted by global militarism and economic competition. The issue is not simply to develop new narratives or to look at world history from points of view beyond Europe: Hui insists on distinguishing himself from pure perspectivism, and rather to confront this order of time in the manner of overcoming modernity for modernity itself, a reappropriation of modern technologies and the technological unconscious.
Hui’s technological thinking proposes two categories that need to be qualified in what follows: cosmotechnics and technodiversity. He starts from an initiative to think a general philosophy of Chinese technology, and in the face of the historical context of modernity to show how other places experience a vastly different space-time from that of other countries (as industrialization shows).
Hui’s work intends to conceptualize a counterpart to Heidegger’s conception of technics and to think of a new possible way for the construction of an appropriate Chinese philosophy of technology. What Hui makes clear is that in regions like China, technics, in the sense that we understand it today, or at least as defined by European philosophers, never even existed; in other words, technics as a generalized human activity and an activity present since evolution can be confirmed, but philosophical conceptions of technics cannot be assumed to be universal. What Hui calls the “vision of Western technology” is not just from modern Germanism, but from Hellenic philosophy, and technics as an ontological category needs to be situated in relation to this longer and larger configuration, the cosmology proper to a Western culture from which it arose. The division of mythos and logos, made explicit in the Athenian academy and found in Plato and Socrates, founds an initial moment to think about cosmology, and Hui believes that “[t]he dialectical movement between rationality and myth constitutes the dynamics of philosophy, without which there would only be positive sciences” (Hui, 2016, p. 11). The hypothesis that Hui however proposes is that despite the distance that philosophy tries to enact between it and mythology, what actually occurs is another story: “In Europe, the attempt of philosophy to separate from mythology is precisely conditioned by mythology, meaning that mythology reveals the germinal form of such a way of philosophizing” (Hui, 2016, p. 11).
If the Western view of technics and technology differs from Heidegger’s analysis of a poetic moment and another of reserve, and since its foundation is aligned with cosmological mythologization, what myths then inform this technology? Hui establishes Prometheanism as the founding myth: the theft of fire (techne) by the man-friendly titan, Prometheus, the assault of the celestial kingdom, of the cosmic natural earth, technics originating from a radically violent process. There are several Greek myths about Prometheus, but in the end, they inform a universal Prometheanism that assumes that all cultures start from this same, originally Greek view of techne, and Hui counteracts this with the Chinese tradition:
Unlike Greek mythology, then, in which the Titan revolted against the gods, bestowing fire and livelihood to humans, thus elevating them above animals, in Chinese mythology there was no such rebellion and no such transcendence granted; this endowment is seen instead, due to the benevolence of the ancient sages (Hui, 2016, p. 16)
Due to this perception that different relationships between the human and its environment inform different conditions of cosmology and consequently of technics, Hui proposes the concept of cosmotechnics, one example being Chinese medicine that uses principles of cosmology to describe its scientificity, like yin-yang, wuxing, harmony, etc. Technics are always cosmotechnical, and it is the unification between the cosmic order and the moral order that is marked by technical activity, whereby the concept of cosmotechnics automatically breaks a given paradigm between technics and nature. The only distinction between contemporary technology and cosmotechnics then is the mediating element between the human and the cosmos, which today is capital itself. Technodiversity ends up designating the meeting of various cosmotechnics, the harmony between localities, regions and varied technical visions.
For Hui then, contemporary accelerationism is nothing more than an update of Prometheanism:
Some recent work has tried to recover what it calls ‘Prometheanism’, decoupling the social critique of capitalism from denigrating technology and asserting the power of technology to free us from constraints and contradictions or from modernity. This doctrine is often identified with, or at least closely related to, the notion of ‘accelerationism’. But if such a response to technology and capitalism is applied globally, as if Prometheus was a universal cultural figure, it risks perpetuating a more subtle form of colonialism (Hui, 2016, p. 12).
Also related to accelerationism, the belief in and commitment to technology as a way of overcoming modernity offers interesting horizons in the contexts of extreme Asia and Europe itself. It is not intended here to see accelerationism as a philosophical or political proposal, but as a phenomenon that already occurs historically and as the main temporal axis of cosmopolitical contemporaneity. If the mediation between the human and the cosmos in the pre-modern past was carried out between symbolic and other exchange elements, the current order is one where such a mediation is carried out by capital. The history of capitalism itself is legible as a feedback loop of such a mediated process, drawing itself in periodic cycles. Eric Hobsbawm in Age of Extremes presents this perspective well in his historiographical analysis, where when “hot” episodes of European capitalism led to the crisis of the beginning of the 20th century, when this capitalistic dynamic is accentuated, the allergic reactions to liberal capitalism offer futures (or perhaps pasts, as the neo-reactionaries bet[10]) and much engagement is produced towards confronting the macropolitical structures of modernity (nation states, democracy, etc).
Social democracy, fascism and Soviet socialism can be seen as the main ways of overcoming European capitalism in this period, all three sharing a common element: the periodic unification of State and Market. Placing economic planning as essential in this context, Keynesianism in the U.S. also indicated the crucial relevance of state presence in macroeconomic modeling: Hobsbawm even wagers the impossibility of any post-1929 state leader not to dignify the need for the presence of the state in economic structures. On the other hand, the so-called ‘third world’ experienced other formidable temporal experiences, with their own contradictions and specific paradoxes. Capital can try to raise itself as a universal element and globalizing force, but the inherent dialectic in the social development of these other countries provided the possibility to contradict it and produce other orders of the greater historical spirit, indicating that it is also in and through capitalism itself that it is possible to run away. It remains to be seen where and when. The growing intimacies between accelerationist projects and the Far East express this link between “Asian productivity” and technological development.
Conclusion
As a final hypothesis of this article, in general terms it is seen that the processes of modernization in countries and contexts different from those of the European and Western axis produced internal developments of their own, and in their own contradictoriness a movement of overcoming arose. In this sense, the thought of technics is essential for these processes, and this different movement can be seen as postmodernization, or postmodernity. This ‘post-modernization’ presents its historical, geopolitical and philosophical evidence in the so-called ‘Asian tigers’ (China, Korea and Japan), especially due to the rigorous presence of economic planning within their models.
The historical and cultural characteristics of these countries produce a synthesis of experience contradictory to the main Western axis (modernization as a process made by globalization, political power, and Europe colonization); instead, post-modernization as a process appears as an amalgamation between the productive systems of capitalism and socialism. Hiroki Azuma, when talking about the emergence of otaku culture in 1980s Japan, perceives postmodern culture as fundamental, and a direct result of the capitalist acceleration in Japanese society in the 1980s.[11] Azuma however seeks to differentiate this context from the concept of postmodernism commonly used: his point is rather to treat it as a complex mixture of structuralism, Marxism, consumer theories and critical theory that characterize the phenomenon and the way these “waves” manifested themselves, in France in the 1960s, in the U.S. in the 1970s, and imported to Japan in 1980.
Thus, postmodernism took another form of manifestation, even becoming a fashion aesthetic aligned with a consumerist narcissism that permeated Japanese society in the 1980s:
For example, as the modern insights of humanity have never fully penetrated Japan, it can adapt to the collapse of the concept of subjectivity with little resistance. In this way, Japan emerges in the 20th century as a leading nation, boasting a fully matured consumer society and technological prowess (Azuma, 2009, p. 17).
Now, Nick Land may have become the great villain of continental philosophy, but he is also a prescient predictor of the contemporary process. His work in the 1990s can be divided into three major moments: one more aligned with a reading of Kant, another fully immersed in Deleuze & Guattari, and the last being the experimental and occult phase of the CCRU. Land writes about the case of China in 1992’s “Circuitries”, but it’s in the celebrated 1994 “Meltdown” that Neo-China is finally mentioned:
Neo-China rises from the future. […] The superiority of Far Eastern Marxism. While the Chinese materialist dialectic denegativizes itself in the direction of schizophrenizing systems dynamics, progressively dissipating the historical fate of hierarchies in Tao-soaked special economic zones, a re-Hegelianized Western Marxism degenerates from a critique of political economy into a sympathetic monotheology of power, aligning itself with fascism against deregulation. The left drowns in nationalist conservatism, smothering its vestigial capacity for “hot” speculative mutation in a “cold” and depressive swamp of blame culture (Land, 2011, p. 447-48).
With his acid style, blending theory and fiction[12], Land realizes “Meltdown” as both a philosophical text and as a great hyperstitious[13] work; in particular, “Meltdown” perceives the capitalist boom of the Sino-Pacific in conjunction with the automated integration of a global economy that certainly breaks the “neocolonial” order (in Land’s terms) of the modern metropolis. Land realizes that the globalization of the late 1990s, rampant technological advancement and the rise of China represents a certain aspect of the deterritorialization of hyperfluid Capital to a planetary state, stripping the first world of neocolonial privileges, deteriorating welfare states, and encouraging neoliberalism into a final stage, influencing “the release of cultural toxins that accelerate the melting process in a vicious circuit” (Land, p. 449).
The human history presented by Land seems to extend into at least 3 forms of confinement: the first is that of the socius itself, the violent way that modernity installed itself with the consequent marriage between reason and experience as well as the sublime and terror; the second is the way that desire is trapped in a constant repression of human structures: ego, family, Oedipus, where the body is inscribed as a social micropod; and finally, geotrauma, the frightening awareness of how humanity is the result of successive biological accidents that culminated in a complete civilizational deformation. As Nietzsche already suggested, the structure and manner in which the body is used are motives for the neurotic afflictions inherent in human experience. Not even the voice escapes this game, since the bipedal head played a fundamental role in preventing vertebral-perceptual linearity and the human larynx in inhibiting virtual speech. The human voice, in simple terms, is the everyday and constant proliferation of the traumatic role of terrestrial evolution towards the beings known as humans. Years later, with the emergence of concepts such as the Human Security System and the Cathedral, the web of repressive and domesticating social history ends in an even scarier and more neurotic organization, but with an admittedly revolutionary and highly relentless potential: capital.
Land is a complete anti-humanist, a staunch critic of anthropocentrism, and while Hui does not exactly deal with the subject, he relegates humanity to a current stage of need for symbiosis with both the ecological universe and the technical world, perhaps approaching a mediating position between various converging trends (humanisms x post- and transhumanisms), like Donna Haraway. The key differences between Land and Hui amount to their differential cosmopolitical understanding of the forces that operate on the technical matrix of contemporaneity, Hui being a staunch critic of this forced globalization and Land an expert enthusiast for the process.
It is Land who most identifies Sinofuturism as an important symptom of contemporaneity. As a conclusive hypothesis, the explosion of the Sino-Pacific with the Chinese rise in the world market expresses a thesis that can be called the ‘end of unilateral globalization’ (or post-modernization), where the elementary mixture of state and market in the Chinese model indicates something really new happening, a hyperstitious projection of the future that is implanted into the contemporary via China.
Maybe this projection is that of developed, real capitalism, which has emerged by inhibiting a series of elements from European and Western modernity that no longer served it. If the West has “degraded” itself in a completely neoliberalizing bet, true capitalism (as it was in Europe at its beginning, with a massive state presence) is currently emerging from extreme Asia. Things like Carl Schmitt’s influence in Chinese schools of thought, along with a growing means of organization that illustrate other ways of thinking about multiculturalism, democracy, and human rights (aspects dear to our new phase of modernity, especially after the horrors of war and the implementation of organizations such as the UN) make China a living example for the way out of modernity via the acceleration of the flows of capitalism. In this way, Chinese socialist modernization (see Jinping, 2019, p. 13) appears much closer to the understanding of a New Economic Formation[14] with a completely unprecedented social formation, one of a different kind of modernity, or perhaps realizing a proper form of “post-modernity” itself.
NOTES
[1] From German; reference to the Enlightenment thought of Immanuel Kant.
[2] Concept of the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers which attempts to realign the natural and/or cosmic elements with politics.
[3] Authors such as Julius Evola, René Guenon and the most recent Aleksandr Dugin compose this picture of so-called traditionalism. They are usually related to the varied mysticisms and occultisms of pre-modern civilizations.
[4] Influenced by the so-called ontological turn, the perspectivists can be seen as authors more invested in indigenous perspectivism and with ecological propositions, such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marco Antônio Valentim, Philipe Descola, and Bruno Latour.
[5] Flora Tristan, a contemporary of the Internationals and the workers’ movement, is another author who points out similar diagnoses in the 19th century.
[6] It is hard to define accelerationism as an autonomous movement or school of thought. In general, it can be defined as the perceptual horizon that it is by accelerating capitalism itself it is possible to overcome it. The concept gained strength in the last decade of the 20th century due to the informational expansion of computers; famous and inspiring authors of this set of ideas are now identified as a research unit of philosophers at the University of Warwick in the 1990s, the CCRU (Center for Research in Cyber Culture).
[7] See Marx (1848): “…in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks down old nationalities and pushes the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to an extreme point. In a word, the free trade system accelerates the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote for free trade.”
[8] One of the eight structural trigrams of the I Ching.
[9] A famous kind of oracle book in the history of Chinese philosophy.
[10] See Hui, “On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries”, published in e-flux, n.81 (April 2017).
[11] In a note in Introduction to Reading Hegel about Japanese and US societies, Alexandre Kojève offers a very similar perspective.
[12] One of the hallmarks of the CCRU’s work is the mixture of fictional elements and philosophy. The idea of theory-fiction indicates the incorporation of fictional elements in reality.
[13] The best definition of hyperstition can be made by the CCRU itself: “There is no difference in principle between a universe, a religion and a hoax. All involve manifestation engineering, or practical fiction, that is unbelievable. Nothing is true, because everything is in production. Because the future is a fiction, it has a more intense reality than the present or the past. The CCRU uses and is used by Hyperstition to colonize the future, traffic with the virtual and continually reinvent itself” (CCRU, 2015, p. 9).
[14] Elias Jabbour, a Brazilian researcher of China, uses this term to treat China as market socialism.
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