1.
Although still a young writer and researcher, it is probably not an exaggeration to say that Yuk Hui is already one of the most influential contemporary thinkers of technology working today. This position is certainly warranted by the strength and scope of his work, the expansive drive and breadth of which is inspiring, especially in its openness to the concepts of thinkers that are often considered to be antithetical to each other. Hui will quote Deleuze & Guattari, Fichte, Sloterdijk and Teilhard de Chardin in the same breath, he is interested in both the continental and analytical traditions, he drinks from Batesonian ecology and the idea of Gaïa as well as from Heidegger’s romantic and cataclysmic diagnosis of modern technology. His notion of recursivity is able to somehow take in conceptual edifices as distinct as both Gilbert Simondon’s contingent circuit of recurrent causality as well as Hegel’s logical-mystical theurgy of the concept. A dedicated reader of the polymath (and cultural transducer between East and West) Joseph Needham, there is a lively and contagious enthusiasm in the agility of Hui’s thinking which seems to be always interested in taking what is best or more helpful from every thinker and tradition, instead of focusing only on the cracks and fissures (as well as on the inherited conceptual schisms of schools and groups).
Through his work on technology in China to his work on the ontology of digital objects, leading to his ambitious Recursivity and Contingency (which tries to discuss cybernetics and organology in a longer durée, in relation to German Idealism and other intellectual traditions), Hui is consistently investigating new and deep questions in the philosophy of technology while keeping alive the intellectual legacy of Bernard Stiegler, a substantial presence in the field who was hugely formative for Hui’s thinking and who passed away recently in an unfortunate and untimely death.
With all this said, however, Hui’s vision of cosmotechnics and technodiversity can also seem, at times, to be more of a hopeful prescription of political plurality than a fully-realized vision of how a diversity of technical realities could be reconciled, either in theoretical discussion or in political practice. His work is certainly one of the best blueprints available for a global repositioning of the question of technology, but I fail to see as yet what Hui’s technodiversity could really be besides a (healthy) plea for political pluralism. Here I want to explore this tension at the heart of his work, namely as it manifests in his latest book Art and Cosmotechnics.
2.
The outline of what Hui is setting out to do in this recent volume is, to me, very exciting. That is, he endeavors to re-think technology through art, and to extend his notion of cosmotechnics through a grounding of aesthetics in locality. What’s more, this task is to be executed in what seems to be a tentatively postcolonial direction. As he writes:
It is of ultimate importance today to ask how modernity can be overcome from a non-European perspective. One such possibility can be found in reflecting on the varieties of aesthetic and technological experience in order to rearticulate a program after the postmodern.[1]
The necessity to overcome a Eurocentric perspective, Hui explains, would be important not only for those localities which were colonized, but also for Europe itself, precisely for it to overcome its fatal destiny of enframing (or Gestell) which Heidegger warned against in his influential text on the question of technology. The immediate relevance and importance of a theoretical enterprise such as this would seem to be enormous, which is perhaps why the book ends up being, to this reader at least, mostly a disappointment.
As far as I understand, Hui wants art to be a visionary resource for society, a permanent possibility for expansion and renewal of our sensibility and imagination, especially our technical imagination. He wants art to be far more visionary, in fact, than contemporary art currently is (for him, at least). Yet he offers little to no examples of what kind of imagination-expanding art he means, or why exactly current art fails (I would argue that it doesn’t necessarily, at least not so thoroughly as he suggests).
The most successful parts of the book are those where Hui takes on a comparative reading of Eastern aesthetic traditions, in a way which resonates with and expands his approach in The Question Concerning Technology in China. This is where Hui’s work usually shines, in his generous and erudite desire to forge unlikely bridges between disparate traditions in the East and the West, and to do so in a remarkably clear manner.
I have no way of fully assessing his reading of these traditions here (being tremendously ignorant of Eastern art) but I can certainly appreciate his use of Schelling and Simondon (as well as the Gestalt model of ground and figure) to articulate a frame for cultural transduction between diverse aesthetic traditions, and especially for grounding this diversity in a robust notion of locality and resonance. The cosmos in cosmotechnics, as it turns out, is better understood as a localized affective cartography and choreography. This is also why Hui’s understanding of art and aesthetics in this book should be taken as relevant for the further development of his notion of technodiversity (and also why his eventual failure in this regard is of conceptual consequence for his larger enterprise).
As the book progresses, however, Hui mostly tackles a lot of common tropes in 20th century art theory and criticism, from mass reproduction and ‘aura’ to Duchamp and contextual framing, recapitulating familiar notions and conclusions via Cézanne and Klee, Danto and Heidegger, which should be very familiar for anyone used to reading Anglo-American and Continental art theory written in the second half of the last century.
Hui’s understanding of art, at least as shown here, is built on familiar modern notions of expansiveness, invention, and rendering the invisible visible (partly taken from Klee and Deleuze), announcing the usual fanfare of romantic-cum-modern aesthetic sensibility. The most original and salient aspect of his vision here is the desire for art (or even aesthetic experience and thought, more broadly) to be a singularly important mediator between philosophy and technology. Unfortunately, this direction seems to be much more of a promise than a realization in the book. As he describes it, aesthetics is this experimental mode able to cross outdated disciplinary divisions, but for that to actually happen, he explains, it likely needs to “deterritorialize itself beyond the present confinement within the art market and the so-called contemporary art industry.”[2]
Sure, but what would that mean, exactly? To produce art under popular vernaculars, to do so through radical gestures of political intervention for the production of actual commonality? Hui does not offer any concrete examples of artistic and curatorial practices that could go beyond the limits of the current market, as if no one was already trying to propose alternatives. While not an art critic (my field of research is media theory and comparative literature), even I am aware that plenty of experimentation with institutions has existed and still exists, arguably since the onset of various modern avant-gardes, but certainly since the waves of institutional critique in the sixties and seventies. Many of the current attempts at experimentation beyond the traditional market even have a digital or technical bent which could particularly interest Hui (like Joshua Citarella’s DNR group, or Brad Troemel’s work), but as vaguely as they are written here, Hui’s criticisms levied at the contemporary art world seem unhelpful and, to be honest, a bit cliché.
Of course the contemporary art market can and should be criticized for multiplicitous reasons, like any creative industry under capitalism: my point is not that Hui is unfair to it. What I find puzzling is how one sets out to write such an ambitious (and even programmatic) book about art and technology without really mentioning or dealing with almost any actual examples and counterexamples of contemporary art.
Hui is not guilty of epistemological arrogance here. He is certainly not looking down on art as a philosopher, but instead values art as having an important function, and surely with its own kind of plasticity and dignity. Yet he discusses the limits of the art world, as he discusses almost everything, strictly as a conceptual affair (no wonder, for instance, he sees conceptual art as a demonstration of Hegel’s “becoming concrete and real of the Concept”, which is a nice joke but a very silly historical reading if meant seriously). There is little to no discussion of political economy or contingent social forces that are at play in contemporary media ecologies of art, which of course would form the actual limits of the art world that he seems to be rallying against.
When it comes to philosophers making sweeping and unspecific assertions about art, Hui is not in bad company, of course, following an honorable tradition that includes Plato and Hegel. We are reminded here of one of his most important influences, Gilbert Simondon, and his own slightly depreciative comments on art and aesthetics, particularly the ones he makes in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, which are similarly not well-explained. Both Hui and Simondon seem eager to give artistic creation an important place inside an ecological and multi-phasic vision of culture, but they are also constitutively unclear about the historical limits that are said to so terribly constrain the power of art.
What is particularly puzzling about these kind of complaints is that the story of 20th century art is the story of several waves of attempts at shattering the modern bubble of artistic autonomy and of bringing it into the wild of life and society (with different degrees of success and of later reverberation, this was attempted by artists as diverse as the Dadaists and the Situationists, by the likes of Joseph Beuys and Andrea Fraser, or even Andy Kaufman and George Clinton, to mention a few obvious but some provocative examples). Like Simondon, Hui seems either unaware or unimpressed by all of these efforts, and, in fact, he also seems to be mostly uninterested in artists that are more recent than Duchamp (Warhol being one of the few exceptions, to no great effect).
By the end, not only are we left unimpressed by what Hui has to say about art, but one might end up feeling the whole theoretical enterprise of cosmotechnics faltering at this very point. Let us now explore this second, more ambitious claim.
3.
Hui writes that cosmotechnics is “the unification of the cosmic order and moral order through technical activities”.[3] The diverse and polyphasic field of art then does seem apt as an important connective tissue between these disparate orders, but the unfortunate limits of Hui’s notion of art, at least as presented in this book, makes me fail to see why cosmotechnics would not simply be another form of multiculturalism, one which brings technics to the foreground.
If cosmotechnics is the name we give to the aesthetic grounding of a technical culture inside its own locality, isn’t that what the anthropology of art has already been trying to describe for ages, with its own toolkit and vocabulary?
In a recent interview with Ana María Guzmán Olmos and Hugo Villafuerte, Hui is directly asked about “the difference between cosmotechnics and multiculturalism or postcolonialism”.[4] I am not sure Hui answers the question in a straight manner, but he does offer a formulation of the problem that might be helpful. Harking back to Kant, Hui lays out his cosmotechnical scheme as an attempt to solve what he calls the antinomy of the universality of technology. That is, he means the tension between the fact (or thesis) that technology is a human constant and the fact (or antithesis) that technology is always constrained and enabled by particular cosmologies. For Hui, his concept of cosmotechnics is precisely designed to address this antinomy by broadening the concept of technology and enlarging its imagination.
This formulation might be useful, but I do not understand what is supposed to be the difference between technical diversity and cultural diversity as a whole, as Hui describes it here. After all, one can conceivably produce similar antinomies of universality around the notions of art, culture, mythology and so forth (depending on how you define them, of course, all of these fields of human activity can be said to be both universally present and heavily diverse in human communities).
As a media theorist and reader of Gilbert Simondon, I submit that what would make the idea of technical diversity essentially different from a simple idea of cultural diversity is the stubborn fact that technicity has an operational dimension which other fields of culture do not need to have, or at least not with the same kind of mechanical efficacy. A myth or a symbolic choreography can “work” in a number of invisible and subtle ways, but one expects technical objects to have a practical effectiveness which is, at least to a point, context-independent (an axe is what an axe does, no matter where it is, just like a pistol or an algorithm). That is why the question of technical diversity seems to be, at least on this point, fundamentally and politically different from that of cultural diversity as a whole. This is also why Hui’s previous work is helpful and important, to be sure, at least in framing these issues in a clear manner. Yet it also seems to be the point in which this latest book seems to present us, perhaps, with a bit of a dead end.
If technical diversity offers its own kind of tricky aporias and pitfalls, it would seem that the real political task is how to offer modes of practical and theoretical compatibility under a common operational ground of technicity. The spectrum of technical affordances (that which Leroi-Gourhan called technical tendencies) is what is given to us – just like the electromagnetic spectrum is given – so what varies is how any culture will flesh out and embody these affordances concretely in daily practices and actual implements. As far as we know, no human choreography is able to make nature behave differently at its basic mechanics, so that is not exactly what is at stake in technodiversity (despite the importance of the notion of multinaturalism in contemporary anthropological discussions after the so-called ontological turn, but for other reasons).
To be clear, I am not here questioning the depth or the reality of the diversity in technical cultures, when I affirm the existence of something like a common (or even universal) operational ground of technicity. Further, I am not pretending that these transcultural problems are easy to formulate, let alone solve. Hui naturally cannot be blamed for not having a complete solution to them, like Fernando Wirtz also suggests in his text on cosmotechnics in Latin America. His work is, at the very least, certainly useful in giving us such a broad and generous synthesis of these issues (the greatest demonstration of which is the fertile use that other authors are already finding in it, Wirtz included).
As far as I understand it, the question of technodiversity and cosmotechnics should be one of both political and theoretical composition between disparate cultural forms of production. That is, the delicate and difficult political diplomacy, construction and struggle of finding modes of conversion and interoperability between radically distinct social choreographies and their distinct forms of producing and reproducing value. In this sense, it is similar to Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitical proposal (Hui himself would perhaps agree, articulating in a recent interview that the task of decolonization is not merely of decomposition but also of “recomposition”).
This practical and political interoperability of radically distinct different social choreographies and values is a truly difficult and even mind-boggling question to which there is no one clear and immediate practical or theoretical answer at the moment. Our shared theoretical ability to describe the conflicts between Western scientific culture and other modes of value-production are still frequently tied by either fetishistic or condescending prejudices, and there is still a long way to go if we are going to try to build a truly democratic scientific realism, one able to defeat the demented denial of climate change and vaccines without being grounded on the same imperialistic and rationalistic hubris and full-blown erasure of all other existing cultural forms that has defined so much of the global expansion of modernity.
Hui certainly seems to be more pointedly aware of all of these thorny difficulties than many other influential thinkers of technology (like the otherwise interesting Benjamin Bratton, for instance, with his almost comic moments of modernist techno-chauvinism), but after reading his latest book, I’m not sure how far his notions of cosmotechnics and technodiversity can take us. The strategy of broadening the notion of technology and enlarging its possibilities through art, which was Hui’s premise after all, does seem like a sensible one. But for that to work, one would probably need a more robust and radical ecological understanding of the contemporary possibilities of art, in their actual limits and affordances.
I look forward to seeing the further developments of Hui’s work, as always, but I for one also admit to hoping that at some point he can eventually shake off some of that encrusted Black Forest dirt from his shoes, to perhaps get outside of starting with Heidegger every time a problematic is being addressed (which I say in all kindness). Who knows, maybe he will start seeing some new problems, or seeing them in a new light. Whatever else happens, I do personally submit the wager that these old conceptual gods, with all their romantic dread and angst, will not save us here.
Notes
[1] Yui Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics (New York: e-flux, 2022), 27.
[2] Ibid., 62.
[3] Ibid., 41.
[4] http://journal.philosophyandtechnology.network/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Technophany_1_Conversation-with-YH_P1.pdf