Machine and Ecology

Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20 MACHINE AND ECOLOGY Yuk Hui To cite this article: Yuk Hui (2020) MACHINE AND ECOLOGY, Angelaki, 25:4, 54-66, DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2020.1790835 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2020.1790835 Published online: 06 Aug 2020. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cang20 ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities volume 25 number 4 august 2020 1 introduction It might very well still take a considerable time to recognize that the “organism” and the “organic” present themselves as the mechanistic-technological “triumph” of modernity over the domain of growth, “nature.” (Martin Heidegger, Ponderings XII–XV) […] We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist. Europeanization does not constitute a becoming but merely the history of capitalism, which prevents the becoming of subjected peoples. (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?) The river is the locality of the locale of the home. The river at the same time determines the becoming of human beings as historical in their being at home. The river is the wandering of that journey in which the becoming of being at home has its essence. (Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymne “Der Ister”) T his article titled “Machine and Ecology” hopes to investigate the relation between machine and ecology, and the philosophical and historical questions concealed in these two seemingly incompatible terms. First of all, I want to problematize these two ambiguous terms, “machine” and “ecology,” as a preparation to de-familiarize and de-romanticize certain ideas about techno-ecology, and to suggest a political ecology of machines, which will center around what I term technodiversity. This quest for technodiversity belongs to a systematic inquiry of my thesis on cosmotechnics in The Question Concerning Technology in China (2016), which argues against certain yuk hui MACHINE AND ECOLOGY traditions of philosophy, anthropology and history of technology, and suggests that instead of taking for granted an anthropologically universal concept of technics, one should conceive a multiplicity of technics, characterized by different dynamics between the cosmic, the moral and the technical. Conventionally, one tends to think that machines and ecology are opposed to one another, because machines are artificial and mechanical while ecology is natural and organic. We may call this a dualism of critique (instead of a critique of dualism), since its mode of critique is based on the setting up of binaries, which it fails to go beyond, like the unhappy consciousness. This opposition has ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/20/040054-13 © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2020.1790835 54 hui resulted from some stereotypes concerning the status of machines. Even today when people talk about machines they tend to think of mechanistic machines based on linear causality, for example, the digesting duck designed by the technician Jacques Vaucanson or the mechanical Turk by Wolfgang von Kempelen in the eighteenth century; and when they talk about ecology they tend to think of nature as a self-regulating system, which gives everything and takes back everything. 2 after the overcoming of dualism The above-mentioned notions of machine and ecology undermine both the history of technology and the history of philosophy, therefore they also ignore the technical reality which conditions the validity of such a criticism. Criticism based on dualism fails to understand itself historically and critically. The mechanistic view of machines was already completely surpassed and rendered obsolete by cybernetics in the mid-twentieth century; instead, we have witnessed the emergence of a mechano-organicism. Today cybernetics becomes the modus operandi in machines ranging from smartphones to robotics and spacecraft. The rise of cybernetics was one of the major events in the twentieth century. Different from mechanism, which is based on linear causality, e.g., A–B–C, it rests on a circular causality, e.g., A–B–C–A′ , meaning that it is reflective in the basic sense that it is able to determine itself in the form of a recursive structure. By recursion we mean a non-linear reflective movement which progressively moves towards its telos, be it predefined or auto-posited. Cybernetics belongs to a larger paradigm in the sciences, namely, organicism, which originated from the criticism against mechanism as a fundamental ontological understanding. Organicism also has to be distinguished from vitalism, which often relies on a mysterious (separate, immaterial) “vital force” to explain the existence of a living being; instead, it finds its foundation in mathematics. Cybernetics, as one form of organicism, mobilizes two key concepts, feedback and information, to analyze the behavior of all beings, 55 both animate (living) and inanimate (lifeless), and both nature and society. In the first chapter of his Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), the founder of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, first reiterated an opposition between Newtonian time and Bergsonian time. Newtonian motion is mechanistic, and timesymmetric, hence reversible, while Bergsonian time is organic, biological, creative and irreversible. It is not until the Second Law of Thermodynamics, proposed by the French physicist Sadi Carnot in 1824 (almost a century after Newton’s death in 1727), that we recognize the “arrow of time” in being and the fact that the so-called entropy of a system increases with time and is irreversible. Already in his first book Essai sur les donné es immé diates de la conscience (1889), Bergson launched a fierce attack on the way in which time was conceptualized in Western science and philosophy. Time is here understood in terms of space, for example, in terms of intervals which can be represented in space. Therefore, the time that was thus conceptualized is actually timeless according to Bergson. It is also homogenuous, like the intervals marked on a clock. Instead, organic time or duré e, Bergson suggested, cannot be fully understood as extension ordered in spatial terms, rather it contains heterogeneity or qualitative multiplicity in organic forms. Time is a force which is singular in every instant, like Heraclitus’s river; it doesn’t repeat itself twice like a mechanical clock. Indeed, mechanical or linear causality doesn’t exist in correct duration. Bergsonian “organic” time also provides a new way to understand human consciousness and experience. Wiener proposed that such opposition was already surpassed by the discovery of statistical mechanics in physics. For example, considering a container of particles, with statistical mechanics it is possible to communicate between the macrostate and the microstates, therefore, to control the behavior of the system. In other words, cybernetics endeavors to eliminate dualism, it wants to create a connection between different orders of magnitude, macro and micro, mind and body, like what Hans machine and ecology Jonas says in his Phenomenon of Life regarding cybernetics, “an overcoming of the dualism which classical materials had left in possession by default: for the first time since Aristotelianism we would have a unified doctrine, or at least a unified conceptual scheme, for the representation of reality” (111). The same observation was made in Gilbert Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (2012), where he considers the reflexive thinking of cybernetics (characterized by feedback and information) as key to the resolution of the dualism intrinsic in culture: traditional and modern, rural and urban, major (adult) and minor (child) modes of technology education, etc. In Recursivity and Contingency (2019), I put feedback under a more general category: recursivity. Recursion in general designates a non-linear operation which constantly returns to itself in order to know and determine itself. There are different modalities of recursions, but they all share the overcoming of dualism. Information is the measurement of the degree of organization, feedback is a recursive or circular causality which allows auto-regulation to take place. For example, when reaching my arm to grasp a bottle of water, many feedback processes are taking place, which allows me to adjust the attention of my eyes and the muscles of my arms until I reach the destination, or the telos. Therefore, towards the end of this chapter, Wiener was able to claim that: The modern automation exists in the same sort of Bergsonian time as the living organism, and here there is no reason in Bergson’s considerations why the essential mode of functioning of the living organism should not be the same as that of the automation of this type […] In fact, the whole mechanist–vitalist controversy has been relegated to the limbo of badly posed questions. (44) Whether the claim of Norbert Wiener can be completely justified has to be scrutinized under the light of history. However, it remains significant for us to reconceptualize what is happening today regarding the relation between machine and organism, human and environment, technology and nature, departing from Wiener’s cybernetics. Wiener’s bold statement suggests a radical revaluation of the humanist values which oppose the organic and the inorganic, and it also renders the humanist critique ineffective. Different from what, for example, André Leroi-Gourhan and Bernard Stiegler might call “organized inorganic,” Wiener’s focus was not the man–machine or man–tool hybrid, but rather the possibility of assimilating both the organic and the inorganic by cybernetic machines. Modern machines are all cybernetic machines: they all employ circular causality as their principle of operation. In this sense, a cybernetic machine is no longer merely mechanistic, but rather assimilates certain behaviors of organisms. It is important to bear in mind that resemblance doesn’t mean equivalence, and it is this misunderstanding that dominates our contemporary politics of machines today. Ecology is equally a concept charged with ambiguity. If ecology is rooted in an attempt to understand the relation between the living being and its milieu, as it is in the case of Ernst Haeckel in the nineteenth century and is continued in the early twentieth century by Jakob von Uexkü ll, we have to bear in mind that this discourse remains important but insufficient to understand the complexity which belongs to human societies. Jacob von Uexkü ll has furthered Haeckel’s concept of ecology to show that the environment is not only that which selects according to its physicality (in this respect Haeckel remains a Darwinian), but also that which is selected and internalized by the living being. The first type of selection may be called adaptation, meaning that the living being has to adapt itself to the milieu according to the available resources and physical conditions; the second type of selection may be called adoption, meaning that the living being has to select and to construct contexts from what is available to it as means of survival. The tick, an arachnid without eyes, remains inactive from its position on a tree, and only by detecting the smell of butyric acid (sweat), wind and warmth – which signify the approaching of a mammal – it falls down in order to attach to the animal’s body, to reach the skin and then to suck its blood. There is a semiotics 56 hui in the process of selection of information, based on the Bauplan, the sensorium and the central nervous system of the animal, which in turn defines its Umwelt (von Uexkü ll 50–51). However, human beings are not ticks, they invent tools and change the environment. They are beings talented not only with adapting to the external environment but also with changing and adopting that environment itself through technical means. In these processes of adaptation and adoption, we see that there is a reciprocity between the living being and its environment, which we can also call its organicity, namely, the fact that they do not only exchange information, energy and matter but also constitute a community. A human community is far beyond the sum of the human actors that constitute it, it also includes their environment and other non-human beings. The intervention of human beings in the environment defines the process of hominization, the evolutionary and historical becominghuman and its politics. It is beyond our capacity to outline this process, however, human civilization could be seen as an intimate and complicit relation between humans and their environment, which gives rise to what is called mesology since Plato (according to Augustin Berque’s historiography). However, to cut it short to the subject at hand, let us interrupt with a verdict from Marshall McLuhan, who said in an interview from 1974 that: Sputnik created a new environment for the planet. For the first time the natural world was completely enclosed in a man-made container. At the moment that the Earth went inside this new artifact, Nature ended and Ecology was born. “Ecological” thinking became inevitable as soon as the planet moved up into the status of a work of art. (49) This verdict of McLuhan has to be further analyzed. The 1957 event, namely, the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union, is the first time that human beings were able to ponder upon the earth from the outside, and in this respect, the earth is now principally viewed as an artifact with the aid of space technology. In The Human Condition, Hanna Arendt also describes the 57 1957 launch of Sputnik as “second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom,” because it suggests, like what Konstantin Tsiolkovsky said, that “mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever.” This liberation from the earth directly confronts humankind with the infinite universe and prepares for a cosmic nihilism. It is the moment that nature ended and ecology was born. In contrast to the meaning that Ernst Haeckel gave to the term ecology towards the end of the nineteenth century meaning the totality of relations between a living being and its environment (2: 286–87; see also Richards 8), as well as to von Uexkü ll’s definition of it as the selection process from the Umgebung (physical environment) to the Umwelt (the “interpretation” of the world by the living being), what McLuhan meant by ecology is no longer a biological concept. According to McLuhan, the earth is considered to be a cybernetic system monitored and governed by the machines upon it and in outer space. What we witness is the disappearance of the earth, since it is continuously absorbed into a plane of immanence constructed by the recursive thinking of cybernetics. The hybridism between the natural environment and machines constitutes a gigantic system, and it is in this conceptualization that nature ended and ecology began. Ecology, beyond its strict use in biology,1 is not a concept of nature but rather a concept of cybernetics. This is more evident when we refer to the notion of Gaia coined by James Lovelock to describe the ecological system of the earth: “a cybernetic system with homeostatic tendencies as detected by chemical anomalies in the Earth’s atmosphere” (142). So we quickly arrived here at the position that the modern machine is no longer mechanistic and ecology is nothing natural; in fact, modern machines and ecology are two discourses adhering to the same principle, namely, cybernetics. The difference being, if we insist, that we have moved from individual machines, for example, those automatic machines in the factories of nineteenth-century Manchester described by Marx, to technical systems which connect different machines and establish recursivity between machine and ecology them. These systems can take different scales, from a local network to a planetary system such as the earth’s technosphere. Now we want to ask what could be the implications of this redefinition of (the relation between) machine and ecology. 3 technological becoming of geophilosophy We are more than ever in an epoch of cybernetics, since cybernetics was not a discipline parallel to other disciplines such as philosophy and psychology, but rather it aimed to be a universal discipline, able to unite all other disciplines, therefore, we could say, a universal (mode of) thinking par excellence. Cybernetics as a universal reflexive thinking has displaced the role formerly always played by philosophy as reflexive thinking. This displacement is not a rejection of philosophy, but rather, in the parlance of Martin Heidegger, the completion or end of philosophy (the German word Ende signifies both completion and end). What does this end mean? Does it mean that Western philosophy has no more role to play in the technological age, since it is already completed in it as its destiny? Or does it mean that philosophy in order to survive will have to reinvent itself, namely, to become a post-European (or postmetaphysical, post-ontological as you like) philosophy, and this is also no exception for Europe itself? I do not want to open a Pandora’s box here, but I simply want to point out that cybernetic thinking as an alleged universal and ecological thinking is that which sublates, or at least pretends to sublate, the traditional metaphysical dualisms in ontology and epistemology, and it is in this respect that it calls forward a new condition of philosophizing, and therefore a new inquiry into the question of ecology. Here is the postulation: maybe it is no longer a dualism which is the source of danger in our epoch, but rather a non-dualistic totalizing power present in modern technology, which ironically resonates with the anti-dualist ideology (e.g., rejection of any comparison between the East and the West). Ironically, because the anti-dualist ideology still believes that the main danger is dualism, without realizing that this duality is no longer the foundation of modern science and technology. In other words, without having examined this intimate relation between philosophy and technology, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to develop a philosophical thinking contemporary to our situation. Now, let’s bring our skepticism to the fore and pursue the argument further: will cybernetics be the solution to the ecological problems that we face today? Will the organismic model at the heart of cybernetics be able to overcome the shadow that European modernity has cast on us for centuries? If the early moderns provide us a mechanistic view of the world through geometrization (Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Descartes among others) and experimental science (Bacon and Boyles), now with cybernetics as the realization and concretization of organismic thought which started culminating since the end of the eighteenth century, can we finally terminate modernity with cybernetics? Don’t we already find in cybernetics, and its planetary version, the Gaia theory, a generic logic that rests on the recognition of the relation between the living being and its milieu, that which the philosopher and orientalist Augustin Berque has emphasized in many places? To overcome the modern alternative is to recognize that the structural moment of our existence – our mediance – is such that each of us is split: “half” (in Latin, medietas, hence mediance) in one’s individual animal body, while the other “half” consists of the eco-technical-symbolic system that is our life milieu. (Berque 60) Berque has been endeavoring to propose a non-binary thinking that he found in Japanese thought or Eastern thought in general, and opposed it to the modern thought of which Cartesian dualism is the spokesperson. However, let us not rush to an answer because we may fall victim to the dualism of critique that we discussed above. Instead, let’s consider the epigraph from Heidegger at the opening of this article concerning the relation between 58 hui organism and technology. Heidegger saw that this becoming organic, or becoming ecological, is no more than the mechanistic-technological triumph of modernity over nature. This statement has to be accessed beyond the cynical impression that one may have at first glance. Heidegger’s critique of cybernetics deserves our reflection today, since it is not about the celebration of the overcoming of dualism, but rather serves a call for prudence [phronesis] and a warning to avert from illusions and false analysis. Because at first glance, one may be able to claim that cybernetics has fulfilled an anti-dualistic critique of modernity. I would like to suggest, or even better to provoke, that with the rise of cybernetics and its organismic model, we may need a new agenda for mesology. We will have to understand this by rethinking the relation between technology and the environment. Instead of seeing technology as a result of the determination by the geographical milieu or that the natural milieu is destroyed by technology, one cannot neglect how the technology–environment complex constitutes its own genesis and autonomy, and how such genesis could be rethought or resituated in a cosmic reality which is proper to the milieu or fûdo (風土) in the sense of the Japanese philosopher Tetsurō Watsuji. We will elaborate on this point towards the end of the article. To be brief – and this will deserve much more detailed analysis for sure in the future – this technological–environmental complex could be understood in two senses which are seemingly different yet remain intimately related. First of all, it is what the paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan terms technical milieu (Milieu 340–50). The technical milieu is that which acts as a membrane between the internal milieu conceived as an unstable and dynamic “mental tradition,” and the external milieu consisting of the climate, natural resources and the influences of other tribal groups (334–35). Leroi-Gourhan uses the cell as an organic metaphor to explain the relation between these three terms and the permeability and resistance against technical tendencies. The technical milieu is that which is produced by the irreducible differences between the internal and 59 external milieus, while at the same time it filters and diffuses what comes from the external milieu so that it can maintain the consistency of the internal milieu. In other words, the internal milieu and the external milieu form a reciprocal relation through the mediation of the technical milieu. The second sense concerns a techno-geographical milieu, a term coined by Gilbert Simondon. It literally means that the geographical milieu including natural resources is no longer simply an object of exploitation but is rather integrated into the functioning of the technical object. In On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon gives us the famous example of the Guimbal turbine which successfully integrates the river as both the driving force (of an engine wrapped by oil under high pressure) and the cooling agent (57–58). In this case, the functionality of the river is multiplied, it becomes an organ belonging to the technical objects; the river is also what Simondon calls an associated milieu which provides a feedback mechanism for stabilizing and regulating the dynamic system: the stronger the current, the faster the turbine moves. Theoretically, more heat is produced which may burn the engine, while since the current is also fast, the heat can be more effectively carried away. The river and the turbine thus form a technoenvironmental complex. Both Leroi-Gourhan and Simondon were influenced by the metaphor of the organism in their conceptualization of the technical milieu and the associated milieu. This aspiration to an organismic or holistic model was a significant intellectual movement of their time. The role of the technical milieu in Leroi-Gourhan as a membrane between the internal and external milieus, was similar to what Simondon calls associated milieu, with the difference that Leroi-Gourhan still wants to single out the technical from the cultural (internal) and natural (external), while in the scheme of Simondon such distinctions have already disappeared. Simondon calls it a techno-geographical milieu (this is also the reason why Simondon was able to conceive of a conceptual plan for overcoming the antagonism between culture and nature, nature and machine and ecology technology, culture and technology). Simondon’s interpretation of the significance of the Guimbal engine and the notion of the associated milieu was very much influenced by Wiener’s cybernetics; and the reflective logic in cybernetics seems to Simondon to have displaced philosophy; and it is from this point that we can understand Heidegger’s claim that cybernetics marks the end of philosophy. The river of Simondon stands in a peculiar relation to what Heidegger says in The Question Concerning Technology about the hydroelectric plant in the Rhine river, where the river becomes a mere standing reserve, to be constantly challenged and exploited by modern technology (16). Peculiar because at first glance, Simondon’s formulation of the river as a techno-geographical milieu expresses an optimism, while Heidegger’s description of the Rhine river as standing reserve is, though not necessarily pessimistic, a critique against the “technization” of phusis; however, they both refer to the same end of philosophy but with two different attitudes. The emphasis of Simondon for what concerns the Guimbal engine is not simply about the exploitation of the river, but also it demonstrates a reciprocity between the technological and the natural, or what Simondon himself calls “co-naturality.” The reciprocal and communal structure demonstrated by the Guimbal engine is only one case of the cybernetic thinking to which Simondon aspires for the overcoming of dualism or its more aggressive form, antagonism between culture and technology, nature and technology. After cybernetics, especially with the notion of “structural coupling” from biologists Hubertus Maturana and Francisco Varela, the technical functionality of the river described by Simondon seems to be present as a generic model of the techno-geographical complex. Environment is not only that which is modified by technology, but rather it is also more and more constituted by technology. Ecological thinking is not simply about protecting nature, but fundamentally a political thought based on environments and territories. Technology’s increasing capacity to participate in the modulation of the environment forces us to develop a geophilosophy. This is by no means a new discovery, however, it is essential to analyze this historical trajectory in order to understand the stake of technological development today: (1) The relation between the human and the environment is complexified in the course of time and the semiotics that defines perception and interpretation has to be constantly updated according to the evolution of technical objects in the sense of Simondon. The continuity and discontinuity from biological sensory detection, to the display of signs and symbols, and to the invention of electronic sensors that gradually cover the urban and rural area today entails a technological trajectory which constantly defines and redefines human and nature, which Peter Sloterdijk might term the domestication of human beings (89). (2) The technology which is used for the domestication of livestock is fundamentally a modulation of the relation between livestock and its environment; or in other words, human beings intervene into the environment by controlling its fertility and sterility in order to modulate the behavior of the livestock on a large scale. Human communities maintain an apparent autonomy through the invention of laws, customs and symbolic systems which define taboos and transgressions. These constitute social norms and therefore also its opposite, social inadaptability, which is central to Michel Foucault’s analysis. (3) The technology of livestock domestication has gradually merged with the self-domestication of the human being, which may be understood in terms of what Foucault calls governmentality. Human beings’ intervention into the environment constitutes a specific kind of governmentality which Foucault calls environmentality. At the beginning of this environmental thinking, we see that, and here I quote Foucault, “the population is the object that 60 hui government must take into account in all its observations and knowledge [savoir], in order to be able to govern effectively in a rational and conscious manner” (217). (4) The control of population represents a molar type of governmentality which treats human beings in large quantities, therefore its technique can only be implemented through the mediation of laws and regulations which treat each subject as an equal and particular being. Technological inventions since the twentieth century supplement this molar mode of control with a molecular mode, meaning that each human being is treated as an individual, which differs from other individuals. Such an individual is defined by the relation between the individual and its environment constantly captured and capitalized in the form of data. This form of governmentality has become dominant during the coronavirus pandemic. The generalization of recursive algorithms and its implementation in digital computers concretize cybernetic thinking and its applications in almost all social, economical and political domains. Capital moves from a mechanistic model accurately observed by Marx towards an organismic model realized by informational machines equipped with complex recursive algorithms. Data is the source of information, it is that which allows the recursive models to be ubiquitous and effective. The digital urbanism that is in the process of developing and which will be the central theme of the digital economy, is driven by the recursive operation of data. Data, in Latin, means something which is already given, like sense data that determines the falling of the tick or the red color of the apple in front of me; since the mid-twentieth century, data has acquired a new meaning, namely, computational information, which is no longer “given” from without, but is rather produced and modulated by human beings (Hui, Digital Objects 48). In this sense, we can see that the notion of “societies of control” described by Gilles 61 Deleuze is far beyond the common discourse of a society of surveillance, it rather means societies whose governmentality is based on the auto-positing and auto-regulation of automatic systems. These systems vary in scale: it can be a global corporation like Google, a city like London, a nation state like China and also the whole planet. 4 ecology of machines Here we would like to return to the question raised earlier: is cybernetics and its continuation in the twenty-first century via the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann et al. already a response to the critique of industrialism which inherited the dualistic tendency of early modern thought, like what Ludwig von Bertalanffy once outlined in his 1936 General System Theory that: The mechanical world view, taking the play of physical particles as ultimate reality found its expression in a civilization which glorifies physical technology that has led eventually to the catastrophes of our time. Possibly the model of the world as a great organization can help to reinforce the sense of reverence for the living which we have almost lost in the last sanguinary decades of human history? (49) With the becoming reflective of cybernetic machines, is it possible to surpass modernity and hence the epistemologies which accompany it? Or is the generic model suggested by cybernetics for overcoming dualism still within the paradigm of modernity, as Heidegger suggested in the 1930s? What does it mean to be still within the paradigm of modernity? It means, I suggest, that it undermines the necessity of locality and diversity because it insists upon a universal episteme and upon the concept of progress. Although it is true that machines are becoming organismic, it is in the permanent process of “becoming” as Simondon has observed, no matter how concrete a technical object is, that it still retains reminiscences of abstract schemes, while a living being is always already machine and ecology completely concrete. It is within the parallax between the “not being completely concrete” and the illusion of being able to replace nature with digital informational technology that we find the question of politics today. The former remains a humanist critique while the latter is rather transhumanist. Heidegger’s response is neither humanist nor transhumanist, but rather, according to our interpretation, local. Being for Heidegger is a notion specific to a locality, which is called the land of the evening [Abendland]; not at least from a linguistic point of view, the concept of being didn’t have its correspondence in Chinese language and thought (Graham 322–59). We could find it in his reading of Hö lderlin’s hymn “Der Ister,” in which the river is conceived as both locality [Ortschaft] and wandering (or journeying) [Wanderschaft] at its origin (Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn 30). The river, which is the external milieu for LeroiGourhan and the associated milieu for Simondon, is the locality which is by default keeping stationary, and it is the wandering which moves forward. This seemingly contradictory movement, forward and backward, constitutes the historicity of “being there” (Da-sein). However, the destiny of locality is not yet clear in the technological epoch, and this ambiguity is the source of reactionary politics. It is because the question of the truth of Being can only take place in the danger brought about by human’s frenzy for the gigantic, in the form of an event of appropriation initiated by a “shock of deep awe” (Schrecken der Scheu) (Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie 8). However, shall one wait for this eschatology to happen, or should one instead take other paths which don’t follow the history of Western thought as long as the universal has to be contested? It is the question of Being which Heidegger wants to explore that brings us back to the question of locality and historicity. The claim that with the invention of network technology, there is a compression of time and space sometimes prevents us from seeing what has always been already there and beyond. Indeed, one of the major failures of the twentieth century is the inability to articulate the relation between locality and technology and the reliance on an almost standardized ecological thinking endowed with a strong European humanism; technology became a provocation of either reactionary politics which is based on a dualism between tradition and modernity or a fanatic accelerationism which believes that the problems that we have and have inherited will finally be resolved by technological advancement, be it geoengineering for repairing the earth or the subversion of capitalism by accelerating towards full automation. From the economic and technocratic perspective, there is very little value in taking locality into consideration besides for its relevance to the availability of natural resources. The advancement of network technology will speed up the spatial compression and therefore there is no more value to discuss what could be called “geographicality” since all exchanges are done at the speed of light. This ignorance of the milieu is also an ignorance of locality; it fails to establish an intimate and complicit relation between the earth seen from the perspective of the territory and globalizing technology. We still have to add why cybernetics is not yet sufficient as a non-dualistic solution before we arrive at understanding locality. The logic of cybernetics remains formal; therefore, it underestimates the milieu by reducing it to mere functionality based on feedback so that the milieu can be integrated into the operation of the technical object. In this respect, the milieu is exposed as a scientific and technological object, while its position within the genesis of technicity is ignored. This is also why until Part III of On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon declared that analysis of the evolution of technical objects and the analysis of the relation between the human and technics are not sufficient to understand technicity, and that it is necessary to situate technical concretization within the genesis of technicity, which means to relate technological thought to other thoughts. Simondon’s unfinished project (judged from the standpoint of cosmotechnics) suggests conceiving a genesis starting with a magic phase which constantly bifurcates, firstly into technics and religion, 62 hui then in the second stage, each of them bifurcates into the theoretical and practical part. Simondon understands technological development as a constant entanglement with religious thinking, aesthetic thinking and philosophical thinking oscillating between technology’s exigency to diverge and thinking’s necessity to converge. Technicity means here the cosmo-geographical specificity of technology and how such cosmogeographical particularity has participated in shaping the technological mentality, which includes understanding of technology, a sensibility towards matter, form and other forms of existence, relation between art and spirit, etc. It is also for this reason that Simondon’s project has to be pursued further by looking into the cosmological specificity of cultures. For example, Tetsurō Watsuji has tried to point out almost a century ago how the milieu affects the way of seeing and painting. The Japanese word fûdo comes from the two Chinese characters for wind (風) and soil (土). Watsuji classifies three types of fûdo, namely, monsoon, desert and meadow. To give brief examples of Watsuji’s observations, he thinks that, since Asia is heavily affected by monsoons, the resulting relative lack of seasonal change creates an easy-going personality. In Southeast Asia especially, since the weather is always very warm, nature provides a plenitude of foodstuffs, and therefore there is no need to labor too much in order to survive, or to worry about the possibility of day-to-day living. Similarly, he argues that the lack of natural resources in the deserts of the Middle East creates solidarity between peoples, so that the Jewish people, although they live in diaspora, remain united; while in the meadowlands of Europe, clear and regular seasonal changes demonstrate the constancy of the laws of nature, thus suggesting the possibility of mastering nature with science. This cosmological specificity gives rise to different technics, for example, in Greece the plenitude of sun and clear sky gives priority to the form, while the obscure fûdo in Asia gave rise to the style of haziness in painting (Watsuji 90). Cosmo-geographicality constitutes an important dimension of locality. 63 Cybernetic thinking remains a thinking of totalization, since it aims to absorb the other into itself, like Hegelian logic, which sees polarity not as oppositional but rather as a motivation towards synthesized identity. This is also why the Hegelian and cybernetician Gotthard Gü nther considers cybernetics fundamentally the operational (technical) realization of Hegelian reflexive – i.e., dialectical – logic (95). The complexification of cybernetic logic finally leads to an absolute totality. Bearing this in mind, without being able to reiterate Gü nther’s interpretation of the place of Hegelian reflexive logic in cybernetics here,2 we can probably formulate our claim as follows: to think beyond cybernetics is to think beyond the totalizing effect of a nondualist thinking. In other words, how to reintroduce the question of locality into the discourse of machine and ecology today? And how does this reintroduction of locality contribute to the discourse on machines? We are not opposing machine and ecology as if machines are those things that only rape Mother Nature and violate the harmony between the human and nature, an image attributed to technology since the end of the eighteenth century. We must advance instead towards an ecology of machines. Neither are we following the Gaia theory that the earth is a single super organism or a collectivity of organisms in line with the thought of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. Instead, I would like to propose to reflect on an ecology of machines. To open this ecology of machines, we will need first of all to go back to the concept of ecology. The fundament of ecology is diversities, since it is only with biodiversities (or multispecies including all forms of organisms including bacterial) that the ecological system can be conceptualized. To discuss the ecology of machines, we will need a different notion in parallel to biodiversity, which we call technodiversity. Biodiversity is the correlate of technodiversity, since without technodiversity, we will only witness the disappearing of species by a homogenous rationality. Take the example of pesticide, which is made to kill a certain species of insects regardless of their machine and ecology geographical locations precisely because it is based on chemical and biological analysis. However, we know that the use of the same pesticide may lead to different disastrous consequences in different environments. Before the invention of pesticide, there were different techniques employed to combat insects threatening the harvest of agricultural products, for example, natural resources found in the region. Namely, there was a technodiversity prior to the employment of pesticide as a universal solution. Pesticide is apparently more effective in the short term, but it is well established today that we have been only looking at our toes when we think about the distant future. We can say that technodiversity is fundamentally a question of locality. Locality doesn’t necessarily mean ethnocentrism, nationalism or fascism, but rather, it is that which forces us to rethink the process of modernization and globalization and allows us to reflect on the possibility to resituate modern technologies. Locality is also key to conceive of a multiplicity of cosmotechnics. Locality doesn’t mean identity politics here, but rather the capacity to reflect on the technological becoming of the local, not to retreat to traditionalism of one form or another, but rather for multiple localities to invent their own technological thought and future – an immunology or rather immunologies yet to be written. What are the localities of non-European countries such as Japan, China and Brazil, today? Heidegger’s long exposition on the relation between technology and Western philosophy is occidentally oriented. We should take the term orientation in a literal sense here, namely, as Erörterung, i.e., an identification as to where one is and as to what one will become. It is in this sense that Heidegger is also a thinker of geopolitics. To take up the project of Heidegger, but also to go beyond him today, is to carry his reflection beyond Europe. I want to put this challenge into a speculative question: for non-European cultures, can we identify their own technological thought in the same way that they also have different fûdo? Can these technological thoughts contribute to the imagination of technological futures, which are now unfortunately dominated by the transhumanist ideology? I tend to believe that it is possible and necessary to rediscover different technologies, which I call cosmotechnics. Cosmotechnics is not simply about, different ways of making things, for example, different techniques of knitting or dyeing. I gave it a preliminary definition in The Question Concerning Technology in China as the unification of the moral and the cosmic through technical activities. The term unification will have to be further elaborated,3 for our purpose here, cosmotechnics should be understood as an Urtechnik, it challenges our current understanding of technology and therefore also its future. This cosmological specificity must be rethought beyond astral physics, beyond the conceptualization of the universe as a thermodynamic system; it also reopens the question of moral beyond ethical rules which are added posteriorly as constraints to new technologies. Technical activities unify the moral order and the cosmic order; and by unification I mean reciprocal processes which constantly enforce each other to acquire new meanings. This is the reason why I wanted to reinterpret what André Leroi-Gourhan calls technical tendency and technical facts (L’homme 27–35). Technical tendency is what seems to be universal, like laws of nature, for example, the use of flint to produce fire and the invention of wheels for transportation could be found in almost every civilization (we rarely see any triangular wheels if only in our imagination). Technical facts are the particular features that vary from one civilization to another; in the process of diffusion, technology was filtered and modified according to constraints intrinsic to the internal milieu. For Leroi-Gourhan, technical facts are determined by numerous factors, but largely by material constraints, while I tend to think that the differences in technical facts entails different cosmologies and their moral constraints, which encompass far more than functional aesthetics. I would like to conclude by picking up the biochemist-turned-sinologist Joseph Needham’s question here, namely, why didn’t modern science and technology develop in China and 64 hui India but only in Europe? Historians who attempt to answer this question tend to carry out comparative studies on the advancement of technology in Europe and China as if the essence of technology concerns merely efficiency and mechanical causalities: for example, papermaking in the second century in China was more advanced than in Europe. However, this line of inquiry, it seems to me, has betrayed Needham’s own stance. This is so because Needham was actually suggesting that there were two different trajectories of technology in China and in Europe, which were less constrained by material causes than by their different ways of thinking and forms of life. To put it in other words: answering Needham’s question is not to show who is more advanced than the other, but rather to elaborate on the different systems of technological thought. It is the reason why The Question Concerning Technology in China was aiming to be a response to Needham by taking his implicit thesis further. The technological upheaval since the nineteenth century has presented us with a convergence which at times seems inevitable while at the same time seems problematic and necessary to be fragmented in favor of other forms of convergence. The inquiry into the relation between machine and ecology is less about how to design more intelligent machines, but rather requires first of all a discovery of cosmotechnical diversity, while such diversity has to be thought through by going back to the question of locality, therefore re-articulating the concept of technics by resituating it within the geographical milieu, culture and thinking. The task that is left to all of us is the effort to rediscover these cosmotechnics in order to reframe modern technologies, namely, by reframing the enframing [Gestell]; only through such a reframing can we imagine a “new earth and people that do not yet exist” (Deleuze and Guattari 108). disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. 65 notes 1 Note that a lot of biologists use this term and it is generally considered to be a biological discipline studying relationships of biotic and abiotic elements. 2 For a more detailed analysis please see Hui, Recursivity and Contingency, ch. 2. 3 I will elaborate on this notion of “unification” in my forthcoming book Art and Cosmotechnics (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, Nov. 2020). bibliography Arendt, Hanna. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998. Print. Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. London: Allen, 1913. Print. Berque, Augustin. 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