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Technology After
Hegemony: On Yuk Hui’s
“Art and Cosmotechnics”
April 2, 2022 • By Bryan Norton
IN HIS 1964 LECTURE “
End of Philosophy and the
Task of
inking,” Martin
Heidegger proposed that
philosophy’s historic function
of providing a uni ed account
Art and
Cosmotechnics
YUK HUI
of the world was growing
obsolete. Cybernetics, the
postwar scienti c research on
technical systems, was outperforming philosophy in
this traditional role. In uencing everything from art
e
and sociology to computation and neurobiology, this
ambitious new discourse envisioned the relationship
between a system and its environment as a series of
feedback loops determined by communicative
exchange. Deemed capable of accounting for
everything from a cell’s interaction with its
surroundings to the economics of human labor,
cybernetics presented a more coherent metaphysical
system than Plato or Hegel could have imagined.
While clearly impressed with these advances,
Heidegger’s proclamation of the “end of philosophy”
comes with a major warning.
ough cloaked in the
organic language of growth and spontaneity, this new
mode of scienti c inquiry risks a colonizing attitude
toward human beings and the natural world.
e
technological ethos of postwar scienti c
advancement, for Heidegger, threatens to reduce even
the arts to mere “regulated-regulating instruments of
information” wielded for power and pro t. For this
reason, as Yuk Hui suggests in his new book, Art and
Cosmotechnics, Heidegger turns to artists like Cézanne
and Paul Klee, seeking to uncover a more ethical
relation between human life, art, and nature.
is exchange between art, philosophy, and
technology, thematized by Heidegger, provides the
linchpin for Hui’s book. Following closely on the
heels of Recursivity and Contingency (2019), a
masterful treatise on cybernetics and German
Idealism, Art and Cosmotechnics attempts to excavate
once more the speculative role the arts might play in
fostering experimental modes of philosophical and
scienti c thought. Key to this exploration is the way
artistic process, for Hui, suggests a mode of
noninstrumental relation between human activity and
the natural world that runs counter to prevailing
narratives about technology. Rejecting the futurist
idea of a triumphalist singularity achieved by
advances in machine learning and arti cial
intelligence, Hui argues that the creative and
nonutilitarian view of the world opened up by the
arts makes room for an understanding of technology
that cannot be reduced to forms of capitalist
extraction.
Art and Cosmotechnics, however, spills little ink
re ecting on what this sort of artistic process might
look like, preferring instead to reconstruct and
synthesize Heidegger’s ideas and those of Hui’s other
big in uence, the sinologist-philosopher François
Jullien. While providing a near-exhaustive account of
the impact artists like Klee had on Heidegger’s
philosophy of technology, and of Jullien’s lifelong
work on exchanges between China and Europe, Hui
neglects to mention just what kind of art could
possibly still function in this emancipatory fashion
today. Is it still the modernist artwork and its
unapologetic formalism, as Heidegger’s favorite
examples might suggest? Or is it perhaps what Hui’s
previous collaborator Andreas Broeckmann calls the
“machine aesthetics” of artists like Stelarc and Seiko
Mikami?
While never engaging with concrete artistic
developments, Art and Cosmotechnics does join a
chorus of thinkers in recent years urging us to re ect
seriously on cultural and technological changes
happening around the globe. Perhaps the greatest
strength of Art and Cosmotechnics lies in Hui’s
insistence that we can no longer ignore the rapidly
transforming relations between East and West when
considering philosophical approaches to technology.
As American hegemony wanes, the power vacuum
left behind is at risk of being lled by a new cultural
force: sinofuturism. Described by media artist
Lawrence Lek as a “science ction that already
exists,” sinofuturism seeks to replace the universalism
previously ascribed to Western culture with China’s
own brand of hegemonic power.
e key to
countering such universalizing forms of political
aspiration, Hui insists, lies in attending to the ways
cultural di erence seeps into the stories we tell about
technology and its place in the world.
is organic
mode of thinking, which Hui refers to as
cosmotechnics, would ensure the “uni cation of
moral order and cosmic order through technical
activities,” while also acknowledging an irreducible
a nity between forms of technical activity and their
cultural location.
While Art and Cosmotechnics is again sparse in
describing what this would precisely entail, readers
interested in an example might turn to Hui’s rst
book, On the Existence of Digital Objects (2016), for
illustration. In the rst part of that book, Hui relates
an anecdote from a W3C workshop where a
European programmer suggests ordering all objects
according to a family-tree model. Participants from
China and Japan quickly point out the di culties this
would present for non-European linguistic systems,
with multiple characters for paternal and maternal
family members.
e absence of further examples in
Art and Cosmotechnics, however, makes it di cult to
discern just what exactly the project of cosmotechnics
is after when it comes to artistic production. Is
cosmotechnics supposed to provide grounds for a sort
of power-sharing agreement between East and West?
If this is so, how does the project unfold without
giving way to new forms of cultural essentialism?
While failing to provide direct answers to these
questions, Art and Cosmotechnics nevertheless
highlights what might be the most urgent aspect of
Hui’s project: it seeks to provide a noninstrumental
attitude toward life capable of carving out an
alternative to both cultural universalism and
identitarian tribalism.
Art and Cosmotechnics begins with a sweeping
introduction that spans Greek tragedy, German
Idealism, Chinese landscape painting, and the history
of philosophy in China. Hui urges us to take seriously
the idea that technical activity might serve a
stabilizing role in a world of political and
technological upheaval. Key to Hui’s exploration is
the emphasis he places on acknowledging a variety of
cultural perspectives that might inform our approach
to technical activity, an important feature of his
response to shifting relations between East and West.
Just as “[e]ach culture has its own cosmology, which
is a product of its own geography and the
imagination of its people,” Hui proposes
cosmotechnics as a way of thinking about technology
that remains speculative and noninstrumental, as it
was for Heidegger. In contrast to Heidegger, though,
cosmotechnics would resist both the universalizing
tendencies of European tradition and the allure of
sinofuturist fantasy. It is at times di cult to overlook,
however, the way Hui’s phrasing seems to fall back on
an essentializing understanding of identity, rather
than providing an alternative to both universalism
and essentialism.
Hui’s opening section lays the theoretical groundwork
for the rest of the book by outlining two distinct
modes of thought regarding technical activity and, by
extension, human-nature relations. In Europe, there
is a well-established metaphysics of tragedy dating
back to the ancient Greeks. Coming to full
expression in the work of German Idealists like
Schelling and Hegel, this tragic mode is de ned by a
logic of discontinuity that pervades the European
tradition. Whether it be Sophocles’s Creon struggling
against fate or Cézanne depicting Mont SaintVictoire from multiple angles, Western culture is shot
through with attempts to assert what Hegel called
the “higher right of the Idea against nature.” While
running the risk of being reductive in its broad
characterizations (Hui even suggests at one point that
the US and Europe should be treated as a singular
entity where questions of art and philosophy are
concerned), the book makes up for such
overgeneralizations by highlighting the strengths of a
comparative approach to philosophy and art. While
Western thinking is de ned by a logic of tragic
discontinuity, its cultural cosmology structured by
narrative tensions, Chinese thought exhibits a logic of
oppositional continuity that is identi ed with the
Daoist notion of xuan.
is dynamic contains
opposition, much like tragic thinking in the West,
but it ultimately emphasizes continuity and harmony
over discontinuity and historical rupture.
e rst chapter, “World and Earth,” discusses in
fuller detail the logic of oppositional discontinuity
that has come to be associated with Western art and
philosophy. In this section, Hui turns again to
Heidegger, this time to the argument in his 1954
essay “
e Question Concerning Technology” that
modern science has forgotten the essence of technical
activity, which is fundamentally poetic and
noninstrumental. Following Heidegger’s hope of
nding a “path […] which leads to a belongingtogether of poetry and thought,” Hui argues that we
need art now more than ever to overcome what
Heidegger called the fundamental strife between
earth and world, an opposition constituting the basic
discontinuity of Western thinking. It is hard not to
notice how vague this all sounds.
e loose
invocation of “art” in particular may ring hollow for
anyone actually invested in the ways artists engage
with new technology, not to mention sounding
suspect to those familiar with the history of willing
collaboration between big business and the avantgarde. For readers interested in philosophical
aesthetics, however, Hui does present a masterful
reconstruction of the role nature plays in humantechnics relations in phenomenology. While insisting,
with Heraclitus, that nature loves to hide, Western
philosophical and political thought employs
technologies of extraction that threaten to chase
down and destroy the natural environment. For
Heidegger, it was cybernetics research in the mid20th century that represented this threat most
powerfully. For Hui, sinofuturist fantasies and the
Promethean ambitions of value extraction have
concocted new forms of these colonizing impulses.
Much of the rst chapter is spent surveying
Heidegger’s thoughts on poetry and art, which Hui
proposes we understand as the philosopher’s attempt
to sketch what a non-colonizing approach to
technical activity and nature might look like. While
he provides a masterfully crafted account of
Heidegger’s writings on the subject, however, it is
often hard to tell where this reconstructive activity
ends and Hui’s own intervention begins. For
example, Hui summarizes a commemorative essay
Heidegger wrote in 1946 commemorating the death
of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, which saw the Duino
Elegies as illustrating a mode of thought that pushed
back against instrumentalization. But what forms of
art today are capable of this sort of resistance to
technocracy? What poets or artists might ll the role
Rilke and Cézanne served for Heidegger? Hui never
says.
While Art and Cosmotechnics provides few answers to
such questions, it does e ectively outline the stakes of
technical activity and its relation to cultural identity.
While, for Heidegger, the crisis of European
philosophy leads away from philosophy and toward a
nearly mystical understanding of artistic creation, the
dualisms inherent in European philosophy point to a
bigger problem for Hui: Europe itself is in crisis, its
cultural hegemony on the wane.
e need to think
beyond the West provides the subject of Hui’s second
chapter, “Mountain and Water.” Here he turns to the
landscapes of shanshui in order to highlight an
alternative to the tragic attitude of Western thought.
Summarizing the work of Jullien, who suggests that
there is a noticeable absence of the Western hostility
between form and matter in Chinese art, Hui argues
that Chinese thought may provide an alternative to
the intensely oppositional logic of Western
metaphysics. Hui draws on commentaries on Laozi
by the philosophers Wang Bi and Mou Zongsan,
among others, in order to point out the organic,
Daoist logic inherent in shanshui, a logic that di ers
from the oppositional discontinuity of the West.
Comparing this logic to Immanuel Kant’s notion of
reciprocity (an aesthetic idea explored more fully in
Recursivity and Contingency), Hui turns to classic
paintings by Guo Xi, Xu Daoning, and others to
show how such a logic of oppositional continuity
might ultimately help “situate humans and their
technological world within a broader cosmic reality.”
e reference to Kant, however, is a real missed
opportunity, as Kant’s mode of reciprocity, or
Wechselwirkung, has been interpreted by philosophers
and art historians as providing the contours of an
early aesthetic theory of interaction between artwork
and viewer. Instead of taking the opportunity to
discuss concrete artistic practices, however, Hui
jumps to a consideration of how an oppositional
continuity in human relations to the natural world is
developed in the Confucian logic of qi. Whereas
Daoism and Confucianism are often seen as
irreconcilable schools of philosophy, Hui points out
that there previously existed a strong history of
mutual collaboration between them. As pointed out
by Jullien and others, this trend was completely
interrupted by the upheaval of European colonization
following China’s defeat in the Opium Wars during
the 19th century. Reconstructing this history of
cooperation between Daoism and Confucianism in
China, Hui reminds us that the Confucian qi,
understood as a sort of feeling of the cosmic whole,
may be likened to what Kant and the German
Idealists referred to as intellectual intuition. While
Kant only describes this intuitive mode of
apprehension in negative terms, using it to demarcate
the limits of knowledge, the logic of qi, when
explored alongside the organic dynamism of the dao,
provides the basis for a new relationship between
gure and ground (Hui now drawing from Gestalt
theory). Prospective readers should be warned that
the rapid pace of Hui’s associative thinking can be
rather disorienting.
e third section, “Art and Automation,” turns to the
way re ections on the creativity of art can allow us to
reconceptualize technology in a fashion that is
neither instrumental nor colonizing. To accomplish
this task, Hui argues that we must distinguish “[t]he
recursivity of the world […] from the recursivity that
technology is in the process of mastering.”
Reconceptualizing technology, in e ect, requires that
we learn to think more organically. To this end, Hui
returns to the Daoist logic of xuan exhibited by
shanshui paintings, which illustrate an alternative
view of nature that diverges from the modes of value
extraction employed by many contemporary digital
tools.
is noninstrumental approach, however, does
not mean we must become Luddites, unplugging our
computers or denying advances made in arti cial
intelligence. Rather, Hui urges us to adopt what he
calls a “generalized recursive thinking” that would
seek “to understand and to co-exist with machines.”
For readers invested in recent work on computation
theory and digital capital, this idea calls to mind work
by theorists such as Luciana Parisi, with her concept
of the incomputable. In another associative move,
Hui turns to Kurt Gödel in order to recover a sense
of the contingency inherent in both human life and
algorithmic processes. While not mentioning Parisi
directly, Hui does deal extensively with a variety of
scholarship on arti cial intelligence, including work
by Brian Cantwell Smith and Hubert Dreyfus.
is
chapter, however, is another missed opportunity to
mention concrete examples of art dealing with these
topics, a lacuna that is all the more glaring
considering Hui’s prior collaboration with art
historian and machine-art a cionado Andreas
Broeckmann.
Despite the real promise of Hui’s project, Art and
Cosmotechnics ends on a rather abrupt, unsatisfying
note. In this nal section, Hui turns to Jean-François
Lyotard and his writings on the “inhuman,” a pivot
familiar to those who recall the conclusion of
Recursivity and Contingency or who know Hui’s work
on the exhibit Lyotard curated in 1985 at the Centre
Pompidou. In Hui’s view, Lyotard provides insight
into our present moment through his analysis of the
“clear mirror” of the 13th-century Japanese Buddhist
Dōgen. While neglecting to outline in detail what he
o handedly refers to as a profound “crisis of
aesthetics and therefore of the contemporary arts,”
Lyotard’s all-out embrace of the avant-garde in his
1968 talk “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy” (gathered
in his 1988 book
e Inhuman: Re ections on Time)
appears mystical at best and, in hindsight, uncritically
technocratic at worst. Is this warmed-over techie
Buddhism all that cosmotechnics ultimately has to
o er?
While there is still much work to be done on the
relationship between art, technology, and philosophy,
Art and Cosmotechnics serves as a crucial reminder of
the importance of what, for Hui, seems to matter
most: technodiversity.
e book provides a fruitful
look into the way philosophical investigations of art
may bene t from comparative approaches to
technology and cultural cosmology. While
undeniably dense and challenging, it will reward
patient readers with its mapping of a complex history
of intellectual and political exchange. While not
every node ts harmoniously in the network of links
Hui seeks to establish between technology and
nature, East and West, Art and Cosmotechnics is
nevertheless a bold synthesis, both recursive and
organic. It reads a lot, in fact, like cosmotechnics.
¤
Bryan Norton is a PhD candidate in Comparative
Literature and Literary
eory at the University of
Pennsylvania. He works in media studies, the history of
science, and German literature and philosophy.
Bryan Norton
Bryan Norton is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and
Literary eory at the University of Pennsylvania. He works in
media studies, the history of science, and German literature and
philosophy.
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