Yuk Hui’s notion of ‘cosmotechnics’ (2020) represents a critique of Western theories of technology that represent their own attitudes to technology as universal. Contemporary Western theories argue, for example, that responses to technology are characterised by ambivalence. Technology conveys a sense of doubling and represents an alien sphere properly separate from the human. Yuk Hui and others argue that this is a very particularly Western conception and that other cultures respond differently. For example, Wang (2013) summaries how Confucian and Taoist conceptions of incorporate technology within an overall conception of harmonious, resourceful and skilful being.
I don’t disagree with this critique of Western hubris as such, or with the contention that culture mediates responses to technology. My concern is more with a tendency to conceive an essential difference between the West and the East. My worry is that the attitudes characteristic of each cosmos (cultural locality) can appear neatly distinct. Binary differences can gain an unwarranted prominence, in which both traditions lose features of philosophical and historical complexity and ambiguity. This criticism hardly applies to Yuk Hui himself, who does engage in very thorough investigations of features of each tradition (2020, but does seem pertinent to many efforts to summarise broad differences between Occidental and Oriental responses to technology.
I would argue that the strong Western suspicion of technology and the corresponding notion of some beleaguered space of pure human identity is a modern invention. It represents a response to emerging technological forms and associated modes of social organisation – an effort both to protect the human and to make it available as an illusionary product of the overall system. Here, I am alluding to the tendency of capitalism to facilitate prospects both of alienation and integral human being – to simultaneously structure intensive machination of society and also offer fond, market-based spaces of recovery.
The Western notion of bourgeois individuality is historical and not at all universally relevant to Western conceptions of human identity. The feudal conception, for instance, appears very different. People obtained identity through their place within the overall hierarchical system and via their expertise. If there was a human essence, it was nothing clearly individual but had its basis more in global conditions of commonality (flesh, spirit) and social frameworks of difference.
Countering this, one could point to common tendencies within the Western philosophical tradition – for example, Plato’s suspicion of writing – as evidence of a characteristic separation of the technological and the human. But even this example, so regularly employed, is problematic. What, after all, did Plato recognise in human speech, in the authenticity of voice? It was not simply some undivided realm of essential human life but rather the spectre of the dead. All genuine thought, he argued, was a form of memory that engaged with sphere prior to life, that found means to recover forms that were in no way living. Philosophical truth, at is very basis, manifests a relation to a beyond that specifically exceeds mortal human identity. The logos represents a relation of the living voice to the inanimate. This instantly complicates any simple effort to separate the human from the non-human or the living from the dead. So, if writing is criticised for its alienation from truth, it cannot simply be in terms of a rejection of any prospect of death and of the interpenetration of the inanimate within human thought and life, but more in terms of its work of mediation and doubling. I won’t attempt to unpick this any further now, but my overall point is that Plato’s philosophy is nowhere near as unilateral in its rejection of a human relation to the inanimate as we may imagine.
In some ways it makes more sense to contextualise Plato’s condemnation of writing less in terms of the rejection of technology per se than in terms of his overall and unconvincing effort to separate philosophy from sophistry. Both are recognised as machines for doubling, for shaping phantoms in the guise of truth.
In any case, Plato is hardly consistent in rejecting any close interaction between the human and the technological. Philosophers, of course, must devote themselves to leisure. They must think, speak to one another and fall in love, but everybody else has little time for any of this. The justice (harmonious constitution) of society depends upon everybody focusing on their specific expertise – weaving, shoe-making, etc. Indeed, despite the need to separate this labouring strain of life from the the proper sphere of leisured, thoughtful, vocal interaction, Plato constantly employs metaphors from the former to inform the thinking of human social and political identity and how philosophy itself should proceed. The notion of expertise, which incorporates a relation to all kinds of technological devices and processes, is hardly at all simply subject to condemnation. On the contrary, it provides the model for human being.
My general point is that the Western tradition is not simply as Yuk Hui’s ‘cosmotechnics’ represents it. Nor is the East so straightforwardly different. It is different certainly but not without also incorporating its own ambivalence and uncertainties. Japanese Zen Buddhism, for instance, as informed by Chinese Taoism, is regularly critical of book learning and the presumption of any predictable modes of obtaining enlightenment. It privileges an ineffable, direct mode of communication that incorporates a suspicion of conventional scholarship and forms (devices) of learning.
The notion of ‘cosmotechnics’ provides a worthwhile provocation and encourages more historical and local examination of socio-technological phenomena, but there is a need to avoid cultural stereotypes that fail to engage with the rich complexity of particular traditions.