COSMOTECHNICS FROM AN ANTHROPOTECHNOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics provides us with an excellent theoretical device to investigate the role of technology in relation to a culture’s self-understanding. This paper, in the first place, aims to contextualise Hui’s reflexion on cosmotechnics within the broader field of contemporary philosophy of technology, outlining its discerning potential in undermining the outworn, Western dichotomy between nature and culture. In this spirit, it is stressed how cosmotechnics nicely fits in an anthropotechnological perspective, i.e., an understanding of the relation between technics and humans as originary and constitutive. In the second place, the goal of this paper is to evaluate the explanatory significance of the concept of cosmotechnics regarding the possibility of a comparative investigation of the modes according to which different cultures conceive technics and their relation to it. In this spirit, the concept of cultural techniques, i.e., scriptural, figurative and computing techniques embedded with a self-representative potential, is brought about in order to show which kind of technologies are most likely to determine and influence a culture’s self-understanding and should therefore be privileged by the focus of a comparative cosmotechnical inquiry.

Keywords:

• cosmotechnics
• anthropotechnics
• cultural techniques
• ontological turn
• technology

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 It may be of some interest to notice that, different from Hui’s approach, Esposito identifies the body and not technics as what enables us to undermine this dichotomy and reconcile what has been illegitimately separated (99–147).

2 It is worth noticing that, incidentally, Descola (Beyond Nature) also admits that a collective’s technical system can, in turn, sometimes modify its ontology and modes of categorisation (189–96).

3 It may be of some interest here to briefly compare Macho’s cultural techniques with what Stiegler (Technics and Time 3) calls hypomnesic techniques. The latter are those kinds of techniques that actually frame explicitly determinable knowledge, always working as pharmaka, that is, in both curative and poisoning way (Stiegler, What Makes Life). Although the performance provided by cultural and hypomnesic techniques may seem very similar, what distinguishes the former from other, generic technical activities is their self-representative potential, while what differentiates the latter is rather their being susceptible to articulate linguistic knowledge according to a shared criterion of grammatisation, that is, both inscription in a medium and agreed understanding of this inscription.