When I was first invited by the editor of Angelaki to edit a special issue on cosmotechnics in 2017, I didn’t pay much attention, since I didn’t feel like editing a special issue dedicated to a concept that I had introduced only recently and was still to be fully developed. I only agreed to do so a year later, since it seemed to me that in the face of the global catastrophes of the present and the future, it is crucial to develop new conceptual tools to deal with the technological condition today. Pieter Lemmens was sympathetic with this project and was willing to participate in the editorial process – and in fact, he did a large part of the work. The concept of cosmotechnics is first of all a challenge to how technology has been understood in philosophy, anthropology and history in the twentieth century, which I will schematically present in terms of the following questioning.
In philosophy of technology, Martin Heidegger’s famous 1949 Bremen lecture on the essence of technology, later published under the title The Question Concerning Technology, has been well received worldwide. In it Heidegger proposed that there is a rupture between what the ancient Greeks called technē and what he referred to as modern technology, for they differ in their essences. Technē has its essence in poiesis, i.e., bringing-forth, while modern technology or enframing [Gestell], sees everything as standing reserve or as resources to be exploited. We should ask ourselves, however, where the position of, say, ancient Indian technology, Chinese technology or Amazonian technology is in Heidegger’s analysis? For sure, these technologies are not equivalent to modern technology, but can one assimilate or reduce them to Greek technē?
In anthropology of technology, the invention and use of tools (often covered by the terms labour or praxis) has been understood as the determining process behind hominization, convincingly demonstrated for instance by André Leroi-Gourhan. Technics has been interpreted by the latter as an extension of organs and an externalization of memory. In this interpretation, technology is anthropologically universal. This is not wrong in so far as such externalization and extension are considered as proceeding from what Leroi-Gourhan called a “technical tendency,” but we still have to explain what he called “technical facts,” which are different from region to region, and from culture to culture. What is embedded in these technical facts apart from a causal reduction to cultural difference, or even sometimes to contingency?
In history of technology, Joseph Needham raised a haunting question, namely, by asking why modern science and technology wasn’t developed in China and India, while at the same time showing the large amount of scientific and technological development in China before the sixteenth century. Echoing Needham’s inquiry, there have been significant inquiries on comparing technological development in different regions of the world in order to show that, for example, one particular region is more advanced in papermaking or metallurgy than another. However, this is a distortion of Needham’s question, which in fact suggests that one cannot compare Chinese science and technology directly with that of the West, since they are based on different epistemologies and philosophies. In this sense, how can one re-articulate these differences?
These are some of the boundaries that the concept of cosmotechnics attempts to negotiate, since they all imply a universal concept of technology, which is in fact a residue of the desire of a particular kind of thinking. I gave a preliminary definition of cosmotechnics as unification between the cosmic order and the moral order through technical activities, in order to suggest that technology should be re-situated in a broader reality, which enables it and also constrains it. The detachment of technology from such a reality has resulted from the desire to be universalizing and to become the ground of everything. Such a desire is made possible by the history of colonization, modernization and globalization, which, being accompanied by its history of economic growth and military expansion, has given rise to a mono-technological culture in which modern technology becomes the principle productive force and largely determines the relation between human and non-human beings, human and cosmos, and nature and culture. The problems brought about by this mono-technological culture are leading to the exhaustion of resources and of life on earth and to the destruction of the environment, which are central to the discourse around the Anthropocene. It is also in this social and political context that it seems urgent to re-open the question of technology and the quest for a multiple cosmotechnics.
acknowledgement
The editors would like to express their gratitude to all the contributing authors, to Dan Ross for the translations, to Sougwen Chung for the cover image and to Edwin Lo for editorial assistance. This special issue benefited from the support of the Cosmotechnics/Critical AI project funded by the City University of Hong Kong.
Issue image: Sougwen Chung, Artefact1 (Process), 2019, by permission.