MACHINE AND ECOLOGY

Abstract

This article investigates the relation between machine and ecology, and the philosophical and historical questions concealed in these two seemingly incompatible terms. The opposition between machine and organism was fundamental to philosophical projects since the eighteenth century. However, the emergence of cybernetics in the first half of the twentieth century proposed a unified logic which transcended the dualism between machine and organism, or technics and nature, and therefore also the opposition between machine and ecology. Cybernetics poses a limit to philosophy, which Heidegger called the end of philosophy, and also a challenge for thinking. If the promises of cybernetics are effective, does it suggest also that cybernetics is the way out of modernity? Or is it rather, as we want to suggest here, that after cybernetics 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? If one cannot simply oppose machine and ecology, we demand a political ecology of machines, which will center on the concept of technodiversity, in the sense of a systematic approach for understanding the history and plurality of cosmotechnics and their diverging futures by revisiting the question of locality.

Keywords:

• cosmotechnics
• technodiversity
• locality
• non-dualist logic
• cybernetics

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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).