Angelaki

Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20

COSMOTECHNICS AND THE ONTOLOGICAL TURN

IN THE AGE OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

Pieter Lemmens

To cite this article: Pieter Lemmens (2020) COSMOTECHNICS AND THE

ONTOLOGICAL TURN IN THE AGE OF THE ANTHROPOCENE, Angelaki, 25:4, 3-8, DOI:
10.1080/0969725X.2020.1790830

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2020.1790830

Published online: 06 Aug 2020.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 3313

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cang20
 ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 25 number 4 august 2020

H eidegger’s 1949 Bremen lecture on “The

Question Concerning Technology” has
been enormously influential in its conceptualiz-
ation of the ontological essence of modern tech-
nology as being less that of the originary
classical Greek notion of technē , understood as
a bringing-forth of beings, than of what Heideg- EDITORIAL
ger called “enframing” [Gestell], understood as
a mode of revealing of beings that provokes or INTRODUCTION
challenges them forth exclusively as standing
reserves [Bestand]. Under enframing,
“nature” is being reduced to a gigantic reservoir pieter lemmens
of energy and material resources for economic
and technological exploitation. While this
image and critique of modern technology has
been widely if critically accepted in the West,
COSMOTECHNICS AND
what has often been missed in those criticisms THE ONTOLOGICAL
of its detail or trajectory is its applicability
when extended to non-Western technological TURN IN THE AGE OF
developments, both historically and projec-
tively, for if these are not reducible to either
THE ANTHROPOCENE
technē or enframing in the Western sense, how
can we articulate their unfolding and what
could this question of technology prior to the be equated to naturalism, which is a product
Heideggerian formulation contribute to the of modernity, characterized by an opposition
current debate on the Anthropocene and the between nature and culture, in which nature is
profound ecological and geological mutations conceived as a universal ground that is
it entails? common to all particular cultures arising from
One current way forward in this context of it while each having a different view or con-
the Anthropocene is a reappraisal of the idea ception of that nature, which is adequately con-
of nature. For example, some representatives ceived though only by Western science. This
of the so-called “ontological turn” in contem- naturalist framework of one universal nature –
porary anthropology such as Philippe Descola mono-naturalism – and many particular cul-
(Beyond Nature) and Eduardo Viveiros de tures – multiculturalism – is being confronted
Castro (Cannibal Metaphysics and Relative by these anthropologists with an alternative
Native) have proposed an unravelling of the framework, principally derived from Amerin-
concept of nature to show that nature as it is dian animism, of a commonly shared culture –
experienced in non-European cultures cannot mono-culturalism – giving rise to many

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/20/040003-6 © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group
https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2020.1790830

3
 editorial introduction

different natures – multi-naturalism – as well as (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 95–96), if

with other ontologies, to wit totemism and ana- only because they have already experienced
logism, that each understand the relation the collapse of their cosmos (104). And the
between nature and culture in yet other ways. recent COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated
This mobilization of the non-modern can be how fragile and arguably broken the global capi-
seen as an attempt to reconceptualize the talist arrangement already is, with very dire
relation between the human and the non- prospects on the horizon.
human, and hence to go beyond the nature– More importantly still, the great majority of
culture dichotomy that restricts all visions to a non-Western cultures have since long been
parochial Western worldview. It is in the same enframed themselves by Western technology
spirit, but as a more pragmatically realist and through colonization and imposed moderniz-
political gesture, that this special issue of ation such that the global technological con-
Angelaki addresses a parallel question for tech- dition has also become their destiny. Any
nology, which is whether it is also possible to “return” to native ontologies or conceptions
conceive of multiple technologies, understood of nature seems rather futile in this regard.
specifically in the sense of multiple cosmotech- All over the planet, a “second nature” that
nics and if so what form this may take? It is has been thoroughly affected by technology
our belief that it is not only the notion of has come to replace the allegedly pristine
“nature” that has to be challenged as the anthro- “first nature” of yore. This is precisely the con-
pologists did, but also the efficacy of any “return dition of the Anthropocene, where the techno-
to nature” should be questioned, and that it is sphere – as the material condition of what
rather more urgent today to rethink the ques- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Vladimir Ver-
tion of technology and of its possibilities for nadsky have dubbed the noosphere in the
humanity’s future existence and coexistence 1920s – has come to overrule the biosphere.
with non-human inhabitants on the planet. It is this development that is hardly if at all
Although the critique of modernism and taken into account by the representatives of
Western naturalism from the viewpoint of current anthropology’s ontological turn, who
non-modern and non-Western ontologies – generally fail to appreciate the decisive role of
such as practiced today by Descola and Viveiros technology in anthropogenesis as well as in cos-
de Castro but also others such as Tim Ingold, mogenesis, such as it has been emphasized in
Eduardo Kohn and Robin Wall Kimmerer – is the work of the French paleoanthropologist
certainly worthwhile and fruitful for fostering André Leroi-Gourhan and more recently by
the ontological imagination in our search for the French philosopher and social critic
other, less destructive and less alienating Bernard Stiegler (Technics and Time 1). The
modes of (co-)existence (cf. Weber), we share ideas of these two authors have been particu-
Clive Hamilton’s reservations about the ulti- larly important for Hui in the development of
mate value of what he aptly calls “‘going his project of cosmotechnics.
native’ ontologically” for confronting the prob- Just as the ontological turn wants to do away
lems of the Anthropocene (106). The fact of with the opposition between nature and
the matter is that non-Western cultures are culture, the concept of cosmotechnics is
just as overwhelmed and disoriented by the designed to overcome modernity’s opposition
Anthropocene as Western culture itself, between nature and technology. Far from
although it may very well be the case that the recommending a rehabilitation of pre-modern
Earth’s indigenous populations are in some or non-modern ontologies or cosmologies
sense much better prepared for the impending though, the cosmotechnics project explicitly
breakdown of the capitalist world system than looks at the future and aims to be an imagina-
the well-pampered yet for the most part overly tive and inventive discipline in search for
distressed, precarized and proletarianized new cosmotechnics, and that is to say a plural-
inhabitants of the so-called “affluent societies” ity of cosmotechnics for the age of the

4
 lemmens

Anthropocene, in which the different cultural the Western technological trajectory has come
spheres that exist across the globe are not to dominate nearly all other cultural spheres
called to retreat into their ancient cosmological around the globe and has indeed become a pla-
structures – or what Peter Sloterdijk calls their netary force – the gigantic, monolithic force
traditional symbolic “immuno-spheres” (Slo- foremost responsible for the arrival of the
terdijk and Heinrichs) – but to imagine and Anthropocene as the age of generalized
invent new practices of technological world- psychic, social, cultural, economic and ecologi-
formation, taking inspiration from the ideas cal deterioration or “entropization,” as
behind these structures, not in the least the Bernard Stiegler has put it, characterizing the
moral or ethical ideas. It may indeed be “too Anthropocene as the Entropocene (Automatic
late to exhume the corpse of Confucius” as Society).
Hamilton argues (107), but that does not According to cosmotechnics all technics are
mean it makes no sense at all to consult the fundamentally cosmological and all cosmologies
Confucianist tradition – and by extension are fundamentally technical, and what it under-
other traditions of thought beyond those of lines is that technology is not a universal, trans-
the West – for cues of how to think differently cultural category but essentially dependent in
about “the unification between the moral order its unfolding on a non-technical cosmological
and the cosmic order through technical activi- factor that is culture-specific. As such it aims
ties,” as Hui’s preliminary definition of cosmo- to rethink and re-orient the question concerning
technics has it. A further objective of the technology in terms of the question concerning
cosmotechnics project, which it shares with technodiversity. Its emphasis on multiple cos-
Gilbert Simondon’s genetic philosophy of tech- motechnics has to be distinguished from so-
nology, is to work towards a reconciliation of called multiculturalism, which is fundamentally
nature and technology. a reactionary politics of cultural identity. The
When an anthropologist such as Descola multiplicity of cosmotechnics implies multiple
develops an “anthropology of nature” (Die Öko- epistemologies and epistemes which can con-
logie der Anderen), it should also be possible to tribute to reflection on the development of tech-
conceive of something like an “anthropology of nologies, opening up a discourse on
technics,” and if there are indeed multiple technodiversity for overcoming the current
natures then it should also be possible to think homogenization and planetarization of enfram-
of multiple technics that are different from ing actualized in the Anthropocene. Hui,
each other, and not just functionally and aesthe- again, uses China as an example to demonstrate
tically different – say at the level of technical that it is not only possible but also necessary to
artefacts – but different at the ontological and elaborate on culture-specific histories of cosmo-
onto-historical level in the Heideggerian sense, technics, and to see how these different under-
or as Hui prefers: at the level of cosmology or standings can be reconsidered and reevaluated
histories thereof. so as to re-orient and re-imagine current techno-
The concept of cosmotechnics was initially logical globalization with its nearly complete
introduced in Hui’s treatise The Question Con- obliteration of technodiversity from a cosmo-
cerning Technology in China. An Essay in Cos- technical perspective.
motechnics, which understood itself first of all The ultimate concern of the cosmotechnics
as a response to Heidegger’s original question project, which is further developed by Hui in
concerning technology but aiming to expand Recursivity and Contingency and in Art and
this question beyond Heidegger’s still Euro- Cosmotechnics (forthcoming in 2020), is to
centric horizon and opening it up towards show the necessity of overcoming the current
other, non-European cultures, such as Chinese global dominance of Western or promethean
culture which Hui, being Chinese himself, has technology, re-interpreted as one particular
taken as an example in his book. The concern form of cosmotechnics (i.e., that of capitalism).
that Hui shares with Heidegger is the fact that Its ultimate objective is to encourage another,

5
 editorial introduction

non-Eurocentric way of thinking about technol- a more pluralistic, historical and regional
ogy in order to bring about what Hui calls a understanding of this relation, enabling what
bifurcation or rather fragmentation of World he calls a genuine “political ecology of
History such that it may open the future machines.” Bernard Stiegler, in an article
toward a plurality of heterogeneous technologi- that relates Hui’s concept of technodiversity
cal trajectories, each driven by a different cos- to his own notion of noodiversity, argues for
motechnical imaginary. As such it projects a the necessity to develop an entirely new theor-
profound “reframing” of the current planetary etical computer science with a view to counter-
enframing so as to “recosmicize the Earth” ing the entropic tendencies inherent in the
(Augustin Berque) and doing so in a variety of global digital milieus of contemporary “plat-
locally specific ways. form capitalism” so as to rethink the relation
In this special issue, ten authors explore between the nervous and the logical and resur-
various dimensions of the cosmotechnics propo- rect a new space for the exercise of reason,
sal, some in closer dialogue with Hui’s work, which is now in the process of being dissolved
others by relating to it more tangentially and in a digitally automated understanding, itself
taking it into other, sometimes very different, completely reduced to calculation. Jason Tuck-
directions. I have to confine myself here to an well takes Hui’s idea of cosmotechnics as start-
extremely concise exposition of the authors’ ing point for a critique of technicity conceived
contributions. as a uniquely human characteristic, a viewpoint
Pieter Lemmens interprets Hui’s cosmotech- derived from Aristotle, arguing instead that
nics in terms of a “critical synthesis” of Hei- technically mediated agency is constitutive
degger’s and Stiegler’s views of technology for all species and showing that this articulates
which updates them for the emerging post- nicely with the non-universalist conception of
Eurocentric epoch. Marco Pavanini situates technics embraced by Hui and allows for the
cosmotechnics within an anthropotechnologi- possibility of non-humans also having a cosmo-
cal and culture-historical perspective and technics. Sjoerd van Tuinen, in a historically
shows that it, as an inevitably comparative dis- informed reflection on the possible future(s)
cipline, requires reflexive awareness of the of artificial intelligence, more or less presents
various “cultural techniques” that condition Leibniz as a cosmotechnic thinker of techno-
any culture’s self-understanding so as to logical and noetic diversity avant la lettre, con-
guard itself against ethnocentrism, suggesting trasting his proto-cybernetic idea of reason as
the cultural techniques approach developed distributive composition and unnatural
among others by Thomas Macho to be the common sense with Hegel’s collectivization of
proper “organon” of cosmotechnics. André s an artificial yet self-naturalizing good sense.
Vaccari emphasizes the affinity of Hui’s cos- Clive Hamilton argues that exploring ancient
motechnics with that of Gilbert Simondon cosmological frameworks for conceiving new
and then mobilizes both to offer a scathing cri- future cosmotechnics in the plural may be
tique of the hegemonic cosmotechnics of wrongheaded since they all originate from the
today’s hypercapitalist conjuncture, that of definitively past epoch of the Holocene,
transhumanism/singularitarianism, inter- whilst the development of what he calls a
preted as a corporate, neosubstantivist ideol- “fifth ontology” beyond those four currently
ogy serving the agenda of a rabid held by humans on the planet (as distinguished
neoliberalism intent on totally controlling and by Philippe Descola) will necessarily originate
colonizing the planet. Yuk Hui for his part from our progressive interactions with the
argues that cosmotechnics can help to over- entirely unprecedented Anthropocene Earth.
come the totalizing tendency of the currently Fré dé ric Neyrat responds to the cosmotechnics
dominant cybernetic paradigm structuring proposal affirmatively yet critically, from his
the relation between nature and technology, own quite unique “Alienocene” perspective,
or between ecology and machines, by offering by presenting “Afrofuturism” as an

6
 lemmens

alternative, non-imperialist, non-colonialist bibliography

and non-exploitative cosmotechnics countering
Danowski, Déborah, and Eduardo Viveiros de
the violent, acosmic cosmotechnics of capital-
Castro. The Ends of the World. Trans. Rodrigo
ism. In this Afrofuturist cosmotechnics, the Guimaraes Nunes. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. Print.
cosmos is not limited to our terrestrial abode
though but designates the entire universe as a Descola, Philippe. Beyond Nature and Culture. Trans.
trajectory extending all the way to its an- Janet Lloyd. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2013. Print.
archic origin in the so-called Big Bang, remind- Descola, Philippe. Die Ökologie der Anderen. Trans.
ing us of the ultimate futility of any technologi- Eva Moldenhauer. Berlin: Matthes, 2014. Print.
cal will-to-power. Peter Skafish finally relates
Hamilton, Clive. Defiant Earth. The Fate of Humans
to the cosmotechnics proposal by reflecting, in the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. Print.
from a more anthropologically or rather
anthropotechnologically informed approach Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning
and in dialogue with anthropology’s contem- Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William
porary ontological turn, on the body and on Lovitt. New York: Harper, 1977. Print.
“techniques of the body” (a term coined by Hui, Yuk. Art and Cosmotechnics. Minneapolis: U of
Marcel Mauss) from a pluri-ontological and Minnesota P. Forthcoming.
“polyrealist” perspective, showing how the Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in
body and its technicity manifest in very differ- China. An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Falmouth:
ent ways according to its ontological as well as Urbanomic, 2016. Print.
cosmological embedding, illustrating this in
particular with reference to Amerindian sha- Hui, Yuk. Recursivity and Contingency. London:
Rowman, 2019. Print.
manism and – most extensively – traditional
Chinese medicine. Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment.
It will be obvious from this all too brief Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London:
preview that cosmotechnics is a concept that Routledge, 2011. Print.
opens up many possible avenues for philoso- Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think. Toward an
phical reflection, offering a fresh perspective Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: U of
for rethinking the human–nature–technology California P, 2013. Print.
nexus in multiple ways. We hope that this
Leroi-Gourhan, André. Gesture and Speech. Trans.
special issue marks the beginning of the devel-
Anna Bostock-Berger. Cambridge, MA: MIT P,
opment of cosmotechnical thinking as a new 1993. Print.
direction for the philosophy of technology,
that also allows for an enriched dialogue with Sloterdijk, Peter, and Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs.
Neither Sun Nor Death. Trans. Steve Corcoran.
other disciplines such as ethnology, anthropol-
Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e), 2011. Print.
ogy, cultural history, social and political
science, and not in the least also the arts. We Stiegler, Bernard. Automatic Society Vol. 1. The Future
thus hope that it may inspire future critical of Work. Trans. Daniel Ross. Cambridge: Polity,
thinking about the human condition in the 2016. Print.
context of the Anthropocene and may Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 1. The Fault of
support imagining a new technological Epimetheus. Trans. Richard Beardsworth and
modus vivendi on this planet or rather a mul- George Collins. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Print.
tiplicity thereof, and we also Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics.
hope, finally, that the cosmo- Trans. Peter Skafish. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014.
technics project will be taken Print.
up by different cultures and Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. The Relative Native.
different localities on the Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds. Chicago:
planet. Hau, 2015. Print.

7
 editorial introduction

Wall Kimmerer, Robin. Braiding Sweetgrass.

Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the
Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2015.
Print.
Weber, Andreas. Indigenialität. Berlin: Nicolai,
2018. Print.

Pieter Lemmens
Radboud University Nijmegen
Faculty of Science
Institute for Science in Society, HG05.532
Heyendaalseweg 135
6525 AJ Nijmegen
The Netherlands
E-mail: [email protected]