I just finished my belated reading of Yuk Hui’s Recursivity and Contingency (2019). I wished I had read it before or during my PhD work, but I simply didn’t get around to it. It’s really a great and illuminating work. I myself have argued elsewhere that cybernetic thinking can be thought of much as Simondon conceived of what he called Encyclopedism: a long period of rationalization spanning three centuries, of which Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie would only be its more concrete manifestation. Similarly, I claimed that cybernetics would be the more concrete or evident manifestation of a broader and more pervasive form of rationalization (cybernetic thinking) that can be traced back to the 19th century and is still active today, in the 21st century. But of course I fell short. As Yuk Hui shows, the rise of this kind of thinking can be traced back to the 18th century, and more specifically to German Idealism – I found this fascinating. Hui’s argument is that the genesis of the notion of the organism and the rise of an organicism appear in the works of Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and others, and that this would be the philosophical basis for the emergence of the sort of thinking that, much later, made cybernetics renderable. More specifically, this philosophical developments would show, Hui argues, the passing from an external nature to ecology, and later the transit from an organized inorganic to the current organizing inorganic – that is, AI systems and the like.
Towards the last third of the book, Hui turns to Heidegger and his famous 1966 interview in which he claimed, precisely in reference to the rise of information machines and cybernetics, that “only God can save us.” For me, this was one of the most important parts of the book, because away from the seemingly apocalyptic halo of Heidegger’s claim, Hui invites us to interpret this call in a different, perhaps optimistic way. At this point, Hui begins to draw a connection with the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon to remind us all that technicity and religiosity are the two main modes by which humans learned to relate themselves to the world; respectively, the figure(s) and the background of that relationship. These two modes, we learn through Hui and Simondon, are in turn the product of an early bifurcation that originated in a much more primitive mode of understanding or rather relating to the world; namely, the magical universe. In this way, technicity and religiosity would be the separation of the figure(s) and the background of the world – which were united in the magical universe – into two main streams. What is particularly interesting here is that, according to Simondon, between technicity and religiosity, as a kind of neutral space, lies a third mode of relating to the world: aesthetics.
This third mode, Simondon explains, would not only make it possible to potentially connect the objective figures that technicity makes possible with the background characters that remain in the realm of religiosity and that, in turn, make room for the emergence of the subjective. Aesthetics would also evoke, or rather invoke, precisely through this connection, the ancient unity of the magical world; the unity between figure and background.
In a way, it seems to me that it’s to this potentiality that Hui invites us to look at when he reassesses Heidegger’s “only God can save us.” Put simply, the search for a reunification between technicity and religiosity – the latter, of course, not in the modern Western sense, but more broadly understood as the open realm or spirituality and moral values. Here, I think, lies Hui’s cosmotechnics; a program that going beyond the bifurcation that produced technicity and religiosity as two oppossing streams – certainly a Western enterprise – invites us to conceive of technological thought and technology itself in (an aesthetic) unity with spirituality and moral thought. This would be one of the most important lessons, Hui argues, that the history of technology in China can teach the West; that only a technicity fused with the realm of spirituality and moral thought via aesthetics can save us from our current technological drive.
Now, I wonder how the program of Hui’s cosmotechnics can help us to reassess the history of technology in Latin America; a region that, at least from the Western point of view, has been largely deprived of its own technical and scientific stream, which in turn has been confined, if not condemned, to a realm of mystical spirituality, or simply to ancient magic. A path of cosmotechnical redemption is urgently needed for this region, I would argue.
