Tools of the Trade
“IF A PHILOSOPHY of the future exists,” claimed Michel Foucault in a conversation with Zen monks, “it must be born outside of Europe or it must be born of encounters and reverberations between Europe and non-Europe.” As John Rajchman emphasizes in his introduction to The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter (2024), an anthology of lectures and interviews given by Foucault during a 1978 trip to Japan, such a philosophy can no longer be based on a master thinker in any one country or language. “On the contrary,” he writes, “it will require many languages, places, and civilizations at once, brought together not by a higher truth or supervenient method, but instead by a constant agitation, ever renewed, punctuated by unpredictable ‘events.’”
The Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui’s writings on the philosophy of technology offer such an ongoing agitation, bringing together conceptual schemes from an array of intellectual traditions—Chinese, Japanese, European, and American. His leitmotif, an understanding of what the Greeks called techne, seems more urgent than ever. Influential voices in philosophy and critical theory, such as the Frankfurt School’s key representatives, established an attitude so fundamentally techno-skeptical that any form of affirmation, let alone enthusiasm, had to appear at best naive. The essence of technological reason, we were told, lies in hegemonic control and the totalitarian exploitation of nature. Its distancing effects make it an enemy of more authentic forms of experience, like that of great art. For Martin Heidegger—a thinker on the other extreme of the political spectrum from the Frankfurt School—what in German is called Technik represented the ultimate threat.
The art world’s dominant attitude toward modern technology has hardly been one of enthusiasm either, even if the twentieth century saw moments of techno-optimism—from Italian Futurism and Russian Constructivism to the 1960s art and technology movement. Today, techno visionaries, such as Laurie Anderson and Cao Fei, are exploring the poetic possibilities of the latest digital tools.
At a moment when we cannot imagine a world without accelerating technologies, it seems to me that we need thinkers like Yuk Hui to help us navigate the one we have.
—Daniel Birnbaum
DANIEL BIRNBAUM: Many people I know are reading your recent book Post-Europe [2024] right now. It challenges us to participate in the creation of a new, globally conscious mode of thinking—an approach that is responsive to the complexities of our interconnected world. You draw upon a rich tapestry of philosophical influences, including thinkers like Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, and Jan Patočka as well as Kitarō Nishida, to support a vision of a post-European philosophical landscape.
YUK HUI: It is not my main aim to fight Eurocentrism, not only because many people have been doing this for a long time, but also I think now we have to ask: What happens afterward? Does it mean a Sinocentrism, a Russocentrism, or American imperialism? What has concerned me from the outset, as you can see in all my books, is what it means to do philosophy today. Post-Europe starts with a meditation on the relation between Europe and philosophy as interpreted by various philosophers in the twentieth century, from Edmund Husserl to Jan Patočka, Jacques Derrida, and others. I was particularly drawn to the idea of the Heimat [Homeland]—Europe as the Heimat for philosophy.
DB: Do you see the post-European condition as primarily liberatory or as something that also worries you? Do we have reasons to be nostalgic about some aspects of the Eurocentric framework?
YH: This post-European condition is also a planetary condition, in the sense that we must develop a new framework to understand the future of coexistence—between people, but also between humans and nonhumans. Planetary is not the same as global, since globalization is a disguised imperialism maintained by a thermodynamic ideology (i.e., open system, free market, etc.), even though one cannot deny some benefits that it has brought. However, globalization as one phase of planetarization has come to the end, as we glean from newspapers. The tension arises from, on the one hand, the process of universalization of certain values and culture, and on the other hand, the resistance against it, or the longing for Heimat, which has led to a polarity that we observe in many countries today: for instance, “Make America Great Again” or the great renaissance of the Chinese nation, etc. In my book The Question Concerning Technology in China [2016], there is a chapter titled “The Dilemma of Home-Coming” that deals with the nostalgic politics of Heidegger and Aleksandr Dugin, but also the “conservative revolution” in general. I call it a dilemma since such nostalgia is deeply embedded in our habits, both psychologically and physiologically. Post-Europe starts with Keiji Nishitani eating a Japanese meal in Freiburg[, Germany,] made by the niece of Kitarō Nishida, who also came to study under Heidegger. Nishitani was overwhelmed by the taste of the rice after spending a year and a half on a German diet.
DB: Did he ever recover?
YH: Some thirty years later, he remembered that moment and wrote about how that rice is related to the land called Japan, and the blood and sweat of his ancestors. After his return to Japan, he participated in the intellectual movement “Overcoming Modernity,” as well as three other symposia that retrospectively justified Japan’s participation in the Second World War as a means to overcome European decadence. Today this voice echoes throughout the globe together with the call of wars. Post-Europe is a response to this seemingly repetitive situation and the increasing tendency of legitimating a nationalist and fascist discourse.
DB: Today the tech giants have become increasingly powerful politically. What are your thoughts about this?
YH: I deal with this question more in Machine and Sovereignty [2024], which attempts to read political philosophy from the perspective of technology, or, less humbly, to sketch a Tractatus Politico-Technologicus. I was particularly interested in the relation between sovereignty and the machine in the work of Thomas Hobbes, G. W. F. Hegel, and Carl Schmitt, and I want to understand what is at stake besides the obvious statement that tech giants are taking control or that the sovereign is declining because of globalization, which we often heard about twenty years ago. When Vladimir Putin made the statement in 2017 that “whoever leads in AI will rule the world,” it was clear that the technology will determine the conception of sovereignty in a rather explicit way. I say “explicit” because there is always an intimate relation between technology and sovereignty, especially when we look into Schmitt’s elementary philosophy concerning the relation between technologies governing land, sea, and air exploration and international politics.
DB: A recent issue of the German art magazine Texte zur Kunst is about Thanatos, the death drive, which according to Freud is stronger than the will to life. Some of the writers in the issue associate the death drive with technological reason. Do you see technology as a destructive force?
YH: We tend to misunderstand technology as a thing, or things. There are different tools, different machines and different systems, but technology as such is difficult to clarify, as all nominalist critiques reveal. The relation between humans and technology is more complex than that. If we restrict ourselves to a preliminary definition of technology as the capacity of toolmaking, then technology is essential to survival; therefore it is part of life, since without it life will not be possible. Technology is the foundation of the symbolic and spiritual world that makes humans human, but also at the same time destabilizes the very concept of the human and pushes us to realize that there has been only a process of hominization or anthropogenesis. Associating the death drive with technological reason is very much a Judeo-Christian reading of an imminent apocalypse, often discussed in mass media, ranging from nuclear meltdown to robot/AI revolts. It is, however, undeniable that there is also a destructive force in technology that we witnessed historically and now also see in our everyday life—considering the climate change we are living in now.
“Our imagination is not merely triggered by technology; our imagination should also determine what kind of technology shall be invented and shall not be used.” —Yuk Hui
DB: Do you think of technology as something that will ultimately destroy our planet or as something that may save us?
YH: Now we are directed by a transhumanist ideology closely associated with Silicon Valley, and it also grows in all other silicon valleys that all the countries are trying to cultivate. I think this is the real danger, since we are losing our imagination and, even worse, our hope and belief.
DB: Is the hope in art? One could claim that post-Kantian thought all the way up to Theodor Adorno and Jean-François Lyotard is inconceivable without perpetual attempts to bridge the gap between the realm of knowledge and that of aesthetic experience. It seems to me that you are taking this dialogue into the digital era in ways very few have even attempted. Do you think that new immersive media will give rise to entirely new kinds of artworks, things we simply could not imagine before these media emerged?
YH: I am interested in the question of medium, and the relation between art and medium, partly for the reason that you have raised, namely to understand and bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and aesthetic experience, phenomenon and noumenon in the Kantian sense. The rise of new media such as AR/VR and AI is producing some profound impacts on the imagination of art, but what is often lacking is a critical assessment of the relation between art and medium. There has been a naive technological determinism (which we can trace to Walter Benjamin but also Friedrich Kittler and others) that believes that the nature of art is shaped by the media.
DB: What would be an example of that?
YH: Recently we saw many conferences around “art in the age of x.” X could be NFTs or the Metaverse, but very soon the hype would burst like a bubble. Today technological media has become hyper-industrial in comparison with the canvas artists used for painting; they are actually industrial products that are submitted to the speed of innovation. I see the relation between art and medium as resistance, especially when we read the history of modern art in parallel to the history of industrial technology. On the one hand, I believe, as Benjamin did, that the medium has a profound impact on artistic creation; on the other hand, I am cautious with the industrial agenda, and instead, I want to ask how a renewed concept of art helps us to understand our relation to these media, and also to transform them.
DB: Photography, film, radio, television, video, the computer, virtual reality, the blockchain. . . . The introduction of technologies has continually changed the possibilities of artistic expression. What will be the next invention that could trigger artistic imagination and production? A guess: quantum computing.
YH: I am not the kind of person who can make these predictions. I think ChatGPT can do a better job in predicting what is to come. Isn’t this the paradigm of the LLM [large language model]? We are in a time when technological determinism, which is also promoted by transhumanism, is becoming common sense. Yet our imagination is not merely triggered by technology; our imagination should also determine what kind of technology shall be invented and shall not be used.
DB: A few years ago, during the pandemic, I curated a number of augmented-reality exhibitions, and you contributed a little essay to one of them, which presented interactive AR works by artists like Koo Jeong A, Julie Curtiss, and Cao Fei. I remember that you discussed the fundamental difference between an AR system used for shopping and one employed to create art. If the latter would ever emerge, you wrote, it would need to present truly extraordinary events. By extraordinary, you continued, we mean that which suspends the logic of space and produces real surprise. Have you experienced such a surprise yet in the art world that has developed since then?
YH: I wrote that essay in 2019, when I encountered some works using AR/VR that are actually quite touristic, either in the name of digital heritage or entertainment. It is true that these experiences—seeing waves tracing after you, sharks swimming around you, flowers suddenly blossoming in front of you—are indeed challenging for our senses, but I feel that something is missing besides them becoming tourist spots for taking Instagram pictures. More and more, I am getting bored by works that convert data into visual or sonic elements by using a random-number generator. If we agree that these technologies have the function of augmenting our senses, it is necessary to ask what kind of senses are augmented and what it really means. Maybe we should return to what Nietzsche calls a greater “spiritualization and multiplication of the senses.”
DB: In the mid-1980s, Lyotard staged an art-world intervention. He did so with a brief essay and an exhibition. The essay, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” appeared in the April 1984 issue of Artforum, with a contributor’s note mentioning that its author was at the time preparing “Les Immatériaux” (The Immaterials), a sprawling exhibition that would open a year later at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. I know that you have studied this project.
YH: I spent a couple of years studying this exhibition. I still remember vividly going to the archive of the Centre Pompidou, opening those dusty boxes and reading as much as I could. Actually, the first time you and I got in touch is when I invited you to contribute to an anthology on “Les Immatériaux” that was published a decade ago [30 Years After Les Immatériaux: Art, Science, Theory, 2015]. The question of sensibility was central to the exhibition, and I even tend to think that it is an exhibition on sensibility, which is the object of art. Lyotard didn’t want to call it an exhibition—rather, he called it a manifestation. And in the show, most of the objects were industrial objects such as robot arms, the Minitel, artificial skins, etc. The journal Technophany, which I founded [in 2021], is producing a special issue dedicated to the centennial of Lyotard’s birth, which will come out very soon. I know I don’t have the capability to be a curator, even though I am always interested in continuing the thread left by Lyotard. As you know, Lyotard wanted to make a sequel titled “Résistances,” and I believe that the term demands a new interpretation today since Lyotard was observing the situation in the 1980s and 1990s. Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno contacted me a while ago during Covid to initiate this project, but unfortunately, we didn’t go any farther.
DB: I know, I have been talking to them about this for a quarter of a century. I still think you should revisit Lyotard in the form of an exhibition, or “manifestation,” exploring technologies as a kind of plurale tantum. Your concept “technodiversity” interests me. Could you explain its significance and how it fits into your philosophical framework? How could one relate it to the notion of biodiversity?
YH: I developed the concept of technodiversity around 2018 after my work on cosmotechnics, which I elaborated in The Question Concerning Technology in China. In the book, I used China as an example to demonstrate that there are multiple technological thoughts beyond the well-known European discourse. How do they contribute to the world that has become technologically homogeneous? The becoming-homogeneous of technology is not the nature of technology itself, which rather is shaped by certain forms of knowledge, by industrial propagandas, state strategies, etc. I used China as an example since I know a bit about the Chinese classics, but the aim is to show that this exercise should be extended beyond my own knowledge and writing—to understand the history of technology not through a lineage determined by advancement, but rather as technodiversity that could help us to shape the future. I am very glad to see that this call resonated in many places in the world, from India to Brazil, and that the discourses developed by these researchers are raising awareness of the problem and enabling a locality to understand the possibility of transforming their relation to technologies and environments. This is work that I cannot do myself, and so I consider the project of technodiversity a collective one.
DB: The first book of yours that I read carefully was The Question Concerning Technology in China. I remember spending a lot of time trying to understand the Chinese terms jishu (技術) and keji (科技), normally used as translations for “technics” and “technology,” respectively. You propose a different starting point and another linguistic genealogy: the categories qi and dao. What are the challenges here and why is it important to find another approach?
YH: When I was a student, I was always puzzled by the fact that the literature concerning philosophy and technology is almost entirely Western—mostly European and sometimes American. Occasionally there are some exotic ones, but they hardly make any sense. If we take Heidegger seriously that the Greek techne has to be understood in relation to the question of Being, then should one also say that the ancient Chinese or Indian technologies also concern the question of Being? This will lead to many problems, since it is doubtful that the question of Being in the Greek sense existed in China. And if one wants to follow Kitarō Nishida that the West has Being as its central question and the East has Nothing as its central question, then one sees immediately a contradiction. However, throughout the process of modernization, translation has posed a great problem: Terms like metaphysics, nature, and technology often are first translated from European languages by Japanese intellectuals into kanji and later adopted by the Chinese. It seemed to me that in order to open up the question of technology beyond the modern European interpretation, we should go beyond such translations omnipresent in modernization and construct a different philosophical inquiry.
DB: How would you do that?
YH: This was why I suggested not using keji and jishu as used in modern Chinese to understand technology, but rather looking into the Chinese classics to explore a different concept of technology. Already in the commentary (Xi Ci) on the I Ching, we find an opposition between dao and qi. Dao is what is above the form (xing), and qi (포, literally utensil, to be distinguished from the word of the same pronunciation 氣, usually rendered as breath) is what is below the form. Dao and qi are two metaphysical categories that persisted throughout the history of Chinese thought, with various interpretations of their unification and separation. In other words, I wanted to read the history of Chinese thought through the lens of the relation between dao and qi.
DB: The notion of technodiversity is clearly linked to a cluster of other concepts.
YH: Yes, technodiversity is accompanied by two other concepts, biodiversity and noodiversity (noo– comes from the Greek word nous, like noiesis, “thinking”). We used to think (and it continues to be so) that biodiversity is something to be protected, since it is an objective reality existing outside of us, like how we talk about protecting nature today. In fact, we live in “nature” and with these multifarious species in direct or indirect ways. Biodiversity is maintained and cultivated by our everyday activities, which are regulated by two major factors. First, our way of understanding our relation to the environment, which varies from one locality to another and is embedded in language, customs, and so on. I call it noodiversity. In fact, the concept means to be a resistance against what the early-twentieth-century Catholic mystic philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the noosphere, which for him converges throughout human history. I appreciate the work of Teilhard, and I return to his writings from time to time, especially his diaries, but I think his understanding of technology has to be questioned, since it was meant for him as a proof of God. (In the end, we can understand his position, since he was a Jesuit and also a renowned paleontologist.) Second, the technological apparatuses that support these everyday activities, ranging from writing to farming and building. When we look into archaeology or even paleontology, we can observe the relations between these three diversities, which form a circle or a matrix.
DB: And ultimately it’s the future of the planet that is at stake?
YH: After colonization, modernization, and then globalization, industrial technologies pervaded every corner, and the relation between biodiversity, noodiversity, and technodiversity is disrupted from one locality to another. The homogenization of technology also led to the disappearance of noodiversity and the destruction of biodiversity. Today it is not only industrialization but also geopolitics that play a determinative role in speeding up the process. It seems to me the return to technodiversity is crucial for going beyond the impasse of the planetary crisis. However, it by no means suggests returning to the antique technologies or to a nationalist discourse, but rather to rediscover in the previous configuration new momentum and new thought.
DB: In his 1967 book A Year from Monday, John Cage explored how electronic media extended the human mind beyond the individual and made it social, describing electronic technology as an extension of our brains. One of today’s most vociferous techno-optimists, Ray Kurzweil, spells out Cage’s prophecy: By the 2030s, virtual reality will be totally realistic and we will spend most of our time in this new space.
YH: What impressed John Cage and Glenn Gould (who was also influenced by Marshall McLuhan) is turning into common sense passed to us from the twentieth century. Today when you ask a high school student about technology, he or she can tell you that it is the extension of the body without any hesitation. Their generation is probably exposed to more virtual reality than us because of video games. Kurzweil is Google’s chief futurist, a transhumanist who also predicted that humans could achieve immortality by 2030. These prophecies are equally industrial prophecies, and they will be self-fulfilled by the industry. When they say that soon there will be mass unemployment, it is because they have been producing robots to replace the human workers. When they say that the world will be completely virtual, it is because they are commercializing our experiences. Again, I think if you ask ChatGPT, it will give you an affirmative answer, since it seems to be “logical,” given that this discourse becomes a norm (of the data being collected). And precisely because it is a norm, meaning an empirical inclination, which is also contingent (therefore it can be otherwise), it has to be questioned: Is this the right path that humans want to take?
