Yuk Hui

Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol.1 is dedicated to the epistemological reconstruction of cybernetics, consisting of a series of historical and critical reflections on the subject – which according to Martin Heidegger marked the completion of Western metaphysics. In this anthology, historians, philosophers, sociologists and media studies scholars explore the history of cybernetics from Leibniz to artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as the development of twentieth-century cybernetics in various geographical regions in the world, from the USA to the Soviet Union, Latin America, France, Poland, China and Japan. The reconstruction shows the various paths of cybernetics and their socio-political implications, which remain unfamiliar to us today. It reveals more than what we thought we knew – and yet we hardly know – and allows us to understand where we are and to reflect on the future of technology, ecology and planetary politics.

We find ourselves in a media-intensive milieu comprising networks, images, sounds, and text, which we generalize as data and metadata. How can we understand this digital milieu and make sense of these data, not only focusing on their functionalities but also reflecting on our everyday life and existence? How do these material constructions demand a new philosophical understanding? Instead of following the reductionist approaches, which understand the digital milieu as abstract entities such as information and data, this article proposes to approach it from an embodied perspective: objects. The article contrasts digital objects with natural objects (e.g., apples on the table) and technical objects (e.g., hammers) in phenomenological investigations, and proposes to approach digital objects from the concept of “relations,” on the one hand the material relations that are concretized in the development of mark-up languages, such as SGML, HTML, and XML, and on the other hand, Web ontologies, the temporal relations that are produced and conditioned by the artificial memories of data

This article asks how can we articulate the limit of artificial intelligence, which virtually has no limit? Or maybe the definition of AI already implies its limit, how Marvin Minsky once declared that there is no generally accepted theory of intelligence, and that AI is only one particular way of modelling it. This article revisits the debate between Minsky and Hubert Dreyfus and repositions them in terms of an opposition between mechanism and organism, in order to expose the limit of Dreyfus’s Heideggerian critique. It suggests reflecting on the relation between noodiversity and technodiversity to methodologically broaden the concept of intelligence, and on how different concepts of intelligence could be thought by introducing the Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan’s interpretation of Kant’s intellectual intuition.

This article aims to bring forward a critical reflection on a renewed relation between nature and technology in the Anthropocene, by contextualizing the question around the recent debates on the “ontological turn” in Anthropology, which attempts to go beyond the nature and culture dualism analysed as the crisis of modernity. The “politics of ontologies” associated with this movement in anthropology opens up the question of participation of non-humans. This article contrasts this anthropological attempt with the work of the philosopher Gilbert Simondon, who wants to overcome the antagonism between culture and technics. According to Simondon, this antagonism results from the technological rupture of modernity at the end of the eighteenth century. This paper analyses the differences of the oppositions presenting their work: culture vs. nature, culture vs. technics, to show that a dialogue between anthropology of nature and philosophy of technology will be fruitful to conceptualize a renewed relation between nature and technology. One way to initiate such a conversation as well as to think about the reconciliation between nature and technology, this article tries to show, is to develop the concept of cosmotechnics as the denominator of these two trends of thinking.

_ Source: _Volume 47, Issue 1, pp 60 - 84 This article takes up Heidegger’s commentary on Rimbaud’s _Lettres du voyant_ as the starting point for an exploration of the question of rhythm in Heidegger’s thought, and an attempt to situate it within his understanding of technics and Being. Besides pursuing a historical study of the concept of rhythm in Heidegger’s work, this article proposes to understand rhythm through the concept of individuation. It responds to the French philosopher Jacques Garelli’s critique of Heidegger that the latter ignores the question of individuation and always starts with beings that are already individuated. On the contrary, this article attempts to sketch a theory of individuation of rhythm in Heidegger’s proper thinking through a re-interpretation of the _Fug_—a word he used to translate the Greek word δίκη and words derived from it: joint, structure, submission, etc.

This article addresses “Creativity after Computation” by looking into the concept of artificial imagination, namely the machine’s ability to produce images that challenge artmaking and surprise human beings with the aid of machine learning algorithms. What is at stake is not only art and creativity but also the tension between the determination of machines and the freedom of human beings. This opposition restages Kant’s third antinomy in the contemporary technological condition. By referring to the debate on the question of imagination in Kant, Heidegger, and Stiegler, the article suggests that imagination is always already artificial and that it is more productive to develop an organology of artificial imagination. It clarifies the notion of artificial imagination and offers an organological reading through a reinterpretation of Leibniz’s monadology, Kant’s sublime, and Schiller’s aesthetic education against the backdrop of recursive algorithms.

In this dialogue, Hiroki Azuma discusses with Yuk Hui about the perception of technology in Japan after the defeat in the Second World War, from the Kyoto School to the postmodern critics, and the ambivalent conflicts between the modern and the tradition. The postmodern culture has a different signification in Japan than in the West as well as in other parts of Asia. Azuma documents the rise of the Otaku culture in Japan, and calls them “database animals,” a thesis that he formulated through his reading of Alexandre Kojève’s end of man and the absorption of the human subject into the technological world.

This article aims to clarify the question of speed and intensity in the thoughts of Simondon and Deleuze, in order to shed light on the recent debates regarding accelerationism and its politics. Instead of starting with speed, we propose to look into the notion of intensity and how it serves as a new ontological ground in Simondon's and Deleuze's philosophy and politics. Simondon mobilises the concept of intensity to criticise hylomorphism and substantialism; Deleuze, taking up Simondon's conceptual framework, repurposes it for his ontology of difference, elevating intensity to the rank of generic concept of being, thus bypassing notions of negativity and individuals as base, in favour of the productive and universal character of difference. In Deleuze, the correlation between intensity and speed is fraught with ambiguities, with each term threatening to subsume the other; this rampant tension becomes explicitly antagonistic when taken up by the diverse strands of contemporary accelerationism, resulting in two extreme cases in the posthuman discourse: either a pure becoming, achieved through destruction, or through abstraction that does away with intensity altogether; or an intensity without movement or speed, that remains a pure jouissance. Both cases appear to stumble over the problem of individuation, if not disindividuation. Hence, we wish to raise the following question: in what way can one think of an accelerationist politics with intensity, or an intensive politics without the fetishisation of speed? We consider this question central to the interrogation of the limits of acceleration and posthuman discourse, thus requiring a new philosophical thought on intensity and speed.

In this dialogue with Yuk Hui, Pieter Lemmens explains the discipline called philosophy of technology and gives a concise overview of the most important contemporary approaches within this field. He also offers a critical evaluation of what are probably the two most salient characteristics of contemporary philosophy of technology, the so-called “empirical turn” and the “ethical turn,” which are deeply related and partly reflect the discipline’s on-going alignment with the global neoliberal agenda of exclusively profit-driven technological innovation. He also critically reflects on recent developments in the molecular and informational life sciences such as genomics, metabolomics, bioinformatics and synthetic biology.

This article explores the concept of individuation in the early Schelling and Simondon by bringing them into dialogue, thereby highlighting affinities and differences in their philosophical projects in light of their epistemological and historical backgrounds. Individuation stands out as a major component of both Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and Simondon’s theory of genesis. But its role within both authors’ thinking is quite different: while for Schelling individuation constitutes a major problem that the philosophy of nature ventures to solve, namely the constitution of finite products from the absolute productivity of nature, individuation as a process is the fulcrum of Simondon’s philosophy as a whole, both a driving force and a name for being as such. These divergent approaches are related by a common quest for an immanent genesis of being and the necessity of the third, elaborated in close dialogue with the scientific discoveries of their respective times and the re-appropriation of metaphysics. This article approaches Schelling’s and Simondon’s theories of individuation respectively from the concept of force and the concept of information, and suggests how these two seemingly parallel enquiries can be read as complementing each other in parallax, in order to contribute to the contemporary understanding of nature and individuation.

This article comments on a paper titled ‘Technique et eschatologie: le devenir des objets techniques’ that Gilbert Simondon presented in 1972. For Simondon, eschatology consists of a basic presupposition, which is the duality between the immortal soul and the corruptible body. The eschatology of technical objects can be seen as the object’s becoming against time. Simondon suggests that in the epoch of artisans, the product through its perfection searches for the ‘immortality of his producer’, while in the industrial epoch standardization becomes the key mover, in the sense that different parts of the object can be replaced. This analysis of Simondon on the relation between technics and eschatology allows a speculation on the soul of technical objects by tracing his earlier works. This conception of the soul, as this article tries to show, allows Simondon to address the alienation of technical objects in juxtaposition to a Marxist critique of alienation.

This article aims to bring forward a critical reflection on a renewed relation between nature and technology in the Anthropocene, by contextualizing the question around the recent debates on the “ontological turn” in Anthropology, which attempts to go beyond the nature and culture dualism analysed as the crisis of modernity. The “politics of ontologies” associated with this movement in anthropology opens up the question of participation of non-humans. This article contrasts this anthropological attempt with the work of the philosopher Gilbert Simondon, who wants to overcome the antagonism between culture and technics. According to Simondon, this antagonism results from the technological rupture of modernity at the end of the eighteenth century. This paper analyses the differences of the oppositions presenting their work: culture vs. nature, culture vs. technics, to show that a dialogue between anthropology of nature (illustrated through the work of Philippe Descola) and philosophy of technology (illustrated through the work of Simondon) will be fruitful to conceptualize a renewed relation between nature and technology. One way to initiate such a conversation as well as to think about the reconciliation between nature and technology, this article tries to show, is to develop the concept of cosmotechnics as the denominator of these two trends of thinking.

What will philosophy of technology be as its practitioners depart from the cross- roads of the ideas of Don Ihde and Bernard Stiegler? Their two lines of thought confront and cross each other, giving rise to different ways of understanding technologies. Rather than following one or the other of these directions, I propose an Erörterung of such crossroads. As Heidegger’s commentary on Georg Trakl’s poetry insists, Erörterung means, first, “to point out the proper place or site of something to situate it,” and, second, “to heed that place or site ”. This Erörterung has to be conducted at multiple times, on multiple levels, as each of them hermeneutically identifies its own site. I proceed first through an Erörterung of the crossroads of the thinking of technology after Ihde and Stiegler, and second through an Erörterung of the Ort or the site of the first Erörterung, where the Ort for Heidegger is the land of the evening, the Occident [Abendland], in the throes of globalization, or more precisely Americanisation, a form of disorientation, that obscures the unconcealment of the essence of the human-technology relationship central to Heidegger. In the third part, I propose that the way to integrate and extend Heidegger, Ihde, and Stiegler is to acknowledge the importance of historical, cultural, and geopolitical difference in the interrelationship between the cosmos, morality, and technical activities, what I call cosmotechnics.

This paper aims to approach the notion of writing in the digital age in order to reflect on the question of technodiversity, or the multiplicity of cosmotechnics. It takes off with what seems to be two criticisms against each other: one from Derrida's Of Grammatology, where he claims that ‘the notion of technics can never simply clarify the notion of writing’; and the other from Stiegler's Discretising Time, where he openly criticized Derrida, ‘I think that Derrida unfortunately has never really explored the condition of the history of the supplement’. The essay elaborates on the contexts of these claims and suggests that this ‘indirect’ debate could be read as a parallax concerning the diversities of writing, one horizontal and the other vertical. Derrida, this essays argues, through his setting up of opposition between Hegel and Leibniz, Western phonogram and Chinese pictogram, substance and relation, proposes a diversity of writings which cannot be reduced to each other; while Stiegler by outlining a history of grammatisation, from literal, to analogue and now digital writing, proposes that philosophy has to be rethought according to this history and its respective technological conditions. This essay proposes synthesizing Derrida and Stiegler's claims to reflect on the future of technodiversity.

A systematic historical survey of Chinese thought is followed by an investigation of the historical-metaphysical questions of modern technology, asking how Chinese thought might contribute to a renewed questioning of globalized technics. Heidegger's critique of modern technology and its relation to metaphysics has been widely accepted in the East. Yet the conception that there is only one—originally Greek—type of technics has been an obstacle to any original critical thinking of technology in modern Chinese thought. Yuk Hui argues for the urgency of imagining a specifically Chinese philosophy of technology capable of responding to Heidegger's challenge, while problematizing the affirmation of technics and technologies as anthropologically universal. This investigation of the historical-metaphysical question of technology, drawing on Lyotard, Simondon, and Stiegler, and introducing a history of modern Eastern philosophical thinking largely unknown to Western readers, including philosophers such as Feng Youlan, Mou Zongsan, and Keiji Nishitani, sheds new light on the obscurity of the question of technology in China. Why was technics never thematized in Chinese thought? Why has time never been a real question for Chinese philosophy? How was the traditional concept of Qi transformed in its relation to Dao as China welcomed technological modernity and westernization? In The Question Concerning Technology in China, a systematic historical survey of the major concepts of traditional Chinese thinking is followed by a startlingly original investigation of these questions, in order to ask how Chinese thought might today contribute to a renewed, cosmotechnical questioning of globalized technics.

On the Existence of Digital Objects conducts a philosophical examination of digital objects and their organizing schema by creating a dialogue between Martin Heidegger and Gilbert Simondon, which Yuk Hui contextualizes within the history of computing. How can digital objects be understood according to individualization and individuation? Hui pursues this question through the history of ontology and the study of markup languages and Web ontologies; he investigates the existential structure of digital objects within their systems and milieux. With this relational approach toward digital objects and technical systems, the book addresses alienation, described by Simondon as the consequence of mistakenly viewing technics in opposition to culture.

This essay takes up the line of critique of François Jullien in The Great Image Has No Form, that Chinese landscape painting ( shanshui) provides a counter-example to Western painting. The opposition, namely that the former undermines form and the latter focuses on form, provides two kinds of access to ‘truth’ and demonstrates two different philosophical temperaments between China and Europe. The article attempts to reflect on Jullien’s comparison and the varieties of experience of art that Jullien has opened up for us. It also hopes to go a step further by exposing the different logic and sensibility that are present in shanshui painting through a reading of Wang Bi and Mou Zongsan.

We find ourselves in a media‐intensive milieu comprising networks, images, sounds, and text, which we generalize as data and metadata. How can we understand this digital milieu and make sense of these data, not only focusing on their functionalities but also reflecting on our everyday life and existence? How do these material constructions demand a new philosophical understanding? Instead of following the reductionist approaches, which understand the digital milieu as abstract entities such as information and data, this chapter proposes to approach it from an embodied perspective: objects. The chapter contrasts digital objects with natural objects (e.g., apples on the table) and technical objects (e.g., hammers) in phenomenological investigations, and proposes to approach digital objects from the concept of “relations,” on the one hand the material relations that are concretized in the development of mark‐up languages, such as SGML, HTML, and XML, and on the other hand, Web ontologies, the temporal relations that are produced and conditioned by the artificial memories of data.

This article aims to reconstruct Simondon’s concept of technophany, which disperses throughout different writings that appeared posthumously and suggest how elaborating this concept could be understood as a significant philosophical task today. Technophany, namely the manifestation of technicity, is central to Simondon’s thought on techno-aesthetics and, more importantly, his intellectual project of reintegrating technology into culture. However, when we place Simondon’s concept of technophany in today’s context, namely the convergence of technology, art and design since the second half of the 20th century, we see that technophanies are becoming more or less ordinary marketing phenomena of the tech industry. Then, could the concept of technophany still take up this task of reconciling technology and culture? Or, instead, is it reduced to a mere economic category, and Simondon’s techno-aesthetics is only a forerunner of today’s industrial marketing strategies? In order to respond to these questions, this article returns to the source of Simondon’s concept of technicity. It shows that there is an intimacy between technophany and Mircea Eliade’s concept of hierophany, and indeed, Simondon’s genesis of technicity vividly mirrors Eliade’s analysis of sacrality and its crisis in modern times. The concept of technophany acquires a new meaning, and it refuses to be a mere phenomenon of publicity as one might easily misread it. Technophany has the task of occupying the “no man’s land” between technicity and sacrality. However, what exactly does it mean? Through the reconstruction of the concept of technophany in Simondon’s thought, this article hopes to examine the limit of the concept and, at the same time, reconceptualise and prolong it.

By going back to the critical moment of the cybernetisation of the museum and of the exhibition, this essay aims to put forward a thesis considering exhibition as medium. It elaborates on the notion of medium by contrasting it with Canguilhem’s notion of milieu, in order to redefine it, in a non-substantialist way, as modulation in light of Simondon’s and Deleuze’s works. It proposes a genealogy of the exhibition as medium and describes a critical historical trajectory shaped by institutional and informational infrastructures.