The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics
by
4.13 · Rating details · 31 ratings · 5 reviews
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. (less)
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. (less)
Paperback, 346 pages
Published December 19th 2016 by Urbanomic
Recommend This Book None of your friends have reviewed this book yet.
Ask the Goodreads community a question about The Question Concerning Technology in China
Be the first to ask a question about The Question Concerning Technology in China
Showing 1-30
Aug 21, 2019Ximena Jiménez rated it really liked it
“[…] we must move away from the visual image of the globe, since it carries with it the question of inclusion and exclusion. The notion of cosmos as ‘house’ and 'sphere' originates from an antique European cosmology; a ‘stimulating image of an all-encompasing sphere’...”
Ya en su libro pasado _Sobre la existencia de los objetos digitales¬_, Yuk Hui había planteado un tiempo metafísico en el que se desarrollan los objetos digitales. En ese volumen escribe sobre la sincronización digital de los sistemas computacionales a escala global (¡en un planeta que no es para nada global o esférico!). Este libro es un gran acierto, con el trabajo filosófico más riguroso posible de nuestro tiempo se demuestra que lo que se entiende como tecnología, ligada a una evolución y desarrollo del pensamiento, está ausente de la cultura china: no hay tecnología en la China contemporánea. Para llevar a cabo esta labor funda el concepto de cosmotécnica, a través del cual hace una propuesta material sólida en contra de la catástrofe ecológica que ha provocado la tecnologización occidental en todo el planeta: la creación de interfaces cosmólogicas que nos regresen la dirección. Es un gran libro que nos pone adelante una labor del pensamiento enorme, pero que es brillante y esperanzadora. Recomendadísimo. (less)
Ya en su libro pasado _Sobre la existencia de los objetos digitales¬_, Yuk Hui había planteado un tiempo metafísico en el que se desarrollan los objetos digitales. En ese volumen escribe sobre la sincronización digital de los sistemas computacionales a escala global (¡en un planeta que no es para nada global o esférico!). Este libro es un gran acierto, con el trabajo filosófico más riguroso posible de nuestro tiempo se demuestra que lo que se entiende como tecnología, ligada a una evolución y desarrollo del pensamiento, está ausente de la cultura china: no hay tecnología en la China contemporánea. Para llevar a cabo esta labor funda el concepto de cosmotécnica, a través del cual hace una propuesta material sólida en contra de la catástrofe ecológica que ha provocado la tecnologización occidental en todo el planeta: la creación de interfaces cosmólogicas que nos regresen la dirección. Es un gran libro que nos pone adelante una labor del pensamiento enorme, pero que es brillante y esperanzadora. Recomendadísimo. (less)
One of the most broadly rewarding things I've read in a long time. A fuller review to come later; I can't possibly fit in all my thoughts on it in the short time I've got.
One very simple note: one question that this book brought up for me was "why tradition?" Why does China have to develop its response to modernity from a historical Chinese cosmology? If it's true that the ties to past systems of belief have been completely severed, isn't the situation so far gone that we might as well start from scratch, or from a curated hodgepodge of whatever we find useful in all the traditions of the world? Hui never really says why such an approach would be misguided, but it seems deeply important to his project that, broadly, new alternatives to modern capitalist technics be based on local philosophical history. Does that insistence on continuity with the past come from a conviction that it isn't quite as gone from our thinking as it seems, or is it just impossible to start a cosmological project from scratch in a world where the default conception of nature we're trying to critique also pervades our entire social experience? These questions don't just apply to China; as with everything in the book, China is one (very important) case in a world full of cultures coming to a reckoning with the shortcomings in the transplanted technical thinking that, at this point, is almost completely international. (less)
One very simple note: one question that this book brought up for me was "why tradition?" Why does China have to develop its response to modernity from a historical Chinese cosmology? If it's true that the ties to past systems of belief have been completely severed, isn't the situation so far gone that we might as well start from scratch, or from a curated hodgepodge of whatever we find useful in all the traditions of the world? Hui never really says why such an approach would be misguided, but it seems deeply important to his project that, broadly, new alternatives to modern capitalist technics be based on local philosophical history. Does that insistence on continuity with the past come from a conviction that it isn't quite as gone from our thinking as it seems, or is it just impossible to start a cosmological project from scratch in a world where the default conception of nature we're trying to critique also pervades our entire social experience? These questions don't just apply to China; as with everything in the book, China is one (very important) case in a world full of cultures coming to a reckoning with the shortcomings in the transplanted technical thinking that, at this point, is almost completely international. (less)
Mar 23, 2019Riar rated it really liked it
It really opens a new horizon for me. A new territory that now I crave more. Some mild critic on the unresolved conclusion in the end—mildly obscure and vague in terms of political subjectivity, however, the solid theorisation and grounded philosophising the distinct thread between the East and the West are paid-off. The chapter on Keiji Nishitani, New Confucianism, Joseph Needham's question, sinofuturism, and Simondon theorising antenna tv in relation to the ontological turn in anthropology are just some of the myriad favourite parts of this book. Hope to read more from his other monograph. (less)
The basic thesis of this book is that technology as it is understood in the west today -- as something apart from humans that transforms our relationship to nature into one of mastery and control -- has never existed as such in the East, and in China particularly, except as an imposition of Western thinking from without.
No comments:
Post a Comment