/lit/ - Literature

>The concept of cosmotechnics— beyond cosmologies— therefore hopes to reopen both the question and the multiple histories of technology. In other words, in using China as an example, and proposing to take up the Qi-Dao cosmotechnics as the ground and constraint for the appropriation of modern technology, we aim to renew a form of life and a cosmotechnics that would consciously subtract itself from and deviate from the homogeneous becoming of the technological world.

>Simondon, rather than presupposing a definite end to human progress, proposes to understand human progress in terms of cycles characterised by the internal resonance between human being and objective concretisation:

>[W]e can say that there is human progress only if, when passing from one self-limiting cycle to the next, man increases the part of himself which is engaged in the system he forms with the objective concretisation. There is progress if the system man-religion is endowed with more internal resonance than the system man- language, and if the man-technology system is endowed with a greater internal resonance than the system man-religion.

>Here Simondon identifies three cycles, namely ‘man-language’, ‘man-religion’, and ‘man-technology’. In the ‘man-technology’ cycle, Simondon observes a new objective concretisation, which is no longer that of natural language or religious rituals, but that of the production of ‘technical individuals’. It is possible that technical concretisation may not produce any internal resonance, and therefore may not lead to a new cycle. This, we might say, constitutes Simondon’s critique of modernity, a critique that finds its concrete example in today’s China as well as in most parts of Asia, where one finds a entropic becoming driven by capitalism (the dominant cosmotechnics) leading nowhere, and with no resonance— the universalisation of Descola’s sense.

>This is the danger posed to all of us in the Anthropocene. Here, producing an internal resonance is the task of translation. The ‘internal resonance’ we seek here is the unification of the metaphysical categories of Qi and Dao, which must be endowed with new meanings and forces proper to our epoch. One will certainly have to understand science and technology in order to be able to transform them; but after more than a century of ‘modernisation’, now is the moment to seek a new form of practice, not only in China but also in other cultures. This is where imagination should take off and concentrate its efforts. The aim of this book has been to put forward such a new translation based on difference. It is only with this difference, and with the capability and the imagination to assert this difference in material terms, that we can stake a claim to another world history.