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Angelaki : journal of theoretical humanities, 2020-08, Vol.25 (4), p.81-96
Ort / Verlag
Abingdon: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Erscheinungsjahr
2020
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Taylor & Francis
Beschreibungen/Notizen
One of the orienting claims in Yuk Hui’s The Question Concerning Technology in China is that an adequate accounting for the pluralism of technicity remains forthcoming. Hui brings this to our attention by arguing that a cosmological dimension, animate in the evolution of technology, leads to distinct “local” technicities; this should be contrasted to the consensus that technology is a universal phenomenon. Hui defends this differentiating role of the cosmic, by way of a Kantian antimony between two genetic problems. In Hui’s presentation, this antimony specifically concerns the status of an “anthropological universality” within technics. On the one hand, technics as the “extension of somatic functions and the externalisation of memory” is only differentiated by its passage through local conditions, but on the other, technics would be genetically affected by a cosmological (cultural, mythic) dimension, that would differently orient distinctive evolutionary developments within it.In this paper, I consider another source for Hui’s technical pluralism by arguing that functional differences inhere within the technical, itself. What this implies, is not only a reconsideration of technic’s “universality,” but also the anthropomorphism implied in the image of homo faber: what defines technicity and technology as an immanent, extensive and human-exclusive prosthesis. In order to do so, I return to Aristotle’s primary (or primitive) centralisation of the technite to argue that his causal accounting of technics should not have been restricted exclusively to the human, but rather considered as a general property of how agents deviate primary processes. I then show how technē – reconstituted as the affective power of many agents – suggests that a technically mediated agency is not only constitutive of human difference (Stiegler’s foundational prosthesis) but must more generally be evident in the agential character of diverse, even primordial species.This also entails a reconsideration of the relationship between technics and telos. This is because it is not only the agential distinction Aristotle draws between humans and other species that requires renovation, but also the widely criticised move to extend telos (the efficient cause specific to the technites) into a teleological purpose animating nature. However, rather than follow the critique of teleology in the Aristotelianism of the early modern period (with Suarez, Descartes and Spinoza), I will rather argue that telos should be recast as a dynamic interventional power that belongs broadly to agents. That is to say, if technē is a model of agency inseparable from the emergence of even primordial life, then we require an analysis of how an artificial, technical dimension inheres within non-human agents. I will finally outline how this technicity of non-human agents remains compatible with Hui’s cosmotechnics.