Cosmotechnics from an Anthropotechnological Perspective

Abstract

Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics provides us with an excellent theoretical device to investigate the role of technology in relation to a culture’s self-understanding. This paper, in the first place, aims to contextualise Hui’s reflexion on cosmotechnics within the broader field of contemporary philosophy of technology, outlining its discerning potential in undermining the outworn, Western dichotomy between nature and culture. In this spirit, it is stressed how cosmotechnics nicely fits in an anthropotechnological perspective, i.e., an understanding of the relation between technics and humans as originary and constitutive. In the second place, the goal of this paper is to evaluate the explanatory significance of the concept of cosmotechnics regarding the possibility of a comparative investigation of the modes according to which different cultures conceive technics and their relation to it. In this spirit, the concept of cultural techniques, i.e., scriptural, figurative and computing techniques embedded with a self-representative potential, is brought about in order to show which kind of technologies are most likely to determine and influence a culture’s self-understanding and should therefore be privileged by the focus of a comparative cosmotechnical inquiry.