GB Talks vol.2_ "Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics" by Yuk Hui

| When : 31st Oct, 2017 (Tuesday), 16:00-18:00

| Where: Conference Hall, 3F Gwangju Biennale Foundation

As an integral part of GB Monthly Gatherings, followed by the talks by Azuma Hiroki & Alex Taek-gwang Lee on 1st Sep as the vol.2, Yuk Hui will give a public lecture on "Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics" for the next edition

Abstract

This talk wants to approach the question of cosmopolitism for the following two reasons, which correlate with each other; and these two reasons also correspond to the two different senses of the word cosmopolitics. Firstly, we are witnessing the end of an unilateral globalisation: the so-called globalisation has been only a unilateral one, meaning the universalization (synchronization) of particular epistemologies and world view through techno-economical means, however this unilateral globalisation came to its end, indicated by the 911 event, and which we can also read in an article of Peter Thiel “Straussian moment”, in which he stated “The modern West has lost faith in itself. In the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment period, this loss of faith liberated enormous commercial and creative forces. At the same time, this loss has rendered the West vulnerable.

Is there a way to fortify the modern West without destroying it altogether, a way of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater?” If we are convinced that such a globalisation came to its end, and that it invokes an unhappy consciousness of the West, then it is necessary to start imagining a new order which is no longer a continuation of the same geopolitics with mere different power configuration.
Secondly, human species on the earth is confronting the same crisis closely associated with the Anthropocene. The earth and the cosmos have been transformed into a gigantic technological system, the culmination of the epistemological and methodological rupture which we call modernity. The lost of the cosmos is the end of metaphysics in the sense that there is nothing behind the perfection of science and technology. This end of the cosmos in the 17thand18thcenturyinEurope,aviewsharedamonghistorianssuchasRémiBrague,AlexandreKoyréamongothers,shouldbereadintheAnthropoceneasaninvitationforacosmo-politics , not only in the sense of cosmopolitanism but also politics of the cosmos. In this context that I would like to suggest that in order to develop such a cosmopolitics, it is necessary to elucidate the question of cosmotechnics, a concept that I developed recently as an attempt to re-open the question of technology by proposing an antinomy of the universality of technology and undoing translations based on equivalence.
In order to elaborate on the thesis cosmotechnics as cosmopolitics, I will divide this talk into three parts. This first part will demonstrate how the Kantian concept of cosmopolitics is rooted in his concept of nature; in the second part, we will situate the multinaturalism proposed by the “ontological turn” in Anthropology as a cosmopolitics, which in contrast to Kant’s pursuit of the universal, suggests a certain relativism as the condition of co-existence; in the third part, I will try to show why it is necessary to move from cosmology to cosmotechnics as a politics to come.

Yuk Hui

Yuk Hui is currently researcher of the project Techno-ecologies of Participation at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, where he teaches at the institute of philosophy; he is visiting professor at the China Academy of Art and member of the Centre international des études simondoniennes (MSH Paris Nord). Previous to that, He was postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Research and Innovation of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, as well as visiting scientist at the T-Labs Berlin. He published on philosophy of technology and media in periodicals such as Metaphilosophy, Research in Phenomenology, Parrhesia, Cahiers Simondon,  Jahrbuch Technikphilosophie, Implications Philosophiques, Angelaki, Intellectica, New Formations, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, Parallax, etc. He is co-editor of 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory (2015), author of On the Existence of Digital Objects (prefaced by Bernard Stiegler, University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and The Question Concerning Technology in China -An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, 2016).