La pregunta por la técnica en China: Un ensayo sobre cosmotécnica

Technique is in a certain sense anthropologically universal. As an extension of the organs and externalization of memory, it is inseparable from the understanding of the human being as a species. But universality is only one of its dimensions. Heidegger's famous 1953 lecture, “The Technical Question,” initiates a fundamental shift: the essence of modern technology is, rather than an anthropological universal, a consequence of Western metaphysics. In other words, the reduction of the world to the condition of a resource for human beings is the result of the antithesis between nature and culture that has governed the West since the 18th century.
Is it possible to think of multiple techniques, which are different from each other not only in functional and æsthetic terms, but also ontological and cosmological? For the Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui, technique is always cosmotechnical, since it derives from the cosmology that gives coherence and meaning to the community from which it emerged. In line with the search for technodiversity present in the essays in “Fragmenting the Future,” this book explores the history of Chinese thought in an attempt to find antidotes to the Western technological modernization program.
If we are to challenge the prospect of global self-extinction, we must reappropriate the current technology, change the direction of its movement and reframe it through a systematic reflection on the possibilities of multiple, traceable and even productive cosmotechnics. The case of China is particularly significant because of its growing geopolitical relevance as one of the great world powers. So reopening the question of technology in China does not imply any localist return to cultural essentialism or any kind of ethno-futurism: for Hui it is a matter of elaborating a cultural strategy for a new agenda and a new imagination of technology that will allow us to overcome the labyrinth of globalized techniques and restart modernity on other foundations.