From Techné To Cosmotechnics: Technology, Modernity, and Nonmodernity

Abstract What would a nonmodern answer to the crisis of technology look like? We need to understand the essence of technology in order for any exit from modernity to be understandable. Firstly, we must return to the problematic raised in Martin Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology. It is precisely its holism that constitutes the most valuable element of Heidegger’s study of technology, but at the same time also limits its usefulness. Cultural specifics are completely absent from Heidegger’s approach. It examines only one form of techné, namely the Western format originating in the heritage of ancient Greece. We may correct Heidegger’s Eurocentrism with a pluralist approach to the consideration of technology. Cultural anthropologist Philippe Descola has distinguished four types of ontologies: animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism. The Western-style approach that separates nature and culture - which Descola calls “naturalism” - is only a late exception in the history of the human race. Descola sees multinaturalism, the pluralism of concepts of nature, as an exit from modernity. Philosopher of technology Yuk Hui, reflecting on Heidegger’s conception of technology and Descola’s nonmodern multinaturalist experiment, proposes a third way out of modernity: cosmotechnics. According to this position, technology, which takes many forms, can be reintegrated into a moral cosmic approach. A nonmodern approach does not mean a conservative return to the traditions of the past, but rather a selective re-actualization of traditions, on new scales and within novel contexts. The Anthropocene era gives this experiment special relevance, for now the question of technology has become a problem with planetary stakes. In the third section of our paper, we reflect upon Clive Hamilton’s ideas relating to the Anthropocene, technology, and his critique of Descola and Hui’s nonmodernism.