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In his latest book, Recursivity and Contingency (2019), the Hong Kong Yuk Hui argues that recursivity is not merely mechanical repetition. He is interested in “irregularity deviating from rules.” He develops what could be called a neovitalist position, which goes beyond the view, dominant in popular culture today, that

01/06 there is life inside the robot (or soon will be). In the “organology” Hui proposes, a system mimics growth and variation inside its own technical realm. “Recursivity is characterised,” he writes, “by the looping movement of returning to itself in order to determine itself, while every movement is open to contingency, which in turn determines its singularity.”1 Geert Lovink Following On the Existence of Digital Objects (2016) and The Question Concerning for in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (2017), Recursivity and Contingency is Yuk Hui’s third the Twenty- and by far most ambitious book. Divided into five chapters that deal with different eras and First Century: thinkers, it starts with Kant’s reflective judgement, which Hui sees as a precursor to recursivity. The book then moves on to Hegel’s An Interview reflective logic, which anticipates cybernetics. According to Hui’s organology (and that of with ), science and technology should be understood as means for returning to life, as paths towards true pluralism, or “multiple Philosopher Yuk cosmotechnics,” to use Hui’s own key concept Hui from his earlier book. Our understanding of computational possibilities should not be limited to the “disruptive” of Silicon Valley, oriented as they are towards short-term profits. Hui looks beyond this myopic view of technology. His foundational project is to dig into the philosophical foundations of today’s digitality, to examine the episteme that presents itself as a new form of totality (or as a “techno-subconsciousness,” as I have described it elsewhere). How can we think in an age when the online self is surrounded by artificial stupidity and algorithmic exclusion in the name of ruthless profit maximization and state control? Is there a liberated self inside cybernetics? đđđđđđđđđđ – Geert Lovink

Geert Lovink: Could you introduce the terms

e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 2 — s p t m b 9 đ G L v i k C y b e r n t i c s f o h T w - F u : A I v P l p Y k H “recursivity” and “contingency”? How do these two terms relate to feedback, which is a central concept in cybernetics? Is it possible to sketch out potential cybernetic technologies that are not based on the principles of the current revolution?

Yuk Hui: Recursivity is a general term for looping. This is not mere repetition, but rather more like a

09.12.19 / 13:45:03 EDT spiral, where every loop is different as the longer based on the same . Rather, process moves generally towards an end, they are recursive – capable of integrating whether a closed one or an open one. As a contingency into their operations. computer science student, I was fascinated by đđđđđđđđđđThis centrality of recursivity to recursion because it is the true spirit of contemporary machinery has been obscured by automation: with a few lines of recursive code various ways of describing capitalism, due to the you can solve a complicated problem that might fact that Marxists tend to discuss information demand much more code if you tried to solve it in 02/06 technology in much too abstract terms – a linear way. “immaterial labor,” “free labor,” and so forth. đđđđđđđđđđThe notion of recursivity represents an Deleuze tried to make this point in his famous epistemological break from the mechanistic “Postscript on Societies of Control,” but he worldview that dominated the seventeenth and lacked the vocabulary to do so, and simply eighteenth centuries, especially Cartesian borrowed the concept of modulation from the mechanism. The most well-known treatise on philosopher Gilbert Simondon. this break is Immanuel Kant’s 1790 Critique of đđđđđđđđđđIf we want to overcome this failure to Judgment, which proposes a reflective judgment appreciate recursivity, we need to understand its whose mode of operation is anti-Cartesian, significance, and find ways to describe it and nonlinear, and self-legitimate (i.e., it derives analyze it. claimed that the universal rules from the particular instead of emergence of cybernetics in the mid-twentieth being determined by a priori universal laws). century marked the completion and end of Reflective judgment is central to Kant’s philosophy. In response to Heidegger, I understanding of both beauty and , which recontextualize cybernetics within the history of is why the two parts of his book are dedicated to philosophy, with the aim of exposing both its aesthetic judgment and teleological judgment. limits and potential. In order to do this, a new Departing from Kant, and with a generalized language and new concepts are needed. This is concept of recursivity, I try to analyze the why the book focuses on developing the emergence of two lines of thought related to the concepts of recursivity and contingency, which I concept of the organic in the twentieth century: then use to analyze the theoretical foundations organicism and organology. The former opens of organicism and organology. towards a philosophy of biology and the latter a đđđđđđđđđđWe can distinguish two strains of philosophy of life. In the book, I attempt to organicism: a philosophy of nature (exemplified recontextualize organicism and organology by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, within today’s technical reality. Joseph Needham, Joseph Henry Woodger, and đđđđđđđđđđContingency is central to recursivity. In the Alfred North Whitehead, among others), and a mechanical mode of operation, which is built on what I call a “mechano-organicism,” which linear causation, a contingent event may lead to encompasses cybernetics as well as systems the collapse of the system. For example, theory. Through historical analysis I try to think machinery may malfunction and cause an recursivity beyond cybernetics. This is reflected industrial catastrophe. But in the recursive mode in how the book is structured: the first two of operation, contingency is necessary since it chapters are dedicated to organicism from Kant enriches the system and allows it to develop. A to cybernetics via Schelling, Hegel, Norbert living organism can absorb contingency and Wiener, and Kurt Gödel; the third and fourth render it valuable. So can today’s machine chapters are dedicated to organology from Kant learning. to , , đđđđđđđđđđGL: Cybernetic concepts such as feedback Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, and my own and the “black box” often gives rise to a reflection on this tradition; the last chapter simplistic understanding of automation. How can unfolds a political philosophy that argues against we overcome this? the totalizing tendency of far-too-humanist modern technology. YH: In the time of Descartes, and later Marx (who described human–machine relations in the GL: What is mechanism today, in a world where factories of nineteenth-century Manchester), e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 2 — s p t m b 9 đ G L v i k C y b e r n t i c s f o h T w - F u : A I v P l p Y k H digitization has taken over? The nineteenth- automated machines performed homogeneous, century mechanistic worldview essentially tried repetitive work, like a clock. As Marx wrote, a to explain life without life. This has since given craftsman-turned-factory-worker failed to way to the “organic” perspective that is dominant cooperate with this kind of machine on both a today. Why is it nonetheless necessary to psychological and somatic level because a distance ourselves from the mechanistic? Is it machine enclosed within itself is a separated still a living ? reality. Marx attributed this failure to alienation. đđđđđđđđđđYH: We live in an age of neo-mechanism, in In our time, however, automated machines are no which technical objects are becoming organic.

09.12.19 / 13:45:03 EDT Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Kant YH: Bergson was a philosopher who opposed the wanted to give a new life to philosophy in the organic to the mechanical. This was due to the wake of mechanism, so he set up a new historical background that we briefly mentioned condition of philosophizing, namely the organic. before, the nineteenth century being the age of Being mechanistic doesn’t necessarily mean mechanism, physics, and industrialism. In 1907, being related to machines; rather, it refers to Bergson published Creative Evolution, which for machines that are built on linear causality, for Canguilhem, together with the journal L’Année example clocks, or thermodynamic machines like 03/06 Biologique launched in the same year, marked the steam engine. When I say that Kant set up the birth of the philosophy of biology in France. It the “organic” as the condition of philosophizing, was also Canguilhem, in his 1947 essay it means that for philosophy to be, it has to be “Machine and Organism,” who proposes that organic. So for post-Kantians like Johann there is a general organology in Bergson’s Gottlieb Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, there is a Creative Evolution. The return to life is a return to pronounced organic mode of thinking, ranging an organic whole which renders the mechanical from the philosophy of nature to political part possible. This organic whole takes the name philosophy. And if philosophy since Kant has of “élan vital” in Bergson. Life is a recursive mechanism as its counterpart, it seems that process; it is a constant exchange between the today, as you and others have observed, this figure and the ground (if we use Gestalt counterpart has been transformed into an vocabulary) through a process of making and organic being. Our computers, smartphones, and unmaking. domestic robots are no longer mechanical but đđđđđđđđđđThis is also why evolution is creative, since are rather becoming organic. I propose this as a it is fundamentally organological in the sense new condition of philosophizing. Philosophy has that evolution is also a process in which human to painfully break away from the self- beings are obliged to constantly create new contentment of organicity, and open up new organs (e.g., figures), while not being blinded by realms of thinking. them, i.e., by not regarding them as the totality of đđđđđđđđđđWhat I wanted to elaborate in this book is reality. Mechanism wants to explain life, without not only a history of philosophy and a history of realizing that it is only a phase of life, e.g., a technology, but also what comes after this figure. Bergson, on the hand, wants to organic mode of thinking, or a new condition of resituate mechanism in a broader reality – philosophizing after Kant. Organicism is still namely life itself. So Bergson is not against regarded as a remedy to industrialism today, science or even mechanism, but rather against even though the actualities of machines and science becoming merely mechanical and industry in the twenty-first century are no longer ignoring life. There is basically no opposition the same as they were hundreds of years ago. A between Bergson and Canguilhem, since both of false analysis can be misleading and also them reject the proposal to explain life without harmful for the understanding and assessment life. They want to “rejoin life through science.” of our situation today. Philosophy has to negate đđđđđđđđđđGL: Should we no longer be concerned the totalizing tendency in organic thinking, which about the uncritical use of biological metaphors is in the process of being implemented in in technological and social contexts? I come from different technical apparatuses, from social a political generation where this was openly credit systems to the “superintelligence.” I think questioned. Why do you speak of the “evolution” Jean-François Lyotard already reflected on this of systems? What do we gain by speaking of some forty years ago in his Postmodern “emergence,” knowing that all these Condition, especially in his critique of Niklas technologies are consciously fabricated by Luhmann’s systems theory. One should reread humans, aka male engineers? Lyotard carefully. This is why my last chapter is devoted to Lyotard and the “inhumanism” that I YH: Today, when certain dualist logics (e.g., want to elaborate as a philosophy of human vs. machine) have been more or less fragmentation. overcome, yet criticism of dualism as such đđđđđđđđđđGL: You write that for a vitalist such as remains essential for various social and political

Bergson, artificial systems are mechanical and e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 2 — s p t m b 9 đ G L v i k C y b e r n t i c s f o h T w - F u : A I v P l p Y k H projects – such as overcoming modernity, for not real. “Science, when it becomes mechanical, example – isn’t this ignorance problematic? How prevents us from comprehending the creativity do we reflect critically on all this? That is the aim which is life itself. Life is a recursive process of of my book. What does it mean for one to become making in the unmaking.”2 In this passage you cyborg? Donna Haraway has always been an quote Canguilhem, Foucault’s mentor, who organicist. Her work was significant in the 1990s argued in Knowledge of Life from 1966 that we for overcoming the dichotomy between the should “rejoin life through science.” mechanical and the organic. However, at that time the organic mode of thinking was already

09.12.19 / 13:45:03 EDT coming to an end. Maybe today we should of organizations do you envision for it? A reconsider all these concepts from the new ? Bauhaus? What are some condition of philosophizing that I tried to explain contemporary examples that inspire you? above and that I elaborate in my book. đđđđđđđđđđYH: You are absolutely right, this has to be a đđđđđđđđđđTo ask a concrete question: Is someone who new movement, or a new school of thought that has an artificial arm and an artificial eye no develops different understandings and practices longer human, since within this person the of technology. In recent years, many people have organic and the mechanistic are no longer 04/06 been talking about a certain revival of the Black opposed? Or from another perspective, is Mountain College model, since this new transhumanism, with its belief that the entire movement will first of all demand a new syllabus body can be replaced and enhanced, actually and new forms of collectivity, with the aim of built upon a linear way of thinking, one that transforming the industrial world, like what the expresses an extreme humanism? On the Bauhaus wanted to do. For my part, in 2014 I surface, transhumanism seems to want to get rid established a research network called “Research of the concept of the human. However, this Network of Philosophy and Technology.” We have gesture is only camouflage. Transhumanism is a been trying to develop collaborations between quintessentially humanist approach to the world, different institutions and individuals, but we still since all is captured within a metaphysical gaze. have a long way to go. I believe that this has to be đđđđđđđđđđHow helpful is it to think from the a collaborative project. We will need the perspective of organology? The term “general participation of researchers who share a certain organology” was coined by Canguilhem in analysis and set of problematics. “Machine and Organism.” But more than anyone đđđđđđđđđđGL: Is cybernetics the metaphysics of else it was Bernard Stiegler who elaborated on today? Heidegger may have predicted that the . He developed the concept of cybernetics would replace philosophy, but there organology around 2003 while he was the is no sign of this so far, at least not in the director of IRCAM at the Centre Georges Western academic world. Philosophy of Pompidou, an institute dedicated to technology is a marginal subdiscipline at best. Is experimental music. The term actually comes it time for a radical reform of the academic from music, not Bergson. Notwithstanding the disciplines? different motivations of Canguilhem, Stiegler, and Bergson, they all point to the idea that YH: In Recursivity and Contingency, I try to show human life can only be maintained through the why Heidegger was right concerning the end of organization of the inorganic, i.e., through the metaphysics and also why it is necessary to invention and use of tools. Maybe we should think beyond Heidegger. In 1966, journalists from pose the question in this way: Will the Der Spiegel asked Heidegger what comes after development of artificial intelligence and philosophy. He replied: cybernetics. The organic machine learning allow us to rejoin life? is, for Heidegger, nothing but the mechanical- đđđđđđđđđđLet’s move a step further. What if these technological triumph of modernity over nature. machines are no longer simply “organized This is why I think the organic mode of thinking, inorganic” entities, but rather gigantic systems in and the fields it has given rise to such as ecology, the making? The evolution from technical objects cybernetics, Gaia theory, etc., are manifestations to technical systems was my focus in On the of this “end.” The question is how to think beyond Existence of Digital Objects, and it is further this end. elaborated in Recursivity and Contingency. These đđđđđđđđđđIn his 1964 essay “The End of Philosophy systems are now the organizing agents of human and the Task of Thinking,” Heidegger also says lives and social orders. It seems to me necessary that this end means that world civilization will to return to these questions and to extend the henceforth be based on Western European concept of organology already developed by thought. This is of course a provocative anthropologists and to the analysis assertion, and I deal with it extensively in my of our actual situation. second book, The Question Concerning đđđđđđđđđđGL: Towards the end of your new book you Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. ask if recursive thinking will allow us to the e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 2 — s p t m b 9 đ G L v i k C y b e r n t i c s f o h T w - F u : A I v P l p Y k H đđđđđđđđđđThe concept of cosmotechnics concerns the relaunch the question of organicism and idea that different cultures and epochs have technodiversity, or if it will only by used by a different ways of thinking about technology. deterministic system “that is moving toward its Cosmotechnics is central to Recursivity and own destruction.”3 We already know about the Contingency too, since the book tries to reductionist school of thought – it has taken over reconstruct different understandings of the world. How about the non-reductionist technology, with the aim of developing school of thought? What can people do to Heidegger’s concept of “enframing” (Gestell), become part of it? Is it a movement? What forms which he regards as the essence of modern

09.12.19 / 13:45:03 EDT technology. I do not argue that we abandon that its agenda is far too limited. Two years ago, I cybernetics, just recognize both its limits and its was invited for a job interview by a department of potential. digital humanities in England. Afterward I was đđđđđđđđđđIn Recursivity and Contingency there is a told, with a certain amount of regret, that they dialogue between cybernetics and Chinese didn’t need a philosopher at the moment. thought through the figure of Joseph Needham. đđđđđđđđđđIt seems to me that technology has become You can see the book as a footnote to §17 of The the common thread across disparate disciplines.

Question Concerning Technology in China, where I 05/06 In other words, different disciplines all want to discussed Needham’s characterization of respond to the challenge of technology. Will this Chinese philosophy as organicism. In the latter bring forth new forms of radical technological book, I argue for the existence of a Chinese thought that aren’t limited to twentieth-century technological thought that is grounded in a media theory, , and different understanding of the cosmos and the literature studies? Digital humanities is not yet a moral. I am glad to see that this proposal has global discipline. Maybe as it is adopted in been welcomed in China, Japan, and Korea different localities, it should be questioned and (largely because of the similarity of thought in redefined. I think this is what researchers from those places). Some younger scholars have different disciplines have to think together. We enthusiastically engaged with it. The Korean have to take this opportunity to rethink the translation has already come out, and the existing disciplines and allow new thoughts to Chinese and Japanese translations will come out flourish. later in the year. đđđđđđđđđđGL: The gap between the intense use of đđđđđđđđđđIf we follow what Heidegger says – that digital technology and the fundamental world civilization is now completely based on understanding of the transformations caused by Western European thought – then the end of these technologies is growing by the day. What philosophy is also a call for other ways of would you suggest to bridge this gap? I don’t see thinking. Can the Global South rediscover its own this happening in Europe, a continent that is cosmotechnics and technological thought, and rapidly closing in on itself, becoming more and thereby give new direction to technological more regressive. Should we pin our hopes for development in general? Will the defeat of new technological thinking on Asia? Or should we Huawei in the recent political struggle between perhaps envision distributed networks of the US and China force the company to develop knowledge production? its own operating system, or will it just develop đđđđđđđđđđYH: We need to rethink the education another version of Android coded in Chinese? system and the existing divisions of disciplines This is decisive for a new technological agenda that have been adopted in the past several as well as a new geopolitics to come. decades. It is probably not possible to bridge the đđđđđđđđđđYou asked about philosophy of technology. I gap between already existing disciplines, since rarely present myself as a philosopher of when you attempt to bridge a gap, this gap is at technology unless I find myself in a situation the same time maintained. One possibility is to where I am forced to choose a narrow discipline. create a new discipline in which this gap no Like Stiegler, I tend to believe that technology is longer exists. the first philosophy. Philosophy has always been đđđđđđđđđđI spent the best time of my youth studying conditioned and called forth by the technological and working in England, France, and Germany. conditions of its given epoch. Europe is deep in my heart, but I am afraid that đđđđđđđđđđGL: Just as cybernetics has failed to replace Europe will be impoverished by its increasing philosophy in the academy, disciplines like racism and conservatism. I wouldn’t want to say “digital studies” and “internet studies” have yet that new technological thought will necessarily to catch on. At the same time, we’ve seen the rise come out of Asia instead of Europe, but I do of “digital humanities,” which has been given the believe that such thought can only emerge out of unholy task of innovating a dwindling field of the incompatibility between systems of thought, knowledge from the inside. Any humanities since it is the incompatibility between them that approach that is not data-driven is in fact fading leads to the individuation of thinking itself, away. What’s going on here? e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 2 — s p t m b 9 đ G L v i k C y b e r n t i c s f o h T w - F u : A I v P l p Y k H avoiding both subordination and domination. đđđđđđđđđđYH: Today, every discipline wants to have However, I have increasing doubts if Europe is artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big ready for this. It seems to me of ultimate data as their research subjects. We see it in importance to rearticulate the relation between sociology, architecture, philosophy, philosophy, technology, and geopolitics today, anthropology, media studies, the natural which I am afraid remains largely unthought. sciences – you name it. But as you suggested, đđđđđđđđđđ× the research questions are often rather narrow. I am not against digital humanities. The problem is

09.12.19 / 13:45:03 EDT Yuk Huiđis a philosopher based in Berlin. He is the đđđđđđ1 author of three monographs:đOn the Existence of Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency (Rowman & Digital Objectsđ(Univ. of Minessota Press, 2016),đThe Littlefield, 2019), X. Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnicsđ(MIT Press, 2016), andđRecursivity and đđđđđđ2 Contingencyđ(Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Hui, Recursivity and Contingency. Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist and internet critic. Since 2004 he has led the Institute of Network đđđđđđ3 Cultures. His latest book is Sad by Design (Pluto Press, Hui, Recursivity and 06/06 Contingency. 2019). e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 2 — s p t m b 9 đ G L v i k C y b e r n t i c s f o h T w - F u : A I v P l p Y k H

09.12.19 / 13:45:03 EDT