Art and Cosmotechnics

e-flux

Art and Cosmotechnics

Yuk Hui

Printed and Distributed by

the University of Minnesota Press
 CONTENTS

PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix

Introduction
On the Education of Sensibility

§1
THE HISTORICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF THE
TRAGIC COSMOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

§2
THE RECURSIVE LOGIC OF TRAGIC ART . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

§3
VARIETIES OF EXPERIENCE OF ART . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

§4
DAOIST VS. TRAGIST
COSMOTECHNICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

§5
THE OVERTAKING OF RECURSIVE
MACHINES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

§6
AFTER EUROPE, ART AND
PHILOSOPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
 Chapter 1
World and Earth

§7
ART AFTER THE END OF
PHILOSOPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

§8
THE OTHER BEGINNING
THROUGH ART . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

§9
TRUTH IN THE ARTIFICIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

§10
THINKING AND PAINTING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

§11
ART AND THE COSMIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

§12
EPISTEMOLOGY OF
THE UNKNOWN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
 Chapter 2
Mountain and Water

§13
VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE:
NOTES ON PHENOMENOLOGY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

§14
FIRST ATTEMPT CONCERNING
SHANSHUI: LOGIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140

§14.1
THE CONCEPT OF XIANG
AND XING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142

§14.2
THE LOGIC OF XUAN:
OPPOSITIONAL CONTINUITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154

§14.3
THE RECURSIVITY OF XUAN:
OPPOSITIONAL UNITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

§14.4.
THE COSMIC AND THE MORAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184

§15
THE REALM OF THE NOUMENON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191

§16
SENSING AND RESONATING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
 Chapter 3
Art and Automation

§1 7
THE STATUS OF MACHINE
INTELLIGENCE TODAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

§18
THE LIMIT OF ORGANICISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222

§19
THE INCOMPUTABLE AND
THE INCALCULABLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232

§20
INTELLIGENCE, REASON,
AND INTUITION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246

§21
SECOND ATTEMPT CONCERNING
SHANSHUI: PLACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254

§21.1
THE BASHO OF SHANSHUI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

§21.2
EMPLACING IN BASHO
AS RESITUATING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266

§21.3
SPACE AND PLACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272

§22
ART AS EPISTEMIC
REVOLUTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289

INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
for Johnson
 Figure 1.
Ma Lin (꼛뜿), Scholar Reclining and Watching Rising Clouds, Poem by Wang
Wei, 1225-75. Album leaf, ink on silk. 25.1 × 25.2 cm Cleveland Musuem of Art.
The dao that can be said is not the eternal dao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
Wu (nothing): the origin of heaven and earth.
You (being): the mother of ten thousand things.
Empty of desire, one perceives mystery.
Filled with desire, one perceives manifestations.
The two spring from the same source but differ in name;
Both are designated as xuan.
Xuan and again xuan,
gate to all mysteries.

—Dao De Jing

麥〳麥ꬌ䌢麥
そ〳そꬌ䌢そ
搂そ㣔㖒⛓㨥
剤そ蠝暟⛓嫢
佦䌢搂妝⟃錚Ⱖ㦫
䌢剤妝⟃錚Ⱖ䗧
姽Ⰽ罏ずⴀ罜殯そ
ず閗⛓桡
桡⛓⿶桡
滞㦫⛓Ꟍ

շ麥䗞竤ո
 [The artist] is perhaps,
without really wanting to be,
a philosopher.

—Paul Klee, On Modern Art

Because it is the artists, not the philosophers,

who are the first adventurers,
or, let’s say, the pioneers of thought.
Philosophy, as we know, is always a late riser.

—François Jullien, This Strange Idea of the Beautiful

 Preface

The current work can be read as the continuation of my last book,

Recursivity and Contingency, in which I introduced and enlarged
the concept of recursivity and formulated a history of recursive
thinking in Western philosophy. This book takes up aesthetics as
its subject; instead of treating it as an inferior faculty of cognition,
it transposes it to the realm of logic. In juxtaposition to the recur-
sivity of tragist logic and cybernetic logic explored in this work, it also
endeavors to sketch out the recursivity in Daoist thinking, which
I call Daoist logic. This interpretation was largely inspired by the
thinking of Wang Bi (226–249) from the Wei-Jin period as well as
the New Confucian philosopher Mou Zongsan (1909–1995).
I am neither an art historian nor an art critic, and this work
doesn’t pretend to belong to these fields. Art and Cosmotechnics
firstly responds to the yet-to-be-identified other beginnings after
what Heidegger called the end of Western philosophy by asking:
What is the position of art after the end of philosophy and in post-
European philosophy? Secondly, this book hopes to address the
relation between art and such philosophy yet to come by reopening
the question of art and its varieties of experience, to ask how aes-
thetic thinking could contribute to our inquiry.
This work started as a mediation on shanshui (literally moun-
tain and water) painting, an aesthetics that has lived within me since
my childhood. In 2015, when I was first invited by Professor Gao
Shiming to lecture at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, I redis-
covered these aesthetics that I had set aside after I left to study and
teach in Europe. I benefited from many discussions, though brief,
with Gao Shiming, and have always been impressed by his knowl-
edge of both Chinese and Western classics, as well as his creative
and provocative way of looking at the contemporary world. Since
then, I have taught in Hangzhou every spring together with Bernard
Stiegler, with whom I have had many discussions and promenades
along the West Lake. The China Academy of Art and Hangzhou’s
West Lake have been sources of inspiration instrumental to this

xix
 PREFACE

study. I remember late spring nights sitting on the edge of the lake
under sweeping willows, listening to the insects and looking into the
reflections of the water for hours without being disturbed. This rou-
tine was unfortunately interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic in
2020; and the discussion with Bernard will no longer be possible,
after all. Hangzhou will not be the same place without him. It was
also in Hangzhou that I had the chance to meet Johnson Chang, and
I have benefited greatly from his rich knowledge of Chinese culture
and aesthetics, his curiosity and passion for almost everything, and
his generosity. This work is dedicated to him.
The collection of modern paintings at the Berggruen Museum
in Berlin Charlottenburg has been of great inspiration; it was a place
where I spent many weekends. The warm invitation from Professor
Henning Schmidgen to teach at the Bauhaus University allowed me
to ponder upon the traces of Klee and Kandinsky, as well as to put
this manuscript together. I would also like to express my gratitude
to friends and colleagues who have read and commented on vari-
ous versions of the manuscript, including Barry Schwabsky, Martijn
Buijs, Pieter Lemmens, Anders Dunker, Jude A. Keeler, and Kohei
Ise; as well as to my students in Lüneburg, Weimar, Hangzhou, and
Hong Kong who participated in my seminars between 2016 and
2020. Lastly I would also like to thank Brian Kuan Wood and Colin
Beckett for their great editorial work, critical comments, and invalu-
able suggestions.

Yuk Hui
Spring 2021
Hong Kong

xx
 INTRODUCTION
ON THE EDUCATION OF SENSIBILITY