AFTERALL PAGE 60 A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry

Contexts
 Yuk Hui

AFTERALL PAGE 61 A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry

 ON THE PERSISTENCE OF THE NON-MODERN
A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry

Yuk Hui

Farewell, phantoms! The world no longer needs

you – or me. By giving the names of progress to
its own tendency to a fatal precision, the world
is seeking to add to the benefits of life the
advantages of death. A certain confusion still
reigns; but in a little while all will be made clear,
and we shall witness at last the miracle of an
animal society, the perfect and ultimate anthill.

–Paul Valéry, The Crisis of Spirit

1. THE MODERN
1919, right after World War I, Paul Valéry lamented the crisis of
the European spirit in the form of two letters. In view of the
devastation of many lives and cities seen at the culmination of
the modern epoch, Valéry wrote: ‘Europe in 1914 had perhaps
reached the limit of modernism.’1 The modern epoch had
turned out to be a Faustian nightmare. Phantoms – symbols
of the non-modern – were being expelled from the world as it
turned towards mere scientific constructs and technological
exploits. These phantoms, however, continue to haunt the
modern. Modernity was characterised by a technological
unconsciousness willing infinite progress. By a technological
unconscious, I mean the supposition that human beings
could advance history according to their will and desire while
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ignoring the apparatus that makes the will possible, and that
turns desires into nightmares. Philosopher Gilbert Simondon
saw in it a progressivist optimism, which was paradoxically
motivated by technology and the desire to lay transparent
such technologies, which he identified, for example, among the
eighteenth-century French encyclopaedists.2 This optimism
confronted its own misery towards the end of the nineteenth
century, just as Nietzsche had described decades earlier
in aphorism 124 of The Gay Science, titled ‘In the Horizon of
the Infinite’:

We have forsaken the land and gone to sea! We have

destroyed the bridge behind us – more so, we have
demolished the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out!
Beside you is the ocean; it is true, it does not always roar,
and at times it lies there like silk and gold and dreams of
goodness. But there will be hours when you realize that
it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than
infinity. Oh, the poor bird that has felt free and now strikes
against the walls of this cage! Woe, when homesickness
for the land overcomes you, as if there had been more
freedom there – and there is no more ‘land’!3

Those who believe in infinite progress ultimately realise that

the most fearsome thing ever is the infinite. Technologies they
believe might assist them towards the realisation of humanity
turn out to usher in a process of dehumanisation, or to result
in nothing more than the realisation of an anthill. However,
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modernity didn’t end in 1919. World War II was yet to come, Previous page: Hand-coloured lithograph
actualising the anxiety of the modern through the outbreak from Joseph Josenhans, Bilder aus der
Missionswelt (Images from the World of
of one of the most miserable disasters in history, from which Missions), Mainz: Scholz, c.1860
Europe more than 70 years later has not yet fully recovered.

A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry

At that same time in East Asia, this anxiety was expressed in
the explicit outcry of the Kyoto school philosophers, whose
slogan of ‘overcoming modernity’ is now often associated with
the philosophers’ engagement with ‘total war’, imperialism,
nationalism and fascism.

While it is not possible to exhaust the complexity of the concept

of modernity, the episodes above allow us to appreciate a
certain discomfort with the term ‘modern’; and it is in this
respect that we may understand the title of Bruno Latour’s
book We Have Never Been Modern.4 And yet, modernity
remains with us. Decades of efforts to disprove the assumption
that modernity is a monopoly of the West, there have arisen
ideas of a Chinese modernity, a Japanese modernity, an East
Asian Modernity and so on. In 2014, the exhibition ‘Modernités
plurielles de 1905 à 1970’ at the Centre Pompidou in Paris
showed more than a thousand works from almost four hundred
artists.5 It was a large-scale attempt to demonstrate that the
discourse of modernity should be extended beyond Europe.

But what is meant by modernity? And what does it signify,

besides a certain pretention to cultural diversity and equality,
to emphasise that there have been plural modernities? Is it
not more urgent, in view of global technological acceleration,
to consider the non-modern? I understand the non-modern
not as that which is not yet, and will become, modern, but
rather as that which resists becoming modern, and probably
won’t ever be. The effort of this essay is to demonstrate why

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I prefer to rearticulate the non-modern instead of, on the one
hand, the pursuit of a national or regional modernity, which
probably never existed, and in any case risks being parasitical
on forms of nationalism, and on the other, the transmodern of
Enrique Dussel, which like most of the postcolonial discourses,
unconsciously undermines the question of technology.6

How can the non-modern be an exodus from modernity? One

might ask if, by opposing the modern and the non-modern, we
are not still in a sense falling prey to the modern, such resistance
being its verso – its reactionary other? In order to think with
and beyond the non-modern we will have to clarify confusions
around the term modernity. This is beyond the scope of the
present text but to briefly make the attempt: first, modernity
must be distinguished from modernism as artistic and literary
genres – the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, for example, the
prose of Charles Baudelaire and the painting of Paul Cézanne;
second, it should not be confused with modernisation, which
is a process of universalising epistemologies that emerged
during and developed since the period of European modernity,
and is often equated in vague terms with modern science
and technology. The pursuit of the ‘modern’ in non-European
countries concretises in the modernisation of agriculture,
industry, defence, and science and technology. Modernity in
its narrow sense is an epistemological and methodological
rupture, which began in sixteenth-century Europe. Modernity,
in this sense, concerns the production of knowledge, or rather
– to use the language of Kant – the sensible condition under
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which knowledge is produced. Here we may want to echo

Michel Foucault when he says, in What is Enlightenment?:
 Thinking back on Kant’s text, I wonder whether we
A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry

may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than

as a period of history. And by ‘attitude,’ I mean a mode
of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice
made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and
feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and
the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents
itself as a task.7

Modernity, for Foucault, is a particular way of thinking and

feeling, or more precisely an episteme, to use the term of his
earlier work The Order of Things, in which he characterises
three epistemes in Europe since the sixteenth century, namely
the Renaissance, the Classical and the Modern.8 This is also
the reason for which I reinterpret the notion of episteme as
the sensible condition under which knowledge is produced.
I emphasise the question of sensibility because it is also that
which makes the co-existence of different epistemes possible.
Modernisation is a process that universalises these forms of
thinking and feeling through a process of colonisation by the
West, facilitated by navigation and military technologies that
propagate this rupture outside of Europe. We can probably
say there has been a process of modernisation in China, Japan
and Korea, for example, but I am not sure if it is legitimate to
claim that there has been a Chinese, Japanese, Korean or even
an East-Asian modernity. I do not mean that modernisation
without modernity is necessarily bad or vice versa, nor is such
a dichotomy necessarily helpful to the question of ‘badness’;
I mean only to say that modernisation in Europe was different
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from modernisation outside of Europe. Outside of Europe,

there is little continuity in the nature of the rupture, nor does
it take place in dialogue with its past. Indeed, it is only when
history and tradition lose their grip on the ever-transforming
technological environment that the process of modernisation
can accelerate.

2. THE POSTMODERN
I think it is necessary to distinguish modernity as an historical
event from modernisation as a world historical process, or
more precisely a process of technology’s universalisation of
knowledge on a global scale. Modernity renewed an image
of the world that, somewhat contrary to the Copernican
turn, reaffirmed a certain geo- and anthropo-centrism. The
concept of the modern here becomes a pivot on which
the articulation of a world history turns, going from the pre-
modern, through the modern, to the postmodern. Is the
postmodern an overcoming of the modern? It is precisely
around this question that Enrique Dussel has cast doubt, and
proposes to talk instead of the transmodern:

In effect, beginning with the ‘postmodern’ problematic

about the nature of Modernity – which is still, in the final
instance, a ‘European’ vision of Modernity – we began to
notice that what we ourselves had called ‘postmodern’
was something distinct from that alluded to by the
Postmodernists of the 1980s. [...] For this reason, we saw
need to reconstruct the concept of ‘Modernity’ from an
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‘exterior’ perspective, that is to say, a global perspective

(not provincial like the European perspective). This was
 necessary because ‘Modernity,’ in the United States and

A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry

Europe, had (and continues to have) a clearly Eurocentric
connotation, notorious from Jean-François Lyotard or
Gianni Vattimo through Jürgen Habermas, and in another,
more subtle manner even in Immanuel Wallerstein, which
I have called a ‘second Eurocentrism.’9

Dussel is right that, seen from its outset, the postmodern is

a reflection on and a critique of European modernity. As he
continues: ‘Post-modernism is a final stage in modern European/
North American culture, the ‘core’ of Modernity. Chinese or
Vedic cultures could never be European post-modern, but
rather are something very different as a result of their distinct
roots.’10 It thus becomes intriguing to ask what it means for
non-European cultures like China to embrace the postmodern
without ever having been modern. Does this discontinuity not
suggest the bankruptcy of the idea of a perfect world history
structured around modernity? However, contra Dussel’s
critique of Lytoard, I would like to argue that the perspective of
transmodernity misses one central theme of the postmodern
discourse, which I want to call technological consciousness.

I refuse – and I do so with reasons I have discussed elsewhere –

to see Lyotard as a merely Eurocentric thinker.11 In comparison
with the technological unconsciousness of the moderns, the
postmodern discourse developed by Jean-François Lyotard
from 1979 was largely driven by a technological consciousness.
What is meant by technological consciousness? Lyotard’s
1979 publication The Postmodern Condition: A Report

PAGE 65
on Knowledge was a response to the rapid technological
transformation of society, especially under the influence
of information and communication technologies.12 Lyotard
sees that a new epochal sensibility is demanded in order to,
first of all, understand this transformation and, second (and
more importantly) to destabilise the modern way of thinking.
If the modern sensibility was characterised by a demand for
certainty, order, domination and progress, the postmodern one
is characterised by feelings of insecurity, anxiety, uncertainty
and sublimity.

In other words, Lyotard sees that new technologies, products

of the modern, dialectically destabilise modernity; therefore,
instead of seeing these new technologies – from information-
to nanotechnologies – as products of or continuations of
the modern, he demands that they be understood, via a new
sensibility, as means of subverting the modern.13 I would like
to emphasise that Lyotard’s concern for technology is as
something to be reclaimed – something with a transformative
power to render the modern sensibility obsolete. Although
Lyotard never calls postmodern sensibility an episteme in
Foucault’s sense, it seems right to doubt what else could it be.14

The discourse of postmodernity that centres on technological

consciousness is not a familiar one within discussions of
the postmodern, neither in the West nor in Asia. For Fredric
Jameson, for instance, the postmodern is the cultural logic of
late capitalism – such logic is one aspect of the postmodern
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episteme, but it doesn’t necessarily capture the spirit of the

postmodern itself. A neglect of technological consciousness
 is present in almost all secondary discourses around the
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postmodern. The same goes with Dussel’s discourse of

the transmodern, in which the central role of technology is
nowhere to be found.15 Not to say that Dussell paid no attention
to technology, but simply that it never became a thematic
in his theory of the transmodern. However, without such a
technological consciousness, how can a true liberation be
possible? Let’s look at Dussel’s solution:

Modernity will come into its fullness not by passing from

its potency to its act, but by itself through a corealization
with its once negated alterity and through a process of
mutual creative fecundation. The transmodern project
achieves with modernity what it could not achieve by
itself – a corealization of solidarity, which is analectic,
analogic, syncretic, hybrid and mestizo, and which bonds
center to periphery, woman to man, race to race, ethnic
group to ethnic group, class to class, humanity to earth,
and occidental to Third World cultures. This bonding
occurs not via negation, but via a subsumption from the
viewpoint of alterity [...].16

What Dussel emphasises here are transversal dialogues

between different cultures, creating a solidarity that
incorporates their different points of view, including that of
European modernity. In other words, non-European cultures
can learn from modernity while at the same time developing
a critique of it from their own standpoints. However, how
such a transversal dialogue is possible when the whole
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world is transformed by an overpowering technological

force remains unclear. For Martin Heidegger, this gigantic
technological force is the realisation of a specifically Western
metaphysics. Realisation here means at the same time end
and accomplishment. The development of technical systems
and their constant convergence on a global scale is an
expression of this kind of great completion. In 1964, Heidegger
writes that: ‘[t]he end of philosophy proves to be the triumph
of the manipulable arrangement of a scientific-technological
world and of the social order proper to this world. The end
of philosophy means: the beginning of the world-civilization
based upon Western European thinking.’ 17 If Heidegger is right,
a reopening of world history can only be achieved by starting
with this as necessity in order to go beyond it and to render
it contingent.18 I am not sure how many transversal dialogues
have really been developed in the past decades; to the
contrary, what we have been witnessing are wars, wars of every
form. The gigantic technological force that is in the process
of transforming the Earth cannot be subverted unless this
force itself necessarily becomes the subject of interrogation
and transformation. Or as Heidegger says in ‘Wozu Dichter?’
(‘What Are Poets For?’), an essay dedicated to the poetry of
Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘[I]t may be that any other salvation than
that which comes from where the danger is, is still within the
unholy [Unheil]’.19

As an interlude to this section, a comment from Arnold Toynbee

seems to us very relevant today, when he tried to explain Asian
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countries’ naive importation of Western technology in the

nineteenth century. Namely, he claimed that Far Easterners
in the sixteenth century refused the Europeans because the

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latter wanted to export both religion and technology, while in
the nineteenth century, when the Europeans only exported
technology, the Far Eastern countries considered technology
a neutral force that could be mastered by their own thought.
The result is, as Toynbee rightly observed: ‘this technological
splinter [...] which did succeed in pushing its way into the life of
a Far Eastern society that had previously repulsed an attempt
to introduce the Western way of life en bloc – technology and
all, including religion.’20

3. THE NON-MODERN
Today, decades after the emergence of the transmodern
discourse, the term has resurfaced to haunt us, along with the
non-modern. What remains of it that can be reaffirmed? And
what has yet to be updated? I believe that Dussel’s critique
of a perfect history, recounted as the succession of the pre-
modern – modern – postmodern, is worth bringing back to the
table. It remains problematic to situate non-European countries
in a world history based on a European discourse. However,
merely deviating from European discourse is not enough,
since a true ‘world history’ remains to be opened up. To the
prevailing linear history, I would like to add one more milestone:
pre-modern – modern – postmodern – apocalypse. The
apocalypse captures the sentiment of our epoch: ecological
crisis, the Anthropocene, robot revolts, AI governmentality, the
colonisation of outer space and the coronavirus pandemic that
we are confronting. The Übermensch that we will all become
thanks to the promises of human enhancement remains a

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cowardly longing for an eschatology, in the hope that after
catastrophe a new beginning ought to begin.

In recent years, in view of the ecological crisis and the

declaration that human beings have entered the era of
the Anthropocene – an era that reaffirms a historical
anthropocentrism – there has been another wave of thought
proposing to overcome modernity by rearticulating the non-
modern. The so-called ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology,
closely associated with the work of Philippe Descola and
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro among many others, is such an
attempt to overcome modernity by undoing those categories
that are central to the modern project. These thinkers do so
by returning to the non-modern. Descola, the successor to
Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France, has proposed
to re-examine the concept of nature. Nature as it is understood
today in the globalised world refers to the non-man-made
environment surrounding us. It is a modern construction based
on the opposition between nature and culture that Descola
calls ‘Naturalism’. Nature is here considered to be the opposite
of culture and at the same time an object to be mastered by
culture or the ‘spirit’. However, this naturalism is not a default,
but rather a fault. In Beyond Nature and Culture, Descola cites
the diary of Henry Michaux, written when the writer returned to
Paris in 1928 after having visited a friend in Ecuador.21 The trip
required that they canoe alone for a month along the Amazon
river. Upon their arrival at Belém do Pará, Michaux describes
an amazing scene that problematises the modern concept of
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nature: ‘A young woman who was on our boat, coming from

Manaus, went into town with us this morning. When she came
 upon the Grand Park (which is undeniably nicely planted) she
A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry

emitted an easy sigh. “Ah, at last, nature,” she said, but she was
coming from the jungle.’22 The role that the non-humans – the
jungle, leopards, plants – play for the Amazonians is not that of
nature understood today. Indeed, in these Indigenous groups,
one finds forms of knowledge irreducible to those based on
the division between nature and culture.

It was in the process of globalisation that Naturalism was

universalised, at times seeming irreversible. This univer-
salisation of naturalism was exemplified in a song composed
for the Science Society of China founded in 1915. The melody
was composed by Chao Yuen Ren in 1923, a linguist who later
joined the Macy Conference on cybernetics (1946–53) and the
lyric was written by Hu Shi, one of the most celebrated Chinese
intellectuals of the twentieth century:

擬中國科學社社歌詞
曲﹕趙原任；詞﹕胡適

我們不崇拜自然。他是一個刁鑽古怪；
我們要捶他，煮他，要叫他聽我們的指派。
我們要他給我們推車；我們要他給我們送信。
我們要揭穿他的秘密，好叫他服事我們人。
我們唱天行有常，我們唱致知窮理。
明知道真理無窮，進一寸有一寸的歡喜。

Song of the Chinese Science Society

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Melody: Chao Yuan Ren; Lyrics: Hu Shi

We do not worship nature. He is a tricky and weird;

We have to beat him, boil him, and tell him to listen
to our assignments.
We want him to push wagons; we want him to deliver
letters for us.
We need to expose his secrets so that he can serve us.
We sing that heavens act perpetually, and that we dare
knowing the truth.
We know that truth is infinite, still feel joyful when
moving every inch forward.23

What we can see in this lyric is the idea that meaning is

no longer to be deducted from nature, as was central to
ancient Confucian and Daoist thought, but rather that nature
is something to be explored and exploited. Can we say that
this is an advancement of history in the sense of becoming
modern? Or does it rather suggest a need to problematise
the knowledge that we today call modern? How can we make
sense of any reminiscence of the non-modern besides being
haunted by it? Alas, how relevant is Confucian moral philosophy
to the autopilot cars and sex robots of the twenty-first century?
Could such thoughts realise anything other than a new age
of psychotherapy?

By rearticulating the non-modern, anthropologists call for what

they term multinaturalism. Let a hundred natures blossom, in
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order to re-enchant the Anthropocene. But is it sufficient to just

go back to multinaturalism? Or, is this return to nature a mere
reiteration of what Dussel calls a transversal dialogue, which

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ignores the technological consciousness on which Lyotard
relentlessly insisted?

For my part, I am convinced that in order to reopen world

history in the wake of this linear caricature, the task is no longer
simply to do with preserving non-modern knowledge forms,
which constantly haunt us, but rather with conceiving a future
for such knowledge. To have a future means to be active and
relevant; to be active means to be able to participate in the
life of the mind. We must therefore consider the technological
consciousness of postmodern discourse a critique but also a
supplement, to the transmodern.

In The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay

in Cosmotechnics, I propose to reopen the question of
technology by asserting a multiple cosmotechnics, as well as
multiple histories of cosmotechnics.24 ‘Cosmotechnics’ is a
concept I use to redefine the concept of technics as a deviation
from its conception in the twentieth century, in which it was
typically limited to the Greek technē and modern technology.
However, the question of whether Chinese technology or
Indian technology can be reduced to the Greek technē
remains. Or despite the common role played by technology
in the process of hominisation, namely the becoming of
human being, shouldn’t we also reassert the existence of a
technological diversity within this process, and render it visible
for re-examination? How, then, can we articulate a multiple
cosmotechnics and to what extent is this articulation useful

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to imagining a technodiversity in the Anthropocene? Here lies
what I call an antinomy of the universality of technology:

Thesis: technology is an anthropological universal, understood

as an exteriorisation of memory and the liberation of organs
as some anthropologists and philosophers of technology
have formulated.

Antithesis: technology is not anthropologically universal, it is

enabled and constrained by particular cosmologies, which go
beyond mere functionality or utility. Therefore, there is not one
single technology, but rather multiple cosmotechnics.

The antithesis is where we can identify and position the non-

modern. It is that which refuses to be reduced to a linear
historical process and which resists expulsion from the world.
In the first volume of his Science and Civilisation in China, the
great sinologist Joseph Needham has asserted multiple times
that it is not productive to compare Chinese science and
technology with that of the West as if they were the same,
one being more advanced than the other in different periods
of a linear and unique history.25 In the second volume, with
the subtitle History of Scientific Thought, Needham continues
his assertion that Chinese scientific and technological
thought is fundamentally organistic and that unlike the early
European moderns, for example, Descartes, it has never
been mechanistic.26 Today, as an après-coup, we may want
to understand what Needham said as an invitation to look into
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different scientific and technological regimes of thought.

 I have proposed to use China as an example through which to
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speculate on a possible technological thought, with a specific

history, that is centred on the discourse of unity between Dao
and Qi. This unity could be analogically understood in terms of
the unity of the ground and the figure in the sense of Gestalt
psychology.27 I attempt to use these two categories Dao and Qi
to develop a line of thought that deviates from the understanding
of a universal technics, and to demonstrate that this thought
has its own history, indeed demands such a history if it is to
have a possible future. Yet, this is only the beginning of a long
journey. I think that if we want to go beyond modernity, and if
the non-modern is to mean something beyond the modern’s
mere reverse, or that which negatively adheres to the modern,
then the persistence of the non-modern has to be understood
as a transformative power, which allows, or at least serves a
starting point, for the reopening of a technodiversity.
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El Lissitzky, Tatlin at Work,

1921–22, collage, 29 x 23cm
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1 Paul Valéry, ‘The Crisis of the Mind’, in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry
Vol. 10, History and Politics (trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Matthews),
New York: Bollingen Foundation and Pantheon Books, 1962, p.28.
2 See Gilbert Simondon, ‘The Two Fundamental Modes of Relation Between
Man and the Technical Given’, in On the Mode of Existence of Technical
Objects (trans. Cecilia Malaspina and John Rogove), Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp.103–27.
3 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (ed. Bernard Williams), Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001, p.119.
4 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (trans. Catherine Porter),
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
5 ‘Modernités plurielles de 1905 à 1970’, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 23 October
2013–26 January 2015.
6 See Enrique Dussel, Filosofias del Sur: Descolonización y
Transmodernidad, Mexico: Akal and Inter Pares, 2016.
7 Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The
Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, p.39.
8 Here, Foucault defines an episteme as follows: ‘In any given culture and at
any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the
conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or
silently invested in a practice.’ M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An
Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London and New York: Routledge,
2005, p.183.
9 E. Dussel, ‘Transmodernity and Interculturality: An Interpretation from
the Perspective of Philosophy of Liberation’, Transmodernity: Journal of
Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, vol.1, no.3, 2012,
p.37, available at https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6591j76r (last accessed
on 20 January 2021).
10 Ibid. Emphasis original.
11 See Yuk Hui, ‘§25, Anamnesis of the Postmodern’, The Question
Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics, Falmouth, UK:
Urbanomic, 2016/2019, pp. 269–82; Y. Hui, ‘The Inhuman that remains’,

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Recursivity and Contingency, London: Rowman and Littlefield International,
2019, pp.233–78.
12 See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge (trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi), Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984; it is said that the report itself was a
response to another report authored by Simon Nora and Alain Minc under
the title L’informatisation de la société, a report to then President of France
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, later translated into English as The
Computerization of Society, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981.
13 See Y. Hui, ‘Towards a Relational Materialism. A Reflection on Language,
Relations and the Digital’, Digital Culture & Society, vol.1, no.1, pp.131–47.
14 The postmodern as episteme was instead elaborated by Jean-Louis
Déotte. See J.-L. Déotte, ‘Ce que je dois à Foucault’, Appareil, no.4, 2010,
available at http://journals.openedition.org/appareil/913 (last accessed on
22 March 2021).
15 Here I would like to thank my friend Walter D. Mignolo for confirming my claim.
16 E. Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of ‘the Other’ and the
Myth of Modernity (trans. Michael D. Barber), New York: Continuum, 1995.
17 Martin Heidegger, ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’, On
Time and Being (trans. Joan Stambaugh), New York, Hagerstown, San
Francisco and London: Harper & Row, 1972, p.59.
18 See Y. Hui, ‘Machine and Ecology’, Angelaki, vol.25, no.4, 2020, pp.54–66.
19 M. Heidegger, ‘What Are Poets For?’, Poetry, Language, Thought (trans.
Albert Hofstadter), New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2001, p.115.
20 Arnold Toynbee, The World and the West, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1953, p.67.
21 See Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (trans. Janet Lloyd),
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
22 Ibid., p.32.
23 See Chao Yuan Ren’s library, hosted by the Chinese University of Hong
Kong, http://chaoyuenren.lib.cuhk.edu.hk/music01.htm (last accessed on 18
March 2021). Translation the author’s.
24 See Y. Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China, op. cit.
25 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China. Vol. 1, Introductory
Orientations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954.
26 J. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China. Vol. 2, History of Scientific
Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956. However,
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whether Chinese thought is organismic in the sense Needham gave to it is

another question.
27 This is further elaborated in Y. Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
AFTERALL PAGE 72 A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry
 A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry
PAGE 73
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Installation view, ‘Les Immatériaux’, Centre Pompidou,

Paris, 1985. Photograph: Jean-Claude Planchet.
© Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI Bibliothèque Kandinsky.
Courtesy RMN-Grand Palais