On Sinofuturism: Cosmotechnics and Dis-orient-ation

In The Question Concerning Technology in China, Yuk Hui claims that sinofuturism as it exists in its current form, i.e. as a hypercapitalist/communist hybrid with “Chinese characteristics”, is ultimately an acceleration of the European modern project which has taken hold across the world. To conceptualize a new future requires moving beyond this project in such a way that the local takes on a new significance, not merely in the form of a reutilization of indigenous knowledge or vernacular aesthetics, but as inherently tied to, and reflective of, the global. As Hui writes:

[T]oday, the task of overcoming modernity through modernity brings us to the question of specificity and locality. Locality is not the reassuring alternative to globalization, but its “universal product”. If we want to talk about locality again, then we must recognize that it is no longer an isolated locality […] but must be a locality that appropriates the global instead of being simply produced and reproduced by the global. The locality that is able to resist the global axis of time is one capable of confronting it by radically and self-consciously transforming it — rather than merely adding aesthetic value to it.

Overcoming modernity through modernity recognizes the same philosophical imperative that underlies anti-hauntology. Localized aesthetics are not enough to counter the aesthetics of the apocalypse. In order to move beyond modernity as it exists now — trapped in its Backrooms and virtual plazas, haunted by digital ghosts symbolising the end — we must reconceptualize what localization means in relation to globalization.

Indeed, the Backrooms and their liminal counterparts are a perfect example of a Westernized subconscious made real through the digital image; they are a specifically localized dystopia that has become global. The disquieting nature of the Backrooms is a by-product of Western industrial capitalism’s infiltration into the very concept of space. Hell, for the contemporary urbanized consumer in China, Europe, and America, is no longer fire, flames and eternal damnation, but the endless drudgery and disorientation of the office environment.

However, as Hui notes: “‘Disorientation’ does not mean simply that one has lost one’s way and doesn’t know which direction to choose; it also means the incompatibility of temporalities, of histories, of metaphysics: it is rather a ‘dis-orient-ation.'”

Here, Hui’s play on words works on multiple levels. The first refers to the malaise diagnosed by Bernard Stiegler in Technics and Time 2, which places disorientation at the center of his critique of contemporary industrial capitalism. The second highlights the loss of grounding that so-called “oriental” societies have, according to Hui, been going through since the slow embracing of the European modernist project from the nineteenth century onwards.

The drudgery of the Backrooms, this boredom at the end of the world, is no longer limited to the West; it is slowly transmuting itself into a universal concept. We merely need to look at China’s tǎng píng (literally “lying flat”) movement, which advocates a simple way of life, rejecting the typical hyper-competitive lifestyle many young Chinese urbanites are forced into, to see this in action. Here, like similar movements that have taken place in other parts of the world, many of the urban youth in China are seeking a form of resistance against the disorientation that arises from the combination of Western industrial capitalism and Chinese collectivist history, which, Hui claims, also implies a loss of metaphysical grounding. So, perhaps tǎng píng can be seen as a short-lived remedy to the dual notion of dis-orient-ation, but it is not a long-term solution. The malaise of the end is ever present.

Here it is useful to remember the words of David Graeber who claimed that “the world we inhabit is something we made, collectively, as a society, and therefore, that we could also have made differently.” The point raised by Hui, which also underlies anti-hauntology, resonates strongly with Graeber’s statement. To Hui, different ways of imagining the world — our different thought structures and cosmologies — have an active effect on the technics of the future. This new form of thinking is what Hui calls “cosmotechnics”. It emphasizes that our scientific and technical thinking emerges under cosmological conditions that are expressed in the relations between humans and their milieus. These relations are never static. They can always be reimagined.

Therefore, in order to reappropriate modern technology away from the Western industrial model, the first requirement is to reconfigure the fundamental metaphysical grounds that underpin our understanding of technologies in general; the second is to reconstruct a new episteme upon this ground which will serve as the condition for technical invention, development, and innovation, in such a way that these innovations will no longer be mere imitations or repetitions of Western industrial technologies. This cosmotechnical approach to the creation of a new future would allow contemporary societies across the world to re-orient themselves not only temporally (in relation to the past and the future) but spatially and technologically (in relation to their cosmological milieu). It is the first step in overcoming modernity and moving past the techno-logic of the end.

So, where do we go from here? With anti-hauntology breaking down the temporal specificities of cultural production, and cosmotechnics re-imagining the local and the global, what future can we now imagine? What new language will be made with the semiotics of the end? The future is ours to make. This afterword has sought to take on board the lessons of Deleuze and Guattari and “start at the end”, but of course, this is only one small step (for man) in the right direction, it is up to us collectively to decide where to take the giant leap (for mankind). To conclude, I will leave my readers with another quote from Yuk Hui; a philosopher who understands this all too well. As he writes at the end of his book:

One will certainly have to understand science and technology in order to be able to transform them, but after more than a century of “modernization”, now is the moment to seek a new form of practice, not only in China but also in other cultures. For China addressed in this book is only one example, and only one of many possibilities. This is where imagination should take off and concentrate its efforts.

Let us use our imagination to concentrate our efforts away from the logic of despair, towards the logic of hope. Only then can we rewrite the future after the end.

Bibliography

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It, London: Penguin, 2019.

Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics, Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2016.

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.