Machine and Ecology

Bibliographic Data

ID4887508
AuthorsYuk Hui (0000-0002-3242-9819)
Year2020
Volume25
Issue4
Pages54-66
Publication date2020-07-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAngelaki (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0969-725X • E-ISSN: 1469-2899
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0969725x.2020.1790835
OpenAlexW3046960178
LanguageEN
Citations received17
References cited7

This article investigates the relation between machine and ecology, and the philosophical and historical questions concealed in these two seemingly incompatible terms. The opposition between machine and organism was fundamental to philosophical projects since the eighteenth century. However, the emergence of cybernetics in the first half of the twentieth century proposed a unified logic which transcended the dualism between machine and organism, or technics and nature, and therefore also the opposition between machine and ecology. Cybernetics poses a limit to philosophy, which Heidegger called the end of philosophy, and also a challenge for thinking. If the promises of cybernetics are effective, does it suggest also that cybernetics is the way out of modernity? Or is it rather, as we want to suggest here, that after cybernetics it is no longer a dualism which is the source of danger in our epoch, but rather a non-dualistic totalizing power present in modern technology? If one cannot simply oppose machine and ecology, we demand a political ecology of machines, which will center on the concept of technodiversity, in the sense of a systematic approach for understanding the history and plurality of cosmotechnics and their diverging futures by revisiting the question of locality

Binary opposition · Biology · Cybernetics · Dualism · Epistemology · Modernity · Opposition (politics · Politics · Relation (database · Sociology · Alexander von Humboldt Studies · Computer Science · Earth Systems and Cosmic Evolution · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life · Ecology · Law · Philosophy

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