HEAVEN IS QUIET AND TECHNOLOGIES ARE EVERYWHERE: CHINESE COSMOTECHNICS AND DYADIC APPROACHES TO INTERNATIONAL STRUCTURE

Abstract

What constitutes the “practical” nowadays and how is it to be assessed? Can the concept of cosmotechnics, how technologies align with broader cosmic goals, be refined by recourse to Chinese traditions? In responding to these questions, I argue for a relational approach that considers technology and practical thinking, or techno-praxis, as a lens for interpreting political affairs. Drawing from philosopher Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics and the Neo-Confucian ti-yong (essence – function) dyad, a framework is proposed that synthesizes the technological and practical (qi-yong) in a dyad of its own. This dyad aims to provide a diagnostic cosmopolitics by focusing on notions of practicality and power, which are also reshaped by changes in dominant cosmotechnics. While qi-yong and techno-praxis form the primary dyadic center of this framework, how and in what fashion they relate are the other major theoretical foci of the dissertation. This involves making explicit the patterning of technical activities as an analytical space, and as part of general theorizations of patterning and their significance. Drawing on Gregory Bateson’s theory of cultural contact and schismogenesis, I conceptualize “dyadic patterning” as to how dyads are shaped through polarities of activity. Whereas common-sense understandings of politics primarily center the relational sensibilities of political groupings or state actors, techno-praxis as a dyad shifts towards the relation between technics/technicians/administrators and practices of power negotiation, with dyadic patterns between them at times reciprocally generative, symmetrically competitive, openly complementary, highly distanced, lopsidedly consuming, etc. This theoretical and genealogical construction of qi-yong/technopraxis culminates in two case studies, studying: (1) the patterned relations of technics and practices via readings of Chinese IR theorists, and (2) CCP approaches to technology under Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping. These cases also attempt to bring Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics into conversation with IR and the political practicalities of elite power. Following Yuk Hui’s contention that the ti-yong dyad of “Western science, Chinese culture” forwarded after the Opium Wars remains dominant, there remains a desperate need for responding to how technics and technologies are integrated with human activities and practices, with practices of power being the focus of this project. In so doing, I hope to not transcend (or discard) binaries like East/West, mind-body, or techno-praxis, but to seek the variety of possible relations and how their changing patterns can be constructively engaged from within