Review: Yuk Hui, ‘Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking’
Review of Yuk Hui’s Machine and
Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking
(University of Minnesota Press, 2024) 368 pages
Abstract
Technology has changed the way the world is ordered and organised. What relevance do sovereignty and the nation-state have in this new digital nomos of the Earth? Under what conditions might planetary thinking be made possible given the iron-grip that nation-states have over politics? Hui’s third book in his trilogy of a philosophy of technology develops a political epistemology through which to think about global crises: automated reason and artificial intelligence, ecological crises, and geopolitical conflicts. This review explores the problems of sovereignty that persist in Hui’s approach to planetary thinking and technodiversity.
Reviewed by Cera Y.J. Tan
As the final part of a trilogy of a philosophy of technology, Machine & Sovereignty (2024) takes up the question, left off by the first two books, of a political epistemology towards planetary thinking. In this book, Hui attempts to work through the question of technodiversity through the concept of sovereignty. Yet, insofar as Hui conceptualises sovereignty as pharmacological in both its “totalizing tendency” and its “power to shield off” this (external) force (Hui 2024: 247), the problems surrounding sovereignty demonstrated in Jacques Derrida’s reading of restricted to general economy do not quite go away (Derrida 1978). While Hui draws on Derrida’s more political works concerning sovereignty (Derrida 1990, 2003, 2005), following Stiegler’s misconception of the lack of politics and history in Derrida’s deconstruction of sovereignty, it becomes clear that the sovereignty at stake in Hui’s book cannot only be considered in the vein of the political, which Hui feverishly attempts to demarcate through Hegel and Schmitt. Sovereignty refers to excess (resources) that cannot be utilised and can only be lost—a use-less deconstruction of values undergirded by the global system today. It is from this concept of sovereignty that any inquiry into the new digital nomos of the Earth must begin.
Confronting limits
Hui takes us on a “long sojourn” to demonstrate the technical in the political and vice versa. In the search for a planetary politics beyond the constraints of the nation-state, the tractatus politico-technologicus sets out to uncover the limits of Hegel’s political form of the state and Schmitt’s Großraum. The method by which Hui imagines planetary thinking—through a recursive “exhaustion” of Hegel’s and Schmitt’s political theory and their limits—involves clearing a space for alternative (political) epistemologies to emerge (2024: 18). Indeed, by calling upon their theories in order to expose their limits, Hui, in exemplary deconstructionism, sets out the conditions upon which planetary thinking is made possible or impossible (2024: 264). As an extension of the crisis of (ecological, economic, military, techno-scientific) limits at the height of the Cold War, Hui turns the discussion towards (computational, systemic) limits and recursive systems that confront their own limits as necessary contingency for their operation rather than as catastrophe that halts the (industrial) machine (2015: 139).
In the first two chapters of Machine and Sovereignty, Hui deals with Hegel’s world spirit in relation the political form of the state through the epistemology of organism. The third chapter attempts to move from Hegel’s theory of the state to current domains of bioeconomy and cybernetics. Chapters 4 and 5 return to Schmitt, who offers a different political epistemology from Hegel to address the stalemate between technology and the state. The final two chapters turn towards the question of war vis-à-vis the political form of the state in order to conceive of a new language of coexistence. Here, Hui turns to Bergson and Leroi-Gourhan in an attempt to rethink democracy and technodiversity. At the heart of technodiversity lies the recursive negotiation between the local and the global, which the planetary, mediating the two but belonging to neither, attempts to intervene.
Parts and whole; local and global
Hui’s political epistemology of technology remains incomplete without a discussion of Heidegger’s negotiation of physis [φύσις] and logos [λόγος]. Heidegger, in ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ (1959), describes logos as the part of physis that reflects upon itself: logos breaks away [auseinandertritt] from physis and “set[s] itself up in opposition [gegenüber] to physis as the decisive domain, the source [Ursprungsort] of all determinations of being” (187). Logos (ratio, law, culture) is the part of physis that has split “itself” off from physis, in order to return to represent and speak about itself. The reflection of physis upon itself recalls the recursive function that Hui associates with opening up the system (of thinking, of reason) to contingency. For Heidegger, the opening risks transforming logos as truth into a tool, “organon”, as something that is “already there” (1959: 188).
This stalemate is what technodiversity and planetary thinking are up against—of the part/locality that speaks for the whole/global. This is also where the stakes of Hui’s divergence from Heidegger a la Bernard Stiegler lie. Whereas Heidegger’s pessimism views the organon of reason as a consequence of logos losing its essence, Hui, via Stiegler, argues that the organon or the exteriorisation of reason undergirds humanity in an epiphylogenetic process. The continuation of humanity is made possible not simply by inheritance of lofty idea(l)s like civilisation and culture, but rather by technics (writing, painting) that continue life by other means, a discussion found in Chapter 3: from Noetic Reflection to Planetary Reflection. The formation and continuation of the state, Hui observes through Stiegler, is an “exosomatic process” by which the ex-organism of the state maintains collective individuation processes of integration and coherence (Stiegler 2018: 29). In this way, Stiegler imagines politics as a manifestation of a “negentropic war against entropic capitalism” (Hui 2024: 193). Pushing this insight further and connecting Henri Bergson and Carl Schmitt in Chapter 6: An Organology of Wars, Hui observes that because of the state’s failure to address technological acceleration, the “new organs” of the state remain externalised where they should, in (Hegelian) spirit instead of merely in material, be internalised (2024: 195-97).
However, Hui’s working of internal/external collapses upon itself when considering the recursivity that mediates the two. The state, by its very structure, cannot recognise the external as always already internal—global platform services from financial and retail to food delivery and hospitality undergirded by labour from the Global South (Schmalz et al. 2023: 209); international climate laws that do not account for countries ecologically and politically impacted by the longue-duree of colonialism (Bochaton 2021; Pillay 2023). It is thus insufficient to find recourse in recursivity as an opening up of systems towards indeterminacy; it must be recognised that the return of logos, for all its recursive potential to incorporate contingency, always threatens to close rather than open the system. This is where sovereignty enters the picture.
Sovereignty and economy
Technology, Hui argues, has become the “main battlefield where different nation-states enter into conflict” (2024: 2). In Chapter 2: The Organism of the State and Its Limit, Hui observes that the state returns politics to a geo-politics, unable to transcend the nation-state to achieve a “great unity” of planetary politics (2024: 84). Hui treats sovereignty not simply as a tool of or synonymous with the state: sovereignty is not only a spatio-territorial phenomenon but also, because of the impasse of the organisation of the world into nation-states, very much an epistemological problem. The technics of sovereignty involve a management not just of inside/outside borders and territories, as Foucault associates with the Greek god, but also of norms/exceptions. More specifically, and through an engagement with Carl Schmitt in Chapters 4 and 5, sovereignty as expressed in the decision on the exception is undergirded by a logic, even an epistemology of decisionism. Turning from Hegel to Schmitt to account for the new nomos of the digital earth, Hui finds Schmitt’s Großraum running up against its political and epistemological limits in the digital realm not least because of the infrastructure Benjamin Bratton describes as the stack of digital platforms which opposes sovereignty at the same time that it is undergirded by it (2024: 189).
By yoking sovereignty to epistemology, Hui imposes a task on sovereignty which requires it to “open a new epistemological condition that transforms the megamachine and radically renews its relation to it” (2024: 247). In other words, sovereignty is tasked with recursively revisiting the relationship between the technical and the political in the megamachine of science, technology, and nation-state.
What, then, makes Hui’s recursivity exempt from the totalising enframing of ratio as logos and reason, especially if the gesture by which logos can return to speak for and represent physis is precisely recursive? If recursivity opens the system towards contingency and accidents in order to think beyond the enframing of (Western) rationality and science of knowledge, how can we ensure the non-rational, the incalculable, or the Unknown (Unbekannte) through which Hui a la Heidegger speaks about cosmotechnics and technodiveristy does not simply get repurposed by the recursive gesture (2021: 123)? Luciana Parisi (2019) warns us of the danger of this recursive movement in subsuming all contingencies, fossilising them to norms—where the mechanism of the norm is established between living being an its milieu (Hui 2019: 191)—to form the entire horizon of stagnant, infinite (in the combinatorial sense that Leibniz explored) thought so that the future of thinking has been colonised in advance. Her recourse to Laruelle’s Philosophical Decision that comes only at the last moment, is a bid towards forestalling contingency as mere fuel for recursivity (2021).
Hui provides no definitive answer to this problem of recursivity. Instead, he moves to invoke the image of an inexorable economy of power and knowledge which sovereignty maintains and in which it is implicated, Chapter 5: Nomos of the Digital Earth makes an apposite, if belated, return to Derrida and the question of a democracy to-come (avenir). Shifting the discussion of democracy as a political concept to the technical means by which democracy is enacted within and across state borders, Hui aligns the question of democracy from the 90s to the question of a democratisation of knowledge and technology (2024: 219). Post-broadcast media and their effect on national elections; bots and web brigades in the dead internet theory; neo-colonial military warfare (Downey 2023); Asian and indigenous LLMs (Kite 2017); fauxtomation and AI running on third world labour (Kate Crawford 2021). These are the variegated stakes of the intersection of technical systems and sovereignty today.
Sovereignty thus features as the force behind the recursivity that Hui imagines negotiates localisms and nationalisms, heterogenisation and homogenisation. Hui turns to Kant and trade as a mediation of borders based on “community and reciprocity” (2024: 227). The algorithm of international trade proposed by Kant and taken up by Hui ensures cooperation between different people and different localities (2024: 76). Those who “behave poorly” on the international stage will be “discredited and refused commercial activities” (Ibid). In recursively considering the local in the global or the global in the local, trade is undergirded by sovereignty and how “frictionless” the borders can become. Indeed, Bishop and Roy have observed how International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) operates as “the legal and administrative lubricant” to move across borders (2021). What, then, are the stakes of sovereignty in technodiversity?
Towards technodiversity
In attempting to think through technodiversity, Hui argues in Chapter 7: Toward an Epistemological Diplomacy that “[e]ach fragment is an individual that recursively produces a small system and joins with other fragments to create an organic whole. The system is not a closed system since, unlike the dialectical method, fragments join each other through resonances but not through borders or doors.” (2024: 240-41). In fact, Hui points out the false association of cybernetics with surveillance capitalism and societies of control. Whereas pre-emptive technologies across domains of consumerism and security are implicated in closed systems that strive to occupy the vantage point of Laplace’s demon (2024: 198)—of having the information that reverses the entropic march towards use-less energy, cybernetics and recursivity a la Norbert Wiener and Gilbert Simondon work with open systems by which contingency stands not as an “exhaustion of possibilities” but rather an encounter with limits (2024: 202). To Heidegger’s question of the end or completion of (Western) philosophy, Hui argues that the dialectical method has fallen out of favour because of its tendency to subsume locality under (hegemonic) universality rather than maintain fragments of localities connected via resonance to a larger universal due to techno-logos.
Yet, Hui’s move away from the dialectical method is symptomatic of his reading of sovereignty as restricted rather than general economy. Derrida observes that “[o]nce sovereignty has to attempt to make someone or something subordinate to itself…it would be retaken by dialectics, would be subordinate to the slave, to the thing and to work” (1978: 335). This means that even if Hui signals the end of dialectics in thinking planetarily, dialectics will continue as the method by which limits are indefinitely deferred as long as we continue to put to work our knowledge, science, and technology towards maintaining the megamachine: this is the stalemate already hinted at in Heidegger’s demonstration of logos.
Hui misses the angle of sovereignty as “useless, senseless loss” (Derrida 1978: 342) when he turns to sovereignty as gift. Sovereignty in international relations enters into a restricted economy of power over borders, both metaphysical and territorial. Through Karatani’s imaginary scenario in which military sovereignty is gifted to the United Nations, or more pointedly, the national is gifted to the inter-national, Hui attempts to find a way out of the impasse of either rejecting or embracing sovereignty, both of which reify the nation-state-capital economy (2024: 260). Hui considers the possibility of techno-science as a gift through Fichte’s treatise on the Closed Technological State (2024: 262). Techno-science, according to Fichte, seems to fulfil the criterion of a gift set out by Karatani in that it cannot be rejected: it remains a connection that cannot be eliminated. In other words, techno-science holds the potential of overcoming the inexorable economy of borders, knowledge and warfare, by constituting the very technical conditions upon which humanity is made possible in the first place. This is what Hui implies when he brings sovereignty (as gift) back into the fold of techno-science towards thinking of an epistemological diplomacy in the twenty-first century.
Yet, once the national is gifted to the inter-national, it becomes yet another means of deploying (national) technology to (inter-national) work: the Hegelian Aufhebung moves from general to restricted, from infinite indetermination to infinite determination. A gift, as an aporetic gesture, interrupts the economy of exchange. Derrida (1992), through Marcel Mauss (1990), argues that a gift, in order to be a gift, cannot be reciprocated (which is altogether different from rejection), else it ceases to be a gift and becomes mere commodity in an economy. With infinite determination of the same system, recursivity no longer confronts the very limits that Hui affords to transcending the existing world order.
This problem of sovereignty is what Hui finds himself up against and which he fails to grapple except in the moment when he implicates the stalemate through David Lapoujade’s observation: “human experience is a prisoner of circles, of all the innumerable circles that the intelligence imposes on thought and that make the human species turn around on itself. Man is literally surrounded by his intelligence. If there is something that Bergson didn’t stop combatting, it is these circles, precisely because they make it impossible for us to carry out the necessary leaps to change the level of reality” (Lapoujade 2018, qtd in Hui, 2024: 204). Only an understanding of recursive sovereignty and its tendency towards a restricted economy of circles can the level of reality be changed.
References
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Cera Y. J. Tan is a Lecturer at the Singapore University of Social Sciences. Her research interests include critical theory and continental philosophy, media studies and philosophy, cultural studies and theory, and the philosophy of technology. Her works have been published in the journals Cultural Politics and Media Art Study and Theory. She is currently working on her monograph on the undecidables of philosophical and computational systems, and what they bring to bear on the question of critique in an age of automated reason.
Email: ceratanyj@suss.edu.sg / cera@u.nus.edu
