Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking

by Yuk Hui

Developing a new political thought to address today’s planetary crises What is “planetary thinking” today? Arguing that a new approach is urgently needed, Yuk Hui develops a future-oriented mode of political thought that encompasses the unprecedented global challenges we are the rise of artificial intelligence, the ecological crisis, and intensifying geopolitical conflicts.

Machine and Sovereignty starts with three premises. The first affirms the necessity of developing a new language of coexistence that surpasses the limits of nation-states and their variations; the second recognizes that political forms, including the polis, empire, and the state, are technological phenomena, which Lewis Mumford terms “megamachines.” The third suggests that a particular political form is legitimated and rationalized by a corresponding political epistemology. The planetary thinking that this book sketches departs from the opposition between mechanism and organism, which characterized modern thought, to understand the epistemological foundations of Hegel’s political state and Schmitt’s Großraum and their particular ways of conceiving the question of sovereignty. Through this reconstruction, Hui exposes the limits of the state and reflects on a new theoretical matrix based on the interrelated concepts of biodiversity, noodiversity, and technodiversity.

Arguing that we are facing the limit of modernity, of the eschatological view of history, of globalization, and of the human, Hui conceives necessary new epistemological and technological frameworks for understanding and rising to the crises of our present and our future.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

368 pages, Hardcover

Published October 29, 2024

About the author

Yuk Hui studied Computer Engineering and Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong and Goldsmiths College in London, with a focus on philosophy of technology. He currently teaches at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Between 2012 and 2018 he taught at the institute of philosophy and art (IPK) and Institute of Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media of the Leuphana University Lüneburg where he wrote his habilitation thesis. He is also a visiting professor at the China Academy of Art where he teaches a master class with Bernard Stiegler every spring. Since 2019 he is Visiting Associate Professor at the School of Creative Media of City University in Hong Kong. Previous to that, he was a research associate at the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics of Media (ICAM), postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Research and Innovation of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and a visiting scientist at the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin. He is initiator of the Research Network for Philosophy and Technology, an international network which facilitates researches and collaborations on philosophy and technology. Hui has published on philosophy of technology and media in periodicals such as Research in Phenomenology, Metaphilosophy, Parrhesia, Angelaki, Theory Culture and Society, Cahiers Simondon, Deleuze Studies, Intellectica, Krisis, Implications Philosophiques, Jahrbuch Technikphilosophie, Techné, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, Appareil, New Formations,Parallax, etc. He is editor (with Andreas Broeckmann) of 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory (2015), and author of On the Existence of Digital Objects (prefaced by Bernard Stiegler, University of Minnesota Press, March 2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China. An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, December 2016), and Recursivity and Contingency (Rowman & Littlefield International, February 2019). His writings have been translated into a dozen languages.

Reviews

[Alexander Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most important works of philosophy on techno-politics to be published since the turn of the millennium. I have my qualms, but undeniably this work is a monument that can't be ignored and deserves a respectable response.

Despite really appreciating this work, this book does not answer precisely what "technodiversity" is or how it functions in relation to statist politics which is the the ground on which Hui positions the book. That said, it invites a basis on which a plurality of responses can be made. This book invites well formed solutions more than creates them, a point of which Hui seems to find more important. For that, I don't fault the book. The problem is well formed. The solution is to come.

[R. S. Alamsyah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hui's Machine and Sovereignty is an attempt at creating a "Tractatus-Technologico-Politicus." Such an ambitious goal entails a synthesis and exploration of various major political ontologies and epistemologies, mechanistic (Cartesian, Hobbesian, etc.) and organistic (Kantian, Hegelian, etc.). It seems at first as an attempt to create an heir to Kant's perpetual peace, advocating for a 'planetary thinking' beyond the nation-state. Hui, instead, interestingly moulds a theory which seeks to both expand and go beyond the theories of Hegel and Carl Schmitt, both who are traditionally read as mere nationalists. In the end, he carves out a systematic political philosophy based on a vision of a planetary polity which reconciles political universality with geographic localism qua 'technodiversity,' which intends on bringing about a technological reason that isn't limited to European and American rationality.

Hui amalgamates different theories, from Georgescu-Roegen's entropic economics, Wiener's Cybernetics, and Karatani's capital-nation-state to illustrate his view. The breadth of his references is diverse, but it weighs down on the readability and the coherence of "Machine and Sovereignty." Hui's original thought feels buried. The book could have benefited from an increase in length, and an expanded exploration of his normative ideas.

[D · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lo peor que ha escrito Yuk Hui. No resuelve el problema planteado entre tecnodiversidad y planetariedad, y apenas piensa esta última. Es más bien una exposición de los sistemas de Hegel y Schmitt acompañada de algunas ideas propias.

[Dave Tilley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good book. Deep and yet accessable.