Writing and Cosmotechnics

Yuk Hui

Abstract
This paper aims to approach the notion of writing in the digital age in
order to reflect on the question of technodiversity, or the multiplicity
of cosmotechnics. It takes off with what seems to be two criticisms
against each other: one from Derrida’s Of Grammatology, where he
claims that ‘the notion of technics can never simply clarify the notion
of writing’; and the other from Stiegler’s Discretising Time, where he
openly criticized Derrida, ‘I think that Derrida unfortunately has never
really explored the condition of the history of the supplement’. The
essay elaborates on the contexts of these claims and suggests that this
‘indirect’ debate could be read as a parallax concerning the diversities
of writing, one horizontal and the other vertical. Derrida, this essays
argues, through his setting up of opposition between Hegel and Leibniz,
Western phonogram and Chinese pictogram, substance and relation,
proposes a diversity of writings which cannot be reduced to each other;
while Stiegler by outlining a history of grammatisation, from literal,
to analogue and now digital writing, proposes that philosophy has to
be rethought according to this history and its respective technological
conditions. This essay proposes synthesizing Derrida and Stiegler’s
claims to reflect on the future of technodiversity.
Keywords: deconstruction, technics, Stiegler, Derrida, writing, digital

Derrida Today 13.1 (2020): 17–32

DOI: 10.3366/drt.2020.0217
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/drt
 18 Yuk Hui

. . . jamais la notion de technique

n’éclairera simplement la notion d’écriture
– Derrida (1967, 18)

Histoire [du supplément] dont je pense que

Derrida n’a malheureusement jamais
réellement exploré les conditions
– Stiegler (2000, 117n6)

1. Technics as Supplement
This essay will take off from the above two quotations from Jacques
Derrida and Bernard Stiegler and will formulate our inquiry based on the
differences that are underlined by these two quotations and that remain
yet to be elaborated. This first quotation from the very beginning of
De la grammatologie (1967) seems crucial to go beyond what Derrida
himself calls ‘supplement’, a concept that has been widely considered
to be at the centre of his method of deconstruction, especially with
regard to technics. To put it briefly and probably in an over-simplified
way: technics is the support that enables the play between protention
and retention (in the sense of Edmund Husserl) and it is also this
‘retention and protention of differences, spacing and temporalizing,
différance a play of traces’ that gives us the concepts of difference and archi-
writing (Derrida 2004, 289). After the above opening quotation, Derrida
continues by saying that ‘on the contrary, we believe that a certain
type of question of the meaning and origin of writing precedes or
at least merges with a certain type of question on the meaning and
origin of technics’. What does Derrida want to suggest here? Is there
a temporal discrepancy between the origin of writing and the origin of
technics? Can we interpret this in the following way: that writing can
never be reduced to a general or universal understanding of technics as
supplement?1
The quotation from Bernard Stiegler seems to suggest that Derrida had
never gone far enough into the history of supplement. The history of the
supplement is the history of writing, which according to Stiegler could
be understood, in a rather comprehensive periodization, in terms of
literal, analogue and digital writing. What Stiegler is claiming is that the
notion of the supplement, and therefore the method of deconstruction,
 Writing and Cosmotechnics 19

remains too general to respond to our epoch, which is historical since it

conditions and is conditioned by its technological medium.
We want to ask: is it because Derrida ignored the history of the
supplement that he arrived at the conclusion that technics could never
simply clarify the notion of writing? In other words, does Derrida’s
claim come out of his insufficient understanding of the supplement,
as Stiegler has stated? Or, is it that Derrida already saw that even if
one exhausts the history of the supplement, one could still never clarify
the notion of writing with the notion of technics? Because the concept
of supplement remains universal and general, it cannot be sufficient
to explain the diversity of writing? We see that two quotations may
suggest two diverse notions of writing: one is horizontal: there are
different writing systems, alphabetical and non-alphabetical writing, as
Derrida has explored in On Grammatology and that we will examine
in detail later; the other is vertical: there is a history of writing, which
implies different technologies, that would be literal, analogue and digital.
Between these two quotations, we find a ‘parallax’ of diversities, and
it is this parallax that seems to me to be able to allow us to open a
new inquiry into the question of writing today, and the question of
technology in general, which I term cosmotechnical (Hui 2017).
This difference between Derrida and Stiegler – staged here as a mutual
critique – is crucial for our inquiry because I believe that these two
‘nevers’ never (jamais) truly engaged with each other, and that a parallax
in our opening quotations urges us to look for an interpretation of
the relation between writing and technics that is yet to be questioned
and completed. We will attempt to show how these two statements
can be interpreted and how we must re-read both thinkers in light
of the domination of digital writing today. We want to situate our
interpretation of both thinkers around the question of digital technology
for two reasons. First of all, we want to (re)evaluate their comments on
the relation between technics and writing; and secondly, we want to put
forward a new agenda concerning digital writing.
Derrida lived through the first decades of digitalization, and used
the computer to write for the first time during the occasion of the
exhibition Les Immatériaux co-curated by Jean-François Lyotard at
the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1985.2 Derrida’s concept of the
supplement and his development of pharmacology is fundamental for
the study of technology today. However, his commentaries on digital
technology remain general. One can find occasions where Derrida gave
statements such as, ‘[email] even more than the fax, is on the way to
transforming the entire public and private space of humanity, and first
20 Yuk Hui

of all the limit between the private, the secret (private or public), and the
public or the phenomenal’ (Derrida 1996, 17). Derrida is not close to
technology. According to Benoît Peeters, Derrida’s biographer, Derrida
was afraid of using email.3 By contrast, Stiegler started his career as a
‘philosopher of technology’, and entered the intellectual scene in France
with an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 1988 entitled ‘Memory
of the Future’, concerning the impact of digital technologies, and later
served as acting director at the National Institute of the Audiovisual
[INA- institut national de l’audiovisuel] and later director at the
Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music [IRCAM]
before establishing the Institute for Research and Innovation [IRI] in
2006 within the Centre Georges Pompidou. In other words, Stiegler’s
relation to technology is closer than Derrida’s, and we can therefore
understand that his critique of Derrida’s undermining of the history of
the supplement comes largely from Stiegler’s personal engagement with
technology.

2. Technicity and Diversity

If our previous interpretations of the two quotations are justified with
regard to the difference in understanding of the diversity of writing in
Derrida and Stiegler (which we characterized as horizontal and vertical),
then what do these differences mean for digital technology today? If
Stiegler is right in his critique of Derrida, then digital technology could
problematize Derrida’s thinking on technics and writing. If Derrida
is right in his statement concerning the irreducibility of writing to a
general interpretation of technics, then it forces us to look into what
this would mean for digital technology. I would like to associate this
difference with what the palaeontologist and anthropologist André
Leroi-Gourhan calls the difference between the ‘technical tendency’ and
‘technical facts’. Leroi-Gourhan played an important role in Derrida’s
Of Grammatology and Stiegler’s first volume of Technics and Time (and
his other writings). According to Leroi-Gourhan, the technical tendency
can be compared to the necessity of physical laws where, for example,
in almost all civilizations we can find the use of flint and the wheel. (We
have never seen a squared wheel being used for transportation). Now,
within this universal technical tendency, we observe a diversification
of artefacts across different cultures. This diversification is caused by
cultural specificities, but also reinforces them, in a kind of feedback loop.
Leroi-Gourhan calls these specificities ‘technical facts’ (Leroi-Gourhan
1973a, 336–40; 1973b, 27–35). While a technical tendency is necessary,
 Writing and Cosmotechnics 21

technical facts are accidental: as Leroi-Gourhan writes, they result from

the ‘encounter of the tendency and thousands of coincidences of the
milieu’ (Leroi-Gourhan 1973b, 27). The invention of the wheel is a
technical tendency, whether or not wheels will have spokes is a matter
of technical fact. If we give ourselves the liberty to summarize the
difference between technical tendency and technical facts, we can say
that technical tendency is universal because it is determined by laws
of nature, while technical facts are particular as they are influenced by
both the interior milieu (for example, tradition) and exterior milieu (for
example, natural resources, or the influence of other tribes or clans).
It seems to me that Stiegler has taken up what Leroi-Gourhan calls
the organized inorganic largely as a question of technical tendency,
a necessary process of hominization qua evolution. The organized
inorganic also corresponds to the concept of the supplement since
it suggests that tools are artificial organs; the invention of tools is
a parallel process involving the externalization of memory and the
liberation of bodily organs. We may also be able to understand archi-
writing in terms of technical tendency, but in comparison, it seems that
Derrida took very seriously, at least in Of Grammatology, technical
facts and went much further than Leroi-Gourhan’s anthropological
approach.
We may want to understand Stiegler’s critique of Derrida’s ignorance
of the history of the supplement in two ways. First, beyond Derrida’s
effort, Stiegler proposes a periodization of modes of writing, which
we have cited earlier, from literal writing to analogue and now digital
writing; second, each form of writing corresponds to a specific epoch and
also conditions the political, social, economic and spiritual life of each
epoch. A significant technological invention will disrupt the stability of
the relationship between the human system and the technical system, for
example the introduction of digital technology imposes legal, political,
economic and social challenges to the previous regime, which we can
also understand in terms of epoch and epokhē, of suspension; the human
system will have to suppress and rebalance the technical system in order
to restore order.4 It is for this reason that Stiegler wants to introduce a
new approach, which he calls digital studies, in contradistinction from
digital humanities.
If we accept the periodization of writings as Stiegler proposed,
we will immediately find ourselves confronted with the question of
the diversity of writing. Is digital writing a universal writing? Or,
what does one really mean by digital writing? More concretely, let us
raise this seemingly naïve question: will digital writing eliminate the
22 Yuk Hui

diversity of writing because digital technology today is the medium

of synchronization? We borrow the term synchrony and diachrony
from linguistics. Synchronicity concerns language at a certain point in
time, for example, the present; diachronicity concerns the development
and evolution of a language through history. Synchronicity is aligned
with synchronization, since it requires a standard to be shared by all
the parts to be synchronized; but this raises the question of whether
synchronization will destroy heterogeneity. It also opens the question of
the heterogeneity that arises from interpretation, weakening or undoing
the opposition between synchrony and diachrony. As Stiegler himself
has claimed, the invention of the Greek alphabets also generated the
distinction of other dialects, with this synchronization giving rise to law,
which enabled the foundation of the polis and literature and other literal
forms of art, which in turn opened spiritual life (Stiegler 2017, 74). If
we follow this logic, then we can legitimately argue that today, with
the invention of digital writing, synchronization has become much more
powerful, becoming the very foundation of what we call digital cultures.
However, in the above argument, there are two major presuppositions.
First, there is a technological determinism that sees culture as the product
of this synchronization process mediated by technology, from literal
writing to analogue writing and now digital writing. The sacrifice of
diachronicity – or the loss of the dynamism and diversity of language
before synchronization – can be justified for the sake of culture. Second,
it may give us an impression that there is only one lineage of technology
from the premodern to modern and now postmodern, or from literal
writing to digital writing, in a way comparable to the concept of progress
and the spirit of Enlightenment humanism.
What is the limit of this synchronization and the limit of the
differences produced by it? I think this is the key to engaging with
the difference between Derrida and Stiegler, and it is important to
read both of them together, instead of reproaching Stiegler with
Derrida or vice versa. I believe that both of them were talking about
diversities in two quite distinct dimensions. In Of Grammatology,
Derrida opened the question of techno-diversity which he then did not
pursue further in his career. His discourse on technodiversity centres on
the difference between European phonetic writing and Chinese pictorial
writing. In sinology, Chinese writing has been referred to as having
the form of an ideogram. In the section that follows, I contest this
characterization, because I do not think that the question of form,
of eidos, is central to Chinese writing, as Derrida has understood
as well.
 Writing and Cosmotechnics 23

3. Phonograms versus Pictograms, or Hegel versus Leibniz

The difference between Western phonetic writing and Chinese pictorial
writing has been articulated for centuries. According to Derrida’s
reading, the European conception of Chinese writing could be divided
into two attitudes, which would either be ‘hyperbolic admiration’,
incarnated in Leibniz, or ‘ethnocentric scorn’, exemplified by Hegel
(Derrida 1998, 87). Of Grammatology has lengthy expositions
dedicated to elaborating the differences between Leibniz and Hegel,
which could be read, I would argue, as an exploration of the cosmo-
technical thinking of the East and the West. We know that Leibniz
admires Chinese writing, not only because the I Ching hexagrams
resemble the binary system that he had developed earlier, but also
because it seems to him a rather developed system based on visual
symbols. The Chinese had used a limited amount of visual symbols to
create a language possessing a high capacity for expression, akin to what
Leibniz aspired to in his ‘best of the possible worlds’:
God has chosen the most perfect world, that is, the one which is at the same
time the simplest in hypotheses and the richest in phenomena, as might be a
line in geometry whose construction is easy and whose properties and effects
are extremely remarkable and widespread. (Leibniz 1989, 39)

Chinese writing confirms Leibniz’s optimism: it is possible to find such

symbols and rules of combination that would allow a perfect and
global language to appear. Chinese writing remains an inspiration for
Leibniz’s creation of a characteristica universalis. We would like to
note that characteristica universalis is considered to be the philosophical
foundation of today’s digital writing and Leibniz is considered the
patron saint of cybernetics. However, there is no simple, linear
relationship between Chinese writing, universal characters and digital
writing. Rather, as we will see more clearly, the complexities (in
both technological and political senses) have yet to be evaluated. The
universal character is universal in the sense that it is visual and therefore
it may be able to bypass phonetic differences:
Those who know the Chinese characters are right to believe that it will
become a universal character, whose written form would be understood by all
the world. If all peoples in the world could agree on the designation of a thing
by a character, one people could pronounce it differently from the other. And
we could introduce a Universal Symbolism . . . . (Leibniz 1981, 290)

Hegel reproached Leibniz by saying that Chinese written language is

imperfect because there is no correspondence between the written and
24 Yuk Hui

the spoken; and indeed, it is an obstacle to science. The German language

is superior and easier to learn since it only employs twenty-six letters,
while on the contrary, ‘the Chinese do not have twenty-six letters,
but instead many thousands of characters (Zeichen). The number of
them necessary for ordinary purposes is 9,351, and in the opinion of
some more than 10,000; scholars need 80,000–90,000’ (Hegel 2011,
239–40). Against this, Hegel claims that ‘only to the exegeticism of
Chinese spiritual culture’, its ‘analytic notation of representations . . .
which seduced Leibniz to the point of wrongly preferring this script to
the alphabetic, rather contradicts the fundamental exigency of language
in general, namely the noun’ (Derrida 1998, 25–26). How might we
understand this fierce comment from Hegel? Derrida explains that by
noun, it means substantiality, that other name of presence and of ousia
(often translated as essence). In Plato, the ideal form (eidos) behind
all empirical appearance of a particular being is its essence. Aristotle’s
Metaphysics (Book Z) proffers three candidates for ousia: 1) matter;
2) form; 3) a compound of form and matter. But ultimately, Aristotle
reserved for form (eidos) alone the name of ousia (Aristotle 1956,
1028b4). It is for this reason that I object to referring to Chinese
characters as ideograms since it is inaccurate to think of idea in the
Greek sense. I prefer the term ‘pictogram’ since Chinese characters are
less oriented to the ideal form of being, but rather to the relation among
beings. In this respect Hegel is still within Western metaphysics, an onto-
theology opened by Plato and Aristotle, while Leibniz, partially with
the influence from the Jesuits in China, especially Father Bouvet, has
attempted to go beyond such a view.
We can at least claim that in Of Grammatology, Derrida provided
a synthesis for the readers to understand these two ‘technical facts’ of
Chinese and Western characters philosophically. It is true that both
writings could be thought of as supplements, as exteriorized memory and
that there is a mechanism of archi-writing at play in terms of different
orders of retention and protention. However, there are significant
differences that are probably ‘prior to’ (if not coincident with) the
origin of technics. These differences are fundamental and irreducible
to the technical mediums of expression. The Chinese also had cave
paintings (as in the West). However, they developed a writing that
was informed by a different cosmology and different philosophical
temperament. With this in mind, we may want to reconsider Derrida’s
strategy of opposing substance and relation, and their incarnations in
phonetic writing and pictorial writing. Substance and relation are two
categories full of tension within the history of Western philosophy.
 Writing and Cosmotechnics 25

In Aristotle’s Categories, we know that relation is considered one of

the nine accidents of substance (subject); however, by the end of his
section on the ‘relative’ in Categories, Aristotle left the interpretation
open-ended:

Indeed, if our definition of that which is relative was complete, it is very

difficult, if not impossible, to prove that no substance is relative. If however,
our definition was not complete, if those things are only properly called
relative in the case of which relation to an external object is a necessary
condition of existence, perhaps some explanation of the dilemma may be
found. (Aristotle 1991, 8a28–34)

It is beyond our scope here to trace how the relation between substance
and relative was investigated in the medieval time by philosophers such
as Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas, Albert the Great, Henry of Ghent, or
Duns Scotus. Our purpose here is only to point out that substance
and relation remain two irreconcilable concepts in Western philosophy.
These concepts remain contradictory until the more recent emergence
of a philosophy of relation, exemplified in the work of Alfred North
Whitehead. The fraught relation between substance and relation brings
us to the distinction between synchronization and heterogeneity. Derrida
claims with regard to Hegel’s phonocentric proposal for the ‘Aufhebung
of other writings, particularly of hieroglyphic scripts and the Leibnizian
characteristics’ that ‘non-phonetic writing breaks the noun apart’
(Derrida 1998, 25). Derrida continues, ‘It describes relations and no
appellations . . . in this regard Leibniz is as disturbing as the Chinese
in Europe’ (Ibid., 26).
Today, with Leibniz no longer among us, the Chinese may become
even more disturbing in the digital age: digitization in China operates
at a much faster pace than elsewhere in the world. We are in an
age of global technological competition tending towards technological
singularity. Digital technology is the medium of synchronization, and
one is justified to doubt if this synchronization could really open a
diachronization, or whether it would only open a limited heterogeneity
within a highly homogenized system (in the same way that multi-
culturalism has been contained within a secular and modernized society).
Derrida hinted at the tension between a substantial thinking and a
thinking based on relations, but he didn’t enter into the question of
relation here, since it is a thinking different from the Western tradition,
and that is also why Heidegger also renounced the development of a
theory of relation in paragraph 18 of Sein und Zeit after his analysis of
the ready-to-hand. We must be careful to state things correctly: it is not
26 Yuk Hui

that there is no relationality in alphabetical writing. The composition

of a word can be analysed according to relations such as vowels and
consonants, prefix and postfix, subject and predicates in the sentence.
This is also why Bertrand Russell in The Principles of Mathematics
criticized Aristotelian logic based on subject and predicate, arguing
instead for a calculus of relation and relata (Hui 2016). So what is
the question of relation that Derrida hinted at but did not explore?
Leibniz hypothesized that Chinese writing started with the hexagram
and evolved into the pictogram. This may be questionable when we
study the history of writing in China with some degree of care, but
Leibniz’s claim that both hexagram and pictogram come from the
observation of phenomenon and pattern is also not without reason. In
one of the most important ancient commentaries of the I Ching, Xi Ci
we can read:

Anciently, when Bao-xi had come to the rule of all under Heaven, looking up,
he contemplated the brilliant phenomenon exhibited in the sky, and looking
down he surveyed the patterns shown on the earth. He contemplated the
ornamental appearances of birds and beasts and the (different) suitabilities of
the soil. Near at hand, in his own person, he found things for consideration,
and the same at a distance, in things in general. On this he devised the
eight trigrams, to show fully the attributes of the spirit-like and intelligent
(operations working secretly), and to classify the qualities of the myriads of
things. (Xi Ci II)5

Writing is a visual abstraction of the movement or change of

phenomenon, which is called xiang ( ); it means phenomenon but also
image. Chinese writing is a philosophy of things, as the Bishop of Chester
John Wilkins famously says. The basic construction of Chinese writing is
pictograms, but not all Chinese characters are drawings of patterns and
phenomena, since there are also other techniques being used to construct
characters ( ). However, pictograms
remain the basic model, and it is also famously claimed by the Tang art
historian Zhang Yanyuan (c.815–875) that painting and writing come
from the same source in China (Zhang 1993).
Concerning the question of pattern, we can read a critique of
substantialism that was articulated by the cybernetician Gregory
Bateson. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, when commenting on Alfred
Korzybski’s famous dictum that ‘the map is not the territory’, Bateson
argued that Western thinking is essentially a thinking of substance that
ignores the question of pattern:
 Writing and Cosmotechnics 27

Figure 1. The evolution of the character , which means both elephant and
phenomenon/image.

[H]is statement came out of a very wide range of philosophic thinking, going
back to Greece, and wriggling through the history of European thought over
the last 2000 years. In this history, there has been a sort of rough dichotomy
and often deep controversy. There has been a violent enmity and bloodshed.
It all starts, I suppose with the Pythagoreans versus their predecessors, and the
argument took the shape of ‘Do you ask what it’s made of—earth, fire, water,
etc.?’ Or do you ask, ‘What is its pattern?’ Pythagoras stood for inquiry into
pattern rather than inquiry into substance’. Cybernetics in the 20th century is
also an intellectual movement that wants to move away from a substantialism
into a process characterized by feedback and recursive operations. (Bateson
2000, 455)

In contrast to the anti-substantialist thinking that Derrida among others

proposed, a philosophy of relation is what I have been attempting to
construct since my first book On the Existence of Digital Objects, which
is a study of relational thinking in and beyond the digital. Writing is
not simply an abstraction of meaning, which embeds logical relations
(which I call discursive relations, namely that which could be articulated
by language); it also embeds what I call existential relations, meaning
the relation between the human and its external world. We will see that
the unified meaning of a character can be decomposed into parts with
different meanings, which are relations and significations being observed
in the world and the cosmos. For example, we look at the character, that
means legal or law ( ). On the left we have water; on the right, we have
the symbol of ‘go’. Law means precisely letting flow like water. Another
character, to rest ( ), is a human next to a tree; the tree and human
relation constitutes rest.
If you can follow me so far, we come to understand what Derrida
says and what we quoted at the beginning of this essay: ‘the notion of
technique can never simply clarify the notion of writing’. This needs to
be understood in a sense that is probably different from what Derrida
28 Yuk Hui

himself wanted to say – at least it is beyond archi-writing as technics.

We see that Chinese writing as a practice of traces embeds already
rich relations and patterns that could not be identified in phonetic
writing. This relational way of composition embeds an original way
of describing the human and its cosmos. To write is not simply to
deliver communicative meaning but also to ponder about the relation
between the human and the cosmos. Of course, these uncanny relations
hide themselves when one develops the habitude of writing, so that
the mind alone becomes the subject of enunciation and exteriorization;
however, it is also by mastering writing as an art, instead of a mere
means of communication, that one understands the relation between
writing and the Dao. The sixth century literary scholar Liu Xie says
in his classic, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons that ‘[t]he
Dao inspires writing and writing illuminates the Dao’ (Liu 1983). In
ancient China, to say that someone can write does not mean the same
as today – writing or typing an article – but rather means that someone
can practice calligraphy. To become a writer is to be a calligrapher, to
master the art of writing, to give spirit to the pictogram, to search for
the Dao through writing.
Of course we are no longer in ancient times, and modernization
has rendered such traditions obsolete. The spirit of dao was displaced
by modern astrophysics, and fled in the face of Elon Musk’s Tesla
Roadster. With digital writings, everything could be reduced to twenty-
six character alphabets, which could be further reduced to ASCII code
then binary code; yet there are different ways of reduction, just as there
are different input methods. Without going too far back into the history
of Chinese typewriters, and without listing all the input methods, we
would like to show two major input methods, one used in Taiwan and
Hong Kong (traditional Chinese) and the other in Mainland China.
The first one, named after the inventor of writing, Canjie (below left,
Figure 2), is based on the composition of pictograms; the character law
( ), for example, can be decomposed into three symbols. The second is
based on Romanization (below right, Figure 2), which is today called
Pinyin.
The Romanization of Chinese writing was a project already instigated
at the beginning of the twentieth century, a project that even proposed to
abandon hieroglyphic writing completely and instead adopt alphabetical
writing. Fortunately it has not yet been abandoned, but the project
of Pinyin (26 character alphabets) is almost complete. Here we would
like to pause with a question: what is the point of coming back to the
question of Chinese writing and its differences from phonetic writing
 Writing and Cosmotechnics 29

Figure 2. Screen captures made by the author.

if all of them could be typed with alphabets? The aim is not to return
to an ancient way of writing, but rather to step back and ask if there
are different histories of technologies, and if so, what are the relations
between these technologies, and the human and the cosmos? With
writing as an example, we tried to show that it is not possible to identify
and compare phonetic writing and non-phonetic writings in a narrow
sense, namely the exteriorization of sound and practice of traces. Writing
is here also a metaphor, it is not reducible to a technique or a general
concept of technics, but rather it is that which situates technics within
a cosmic reality in the same manner that a ground relates to figure in
Gestalt psychology. The ground stabilizes the form while the form also
transforms the ground. However, when it produces a subversion of form
and ground, then we arrive at what Gilles Deleuze calls a transcendental
stupidity, and that is the danger that we are facing.
In recent years Stiegler has been proposing what he calls the
‘bifurcation of the future’ in the biological sense, namely that the current
technological development is moving towards an impasse and that it
fails to produce differences, or in his own words: we are living in an
epoch without epoch (Stiegler 2018). He turned towards open source
movement and hacker culture in order to look for alternatives both
within and beyond industry, and has more recently expressed his own
vision of a new urbanism in St Denis in the north of Paris.6 How is
this opening of the question of technology and hence time or future
possible at all? In order to conceive such a bifurcation of the future,
or as I prefer calling it a ‘fragmentation of the future’, I suggest that we
conceive of a multiplicity of technologies, which I call ‘cosmotechnics’
as a complement to Stiegler’s idea. This diversity should be conceived
beyond the European history of epistemology and technology.7
It is through the reading of Derrida and Stiegler that we arrive at
two notions of diversity and two philosophical histories of diversity. We
30 Yuk Hui

are not reproaching one with the other but rather suggesting that they
complement each other. Derrida’s contribution in Of Grammatology
can be illuminated through a parallel reading of Stigler’s work; without
such a reading it risks being obscured by the question of cultural
difference or a critique of phonocentrism and Eurocentrism (though
such a critique is still very much needed). Our inquiry cannot stop here;
there are still many unresolved questions: how to raise the question of
technodiversity when intellectuals are craving for an artificial general
intelligence (AGI)? We must return to history in order to orient where
we are standing but also with a sense of distance. Will it be possible to
find strategies to liberate us from this apocalyptic end of technological
singularity and reopen the question of the future? We are far away
from being capable of answering this question in a single article. This
Umwertung, or revaluation of the concept of technology – that is to say,
this deviation from a conventional understanding of a lineage from the
Greek technē to modern technology – is a shock, and this shock is also a
suspension that may allow us to look at modern technology anew, and
to negotiate a new relation with it. By negotiating a new relation, I don’t
mean putting technology to a different use, but rather the designing of
tools that embed different sets of relations and epistemologies from those
that are dominant.
To return to histories of technologies is not to constrain modern
technology with culture, or set up a dichotomy between them, but
rather to reconcile culture and technics in the sense of Gilbert Simondon
(Simondon 2017). The ultimate question for us, through this reading of
Derrida and Stiegler, is: will it be possible to conceive technodiversities
by reappropriating digital writing or new alphabets? Re-appropriation
in this sense: not being simply determined by technology, but
transforming it in order to give it new directions. We may want to
call this reappropriation Er-eignis in the Heideggerian sense; it is a
transformative act which reframes the enframing [Gestell] of modern
technology. And it is with this attempt at questioning that we respond
to the aporia of synchronicity that we raised at the beginning, in order
to conceive a true futurism made possible by technodiversity.

References
Aristotle (1956), Metaphysics, ed. and trans. by John Marrington, London:
Everyman’s Library.
Aristotle (1991), ‘Categories’, in Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes,
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Bateson, Gregory (2000), Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in
Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
 Writing and Cosmotechnics 31

Derrida, Jacques (1978), Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
——(2004), ‘Difference’, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and
Michael Ryan, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
——(1996), Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
——(1998), Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore and
London Johns Hopkins University Press.
Gille, Bertrand (1978), Histoire des techniques: Technique et civilisations, technique
et sciences, Paris: La Pleïade, 1978.
Hegel, G.W. (2011), Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Volume 1, trans.
R. F. Brown and P. C. Hodgson, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hui, Yuk (2016), On the Existence of Digital Objects, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Hui, Yuk (2017), The Question Concerning Technology in China. An Essay in
Cosmotechnics, Falmouth: Urbanomic.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von (1989), Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays,
trans. Daniel Garber and Roger Ariew, Indianapolis: Hackett.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von (1981), New Essays on Human Understandings, ed.
Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leroi-Gourhan, Andre (1973a), Milieu et Technique, Paris: Albin Michel.
Leroi-Gourhan, Andre (1973b) L’homme et la Matieère, Paris: Albin Michel.
Liu, Xie (1983), The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, trans. Shih, Vincent
Yu-chung, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press.
Simondon, Gilbert (2017), On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,
Minneapolis: Univocal.
Stiegler, Bernard (2018), The Neganthropocene, trans. Daniel Ross, London and
Michigan: Open Humanities Press.
Stiegler, Bernard (2000), ‘Discrétiser le temps’, in Les cahiers de médiologie 2000/1
(No. 9), pp. 115–21.
Stiegler, Bernard (2017), Philosophising by Accident, trans. Benoit Dillet, Edinburgh:
University of Edinburgh Press.
Zhang, Yanyuen (1993), ‘Notes on Famous Paintings of the Past Dynasties’, in
A Complete Collection of Chinese Calligraphy and Painting vol.1, Shanghai:
Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Publication House.

Notes
1. If we understand from Derrida’s 1968 essay ‘Différance’, published a year
after Of Grammatology, that archi-writing – the retention and protention of
differences – is technical in nature, then we can conclude that archi-writing (an
economy of the supplement made possible by technical traces) is prior to writing.
However, it seems to me that such understanding is not sufficient in the context of
Of Grammatology, where Derrida has opened a significant inquiry into diversity
which he didn’t pursuit further in his later writings.
2. According to a conversation with Bernard Blistern, director of the national
museum of the Centre Georges Pompidou, who was Lyotard’s assistant during
the preparation of Les Immatériaux.
3. In the program Les Nouveaux Chemins de la connaissance, France Culture,
10.10.2014, https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/les-nouveaux-chemins-de-la-
connaissance/actualite-philosophique-jacques-derrida-des
32 Yuk Hui

4. This is the theory developed by the French historian of technology Bertrand Gille
(1978).
5. Xi Ci II, tr. J. Legge, http://ctext.org/book-of-changes/xi-ci-xia/ens, I have
modified the translation of Legge, who relates form to the sky and pattern
to the earth, however in order to be royal to Ci Xi, where we read: ‘What
appears in the heaven as phenomenon, takes concrete form/pattern on the earth.
( )’, we associate phenomenon to the sky, and pattern/form to
the earth.
6. https://recherchecontributive.org/
7. Indeed since 2015 with Stiegler, we travelled together every year to China and
taught together at the China Academy of Art, and it is during these occasions that
we discussed intensively Leroi-Gourhan and technodiversity. We were supposed
to confront the question of technodiversity during our public seminars in Taipei
November 2019, however, we could only touch upon it tangentially.
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