An Organology of Wars

§26. The Disproportion of Organs and the Hubris of Wars

Bergson considered that the First World War resulted from the problem inherent to the development of mechanical science. This might, on first appearance, seem like a strange argument for many contemporary readers since, according to well-known historical explanations, if the cause of the First World War was at once economic and political, how then could mechanical science, which was a part of industrialism, be the true source of war? Bergson observed that in the nineteenth century, there was an organological expansion that gave “a wholly unforeseen extension to the mechanical arts and had equipped man in less than fifty years with more tools than he had made during the past thousands of years he had lived on the earth.”4 Put into the terminology of Mumford, this development replaced the human parts in the megamachine with mechanical art and consequently transformed the mentality of the megamachine. This abrupt expansion of the megamachine is, for Bergson, the source of war. The mechanization of the nineteenth century caused an unexpected effect on humanity: “his body became suddenly and prodigiously increased in size, without his soul being able at the same time to dilate to the dimensions of his new body.” In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, published in 1932, Bergson repeated his analysis:

Now, in this body, distended out of all proportion, the soul remains what it was, too small to fill it, too weak to guide it. Hence the gap between the two. Hence the tremendous social, political and international problems which are just so many definitions of this gap, and which provoke so many chaotic and ineffectual efforts to fill it. What we need are new reserves of potential energy—moral energy this time.5

Bergson considers tools and instruments to be artificial organs, arguing that in the nineteenth century, mechanical artifices progressed at such a rate to cause a disruption between inorganic and organic organs. Technological acceleration occurred not only in industry but was also felt everywhere in society. It also presented a new opportunity for politics, just as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti claimed in “The Futurist Manifesto” (1909), published five years prior to Bergson’s speech: “Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible?”6 Human society was hence disrupted by a form of negative organology: through the expansion in exosomatic organs, a new hubris is produced, which then expressed itself as moral, social, and international problems. Such a conflict of organs could not be pacified; instead, it produced violence and destruction. This hubris is considered the origin of war in Bergson’s analysis; it demands moral energy as its counterpart, which can transform it or give it a new direction. While the world was trying to spiritualize machines, an “inferior force,” by which Bergson means mechanical thinking, was taking a rather opposite direction. This “inferior force,” as we mentioned earlier, fails to explain life, and therefore, when it comes to dominate the tendency of society, it reverses the relation between life and technology: technology is no longer in service of life, but rather it destroys life from within. Bergson expressed his anger in a series of questions in his 1914 speech:

What kind of a world would it be if this mechanism should seize the human race entirely, and if the peoples, instead of raising themselves to a richer and more harmonious diversity, as persons may do, were to fall into the uniformity of things? What kind of a society would that be which should mechanically obey a word of command mechanically transmitted; which should rule its science and its conscience in accordance therewith; and which should lose, along with the sense of justice, the power to discern between truth and falsehood? What would mankind be when brute force should hold the place of moral force? What new barbarism, this time final, would arise from these conditions to stifle feeling, ideas, and the whole civilization of which the old barbarism contained the germ? What would happen, in short, if the moral effort of humanity should turn in its tracks at the moment of attaining its goal, and if some diabolical contrivance should cause it to produce the mechanization of spirit instead of the spiritualization of matter?7

Bergson’s criticism, spoken more than one hundred years ago, is still valid today, especially if we keep in mind that predictions and prophecies of an imminent Third World War have proliferated since the pandemic started. War as a possibility is that which stabilizes the relation between different lands, but war as an actual event doesn’t possesses this stabilizing effect, if not exactly its opposite; instead, it necessarily leads to total military mobilization and destruction. In the Hegelian sense, the spirit progresses in history, and such a progression takes a recursive form; the spirit externalizes in order to internalize, without which there is no progress. However, in Bergson’s speech on war, he indicates that there has been a failure to respond to technological acceleration; that is, the spirit failed to internalize what it externalized. Such a failure is due to the spirit’s lack of strength to spiritualize matter; it remains trapped in materiality from which it is no longer capable of leaping. We may say that war, in general, according to Bergson’s analysis, is an organological problem that occurs when the spirit fails to render artificial external organs compatible. This failure shows that conceptualizing the state as either mechanism or organism is insufficient for understanding the state’s organological nature. For Hegel and his students—for example, Ernst Kapp, whom we discussed in chapter 2—the organism stands as a counterforce of mechanism and, therefore, a possible exodus, as Kapp wrote when comparing the despotic state and the liberal state: “The more mechanically a state becomes governed, the more despotically it is governed; the more organically a state governs itself, the freer it is.”8 However, these two images of the state, mechanism and organism, despotism and liberalism, actually share the same fate.

When mechanism is identified not only with technology but also with the mentality of a nation, that is to say, a nation looks at the world from the view of mechanical rationality, then this hubris may lead to a violence that wants to render the whole world according to such principles. This could be applied to the German nation of the First World War, Japan (as well as Germany and Italy) of the Second World War, and, more recently, the Russian war in Ukraine. For the Kyoto School thinkers, modern science and technology (or more precisely “civilization of mechanism”) are symbols of the decadence of the West, which the East was forced to adopt, while the only way to overcome this decadence was to return to the absolute nothingness that is the core of the Eastern thought.9 For Russian right-wing thinkers such as Maxim Kalashnikov10 and Alexander Dugin, Western technology is the synonym of the anti-Christ, which represses the Russian truth; such a Russian truth will be revealed, once Western oppression is negated and annihilated. Dugin adopted Schmitt’s concept of the Großraum (a term also appropriated by Kyoto School thinkers to conceptualize the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere during the Second World War) seeing it as a countermovement against Western imperialism (here, not only American imperialism, though it stands as the most confrontational). A multipolar world that includes Eurasia is, indeed, an intuitive solution to the current geopolitical problem; however, we should also ask if this is not merely an ideology, an ideology that opposes positions such as the liberal and the authoritarian as seen from the Western perspective or the imperialist and the repressed as seen from the non-Western perspective. For we know ideologies reduce the complexity of the actual world to simplified categories through constructed contexts, settings, and antagonistic emotions, but they are not yet reason grounded in concrete historical conditions, simultaneously aspiring to elevate above them. In this sense, Schmitt’s Großraum remains an anti-imperialist ideology; what maintains its diversity and heterogeneity is beyond the question of ideology, something that Schmitt failed to address.

Technology has pervaded everyday social and political life, and organological mutation intensifies when technology accelerates exponentially, as it has in the past hundred years. The failure to spiritualize the expansion of the new organs leads to hubris, which expresses itself as conflict and war. Indeed, we can say that this organological problem has appeared in every epoch—in a phenomenological sense, it suspends the previous epoch. This process of suspension becomes more and more intensified when industrialization enters new phases, particularly the disruptive phase that we are currently witnessing. Bergson concludes, therefore, “The last war, together with those future ones which we can dimly foresee, if we are indeed doomed to have more wars, is bound up with the industrial character of our civilization.”11 War is bound up with the industrial character, not only because of the competition for resources and goods but also because of something almost tragically produced as internal to civilization’s technological progress.

§27. From a Cybernetics of Freedom to an Organology of Differences

If the problem were simply about whether technology was mechanistic or organismic, then it would be possible to conclude that, by the twenty-first century and after cybernetics, Bergson’s critique of machines is no longer valid since, as cybernetics claims, and as we discussed in chapter 3 and detailed in Recursivity and Contingency, the cybernetic machine can no longer be subsumed under the eighteenth-century category of mechanism, being in the constant process of becoming organic. As such, cybernetic models have their ground more in biology than physics because they are recursive machines, namely, nonlinear machines, instead of mechanical and linear machines. In chapter 3, we also examined how the Hegelian reflective logic could be extended into different domains and converge into a planetary reflection. Should not this program be the best projection of the future of human beings?

If Hegel’s imagination of the organic unity of the state could be gradually assimilated by a cybernetic operation, then we might be able to claim that, more than ever before in history, we are on the verge of realizing such an ideal. However, in chapters 1 and 2, we also saw how Geist, as a planetary thinking, encountered its own limit. We are currently seeing that the world powers in the East and the West are incisively engaging with each other in economic competition and military expansion; the song of war has already been heard. At the same time, as we have already seen in chapter 3, cybernetics goes beyond cultural differences and attempts to grasp humanity and the earth as a whole. We see that cybernetics presents us with two paths. The first is the perfection of the nation-state via a global network of artificial intelligence systems, which could take over state administration and planning—a replacement of the Hegelian middle (thinking) class and public servants with robotics and artificial intelligence; the second path is the construction of a digital earth that transcends the nation-state, one that perhaps provides us with a new humanity, similar to how Beer interpreted Teilhard de Chardin. These two paths are apparently in conflict with each other, and retrospectively, we can see that the second path is obscured and rendered almost unpractical by the first path—so far, the twenty-first century seems to be still a century of nationalism.

Cybernetics today is falsely associated with surveillance capitalism or societies of control; the association of the cybernetic movement with military or state-related think tanks may contribute to this image. Nevertheless, the importance of cybernetics shouldn’t be obscured by this kind of journalism. The pandemic has already demonstrated the centrality of digital technology in population control. A disciplinary society in the sense of Michel Foucault does not fade into the background but rises to the fore during such occasions. The cybernetic system that we are witnessing today, be that social credit system or state administration, is a closed system in the sense that it aims to perfect the predictability of the system as anticipated by Laplace’s demon. Or, in other words, in societies of control, all systems are becoming—or at least want to be—comparable to Laplace’s demon, possessing the ability to determine every future event. These demons have become ubiquitous; as it is frequently put, “Algorithms know you better than you know yourself.” Preemptive technologies are applied at the personal level for the purpose of maintaining consumerism. At the political level, they imply preemptive wars, as has become particularly true post 9/11: antiterrorism, anti–potential threats such as the war in Iraq and recently in Ukraine.

Humans desire the ability to predict, yet acquiring this ability has proven challenging. Fortune tellers in different cultures have used different methods to predict an individual’s future, be that through divination or cartomancy. Ancient divination is also based on patterns or statistics—for example, in palm reading or horoscopes. If we consider all of these forms of divination to be an intuitive understanding of statistics, then it is clear that today’s recursive algorithms integrated with ubiquitous censors ranging from smartphones to all detective devices on every corner of the street are capable of not only better predictions but also recommendations related to an individual’s next move. This is perhaps not the only possible destiny for cybernetics; indeed, it is highly problematic to impose such a moral verdict on it simply because of a particular use of it in society. In an article titled “Steps to a Cybernetics of Autonomy,” Francisco Varela distinguished two paths for cybernetics; one is that of John von Neumann, the other Wiener’s:

Norbert Wiener by emphasizing the quality of independence, autonomy, creativity, the quality of living beings to create their meaning, to create their world. John von Neumann by emphasizing the quality of specifying decision rules, procedures for exact computation, control. During those early days, it was unclear what was going to be the dominant trend of those two sides of the issue—whether control, autonomy or both. It seems to me that it is quite clear—looking back from the 1980ies—that von Neumann actually prevailed.12

Francisco Varela suggests further developing Wiener’s cybernetic approach, which the von Neumann model has thus far only undermined. However, Varela’s solution does not seem to address the question of freedom. He appears to have made the error I call the dualism of critique. That is to say, Varela contrasts the lineage of Descartes, Von Neumann, and Turing with that of the autonomous system. The autonomous system is capable of self-determination (the so-called eigen-behavior), and meanings emerge in the operation (the so-called operational closure, which is maintained by internal regularities). I call it a dualism of critique because, in pretending to go beyond dualism, it falls prey to a dualism that is itself the “operational closure” of the critique. Therefore, the opposition between mechanism, which he associated with Descartes, von Neumann, and Turing (this association is controversial in the eyes of historians of science, as contested in Recursivity and Contingency) and organism, which he describes as an autonomous system, in fact continues the legacy of modern philosophy. The path Varela wants to explore only confirms the becoming organic of the cybernetic systems described in Recursivity and Contingency. When it becomes “autonomous,” it only means that the system is subsequently more powerful in handling contingency and modelling normativity. In Recursivity and Contingency, I tried to show how the formation of the organizing inorganic (technological systems such as platforms, in contrast to organized inorganic, such as tools and instruments) imposes a problem that we are forced to answer: the question of human freedom in the technological epoch. If Kant’s third antinomy was based on an opposition between the laws of nature and freedom (which we discussed in chapter 1 together with Hegel’s criticism of it), then today, this antinomy has returned, only now with new clothing, as the opposition between the autonomy of technological systems and freedom—this was the central theme of Recursivity and Contingency. Given the organic becoming of technological systems that possess a higher degree of flexibility and predictability, freedom becomes a question of calculating probabilities.

If Hegel could claim that the political state was a milestone of human reason since it is only in the political state that freedom could be realized, it is because, in Hegel’s time, the organic constitutes an ideal yet to be achieved. The state remained a cybernetic idea that found its concrete existence in human flesh. Cybernetic machines in the twentieth century have concretized into a digital form that now have the full potential to replace almost all tedious administrative tasks. We may even see within a given time the obsolescence of politicians, as Günther Anders said about the human being. In the end, the engineers will be the guardians of the state. Later, no guardians will be required because machines will be capable of moral judgments and self-maintenance. This image may still sound futuristic if not fictional, but it is nonetheless already foreseeable in the current technological tendency. Predicting the future has become a common task in all disciplines: literature, art, natural science, technology studies, and so on. This development is not without its price to pay; as Bergson pointed out, one has to smoothen its organological rupture. The political state in the age of autonomous technological systems has to transform itself in a seemingly contradictory way. First, it is forced to turn itself into a political vital force by renewing a decisionism in the Schmittian sense, as has been seen in the normalization of states of exceptions occurring in both the so-called democratic and authoritarian states. The sovereign exhibits itself as the authority of exception, overriding all kinds of law, including programming codes. Second, it is forced to make the state administration fully compatible with technological systems, in other words, to integrate them into the executive and judiciary operations to increase efficiency and reduce cost.

However, once the technological systems attain a certain degree of autonomy, they no longer follow the subjective will of the political leaders since they are driven by both the tendency to rationalization (what makes the evolution of technical objects possible) and the logic of accumulation (the socioeconomical motivation of technological innovations). The tendency of rationalization is difficult to alter because it requires specialist knowledge, which bureaucrats typically lack. Furthermore, their attempts to alter the tendency frequently result in absurd scenarios. For example, censorship based on keywords often ends up censoring the opinions of politicians themselves. This process of technological deterritorialization weakens the power of the state because it means there are more processes of negotiation, and negotiation often leads to a compromise of power. Therefore, we might say that it is not globalization itself that undermines the nation-states, as theorists such as Antonio Negri believe,13 but rather the technological system and its power of rationalization forces the state to interrupt the economic order to maintain its vitality and retain its power, thus the twilight of globalization that we see today is the consequence of the transformation of the megamachine.

It is unclear how the nation-state can maintain its vitality without going to war and succumbing to self-destruction, just as Russia has been doing since February 2022 with its “special military operation” in Ukraine and more recently the war between Israel and Hamas. However, the Russia–Ukraine war is merely one example of how the current paradigm of technical rationalization is challenging a world order founded on nation-states. This process of rationalization is characterized first by the complexification and materialization of causal relations in digital or maybe later in quantic representations, and second by the increasing capacity of determination of correlations and normalizations. As long as humanity persists, another even more aggressive paradigm will emerge, and technological rationalization will proceed in such a way that the world spirit will be able to develop toward the most actual and rational configuration of the world. However, when one no longer believes in the world spirit14 and dismisses it as a false fiction used to justify the West’s colonization of the world, as Marx does by reducing the world spirit to the world market, the world spirit becomes nothing more than a joke of Hegel’s fantasy in Jena. It might take a long time to recognize that the world spirit does not, in fact, belong to the West or the East; it lived neither in Jena nor in Moscow, for the spirit belongs to the world and the world ought to become spiritual. Hegel’s world spirit, a synonym for human collective intelligence or reason, could still be expanded to respond to the current planetary condition.

Maybe it is worth returning to Wiener’s cybernetics of autonomy, a path Varela proposed to deepen. It is perhaps pertinent to add to Varela that this autonomy is not innocent for Wiener. In a 1960 article titled “Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation,” Wiener rejected the stereotype that machines cannot have any originality; instead, he sees, and we can now confirm some sixty years after his observation, that machines are more than ever able to assimilate the behavior of living beings. And it was precisely because of this that Wiener pointed out the following problem: “One of the chief causes of the danger of disastrous consequences in the use of the learning machine is that man and machine operate on two distinct time scales so that the machine is much faster than man and the two do not gear together without serious difficulties.”15

We could say that Wiener’s warning is twofold. First, artificial organs override organic organs, and the latter is rendered obsolete and helpless. However, it is not limited to the conflict between bodily organs and prostheses but also institutions that largely rely on human factors and technological systems. Second, human planners, including scientists and political leaders, must think on a much longer time scale—for example, fifty years ahead of their time to anticipate the worst scenarios that might arise due to the speed of automation. However, who in the world besides dictators, with a brain composed of organic cells, can make such a prediction, not to mention that a fifty-year plan might only apply to machines of the early 1960s (when Wiener expressed his warning) and no longer for our time? The only way to predict would be to build models continuously collecting large amounts of data and constantly updating their predictions. But such models are often closed, meaning that they can only analyze the future development of a narrow domain by excluding most of the external factors that remain unknown, and that could contingently become significant factors. In other words, data extractionism, which pretends to show us probabilities, leads to an exhaustion of possibilities by excluding the improbable.

If we put aside this dispute between mechanism and vitalism, Bergson’s organological critique becomes more significant than ever. This call for an organological critique could also be identified in the late Wiener, though he did not go any further than highlighting the significance of prosthesis. Wiener proposed to go beyond the typical approach of rendering “unto man the things which are man’s and unto the computer the things which are the computer’s”: “What we now need is an independent study of systems involving both human and mechanical elements. This system should not be prejudiced either by a mechanical or antimechanical bias. I think that such a study is already under way and that it will promise a much better comprehension of automatization.”16 Wiener is probably right in insisting on the study of technological systems, and for this reason, Simondon also considers cybernetics an “organology.”17 Such studies should abandon the mechanism and organism opposition from the outset to understand the profound impact of the technological systems that no longer seem to maintain symmetry between humans and machines. This is the task of what became known as general organology, which may already be found in Bergson and continues via Canguilhem and Simondon to Stiegler. Today, following Wiener’s warning, there are growing disparities between artificial organs and the soul for two key reasons. First, on the individual level, the transhumanist ideology continues to promote human enhancement as a future, namely, the desire to directly modify the organs via either DNA technologies or nanotechnologies in order to augment senses and bodies. Thus, the body becomes a new field of competition, achieved not through training but through consumerism. When human enhancement is legalized, we will enter a process of artificial selection subsumed to consumerism, inevitably creating new political classes distinguished by enhanced and not-yet-enhanced. Second, the technological systems, which I have termed organizing inorganic, such as Google, Facebook, Tencent, or Alibaba, far exceed the capacity of human faculties. They impose challenges to the finitude of the individual faculties and to the power structure of institutions, including the political state. This is not only because they transgress territorial limits and inevitably also transgress legal frameworks but also because they produce an extraordinary “extra-state” power, which we will discuss more in chapter 7.

§28. The Conflict of Tendencies and the Recurrence of Mysticism

How shall we take up Wiener’s task, namely, to understand technological systems but also to intervene in their development and take care of the hubris they produce? Before we address the question of the state, we might want to go back to Bergson’s organological critique. Because if our framing of the above problem as an organological one is valid, then it might be possible to identify some potential answers in Bergson’s accounts. Toward the end of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, in a section titled “The True Vocation of Machines,” Bergson provided some thoughts on how to place machines into their appropriate place. If Bergson calls this their true vocation, it is because machines have thus far been used incorrectly, producing a mechanization of spirit instead of a spiritualization of matter. For Bergson, the mechanization of spirit does not mean turning the human being into a mechanized being, but rather it promotes a life based on material comfort, amenities, and luxuries. Industrialization, since the nineteenth century, has been largely about the mobilization of machines and assigning them an important role in the production and distribution process. Industrialization depends on a generalized mechanization process, one that enables mass production and can also lead to overproduction, the immanent crisis of capitalism. Overproduction is resolved by the thermodynamic ideology, according to which the market is capable of self-regulation. The WTO, IMF, and World Bank are the trinity of power that pushes forward deregulations and consolidates the rules of the thermodynamic ideology. Bergson did not have the word consumerism in his time, so he often uses phrases such as “taste for luxuries” or “mere comfort” to describe this consequence of industrialization and the emergence of consumerism. The mechanization of the spirit resulted in a conclusion involving “exaggerated comfort and luxury for the few, rather than liberation for all.”18 This tendency presents a positive feedback loop, similar to Georgescu-Roegen’s “circumdrome” of the electric razor, discussed in chapter 3. David Lapoujade formulates it in the following way:

This is because 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.19

To resolve the problem of mechanization is not to abandon machines and go back to simple tools, as Bergson himself implied.20 Instead, and as a counterproposal, he suggests returning to a simple life with the help of science. Bergson understands mechanization as a “natural gift” (don naturel) that the human possesses.21 And indeed, the emergence of mechanical science belongs to the tendency of the intellect.22 Mechanization should be situated as a historical moment where artificial organs complexified and reached an organization that allowed them to become autonomous, or what Simondon calls “technical individuals.” For Simondon, technical individuals are those technical objects that possess an associated milieu. The associated milieu allows the machines to stabilize themselves and resist external disturbances; or in more cybernetic language, it is the negative feedback loop between the machine and its environment.23 The machine is not only able to resist the disturbance of the environment by distinguishing the validity of the inputs, such as between a meaningful input and noise, but also to integrate the environment as part of its operation. For example, the current of the river is used to set the Guimbal turbine into movement, but if the current is too fast and the turbine produces too much heat due to the joule effect, then the river can act as a cooling agent to carry away the heat and prevent the turbine from self-destruction, which is often the case for turbines that use air cooling. It is precisely with the emergence of an associated milieu that machines possess the capacity of becoming organic or “holistic.”24 Before the emergence of the industrial technical individual such as automatic machines, the craftsmen were at the center of the tools and created the tools’ associated milieu by using their own bodies—in other words, the craftsmen were themselves technical individuals; since industrialization, with the development of technical individuals in factories, human beings have lost their status, being expelled from the center of production.

The twentieth century was the epoch of the technical ensemble, which refers to the grouping of technical individuals that form a working environment, such as the installation of machines in laboratories and factories. Simondon suggests finding a new role for the human being in this ensemble: like a conductor who resonates with musicians, the human being has to become the coordinator of machines through the feedback loop provided by the new theory of cybernetics.25 The formulation of a lineage from the technical element, technical individuals, and finally, technical ensemble is illuminating because it outlines not only a history of technological concretization but also a subtle relation between society and technology that Marxism failed to understand. At the same time, it also invites us to think the fate of this lineage in the twenty-first century, when technical ensembles such as laboratories and factories cease to be the major form of technological organization—we can already see quite clearly that in developed countries most of the factories are today fully automatized, hence, what we are experiencing are technological systems such as platforms, not individual machines. That is to say, the orchestra no longer exists, and the conductor has no difficulty finding virtual musicians that resonate perfectly with him or her. Contrary to Simondon’s proposal of identifying a new role for human beings, Bergson suggests giving machines a new vocation. Bergson’s suggestion could even seem paradoxical: go beyond mechanization through machines.26

What does it mean to go beyond mechanization through machines? This tautological and, to some extent, tragist gesture is not without significance,27 and here lies one of the most important messages of Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Mechanization is a tendency that opposes another tendency, as static religion does to dynamic religion, intelligence to instinct. The concept of tendency is fundamental to Bergson’s analysis of the evolution of society. We may say that there is a fundamental tendency that is the impetus of life, the élan vital. When encountering an obstacle (in the form of material and external conditions), this original tendency bifurcates into two opposed tendencies, which Bergson calls the law of dichotomy.28 During the concurrence of the two tendencies, one has the upper hand and undermines the other. The dominant tendency will manifest and grow until it reaches a tipping point (or frenzy), beyond which a civilizational tragedy will occur. This is known as the law of the twofold frenzy.29 The dynamic of the two tendencies could be visualized as the movement of a pendulum: once it swings to one extreme, it will then fall and swing to another. The law of dichotomy does not depend on the internal status of the system, but rather it is a response to the external exigence.30 In this sense, we can also understand why Bergson rejected teleology in history, and, indeed, for him, “Finality is external, or it is nothing at all.”31 There is no predefined plot for evolution nor for history; rather, history is another recursive process moving from a closed society to an open society and back again, or from one tendency to its opposite, which, in turn, then swings to another opposed tendency. Bergson describes it in the following terms:

Man loves the dramatic; he is strongly inclined to pick out from a whole more or less extended period of history those characteristics which make of it a struggle between two parties, two societies or two principles, each of them in turn coming off victorious. But the struggle is here only the superficial aspect of an advance. The truth is that a tendency on which two different views are possible can only put forth its maximum, in quantity or quality, if it materializes these two possibilities into moving realities, each one of which leaps forward and monopolizes the available space, while the other is on the watch unceasingly for its own turn to come.32

Suppose mechanization is one of these two tendencies coming out of the impetus of life, then spiritualization is another which has been waiting for its time to come and take over as the dominating tendency. The struggle between tendency and its countertendency might define what Bergson means by life in contradistinction to Darwinism.33 What is particular in this “struggle” is not one cancelling the other, but rather one taking the lead by integrating and preserving the other.34 These two competing tendencies have to be materialized; in other words, even the tendency of spiritualization is not simply something that happens in the mind alone; it has to present itself in material form and possesses its agency. For Bergson, this process of spiritualization should be understood as a type of mysticism. What Bergson means by mysticism is not entirely consistent with the conventional concept of the mystical as that which describes contact with a transmundane superior power. Instead, the mystical life means, first and foremost, the capacity to see the limit of a civilization dominated by one tendency and the capacity to use intuition to envelop it or to resituate it into a larger reality, i.e., the impetus of life. This form of mystic experience is present in everyday life; for example, when confronting a fatal accident or disease, the everyday routine is suspended, and a new path is opened. A closed society, when it comes to its end, has exhausted the impetus that motivated the dominant tendency of that society—for example, mechanization. In view of this impasse, certain privileged individuals who are conscious of this problem might be able to redirect the impetus toward another tendency: “If the individual is fully conscious of this, if the fringe of intuition surrounding his intelligence is capable of expanding sufficiently to envelop its object, that is the mystic life.”35

Here, Bergson’s method comes into full light. The mystical life is a countertendency, and the possibility of such a countertendency belongs to the capacity of certain individuals who are capable of seeing the limit of the current tendency, i.e., mechanism in the case of Bergson. Being aware of this limit, and through intuition, the tendency is countered by another tendency so as to return it to the impetus of life (this is very different from introducing more regulations). As Gilles Deleuze claims, intuition, here, is an exact philosophical method.36 Intuition does not mean simply grasping the silhouette of things; on the contrary, it is that which allows one to reach the thing in itself. In contrast to deduction and induction, which give rise to concepts and ideas, intuition allows the perception of a genetic process. This is also Simondon’s debt, or maybe more accurately, a homage to Bergson in Part III of On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, where philosophical intuition is granted a higher status than induction and deduction, namely, the operation of idea and concept. Intuition reveals a larger reality, resituating the dominating tendency as merely one part of reality, balanced by other parts. A closer reading of Simondon reveals that the term tendency often appears in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects and roughly twenty-one times in Part III of the book, the section where Simondon outlines a genesis of technicity. Here, the genesis of technicity starts with two tendencies, one that departs from the magic unity, namely, the tendency toward religion, and a countertendency toward technics, each producing two other tendencies, one toward theory and the other toward practice. However, we have to note some fundamental differences. In contrast to Bergson’s theory of tendency, bifurcation in Simondon’s theory does not take place due to the obstacle of an external and material condition, but rather it occurs when the system itself attains saturation, namely, the moment when the unity and identity of the system is exceeded, and it is forced to bifurcate so as to resolve internal tensions or incompatibility. In Simondon, the two tendencies, religion and technics, search for a unification between ground and figure analogical to that of the magic unity. In Bergson, the tendencies do not search for unity. Instead, the opposed tendencies function like a pendulum that swings between two extremes. Bergson defines opposition as the antithesis of two tendencies, such as open and closed societies, which are not absolute opposites but two ends of a pendulum’s movement. As a result, the dualism between the mystical and the technological dissolves, and we perceive the need for something new:

So let us not merely say, as we did above, that the mystical summons up the mechanical. We must add that the body, now larger, calls for a bigger soul, and that mechanism should mean mysticism. The origins of the process of mechanization body, proportion, are indeed more mystical than we might imagine. Machinery will find its true vocation again, it will render services in proportion to its power, only if mankind, which it has bowed still lower to the earth, can succeed, through it, in standing erect and looking heavenwards.37

This is not to say that mechanism is something mysterious, but rather is mechanism, first of all, the materialization of one of the tendencies of the élan vital. In other words, mechanism has its origin not in an alien power, not in any errant thinking, but in the impetus of life. Second, mechanization, insofar it is a natural gift, as well as the irrefutable organs, have to be allocated with the right vocation so that they can return humanity to the openness of the élan vital instead of ceaselessly producing hubris. It remains to be asked how to understand such a notion of tendency in today’s context, almost one hundred years after Bergson’s organological critique of wars.

§29. The Dynamics of the Technical Tendency and Technical Fact

Today, we should consider what the conditions might be to shift away from such a negative organology. The call for deceleration resonates among sociologists, scientists, and technologists. There is, of course, the warning from Stephen Hawking, who claimed, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. . . . It could take off on its own and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded,”38 as well as, though ironically, from Elon Musk, who calls for an AI slowdown. In April 2023, Elon Musk, alongside more than a thousand entrepreneurs and AI researchers, called for a six-month suspension of giant AI experiments in order to formulate its dangers and ethical uses. It is not that AI will rebel against humans, as seen in popular science-fiction films, but rather, as we have been attempting to demonstrate, it is more a question of how a negative organology might arise from there.

Is mysticism a way out of this modernity? One can find traces in Bergson’s 1932 book of the call for a mystic genius or an “Enlightenment ideal of humanity.”39 However, this would miss the significance of why Bergson ends the book with a call for the true vocation of machines, not humanity. When Bergson says that “mechanism should mean mysticism,” he no longer opposes mechanism to mysticism. Instead, he sees mechanism and mysticism as two tendencies of his epoch and that mysticism has to make mechanism its very possibility. As we saw earlier, a mystic life does not mean a religious life, a life led by dogma. Like all religions, a mystic life contains the primordial act of believing.40 A mystic life is one in which the nonrational (to be distinguished from the irrational) is rationalized on the horizon of belief and in the consistency of living, like Heidegger’s last God.41 A mystic life starts when one sees the limit of the dominating tendency, just as Bergson saw the limit of the constant materialization of spirit, that which turns humanity into barbarians. In Bergson’s writing, the universality of mechanism is counteracted by the particularity of mystic life. There is no single mystic life, since recognizing the limit is one thing and responding to it is another. We are not suggesting waiting for the intervention of a mystical force from without; instead, we are following Bergson’s insistence on overcoming mechanism through machines. Cybernetic machines are much more powerful than mechanical machines. They could provide more flexibility and possibilities to deal with the current crisis instead of being regarded as a permanent threat. Mysticism thus refers to a much larger and more powerful force capable of deploying mechanism for its own service. Instead of being bound to mechanism, it establishes a new space that encompasses it. If we generalize what has been said here, then mysticism stands symbolically for that which can envelop mechanism and bring it back to life. In this sense, mysticism comes to mean what Bergson calls the attachment to life. The attachment to life is a deviation from the homogeneity of mechanization and a movement toward the new vocation of machines.

To understand the implication of Bergson’s analysis in relation to technological development, we will have to turn to André Leroi-Gourhan’s reading of Bergson. Leroi-Gourhan, in Milieu et Technique, took up Bergson’s concept of tendency and formulated what he calls the technical tendency,42 which is a tendency that is accepted and materially realized in all environments; the laws of nature are such a tendency. However, this does not mean that the laws of physics are just tendencies. Instead, it means that laws of nature are part of an evolutionary impetus in constant externalization. This tendency is illustrated by the fact that we never see a square or triangular wheel in any civilization, only round. However, the technical tendency alone cannot explain the diversity of artifacts. The knife that the Inuit use for dissecting a whale is very different from that for a caribou and is also different from those used in Japan. Leroi-Gourhan developed a different concept that he calls technical facts. These facts are contingently produced as a result of the encounter between the technical tendency and its particular environment and can be understood as a kind of locality:

The tendency which, by its universal nature, is loaded with all the possibilities that can be expressed in general laws, traverses the internal milieu, bathes in the mental traditions of each human group; it acquires particular properties, just as a light ray acquires various properties by passing through different bodies, it encounters the external milieu which offers these acquired properties an irregular penetration, and at the point of contact between the internal milieu and the external milieu materializes this layer [pellicule] of objects which constitute the furniture of men.43

The technical tendency and technical facts constitute a pair that determines the development of a technical milieu that varies between ethnic groups. Leroi-Gourhan offers a more schematic way of defining their difference, arguing that technical tendencies “can be materialized anytime and anywhere,” whereas technical facts “will only be born identical insofar as a certain identity of environment is offered to them.”44 However, Leroi-Gourhan also suggests that technical facts are not only contingent products of the tendency’s encounter with the exterior milieu (such as natural resources, wind, mountains, water, and so on) but are also selected and altered by the internal milieu. For example, in almost every civilization, we find the use of swords; however, it is not only the material that varies between these swords, but also their forms, use, and aesthetics are different too: “But the simple observation of an animal or a technique demonstrates that the general trend does not contain all the characteristics: the sword, which achieves a harmonious whole in all its types, nevertheless offers extremely numerous forms, each conditioned by the material, others by the particular use of the weapon, local fencing customs, aesthetic traditions, etc.”45

We might deduce through readings of Bergson and Leroi-Gourhan that the technical tendency and technical facts are, in fact, two distinct tendencies, whereas one universalizes, the other particularizes. I tried to argue in The Question Concerning Technology in China that technical facts are not only limited by their material environment but also by the cosmology of a locality. Cosmology, in this context, serves as a synonym for a reality that surpasses the confines of technology; instead, technology is encompassed and balanced by other kinds of thinking. The concept of locality or place is one of the resources that allow us to think further about the question of diversification and pluralization. Locality is not in opposition to the planetary; on the contrary, the planetary has to be first of all contemplated from the perspective of locality. Otherwise, we might risk getting lost “among the stars.” However, it is not limited to what Leroi-Gourhan calls the external milieu (namely, the natural environment) but also the internal milieu, which is defined by customs and traditions. Returning to a locality means two things: first, it means giving technology an appropriate place (such as a new vocation), since modern technology recognizes space but not place, insofar as space for technology means dimensions and their numerical values; to give technology a place means resituating it in a broader reality instead of being determined by it. Second, it means to rediscover and reinvent a technodiversity that is compatible with the place, which respects the locality. However, this compatibility is never given at the beginning. I do not see this as a disagreement with Leroi-Gourhan, though it is clear that Leroi-Gourhan did not formulate it in terms of cosmology, but rather religion and aesthetics, as he writes:

The interior milieu traversed by this tendency has therefore left a general imprint on each object, which is briefly analyzed by saying that the handle of such a Lappish spoon is influenced by religious tradition, that the cavity of such a Japanese spoon is inspired by the former use of a bivalve shell tied to a handle: for each example one can thus find technical, religious and decorative explanations.46

Leroi-Gourhan, being largely influenced by Jean Przyluski’s L’Évolution humaine (1926), sees technical facts as being dominated by both the technical tendency and the external milieu.47 Therefore, technical facts should not be excluded from being understood as a tendency, an evolutionary force, but instead as the tendency central to diversification. Furthermore, if we adhere to Bergson’s definition of tendency, that is, a tendency is always accompanied by a countertendency, then technical facts fulfil this criterion as well, providing an understanding of technodiversity. This is also how I proposed the concept of cosmotechnics as a way to “reconcile” the difference between Lévi-Strauss and Leroi-Gourhan, the former having a prime interest in cosmology and the latter on technology.48 I propose comprehending the two tendencies, technical tendency and technical fact, by constructing an antinomy of technological universality:

Thesis: Technology is an anthropological universal, understood as an exteriorization of memory and the liberation of organs, as some anthropologists and philosophers of technology have formulated it;

Antithesis: Technology is not anthropologically universal; it is enabled and constrained by particular cosmologies, which go beyond mere functionality or utility. Therefore, there is no one single technology, but rather multiple cosmotechnics.

Because two tendencies coexist and interact, Leroi-Gourhan could talk about the permeability of the technical milieu, that is to say, how certain technologies may permeate an ethnic group while others do not and how they may take diverse forms in accordance with the internal milieu. The permeability of the technical milieu was largely destroyed by the process of modernization and globalization; already in the above-mentioned 1945 book, Leroi-Gourhan observed that it “delivers by trial and error an increasingly direct passage to the technical tendency.”49 Since modernity, we have seen how the universalizing tendency overrides the particularizing tendency, just as Leroi-Gourhan himself lamented in the second volume of Gesture and Speech that a synchronization of rhythm will lead to a homogenization of temporality. Industrial and military technology is the universal force that breaks all technical milieus and unifies all localities under the banner of an economic program. As discussed in chapter 5 regarding Toynbee, in the nineteenth century, there was a marked increase in the importation of technologies to the Far East; without it, these “ethnic groups” would not be able to compete, thus being doomed to defeat and colonization.50

Efficiency and speed override all other values inherent to the internal milieu. The introduction of the railway in the nineteenth century served as an earlier example of this tendency; on the one hand, it introduced the compression of time and space, which significantly influenced economic change; on the other hand, it created a homogeneity of products, aesthetics, and values. The universalizing tendency seems to have triumphed. The advancement in technical reproducibility in the twentieth century further created a culture of standardization. The question of indifference or homogeneity constituted the main target of critique in the twentieth century,51 which we find most notably in thinkers of the Frankfurt School who criticized the standardization of commodities. Commodity in the twenty-first century is said to be no longer about standardization but rather about individuality and difference. In other words, we have moved from a technology of indifference (mechanistic) to a technology of difference (organismic), starkly contrasting with what Adorno and Horkheimer described. This increase in the variety of taste (and its social and symbolic meaning) does not alter the fundamental nature of capital and by no means signifies the emancipation of human beings from it. It simply means an increase in the choice of consumption, which gives the appearance of heterogeneity, but it is, in fact, just a multiplication based on homogeneity—the homogeneity of values and technologies.

However, we should approach this sociological observation with caution, as it is less straightforward than it might initially seem. In his celebrated “Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin argued that standardization opens a democratic and revolutionary possibility. The standardization of objects and the reproducibility of the artwork free it from what Benjamin called “the aura”—the absolute individuality of any work of art. The aura came into being when the technology of reproduction was very limited; for example, as we are told at the beginning of Benjamin’s essay, for the ancient Greeks, it was limited to founding and stamping.52 Therefore, aura negatively means the limit of the technology of reproduction and positively means that which cannot be reproduced, something that could be aligned with tradition and religious ritual—both of which were effectively mobilized by fascism. The liberation of the work of art from the aura, therefore, opens a new form of participation and produces a revolutionary consciousness. A similar view was held by Stiegler, who, instead of seeing the appearance of alphabetic writing in ancient Greece and the disappearance of dialects as a sign of homogeneity, rightly observes that without alphabetic writing, Greek literature would not exist—we would not be able to read Homer or Plato today. It is the Promethean spirit at work combatting the melancholia of man—melancholia in the sense that man’s fate as Homo faber consists of the constant displacement of his identity by technological inventions. In the work of Benjamin and Stiegler, we see that technology is a standardizing medium. But it is precisely because of its standardization that democracy is made possible, functioning as the condition of access to the sensus communis. The seemingly contradictory evaluation of universalization/standardization will compel us to reflect on a deeper relationship between technodiversity and democracy.

§30. On the Organological Relation between Technology and Democracy

Historically speaking, democracy is about self-determination. There is no democracy without self-determination; otherwise, it would be autocracy or aristocracy. Self-determination means that a community (and here also a locality) can develop protocols and tools that facilitate the community’s communication and operation, enabling each community member to develop his or her potential as a citizen. Democracy was said to be invented in Greece, and it assumes that reason, like Smith’s invisible hand, will be at work. We should not romanticize Greek democracy because it was fundamentally an autochthon and the polis as political form is no longer applicable in our time. However, there are still some important elements that we can draw from it.

The selection of the council members with the use of a randomization device, the Kleroterion, is indeed a test by contingency. In addition to contingency, there is a protocol that prevents contingency from moving toward unreason: if the person chosen is not appropriate, then he will be expelled from the title, with the community being able to regain the control of organization. Contingency only becomes a necessity when it no longer violates reason and becomes compatible with it; reason, we suggest, instead of emotion, should be that which unites the community. As already claimed in chapter 1, reason is the most powerful discourse of Western thought—it is through reason that secular society finds its common ground and the openness of transformation.

Modern democracy, as seen in the previous chapters, is a response to the proliferation of individual rights that followed the emergence of bourgeois society, in which the middle and elite classes became the dominant force in society and the government. Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right could be read as a response to this social change (following the Reformation and the French Revolution) and his philosophical justification of the state as the crystallization of reason. The state could unite the individuals by guaranteeing their rights through the constitution and maintaining the social and political order through state institutions. In contemporary society, individualism takes a different form, moving from the right to freedom to the right to consume or from citizen to consumer.

The concept of democracy being associated with liberal democracy is an event that took place at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. In other words, if there was democracy before liberalism,53 then there will be a democracy after liberalism. Even if we have engaged closely with Hegel and Schmitt, this does not imply that we are following their specific antiliberal and antidemocratic paths. The critique of Hegel and Schmitt remains valid when liberalism is turned into the justification of arbitrariness. This arbitrariness makes modern individuals vulnerable to political and economic manipulation. While liberal democracy has been used as a mechanism to keep legislation from becoming irrational, it does not guarantee reason; instead, it is vulnerable to manipulation and can turn into populism. The problem of liberal democracy is less its inability for political decision, as Carl Schmitt reproached them of being ineffective and indecisive, than its compatibility with consumerism; in liberal democracies, choice risks becoming arbitrary. On the other hand, hatred toward liberalism has led to powerful but ultimately closed governments, which claim to be deliberated democracies. The term deliberated democracy could be simply a play of words since it often only means toy parliaments. Governments in deliberated democracies might occasionally make correct decisions based on the intelligence of the leader, but they will never move toward reason; this is not just because vitam brevem esse, longam artem (life is short, art is long), but also because decisions are frequently dictated by interest rather than reason and the decision process is often opaque and intolerant of any criticism.

In a democratic or authoritarian state (the either-or label the mass media tends to use), the concept of democracy is still limited to the nation-state—a modern form of autochthony compared to the Athenian one. There is a general silence on any notion of democracy that extends beyond the state’s limit, save for the notables, such as Marx, Lenin, and Mao, who argued that true democracy would necessitate the abolition of the state and the party. In State and Revolution, Lenin claimed that whereas the demolition of the bourgeois state demands revolution, the overcoming of the democratic state will not be achieved through revolution but rather by the “withering away” of the state itself: “It is ‘incomprehensible’ only to those who have not thought that democracy is also a state and that, consequently, democracy will also disappear when the state disappears. Revolution alone can ‘abolish’ the bourgeois state. The state in general, i.e., the most complete democracy, can only ‘wither away.’”54 The term “withering away” of the state is borrowed from Engels.55 The bourgeois state does not wither away; it has to be abolished by the proletariats; what withers away is the proletariat state or the semistate.56 What does Lenin mean by this? Does it mean that there will be no democracy? Lenin affirms that communism makes the state “absolutely unnecessary.”57 The withering away of the state means that the dictatorship of the proletariat following the violent revolution will finally dissolve, giving way to a new, free world. Democracy would no longer be the right vocabulary to describe this new world. But what sort of world it is, then? This might be the most difficult of the above questions since it challenges both our imagination and our ability to put it in concrete words. Or, instead of condemning democracy to an always fated relation with the state, the other approach would be to enlarge the concept of democracy beyond the state.

Put another way, will the withering away of the state provide us with a planetary democracy? Furthermore, does planetary democracy mean the participation of all citizens of the world in all decision-making processes? How could this be possible? Would everyone now vote on global issues by pressing a button on their smartphone? Today, this is in principle possible considering that most of the population in developed countries own smartphones. But there are two fundamental problems. First, reducing democracy to the pressing of buttons would most likely pull us back to a kind of arbitrariness (a Hegelian problem we discussed in chapter 1); second, this form of democracy eliminates options—for example, choosing either A or B, but not maximizing possibilities and diversities for the future (a Luhmannian problem).58 In other words, if democracy leads to the exhaustion of future possibilities, it raises fundamental questions about the viability and legitimacy of such a democratic system. These two problems are the major ones that liberal democracy has to overcome, without which it will continue to be discredited.

This returns us to the question of what democracy could mean beyond the state, if it is not to be just a planetary voting mechanism that involves all populations. We might want to refer to what Derrida calls “the democracy to come”59 before addressing the Hegelian and Luhmannian problems. A “democracy to come” means at least two things for Derrida. First, it means a detachment of the secular from the theocratic and the theological;60 second, it is not based on an autochthony as much as it “is not connected to a nation-state, which is not connected to citizenship, to territoriality.”61 The secularization of politics could be interpreted as the pursuit of reason, as ridding politics of the irrational forces inherent to religion so that reason, instead of God, may lead. However, secularizing the state does not guarantee a democracy beyond the state since it presupposes a different political form. The question today is not what such a democracy to come is, but how might it come to be possible.

The procedures that culminate in the collapse of the party and state and that follow a violent revolution and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat do not appear to be repeatable or even attainable today. However, a new democratic process beyond the state is not only relevant but also urgent. When everything stays within the realm of state interests, planetary politics remain reduced to international politics. Could internet technology facilitate such a democracy to come, overcoming many of the barriers that Derrida named? As we know, this was the dream of the internet activists and anarchists of the 1990s. However, today we also know that the possibility to connect beyond territories does not necessarily mean democracy; it could also mean the opposite, platform capitalism that dominates our everyday life, as analyzed in the previous chapters. In any case, this does not mean that future politics should oppose itself to technology, regardless of the fact that technology has become the synonym for calculation and control.

Technology has only ever really been thought of as a tool for democracy, be that the Greek Kleroterion, the modern postal and ballot system, or even now digital platforms that could be used for voting or decision making (for example, the direct digital democracy of the Five Star Movement in Italy) as well as social media that is used to influence other voters. However, this appears to be a rather limited way of understanding freedom and democracy and fails to respond to the Hegelian and Luhmannian criticism. Let us then step back and clarify what is meant by the possibility of democracy beyond the state. First, saying beyond the state does not mean that it has to be larger than the nation-state, something like Schmitt’s Großraum or Dugin’s Eurasia (which for Dugin extends from Siberia to Taiwan); instead, it could mean a political form that is attached to a locality, be that a city, a town, or a village. Second, technology would not serve only as a means toward democracy (for example, voting systems) but instead the democratization of technology will become fundamental to the future of such a democracy to come—a task that we should take up as a response to Hegel and Luhmann, as well as to Derrida’s “democracy to come.” Because without directly addressing the question of technology, such a democracy to come will never come.62 Modern democracy is susceptible to technology precisely because technology has become a dominant force of “democracy,” especially since social media has been used to predict and influence municipal and national elections. In the twentieth century, democracy was vulnerable to analogue technologies of marketing, such as television and radio, which used broadcasting technologies to create and transmit patterns of information in the form of propaganda. Compared to information in its textual form, information in visual and audio forms opens up an intuitive form of communication—more direct and efficient because it can synchronize the audience’s consciousness. In the twenty-first century, the proliferation of digital technology challenged the broadcasting model of the mass media and reconstituted our sensual relation to the surroundings. Information is not only transmitted via successions of images and sound but rather via direct processing of user data, as we have already discussed in the previous chapters. Modern citizens are becoming increasingly more users and consumers in the sense that they adapt themselves to new interfaces and new algorithms over which they have no control or influence. This is the common experience of social media users in the past decade. The “democratization of technology” only took a very limited form in the name of the free and open-source software movement. While open-source software has been appropriated by large corporations such as Google, for example, when Android was an open-source project, it attracted many programmers to contribute to its development. Still, in the end, it is Google that decides which applications remain and which phones can install the updated version of Android. Can we call this the democratization of technology, or is it simply one strategy among others to absorb the creativity of individuals?

Finally, we must acknowledge that all types of subjection to the environment, whether natural or artificial, can be classified as adaptation. As per Darwin’s theory of evolution, animals either adapt to the environment or they fail and disappear. Adaptation stands on the opposite side of democracy since democracy means primarily collective determination, while adaptation means subordination to imposed rules or systems. If, with Derrida, we want to talk about some form of “democracy to come,” then we have to understand that the question of technology is fundamental to this task. Not that a particular technology can solve the problem, but rather to create a new environment and new possibilities of adoption, or a new game with new rules, that may enlarge the possibility of engagements and producing changes. In other words, it is not only about challenging existing powers, but also changing the nature of powers. If we want to overcome the hegemony of the big corporations, which are constantly changing the digital environment so that users have to adapt to new interfaces and new rules, as well as the control of the state, which sees every subject as a set of data, nothing is more effective than creating new environments that allow individuals and collectives to become autonomous agents, in the sense that, instead of adapting to the environment, they could adopt it as a means of self-realization. In classical liberal democracy, one accepts the environment and then each individual acts against it according to one’s preference in order to make it preferable for most people; in this nuanced form, we radically interpret and adopt the conditions that allow an individual to develop and experiment with new ideas and community practices.

It is not clear, as Lenin claimed, that the democratic state will wither away; however, it is at least clear that in order to move beyond that which limits democracy to the state, new infrastructures of democracy will have to be made available that move beyond the monopoly of a few individuals or enterprises. The new game, on the one hand, reflects the locality’s or community’s diversity and singularity because they also represent the differentiated relationship between inhabitants and the environment. But, on the other hand, it will also be a less consumerist economy and more a knowledge-based economy that will allow users to transform into citizens and provide an alternative to Luddite sabotage. This is why we would like to put forward the claim that technodiversity is central to such a future democracy in the planetary condition, having the potential to address the question of locality beyond identity. Hence counter to the technological tendency that homogenizes and totalizes, technodiversity diverges and fragments.

§31. Biodiversity, Noodiversity, and Technodiversity

I suggest considering technodiversity as a program that explores alternatives to the current impasse of innovation and development in the consumerist society and the geopolitical concurrence between nation-states. I call it an impasse because it is promoting a homogenization of technology instead of allowing a heterogenization, hence also a democratization of technology. The homogenization of technology has not only limited our understanding of the possibilities of technology and its future, but it also creates a form of competition that only leads to an apocalyptic sentiment, a desperation that is shared by many people on the earth today. It was not the machine itself, but the homogenization generated by mechanist thinking that Bergson explicitly denounced.

It goes without saying that new technologies bring turbulences to the social and economic system of each epoch (what Bertrand Gille calls, in general, “the human system”63) and trigger resistance from the economic system. For example, certain technologies such as p2p sharing (e.g., Napster in 1999) or cloning (Dolly the sheep in 1996) were suppressed to maintain the coherence of the human system. However, when the resistance of the human system becomes futile, we experience profound desperation, such as the young climate activists who, no longer being heard, employ the not-so-wise strategies of throwing tomato juice or mashed potatoes at the paintings of Van Gogh and Monet. When one fails to act or fails to know how to act, as a consequence, the soul looks inward for a solution without being able to maintain its consistency with the uncertain external milieu; it easily leads to reactionary acts, such as localism and nationalism, which blind us to the planetary condition. Localism and nationalism under the guise of democracy constitute some of the most dangerous games to have ruined the twentieth century.

If we return to our previous dilemma concerning the two paths that cybernetics promises us, the first one is the realization of the political state via advanced technological systems, which opens a new terrain of competition and destruction similar to what we are witnessing now; the second one being the realization of the digital earth that slowly undermines the legitimacy of the nation-state by reducing it to one administrative power among the others. This dilemma presents itself as a problem to be resolved regarding the inquiry into planetary thinking after Hegel’s theory of the state and Schmitt’s theory of the Großraum. It will have to take the question of diversity and pluralism as central. Since the eighteenth century, the nation-state has stood for difference because the state represents the nation, and each nation differs in terms of languages, customs, and cultures. However, the nation-state as a symbol of difference is no more symbolic in our time than earlier, not only because the cultural industry has become global but also because technological acceleration and economic competition have brought the centrality of language, customs, and culture to a rather fragile status (one just has to consider the recent launch of ChatGPT, which exhibits the potential to liberate human beings from learning foreign languages). While the concept of the Großraum saw the nation-state’s limit, it fails, nonetheless, to go beyond the idea of it being an enlarged state. This does not mean that they are not important, but rather what we call culture today can no longer effectively respond to the organological expansion. The question of technology in Hegel is omnipresent though implicit. It was perceived as a constant process of externalization and reflection; however, it remains formal. The question of technology in Schmitt is more explicit in terms of its centrality in the development of the nomos, and its content was described in terms of land, sea, and air; however, technological power is conceived as a homogeneous metaphysical force that resonates with Heidegger’s analysis.

Because the current technological development desires to digitize everything, heritage will become singularly digital heritage, while those traditions that cannot be digitalized will gradually die away. The problem of modernity, that is to say, the acceleration of the obsolescence of concepts and cultures, rouses melancholia in the Freudian sense of the term, that the lost object cannot be overcome by mourning. Melancholia happens when the lost object haunts the psychic apparatus since the latter cannot maintain consistency without the former’s presence. The question central to planetary politics is that of diversity. The multiculturalism of the last decades never really solved modernity’s problems; at most, it was a continuance of the Enlightenment idea of tolerance, which always waits for the moment of intolerance—because when the solution is moral, it is susceptible to emotional manipulation. As we have tried to show, the fundamental question is a technological one. The question of diversity has to be thought of fundamentally from the perspective of technology.

This distinguishes our position from the various paths of “returning to nature” that we can find among the current debates in view of the climate change. We could name a few here without being able to exhaust the list. There is a call to return to romantic nature, where the countryside, the forest, the emerging crops and waking meadows are a negation of the modern technological life, but this “last resort” is now disappearing, especially when digital farming will be fully implemented, one will probably see more machines in the countryside than in the city. There are philosophically more subtle calls to nature—for example, the so-called ontological turn movement associated with anthropologists such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Philippe Descola, and others, which proposes a multinaturalism in contrast to multiculturalism, namely, “one culture and multiple natures.” In parallel to the anthropologists, we also have the school of multispecies, which endeavors to show from the perspective of biology the heterogeneity of species and the necessity of coexistence between them—for example, in the work of Donna Haraway and her reading of Lynn Margulis. These two schools of thought, however, constitute a mutual criticism: the former is considered by the latter as culturalism (the concept of nature is culturally constructed), while the latter is seen by the former as naturalism (a political thought inspired by biology). The difficulty of returning to “nature” is that it tends to undermine the fact that concepts don’t exist alone; singling out the concept of nature without resituating it in the system of concepts and in history doesn’t effectively resolve the problem of modernity. In contrast to the discourse on nature, and therefore also an ontogenesis of the earth, we suggest a new matrix of diversity: biodiversity, noodiversity, and technodiversity.64

Biodiversity, as we understand it, is central to the ecology of the biosphere, and the diminishment of biodiversity is a consequence and the cause of the current ecological crisis. Biodiversity doesn’t only mean the number of species but also the constitution of the environments on the planet that allows coexistence between species. The past two centuries marked a significant decrease in biodiversity and the intensification of environmental disasters. The speed of change in the environment gives little space for different species to adjust themselves in order to adapt to the living milieu. The extreme weather that we have been experiencing will continue getting more and more extreme if the economy and the technological developments associated with it continue accelerating. This dilemma of modernity could be seen, for example, in E. O. Wilson’s reading of Leo Marx: due to the environmental disasters, the moderns found in the natural world a refuge of the spirit, which is “remote, static, richer even than human imagination”; however, this “refuge” is produced by the acceleration toward the machine antipole, namely, “We cannot exist in this paradise without the machine that tears it apart.”65 In other words, the “return to nature” is a reaction against the inevitable path of modernity. One could speculate that when humans stop using technology, then biodiversity will increase as consequence. We now know what happened after those disasters such as that of Krakatoa (1883), Chernobyl (1986), and Fukushima (2011), that there was a sharp increase in biodiversity, plants and animals rapidly occupying the abandoned buildings. We could imagine that after the extinction of the human being, the planet may become even more vibrant; however, we don’t even have to talk about biodiversity in this case, since it already loses meaning. In other words, we can only talk about biodiversity in a meaningful way when we are searching for a coexistence between humans and nonhumans in the process of planetarization. Otherwise, we will only live in a constant denial of the crisis and a nihilism that is nonetheless politically correct.

Given that the human species still exist and continue to dominate the planet, then the concept of biodiversity or that of the “intrusion of Gaia” should take the humans beyond a nihilism to reconsider the possibility of coexistence between different political institutions and different species. This, however, also makes any simple solution of abandoning human civilization to nonhumans suspicious, as Wilson also observed that “the number of species in islands might go down when they become smaller and further away from the mainland.”66 In other words, we should abandon dichotomy between nature and technology, spiritualism and materialism, as Bergson suggests. Still, Wilson’s solution to strike an “equilibrium” is less sophisticated at first glance. His solution outlined in Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life claims that “only by setting aside half the planet in reserve, or more, can we save the living part of the environment and achieve the stabilization required for our own survival.”67 Wilson’s solution is plausible; however, its simplicity also exposes a philosophical and political naivety. The preservation of species in the way Wilson suggests is not wrong, only insufficient.

Biodiversity bears an intimacy with noodiversity and technodiversity, because biodiversity is always local. Bringing animals and plants from one locality to another may cause disastrous effects to the net of life one finds in that specific locality. The maintenance and cultivation of biodiversity correlates to the form of life that one finds in the locality, namely noodiversity and technodiversity. Biological knowledge could also be situated within such localities. This is also why Wilson could talk about an Ecuadoran biology, Kenyan biology, that is also to say a noodiversity: “Can there be an Ecuadorian biology, a Kenyan biology? Yes, if they focus on the uniqueness of indigenous life. Will such efforts be important to international science? Yes, because evolutionary biology is a discipline of special cases woven into global patterns. Nothing makes sense except in the light of the histories of local faunas and floras.”68 In chapter 3, we saw that Teilhard de Chardin considered Vernadsky’s biosphere as the foundation of the noosphere and that the noosphere was that which finally covers the biosphere like a skin over the earth. This is, however, not merely a skin since it also contributes to the growth of the biosphere and the interaction between the biosphere and the atmosphere. Teilhard’s noosphere is not purely nous either; it is a technological triumph and a spiritual realization in which a thinking layer is realized external to the cranium. A technological convergence characterizes the noosphere’s development, with the noosphere consisting of both noodiversity and technodiversity. Noodiversity here refers to different knowledge that originates from specific localities—for example, different cosmologies, customs, values, and so forth. Today, we talk of cultural differences, or to be more striking, clashes of civilizations, because it is assumed that noodiversities cannot be reduced to and are always incompatible with one another. In Teilhard’s theory, noodiversity was somewhat hierarchized, especially in his prioritization of Western thought over Eastern thought. This prioritization is also an identification of Western intelligentsia with technological progress. The progress of the noosphere, however, does not produce a diversification but rather a convergence toward a superbrain. The noospheric reflection or the omega point is also the moment of apocalypse. Technodiversity opposes the technological apocalypse, and instead of convergence, it proposes a divergence or bifurcation.

Suppose we follow our previous analysis on the role of technics as the support of memory and, therefore, also as the support of noiesis. In that case, we can see that technodiversity is fundamental to noodiversity. Because noodiversity belongs to second nature, such a second nature can only be maintained by technization in everyday life. Noodiversity and technodiversity contribute directly to biodiversity since, on the one hand, noodiversity incorporates the relationship between humans and nonhumans. In turn, these relations have to be maintained and enhanced by technologies that facilitate the realization of both human and nonhuman. The consequences of pesticides are universal in that they universally target various biological and chemical properties of insects, yet the use of pesticides in different locations will result in varying outcomes, ranging from beneficial to disastrous. In reality, what Vandana Shiva called the “monoculture of the mind” is omnipresent in the capitalist logic of globalization; we, therefore, end up having monotechnology, which recklessly views itself as the only option.69 Monotechnology appears to give democracy a new opportunity by providing it with global digital platforms that take the guise of empowerment and mobilization, but they eliminate democracy itself. The “monoculture of the mind,” which endangers both biodiversity and noodiversity, suggests that the key to resolving this problem is to return to the discourse of technodiversity. Therefore, the matrix of biodiversity, noodiversity, and technodiversity form a more comprehensive framework than the dialectics between nature and technology for understanding the planetary condition. The question of bifurcation is central since, without differentiation and diversification, it is impossible to talk about difference and diversity. Diversity is not only to be maintained, but it also has to be constantly created.

If today we have to read Bergson’s analysis of war seriously, it is because we are confronting another series of crises, which unfortunately is often analyzed from the perspective of “real politics” and whose solution is limited to the matrix consisting of techno-economic factors. That is to say, analysis beyond economic and military causes is considered ineffective. One may ask, if a locality wants to develop technodiversity, does it also have to develop military technologies not to be defeated? Since, as a locality, particularly a nation competing with other nations, military technology is the most necessary to develop. Without it, one might well be dominated, even annihilated, by opponents. The logic could be also applied to the question of revolution since once a revolution in a locality takes place; it will soon be destroyed by the neighboring localities, similar to how the Paris Commune was destroyed by the French army assisted by Bismarck’s Prussian state. However, if we continue to think this way, it will be impossible to imagine a future other than mankind’s self-destruction.70 In this scenario, the epoch-making power of the sovereign ceases to exist. Perhaps this is the fate of humanity, and such an event would have little impact on the planet, similar to casting a stone into the ocean. The seduction of a profound nihilism appears as a consolation, but it also limits human actions. The impossibility of action is precisely the opposite of human freedom. Human beings have the agency to adopt technology and should also have the agency to renounce certain technologies. This is also why, as we can read from Kant’s Treatise on Perpetual Peace to Georgescu-Roegen’s minimal bioeconomic program, ecology cannot be developed without renouncing militarism, without giving up military acts of aggression. Instead of military competition, Kant appeals to trade or commerce as a possibility of perpetual peace because, based on community and reciprocity, international commerce could form an organicity that enforces each member to autoregulate their behavior.

War, insofar as it is a territorial problem, is, fundamentally, an organological problem. Territorial conflicts appear when trading or exchange no longer stands as a sufficient solution. The inspiration of organic nature ceases to be effective when organological hubris cannot be pacified. However, we could also transpose this argument from an ecology of nature to an ecology of machines (i.e., from biodiversity to technodiversity),71 similar to what we suggested earlier, that is, transposing the opposition between the laws of nature and freedom to that between autonomous technical systems and freedom. As a result, we might say that war is the triumph of the homogeneity of machines because as Mumford pointed out, the megamachine must “destroy all the alternatives, historical, traditional, or perspective” to maintain its autonomy and the status of its manipulators.72 And if there is still value in Bergson’s analysis of war, it is not due to his vitalism, which, as we have shown, is already surpassed by cybernetics, but rather his organological critique of the source of war. Today, given that technological acceleration has surpassed the precedent eras, we will have to conceive different programs that will allow us to overcome the dichotomy of machine and antimachine. With the organological framework, we hope to analyze the epistemological problems from a new perspective and address possible responses to the long-lasting crisis of civilization. However, such organology has to go beyond the common wisdom of understanding technology as an extension of the body or nerves and to understand technodiversity as an imperative for planetary thinking.