Mountain, Water and Anarchy

The article is a detailed review of Yuk Hui’s book «Art and Cosmotechnics» (2021). The review opens with a consideraation of one of the major analytical decisions and conceptual innovations in Hui’s work: the division of recursive logic into tragist and Daoist one. The reviewer then focuses on Hui’s key concept of cosmotechnics, understood as the unification of the cosmic and moral order in technical activity, and points out how this concept is specified in «Art and Cosmotechnics». Reflecting on the need to clarify what is meant by «cosmos» in this context and how this cosmos relates to the function of art, the reviewer draws a line that in its own way supplements Hui’s approach: whereas Hui emphasizes recursivity (and unity), the reviewer emphasizes contingency (and not-one). This reaccentuation also leads to a shift from Hui’s claimed epistemological pluralism to ontological anarchism. After pointing to Hui’s general intension and clarifying both the function of aesthetic thinking and the understanding of the cosmos in the conception of cosmotechnics, the reviewer problematizes the aspect of Hui’s project consisting in the search for the universal, and for this purpose turns to an indigenous cosmo-aesthetics.