**Art: The Margin of Technology**
**Explanation:** This was a philosophy of technology talk I was invited to give to the young artists at the West Five Arts Center. The original title was “Toys and Art: The Margin of Technology,” but in the actual talk I still mainly talked about technology and art; toys were only mentioned in passing. So now I’ve changed the title a bit. What I call “margin” could also be called “defect.” To speak of art as technology’s defect sounds somewhat offensive, so “margin” sounds more positive. A defect always means something that can be supplemented; hitting a wall always means there is room to turn back. Finitude, blockage, and margin, space: these are all one and the same thing.
Essentially speaking, what I discussed was “philosophy of technology,” and for me toys and art are two distinctive forms of technology that cannot be ignored. As for art philosophy and art itself, I am utterly an outsider; all my reflections remain at the level of metaphysical conceptual inquiry. Someone pointed out that what I talked about was too metaphysical and not concrete enough, but as a rustic who knows nothing about art, in my exchanges with artists I could only first hold my ground in a metaphysical posture. In the end we also talked a bit about Bitcoin, which counts as landing on concrete issues. By the way, after the round of lectures back and forth, Bitcoin broke through 1,000 yuan again after half a year, worth celebrating~
What follows is the text I prepared in advance; in the actual report I read part of it and spoke part of it extemporaneously, and many contents changed. The preparation was rather rushed; the toys I intended to talk about as well (the generation of meaning, their relation to art) were scarcely mentioned, and the written exposition also has many stiff passages and is somewhat messy; in the actual talk I tried to handle things flexibly.
1. Technology/Art and Modernity
When reflecting on technology or art, the first thing that must be noted is that these two concepts are entirely modern.
Of course, we know that as long as there are human beings, there is technology; human beings are almost defined as tool users. And the history of art is almost equally ancient: in remote antiquity, our early ancestors were already painting on cave walls and drilling holes in bones to make flutes and play them.
However, the technology and art we talk about today—technology and art—are not concepts known to the ancients. The root of technology is techne, and it has always had a meaning similar to art. The former comes from Greek, the latter from Latin, and their meanings are connected; they are also similar to the Chinese character “艺,” which is very broad in scope: it includes art, craftsmanship, skill, literature and art, and even in general the meaning of “knowledge.” For example, the *Treatise on Arts and Letters* in the *Book of Han* records the various doctrines of the “ten schools and nine currents”; Confucius’s “six arts” are “rites, music, archery, charioteering, writing, and arithmetic”; and the Western medieval educational system had the “seven liberal arts,” including the four arts of the sciences plus the three arts of the humanities: astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, music, grammar, rhetoric, and logic.
The differentiation of the two concepts, technology and art, took place in modern times. In the seventeenth century, technology still meant “theory of craft”; in the *Encyclopedia* compiled by Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century, genres such as poetry, music, and painting only began to be listed together under a single broad category. It was not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that the contemporary meanings of the words technology and art can be said to have formed.
This process of differentiation is similar to the differentiation between science and philosophy: the former is a Latin word, the latter a Greek word, and originally their meanings were also more or less the same. From a stage where “philosophy,” with its broad meaning, was dominant, to “science” becoming independent from it and ultimately crowding out most of philosophy’s territory—the conceptual change in science/philosophy is almost exactly mirrored by the conceptual change in technology/art, and the timing basically overlaps as well: the early modern period to the nineteenth century. This is no coincidence. The rise of science and technology, and the marginalization of “philosophy” along with the independence of “art,” all stem from the same process of modernity. In the end, technology allied itself with science, while art was placed at the opposite end from science. A series of binary oppositions—soul and body, reason and sensibility, objective and subjective, truth and beauty—were established, so that in the eyes of modern people artistic activity became sensuous, subjectively creative, concerned with beauty and experience, and so on. These notions came to seem self-evident, but all this is a consequence of modernity.
So we cannot help asking: how exactly did the modern meanings of technology and art come into being? And if various technological activities and artistic activities have existed since ancient times, why in antiquity did these two concepts not have so sharp a boundary?
2. Technology’s Self-Concealment and Art’s Self-Revelation
We need to carry out a philosophical interrogation of technology/art, but this philosophical interrogation itself is also modern. Although technological activities have been inseparable from human life since prehistoric times, philosophers seem to have only begun paying attention to them in the twentieth century. This fact itself is worth noting: why has the issue of technology long been a blind spot in philosophical reflection?
Heidegger offers two reasons for this. First, Western philosophy from the very beginning pursued “eternity” unremittingly, and eternity exists only in the ideal world of ideas; concrete things that exist in reality and are perishable are, for the pursuit of eternal truth, at best only obstacles to be eliminated.
Second, technology itself has the characteristic of self-concealment, that is to say, when technology is functioning well, it often becomes a background that withdraws of itself and escapes our notice. It only reveals itself when something goes wrong. For example, people who normally wear glasses often do not notice the existence of their glasses, but once there is a problem with them, we pick them up and inspect them closely. When cutting vegetables with a knife, we only pay attention to how the vegetables are being handled, not to the condition of the knife itself. The more skilled and effortless we are, the more the tool hides itself; and unless the knife has become dull, broken, or lost, we will only put aside our attention to the vegetables on the cutting board and turn to the condition of the knife. In short, the fact that technology enters the field of philosophy itself means that modern technology has gone wrong.
But this explanation has its dubious side. In fact, technology is not always a self-effacing background; there are two obvious exceptions, namely toys and art. Even when functioning normally, these two things do not disappear of themselves; on the contrary, they always present themselves before people and always try to attract attention.
If technology is ignored by philosophical reflection because of its self-concealing character, then why is art, which reveals itself and displays itself, also ignored by philosophy? Ultimately, in the eyes of philosophers, what technology or art reveals has nothing to do with eternal truth. The pursuit of truth is merely a matter of the soul in the world of ideas, while bodily activity in the real world is regarded as a pure obstacle, and what art reveals is nothing but some mind-bewitching illusions.
The beginning of Western philosophy is the rise of “natural philosophy,” and this marks the opposition between philosophy and craft. The concept of “nature” stands opposed to “the artificial”; nature refers to what “goes of itself,” to definite and eternal things that are “not subject to human will,” whereas the causes and purposes of artifacts are determined by the human will external to them, and they are arbitrary, perishable things.
Next we will discuss two questions: first, is this opposition between philosophy and craft, which treats craft activity as an eyesore irrelevant to the pursuit of truth, reasonable? Second, are technology’s self-concealment and art’s self-display contradictory? Is art some kind of activity essentially opposed to technology, or is it a special form of technology?
3. Technology as the Disclosure of Truth
Modern philosophy discovered that “truth” is not something ready-made and simply lying there, with which people can directly come into contact. People always reveal truth “through something”; truth always presents itself through something. For example, you say that the proposition “A is P” is true, but the words used to express this truth are human technology, the product of culture and context. If we do not learn the skills of these spoken and written languages within a specific humanistic background, we cannot utter or understand this proposition. Whatever truth may be, it always becomes present through something. Modern philosophy became aware of the mediality of truth and of human finitude—whether or not there exists an independently self-subsistent thing unrelated to human beings, if this thing is to present itself to human beings, and thus be recognized and spoken of by them, then it must always do so “through something.” There is no way to “directly” contact “the thing itself”; even observing with the naked eye requires that, in a specific background, under specific lighting and orientation, the thing can be seen.
Thus modern philosophy turned from ontology to epistemology, marked by a consciousness of “methodology,” shifting its attention away from the “content” of truth and instead focusing on the methods by which human beings can possibly know truth.
There is no direct way to reach truth. Any way of reaching truth is “indirect,” mediating, and therefore also involves some blockage or concealment. Any disclosure is at the same time also a concealment; the activity of disclosure in fact means placing what is disclosed within a background, setting it at the center of the light, but this also means that the background arranged to make this center stand out will itself retreat and become a kind of shadow. In total darkness and total brightness, people can see nothing. Human beings are not God; human finitude limits us to facing things only through various limited perspectives. But these limitations are at the same time the possibility by which things become present; presentation itself is precisely limitation—placing things within a specific boundary. Just as air is an obstacle to flying but also precisely what makes flying possible. In modern philosophy, the limitations of technology and the opacity of mediation are no longer simply regarded as obstacles on the path to truth, but are recognized as the path to truth itself.
4. Nature as Blockage
So Heidegger says that technology is unconcealment, a way truth is disclosed. But does this mean that truth is subject to human will? Is truth arbitrarily designed by human subjectivity? Of course not. Technology is like setting up a stage, clearing a vacant space, and letting things themselves appear as they are in the center of the stage against the background’s contrast. In what “form” things may appear is indeed related to the technological environment, but it cannot be completely predetermined by technology. “Nature” will “show up on its own.” Technology’s control is always limited; it is not that whatever people want to present can be presented. And this part of technology that is “disobedient” is precisely what is called “nature.” Technology is the limitation encountered when nature presents itself, and nature is also precisely the limitation encountered when technology runs of itself. When I try to make a statue out of cotton or a quilt out of marble, I cannot get my way; I will encounter obstacles. And at that moment, what I encounter is “nature,” the thingness of things, the nature of things that is not subject to human will.
This is in fact the original meaning of “nature,” namely “self-emergence.” And this notion of nature underwent two transformations in the history of Western thought. The first occurred already with the ancient Greek philosophers. Aristotle defined “natural things” as “things that have within themselves the principle of motion and change.”
However, what is the difference between “self-emergence” and “having within oneself the principle of motion and change”? From the perspective of modern people, or rather from the perspective after the concept of “nature” has already “fallen,” these two sentences seem to mean the same thing: the reason something can grow by itself is not that the cause is within itself?
But here, the crucial difference is precisely the insertion of the concept of “cause.” We always understand and imagine the changes in things through some chain of causality; this is precisely what happened after the discovery of nature.
The concept of “cause” was originally a juridical term; cause was what was pursued in a court case. Moreover, from the very beginning the concept of cause was closely linked to the image of a person exerting force, to some kind of “external force.”
It was the introduction of this thing that displaced the original concept of nature.
And nature as “self-emergence”—that is to say, that elusive, romantic, changeable, inexhaustible, self-willed, “wild nature.” In other words, the original meaning of “nature” is precisely “anti-normative,” something that cannot be regulated. Yet after ancient Greek natural philosophy, nature instead became normativity itself, “law” itself.
The key point is that the “self” in nature’s “self” originally meant “on its own,” “self-willed”; self-emergence means that things pop up “on their own,” speaking for themselves, uncontrollably, beyond expectation, acting of their own accord.
But the concept of “principle” completely changed the meaning of “nature.” This wild nature, as indeterminacy, was precisely transformed into rational nature, as something graspable. We introduce the concept of “cause,” originally an external force to be pursued in the legal domain, into the understanding of naturally “self-emergent” things. Here the first transformation of the concept of nature was completed, or rather, the first “anthropomorphization”: nature, this thing that goes its own way, was understood as a self-willed criminal, an agent. People began to investigate the “motives” of “nature.”
The second transformation of the concept of nature, namely the formation of the concept of “natural things” distinguished from “artificial things,” ultimately gave rise to the concept of the “natural world.” The “natural world” stands external to technology and becomes technology’s “object.”
5. Art as Technology’s Self-Revelation
We note that nature emerges in technology’s “margin.” Human technology cannot control everything; it always leaves some margin, and “nature” appears in this gap. If technology were without blockage, if everything could operate smoothly according to prior design and go as intended, then we would have no place in which to encounter “nature.”
Here we need to reconsider a previous assumption: when technology is running with ease, it always withdraws into self-concealment. But we find that, in a certain sense, the operation of technology always encounters blockage, and this is precisely what is “natural.”
Indeed, when we use technology skillfully, the technology itself becomes transparent, but it never completely disappears. For example, when I cut vegetables with a knife, when I am using it smoothly, I may be single-mindedly thinking only about what shape I want the vegetables to be cut into, and not constantly paying attention to how I am using the knife. But the existence of the knife never completely disappears from my perceptual world. On the contrary, I am sensing the knife’s existence every moment; I feel the heaviness of the knife, I feel blockage as I swing it, I feel resistance when it cuts the vegetables and strikes the cutting board, and I am also constantly observing the knife’s position and direction. Because of these blockages and feedback, because the knife is never transparent, I can constantly adjust myself; and precisely because I am good at constantly adjusting according to blockage and feedback, I can be called “at ease” in using it. The kitchen knife is both an extension of my body and a terminal of the external world; the finitude of my capacity and the necessity of the external world’s self-willedness meet head-on here, contending and colliding with one another. In short, the kitchen knife here appears as an “interface,” an interface through which humans and nature interact. In the ready-to-hand handling activity, rather than saying the technological object withdraws and recedes, it is better to say that it unfolds as an interface: the interface is the place where “our side” and “the other side” separate and interact, appearing as the boundary between the self domain and the object domain, constructing the relation between inside and outside, subject and object.
Seen this way, technology is not opposed to art. Technology likewise reveals and unfolds itself; only, technology does not place itself at the center of the stage, but instead reveals itself as the background through which objects can appear and the interface through which objects can be handled. Art, by contrast, is what brings blockage and shadow themselves to the center of the stage.
The solidity of stone is the blockage of construction; we always have to laboriously work the stone, yet at the same time the solidity of stone is also the condition that makes construction into construction. It is precisely in this contested interface or margin of maneuver, in the space for turning about, that craftsmanship becomes possible. And sculptural art is precisely the way this contest is displayed to the utmost. Sculpture does not dissolve the properties of stone; rather, it fully reveals those properties.
If a stone statue could present the human form without any blockage, if a portrait could directly and completely present a person’s features, then there would be no sculptural art and no portrait art. The space of art is opened up in the gap of technology. The so-called “margin” is also something superfluous: the properties of stone, the properties of pigment, insofar as technology presents its object, are “superfluous” things, some eyesore of an existence; but any object must be presented in some kind of “margin.” And the activity of consciously exploring, grasping, and bringing into play the margin of technology is art.
Thus, the more a certain technology contains margin, the more it includes ambiguous, blurry, and obstructed parts, the more likely it is to open up a space for art. For example, compared with alphabetic writing, Chinese characters are more ambiguous in inscribing language and have more room to maneuver; therefore, the art of calligraphy in Chinese characters has a broader space. Calligraphy suspends the purpose of “writing,” allowing “writing” itself to present itself.
And what these arts present is not merely “beauty,” but the encounter between human beings and “nature” itself. In a certain sense, art can be said to be the original “philosophy of technology,” a primordial reflection on technology or the human life-world.
5. The Technicization of Nature and the Flattening of Technology
Then let us look again at how the modern rupture between technology and art came about. In antiquity, art did not exist apart from technology; calligraphy did not exist apart from writing. Art was always embedded within technology.
In modern times, however, technology gradually frees itself from “blockage”; “nature” is no longer something uncontrollably emerging of its own accord, but is understood as something preordained and awaiting control. Technology no longer leaves room for sudden emergence, but instead tries, through forceful and total control, to predetermine the entire script, so that nature may appear in a fully controlled, precise manner.
The experimental methods of mathematics, physics, and chemistry are a typical control technology, and the assembly line and scientific management are another form. Under the control of modern technology, everything appears in an orderly, step-by-step way, leaving no room whatsoever for ambiguity and shadow.
Thus the space for art is driven out by mainstream technology, because these mainstream, dominant modern technologies “leave no margin”; they have no blockage; they are precise and efficient. Only obsolete technologies have enough margin to allow art to find a dwelling place. Thus, after photography, the art of painting gained independence.
But does the apparent force of modern technology really succeed in driving out shadow and ambiguity, and in the end let human beings obtain a complete truth unimpeded and unobscured? Clearly not. Modern technology is also only a particular mode of presentation and control, and it must likewise have its own inherent obscurations. Photography may perhaps be more precise than portrait painting, but the figures it presents are not necessarily richer or fuller. No matter how fine a photograph may be, no matter how objectively and accurately it may present a person’s appearance, a photograph is still not that person himself. Whether through photography, reading, or conversation, in every mode of dealing with things we are revealing objects in different ways and interacting with them, yet we can never come into direct contact with “him” himself without mediation, without obstruction. “He” is something beyond what photography and various technical means capture, but he is by no means unrelated to these clearly grasped things; rather, he hides precisely at the boundary between the bright and the dark. “Nature” is obviously not unrelated to the experimental methods of modern technology, but neither is it the data presented in the laboratory itself.
Modern technology’s expulsion of art is, in essence, the expulsion of “nature.”
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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