The Possibility of Cosmopolity

by Lukáš Likavčan & Digital Earth

One of the increasingly popular terms in contemporary theoretical humanities is the category of praxis. In this essay, the Digital Earth collaborator Lukáš Likavčan introduces this term through the philosophy of Czechoslovak Marxist thinker Karel Kosík, and explains how this category shifts the definitions of infrastructure, universalism, topology, totality and – by drawing on Sylvia Wynter – also the human.

Sahej Rahal, stills from finalforest_V2 (summoning ritual), 2021. Courtesy the artist.

A communist party Congress would seldom produce deep intellectual turmoil. But despite all expectations, that was the case with the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, when the First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev presented a denunciation of the Stalinist political practices. In the years to come, it led to the entire rejection of the cult of personality, the new code for public architecture, the new tasks for culture in socialist modernity, and the relaxing of hard censorship in most of the countries of the Eastern bloc. When the news reached Prague – then the capital of Czechoslovakia and now, 65 years later, the city where I’m writing this essay – set events in motion. Khrushchev’s speech gave rise to an intellectual movement that contemporary Czech historians of ideas such as Jan Mervart, Jiří Růžička, or Vít Sommer call post-Stalinism. The main difference from the Stalinist period of the country’s socialist development (itself a short epoch, lasting less than a decade) resided in the multiplication of the agents of knowledge and traditions of thinking. This shift allowed for a broad debate among the country’s intellectuals that oscillated around two poles, humanism and techno-optimism, equally highlighting agents of social, economic, and political progress; culture on the one hand, technology on the other hand. Among these thinkers, Czechoslovak philosopher Karel Kosík has a prominent place as he became internationally renowned for his work Dialectics of the Concrete, first published in 1963.

II.

The main aim of Kosík’s philosophy was to bring together phenomenology and Marxism – a task seemingly difficult to achieve, since the first-person perspective of the phenomenological subject hardly fits into the impersonal historical laws of the Marxist doctrine. Yet, Kosík managed to find a touchpoint of both traditions through the concept of praxis, a term that brings together the subjective apprehension of the world facilitated by the first-person perspective and the collective re-working of the world unfolding in history. Praxis equally exhibits the existential and the communal; it is composed by the personal aspect of projecting oneself into the future as well as the impersonal aspect of being determined by an outside force (be it gravity, the will of the proletariat, or a simple socially-induced habit). This synthetic quality of praxis – its connective tendency – relates to the existence of tools, or what today would be called infrastructure. Despite his proximity to phenomenology, that would indicate a kind of culturalist, humanist ontology, Kosík was also a Marxist, and so he couldn’t conceptualize praxis in other terms besides the material. That was the techno-optimist part of his approach, since this intellectual tradition considered infrastructure as the cornerstone of any activity. In orthodox Marxism, this is sometimes reduced to economic activity, but Kosík generalized this materialist intuition to humanity’s overall encounter with the world. It is indeed hard to imagine a praxis that would not involve materials and objects, even in the case of such a highly intellectual praxis as philosophy; you need a whole set of material conditions to make thinking appear (economic, social, political), and a host of tools to let it proceed (for example, a computer where you can write down your thoughts and look at them from a sufficient distance). But here also lies the synthetic trick of praxis: it highlights the shared infrastructural space that precedes any individual exercise of praxis by a particular human being.

III.

This is the moment where my exegesis of Kosík’s approach turns into speculation. What I take from his fresh, unorthodox Marxist outlook, is the idea of infrastructure as a ‘scaffolding of praxis’ making it the fundamental framework that guarantees praxis’ reproduction. For example, scripture is a technique of codification and propagation of language; computation is a technique of codification and propagation of methods of measuring and quantification of being (for better or worse). Praxis as embedded in materiality puts all its different aspects on the same par. In metaphysical terms, there is no ‘higher’ nor ‘lower' praxis, no transcendental praxis that would hover above the empirical, as would be the case with philosophical reason pondering upon biological life. Of course, there are hierarchies of praxis depending on aims and strategies; sometimes one needs to interpret the world before intervening, and sometimes one needs to intervene to make space for an interpretation to unfold. What is discovered here is an irrevocable equality of all praxis; as they all sit on the same material-infrastructural ground, they cannot have imperial claims over one another. If we stick with our examples, philosophy has no prior mandate to govern other domains of praxis. If philosophy wants to gain any domain of praxis, it must earn it by first reflecting its own contours and boundaries.

IV.
Thinking about philosophy as just one praxis among many may allow us to study it more freely in its different genres and applications. One of its features is its persistent proximity to spatial analogies; thinking is often imagined as a movement, a gesture, perhaps a line of flight, and even in cases when its spatial qualities become less obvious, one may still discover something topological at its roots. Think of categories such as ‘fundamental’ or ‘universal’; The former indicates an existence of a primary layer for everything built on top of it (you see how we eminently ran into spatial vocabulary), while the latter evokes an absolute, all-encompassing, omnidirectional containment. In the history of Western philosophy, the former and latter categories came into close contact repeatedly as philosophy was often asked to provide ‘grounds’ of knowledge and an analysis of the basic units of existence in the most universal way possible. With respect to the ‘universal,’ a particularly significant development occurred towards the end of the European Middle Ages, when the Christian concept of universality was born. It was a remarkably persistent topological vision that united both religious and political theology with the geographical expansion of European power; the observer of the world from above delegated the sovereign power to the head of the Church, who delegated it to the monarchs, who were then mandated to extend God’s influence over non-European territories. The process was imagined as an enlarging circle or sphere of influence (with Rome as its geographical centre). That is a simple topological model of containment, one which unites conquistadors and Christian missionaries with colonial empires of pre-industrial and industrial modernity, as well as with the contemporary geopolitical order.

As is the case with topology of any kind, the best way to describe it is by the means of its limit conditions. With a topology of containment, universalism sits on one end of the spectrum and fragmentation, individualisation, and locality at the other. That is why it does not suffice to reject universalism. In fact, simply moving from one end to another may be an even larger trap. And so, it seems that the term ‘universalism’ ceases to be useful as both a definition and an accusation. What if the very thing to be criticized cannot be critically approached unless one unlearns the spatial tropes it is based upon, including the at-hand critiques the spatial tropes naturally necessitate? Hence, to faithfully engage with envisioning alternatives to the modes of thinking still complicit in perpetuating colonial ramifications – and in an unexpected twist to the slogan that “the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house” – one may wish to relativize not just universalism per se, but the very topology of enlarging (or shrinking) circles and geometrical containments. An entire history has been composed on this topology, and one version can be found in the more than 2500 pages of Peter Sloterdijk’s Sphären trilogy. It is a history written by a European about Europeans dedicated to anyone who wants to comprehend the basic topological constructs of Western philosophy (although Sloterdijk would most probably disagree with this assessment, and I would not subscribe to his political positions).

As we are confronted with a stage of a profound confusion in these times of planetary emergency, we intuitively feel a sense of urgency, yet we struggle to make it tangible.

VI.

One way to relativize the topology of containment as a template of thinking may, quite surprisingly, lead to a critical appraisal of the category of totality. Ancient Greeks distinguished between two kinds of totality: pan (πᾶν) and holon (ὅλον). While the former connotes something comprehensive, as well as dynamic and open-ended, the latter tilts toward the meaning of an enclosed and structured whole. Given this duality, the topology of containment falls under the rubric of holon, while that of pan remains somewhat under-explored, or at least not fully appreciated in contemporary critical discourses. Or maybe appreciated elsewhere. Consider Kosík’s writing about totality and praxis in 1960s:

The spontaneous inclination of 'praxis' and thinking to isolate phenomena and to divide reality into what is essential and what is peripheral is always accompanied by an awareness of the whole in which and from which certain aspects have been isolated. This awareness is also spontaneous, though it is less clearly apparent to naive consciousness, and is frequently unconscious. Dim awareness of a 'horizon of indeterminate reality' as a whole is the ubiquitous backdrop of all activity and thinking, unconscious though it may be for naive consciousness.

This “dim awareness of a ‘horizon of indeterminate reality’ as a whole” contains a message of a totality that resists its calcification into a “false totality” of “hypostasised absolute,” as Kosík would say. This is a totality that cherishes contradiction as a productive moment of its unfolding, one that seeks transformation, variation, and exchange rather than closure: “[...] without contradictions, totality is empty and static; outside totality, contradictions are formal and arbitrary.” If praxis is oriented towards both the communal and individual, and if infrastructure mediates this dual orientation, totality is the liminal yet also general space of exchange that emerges out of this dual orientation. Totality thus generates continuously novel forms of both encountering the world and of the world itself. In the philosophical vocabulary built here, ‘exchange’ is crucial as it can exist only insofar as there is something to be exchanged, meaning as long as there are different modes of praxis which offer something to one another.

VII.

So what are the consequences of this version of totality, of such a ‘liminal yet also general space of exchange’, on categories of identity, such as ‘human’? One thinker I like to read alongside Kosík for their shared interest in the synthetic moment of praxis is Jamaican writer and thinker Sylvia Wynter with her powerful discourse on “genres of being human.” Where Kosík sees a multiplicity of praxis, Wynter sees multiplicity of the origin-stories of humanity. Yet, she also remains convinced of a possibility of their convergence into a species-wide narrative that would valorize the synthetic moment of praxis; the gift of reunion, the possibility of cosmopolity. That is the reason why Denise Ferreira da Silva notes that Wynter wants to dissect the notion of humanity from particularism of Man, or of what Kosík would call “the false totality” of actually existing humanism:

[…] the ethico-political question becomes whether or not critical projects toward global justice, and the images of justice they carry, should work toward dissembling the subjects of raciality to institute a Human universal, but one which, as Wynter hopes, will not be just a refiguring of one particular 'descriptive statement of the human' as the global norm and thus a replication of the present role played by the notion of humanity, as overrepresented by Man, in the global present.

That is: The problem is not ‘humanity’ per se, but the notion of ‘humanity-as-Man,’ picturing ideal humanity in a static description of what it means to be human. In the praxis-oriented approach, however, it makes sense to ask, ‘When is human?’ and ‘Where is human?’ rather than ‘What is human?’ This ‘When?’ and ‘Where?’ is best exemplified by Wynter’s revisiting an ancestral site of Blombos cave, on the shore of the Indian ocean in South Africa, where a seventy-seven-thousand-year-old piece of an engraved ochre with geometrical markings was found. It is probably the oldest evidence of a technologically mediated human communication. While we will never learn what the lines on the stone mean, it is here Wynter locates the birth of a human as storyteller, as a creature able to use symbols to create stories that carry cultures and societies. Wynter’s comprehension of ‘the human as storyteller’ is an opportunity to radicalize Kosík’s materialist intuitions: storytelling as a mode of praxis does not concern stories as pure constructs of imagination, rather they are materially encoded projects, codes of action, and ambitions. Stories are told as they are materialized and performed. And so today, as the symbolic operations and material infrastructures become increasingly indistinguishable, it is the digital that takes the place of the ‘scaffolding of praxis.’ Hence, the ‘Digital’ of ‘Digital Earth.’ At this junction of infrastructure and praxis, the potential for cosmopolity emerges. This is not assembled from above by one universal narrative, backed by the topology of containment, but situating the human as a mytho-poetical creature soaked in streams of semiotic operations directed through the channels of media technologies.

VIII.

As for the ‘Earth’ of the ‘Digital Earth,' it is the concept of the planet where I want to conclude with a proposition on the possibility of cosmopolity after universalism. This possibility lies in Kosík’s alternative topology of totality, which organizes a point where different modes of praxis tap into each other to orchestrate temporary convergences between them. If to be human means to be a storyteller, the convergence sought here is not about the definition of humanity, but about agreeing on having stories to tell together. After all, there would be no storytelling without gathering. This place of gathering, this ‘liminal yet also general space of exchange,’ is identified as the planet in an act of consistent faithfulness to materialism. For this reason, the exchange the planet conditions is equally biochemical and technological as well economic and semiotic, sketching a map of praxis that gradually turns into a terrain of more-than-human metabolisms. Thus, the planet is not a mere ground on which we stand, but a metabolic totality that implicates any praxis. As a result, opting out from telling the story of the human (as an element of the more-than-human) means to resort back to static totalities of the past, whether in the form of all-containing spheres or separated bubbles unable of mutual exchange. Cosmopolity is not to be composed or constructed: it is always already present.

Dedicated to Dorine and those that continue his legacy.

The author would like to extend his thanks to Nora N. Khan, who collaborated on an early draft of this essay.

Further Readings:

Jennifer Gabrys, “Becoming Planetary”, e-flux architecture, October 2, 2018, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/accumulation/217051/becoming-planetary.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category”, Critical Inquiry 46, no. 1 (2019): 1-31.

Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014).