The writers and artists described in this book are joined by a desire to embrace “Eastern” aesthetics as a means of redeeming “Western” technoculture. The assumption they all share is that at the core of Western culture since at least the Enlightenment there lies an originary and all-encompassing philosophical error, manifested most immediately in the perils of modern technology—and that Asian art offers a way out of that awful matrix. That desire, this book attempts to demonstrate, has informed Anglo- and even Asian-American debates about technology and art since the late nineteenth century a ... More

The writers and artists described in this book are joined by a desire to embrace “Eastern” aesthetics as a means of redeeming “Western” technoculture. The assumption they all share is that at the core of Western culture since at least the Enlightenment there lies an originary and all-encompassing philosophical error, manifested most immediately in the perils of modern technology—and that Asian art offers a way out of that awful matrix. That desire, this book attempts to demonstrate, has informed Anglo- and even Asian-American debates about technology and art since the late nineteenth century and continues to skew our responses to our own technocultural environment. Although the “machine” has for over a hundred years functioned as an almost religious object of enthusiasm and veneration, American art and literature have been shaped as much by resistance to technology as by submission to it—and, with startling frequency, that resistance has taken the form of an investment this book identifies as Asia-as-technê: a compelling fantasy that would posit Eastern aesthetics as both the antidote to and the perfection of machine culture.