“Dangerously pigment smears. Artifice is the disrespect of the propriety of borders. Emotion results. The potent surface leans into dissolution and disrupts volition – it’s not a secluding membrane or limit. To experience change, we submit ourselves to the affective potential of the surface. This is the pharmakon: an indiscrete threshold where our bodies exchange information with an environment.”
Lisa Robertson, “How to Colour”1
Towards a Cosmos-Chromatics
Memory, like architecture, has always been susceptible to time and weathering, if not necessarily shaped by its surroundings. For architecture to exist, the very first brick must allow itself contact with the soil, the wind, the rain, and the sunlight; the anamnesis of a priori Knowledge is the impossible construction of an architecture that is never in contact with the city. Techne, or the “exteriorisation of memory”, then, has also never been singular nor universal (Hui 10). Yet, the West’s “arrogance of the grand aesthetico-political endeavour to have ‘thought’ become ‘world’” (Ranciere 10) has led to the “tacit acceptance that there is only one kind of technics and technology,” and therefore only one kind of knowledge (Hui 4). The hegemonic epistemic power over the determination of Being, Knowledge, and techne has always been an “aesthetico-political endeavour,” for it is aesthetics2 that determines modes of articulating forms of thought and perception (Ranciere 10). The word techne itself knows that technological thinking cannot be separated from aesthetic thinking; the Greek conception of techne has been translated not only as technology, but also art.
To engage in knowledge-production beyond fruitless anamnesis, then, we must find alternative ways of engaging with the sensible. Specifically, I posit that color is an apt place to begin the inquiry into techne and being, for it is through color that I arrive at a cosmos-chromatic method of engaging with the world and the self. Cosmos-chromatics, which takes the liberty of playing on the Hong Kong philosopher, Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics, orients itself in the metaphysics of surface, where accidents, contradictions, and movement is welcome. This surface is not one that confines, but that which understands the tendency of pigment to smear, transfer, and fade. Cosmos-chromatics takes on a pharmacological understanding of technology, not only as the paradoxical co-existence of remedy and poison, but as pigment and color. What alternative ways of thinking – both aesthetic and technical – emerge from an expanded understanding of technology not as an instrument, but as a form of surface politics? How does color and techne allow us to speculate a futurity that does not succumb to the apocalyptic anxiety regarding the ‘forgetting’ of being? To explore these inquiries, we must return to where I began: memory.
(re)Programming the Technical Being – The Question Concerning Color
The history of Western philosophy has revolved around a desire for eternity, or more precisely put, eternal Truths. The philosophical concept of eternity and eternal Truth positions Knowledge as a transcendental, primordial memory that has existed for eternity, independent of the passage of time and humanity. Thus, Knowledge came to be defined as a goal towards which civilization and modernization progresses, wherein the material and spiritual world exist within a hierarchical system that presumes a primordial a priori memory of Knowledge that, through techne, can be rendered sensible to the material world. Mankind’s access towards the eternal Truth, or Knowledge, is consequently contingent on our relationality to techne and technology.
The desire for a universal and eternal form of knowledge has begot a procedural programming of the technical being. If the pathway towards Knowledge is dependent on a system of coding that requires a hierarchy of calls to its preceding constituent procedures, then the erasure or substitution of a single function or variable is enough to crash the system. In this pathway, humanity relates itself to such ‘higher’ notions of Knowledge and Being through its position as a wielder of technology, or as a technical being. Technology, then, as the “exteriorisation of memory”, calls upon its preceding constituent ‘memory’ of Knowledge, which constitutes the technical being’s relation to Being (Hui 10). Such procedural programming of the relationship between the human and technological, then, is what has led to the Heideggerian crisis of modern technology as that which threatens the loss of Being – when the human is replaced with the machine, the code comes to a halt.
If it is the programming paradigm itself, and not just a bug, that crashes the system, then perhaps we should focus not on de-bugging, but rather (re)imagining an entirely new system of coding – of thinking. The question concerning technology, then, is a not simply a matter of restructuring humanity’s relation to technology but questioning the universality of technology. In questioning the universality of technology, we must also trouble the stability of universal thought, or the existence of a singular, eternal form of a priori Knowledge. These questions, I argue, are best traced and explored through color, for color, as techne for light, also finds itself effected by the question concerning technology.
That Dangerous Supplement, or Color
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in his Theory of Colours, asserts that color is ultimately derived from the interplay between light and darkness. In doing so, Goethe presumes a hierarchical relationality between color and light; he notes that “colours…are less than the light, inasmuch as they are a repetition of an impression of light,” (Goethe 230-231) and that “every colour, in order to be seen, must have a light within or behind it” (Goethe 233). Whereas light (and darkness) is understood as a “primordial phenomenon,” (Goethe 102) color, determined from light, is a “secondary phenomenon” (Goethe 73) that, by nature of its more material nature, offers a sensible (visible) ‘impression of light.’
Such an understanding defines color as inferior to light, whose existence is contingent upon the existence of the ‘primordial phenomenon.’ It is important that we speak of color and this ‘primordial phenomenon,’ for Goethe’s theory on color had an undeniable influence on the German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and his conceptualization of the ‘world spirit’ (Weltgeist3). In his letter to Goethe, addressed from Berlin on February 24, 1821, Hegel applauds what Goethe “strikingly call[s] the ‘primordial phenomenon’ [Urphänomen],” and concludes that to “ferret out the primordial phenomenon…from those further environs which are accidental to it…[is] a matter of great spiritual intelligence”. Whereas Goethe’s Urphänomen ultimately reduces color to a techne of rendering visible the “dazzling and colourless” force of true light, (15) Hegel’s Weltgeist reduces technology itself into a mere tool for sublimating the world towards a unified, singular method of Being.
The issue Goethe identifies with color is strikingly similar to that of Heidegger’s concern with modern technology. Goethe, even while studying and writing on colors, contends that a “mistake has been committed in the investigation of this subject [of color]…a very serious one, in as much as a secondary phenomenon has been thus placed higher in order…[and] the primordial phenomenon has been degraded to an inferior place…” (Goethe 73). In defining color as supplement to light, Goethe effectively destines light to danger, for when color is privileged as a subject of intellectual inquiry, the subservient relationship begins to sway. Similarly, modern technology becomes dangerous for Heidegger since, in its “destining of revealing” via Ge-stell4, “even God…can lose all that is exalted and holy…[and] sink to the level of a cause, of causa efficiens” (Heidegger 331).
Goethe’s Urphänomen, however, has never been a natural, universal concept, and neither has technology, just as Hegel’s Weltgeist is not necessarily the only form of understanding the world. The Korean tradition of danchung, or the historic process of ‘coloring’ architecture, operates free of such hierarchical understanding of light and color. In danchung, color is understood as light and light understood as color. As the Korean Database5 puts it:
대자연의 빛, 그 오묘한 빛깔 하나 하나에 삶의 의미를 새기고, 만물의 형상과 조화를 품어 온갖 상서로움의 표상으로 승화된 것이 곧 단청이다. 우리의 민족은 삼라만상의 모든 빛깔에서 사물의 이치를 깨닫고, 음양오행과 오채의 조화를 스스로 터득했다.
Within every mystical hue that is nature’s light, Danchung engraves into it the meaning of life, and holds within it all that is sensible in the world in harmony, thus sublimating them into symbols of auspiciousness. Our people discerned the principles of all that exists in the world through all the colors of the world, and mastered the harmony of yin and yang, the five elements, and the harmony of the five colors.
Although I have translated ‘빛깔’ as ‘hue,’ the word contains within it the meaning of not only color, but also light. ‘빛’ (bit), which comprises the first half of the word, means ‘light’. The word ‘빛깔’ does indeed signify ‘color,’ but in referring to color it evokes light, thus establishing a fluid interconnection between two concepts radically estranged in Western philosophy.
It is also worth noting that the tradition of danchung, while recognizing color in equal status to – and as – light, does not negate the technical role color plays in our process of perceiving and sensing the world. The ‘principles of all that exists’ are realized through color, and yet the technical work of color does not diminish the spiritual importance of color as ‘nature’s light.’ Whereas this simultaneous understanding of color as both a ‘primordial phenomenon’ (light) and a ‘secondary phenomenon’ (techne) would be a hazardous contradiction under Goethe’s Urphänomen, if we are to expand our understanding of color beyond Goethe’s, such dangers cease to exist, and in fact have never existed to begin with. The only ‘danger’ color poses, then, is in its productive potential to undermine the authority of Urphänomen, and with it, universal thought.
The tradition of danchung offers an alternative way of perceiving, understanding, and existing in the world today, a method that I call cosmos-chromatics. The word cosmos, like color in danchung, holds within it both the incredibly abstract and material – while it denotes order, universe, or thought, cosmos also refers to the common, ornamental flowering plant. Just as danchung does not negate the technical work of color despite establishing its spiritual importance, cosmos-chromatics simultaneously recognizes the ways different cultures and modes of thought can productively interact with and individuate one another outside of a subservient or domineering relationship. This thought process, then, is only possible outside of the desire for universality and eternity; just as colors smudge, mix, fade, and smear unexpectedly and by chance, cosmos-chromatics privileges the idea that Being is not a pure, interior concept to be retrieved, but a surface that is shaped, eroded, and colored by time, human minds, and external interactions.
- Robertson, Lisa. Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Coach House Books, 2011, p. 143. ↩︎
- Aesthetics here is defined in accordance with how the term is used in The Politics of Aesthetics by Ranciere: “aesthetics refers to the distribution of the sensible that determines a mode of articulation between forms of action, production, perfection, and thought.” (Ranciere 82) ↩︎
- The Hegelian concept of ‘world spirit’ assumes a progressive, teleological understanding of the world, wherein history is always moving towards the ultimate, ‘primordial’ form of self-consciousness as characterized by rationality. ↩︎
- Heidegger asserts that the essence of modern technology is a form of enframing, which he calls Ge-stell, which effectively will reduce (‘enframe’) everything in the world to a ‘standing-reserve’ to be exploited and used. ↩︎
- “Korea’s Art of Danchung (한국의 단청예술).” Krpia, 28 Nov. 2025, https://www-krpia-co-kr.proxy.lib.umich.edu/product/main?plctId=PLCT00004798&affectType=product-main#none/. ↩︎