RELATED TERMS: Hypomnesis, Hypermnesis and Anamnesis; Methodology and Method; Practice
Dan Wang (2025: 71) distinguishes among three meanings of technology. The first is technologies as tools, for example, the pots, pans, knives, ovens and so on required to prepare a meal. Second, technologies can operate as explicit means of instruction, for example, the recipes, blueprints or patents that can be written down, followed and passed on. Third, and for Wang the most important, is technologies as process knowledge, that is, the proficiency gained from practical experience. This last is often discussed in terms of know-how, institutional memory and tacit knowledge, as Wang (2025: 74) notes.
To explore the value of his position, Wang brings to attention the specificity of Chinese process knowledges in the context of the history of architecture. He notes that builders across the world, from the Ancient Egyptians to medieval Europeans and more recently, have sought to arrest the erosion that affects buildings through time by using durable materials, such as stone, which endow the building with a degree of longevity and endurance, if not permanence. However, as discussed by Simon Leys in his 2009 book The Hall of Uselessness, In China builders have embraced the passage of time by using exceedingly perishable, often fragile, materials. By building temples out of wood, with panelling sometimes made of paper, Chinese architecture had a built-in obsolescence. This means that the buildings, if they are to be preserved, demand frequent renewal. Rather than employing the strongest, most durable materials, making the building last, Chinese builders instead embraced transient materials as a means towards the prolongation of designs whose goals are spiritual, by making the process of (re-)building the persistent element.
A major example of this approach to perpetuity-through-transience, Wang notes, is to be found not in China but in Japan: the Ise Jingu, the holiest shrine in Japan’s Shinto faith. The shrine will be rebuilt for its 63rd reconsecration In 2033. The structure, employing techniques from the 7th century, uses no nails, only dowels and wood joints.
Such rituals (of rebuilding) persist, in part, because of the Shinto faith in spiritual renewal; in part, because such shrines are built following the style of rice warehouses, which rot every few decades; and, in part, in order to preserve craft knowledge. The caretakers of the Ise Jingu have tried to ensure that knowledge about how to rebuild the shrine is passed on from one generation to the next.
The staff of the shrine make plans measured in centuries. For example, they have a 200-year plan to plant enough cypress trees to make the nearby shrine forest self-sufficient.
Embracing process knowledge means looking to people to embody perpetuity, evoking eternity, rather than looking to grand monuments as a persistent material assemblages. Thus, Wang argues, to pursue his point about technology, instead of considering technologies as a set of material objects, we should look at them as living practices, an approach used more often in China and Japan than in the West, one which consciously interweaves an awareness of the subject’s relation to the object and their mutual constitutive engagement in an ongoing project.
Embodied knowledge, which is passed on through communal, intergenerational practice and ritual, here is contrasted to knowledge embedded in the environment, in the case of the example, the built environment. The latter, embedded knowledge, may be more difficult to extract from the environment, as the techniques there embedded may no longer be readily accessible to contemporary embodied practices. Such embedded knowledge may become, instead, an object of contemplation, speculation or of use-consumption, rather than being part of ongoing embodied practices.
The debate here opens to questions about anamnesis, hypermnesis and hypomnesis. It also raises the prospect of two kinds of ‘passing on’, two kinds of inheritance, one through embodied practice, the other through objective presence, stabilising the world, which, in turn, suggest two kinds of worldliness and being-in-the-world, one more practical the other more speculative. The latter is, in effect, an offsetting of subject, object and project from one another, with implications for all three of these dimensions of being-in-the-world and the (excluded) worldlessnesses that accompany them in processes of world-building and of ‘passing on’ world-formations.
The debate may also open to questions, in understanding cognition, of the relations among language-based and vision-based approaches to cognition and those approaches that adopt living sensorimotor and organic and inorganic materialist understandings of cognition, intelligence and knowledge which, in turn, influence how memories are grasped, constituted, retained and passed on.
Wang raises the question of how we can pass on the complex knowledge formations that have accumulated in the modern age, which admix embodied, extended, embedded and enactive cognition, given that their processes are not the preserve of any one person or group of people and that we are therefore prone to personal, communal, institutional and societal forgetting. This may suggest that here are serious limits to: our ‘knowing’ what we are doing; our ability to pass on whatever ‘knowing’ that we do have; and our evaluation of that ‘knowing’, that is, knowing for certain its worthiness in being passed on. All of which factors affect the sense of what ‘designing’ may mean, in terms of the projects to which designs contribute and in which they intervene; and in terms of the direction and re-direction of the flows of people, materials, energies and information-communication in which they partake.
Reference
Leys, S. (2013) The Hall of uselessness: Collected essays. New York, NY: New York Review of Books.
Wang, D. (2025) Breakneck: China’s quest to engineer the future. London, UK: Allen Lane.
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