Culture as Counter-Technique
Tropicalismo, rhythm, and Brazilian cosmotechnics
If the first movement was about arrival, this one is about orientation.
Yuk Hui proposes that technology is never universal. Every technical system carries within it a cosmology, an idea of how the world is ordered, what matters, what should be accelerated, what can be sacrificed. He calls this cosmotechnics: the inseparable relation between technical practices and a culture’s way of inhabiting the world.
Seen through this lens, Brazilian culture — and Brazilian music in particular — reveals itself not as expression alone, but as technique. A way of organizing life, time, and relation under conditions of permanent arrival.
Brazil did not develop its culture in isolation. It developed it in collision. Languages overlapped. Beliefs contradicted each other. Power arrived unevenly. And yet, instead of collapsing into a single imposed order, culture became a way of holding multiplicity together.
This is where Tropicalismo matters.
Tropicalismo was not simply an aesthetic movement. It was a cosmotechnical gesture. Electric guitars, mass media, pop culture, and global references were not rejected, but neither were they allowed to dictate the terms of meaning. They were digested, displaced, recomposed. The foreign was welcomed, but re-situated within another worldview.
This is not adaptation. It is re-orientation.
Yuk Hui insists that when technology arrives without cosmological grounding, it becomes destructive. It imposes a single logic, erases local rhythms, and produces exhaustion. What Tropicalismo shows is the opposite move: technique being absorbed into culture, rather than culture being overwritten by technique.
In Brazilian music, rhythm is not decoration. It is governance.
Samba, improvisation, call and response, repetition with variation, these are technical systems that distribute agency. They refuse linear progression. They create time that loops, stretches, breathes. They allow coexistence instead of hierarchy. This is not inefficiency. It is a different intelligence.
Joy, within this system, is not a byproduct. It is a regulator.
Caetano Veloso’s joy is never naïve because it is cosmological. It knows the weight of history. It knows the violence of arrival. And still, it insists on play, irony, and beauty as ways of sustaining life. This is joy as orientation, not distraction. A way of keeping the world habitable.
Hui argues that modern technology has lost this grounding. It travels fast, claims neutrality, and presents itself as inevitable. But without cultural orientation, technique accelerates toward exhaustion. It optimizes without listening. It connects without relation.
Brazilian culture offers another possibility.
It shows that technique does not need to dominate to function. That systems can be rhythmic rather than extractive. That intelligence can emerge from relation, not control. That multiplicity does not require flattening to coexist.
If we understand culture as cosmotechnics, then music, art, and collective rituals are not secondary to systems, they are systems. They encode values. They shape subjectivity. They decide how time is lived and how power is negotiated.
This reframes the question entirely.
The problem is not the arrival of new techniques.
The problem is the absence of cultural orientation at the moment of arrival.
Brazil teaches us that survival depends on recomposition. On the ability to absorb what comes without surrendering the way we inhabit the world. Culture becomes the counter-technique, not by resisting change, but by reshaping it from within.
If the first movement asked how civilizations arrive, this one asks something quieter and more urgent:
What cosmology guides the techniques we accept? And whose rhythms are allowed to remain audible once they do?
by Rods Rodrigues // General Manager Membrz.Club
