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2012 29: 94Theory Culture SocietyErich Hörl

Luhmann, the Non-trivial Machine and the Neocybernetic Regime of Truth  

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DOI: 10.1177/0263276412438592

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Article

Luhmann, theNon-trivial Machine andthe NeocyberneticRegime of Truth

Erich HorlRuhr-University Bochum, Germany

Abstract

In a time in which an exuberant, trans-classical, non-trivial machine culture redesigns

terminologies, remodels logics, produces new evidence, and reorganizes semantic

resources, a new, neocybernetic regime of truth is taking shape. Many of our recent

self-descriptions and theory formations are coined by our media-technological con-

dition. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of Niklas Luhmann, espe-

cially in his inherent narrative of the history of rationality. This essay attempts to

reconstruct Luhmann’s redescription of European rationality, especially the media-

and machine-historical conditions that remain apparent in Luhmann’s account. The

decisive issue is that Luhmann’s history of rationality reveals the technological uncon-

scious of systems theory and indeed the epochal imaginary it belongs to. With the

help of the theories of machines developed by von Foerster, Simondon and Gunther,

Luhmann’s oeuvre must be read as probably the most striking conceptual edifice to

emerge from what could be called the 20th-century’s epochal technological shift of

meaning.

Keywords

cybernetics, Heinz von Foerster, Edmund Husserl, Niklas Luhmann, machine, media

theory, technological culture

The way I see it, the entire world is a nontrivial machine. (Heinz vonFoerster)

Corresponding author:

Erich Horl, Ruhr-University Bochum, Universitatsstrasse 150, Gebaude GB 5/143, Bochum 44780,

Germany

Email: erich.hoerl@rub.de

http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

Non-triviality is fascinating, and this fascination has its own –fascinating – history. What I would like to show is that the term ‘non-trivial’, originally introduced by Heinz von Foerster in the context ofmachine theory, is located at the centre of a historically highly significantnarrative of self-description which arose in response to the grand techno-logical transformations of the 20th century. The principal feature of thisself-description is the translation of the increasingly cybernetic aspect ofall domains of being into a new, theoretically advanced semantic register.Niklas Luhmann, whose work represents a grandiose concretion of thisnarrative, was right to claim that our self-descriptions were still under thespell of semantic registers and linguistic frames inherited from our ances-tors, hence his effort to elaborate a new terminology and a set of con-ceptual innovations more appropriate for describing the complexities ofmodernity (see Luhmann, 2005: 11). We have, however, long since assimi-lated a new semantic register. It arises from our media-technological, thatis, cybernetic condition; it determines our conceptual experiences; and it is,I am afraid to say, in large part to blame for our techno-scientific dogma-tism. It may be as necessary for us to distance ourselves from it as it was(according to Luhmann) necessary to discard the semantic and conceptualregimes bequeathed to us by an older Europe.

If Hans Blumenberg was correct to assume that ‘[e]very epoch inventsits imaginary standpoints, from which it thinks that it can bring its char-acteristic type of knowledge to its most advantageous execution’(Blumenberg, 1987: 43), then it cannot be a matter of thought embodyingand occupying the imaginary standpoint of its own epoch but, morecritically, of discerning, probing and determining its current dogmas.In our case, the evidence of cybernetics and the existence in a cyberneticworld, above all the evidence of being under neocybernetic conditions,has turned into our epoch’s imaginary standpoint. Strangely enough, thisoccurs in some of the most advanced and transgressive discursive con-tributions. To a considerable extent the resources of current social self-descriptions are shaped by neocybernetics. Bruce Clarke and MarkHansen have captured the immense range and virulence of neocyberneticconcepts and images:

Some of the most important theoretical and critical conversationsgoing on today in the cognitive sciences, chaos and complexitystudies, and social systems theory stem from neocybernetic notionsof self-organization, emergence, and autopoiesis. A growing bodyof scholarly work is rethinking the shape and evolution of the rela-tions among science, technology, sociology, psychology, philoso-phy, history, literature, and the arts through neocybernetic terms.Expanding the initial interdisciplinary framework connecting thenatural and human sciences with information technologies, recent

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thinkers, such as Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari,Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, have deployedneocybernetic discourse extensively and transformatively.Neocybernetic discourse is central to current historical, interpret-ative, and theoretical investigations using concepts such as narra-tive, medium, assemblage, information, noise, network andcommunication to remap the territory of knowledge with referenceto the operational boundaries of systems and environments. (Clarkeand Hansen, 2009: 5–6)

In the following I would like to examine and question the history ofthe fascination exerted by non-triviality, especially as it appears inLuhmann’s work. This undertaking, I believe, could be an importantstep toward understanding the genesis and shape of the linguistic andconceptual fixation outlined above. The question is whether this particu-lar discourse (with its underlying epochal imaginary constructs) is at allable to observe what contemporary media theory increasingly describesin eco-technological terms of atmospheric media, ubiquitous computing,ambient intelligence, etc., or whether we need a categorically differentconceptual politics – one not rooted in cybernetic and systemictechno-scientific regimes – to give a feasible account of our presenttechno-medial situation.1

The Fascination with the Non-trivial Machine: Luhmann andthe Cybernetic Imaginary

‘Science’, in the words of Niklas Luhmann, ‘is without a doubt a recur-sively operating system’ (1990: 275). A footnote supporting this claimreveals science to be a specific type of machine: ‘In Heinz von Foerster’ssense: a non-trivial machine’ (1990: 275).

At first glance the note simply serves to clarify a conceptual propos-ition, yet on closer inspection it turns out to be nothing less than animplicit historico-philosophical theorem that governs Luhmann’s ana-lysis of science and indeed his entire oeuvre. Systems theory – this isthe crux of Luhmann’s historical teleology that shapes the very core ofhis understanding not only of science but of all social systems – operatesat the behest of the history of rationality itself. After all, both the planeof immanence on which Luhmann’s concepts circulate and the environ-ment in which they gain consistency are characterized by a fascinationwith the non-trivial machine. The latter is nothing less than the principalprotagonist in his account of the evolution of European rationality,which at this point in time has reached its latest incarnation in theshape of systems theory. Maybe Luhmann’s entire theory design is anintegral component of the ongoing fascination exerted by the non-trivialmachine, under the spell of which he attempted an emphatic new

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description of the occidental as the gradual assertion of non-trivialrationality. According to this redescription, the distinctive features ofoccidental rationality arise not from its origins but from the birth ofnon-trivial machines and associated types of logic that exhibit a newform of rationality. In order to discern its pivotal elements it is thereforenot necessary to go all the way back to ancient geometricians or pre-Socratic philosophers, but only to the grand non-trivial rupture thatstarted to emerge around 1900.

Of course the punchline of any history of fascination including thisone is that it keeps its subjects in the dark. From today’s vantage point,that is, from a certain distance Luhmann’s history of rationality, sointoxicated by non-triviality, assumes the shape of a powerful historicalprojection generated by an enthusiasm for cybernetic machines. It ischaracteristic not only of Luhmann’s own historical self-perception butalso of those of many other contemporaries of the cybernetic age, espe-cially of the protagonists of second-order cybernetics. Despite the com-prehensive shift toward technological conditions in the course of whichthe ostracized technical object, which until then had marked the absenceof all meaning, moved into the centre of a new culture of meaning –despite, in other words, the basic development that, following ScottLash, can be described as the ascendancy of technological forms of lifeand thought (see Lash, 2002: 13–25) – Luhmann ignored the degree towhich his work and his very contemporaneity were as such conditionedby a historic machine change. Although he continued, in a very charac-teristic fashion, to reflect on the media-technological foundations thatshape the various forms of rationality and, more importantly, the genesisand rise of modern rationality, he did not analyse and discuss the degreeto which his own theory and his own narrative of the history of reasonwere indebted to the history of machines. In terms of the history offascination under discussion here, Luhmann’s systems theory is thepurest, most striking conceptual edifice to emerge from what I havecalled the 20th-century’s epochal technological shift of meaning (seeHorl, 2010). At the risk of over-simplifying matters, let me phrase thisas concisely as possible: Luhmann’s theory, no doubt, conceptuallyincorporates the massive technological transformation it depends on.The problem is its denial of this very dependence. The theory fully regis-ters and reacts to the momentous technological change, yet it repressesthe fact that it was itself conditioned by this change. We therefore need toreconstruct and explicate Luhmann’s implicit history of rationality inorder to reveal what it denies, for precisely this denial constitutes themost volatile aspect of his account. What will become evident is thedegree to which the many descriptions, displaying an eagerness toengage figures of non-triviality, regardless of all they may illuminateand uncover, are part of a cybernetic imaginary that conceals as muchas it reveals.

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The distinction between trivial and non-trivial machines is one ofHeinz von Foerster’s most lasting conceptual contributions to cyberneticdiscourse. Introduced in the 1970 essay ‘Molecular Ethology’ (vonFoerster and Poerksen, 2002: 133–68), as part of his critique of theadaptionist behaviourism of early cybernetics, this frequently invokeddistinction was as important to von Foerster’s epistemological and eth-ical arguments as it was to the subsequent elaboration of what came to beknown as second-order cybernetics (see Schmidt, 1996: 385ff.; Brier,2005). Luhmann left no doubt about its significance: ‘Von Foerster’sdistinction between trivial (reliable) and non-trivial (unreliable) machinesis now a frequent quote. All higher forms of life, consciousness and socialcommunication systems are non-trivial machines. This led to a second-order cybernetics’ (Luhmann, 1997b: 362).

However, we should first take note of the fact that von Foerster isdealing with conceptual rather than actual machines. Unlike other cyber-netic pioneers such as Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Norbert Wiener, orStafford Beer, von Foerster never built any physical machines (seeGlanville, 2007). To him ‘[t]he term ‘‘machine’’ represents an abstractframework for speaking about input and output relationships and rulesof transformation’ (von Foerster and Poerksen, 2002: 53). In a decisivemove, these relationships and rules and transformations are embodiedeach in their own way by two fundamentally different types of machine:trivial and non-trivial. The former is ‘characterized by a one-to-one rela-tionship between its ‘‘input’’ (stimulus, cause) and its output (response,effect)’ (von Foerster, 2003: 208). ‘This invariant relationship’ – followingAlan Turing, its logical-mathematical properties rather than its physicalembodiment – ‘is ‘‘the machine’’’ (2003: 208). Given that this relationshipis once and for all determined, von Foerster also refers to it as a deter-minist and, from the point of view of an external observer, completelypredictable system.

By contrast, non-trivial machines are ‘quite different creatures’. Theinput-output relation is described as ‘not invariant’ because it is deter-mined by ‘the machine’s previous output. In other words, its previoussteps determine its present reactions’ (2003: 208). Owing to this recursivestructure the complex behaviour of non-trivial machines, though synthet-ically determined, renders them in principle, or at least in practice, ana-lytical non-predictable systems.

For von Foerster the two machine types embodied corresponding epis-temological programmes that modeled cognitive relationships as eithertrivial or non-trivial. Orthodox epistemology was deemed trivial since itwas based on the assumption of a sovereign subject capable of a completeanalytical determination of a strictly separate object as part of anexhaustive description of the world. Non-trivial epistemology, whichaccording to von Foerster was still in its infancy and in need of futureelaboration, was by contrast characterized by a revocation of the

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primacy of this idealized classical observer epistemology. Its point ofdeparture was the conceptualization of the world as a complex networkof non-trivial machines of which the observer was always already a part.The classical or first-order observer was replaced by a multitude ofsecond-order observers. Cognition turned from classical representationinto a never-ending process of recursive computation that generatesdescriptions of reality (von Foerster, 2003: 211–27). Elaborating a gen-eral epistemology of non-trivial machines became the principal goal of vonFoerster’s second-order research program (see Brier, 2005: 363).

Although von Foerster’s trivial/non-trivial distinction was a strictlysystematic affair, it came with a latent historical index. After all, whatthis distinction entailed only became fully apparent with the arrival ofrecursively operating machines like Ashby’s homeostat, the research intoneuronal networks, and the introduction of computing machinesdesigned to produce non-expected results. It was, strictly speaking, thearrival of non-trivial machines that demanded an epistemological over-haul in the course of which the trivial understanding of the world wasreplaced by the non-trivial understanding of understanding.

Following in von Foerster’s footsteps, Luhmann – who throughout hisoeuvre frequently refers to von Foerster – champions non-trivialmachines as the model and epitome of a new form of rationality andgives an historic twist to von Foerster’s systematic distinction as well asto the non-trivial epistemology it entails: he uses the latter to furnish ahistorical diagnosis according to which we already inhabit the world ofthose different creatures. While he makes no mention of any techno-logical underpinning, Luhmann deciphers – at least between the lines –modernity, and his own present in particular, as a transition from a trivialto a non-trivial attitude and thus the most decisive event in the history ofoccidental rationality since its Greek inception.2 Luhmann views himselfas a protagonist in a grand transformation of attitude that leaves Greecebehind and appears to be nothing less than the key event in the history ofoccidental rationalism, marked by the rise of cybernetics and the shiftfrom the trivial world of the first to the non-trivial world of the secondobserver. Luhmann turns this transformation of attitude embodied bythe new cybernetic machines into a veritable metamorphosis of rational-ity that appears as the very signature of modernity. His theory projectamounts to an apologetics for this transformation – even though, char-acteristically, it remained silent about its technological conditions.

In a peculiar recapitulation of late 19th-century sociology (and inodd harmony with Heidegger’s cybernetics-inspired obituary),Luhmann’s theory of science, which came equipped with all the heftof a new culture of science and machines, intoned a farewell to phil-osophy. The latter was no more than a guardian of the antiquatedtrivial epistemology which – and this is a core element of the fascin-ation exerted by non-trivial machines – had apparently already been

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demolished by second-order cybernetics. But Luhmann, the Latinistwith a passion for Roman law (see Luhmann, 1987: 130), went a stepfurther and demanded that in line with the end of philosophy we alsobid farewell to Greece, the glorified mother country of all trivial theory.This vast theoretical and discursive project of leaving behind both phil-osophy and Greece, a departure from venerable European concepts ofthought and understanding, constitutes the basic feature of Luhmann’sresearch programme. Shaped by contemporary technological condi-tions, Luhmann was struggling, as it were, to arrive at a historicallyand systematically viable account of the shock administered by themomentous change of machines. The latter fueled his revision, indeedhis denial of the well known early history of theory, which in his eyesamounted to a mere prehistory. Backed by the facts and proofs of anon-trivial cultural revolution of science and technology, Luhmannadopted an anti-philosophical stance from which Germany has notyet recovered.

In the hard anti-philosophical politics of knowledge that shape themood and thrust of Luhmann’s history of rationality, the non-trivialmachine does not merely function as the central model of a post-philosophical epistemology. It is above all the carrier of post-ontologicalaspirations that fuel Luhmann’s own work as well as the whole techno-scientific optimism of the second half of the 20th century. ‘The dominantattitude of Old Europe’, Luhmann laconically concludes his grand inves-tigation, ‘can be described with the term ontology’ (1997a: 895). Ontologywas said to be ‘the result’ of an inimitably plausible, that is, trivial, ‘modeof observation that starts with the distinction between being and non-being and from which all other distinctions follow’ (1997a: 895).3 It wasthe core ingredient of the trivial machinery, its enduring cognitive distillateand principal tagline for a trivial understanding of the world whose timehad long since expired under advanced technological conditions. This ver-dict was reserved for all ontological assertions that professed to be morethan Quinian worlds of reference, or that claimed to amount to more thaneither the implicit ontological consequences of our conceptual schemata orthe unavoidable residue of our theoretical frameworks.4

A certain anti-ontological affect may already have been at work in thetechno-scientific self-promotion campaigns and the increased importanceof epistemological questions in the late 19th century, but it did not gainfull force until the arrival of our current technological conditions, aboveall in the shape of the new cybernetic paradigm. Basic terms like com-plexity, emergence, recursion, structural coupling, operational closure,and autopoiesis, to name the major passwords of non-triviality thatstill enjoy wide circulation today, were seen not only as epistemic factsevoked by a new culture of machines but also as an expression of ineluct-able epistemological facts that remain out of reach of any trivial ontologylacking sufficient complexity. The breathless forays directed against all

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alleged primary evidence produced by trivial world understanding as wellas against any desire for ontology, which upon closer inspection appearto be rear-guard actions undertaken in the wake of new cybernetic evi-dence, belong to the very core of Luhmann’s theoretical oeuvre. His anti-ontology is firmly rooted in the unquestioned discursive presuppositionsof his cybernetic, or rather neocybernetic age. Non-trivial rationality is,as it were, the form of the cybernetic age. At least, this is, in my opinion,the implicit punchline of Luhmann’s diagnostic self-understanding.

Machinic Deconstructions of Ontology

To return to Luhmann’s argument, to speak of a basic recursivity ofscience is to indicate a ‘very simple matter with far-reaching conse-quences’. It is simple because ‘recursivity . . . in general refers (forinstance, in mathematics) to the repeated application of operations tothe result of similar preceding operations’ (Luhmann, 1990: 275). Whenwe describe science as a system, the notion of recursivity implies thatdespite indisputable structural couplings with its environment, scienceremains operationally closed. In other words, down to its very founda-tions, science is ‘the result of its own operations’ (1990: 273), since ‘thesystem only recognizes its own operations as occasions for changing itsown states’ (1990: 277). Recursive operations reveal science as a primeexample for the modern autonomy of function. Viewed as a recursivesystem science performs and embodies the basic modern demand for an‘autonomy of separate functional areas’ enabled and enforced by‘[m]odern society’s form of differentiation’, which is itself ‘accomplishedby the differentiation of certain operationally closed, autopoietic systems’(Luhmann, 2002a: 63).

According to Luhmann, the recursive system called science appears tobehave exactly like a non-trivial machine. It finds itself in a given ‘his-torically determined initial state’ and operates in a ‘past-dependent’ and‘structure-determined’ manner that by virtue of its complexity and select-ive connectivity is open to the future and non-predictable. In otherwords, the science machine ‘finds itself in exactly that state (and in noother) which it has reached by way of its own operations. The transform-ations from state to state presuppose structures determining which statecan be reached without the system breaking apart (that is, withouta disintegration of the relationship to its environment)’ (Luhmann,1990: 279).

These structural features are particularly important for the specifictemporality that characterizes the recursive operations of the sciencemachine. The beginning or origin of a problem and an utterance, weare told, may ‘soon be forgotten’ (1990: 272), that is, lost in recursiveloops. What is ultimately important for the operations of the non-trivialscience machine is that ‘in any given situation’, regardless of how things

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may have been before, it can ‘reactualize the history of the system’ (1990:274; emphasis added) with the help of a specific code – namely, the dis-tinction between true and false. According to Luhmann, this ability toreactualize is to be literally understood as an originary reactualization inthe sense of an essential supplementarity. It stands behind the evolution-ary process of science. Regardless of its initial state, science should at anygiven point in time be able to reactualize its own history in order tomobilize it for selective connective operations. Feedbacks, recursive fall-backs, and even anticipations are always at work in the operation of thescience machine (1990: 559). Luhmann speaks in this context of ‘recursiveevolution’ (1990: 280). ‘Science’, he pointedly writes with reference toHeinz von Foerster, ‘is a historical machine that with every change ofstate becomes another machine’ (1990: 284).

Reactualization, the temporal mode of recursion, is said to not onlycharacterize the evolution of the science machine but also, and especially,the temporality of its scientific coding operations. This specific tempor-ality enables an autonomous history of science as a system that operatesat a certain remove from the world. As we shall see, it also provides thebasis for the historicity of science, locating it within the history of ration-ality. According to Luhmann, these coding operations facilitate a depart-ure from the object, interrupting the real presence of whatever happensto appear. As a result, the time of science came to be seen as a ‘self-emergent form of the determination of meaning’ no longer linked to an‘ontological scheme’ that stuck to the presence of things and merelyrepeated the trivial everyday experience of the ‘presence of the present’(Luhmann, 1990: 261). According to this model, the meaning of the non-trivial science machine resides in its destruction of the trivial meaning ofthe world. It does away with the intrusive quotidian relationships tothings that ontological world explications are said to perpetuate. Afterall, ‘ontology is (in comparison to everything we nowadays undertake inphysics and logic) much closer to the quotidian verisimilitude – but morebeautiful, festive and reflective’ (Luhmann, 1997a: 912). Science, then, isa process of reactualization characterized by an essentially non-ontological relationship to the world – especially if you, like Luhmann,consider all ontology to be a metaphysics of presence. In Luhmann’sreading science appears as a massive counter-ontological offensive thatfoils all naıve and originary fixations on being and presence and insteadproceeds to lead the way out of the ontological cave. With their signifi-cant interruption of the direct relationship between thought and beingthat is said to be the basic configuration of the ontological approaches tothe world, scientific coding operations always remain incomplete andsubject to open systemic history. The core of the never-ending task ofscience was to bring about a radical de-ontologizing of our relationshipto the world and thus to produce distance.5 Science, then, is not just oneof many non-trivial machines (according to Luhmann all social systems

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are such machines). The grand severance of ontological word referencesand the expulsion of presentist metaphysics it brings about (a diagnosis,incidentally, that moves Luhmann into close proximity to Bachelard)ensures that science fulfils a special – to be precise, de-trivializing – func-tion in the history of rationality.

Cyberneticizing Husserl: On the Birth of the Non-trivialAttitude

The science machine’s never-ending task of de-ontologizing, which con-stitutes its first non-trivial aspect, was also placed in the far more com-prehensive framework of a history of rationality in order to provide ahistorical marker for the appearance and function of non-triviality assuch. Science was not only deemed to be an essential part of the processof modernization that brings about the transfer from trivial to non-trivialconditions. It also had to modernize itself by removing all its intrinsic,increasingly antiquated trivial conceptualizations. One of the main goalsof this auto-modernization was to raise de iure the traditional epistemo-logical understanding stemming from a philosophical idea of science tothe complex level of the contemporary conditions on which the autono-mous functional system science was de facto already operating. Thismeant first and foremost that science had to rid itself of all possibleontological inscriptions and become a pure theory devoid of all explicitand implicit statements on the being of something. Luhmann viewed theconceptualization of a non-trivial science machine as a valid and timely‘post-ontological option’ (1990: 280).

Under complex modern conditions it no longer appeared possible toadhere to the obsolete, deeply traditional, and ontologically orientedapproaches of science by furnishing a ‘description of the world as anobject given to (or ‘‘standing opposed to’’) the observer’ (Luhmann,2002a: 71) – as it had behooved theoria since the time of the Greeks.‘Science can no longer comprehend itself as a representation of the worldas it is’, Luhmann continued, ‘and must therefore retract its claim ofinstructing others about the world. It achieves an exploration of possibleconstructions that can be inscribed in the world and, in so doing, func-tion as forms, that is, produce a difference’ (2002a: 71).6 In other words,science ‘must refrain from defining the world for society’ (2002a: 63) andfrom depicting the world as such. Instead it had to dismantle all ‘primaryevidence’ (1990: 328), the evidence of observable objects and a describ-able world as well as the evidence of the obsolete theoretical attitude thatinsists on a privileged observation. Science had to advance, as it were,against its own Greek ur-scene.

This demand for an expulsion of the profoundly trivial spirit from thesciences was supported by a powerful construct derived from the historyof rationality. For Luhmann, the ‘discontent over the modern culture of

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knowledge’ (1990: 328) that had emerged since the beginning of the 20thcentury – for instance, in complaints about the loss of reference, thewaning of experience or the disappearance of the life-world – wasmerely an expression of a not yet understood change of attitude. Itarose from the scientifically supported transformation of being from apre-modern trivial, mono-contextural world to the conditions of a non-trivial, polycontextural world. Especially in the intense engagement withHusserl’s critique of science on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary ofthe latter’s Viennese lecture on sciences, Luhmann highlighted the newnon-trivial conditions that mandated a departure from Old Europeanways of thinking. The new state of science, which according toLuhmann had long since superseded the ‘communicative situation’underlying Husserl’s diagnosis of a European spirit threatened by tech-nology, was described as follows:

The natural sciences, from physics to biology, have become self-reflexive. They are concerned with objects that observethemselves . . .The fiction of a reality that exists free of cognitionalready had to be given up with Heisenberg; and if such a realitydoes exist, it does not display any qualities to which an observationcould latch on . . .For the time being, let us merely note that for suchcognitions, contrary to what Husserl maintained, Geist is not neces-sary. Rather, they arise out of the universalization of projects ofcognition in the natural sciences, and hence out of a program thatcompels autologies, self-applications – or that remains incompletein its world-intention. (Luhmann, 2002a: 36)

The autological departure from the last great figure of the observer,the transcendental subject of intuition equipped with its own world-intentionality, which had received a massive boost from Heisenberg’sdiscovery of the problems associated with the observer, appeared to bepart of the modern shift into polycontexturality:

Modern society is a polycentric, polycontextural system. It appliescompletely different codes, completely different ‘frames’, completelydifferent principal distinctions according to whether it describes itselffrom the standpoint of religion or the standpoint of science, from thestandpoint of law or the standpoint of politics, from the standpointof pedagogy or the standpoint of economics. (Luhmann, 2002a: 52)

Though he makes no mention of the new technological conditions inthe shape of a/the non-trivial culture of machines, Luhmann asserts thatthe transition to polycontextural configurations of observation andmeaning enforces a shift from a trivial to a non-trivial mindset.

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The changed situation that separates Luhmann’s clarifications of thenew epistemological conditions from Husserl’s diagnosis of a crisisbecomes most apparent in the context of the re-evaluation and reconcep-tualization of that pivotal event in the history of rationality that had beenon Husserl’s mind when, in the 1930s, he attempted to employ his notionof the life-world to recast the sciences. As is known, Husserl reconstructedthe rise of ‘a new sort of attitude of individuals toward their surroundingworld’ (Husserl, 1970: 276) that took place in the sixth and seventh cen-tury BC in Greece. He described the significant change of attitude whichaltered the ‘spiritual shape of Europe’ (1970: 289) and which was now saidto be threatened by the modern processes of technologization and for-malization. Husserl spoke of the birth of a ‘theoretical attitude’. He saw itas the origin of an ideality that now, faced with a critical loss of meaningto technological procedures and a momentous shift of meaning, was morerelevant than ever. ‘With the first conception of ideas’ that occurred backthen, ‘man gradually becomes a new man’ (1970: 277).

‘Humanity’ – this was the basis of the argument – ‘in its historicalsituation, always lives under some attitude or other. Its life has its norm-style and, in reference to this, a constant historicity of development’(1970: 280). The ‘norm-style of human existence’, which Husserl tookto be a ‘first type of historicity’, was the so-called ‘natural primordialattitude of original natural life’ that appeared to be ‘naıvely, straightfor-wardly directed at the world’ (1970: 281). Though present as a ‘universalhorizon’, the world was not ‘thematic as such’ (1970: 281). It is only whenthe theoretical attitude replaces the natural and introduces a new style ofexistence that ‘[m]an becomes gripped by the passion of a world-view andworld-knowledge’ and turns into ‘a nonparticipating spectator, surveyorof the world; he becomes a philosopher’ (1970: 285). To ‘strive for andbring about theoria and nothing but theoria’ (1970: 280) was for Husserlthe main slogan of the new program of ‘world-knowledge through pure,universal seeing’ (1970: 285).7

According to Husserl, ‘the outbreak of the theoretical attitude’ (1970:285) did not only give rise to a ‘new cognitive stance’ but also to a ‘far-reaching transformation of the whole praxis of human existence’ (1970:287). Philosophy was assigned an ‘archontic’ function which it was now,in the crisis of rationality around and after 1900, once again called tofulfil. Ever since the momentous Greek transformation philosophy hadacted as the guardian of the theoretical attitude. In Husserl’s eyes, itsvery platonic present-day task lay in the reflection on and remembranceof that ur-scene of the sciences. The latter were to reside under the roof ofphilosophy and no place else. This was the initial program of philosophyas a ‘universal science’ that now, in the face of foundational crises, was tobe reactivated using phenomenological means. The ‘completely newbeginning’ (Husserl, 1970: 239) Husserl called for in the 1920s provedto be a repetition of the beginning of all theoria.

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In a peculiar way, Luhmann’s reconstruction of the history of ration-ality reconfigures Husserl’s historically sweeping, though evidently obso-lete, doctrine of attitude. The early spectator theory employed byHusserl – despite the fact that ‘already in his time it had little chanceof a future’ (Luhmann, 2002a: 54) – to counter the technologicallyinduced crisis of reason proved to be hopelessly antiquated in the ageof non-trivial machines and their inscrutable complexity. In Luhmann’seyes the range of that comprehensive change of attitude which Husserl,faced with the whole non-idealist technological mobilization, had soemphatically conjured up was pretty limited. The Greek transformationwas at best the beginning of a long-lasting process of change that, as ahistory of European rationality, only hit its home stretch in the 20thcentury. The birth of the theoretical attitude had occurred, as it were,within the horizon of the trivial attitude and its characteristic observerposition. It was the new autonomy of the sciences – that is, their exodusfrom the world of philosophical spectators that had restricted them totrivial world observations – and above all the invention of the non-trivialmachine that brought about a truly dramatic change of attitude. Husserlmay have highlighted an important occurrence in the history of ration-ality, but for Luhmann the pivotal event was not the onset of the theor-etical but the onset of the non-trivial attitude. Its immediate offspring wassystems theory. And this, precisely, was Luhmann’s chief concern: totransform a theoretical attitude still bound to trivial acts of observationin such a way that it would give birth to a wholly un-Greek, non-trivialtheoria.

Luhmann’s theory project, especially its remarkable take on the his-tory of rationality, clearly fell in line with Husserl’s ambitious renewalventure. The guiding interest behind the systems-theoretical reformula-tion of the phenomenological project, however, no longer entailed areturn to the beginning but a search ‘for a form in which the uncondi-tional theoretical interest accepted under the name of philosophy can becontinued in the face of changed conditions’ (Luhmann, 2002a: 37). Thegoal, in Luhmann’s trenchant formulation, was to introduce ‘Husserl’sintuition of theory into a completely different ‘‘lifeworld’’’ (2002a: 56) – atechnological and thoroughly cybernetic lifeworld, no less, shaped bynon-trivial machines. Epoche now stood for the bracketing of all trivialpreconceptions of thought such as subject, spirit and, in particular, all theobsolete figures of ontological world descriptions. Intentionality now wasthe name for ‘the form in which consciousness carries out its operations’(2002a: 44) and had to be described in terms of self- and hetero-reference.And lifeworld, according to Luhmann one of the century’s most conse-quential neologisms, now referred to the irreducible ‘referential contextof all familiar condensates of meaning’ (Luhmann, 1986: 182). The life-world distinction of familiar versus unfamiliar appeared to be ‘the oldest,most primitive and primordial difference because it pertains to any given

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distinction’, yet under polycontextural conditions it was no longer pos-sible to fall back on ‘the distinction familiar vs. non-familiar as if it werea distinction, let alone a foundational one’ (1986: 186; emphasis added).

The clarity of Luhmann’s motto left nothing to be desired:‘[T]ranscendental philosophy [has to be described] anew by the modernmeans of the theory of self-referential systems or by means of secondorder cybernetics’ (2002a: 59). In other words, a contemporary theorydesign had to be on par with the non-trivial attitude. The brand namesembodying this new attitude included ‘formal calculus; second-ordercybernetics; the theory of closed, ‘‘autopoietic’’ systems; or radical con-structivism’ (2002a: 53). And rather than residing under the roof of aphilosophy that acted as a universal science, they originated from math-ematics, biology, neurophysiology, automata theory, linguistics – inshort, from a whole array of theories that, starting in the 1950s, emergedfrom under the new roof of first- and especially second-order cyberneticsand that, in the very way they operated, condensed the form of non-trivial rationality.

Exits from the Cave: Observing Technology

Luhmann relentlessly pursued a distancing from tradition that appearedto correspond to the new conditions. One of his most concise reckoningsis the essay ‘European Rationality’.8 Arguably Luhmann’s most beauti-ful and precise treatise on the end of philosophy, it locates all ontology asantiquated messages from the Old European world of trivial observa-tions. It is no more than a remnant and a survival of a long vanishedstage of European rationality which remained tied to a history ofobservers.

‘The history of European rationality can be described as the history ofthe dissolution of a rationality continuum that had connected the obser-ver in the world with the world’ (Luhmann, 1998: 23). For Luhmann, theassumption of a convergence of thought and being, which had sustainedontology from Parmenides all the way to Heidegger (that is, the occiden-tal Parmenidian variations, as Heidegger himself observed), was at thevery core of the early European, initially Greek belief in a continuum ofrationality ‘that always already merged thought and being in a commonorigin’ (1990: 321). The structural increase in complexity, that is, the lossof the ‘parallel views of a unified world’ (1998: 28) and the correspondingincrease of observer positions, was said to have rendered untenable thenotion of a privileged point of ontological world observation thatallowed for a unifying, certain and binding perception of being. Theprivileged philosophical observer of being from bygone trivial days,who like Husserl assumed that ‘anybody can see what I see’ (Husserl,1989: 77), was replaced by the observer of an observer as the bearer of thenew, non-trivial attitude. He appears as the central conceptual persona in

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the age of non-trivial machines; on his shoulders rests the renunciation – socharacteristic of the epistemological politics of systems theory – of thephilosophical-ontological assumption that we can see and survey theworld.

As Luhmann was able to gather from the work of the cyberneticistGotthard Gunther, the two-valued ontological guiding distinctionbetween thought and being or being and non-being did not only manifestitself in the classical two-valued logic as the principal instrument of trivialworld description. Together with the two-valued logic it also foundexpression in a pre-modern, that is to say archaic and stratified, formationof society whose residues, Luhmann claimed, still cling to us in the shapeof interminable two-valued and above all ontological world descriptions:

Historically, we can see a distinct correlation between the trad-itional assumption of an ontologically describable world – that is,a world describable with the aid of the distinction between beingand nonbeing – and a two-valued logical instrument. This assumes asociety in which differences between different world and socialdescriptions are not all that great and can be decided from incon-trovertible reference points from the top or the center of the system.(Luhmann, 1998: 28)

Whatever non-trivial theoretical intuition it may have possessed fromtime to time, philosophy was burdened by its trivial ontological inherit-ance. In addition, it appeared to be nothing less than a pre-moderninstrument of power, as indicated by its systematic handling of distinc-tions. It consistently displayed a preference for distinctions with inbuiltasymmetry that allow ‘the person who has the positive side of the dis-tinction at his or her disposal [to] make him- or herself master of bothsides’ (Luhmann, 2002a: 39). Subject to polycontextural conditions, how-ever, ontology could be no more than a remnant from the age of ‘theprinciple of a universally valid rationality’ (Luhmann, 1998: 24) when itstill seemed ‘self-evident that all observers have to be observed in thesame way’ (Luhmann, 1998: 26). Without the agreed-upon condition‘that the world is the same for all observers and that it can be determined’(Luhmann, 1998: 26), Luhmann argued, there was no possibility of aconsistent and meaningful discourse on being, that is, no ontology.

Thus the end of the two-valued ontological world rationalization wassupposed to culminate in the ‘shift from ‘‘what’’ questions to ‘‘how’’ ques-tions’ (Luhmann, 1998: 26). From the point of view of a systems theoryinformed by second-order cybernetics, the general transformation fromphilosophical questions of essence that did not for a second doubt thecontinuum of thought and being and the complete determinability ofthe latter, to a drift into an age of relational questions of complexityand indeterminacy that are part of the domain of sociology, revealed the

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ongoing dissolution of the continuum of rationality. Ontology, in short,was to Luhmann the theoretically most potent and enduring figure oftrivial world narration. To quote Heinz von Foerster, it basically belongedto the ‘great love affair of Western culture for trivial machines’ (vonFoerster, 2003: 310). It was, as it were, the pre-modern school of trivial-ization whose time was coming to an end as science came to doubt its love.Ontology – andwith it philosophy – appeared as trivial fates of rationality.

This, in any case, is the systems-theoretical version of the end of ontol-ogy. By giving rise to complexity and securing the final disappearance ofa unified observer perspective, the history of European rationality dis-posed of ontology itself as the first major European form of rationality.The end of ontology therefore appeared as an originally European event.The very term ‘Europe’ was to refer to the gradual dismantling of theontological world view, that is to say, the dismantling of its own originsin the Greek hell of triviality. As Luhmann would have it, the signatureof Europe was its auto-deconstructive constitution, for though Europemay have ensured the mastery of the trivial world view – that was, so tospeak, the meaning of the grand European semantics – ‘only Europe has[also] brought forth worldwide social descriptions that reflect the experi-ence of a radical, structural, transformation of society since the lateMiddle Ages’ (Luhmann, 1998: 22) and thus abolish its own origins.

If philosophy, that old European institution, was to have any future atall, it had to leave behind all forms of ontological thought and terminatethe hegemonic discourse politics it had pursued since early European days:‘Critique – that only means, anymore, observing observations, describingdescriptions from a standpoint that is itself observable’ (Luhmann, 2002a:37). Above all it had striven for ‘a subtler language . . . that functions evenunder polycontextural conditions’ (2002a: 53). There was, Luhmannargued, strictly speaking no alternative to the new critical emphasis on‘redescriptions of descriptions’ that refrain from all conclusive formulas.They ‘rank among the characteristic features of the modern descriptionsof the world’ (2002a: 59) that correspond to the intellectual habitus ofmodern societies. ‘[T]he continual new description of redescriptions’ wasthe only option for a society that was no longer willing to cling to olddescriptions, but instead perceived ‘the prospect of further new descrip-tions of its own concepts as its future’ (2002a: 60). Redescription – that isthe new epistemological password in the age of non-triviality and the newform of European meaning.9 However, this new intellectual style consist-ing of ongoing description should not be confused with thinking.

Luhmann claimed that, unlike philosophy, modern science hadalready left the world of the first observer behind. Science, conceivedas a recursive system, pointed toward a post-ontological form ofworld description that corresponded to the complex world of thesecond observer which followed the dissolution of the rationality con-tinuum. The only thing missing was to give full epistemological credit

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to this form, even against the resistance of orthodox, ontologicallyfixated cognitive relations. Precisely this expulsion of all apparitions oftrivial thought appeared to be the order of the day and, in particular, thatof systems theory. Or, in Heinz von Foerster’s own words: ‘The task athand is: de-trivialization’ (von Foerster, 1984: 13). The crossover from aworld of direct observations which relied on unproblematic distinctionsand simply focused on what was being distinguished rather than howthese operations were performed, to one in which observations areobserved, that is, to observing one’s own operations of distinctions andindications and thereby doing away with any reference to outside, exter-nal conditions, or a supporting world – this crossover appeared to be inline with the history of rationality by representing the immediate conse-quence of the shift from a monocontextural to the plural constitution of apolycontextural world. Spencer Brown’s logic of re-entry, which took thebasic act of observation to be the operative unity of distinction andindication, marked the spot where Europe, or the process ofEuropeanization, was to come round to itself. ‘It could be’, Luhmannwrote in what amounts to a fundamental historico-philosophical state-ment, ‘that the central question of European rationality is hidden in there-entry of the form into the form’ (1998: 32). The logic of re-entrymodels recursive operations, and Luhmann’s entire history of occidentalrationality was geared toward their appearance.

Nonetheless, we must note in passing that Luhmann, too, did notescape the long reach of Old European ontology and its metaphysicalprogram. On the contrary, he remained firmly in its grip: In one vitalregard Luhmann’s non-trivial program is subject to the ‘Platonism effect’described by Derrida as the grand generator of occidental metaphysics.Derrida identified the interruption of ‘the communication between twoopposing values’ (Derrida, 1981: 98) of a difference as the core of Plato’sphilosophical politics, that ever since has determined the occidentalhandling of differences. He further emphasized that within the networkof oppositions that organize the regime of Platonism as well as Plato’sown text, one specific opposition is assigned a privileged structural sig-nificance. In order for the opposing values to be opposed in the first placeand initiate the strict regime of opposition, ‘each of these terms must besimply external to the other, which means that one of these oppositions(the opposition between inside and outside) must already be accredited asthe matrix of all possible opposition’ (Derrida, 1981: 103). Precisely thisPlatonic matrix of inside and outside is celebrated by Luhmann as thegreat post-ontological option that moves us into ‘a different’, no longerold, European ontological world:

In ontologically altogether implausible fashion the primary distinc-tion between being and non-being is replaced by the distinctionbetween inside and outside or that between the self-reference and

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hetero-reference of the observer. According to this new versionthere first of all needs to be an observer present before he candraw the distinction between being and non-being. But there is nometaphysical or logical rule for the choice of primary distinction,there are only socio-historical plausibilities, among them a moderninterest in de-ontologizing the world. (Luhmann, 1997a: 911)

Ever since Plato the ‘ontologically altogether implausible’ distinctionbetween inside and outside, which under current non-trivial conditionsassumes the rank of a ‘primary distinction’, resulted in an ostracizationof the technical as the merely external, with all the associated negativeascriptions of exteriority such as death, artificiality, absence of creativity,and lack of knowledge. Philosophy was shaped by this exteriorizing mar-ginalization; it was the very core of the traditional philosophical politicsof – more precisely, against – technology. Granted, Luhmann’s inside/outside distinction is operative rather than substantial – and, followingGeorge Spencer-Brown, it allows for a switching of sides – but it none-theless remains a rigorous, impermeable distinction (otherwise conceptslike structural coupling would make little sense). Maybe Luhmann’sprominent use of this central distinction, which served to marginalizethe technical object, highlights a certain forgetfulness of the technicalthat secretly ties him to Old European semantics. Indeed, one of themore significant features of Luhmann’s theory is the fact that technology,in particular digital technology, is always, so to speak, an outsider. Insystems-theoretical terms, however, technology is not just the outside of agiven system, it is external to system-environment couplings. It is indif-ferent, that is to say, it is part of that side which forms the environmentof systems but is unable to irritate them and trigger internal processes ofself-determination (though it is capable of destroying systems) (cf.Esposito, 2001: 242).

No doubt the question concerning technology and its forgetting inLuhmann’s oeuvre requires an extensive analysis. To what extent doeshis observation of technology re-enact the occidental marginalization ofthe technical? Indeed, where exactly is the current, contemporary ques-tion concerning technology located within Luhmann’s theory edifice? Inlight of ubiquitous computerization and the network-based emergence ofintelligent environments, which increasingly undermine the distinctionbetween machines and media and give rise to the possibility of a struc-tural coupling of computers and cognition, these questions are not onlyof great importance to systems theory and its future design but also serveto foreground the foundational importance of non-trivial machines forthat theory’s conceptual apparatus.10 Without addressing these issues,any attempt to deal with the history of fascination exerted by non-triviality remains incomplete. Such an analysis, however, will have tobe conducted elsewhere. But to provide a few hints: On the one hand,

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Luhmann insists on abandoning the ‘traditional notion of technologylinked to know-how, performance and decision’ (Luhmann, 1997a:527). He emphasizes that ‘notions of technology that operate by wayof opposing themselves to nature or spirit are no longer of any help’(1997a: 535). Equally obsolete are attempts to contrast ‘technology andreason or technology and ‘‘lifeworld’’, and so on’ (1997a: 522). Instead,Luhmann maintains that ‘changing the concept . . . [should] open up thepossibility of seeing new connections’ (1997a: 529). The statement that‘the evolution of technology’ is followed by ‘a directly correspondingstructure of rationality’ (1997a: 519) seems to indicate that he was atleast in part aware of the fact that the non-trivial attitude is groundedin changes in machine history as well as in the changing meanings of thetechnical itself. In view of the proliferation of non-trivial machines, thisstatement could have been an opportune point of departure for the refor-mulating of the question concerning technology in ways which challengetraditional, pre-technological descriptive semantics and maybe even gobeyond the obsolete understanding of technology itself. Ideally, thisquestion should have been on a level with the latest stage of technologicalevolution. Yet despite all attempts to pull clear from tradition,Luhmann’s description of technology remains caught in a bygone dog-matic view. Though technology is supposed to enable ‘a coupling ofcompletely heterogeneous elements’ (1997a: 526), it is seen as a ‘rigid(as opposed to loose) coupling’ (1997a: 526). Ultimately, technologyrefers first and foremost to ‘technical systems’ characterized by ‘causalclosure and that . . . only in certain respects react to environmental inputs’(Luhmann, 2002b: 95). Despite all the talk about the evolution of tech-nology and the corresponding renunciation of traditional concepts,Luhmann in final analysis invokes the old mechanical notion of technol-ogy as a determined, closed machine – an approach that has its roots in abygone stage of technological evolution. Compare, for example, themany residues of traditional descriptions of technology in Luhmannwith Gilbert Simondon’s far more radical evolutionary theory of thetechnical object which he had been advancing since the late 1950s.Luhmann retains concepts that originated prior to the 20th century,while Simondon’s work focuses on the new age of technical ensembles,open machines, open objects and nets characterized by growing marginsof indeterminacy (Simondon, 2005, 2006).

Transclassical Machines and New Domains of Rationality

Luhmann’s attempt to locate – if not hypostasize – the non-trivial atti-tude in the history of rationality was indebted to a philosophical mentorwho had abandoned the camp of poets and thinkers and crossed over tocybernetics: Gotthard Gunther. Luhmann probably referred to him – aswell as to Heinz von Foerster, who collaborated with Gunther at the

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Biological Computer Laboratory in Urbana11 – when it came to thescientific alignment of his own post-trivial project. Gunther must countas the great philosophical actor of the non-trivial shift, who unlikeLuhmann did not conceal the conditio technologica of this transform-ation. He had been concerned with the possible metaphysical significanceof the machine-technical revolution as far back as the early 1950s.Gunther’s work on the formal and ontological consequences of thistransformation reveal the technological shift of meaning that is also evi-dent in Luhmann’s project, though even in the case of Gunther it stillappears, in the words of Klaus Heinrich, to be a history of fascinationwith its share of blindness and infatuation. More than others, Guntherwas under the influence of and transfixed by the new machine which he,however, called trans-classical rather than non-trivial. Gunther was thefirst to conceptualize the impact of the new recursively operating cyber-netic machines including, first and foremost, the computer on the historyof rationality.12 Basing himself increasingly on a ‘hard’ machine-theore-tical and calculatory foundation, he sought to overcome the long-stand-ing ontological tradition of Western thought – and this is precisely whyLuhmann was so passionately interested in Gunther’s discussion of poly-valence and polycontexturality.13

Gunther repeatedly described what he called the transition from aclassical to a non-classical age and the dawn of a new sense of theworld. The guiding difference classical/trans-classical that structuredhis perception of epochs was based on a solid machine-theoretical foun-dation. First, in 1952, Gunther pinpointed the difference between theArchimedean-classical and the ‘trans-classical or non-Archimedeanmachine’:

In the course of technological development man has conceived oftwo radically different types of machine. The first is the classical-archimedean machine whose purpose is to produce work. It hasbeen joined by the idea of a second machine from which weexpect information rather than work. The ‘first’ machine wasdesigned in analogy to the human arm (and hand), the second isexpected to be a technological reproduction of the human brain.For only the brain processes information. (Gunther, 1976: 96)

The new type of machine that ‘has never been there before in thehuman history of technology’ (1976: 94), and whose origins were justabout to become apparent in the birth of cybernetics, was not onlypoised to shake ‘the sense of the world determined by classical ontology’(1976: 99). With it, Gunther also saw the dawn of a ‘new culture’ and a‘new idea of science’, even a ‘new occidental man who no longer identifieswith the pure forms of classical thought’ (1976: 114). In the wake of thenew machine the human condition of being itself appeared to have been

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changed to a degree that matched the transformation from a primitivelevel consciousness to that of a high culture.

This metaphysically oriented machine-theoretical observation servedto inspire the Hegelian Gunther. It provided the basis for the configur-ation made up of the distinction between classical/trans-classical logic,ontology, science and culture in general that came to characterizeGunther’s work on the transformation of the fundamental metaphysicalstance associated with the second machine. Starting in the 1950s hiscomprehensive formal studies on trans-classical calculus were time andagain accompanied by a technologically grounded theory of culture thatdifferentiated between one-, two- and many-valued cultures. The mean-ing of a culture was said to depend mainly on its technological meaning,which was lowered, as it were, into its symbolic order, its worldview andits basic operating procedures and modes of thought, and that, historic-ally speaking, proceeded from primitive tools to classical and on to trans-classical machines.

One-valued cultures were said to be characterized by an archaic stateof consciousness in which the latter merges with its environment and doesnot achieve any separation between soul and thing or subject and object.Primitive tools, Gunther argued, revealed this ambivalent structure aswell as the unstable form of primitive consciousness in as far as they were‘half nature and half mind’, that is, ‘materially part of a natural context’and yet at the same time ‘an artificial form defined by its purpose’ (1976:92). Only when tools became autonomous and were completely separatedfrom the natural context as well as from the spirit and intention of theircreators – and this, Gunther pointed out, is the primary meaning of thehistory of technology – can we speak of the birth of the pure object, of anobjective being in the strong machine sense. ‘A machine is nothing but atool that within certain boundaries has become autonomous’ (1976: 93).The appearance of the machine, therefore, marks a significant rupture.The autonomy of technology was said to create the consciousness ofclassical two-valued high cultures whose operations were based onmachines rather than on tools and that introduced the regime of trad-itional ontological oppositions, first and foremost that between deadobject and live subject. Gunther emphasized that in the psychic realmof a dualist culture only that was regarded as subjective and ‘psychic’which ‘had to be understood in non-machinic and non-mechanical fash-ion’ (Gunther, 1980: 223). The classical machine shaped the classicalregime of meaning to the core. This first machine culture allegedlyfound its formal expression in the strictly two-valued difference machineknown as Aristotelian logic, that is, in its corresponding dualist onto-metaphysics that operated with two values, being and non-being.Furthermore, the classical machine also inaugurated and implementedthe long-lasting classical observer along with the associated world ofobservation.

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Supported ‘by new technological means’, trans-classical machines aresaid to push the formative central ‘boundary between Ego and Worldever further back into the background of subjectivity’ and ‘attribute evermore of what emerges from that background to the objective world ofthings’. Gunther had in mind no more and no less than a cultural cleans-ing brought about by the spirit of the new machine. As he put it, the‘business of cybernetics’ consisted in ‘demythologizing’ the general clas-sical regime of meaning and its principal mythologem, the distinctionbetween nature and mind, subject and object. Formally this corres-ponded to a departure from the long-lasting Aristotelian world of theobserver that had arisen around the classical machine. A shift in themeaning of machines was said to entail a shift in the meaning of logicaway from a two-valued system of propositions that focused on objectivebeing toward a trans-classical calculus of complex self-reflexive pro-cesses. According to Gunther, the crux of the matter was that thetrans-classical machine promotes a truly technological shift of meaning,that is to say, a synchronized shift of technical and logical meaning, andpointed the way out of the classical onto-metaphysical frame ofreference.

Already in Gunther’s case the predicted exodus from the ‘enclosure ofclassical thought’ (Gunther, 1978: viii) on the basis of trans-classicalmachines amounted to secession from Greece – a philosophical break-up with Athens that Gunther’s close reader Luhmann is sure to havenoted. Gunther, too, saw this as a decisive turning point in the history ofrationality, a ‘historical change of climate’ of such magnitude that itequaled the original Greek events. In the first instance the technologicalshift of meaning revealed to him ‘that the domain of rationality definedby classical axiomatics was surprisingly narrow. Much, much narrowerthan hitherto assumed’ (1978: viii). The main point was that the concep-tualization of rationality and its opposite was to be determined by themachinic realm that characterized cultural and indeed psychic condi-tions. Gunther viewed the destruction of classical axiomatics broughtabout by the trans-classical machine primarily as a comprehensive ‘cor-rection’ (Gunther, 1980: 225) of patterns of rationality that were takenfor granted and that, incorrectly, were considered either ineluctable oronly to be exceeded at the price of descending into irrationality. Guntheralready disposed of a machine-based account of the history of rationalitythat Luhmann completed in grand style, albeit oblivious of alltechnology.

Gunther subsequently tried to advance beyond historical specula-tions by attempting a calculus-based move into the trans-classicaldomains of rationality, especially with the help of his logical theoryof morphogrammatics and polycontexturality. Beyond Greece, Guntherrealized, it was no longer a matter of thinking but of computing. In thecontext of the history of fascination, the crucial point was that the

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trans-classical machine was explicitly awarded the rank of a ‘mindprosthesis’ which

reveals problems whose mere existence remains inaccessible to anytype of natural thinking unassisted by technology. It is an essentialpart of natural consciousness not yet supported by cybernetic mindprostheses that it cannot address certain psychic questions simplybecause it is unaware of the domain of reality in which these ques-tions emerge. (1980: 231)

Gunther’s entire transformation theory was sparked by the appear-ance of the trans-classical machine. As opposed to classical machinesthey were prostheses in a new sense, that is, no longer organ or bodyprostheses but nooprostheses modeled on the most complex of all trans-classical machines, the human brain. But when talking about the historyof fascination exerted by non-classical machines, we always have to keepin mind that in the case of Gunther and Luhmann (and, not to forget,von Foerster) something is suppressed: a mode of thinking that eludesboth trivial and non-trivial thought processes – in the words of GillesDeleuze and Felix Guattari a ‘non-thinking thinking’, as it were, a think-ing beyond cognition and recognition.

Conclusion: Questioning the Neocybernetic Regime ofTruth

We have merely touched upon the still unwritten history of the fascin-ation of the trans-classical and the non-trivial machine, as it reveals itselfespecially in Luhmann’s occidental recursions. Ultimately, it is part andparcel of a process that, in the words of the French mechanologistGilbert Simondon, may be described as the majorization of the technicalobject. The latter no longer appears as an object of utility circumscribedby the metaphysical register of a trans-technical or merely instrumentalreason; rather, by gaining independence it enforces a fundamental revi-sion of the order of things, of the interpretations of the world and self,and even of our basic understanding of rationality and thinking itself. Interms of this history of fascination, Luhmann’s history of rationality is –despite all the fascinating perspectives it enables – a phantasmal depositof the great structural transformation of meaning in the course of whichthe technical object sheds its status as the ostracized object of meaning,located at the zero point of meaning and acting as the embodiment ofnon-meaning, and instead turns into an exponent of an entirely newconstellation of meaning by moving into the very centre of the culturalproduction of meaning. The process reveals how after an extended periodof technophobia the theoretical attitude experiences a technological

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shock, as a result of which its self-description falls under the spell of thetechnical object while simultaneously denying it.14

‘Great moments of technological innovation’, Bernard Stiegler writes,‘are moments of suspension. In its development, the technics that inter-rupts one state of things imposes another’ (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002:149). Under technological conditions it is critical to understand the viru-lence of the technical object and this moment of suspension, to grasp theforce exerted by it and take note of the epistemic folds and politicalstrategies it produces. It is critical that we do not simply replace oldevidences with new ones which are then regarded as the fate of discourseand rationality. Yet this is precisely what, to a considerable extent,Luhmann’s politics of knowledge as well as his construction of thehistory of rationality and, especially, his anti-philosophical and anti-ontological strategy and narrative, do.

The epoche demanded of us does not involve, as Luhmann claimed,the bracketing of metaphysics. After the destruction of object-centredontology brought about by Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida and, finally,Nancy’s co-existential ontology, as well as by the process ontology ofWhitehead and others, this is no longer our most pressing problem.Trivial ontology, which Luhmann, backed by a vast history of rational-ity, decried as an absolutist bastion, was already in his days nothing but aprojection of a certain politics of knowledge. The epoche called for todayinvolves the bracketing of cybernetic presumptions and their uncriticallyaccepted basic terms – fateful terms that have inaugurated an entirecybernetic (more precisely, neocybernetic) regime of truth. Be it astheory or technology, the spreading ‘cybernetic hypothesis’ has a firmgrip on our conceptual politics and self-descriptions (see Tiqqun, 2001). Itmay be necessary to bracket (though not eliminate, avoid or delete),among others, terms like complexity, emergence, autopoiesis, couplingand recursions, all of which characterize the form of non-trivial ration-ality. Instead we need to find non-technological terms to describe ourtechnological condition.

Notes

1. I recently edited a media-theoretical collection featuring a broad array of newconceptual attempts to illuminate our techno-medial situation, especially witha view towards a more general ecological perspective (see Horl, 2011). MarkHansen in particular has provided several descriptions of the new media-technological environment, be it by explicitly appropriating establishedcybernetic semantics (cf. Hansen, 2009) or, as in his most recent contribution,by decisively distancing himself from it (cf. Hansen, 2011). In this context seealso Luciana Parisi’s attempt to reformulate the eco-technological situationbeyond the cybernetic imaginary (Parisi, 2009).

2. I am indebted to a reviewer who pointed me to an important passage in whichLuhmann in passing mentions the technological basis for his use of the term

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‘machine’ (‘data-processing machines’). However, in a significant gestureLuhmann immediately adds that this appropriation of the term constitutesa ‘relatively harmless linguistic usage’ as long as it remains clear ‘that this isnot a reference to trivial machines, which in completely unchanging wayskeep transforming input into output, but to non-trivial machines executingrecursive operations’ (Luhmann, 1990: 402).

3. Elsewhere Luhmann provided an even more succinct definition of the trivialcondition of all ontology: ‘In our usage of the term, ontology refers to apattern of observation, that is, a mode of observation based on the distinctionbetween being and non-being. This implies first and foremost that the dis-tinction between being and non-being is and always remains dependent on anantecedent operative separation between observation (or observer) andobserved’ (Luhmann, 1997a: 896).

4. See Quine (1961: 1–19; 1969: 26–68). I am indebted to Elena Esposito,who after reading an early draft of this essay pointed out that Luhmann,of course, had no objections to a relativistic ontology a la Quine. On thecontrary, he considered it all but indispensable and restricted his oppositionto the absolute, if not absolutist, metaphysical ontology based on thedistinction between being and non-being. This is no doubt correct. Eventhough Luhmann for the main part only spoke of ontology, his criticismwas primarily directed at onto-metaphysics. Yet the question arises whetherthis distinction between absolute and relative ontology is sufficient whenit comes to marking the entire ontological problem, and whether there arenot other forms of ontological thought that Luhmann always already missesout on.

5. According to Luhmann, the temporality of science is in accord withmodern structures of temporalization (on the replacement of the presentistOld European semantics of time by modern temporal consciousness seeLuhmann, 1980: 235–300). Beyond mere chronology, Luhmann conceivesof time primarily as a system time produced by the temporalizing ofcomplexity, more precisely, as a dimension of determining meaning andmanaging complexity. Increasingly complex societies, Luhmann argues,have to ‘further temporalize their complexity and expand their timehorizons, they even have to change their concepts of time . . . becauseit becomes increasingly inevitable to order complexity in sequence’(Luhmann, 1980: 256). For this reason there exists a strong ‘correlationbetween social evolution and the structures of temporal consciousness’(1990: 248). Hence Luhmann’s systems theory can be viewed as an attemptat a fundamental sociology that succeeds an allegedly antiquated funda-mental ontology.

6. See also: ‘The function of science rests on a possible reorganization of thepossible, on a new combinatorics – and not on a reproduction of the given, ona mere doubling of objects in cognition’ (Luhmann, 1990: 328).

7. Only in the fragment on the origin of geometry, in which he contemplates thefunction of reading and writing for the archigenesis of ideality (wherehypomnesis precedes all anamnesis), does Husserl glimpse the basic role ofcultural technics for the birth of ideality, which in Vienna he had stilldescribed as an essentially pre-technical affair (for an extended reading ofthis decisive passage see Stiegler, 2001).

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8. Another important document for Luhmann’s liquidation of tradition is thefinal chapter of the Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft [The Society of Society],especially the section ‘The Semantics of Old Europe I: Ontology’(pp. 893–912). Unfortunately, I can only briefly touch upon this importantanti-philosophical text.

9. Geophilosophically speaking, however, we should note that redescriptionrepresents a watchword of American pragmatism and of Richard Rorty inparticular, who (following John Dewey) used it to move beyond observertheory and metaphysical formulas of closure, which he thought indispens-able for developing a philosophy that remains open to the future. The con-cept of redescription, including the theory of non-closure it contains, goesback to Charles Sanders Peirce’s processual sign theory (see Hampe, 2006:53–75, esp. 60ff.).

10. On the challenge the computer poses for Luhmann’s systems theory – inparticular, the fact that it undermines the positioning of technology on theoutside of the system/environment difference – see Esposito (2001) andBaecker (2001).

11. Further see Muller and Muller (2007). Luhmann frequently refers toGunther, especially in connection with the attempts to leave behind thetrivial ontological program (e.g. Luhmann, 1997: 895). In the context ofLuhmann’s own perception of the non-trivial shift as focusing on theappearance of the conceptual figure of the observer, Gunther is mentionedimmediately after von Foerster and even before Maturana (see Luhmann,2002b: 64).

12. For more on Gunther’s theoretical concept and its historical and noopoli-tical context, see Horl (2008: 182ff.).

13. Elena Esposito, one of Luhmann’s most important students, has researchedthe great significance Gunther had for Luhmann. During a conversation sheoffered the pointed formulation that Luhmann’s social theory could be seenas a consistent attempt to continue Gotthard Gunther’s project of develop-ing a polycontextural and polyvalent way of thinking.

14. Luhmann himself reflected on the connection between self-construction andimaginary construction (see Luhmann, 1997a: 866–8).

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Erich Horl is Professor of Media Philosophy and Media Technology atRuhr-University Bochum, Germany. He is head of the BochumColloquium for Media Studies (bkm). He studied philosophy, culturalstudies and media studies at Vienna, Paris and Berlin and received hisPhD from Humboldt University, Berlin. His research interests cover thehistory and philosophy of cybernetics and the description of the cyber-netization of our forms of life. His most recent publication is Die tech-nologische Bedingung. Beitrage zur Beschreibung der technischen Welt(Suhrkamp, 2011).

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Erratum

This article was translated from the German by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. The author regrets that, through an oversight, the translatorwas not acknowledged on the original article.

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