Luhmann, The Non-Trivial Machine and The Neocybernetic Regime of Truth

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Theory, Culture & Society

29(3) 94–121
Luhmann, the ! The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276412438592
the Neocybernetic tcs.sagepub.com
Regime of Truth
Erich Hörl
Ruhr-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 Günther,
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 von
Foerster)
Corresponding author:
Erich Hörl, Ruhr-University Bochum, Universitätsstrasse 150, Gebäude GB 5/143, Bochum 44780,
Germany
Email: erich.hoerl@rub.de
http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Geograph Institute Der on March 31, 2015

Hörl 95
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 of
machine theory, is located at the centre of a historically highly significant
narrative of self-description which arose in response to the grand techno-
logical transformations of the 20th century. The principal feature of this
self-description is the translation of the increasingly cybernetic aspect of
all domains of being into a new, theoretically advanced semantic register.
Niklas Luhmann, whose work represents a grandiose concretion of this
narrative, was right to claim that our self-descriptions were still under the
spell 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 of
modernity (see Luhmann, 2005: 11). We have, however, long since assimi-
lated a new semantic register. It arises from our media-technological, that
is, 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 conceptual
regimes bequeathed to us by an older Europe.
If Hans Blumenberg was correct to assume that ‘[e]very epoch invents
its 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 embodying
and occupying the imaginary standpoint of its own epoch but, more
critically, of discerning, probing and determining its current dogmas.
In our case, the evidence of cybernetics and the existence in a cybernetic
world, above all the evidence of being under neocybernetic conditions,
has turned into our epoch’s imaginary standpoint. Strangely enough, this
occurs 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 Mark
Hansen have captured the immense range and virulence of neocybernetic
concepts and images:
Some of the most important theoretical and critical conversations

going on today in the cognitive sciences, chaos and complexity
studies, and social systems theory stem from neocybernetic notions
of self-organization, emergence, and autopoiesis. A growing body
of 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 the
natural and human sciences with information technologies, recent

96 Theory, Culture & Society 29(3)
thinkers, such as Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari,

Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, have deployed
neocybernetic 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 and
communication to remap the territory of knowledge with reference
to the operational boundaries of systems and environments. (Clarke
and Hansen, 2009: 5–6)
In the following I would like to examine and question the history of

the fascination exerted by non-triviality, especially as it appears in
Luhmann’s work. This undertaking, I believe, could be an important
step toward understanding the genesis and shape of the linguistic and
conceptual fixation outlined above. The question is whether this particu-
lar discourse (with its underlying epochal imaginary constructs) is at all
able to observe what contemporary media theory increasingly describes
in eco-technological terms of atmospheric media, ubiquitous computing,
ambient intelligence, etc., or whether we need a categorically different
conceptual politics – one not rooted in cybernetic and systemic
techno-scientific regimes – to give a feasible account of our present
techno-medial situation.1
The Fascination with the Non-trivial Machine: Luhmann and

the Cybernetic Imaginary
‘Science’, in the words of Niklas Luhmann, ‘is without a doubt a recur-
sively operating system’ (1990: 275). A footnote supporting this claim
reveals science to be a specific type of machine: ‘In Heinz von Foerster’s
sense: 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 an
implicit historico-philosophical theorem that governs Luhmann’s ana-
lysis of science and indeed his entire oeuvre. Systems theory – this is
the crux of Luhmann’s historical teleology that shapes the very core of
his understanding not only of science but of all social systems – operates
at the behest of the history of rationality itself. After all, both the plane
of immanence on which Luhmann’s concepts circulate and the environ-
ment in which they gain consistency are characterized by a fascination
with the non-trivial machine. The latter is nothing less than the principal
protagonist in his account of the evolution of European rationality,
which at this point in time has reached its latest incarnation in the
shape of systems theory. Maybe Luhmann’s entire theory design is an
integral component of the ongoing fascination exerted by the non-trivial
machine, under the spell of which he attempted an emphatic new

Hörl 97
description of the occidental as the gradual assertion of non-trivial

rationality. According to this redescription, the distinctive features of
occidental rationality arise not from its origins but from the birth of
non-trivial machines and associated types of logic that exhibit a new
form of rationality. In order to discern its pivotal elements it is therefore
not necessary to go all the way back to ancient geometricians or pre-
Socratic philosophers, but only to the grand non-trivial rupture that
started to emerge around 1900.
Of course the punchline of any history of fascination including this
one 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, so
intoxicated by non-triviality, assumes the shape of a powerful historical
projection generated by an enthusiasm for cybernetic machines. It is
characteristic not only of Luhmann’s own historical self-perception but
also 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 which
the ostracized technical object, which until then had marked the absence
of all meaning, moved into the centre of a new culture of meaning –
despite, in other words, the basic development that, following Scott
Lash, can be described as the ascendancy of technological forms of life
and thought (see Lash, 2002: 13–25) – Luhmann ignored the degree to
which his work and his very contemporaneity were as such conditioned
by a historic machine change. Although he continued, in a very charac-
teristic fashion, to reflect on the media-technological foundations that
shape the various forms of rationality and, more importantly, the genesis
and rise of modern rationality, he did not analyse and discuss the degree
to which his own theory and his own narrative of the history of reason
were indebted to the history of machines. In terms of the history of
fascination under discussion here, Luhmann’s systems theory is the
purest, most striking conceptual edifice to emerge from what I have
called the 20th-century’s epochal technological shift of meaning (see
Hörl, 2010). At the risk of over-simplifying matters, let me phrase this
as concisely as possible: Luhmann’s theory, no doubt, conceptually
incorporates 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 represses
the fact that it was itself conditioned by this change. We therefore need to
reconstruct and explicate Luhmann’s implicit history of rationality in
order to reveal what it denies, for precisely this denial constitutes the
most volatile aspect of his account. What will become evident is the
degree to which the many descriptions, displaying an eagerness to
engage figures of non-triviality, regardless of all they may illuminate
and uncover, are part of a cybernetic imaginary that conceals as much
as it reveals.

The distinction between trivial and non-trivial machines is one of

Heinz von Foerster’s most lasting conceptual contributions to cybernetic
discourse. Introduced in the 1970 essay ‘Molecular Ethology’ (von
Foerster and Poerksen, 2002: 133–68), as part of his critique of the
adaptionist behaviourism of early cybernetics, this frequently invoked
distinction was as important to von Foerster’s epistemological and eth-
ical arguments as it was to the subsequent elaboration of what came to be
known as second-order cybernetics (see Schmidt, 1996: 385ff.; Brier,
2005). Luhmann left no doubt about its significance: ‘Von Foerster’s
distinction between trivial (reliable) and non-trivial (unreliable) machines
is now a frequent quote. All higher forms of life, consciousness and social
communication 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 is
dealing with conceptual rather than actual machines. Unlike other cyber-
netic pioneers such as Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Norbert Wiener, or
Stafford Beer, von Foerster never built any physical machines (see
Glanville, 2007). To him ‘[t]he term ‘‘machine’’ represents an abstract
framework for speaking about input and output relationships and rules
of transformation’ (von Foerster and Poerksen, 2002: 53). In a decisive
move, these relationships and rules and transformations are embodied
each 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’ – following
Alan Turing, its logical-mathematical properties rather than its physical
embodiment – ‘is ‘‘the machine’’’ (2003: 208). Given that this relationship
is 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, completely
predictable system.
By contrast, non-trivial machines are ‘quite different creatures’. The
input-output relation is described as ‘not invariant’ because it is deter-
mined by ‘the machine’s previous output. In other words, its previous
steps determine its present reactions’ (2003: 208). Owing to this recursive
structure 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 either
trivial or non-trivial. Orthodox epistemology was deemed trivial since it
was based on the assumption of a sovereign subject capable of a complete
analytical determination of a strictly separate object as part of an
exhaustive description of the world. Non-trivial epistemology, which
according to von Foerster was still in its infancy and in need of future
elaboration, was by contrast characterized by a revocation of the

Hörl 99
primacy of this idealized classical observer epistemology. Its point of

departure was the conceptualization of the world as a complex network
of non-trivial machines of which the observer was always already a part.
The classical or first-order observer was replaced by a multitude of
second-order observers. Cognition turned from classical representation
into a never-ending process of recursive computation that generates
descriptions of reality (von Foerster, 2003: 211–27). Elaborating a gen-
eral epistemology of non-trivial machines became the principal goal of von
Foerster’s second-order research program (see Brier, 2005: 363).
Although von Foerster’s trivial/non-trivial distinction was a strictly
systematic affair, it came with a latent historical index. After all, what
this distinction entailed only became fully apparent with the arrival of
recursively operating machines like Ashby’s homeostat, the research into
neuronal networks, and the introduction of computing machines
designed to produce non-expected results. It was, strictly speaking, the
arrival of non-trivial machines that demanded an epistemological over-
haul in the course of which the trivial understanding of the world was
replaced by the non-trivial understanding of understanding.
Following in von Foerster’s footsteps, Luhmann – who throughout his
oeuvre frequently refers to von Foerster – champions non-trivial
machines as the model and epitome of a new form of rationality and
gives an historic twist to von Foerster’s systematic distinction as well as
to the non-trivial epistemology it entails: he uses the latter to furnish a
historical diagnosis according to which we already inhabit the world of
those 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 trivial
to a non-trivial attitude and thus the most decisive event in the history of
occidental rationality since its Greek inception.2 Luhmann views himself
as a protagonist in a grand transformation of attitude that leaves Greece
behind and appears to be nothing less than the key event in the history of
occidental rationalism, marked by the rise of cybernetics and the shift
from the trivial world of the first to the non-trivial world of the second
observer. Luhmann turns this transformation of attitude embodied by
the new cybernetic machines into a veritable metamorphosis of rational-
ity that appears as the very signature of modernity. His theory project
amounts 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 in
odd harmony with Heidegger’s cybernetics-inspired obituary),
Luhmann’s theory of science, which came equipped with all the heft
of a new culture of science and machines, intoned a farewell to phil-
osophy. The latter was no more than a guardian of the antiquated
trivial epistemology which – and this is a core element of the fascin-
ation exerted by non-trivial machines – had apparently already been

demolished by second-order cybernetics. But Luhmann, the Latinist

with a passion for Roman law (see Luhmann, 1987: 130), went a step
further and demanded that in line with the end of philosophy we also
bid 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 of
thought and understanding, constitutes the basic feature of Luhmann’s
research programme. Shaped by contemporary technological condi-
tions, Luhmann was struggling, as it were, to arrive at a historically
and systematically viable account of the shock administered by the
momentous change of machines. The latter fueled his revision, indeed
his denial of the well known early history of theory, which in his eyes
amounted to a mere prehistory. Backed by the facts and proofs of a
non-trivial cultural revolution of science and technology, Luhmann
adopted an anti-philosophical stance from which Germany has not
yet recovered.
In the hard anti-philosophical politics of knowledge that shape the
mood and thrust of Luhmann’s history of rationality, the non-trivial
machine does not merely function as the central model of a post-
philosophical epistemology. It is above all the carrier of post-ontological
aspirations that fuel Luhmann’s own work as well as the whole techno-
scientific optimism of the second half of the 20th century. ‘The dominant
attitude of Old Europe’, Luhmann laconically concludes his grand inves-
tigation, ‘can be described with the term ontology’ (1997a: 895). Ontology
was said to be ‘the result’ of an inimitably plausible, that is, trivial, ‘mode
of observation that starts with the distinction between being and non-
being and from which all other distinctions follow’ (1997a: 895).3 It was
the core ingredient of the trivial machinery, its enduring cognitive distillate
and principal tagline for a trivial understanding of the world whose time
had long since expired under advanced technological conditions. This ver-
dict was reserved for all ontological assertions that professed to be more
than Quinian worlds of reference, or that claimed to amount to more than
either the implicit ontological consequences of our conceptual schemata or
the unavoidable residue of our theoretical frameworks.4
A certain anti-ontological affect may already have been at work in the
techno-scientific self-promotion campaigns and the increased importance
of epistemological questions in the late 19th century, but it did not gain
full force until the arrival of our current technological conditions, above
all 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 that
still enjoy wide circulation today, were seen not only as epistemic facts
evoked by a new culture of machines but also as an expression of ineluct-
able epistemological facts that remain out of reach of any trivial ontology
lacking sufficient complexity. The breathless forays directed against all

Hörl 101
alleged primary evidence produced by trivial world understanding as well

as against any desire for ontology, which upon closer inspection appear
to 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 presuppositions
of 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 of
science is to indicate a ‘very simple matter with far-reaching conse-
quences’. It is simple because ‘recursivity . . . in general refers (for
instance, in mathematics) to the repeated application of operations to
the result of similar preceding operations’ (Luhmann, 1990: 275). When
we describe science as a system, the notion of recursivity implies that
despite indisputable structural couplings with its environment, science
remains operationally closed. In other words, down to its very founda-
tions, science is ‘the result of its own operations’ (1990: 273), since ‘the
system only recognizes its own operations as occasions for changing its
own states’ (1990: 277). Recursive operations reveal science as a prime
example for the modern autonomy of function. Viewed as a recursive
system 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 ‘accomplished
by the differentiation of certain operationally closed, autopoietic systems’
(Luhmann, 2002a: 63).
According to Luhmann, the recursive system called science appears to
behave 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 other
words, the science machine ‘finds itself in exactly that state (and in no
other) which it has reached by way of its own operations. The transform-
ations from state to state presuppose structures determining which state
can be reached without the system breaking apart (that is, without
a disintegration of the relationship to its environment)’ (Luhmann,
1990: 279).
These structural features are particularly important for the specific
temporality that characterizes the recursive operations of the science
machine. The beginning or origin of a problem and an utterance, we
are told, may ‘soon be forgotten’ (1990: 272), that is, lost in recursive
loops. What is ultimately important for the operations of the non-trivial
science machine is that ‘in any given situation’, regardless of how things

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 to
reactualize is to be literally understood as an originary reactualization in
the sense of an essential supplementarity. It stands behind the evolution-
ary process of science. Regardless of its initial state, science should at any
given point in time be able to reactualize its own history in order to
mobilize it for selective connective operations. Feedbacks, recursive fall-
backs, and even anticipations are always at work in the operation of the
science machine (1990: 559). Luhmann speaks in this context of ‘recursive
evolution’ (1990: 280). ‘Science’, he pointedly writes with reference to
Heinz von Foerster, ‘is a historical machine that with every change of
state becomes another machine’ (1990: 284).
Reactualization, the temporal mode of recursion, is said to not only
characterize 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 operates
at a certain remove from the world. As we shall see, it also provides the
basis 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 happens
to 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 merely
repeated 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 of
the world. It does away with the intrusive quotidian relationships to
things that ontological world explications are said to perpetuate. After
all, ‘ontology is (in comparison to everything we nowadays undertake in
physics and logic) much closer to the quotidian verisimilitude – but more
beautiful, festive and reflective’ (Luhmann, 1997a: 912). Science, then, is
a 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’s
reading science appears as a massive counter-ontological offensive that
foils all naı̈ve and originary fixations on being and presence and instead
proceeds to lead the way out of the ontological cave. With their signifi-
cant interruption of the direct relationship between thought and being
that is said to be the basic configuration of the ontological approaches to
the world, scientific coding operations always remain incomplete and
subject to open systemic history. The core of the never-ending task of
science was to bring about a radical de-ontologizing of our relationship
to the world and thus to produce distance.5 Science, then, is not just one
of many non-trivial machines (according to Luhmann all social systems

Hörl 103
are such machines). The grand severance of ontological word references

and 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-trivial

Attitude
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 a
historical marker for the appearance and function of non-triviality as
such. Science was not only deemed to be an essential part of the process
of modernization that brings about the transfer from trivial to non-trivial
conditions. It also had to modernize itself by removing all its intrinsic,
increasingly antiquated trivial conceptualizations. One of the main goals
of this auto-modernization was to raise de iure the traditional epistemo-
logical understanding stemming from a philosophical idea of science to
the complex level of the contemporary conditions on which the autono-
mous functional system science was de facto already operating. This
meant first and foremost that science had to rid itself of all possible
ontological inscriptions and become a pure theory devoid of all explicit
and implicit statements on the being of something. Luhmann viewed the
conceptualization 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 to
adhere to the obsolete, deeply traditional, and ontologically oriented
approaches of science by furnishing a ‘description of the world as an
object 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 world
as it is’, Luhmann continued, ‘and must therefore retract its claim of
instructing others about the world. It achieves an exploration of possible
constructions 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) and
from depicting the world as such. Instead it had to dismantle all ‘primary
evidence’ (1990: 328), the evidence of observable objects and a describ-
able world as well as the evidence of the obsolete theoretical attitude that
insists 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 the
sciences was supported by a powerful construct derived from the history
of rationality. For Luhmann, the ‘discontent over the modern culture of

knowledge’ (1990: 328) that had emerged since the beginning of the 20th
century – for instance, in complaints about the loss of reference, the
waning of experience or the disappearance of the life-world – was
merely an expression of a not yet understood change of attitude. It
arose from the scientifically supported transformation of being from a
pre-modern trivial, mono-contextural world to the conditions of a non-
trivial, polycontextural world. Especially in the intense engagement with
Husserl’s critique of science on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of
the latter’s Viennese lecture on sciences, Luhmann highlighted the new
non-trivial conditions that mandated a departure from Old European
ways of thinking. The new state of science, which according to
Luhmann 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 observe
themselves . . . The fiction of a reality that exists free of cognition
already had to be given up with Heisenberg; and if such a reality
does exist, it does not display any qualities to which an observation
could latch on . . . For the time being, let us merely note that for such
cognitions, contrary to what Husserl maintained, Geist is not neces-
sary. Rather, they arise out of the universalization of projects of
cognition in the natural sciences, and hence out of a program that
compels autologies, self-applications – or that remains incomplete
in 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’s
discovery of the problems associated with the observer, appeared to be
part of the modern shift into polycontexturality:
Modern society is a polycentric, polycontextural system. It applies

completely different codes, completely different ‘frames’, completely
different principal distinctions according to whether it describes itself
from the standpoint of religion or the standpoint of science, from the
standpoint of law or the standpoint of politics, from the standpoint
of pedagogy or the standpoint of economics. (Luhmann, 2002a: 52)
Though he makes no mention of the new technological conditions in

the shape of a/the non-trivial culture of machines, Luhmann asserts that
the transition to polycontextural configurations of observation and
meaning enforces a shift from a trivial to a non-trivial mindset.

Hörl 105
The changed situation that separates Luhmann’s clarifications of the

new epistemological conditions from Husserl’s diagnosis of a crisis
becomes most apparent in the context of the re-evaluation and reconcep-
tualization of that pivotal event in the history of rationality that had been
on Husserl’s mind when, in the 1930s, he attempted to employ his notion
of the life-world to recast the sciences. As is known, Husserl reconstructed
the rise of ‘a new sort of attitude of individuals toward their surrounding
world’ (Husserl, 1970: 276) that took place in the sixth and seventh cen-
tury BC in Greece. He described the significant change of attitude which
altered the ‘spiritual shape of Europe’ (1970: 289) and which was now said
to be threatened by the modern processes of technologization and for-
malization. Husserl spoke of the birth of a ‘theoretical attitude’. He saw it
as the origin of an ideality that now, faced with a critical loss of meaning
to technological procedures and a momentous shift of meaning, was more
relevant than ever. ‘With the first conception of ideas’ that occurred back
then, ‘man gradually becomes a new man’ (1970: 277).
‘Humanity’ – this was the basis of the argument – ‘in its historical
situation, 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 took
to be a ‘first type of historicity’, was the so-called ‘natural primordial
attitude of original natural life’ that appeared to be ‘naı̈vely, straightfor-
wardly directed at the world’ (1970: 281). Though present as a ‘universal
horizon’, the world was not ‘thematic as such’ (1970: 281). It is only when
the theoretical attitude replaces the natural and introduces a new style of
existence that ‘[m]an becomes gripped by the passion of a world-view and
world-knowledge’ and turns into ‘a nonparticipating spectator, surveyor
of the world; he becomes a philosopher’ (1970: 285). To ‘strive for and
bring about theoria and nothing but theoria’ (1970: 280) was for Husserl
the 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 to
fulfil. Ever since the momentous Greek transformation philosophy had
acted as the guardian of the theoretical attitude. In Husserl’s eyes, its
very platonic present-day task lay in the reflection on and remembrance
of that ur-scene of the sciences. The latter were to reside under the roof of
philosophy and no place else. This was the initial program of philosophy
as a ‘universal science’ that now, in the face of foundational crises, was to
be reactivated using phenomenological means. The ‘completely new
beginning’ (Husserl, 1970: 239) Husserl called for in the 1920s proved
to be a repetition of the beginning of all theoria.

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 by
Husserl – despite the fact that ‘already in his time it had little chance
of a future’ (Luhmann, 2002a: 54) – to counter the technologically
induced crisis of reason proved to be hopelessly antiquated in the age
of non-trivial machines and their inscrutable complexity. In Luhmann’s
eyes the range of that comprehensive change of attitude which Husserl,
faced with the whole non-idealist technological mobilization, had so
emphatically conjured up was pretty limited. The Greek transformation
was at best the beginning of a long-lasting process of change that, as a
history of European rationality, only hit its home stretch in the 20th
century. The birth of the theoretical attitude had occurred, as it were,
within the horizon of the trivial attitude and its characteristic observer
position. It was the new autonomy of the sciences – that is, their exodus
from the world of philosophical spectators that had restricted them to
trivial world observations – and above all the invention of the non-trivial
machine that brought about a truly dramatic change of attitude. Husserl
may 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 was
systems theory. And this, precisely, was Luhmann’s chief concern: to
transform a theoretical attitude still bound to trivial acts of observation
in such a way that it would give birth to a wholly un-Greek, non-trivial
theoria.
Luhmann’s theory project, especially its remarkable take on the his-
tory of rationality, clearly fell in line with Husserl’s ambitious renewal
venture. The guiding interest behind the systems-theoretical reformula-
tion of the phenomenological project, however, no longer entailed a
return to the beginning but a search ‘for a form in which the uncondi-
tional theoretical interest accepted under the name of philosophy can be
continued in the face of changed conditions’ (Luhmann, 2002a: 37). The
goal, in Luhmann’s trenchant formulation, was to introduce ‘Husserl’s
intuition of theory into a completely different ‘‘lifeworld’’’ (2002a: 56) – a
technological and thoroughly cybernetic lifeworld, no less, shaped by
non-trivial machines. Epoche´ now stood for the bracketing of all trivial
preconceptions of thought such as subject, spirit and, in particular, all the
obsolete figures of ontological world descriptions. Intentionality now was
the 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 context
of 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

Hörl 107
distinction’, yet under polycontextural conditions it was no longer pos-

sible to fall back on ‘the distinction familiar vs. non-familiar as if it were
a 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 modern
means of the theory of self-referential systems or by means of second
order cybernetics’ (2002a: 59). In other words, a contemporary theory
design had to be on par with the non-trivial attitude. The brand names
embodying this new attitude included ‘formal calculus; second-order
cybernetics; the theory of closed, ‘‘autopoietic’’ systems; or radical con-
structivism’ (2002a: 53). And rather than residing under the roof of a
philosophy that acted as a universal science, they originated from math-
ematics, biology, neurophysiology, automata theory, linguistics – in
short, from a whole array of theories that, starting in the 1950s, emerged
from under the new roof of first- and especially second-order cybernetics
and 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 appeared
to correspond to the new conditions. One of his most concise reckonings
is the essay ‘European Rationality’.8 Arguably Luhmann’s most beauti-
ful and precise treatise on the end of philosophy, it locates all ontology as
antiquated messages from the Old European world of trivial observa-
tions. It is no more than a remnant and a survival of a long vanished
stage of European rationality which remained tied to a history of
observers.
‘The history of European rationality can be described as the history of
the dissolution of a rationality continuum that had connected the obser-
ver in the world with the world’ (Luhmann, 1998: 23). For Luhmann, the
assumption of a convergence of thought and being, which had sustained
ontology from Parmenides all the way to Heidegger (that is, the occiden-
tal Parmenidian variations, as Heidegger himself observed), was at the
very core of the early European, initially Greek belief in a continuum of
rationality ‘that always already merged thought and being in a common
origin’ (1990: 321). The structural increase in complexity, that is, the loss
of the ‘parallel views of a unified world’ (1998: 28) and the corresponding
increase of observer positions, was said to have rendered untenable the
notion of a privileged point of ontological world observation that
allowed for a unifying, certain and binding perception of being. The
privileged 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 the
new, non-trivial attitude. He appears as the central conceptual persona in

the age of non-trivial machines; on his shoulders rests the renunciation – so

characteristic of the epistemological politics of systems theory – of the
philosophical-ontological assumption that we can see and survey the
world.
As Luhmann was able to gather from the work of the cyberneticist
Gotthard Günther, the two-valued ontological guiding distinction
between thought and being or being and non-being did not only manifest
itself in the classical two-valued logic as the principal instrument of trivial
world description. Together with the two-valued logic it also found
expression in a pre-modern, that is to say archaic and stratified, formation
of society whose residues, Luhmann claimed, still cling to us in the shape
of 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 being
and nonbeing – and a two-valued logical instrument. This assumes a
society in which differences between different world and social
descriptions 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 from

time to time, philosophy was burdened by its trivial ontological inherit-
ance. In addition, it appeared to be nothing less than a pre-modern
instrument of power, as indicated by its systematic handling of distinc-
tions. It consistently displayed a preference for distinctions with inbuilt
asymmetry 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 both
sides’ (Luhmann, 2002a: 39). Subject to polycontextural conditions, how-
ever, ontology could be no more than a remnant from the age of ‘the
principle of a universally valid rationality’ (Luhmann, 1998: 24) when it
still seemed ‘self-evident that all observers have to be observed in the
same 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 a
consistent and meaningful discourse on being, that is, no ontology.
Thus the end of the two-valued ontological world rationalization was
supposed to culminate in the ‘shift from ‘‘what’’ questions to ‘‘how’’ ques-
tions’ (Luhmann, 1998: 26). From the point of view of a systems theory
informed by second-order cybernetics, the general transformation from
philosophical questions of essence that did not for a second doubt the
continuum of thought and being and the complete determinability of
the latter, to a drift into an age of relational questions of complexity
and indeterminacy that are part of the domain of sociology, revealed the

Hörl 109
ongoing dissolution of the continuum of rationality. Ontology, in short,

was to Luhmann the theoretically most potent and enduring figure of
trivial world narration. To quote Heinz von Foerster, it basically belonged
to the ‘great love affair of Western culture for trivial machines’ (von
Foerster, 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 – and with 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 of
a 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 the
ontological world view, that is to say, the dismantling of its own origins
in the Greek hell of triviality. As Luhmann would have it, the signature
of Europe was its auto-deconstructive constitution, for though Europe
may have ensured the mastery of the trivial world view – that was, so to
speak, 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 late
Middle Ages’ (Luhmann, 1998: 22) and thus abolish its own origins.
If philosophy, that old European institution, was to have any future at
all, it had to leave behind all forms of ontological thought and terminate
the hegemonic discourse politics it had pursued since early European days:
‘Critique – that only means, anymore, observing observations, describing
descriptions from a standpoint that is itself observable’ (Luhmann, 2002a:
37). Above all it had striven for ‘a subtler language . . . that functions even
under polycontextural conditions’ (2002a: 53). There was, Luhmann
argued, 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 descriptions
of the world’ (2002a: 59) that correspond to the intellectual habitus of
modern societies. ‘[T]he continual new description of redescriptions’ was
the only option for a society that was no longer willing to cling to old
descriptions, but instead perceived ‘the prospect of further new descrip-
tions of its own concepts as its future’ (2002a: 60). Redescription – that is
the new epistemological password in the age of non-triviality and the new
form 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 had
already left the world of the first observer behind. Science, conceived
as a recursive system, pointed toward a post-ontological form of
world description that corresponded to the complex world of the
second observer which followed the dissolution of the rationality con-
tinuum. The only thing missing was to give full epistemological credit

to this form, even against the resistance of orthodox, ontologically

fixated cognitive relations. Precisely this expulsion of all apparitions of
trivial thought appeared to be the order of the day and, in particular, that
of systems theory. Or, in Heinz von Foerster’s own words: ‘The task at
hand is: de-trivialization’ (von Foerster, 1984: 13). The crossover from a
world of direct observations which relied on unproblematic distinctions
and simply focused on what was being distinguished rather than how
these operations were performed, to one in which observations are
observed, that is, to observing one’s own operations of distinctions and
indications and thereby doing away with any reference to outside, exter-
nal conditions, or a supporting world – this crossover appeared to be in
line with the history of rationality by representing the immediate conse-
quence of the shift from a monocontextural to the plural constitution of a
polycontextural world. Spencer Brown’s logic of re-entry, which took the
basic act of observation to be the operative unity of distinction and
indication, marked the spot where Europe, or the process of
Europeanization, was to come round to itself. ‘It could be’, Luhmann
wrote in what amounts to a fundamental historico-philosophical state-
ment, ‘that the central question of European rationality is hidden in the
re-entry of the form into the form’ (1998: 32). The logic of re-entry
models recursive operations, and Luhmann’s entire history of occidental
rationality was geared toward their appearance.
Nonetheless, we must note in passing that Luhmann, too, did not
escape the long reach of Old European ontology and its metaphysical
program. On the contrary, he remained firmly in its grip: In one vital
regard 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 two
opposing values’ (Derrida, 1981: 98) of a difference as the core of Plato’s
philosophical politics, that ever since has determined the occidental
handling of differences. He further emphasized that within the network
of oppositions that organize the regime of Platonism as well as Plato’s
own text, one specific opposition is assigned a privileged structural sig-
nificance. In order for the opposing values to be opposed in the first place
and initiate the strict regime of opposition, ‘each of these terms must be
simply external to the other, which means that one of these oppositions
(the opposition between inside and outside) must already be accredited as
the matrix of all possible opposition’ (Derrida, 1981: 103). Precisely this
Platonic matrix of inside and outside is celebrated by Luhmann as the
great post-ontological option that moves us into ‘a different’, no longer
old, European ontological world:
In ontologically altogether implausible fashion the primary distinc-

tion between being and non-being is replaced by the distinction
between inside and outside or that between the self-reference and

Hörl 111
hetero-reference of the observer. According to this new version

there first of all needs to be an observer present before he can
draw the distinction between being and non-being. But there is no
metaphysical or logical rule for the choice of primary distinction,
there are only socio-historical plausibilities, among them a modern
interest in de-ontologizing the world. (Luhmann, 1997a: 911)
Ever since Plato the ‘ontologically altogether implausible’ distinction

between inside and outside, which under current non-trivial conditions
assumes the rank of a ‘primary distinction’, resulted in an ostracization
of the technical as the merely external, with all the associated negative
ascriptions 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 politics
of – more precisely, against – technology. Granted, Luhmann’s inside/
outside distinction is operative rather than substantial – and, following
George Spencer-Brown, it allows for a switching of sides – but it none-
theless remains a rigorous, impermeable distinction (otherwise concepts
like structural coupling would make little sense). Maybe Luhmann’s
prominent use of this central distinction, which served to marginalize
the technical object, highlights a certain forgetfulness of the technical
that secretly ties him to Old European semantics. Indeed, one of the
more significant features of Luhmann’s theory is the fact that technology,
in particular digital technology, is always, so to speak, an outsider. In
systems-theoretical terms, however, technology is not just the outside of a
given 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 environment
of systems but is unable to irritate them and trigger internal processes of
self-determination (though it is capable of destroying systems) (cf.
Esposito, 2001: 242).
No doubt the question concerning technology and its forgetting in
Luhmann’s oeuvre requires an extensive analysis. To what extent does
his observation of technology re-enact the occidental marginalization of
the technical? Indeed, where exactly is the current, contemporary ques-
tion concerning technology located within Luhmann’s theory edifice? In
light of ubiquitous computerization and the network-based emergence of
intelligent environments, which increasingly undermine the distinction
between machines and media and give rise to the possibility of a struc-
tural coupling of computers and cognition, these questions are not only
of great importance to systems theory and its future design but also serve
to foreground the foundational importance of non-trivial machines for
that 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 to
be conducted elsewhere. But to provide a few hints: On the one hand,

Luhmann insists on abandoning the ‘traditional notion of technology

linked to know-how, performance and decision’ (Luhmann, 1997a:
527). He emphasizes that ‘notions of technology that operate by way
of opposing themselves to nature or spirit are no longer of any help’
(1997a: 535). Equally obsolete are attempts to contrast ‘technology and
reason or technology and ‘‘lifeworld’’, and so on’ (1997a: 522). Instead,
Luhmann maintains that ‘changing the concept . . . [should] open up the
possibility of seeing new connections’ (1997a: 529). The statement that
‘the evolution of technology’ is followed by ‘a directly corresponding
structure of rationality’ (1997a: 519) seems to indicate that he was at
least in part aware of the fact that the non-trivial attitude is grounded
in changes in machine history as well as in the changing meanings of the
technical itself. In view of the proliferation of non-trivial machines, this
statement could have been an opportune point of departure for the refor-
mulating of the question concerning technology in ways which challenge
traditional, pre-technological descriptive semantics and maybe even go
beyond the obsolete understanding of technology itself. Ideally, this
question should have been on a level with the latest stage of technological
evolution. 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 of
completely heterogeneous elements’ (1997a: 526), it is seen as a ‘rigid
(as opposed to loose) coupling’ (1997a: 526). Ultimately, technology
refers first and foremost to ‘technical systems’ characterized by ‘causal
closure 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 a
bygone stage of technological evolution. Compare, for example, the
many residues of traditional descriptions of technology in Luhmann
with Gilbert Simondon’s far more radical evolutionary theory of the
technical 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 margins
of 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 mentor
who had abandoned the camp of poets and thinkers and crossed over to
cybernetics: Gotthard Günther. Luhmann probably referred to him – as
well as to Heinz von Foerster, who collaborated with Günther at the

Hörl 113
Biological Computer Laboratory in Urbana11 – when it came to the

scientific alignment of his own post-trivial project. Günther must count
as the great philosophical actor of the non-trivial shift, who unlike
Luhmann did not conceal the conditio technologica of this transform-
ation. He had been concerned with the possible metaphysical significance
of the machine-technical revolution as far back as the early 1950s.
Günther’s work on the formal and ontological consequences of this
transformation reveal the technological shift of meaning that is also evi-
dent in Luhmann’s project, though even in the case of Günther it still
appears, in the words of Klaus Heinrich, to be a history of fascination
with its share of blindness and infatuation. More than others, Günther
was under the influence of and transfixed by the new machine which he,
however, called trans-classical rather than non-trivial. Günther was the
first to conceptualize the impact of the new recursively operating cyber-
netic machines including, first and foremost, the computer on the history
of 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 why
Luhmann was so passionately interested in Günther’s discussion of poly-
valence and polycontexturality.13
Günther repeatedly described what he called the transition from a
classical to a non-classical age and the dawn of a new sense of the
world. The guiding difference classical/trans-classical that structured
his perception of epochs was based on a solid machine-theoretical foun-
dation. First, in 1952, Günther pinpointed the difference between the
Archimedean-classical and the ‘trans-classical or non-Archimedean
machine’:
In the course of technological development man has conceived of

two radically different types of machine. The first is the classical-
archimedean machine whose purpose is to produce work. It has
been joined by the idea of a second machine from which we
expect information rather than work. The ‘first’ machine was
designed in analogy to the human arm (and hand), the second is
expected to be a technological reproduction of the human brain.
For only the brain processes information. (Günther, 1976: 96)
The new type of machine that ‘has never been there before in the
human history of technology’ (1976: 94), and whose origins were just
about to become apparent in the birth of cybernetics, was not only
poised to shake ‘the sense of the world determined by classical ontology’
(1976: 99). With it, Günther also saw the dawn of a ‘new culture’ and a
‘new idea of science’, even a ‘new occidental man who no longer identifies
with the pure forms of classical thought’ (1976: 114). In the wake of the
new machine the human condition of being itself appeared to have been

changed to a degree that matched the transformation from a primitive

level consciousness to that of a high culture.
This metaphysically oriented machine-theoretical observation served
to inspire the Hegelian Günther. 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 characterize
Günther’s work on the transformation of the fundamental metaphysical
stance associated with the second machine. Starting in the 1950s his
comprehensive formal studies on trans-classical calculus were time and
again accompanied by a technologically grounded theory of culture that
differentiated 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 and
its 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 state
of consciousness in which the latter merges with its environment and does
not achieve any separation between soul and thing or subject and object.
Primitive tools, Günther argued, revealed this ambivalent structure as
well 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 separated
from the natural context as well as from the spirit and intention of their
creators – and this, Günther pointed out, is the primary meaning of the
history of technology – can we speak of the birth of the pure object, of an
objective being in the strong machine sense. ‘A machine is nothing but a
tool 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 of
classical two-valued high cultures whose operations were based on
machines rather than on tools and that introduced the regime of trad-
itional ontological oppositions, first and foremost that between dead
object and live subject. Günther emphasized that in the psychic realm
of a dualist culture only that was regarded as subjective and ‘psychic’
which ‘had to be understood in non-machinic and non-mechanical fash-
ion’ (Günther, 1980: 223). The classical machine shaped the classical
regime of meaning to the core. This first machine culture allegedly
found its formal expression in the strictly two-valued difference machine
known 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 implemented
the long-lasting classical observer along with the associated world of
observation.

Hörl 115
Supported ‘by new technological means’, trans-classical machines are

said to push the formative central ‘boundary between Ego and World
ever further back into the background of subjectivity’ and ‘attribute ever
more of what emerges from that background to the objective world of
things’. Günther 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 distinction
between nature and mind, subject and object. Formally this corres-
ponded to a departure from the long-lasting Aristotelian world of the
observer that had arisen around the classical machine. A shift in the
meaning of machines was said to entail a shift in the meaning of logic
away from a two-valued system of propositions that focused on objective
being toward a trans-classical calculus of complex self-reflexive pro-
cesses. According to Günther, the crux of the matter was that the
trans-classical machine promotes a truly technological shift of meaning,
that is to say, a synchronized shift of technical and logical meaning, and
pointed the way out of the classical onto-metaphysical frame of
reference.
Already in Günther’s case the predicted exodus from the ‘enclosure of
classical thought’ (Günther, 1978: viii) on the basis of trans-classical
machines amounted to secession from Greece – a philosophical break-
up with Athens that Günther’s close reader Luhmann is sure to have
noted. Günther, too, saw this as a decisive turning point in the history of
rationality, a ‘historical change of climate’ of such magnitude that it
equaled the original Greek events. In the first instance the technological
shift of meaning revealed to him ‘that the domain of rationality defined
by classical axiomatics was surprisingly narrow. Much, much narrower
than hitherto assumed’ (1978: viii). The main point was that the concep-
tualization of rationality and its opposite was to be determined by the
machinic realm that characterized cultural and indeed psychic condi-
tions. Günther viewed the destruction of classical axiomatics brought
about by the trans-classical machine primarily as a comprehensive ‘cor-
rection’ (Günther, 1980: 225) of patterns of rationality that were taken
for granted and that, incorrectly, were considered either ineluctable or
only to be exceeded at the price of descending into irrationality. Günther
already disposed of a machine-based account of the history of rationality
that Luhmann completed in grand style, albeit oblivious of all
technology.
Günther subsequently tried to advance beyond historical specula-
tions by attempting a calculus-based move into the trans-classical
domains of rationality, especially with the help of his logical theory
of morphogrammatics and polycontexturality. Beyond Greece, Günther
realized, it was no longer a matter of thinking but of computing. In the
context of the history of fascination, the crucial point was that the

trans-classical machine was explicitly awarded the rank of a ‘mind

prosthesis’ which
reveals problems whose mere existence remains inaccessible to any

type of natural thinking unassisted by technology. It is an essential
part of natural consciousness not yet supported by cybernetic mind
prostheses that it cannot address certain psychic questions simply
because it is unaware of the domain of reality in which these ques-
tions emerge. (1980: 231)
Günther’s entire transformation theory was sparked by the appear-

ance of the trans-classical machine. As opposed to classical machines
they were prostheses in a new sense, that is, no longer organ or body
prostheses but nooprostheses modeled on the most complex of all trans-
classical machines, the human brain. But when talking about the history
of fascination exerted by non-classical machines, we always have to keep
in mind that in the case of Günther and Luhmann (and, not to forget,
von Foerster) something is suppressed: a mode of thinking that eludes
both trivial and non-trivial thought processes – in the words of Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari a ‘non-thinking thinking’, as it were, a think-
ing beyond cognition and recognition.
Conclusion: Questioning the Neocybernetic Regime of

Truth
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 itself
especially in Luhmann’s occidental recursions. Ultimately, it is part and
parcel of a process that, in the words of the French mechanologist
Gilbert Simondon, may be described as the majorization of the technical
object. The latter no longer appears as an object of utility circumscribed
by the metaphysical register of a trans-technical or merely instrumental
reason; 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. In
terms of this history of fascination, Luhmann’s history of rationality is –
despite all the fascinating perspectives it enables – a phantasmal deposit
of the great structural transformation of meaning in the course of which
the technical object sheds its status as the ostracized object of meaning,
located at the zero point of meaning and acting as the embodiment of
non-meaning, and instead turns into an exponent of an entirely new
constellation of meaning by moving into the very centre of the cultural
production of meaning. The process reveals how after an extended period
of technophobia the theoretical attitude experiences a technological

Hörl 117
shock, as a result of which its self-description falls under the spell of the
technical 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 the
force exerted by it and take note of the epistemic folds and political
strategies it produces. It is critical that we do not simply replace old
evidences with new ones which are then regarded as the fate of discourse
and rationality. Yet this is precisely what, to a considerable extent,
Luhmann’s politics of knowledge as well as his construction of the
history 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-centred
ontology brought about by Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida and, finally,
Nancy’s co-existential ontology, as well as by the process ontology of
Whitehead 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 a
projection of a certain politics of knowledge. The epoche´ called for today
involves the bracketing of cybernetic presumptions and their uncritically
accepted basic terms – fateful terms that have inaugurated an entire
cybernetic (more precisely, neocybernetic) regime of truth. Be it as
theory or technology, the spreading ‘cybernetic hypothesis’ has a firm
grip on our conceptual politics and self-descriptions (see Tiqqun, 2001). It
may be necessary to bracket (though not eliminate, avoid or delete),
among others, terms like complexity, emergence, autopoiesis, coupling
and recursions, all of which characterize the form of non-trivial ration-
ality. Instead we need to find non-technological terms to describe our
technological condition.
Notes
1. I recently edited a media-theoretical collection featuring a broad array of new
conceptual attempts to illuminate our techno-medial situation, especially with
a view towards a more general ecological perspective (see Hörl, 2011). Mark
Hansen in particular has provided several descriptions of the new media-
technological environment, be it by explicitly appropriating established
cybernetic semantics (cf. Hansen, 2009) or, as in his most recent contribution,
by decisively distancing himself from it (cf. Hansen, 2011). In this context see
also Luciana Parisi’s attempt to reformulate the eco-technological situation
beyond the cybernetic imaginary (Parisi, 2009).
2. I am indebted to a reviewer who pointed me to an important passage in which
Luhmann in passing mentions the technological basis for his use of the term

‘machine’ (‘data-processing machines’). However, in a significant gesture

Luhmann immediately adds that this appropriation of the term constitutes
a ‘relatively harmless linguistic usage’ as long as it remains clear ‘that this is
not a reference to trivial machines, which in completely unchanging ways
keep transforming input into output, but to non-trivial machines executing
recursive operations’ (Luhmann, 1990: 402).
3. Elsewhere Luhmann provided an even more succinct definition of the trivial
condition of all ontology: ‘In our usage of the term, ontology refers to a
pattern of observation, that is, a mode of observation based on the distinction
between being and non-being. This implies first and foremost that the dis-
tinction between being and non-being is and always remains dependent on an
antecedent operative separation between observation (or observer) and
observed’ (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 à la Quine. On the
contrary, he considered it all but indispensable and restricted his opposition
to the absolute, if not absolutist, metaphysical ontology based on the
distinction between being and non-being. This is no doubt correct. Even
though Luhmann for the main part only spoke of ontology, his criticism
was primarily directed at onto-metaphysics. Yet the question arises whether
this distinction between absolute and relative ontology is sufficient when
it comes to marking the entire ontological problem, and whether there are
not other forms of ontological thought that Luhmann always already misses
out on.
5. According to Luhmann, the temporality of science is in accord with
modern structures of temporalization (on the replacement of the presentist
Old European semantics of time by modern temporal consciousness see
Luhmann, 1980: 235–300). Beyond mere chronology, Luhmann conceives
of time primarily as a system time produced by the temporalizing of
complexity, more precisely, as a dimension of determining meaning and
managing complexity. Increasingly complex societies, Luhmann argues,
have to ‘further temporalize their complexity and expand their time
horizons, they even have to change their concepts of time . . . because
it becomes increasingly inevitable to order complexity in sequence’
(Luhmann, 1980: 256). For this reason there exists a strong ‘correlation
between social evolution and the structures of temporal consciousness’
(1990: 248). Hence Luhmann’s systems theory can be viewed as an attempt
at a fundamental sociology that succeeds an allegedly antiquated funda-
mental ontology.
6. See also: ‘The function of science rests on a possible reorganization of the
possible, on a new combinatorics – and not on a reproduction of the given, on
a mere doubling of objects in cognition’ (Luhmann, 1990: 328).
7. Only in the fragment on the origin of geometry, in which he contemplates the
function of reading and writing for the archigenesis of ideality (where
hypomnesis precedes all anamnesis), does Husserl glimpse the basic role of
cultural technics for the birth of ideality, which in Vienna he had still
described as an essentially pre-technical affair (for an extended reading of
this decisive passage see Stiegler, 2001).

Hörl 119
8. Another important document for Luhmann’s liquidation of tradition is the

final 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 important
anti-philosophical text.
9. Geophilosophically speaking, however, we should note that redescription
represents a watchword of American pragmatism and of Richard Rorty in
particular, who (following John Dewey) used it to move beyond observer
theory 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, goes
back 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 – in
particular, the fact that it undermines the positioning of technology on the
outside of the system/environment difference – see Esposito (2001) and
Baecker (2001).
11. Further see Müller and Müller (2007). Luhmann frequently refers to
Günther, especially in connection with the attempts to leave behind the
trivial ontological program (e.g. Luhmann, 1997: 895). In the context of
Luhmann’s own perception of the non-trivial shift as focusing on the
appearance of the conceptual figure of the observer, Günther is mentioned
immediately after von Foerster and even before Maturana (see Luhmann,
2002b: 64).
12. For more on Günther’s theoretical concept and its historical and noopoli-
tical context, see Hörl (2008: 182ff.).
13. Elena Esposito, one of Luhmann’s most important students, has researched
the great significance Günther had for Luhmann. During a conversation she
offered the pointed formulation that Luhmann’s social theory could be seen
as a consistent attempt to continue Gotthard Günther’s project of develop-
ing a polycontextural and polyvalent way of thinking.
14. Luhmann himself reflected on the connection between self-construction and
imaginary construction (see Luhmann, 1997a: 866–8).
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Erich Hörl is Professor of Media Philosophy and Media Technology at

Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. He is head of the Bochum
Colloquium for Media Studies (bkm). He studied philosophy, cultural
studies and media studies at Vienna, Paris and Berlin and received his
PhD from Humboldt University, Berlin. His research interests cover the
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Theory, Culture & Society
29(3) 159
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Young. The author regrets that, through an oversight, the translator
was not acknowledged on the original article.
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Non-trivial Machine and sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

the Neocybernetic tcs.sagepub.com

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Non-triviality is fascinating, and this fascination has its own –

Some of the most important theoretical and critical conversations

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thinkers, such as Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari,

In the following I would like to examine and question the history of

The Fascination with the Non-trivial Machine: Luhmann and

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description of the occidental as the gradual assertion of non-trivial

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Geograph Institute Der on March 31, 2015

The distinction between trivial and non-trivial machines is one of

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primacy of this idealized classical observer epistemology. Its point of

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demolished by second-order cybernetics. But Luhmann, the Latinist

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alleged primary evidence produced by trivial world understanding as well

Machinic Deconstructions of Ontology

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are such machines). The grand severance of ontological word references

Cyberneticizing Husserl: On the Birth of the Non-trivial

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The natural sciences, from physics to biology, have become self-

Modern society is a polycentric, polycontextural system. It applies

Though he makes no mention of the new technological conditions in

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The changed situation that separates Luhmann’s clariﬁcations of the

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In a peculiar way, Luhmann’s reconstruction of the history of ration-

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distinction’, yet under polycontextural conditions it was no longer pos-

Exits from the Cave: Observing Technology

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the age of non-trivial machines; on his shoulders rests the renunciation – so

Historically, we can see a distinct correlation between the trad-

Whatever non-trivial theoretical intuition it may have possessed from

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ongoing dissolution of the continuum of rationality. Ontology, in short,

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to this form, even against the resistance of orthodox, ontologically

In ontologically altogether implausible fashion the primary distinc-

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hetero-reference of the observer. According to this new version

Ever since Plato the ‘ontologically altogether implausible’ distinction

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Luhmann insists on abandoning the ‘traditional notion of technology

Transclassical Machines and New Domains of Rationality

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Biological Computer Laboratory in Urbana11 – when it came to the

In the course of technological development man has conceived of

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changed to a degree that matched the transformation from a primitive

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Supported ‘by new technological means’, trans-classical machines are

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trans-classical machine was explicitly awarded the rank of a ‘mind

reveals problems whose mere existence remains inaccessible to any

Günther’s entire transformation theory was sparked by the appear-