Recursivity and

Contingency

Yuk Hui

London • New York

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 Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.
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 For Julien

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Hui_9781786600523.indb 6 1/17/2019 10:35:37 AM
 One can regard the history of the human species in the large as the
completion of a hidden plan of nature to bring about an inwardly
and, to this end, also an externally perfect state constitution, as the
only condition in which it can fully develop all its predispositions
in humanity.
Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal
History with a Cosmopolitan Aim

It might very well still take a considerable time to recognize

that the “organism” and the “organic” present themselves as
the mechanistic-technological “triumph” of modernity over the
domain of growth, “nature.”
Martin Heidegger, GA94 Ponderings XII–X

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 Contents

Acknowledgments xi
Preface, by Howard Caygill xiii

Introduction: A Psychedelic Becoming 1

§1. Adventure of Reason 2
§2. Invisible Nature, Visible Mind 7
§3. Contingency and Finality 12
§4. Beyond Mechanism and Vitalism 16
§5. The Great Completion 19
§6. The Conflict of Organs 25
§7. After Ecology, before Solar Catastrophe 31
§8. The Future Cosmologists 35
1 Nature and Recursivity 41
§9. Kant and the Model of System 42
§10. The Organic Condition of Philosophy 47
§11. Recursivity in Fichte’s Ich 51
§12. Circularity in Soul and Nature 56
§13. Recursivity in Naturphilosophie 63
§14. Organicist and Ecological Paradigm 68
§15. General Organism, Gaia, or Artificial Earth 78
2 Logic and Contingency 85
§16. Recursivity in the Phenomenology of Spirit 86
§17. Organicist and Reflective Logic 90
§18. “Feebleness of the Notion in Nature” 94

ix

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 x Contents

§19. Death of Nature as Affirmation of Logic 97

§20. General Recursivity and Turing Machine 106
§21. Wiener’s Leibnizianism 115
§22. Cybernetics of Cybernetics 124
§23. Information of Dialectics 130
§24. Incomputability and Algorithmic Contingency 140
3 Organized Inorganic 145
§25. From Organicism to Organology 146
§26. Form and Fire, or Life 150
§27. Descartes and the Mechanical Organs 153
§28. Kant as Philosopher of Technology 157
§29. Organology in Creative Evolution 163
§30. Norms and Accidents 175
§31. The Uncanny Fire 181
4 Organizing Inorganic 185
§32. Universal Cybernetics, General Allagmatic 187
§33. Recursivity in Psychic and Collective Individuation 193
§34. An Organology of Contingency 200
§35. Nature or Art 207
§36. Tertiary Protention and Preemption 210
§37. Inorganic Organicity or Ecology 215
§38. The Principle of Ground 220
5 The Inhuman That Remains 233
§39. Postmodernity and Recursivity 235
§40. Technosphere or Christogenesis 245
§41. Inhuman contra System 250
§42. Contingency after System, or Technodiversity 256
§43. Sensibility and Passibility 264
§44. Organicism, Organology, and Cosmotechnics 270

Bibliography 279
Index 297
About the Author 319

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 Acknowledgments

Ever since I was a computer engineering student at the University of

Hong Kong, the concept of recursion has appeared to me as something
almost magical. With recursion in mind, a complex phenomenon or
process can be reduced to several lines of code with a strange form
of looping. Upon completing On the Existence of Digital Objects, I
was convinced that the way to develop a philosophical inquiry into
algorithms was to approach it in terms of the notion of recursivity.
The current writing project began in 2013 and has undergone several
transformations during the course of its development. My research on
the concept of recursivity led me to undertake a reconstruction of its
position in philosophy and the role of contingency in the recursive
genesis. Through the concepts of recursivity and contingency, I have
attempted to outline a historical trajectory of the concept of the organic
since Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, covering the philosophy
of nature, organicism, cybernetics, systems theory, organology, and
ecology. At times this book may appear to be a historical-critical expo-
sition of the subject, but I would not want to pretend that it is a work of
history. It is first and foremost a study in the philosophy of technology.
It aims to provide a critical analysis of Martin Heidegger’s assertion
that cybernetics marks the historical culmination of metaphysics and
the end of philosophy, and suggests ways of moving beyond the current
technological paradigm toward what I call a multiple cosmotechnics.
The current book is the third in a series reflecting on the philosophy
of technology, a series that has followed a sequence from objects to cos-
mos to systems. It is also an attempt to address two major questions that

xi

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 xii Acknowledgments

I left unanswered in the previous two books: first, the Kantian category
of relation that I promised to deal with in On the Existence of Digital
Objects, and second, the notion of organicism that Joseph Needham
developed in relation to his studies of Chinese thought of science and
technology, which I touched upon but did not elaborate further in The
Question Concerning Technology in China. In this respect, this book
could have been titled Specters of Needham.
I terminated this book during a difficult moment of life, when
academic precarity and health issues had to become the quasi causes
of its completion. I want to thank Howard Caygill, to whom I once
promised a book on Kant, for the preface and encouragement; as well
as friends and colleagues who have read and commented upon various
drafts of chapters of this book, in particular Pieter Lemmens, Michäel
Crevoisier, Brian Kuan Wood, Paul Willemarck, Charles Wolfe, Kirill
Chepurin, Martijn Buijs, Louis Morelle, Harry Halpin, Armin Schnei-
der, and Damian Veal, who decided to leave this world soon after he
helped edit the first version of the current work and to whom this book
is forever in debt. I also want to thank the series editors and the editorial
team of Rowman & Littlefield International for having taken care of this
book. Lastly I want to express my gratitude to the support of my family
and friends over the past years, in particular Matthew Fuller, Bernard
Stiegler, and Johnson Chang.

Yuk Hui
Berlin, Summer 2018

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 Preface

Odysseus’s Oar

Yet again

Thou shalt a voyage make, and come to men

That know no sea, nor ships, not oars that are
Wings to a ship
[there] assume ashore
Up to thy royal shoulder a ship oar,
With which, when thou shalt meet one on the way
That will in country admiration say,
‘What does thou with that wan upon thy neck?’
There fix that wan thy oar, and that shore deck
With sacred rites to Neptune

(Odyssey, Book 11, Golding translation)

Tiresias’s admonitory prophesy to Odysseus gives the lie to the

engrained view that the Odyssey is a figure of perfect recursion, a
return enriched in spite of the obstacles and contingencies posed by
the enraged god of sea and earthquakes. It tells us that Odysseus after
returning to Ithaca must depart again, that the circle is but a loop in an
incomplete and perhaps uncompletable voyage. And the conditions of
the redeparture are framed in terms of the oar, probably the most ver-
satile technological object of the ancient world. The oar translated the
energy of the oarsmen into motion, giving “wings to a ship” through

xiii

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 xiv Preface

collective and sometimes forced labor, but it also served to steer and
navigate the ship until the invention of the rudder in the thirteenth cen-
tury. It was the technical object of the helmsman, or cubernetis, who
combined physical skill with information and intelligence in cutting a
path through the sea. Odysseus’s oar was the technical condition for
the capture of energy and for the exercise of the complex skill that is
navigation or the governing of the vessel.
Tiresias’s words also trouble the privilege given to recognition in the
model of recursion. Odysseus will know that he has arrived at his desti-
nation when his oar is not recognized for what it is, when it is mistaken
for a wan or winnowing fan, a technical object used to separate wheat
and chaff in agriculture. In an agrarian culture ignorant of the sea and
its technical objects the oar is mistaken for a winnowing fan. Something
is not quite right, and the countryman sees a mistake—no one carries a
winnowing fan on their shoulder like that—but mistakes the mistake;
it is not so much Odysseus carrying the fan in a strange way as the oar
being mistaken for a fan. And it is here, where the oar sacred to Posei-
don is taken for the winnowing fan sacred to Dionysus—a maritime for
an agrarian technology—that Odysseus is required through sacrifice
to remove the technical object from its contexts and to found a cult to
Poseidon that will surely be confused with one to Dionysus . . . thus
commencing a new and unpredictable history for himself and for the
culture that mistook his oar. The return to where he could not ever pos-
sibly have been gives an air of comedy to Odysseus’s task; he will have
to keep moving, carrying his oar, until he becomes so unfamiliar that he
and his technology can be understood and explained otherwise.
Yuk Hui’s book works within the parameters of this other recursion;
it explores uncompletable returns and resumptions through the role of
contingency in these movements. Through a looping recursive series
of readings of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, physiology and
cybernetics, Gaia theory and Anthropocene discourse, he makes unfa-
miliar what we thought we knew and describes settings and sequences
that disrupt the canons and protocols of reading with which we are
familiar. He hints that we don’t know what we thought we knew—sys-
tematicity and protocols of recursive argumentation—and that we need
to know other things—the philosophy of organism and organology—in
other ways. In all this contingency is paramount, but it is not Louis
Pasteur’s chance favoring a prepared mind, but one for which there
can be no preparation and that cannot be easily anticipated or captured.

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 Preface xv

As with Odysseus taking to the land with his oar, there is a certain
renunciation, even embrace of absurdity at play here, a refusal to feel
at home that extends even to technics itself. The cosmotechnics that is
the object of this and other of Yuk Hui’s works is exemplified by the
surprise of the countryman who sees the oar differently. The technical
object or Odysseus’s oar becomes questionable in intense, uncanny, and
disturbing ways.
There is finally an emancipatory impulse informing these open-ended
movements driven by contingent events and errors that keeps open a
future for Yuk Hui’s thought. Yet it is beleaguered, for when faced
with James Hutton’s deep time with its annals of past worlds, the con-
tingency of journeying with an oar through the countryside sinks into an
insignificance from which not even the moral law can save us. Yuk Hui
knows that the sediment left by the human occupation of the planet will
barely register on the geological record and is rightly skeptical of the
hubris on anthropocene discourse that imagines that human technology
can ever match the levels of destructive havoc that the planet has regu-
larly visited upon itself. Yet this is the occasion not for an apocalyptic
despair but for a measured and hopeful approach to technology, a new
way of putting the question concerning technology. Recursivity and
Contingency takes the remarkable adventure of thought begun in On the
Existence of Digital Objects and The Question Concerning Technology
in China in unexpected and astonishing directions, leaving its readers
with much to think about and to take further themselves.
Howard Caygill

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