Recursivity and Contingency

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“Despite the historical span of roughly 250 years, the diverse range of authors, disciplines and underlying problems, Recursivity and Contingency is held together firmly by its two eponymous concepts……The conceptual versatility of recursivity and contingency may prove useful in further displacing the dominance of the technology as anthropological universal and means of exploitation.”

— The Philosophical Quarterly 

“…la critique de la raison récursive qu’il propose a cette féconde étrangeté des livres qui, nous confrontant à notre finitude, donnent à voir une liberté insoupçonnée et, par une prise de recul salutaire, repoussent l’horizon du pensable. En particulier, la grande cohérence que ce troisième livre révèle dans le travail de Hui, nous offre un regard sur l’histoire de la philosophie continentale renouant avec l’idée qu’une tâche peut et doit être accomplie.”

— Revue Philosophique, Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté

“Recursivity and Contingency submits cybernetics to a massive genealogical reading grounded in German idealism and Naturphilosphie, demonstrating its deepest roots in the “organic condition of philosophizing” since Immanuel Kant, which has developed the concept of the organic in a way that subordinates the phenomenon of technicity to a more general definition of organism.”

Hui’s trilogy has undeniably made him one of the most interesting young philosophers writing today.

— Félix Veilleux, U Toronto Graduate Journal of Cinema and Media Studies

Сколько технических систем, столько и картин мира — а значит, на смену старой универсалистской метафизике должна прийти плюралистическая космотехника. [There are as many technical systems as there are pictures of the world – which means that pluralist cosmotechnics should replace the old universalist metaphysics.]

— Maxim Miroshnichenko, Supernova

“In Recursivity and Contingency, Yuk Hui prompts a rigorous historical and philosophical analysis of today’s algorithmic culture.”

—Ekin Erkan, New Formations

“I hardly know how best to recommend this third major achievement in as many years by one of the most insightful younger philosophers. It reanimates an abandoned arc of reflection that includes cybernetics, organicism, and organology from both European and Chinese traditions to address aspirations for a pluralism of homes within the becoming of an artificial Earth.”

— Carl Mitcham, Colorado School of Mines

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, Kingston University

Recursivity and Contingency is simply an outstanding philosophical treatise on cybernetics that re-opens the all-too human image of technology today. Alongside a zealous re-situating of system theory within philosophies of nature, Hui boldly defies current technocratic aspirations towards totalizing and deterministic systems with a metaphysical commitment to re-envision the relation with the inhuman. Cosmotechnical perspectives, alter-cosmologies, and techno-diversity are here part of human-machine genesis that promises to finally re-situate technology in various cosmic realities.

— Luciana Parisi, Reader in Cultural Theory, Goldsmiths, University of London

Yuk Hui’s rich, new writing shows that in order to understand our modern technological world, we need to understand modern thinking about organisms and organology – and not only to understand but, recursively, to think differently. Hui’s cosmotechnical approach – from cybernetics to history of philosophy – is complex, and exactly because of that, deeply rewarding.

— Jussi Parikka, Professor in Technological Culture and Aesthetics, University of Southampton

Yuk Hui’s Recursivity and Contingency is not simply a major contribution to the Philosophy of Technology – it is an immense resource in that respect – but it is also a lively work of pluralistic experiment in thought. Here Hui’s invitation to think in terms of cosmotechnics comes into its full bloom, engineering an unsurpassably agile guide to questions of technology and culture, nature and mechanism, logic and existence as they have arisen before and as they manifest with full force in the present.

— Matthew Fuller, Professor of Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London

端 的 に は 、サ イ バ ネ テ ィ ッ ク ス の 中 に コ ン ピ ュ ー タ ー の デ ジ タ ル 処 理 を 包 含 し て し ま う 、壮 大な技術哲学と言ってよいだろう…ア ジ ア の 一 角 か ら 包 括 的 で 新 鮮 な 知 が 芽 生 え つ つ あ る こ と を 、 心 か ら 喜 び た い 。 (In a nutshell, it is a grand philosophy of technology that includes computer digital processing within cybernetics… I am truly delighted that comprehensive and fresh knowledge is sprouting from this corner of Asia.)

— 西垣通 Toru Nishigaki, 《毎日新聞》Mainichi shinbun

Krytyczność i dystans nie oznaczają jednak, że technika zostaje potraktowana wyłącznie jako opresyjna i nieoferująca żadnych możliwości. Wręcz odwrotnie, bowiem krytycyzm Huia wobec techniki skupiony jest na rozpoznaniu ograniczeń związanych z jej architekturą, w celu ich rozszczelnienia i wytworzenia otwarć na alternatywy. (Criticality and distance do not mean, however, that technology is treated only as oppressive and devoid of any possibilities. Quite the opposite, because Hui’s criticism of technology is focused on recognizing the limitations associated with its architecture, in order to unseat them and create openings to alternatives.)

— Konrad Kopel, Art Papier

ユク・ホイの『再帰性と偶然性』はものすごい本だ… できれば多くの人に『再帰性と偶然性』を手に取ってほしいと思う。

— 桐原永叔, IT批評

This book employs recursivity and contingency as two principle concepts to investigate into the relation between nature and technology, machine and organism, system and freedom. It reconstructs a trajectory of thought from an Organic condition of thinking elaborated by Kant, passing by the philosophy of nature (Schelling and Hegel), to the 20^th century Organicism (Bertalanffy, Needham, Whitehead, Wiener among others) and Organology (Bergson, Canguilhem, Simodnon, Stiegler), and questions the new condition of philosophizing in the time of algorithmic contingency, ecological and algorithmic catastrophes, which Heidegger calls the end of philosophy.

The book centres on the following speculative question: if in the philosophical tradition, the concept of contingency is always related to the laws of nature, then in what way can we understand contingency in related to technical systems? The book situates the concept of recursivity as a break from the Cartesian mechanism and the drive of system construction; it elaborates on the necessity of contingency in such epistemological rupture where nature ends and system emerges. In this development, we see how German idealism is precursor to cybernetics, and the Anthropocene and Noosphere (Teilhard de Chardin) point toward the realization of a gigantic cybernetic system, which lead us back to the question of freedom. It questions the concept of absolute contingency (Meillassoux) and proposes a cosmotechnical pluralism. Engaging with modern and contemporary European philosophy as well as Chinese thought through the mediation of Needham, this book refers to cybernetics, mathematics, artificial intelligence and inhumanism.