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 condition. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of Niklas Luhmann, especially 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 unconscious 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. (shrink)

Résumé Notre rapport aux technologies médiatiques ne nous met pas tant en présence de nouveaux objets que de nouveaux environnements. C’est donc à partir d’une écologie générale qu’il nous faut tenter de comprendre les médias, nouveaux et anciens. Les réflexions de Félix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon, mais aussi l’agentivité environnementale de Mark Hansen ou la « struction » de Jean-Luc Nancy sont convoqués ici comme autant de pistes fécondes en direction d’une techno-écologie du sens.

The paper presents Jean-Luc Nancy's outline of a history of sense and especially his thinking of exteriorization as an expression and working-through of the technological condition which characterizes the cybernetic culture of machines and objects. Furthermore, the paper suggests to ground the enthusiasm for the open and external (which is dominant in philosophical politics since 1950 and culminates in Nancy's work) in the supplementary, prothetic and transcategorical logic of the technical world.

The paper presents Jean-Luc Nancy's outline of a history of sense and especially his thinking of exteriorization as an expression and working-through of the technological condition which characterizes the cybernetic culture of machines and objects. Furthermore, the paper suggests to ground the enthusiasm for the open and external (which is dominant in philosophical politics since 1950 and culminates in Nancy's work) in the supplementary, prothetic and transcategorical logic of the technical world.