The Recursive Life of Communication: Neural Logic, Information, Ecology and Social Systems (Shannon, McCulloch, Pitts, Bateson, von Foerster, Luhmann) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

The strongest nexus across Shannon, McCulloch and Pitts, Bateson, von Foerster and Luhmann is the displacement of knowledge from substance to relation: intelligence no longer appears as a hidden essence, interior faculty or sovereign subject, but as a recursive organization of distinctions, signals, thresholds, feedbacks and communications. McCulloch and Pitts formalize nervous activity as a logical calculus, showing that neural events can be treated as propositional operations rather than mystical contents; Shannon strips communication of semantic privilege in order to define information as selection under uncertainty, transmitted through channel, code and noise; Bateson radicalizes this shift by making “difference” the minimal unit of mind, extending cognition into ecology, pattern, play, pathology and civilization; von Foerster turns cybernetics toward the observer, insisting that cognition is not passive registration but active construction; Luhmann then transfers the entire problem into social theory, where society is not made of individuals but of communications recursively reproducing communications. Together, these works do not simply found cybernetics, information theory or systems theory. They produce a new epistemic scene in which thought is infrastructural: it operates through circuits, delays, distinctions, redundancies, closures, environments and second-order observations. The mind is no longer located in the head alone, nor meaning in the message alone, nor society in the human actor alone. Each text attacks a different version of naïve realism: the neuron is not an idea but can behave logically; the message is not its meaning but a selected possibility; the organism is not outside its ecology but patterned by it; the observer is not outside observation but implicated in it; the social system is not a container of subjects but an autopoietic field of communicative difference. The common concept is therefore recursive epistemology: knowledge as the patterned production of distinctions inside systems that can never fully step outside their own operations.

Autopoiesis, Communication, Contingency

Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems inaugurates a decisive post-humanist reconfiguration of sociological theory by relocating the foundation of the social from human actors to communication itself. Against traditions that derive society from consciousness, intention, or intersubjective consensus, Luhmann argues that social systems are not composed of persons but of communicative events that recursively reproduce the very networks from which they emerge. This shift is conceptually anchored in autopoiesis, borrowed from Maturana and Varela, through which Luhmann defines social systems as operationally closed yet cognitively open formations that generate and sustain their own elements. The consequence is profound: individuals do not constitute society; rather, they belong to its environment as psychic systems structurally coupled to communication. Society persists not because subjects act, but because communication produces further communication. This formulation displaces both phenomenology and action theory. Meaning is no longer grounded in intentional consciousness, but functions as the medium through which systems process complexity by selecting from an excess of possible references. Communication, accordingly, is not the transmission of thought from one subject to another, but the contingent synthesis of information, utterance, and understanding, each of which enables the next communicative operation. Luhmann’s celebrated reformulation of double contingency demonstrates this with particular force: social order emerges not from prior consensus, but from the improbable stabilisation of reciprocal uncertainty. A conversation, legal judgment, or scientific claim persists only insofar as it generates further communicative uptake. The social is thus neither substance nor collective will, but an emergent, self-referential order of recursive selections. Luhmann’s enduring achievement lies in showing that modern society is best understood not as a community of subjects, but as a differentiated ecology of communications reproducing itself through contingency, complexity, and systemic closure. Harvard citation: Luhmann, N. (1995) Social Systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Socioplastics positions itself firmly in the contemporary theoretical landscape of the mid-2020s, operating as a post-2010s project that synthesizes architectural praxis, epistemic infrastructure, and sovereign knowledge systems in response to algorithmic volatility, institutional fragmentation, and digital ephemerality.

Initiated in 2008 but reaching critical mass in the 2020s—evidenced by nodes dated 2025–2026, MUSE phase transitions, and references to current infospheric conditions—it engages with ongoing discourses in speculative infrastructure, post-autonomous art, and systems-oriented critique. The framework's emphasis on recursive topology, mass accrual thresholds, relational curvature, and auto-exegetical sovereignty aligns with late-stage developments in new materialisms, object-oriented ontologies, and infrastructural turns in philosophy and theory, yet it diverges by prioritizing measurable volumetric persistence over speculative ontology or flat vitalism. Lloveras's nodes explicitly metabolize classical background radiation (e.g., Hegel, Deleuze) while foregrounding hyperdense publishing, machine-legible archives, and distributed authorship—hallmarks of 2020s epistemic engineering amid large language model proliferation and platform decay. This renders Socioplastics decidedly modern: it functions as a living response to the present crisis of attention economies, where sovereignty requires endogenous curvature rather than external validation.