Recursivity and Contingency

Recursivity, in Yuk Hui's technical usage, describes any system that produces through its operation the inputs it requires for further operation. Drawing on cybernetics (Wiener, Maturana) and philosophy (Simondon, Hegel), Hui identifies recursivity as the fundamental architecture of self-maintaining systems—from cells to economies to AI. A recursive system is not merely one that repeats; it is one that creates the world in which its repetition makes sense. AI creative systems are paradigmatically recursive: a large language model trains on human-generated text, generates new text that enters the cultural environment, and future models train on that altered environment. Each cycle reinforces existing patterns, making them more probable, more natural, more invisible. Over time, the recursive system and its environment converge—the system does not merely process its environment but reshapes it, until the environment has been so thoroughly colonized that genuine novelty (contingency) becomes progressively less likely.