They do not overcome modernity, they pluralize its machinery: toward a decolonial relational cybernetics beyond tetralemmatic rationality

Abstract

Purpose The paper examines whether three influential frameworks in contemporary systems theory and organisational analysis – Luhmann's operational closure, Maturana's autopoiesis and the tetralemmatic programme developed by Roth and collaborators – give rise to configurations that conserve or degrade relational viability. It asks what conditions must obtain for a distinction to be admissible in the first place. Design/methodology/approach The argument is conceptual. It proceeds by an internal analysis of Luhmann's account of meaning (Sinn), showing from his own formulations that meaning presupposes the system/environment distinction it is said to constitute. From this circularity the paper derives separability – the assumption that the surrounding domain does not participate in the constitution of the system – as the unthematised condition on which operational closure, irritation and structural coupling jointly depend. Triferential relational logic (Lavanderos, 2026) is then introduced as a formal criterion of admissibility and ecopoiesis and the ecotomo as the relational units it makes available. Findings Every third term admitted by the Luhmannian architecture – programmes, meaning, hetero-reference and irritation – is generated downstream of the system's own operation, and none is prior to or constitutive of the terms it relates. The tetralemma expands the logical positions available within an interactional framework without supplying a criterion of relational admissibility, and therefore produces non-required variety rather than information. Distinguishing environment (separable) from entorno (a constitutive dimension of the relational unit) reverses the order of constitution: from system/meaning/environment to relational admissibility/distinction/system. Research limitations/implications The argument is theoretical and does not offer empirical validation of the divergence model. The paper proposes a distinction among three orders of cybernetics, the third concerning the conditions under which observation itself conserves relational viability. Originality/value The paper identifies separability as an assumption on which the system/environment architecture depends but which it cannot thematise from within and offers a formal criterion of admissibility prior to distinction. First- and second-order cybernetics remain exact within the domain in which terms are separable; the paper argues that this domain has a condition of possibility not describable from within it.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Kybernetes, 2026 · DOI ↗