Language: The Non-Trivial Machine

Conventionally understood as the interface between us (humans) and the ‘out there’, this article proposes that there is an urgent need to write philosophy of language from a perspective which can account for the new ontologies of language being promoted by its increasingly non-human, digital, disembodied applications and ‘realities’. The work starts with a question: what is language when it is no longer made by humans, but by a machine? Employing Heinz von Foerster’s distinction between ‘Non-Trivial’ and ‘Trivial’, Machines, which describes machinic processes involving agency and those which do not, this practice and theory based research explores that question.