“Humans,” Niklas Luhmann writes, “cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.” This book is about the fact that Luhmann had to make this statement, and about why he had to make it, even nearly half a century after the formulation of an exact, that is, a technological-mathematical, concept of communication.

Our question concerns the incubation period of an epochal proposition: There is communication. The history of how it appeared indicates how difficult it was for an entire age to understand its foundations and thus to interpret itself epistemologically and ontologically. The task, to put it in the terms of Heidegger's archeology, is to answer the question: “Where and how did” this proposition “sleep for so long and presciently dream what is unthought in it?”

To accomplish this task, we must elaborate the historical epistemology of the archaic illusion of communication that began to spread in the late nineteenth century and immediately preceded the emergence of the principle, There is communication. At its core, what today may seem mere reveries about a primitive world of transmitting sacred forces was a wild genealogy of the as yet uncomprehended facts of communication and of the revolution in the way of thinking that coincided with it. Despite all the obstacles to knowledge this illusion threw up, it did at the same time prepare the insight into the new basic position of an age. By projecting a primitive formation of world and experience, which could only be comprehended as deviating from the traditional categories and schemata of representational thought, the illusion marked the rejection of the cognitive primacy of intuition and representation, a rejection that was just then taking place in mathematics and physical field theory and thanks to technological media. Where a purely symbolic thinking clearly began to take shape in the sciences, the illusion demonstrated the arduous formation and childhood of all use of symbols. In explaining the becoming of elaborate symbolisms, insight into “the embryonic stage of the high-grade character” also promised to explain the enigmatic epistemic power with which symbolisms were upending the order of things. Speculations about the prealphabetic thinking of the “primitive,” about their peculiar logical distinctions and mental constitution provided an age transitioning to postalphabetic conditions with images of thought for its still-problematic foundations.