Abstract
Nick Land infamously recasts Immanuel Kant as a philosopher of cybernetics-as-control, arguing that the Kantian transcendental subject imposes rigid a priori forms that domesticate all alterity—much as capitalist exchange imposes commensuration on difference. In this polemic, I contest Land’s reading and propose that Kant, far from inaugurating a closed regime of control, opens the door to a metadisciplinary, porous cybernetics of the transcendental. By revisiting Kant’s critical philosophy through contemporary category theory and sheaf theory, I argue that the transcendental is not a static apparatus of domination but an evolving, self-correcting system of constraints and feedbacks. This transcendental cybernetics synthesizes diversity into provisional unities without totalizing them, thereby offering a recursive, non-totalizing approach to the subject–object relation.
To support this view, I draw on my trilogy of works—Prolegomenon to a Treatise (2022), Critique of Transcendental Structure: Toward a Synthetic Unity of Aesthetics and Collective Intelligence (2025), and Dub Langlands: Art Theory Texts on Cybernetics (2025)—which reframe Kantian critique via category-theoretic structures. My Critique of Transcendental Structure, my magnum opus, demonstrates how a “transversal” or “synthetic” reason armed with sheaf theory can achieve unity-in-diversity without enforcing uniformity. I further incorporate Noah Chrein’s recent distinction between two approaches to “categorical cybernetics”—(1) modeling systems by categories vs. (2) modeling systems in arbitrary formalisms with a categorical metatheory—to clarify how the latter approach fosters an open-ended, reflexive framework. The result is a vision of critique as an open system of knowledge: one that continually revises its own conditions (akin to Fichte’s self-positing I and Novalis’s transdisciplinary “Romantic Encyclopædia”) rather than a final legislator of truth. This approach stands in contrast to both Hegelian absolute closure and speculative realism’s flat ontologies, preserving a space for novelty (“voids” of indeterminacy) as the very medium through which rational progress occurs.
2. Beyond Control: Toward a Transcendental Cybernetics
If Kant initiated a critical project that is self-limited and capable of transformation, what might it mean to develop a cybernetics of the transcendental?
Here, cybernetics is understood in a broad sense as the study of systems, feedback, and control—especially self-regulating or recursive systems. A transcendental cybernetics would imply that the very structures conditioning experience are part of a dynamic feedback process: the subject’s categories and forms adapt in response to new inputs and can interface with other “systems” (artistic, scientific, etc.) rather than simply dictating terms. This concept resonates with recent work in philosophy and mathematical theory.
Philosopher and mathematician Fernando Zalamea advocates what he calls a “transmodern” approach that “weaves together strands of the modern and postmodern, the rational and the romantic into a synthetic universality, endlessly revisable and updatable.” (Uberty, Transmodernism) Zalamea’s vision explicitly seeks to move beyond both the self-certain unity of classical modern reason and the emphasis on rupture and difference in postmodern thought, by synthesizing a new continuum that is rigorous yet mutable.
Underlying this is Zalamea’s deep engagement with category theory and topology. He highlights the work of Alexander Grothendieck, whose method in mathematics was to oscillate between local details and global structures in order to “draw together the unity and multiplicity” of a situation. The mathematical concept of a sheaf emerges here as pivotal: “This Grothendieckian structure, which Zalamea identifies as the ‘sheaf,’ is a central concept gluing the always partial and yet continuous fabric of Transmodern space, figuring the restless transits between domains of human activity.”(Uberty, Transmodernism) In plainer terms, a sheaf is a construction that allows one to consistently connect local pieces of information into a coherent global picture, without forcing uniformity on every part.
It embraces an overlap structure where different patches agree on common overlaps but may have internal variety. Zalamea’s transmodern philosophy, undergirded by such mathematical notions, directly informs our proposal: the transcendental can be thought of as a sheaf-like structure, one that holds together diverse perspectives (scientific, artistic, etc.) in a flexible unity.
My recent trilogy of texts provides a concrete development of these ideas. In Prolegomenon to a Treatise, I define the transcendental framework as the set of conditions that make cognition possible. Inigo Wilkins writes: “those enabling constraints that define the human as a suffering, thinking, and acting person.” Crucially, he immediately adds that “this is a Sellarsian perspective in which the transcendental is not fixed but open to change. Constraints are both hindering and empowering … they facilitate by restricting, since without constraints there is just entropy.” (Wilkins, 2021) He thus reformulates Kant’s notion of conditions of possibility in a dynamic register: the transcendental constraints (be they forms of perception, linguistic categories, logical principles, etc.) are not eternally given, but can be incrementally altered as we devise new conceptual frameworks.
Yet there remain constraints—structure is necessary to avoid chaos (pure entropy) and to enable organization. This echoes cybernetician Ross Ashby’s law of requisite variety: a system must have sufficient internal variety to manage the variety of its environment. An open transcendental is one that can expand its repertoire of structures in response to new challenges. Wilkins traces how human inquiry has indeed shifted our transcendental space. For example, he notes with Gabriel Catren that humans can formulate problems in one formal language that require the invention of a new language to solve.
The progression from Euclidean to non-Euclidean geometry, or from classical logic to intuitionistic logic, or from Newtonian to quantum frameworks can be seen as modifications of what counts as “objectively intelligible.” Catren goes so far as to say, “there are no fundamental limitations to the capacity to vary the transcendental perspective,” since we continually create new formalisms that breach prior limits. (Wilkins, 2021) Each such breach is a cybernetic loop: a problematic experience or inconsistency (feedback from the “real”) triggers a revision of the governing framework, which then accommodates a broader range of phenomena. In Kantian terms, we modify the conditions of possibility in light of what initially seemed impossible under the old conditions.
To capture this idea, Catren introduces the concept of the phenoumenon (a portmanteau of phenomenon and noumenon). Rather than maintaining an absolute dichotomy between the thing-for-us (phenomenon) and the thing-in-itself (noumenon), the phenoumenon is “a relative absolute around which unfolds a sheaf of empirical and transcendental perspectives.” (Wilkins, 2021) In other words, reality is not split into a finite appearance and a forever inaccessible essence; instead, for any given domain or entity, we have a bundle of ways of understanding it (empirical data, theoretical models, experiential intuitions, etc.), and we can continuously refine or add to this bundle. The “absolute” (the noumenal kernel) is only approached through an open-ended refinement of our perspectives—much like successive approximations. Crucially, these perspectives form a sheaf : they overlap and must agree on overlaps (ensuring coherence), but no single perspective captures the “whole” truth, and new partial views can always emerge.
This sheaf-theoretic imagery perfectly illustrates a transcendental cybernetics: the subject–object relation becomes a matter of stitching together partial knowledges without assuming a final, God’s-eye view. We neither fall into an irrational multitude of disconnected viewpoints (mere relativism), nor presume a completed total system (absolute idealism). Instead, we get a unity-in-diversity that is iteratively constructed.
As I write in Critique of Transcendental Structure: “In this respect, our approach echoes Kant’s fundamental question about the possibility of the unity of knowledge, even as it moves beyond Kant’s static transcendental framework. Instead of fixed a priori categories or faculties that impose unity from above, we have a flexible, evolving framework that generates unity from below, through the collaboration of many agents and pieces of information. We might say that sheaf theory outlines a new kind of ‘transcendental structure’—one that is not a singular edifice, but a scaffold that grows as our web of understanding expands. It is transcendental not as an unchanging schema, but as the dynamic form of connectivity that makes holistic experience possible. This structure is synthetic and dynamic: a unity that is built out of heterogeneity, rather than a uniform order to which all diversity must conform.”
Here we see a direct rejection of Land’s thesis: unity is not achieved by imposing sameness (a “uniform order”) on diversity, but by synthesizing heterogeneity into a coherent network. The transcendental becomes a “scaffold” or open architecture, akin to a learning organism or an extensible codebase. This is cybernetic in that it stresses connectivity and feedback: the holistic experience emerges from linking pieces together, not from a top-down fiat. Sheaf theory provides the formal language to discuss such linkages rigorously, ensuring that local differences are respected even as global consistency is sought.
Notably, I connect this directly to aesthetics and collective cognition. In my view, an art exhibition or a cultural discourse can function like a sheaf: each participant or observer has a local interpretation, and through communication these interpretations overlap and achieve a degree of common meaning.
The “global” insight of an artwork is something that arises only when these partial views are woven together, and even then, some tensions or “obstructions” may remain as productive sites of new meaning. This stands as a concrete exemplar of transcendental cybernetics: meaning and knowledge are not pre-given or centralized, but emerge from an interactive process that is never definitively completed.
3. Categorical Open Systems: Two Approaches
To further elucidate the theoretical framework of transcendental cybernetics, it is useful to introduce a distinction highlighted by mathematician Noah Chrein. In discussing what Jules Hedges terms “categorical cybernetics,” Chrein distinguishes two broad approaches: (1) modeling systems by categories, and (2) modeling systems by arbitrary structures, with a categorical metatheory to relate those structures. The first approach treats the category (in the sense of category theory) as a direct model of the system in question.
For example, one might model a simple robot or organism as a category whose objects are states and whose morphisms are transitions or actions. The emphasis here is on finding a categorical structure that is the system. The second approach, by contrast, allows the system to be described in whatever formalism suits it (differential equations, graphs, neural networks, social matrices, etc.), but then uses category theory at a higher level to compare, transform, and integrate these formalisms. In other words, category theory provides an organizing language or connective tissue between different models. This second approach aligns more with the spirit of a transcendental cybernetics.
Rather than forcing all of reality into one formal container (say, a single category of all things), we recognize a plurality of structures and then study the morphisms between those structures, the functors and natural transformations that allow a passage from one perspective to another. One might say the first approach risks a kind of categorical absolutism if misapplied: we might be tempted to declare “everything is a category of such-and-such sort” (for instance, Russell’s type theory attempts to model all of logic as a hierarchy of types, or one might try to force physics into one
category).
The second approach is more analogous to the sheaf philosophy: it acknowledges local descriptions in their own terms and seeks a meta-level coherence or translation principle among them. Category theory’s power lies in revealing common patterns across disparate contexts. Indeed, the title of my Dub Langlands hints at an analogy: the Langlands Program in mathematics finds deep connections between number theory and geometry by establishing a correspondence between their respective structures.
By analogy, Dub Langlands: Art Theory Texts on Cybernetics explores
unifying patterns across art, economics, and cybernetics. It uses the metaphor of a direct sum of different approaches—for example, combining a technological perspective with a mythopoetic perspective on electronic music—to create a new hybrid understanding. This is essentially a categorical gluing of theories: the direct sum ⊕ indicates a structure that contains two sub-structures (here, two “subjects” or standpoints) and preserves their individuality (U ∩ W = {0}) while also letting them interact in one space U ⊕ W. The result is “something novel” that was not visible from either standpoint alone.
In short, a categorical metadisciplinary framework does not eliminate disciplinary perspectives but situates them in a higher-order architecture where they can communicate. This reflects a key aspect of transcendental cybernetics: the transcendental need not be a monolithic set of principles (as Kant’s twelve categories might appear), but can be a structured plurality of principles, together with principles about how those principles transform. The cybernetic element is found in the self-referential nature of this arrangement: the system includes rules for changing the rules, maps for changing the maps. We find an early intuition of this in Kant as well, in his idea of the regulative use of reason.
In the Appendix to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that although we cannot know the totality of the world or the ultimate ground of things, reason regulates inquiry by ideas of totality and unity—heuristic goals that push us to extend our systems. This is like a built-in “growth instruction” for knowledge. Kant himself couldn’t formalize this, but today we might view it via category theory as a functor that embeds our current knowledge into a larger hypothetical knowledge, or a drive to refine the commutativity of our diagrams (to remove inconsistencies). Thus, even classical Kant had a glimpse of the second-order aspect: reason thinking about the limits of reason.
The categorical viewpoint also clarifies how recursivity enters the transcendental. A cybernetic system is often characterized by feedback loops; in epistemic terms, this is reflexivity. The transcendental inquiry can turn upon itself: we investigate the conditions of knowledge using the very tools of knowledge, and thereby potentially alter those tools. Philosophers like Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom have described this as the bootstrapping of the space of reasons—we refine our concepts by using some concepts to critique and improve others.
I explicitly ally with the “neo-Sellarsians” in aiming for, as Will Fraser describes, a “radicalized Kantian creed of the Myth of the Given,” meaning I reject any static, given foundation of knowledge and instead sees knowledge as a self-correcting enterprise. In Prolegomenon, I speak of “unbinding universality from the local through the ends of the unlocalized within the local,” a somewhat poetic phrase suggesting that universals (transcendental truths) emerge from local processes when those processes are pushed beyond themselves. This paradoxical-sounding idea (“the unlocalized within the local”) captures the essence of a categorical or sheaf-theoretic transcendental: each local perspective contains a drive or potential (germ) of reaching beyond its context, and category theory lets us make that reaching-out explicit by mapping the local into a more general space.
4. Subject–Object Relations Revisited: Beyond Hegel and Speculative Realism
Transcendental cybernetics reimagines Kantian critique for the 21st century, not as a police operation upon the wildness of reality (as Nick Land would have it), but as a navigation enterprise in an open sea of sense. It presents the relationship of mind and world as an ongoing negotiation: the mind has no choice but to use models and constraints, yet those constraints can be loosened or reshaped in response to what they cannot initially accommodate.
The transcendental, in this view, is a moving target—a structure whose purpose is to be revised. Far from relinquishing rigor, this approach multiplies it: each new framework must prove itself by recovering older results as special cases (much as relativity theory contains Newtonian predictions as a limit), and by enlarging the range of intelligibility (explaining what was previously a mere anomaly). In this way, the critical spirit of Kant is preserved and radicalized. We still ask, “How is X possible?” for knowledge, beauty, morality, etc., but we allow the answers to evolve as X itself evolves and as our own form of questioning evolves.
Ultimately, this polemic suggests that Kant inaugurated not a kingdom of control, but a metadisciplinary laboratory in which philosophy, mathematics, and art collaborate on “the disenchantment of the illusion” only to effect a “re-enchantment” at a higher level as Novalis would have had it. Land accused Kant (and the Enlightenment) of wanting to “legislate for all time … while reproducing itself as the same.” (Land, 63) Transcendental cybernetics answers: a genuine Kantian legacy would legislate for the time being, while enabling the conditions for its laws to change in the future. It is a cybernetics not of freezing order but of order-through-change.
In practice, this means embracing category-theoretic and sheaf-theoretic tools to formalize synthesis across domains, following Zalamea’s transmodern call to integrate “real” mathematics and imaginative philosophy. It means seeing the subject–object relation as an open dialogue—much like a musical improvisation where each phrase from one instrument reshapes the response of the other, gradually weaving a coherent piece. My transdisciplinary oeuvre exemplifies this, merging influences from Kant, Fichte, Novalis, Peirce, and Grothendieck into a new platform for thought. In doing so, it shows that the best answer to Land’s dark cybernetic nihilism is not a return to dogmatic security, but a higher-order cybernetics: one that welcomes the unknown as fuel for its own self-transformation.
The transcendental, we conclude, is not a castle of interiority subduing the world, but a ship outfitted for an endless voyage. It keeps the lights of reason on, not to banish the darkness beyond, but to venture into it safely and curiously. Transcendental cybernetics names this ethos of a reason that is never final, always operative, and incessantly attuned to the alterity that lies both outside us and within us.
REFERENCES
[1] Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787). Trans. N. K. Smith. London: Macmillan, 1929.
[2] Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. Eds. R. Mackay and R. Brassier. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011.
[3] Wark, McKenzie. “On Nick Land.” Verso Blog, 2017.
[4] Schmid, Eric. Prolegomenon to a Treatise on Mathematical Structuralism, Constructive Computationalism, De-ontologized Metaphysics of Hermeneutics, and the Synthetic A Priori. Frankfurt: Bauer Verlag, 2022.
[5] Schmid, Eric. Critique of Transcendental Structure: Toward a Synthetic Unity of Aesthetics and Collective Intelligence. Oslo: Centralbanken, 2025.
[6] Schmid, Eric. Dub Langlands: Art Theory Texts on Cybernetics. New Lebanon: Graham Vunderink Gallery, 2025.
[7] Zalamea, Fernando. Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics. Trans. Z. L. Fraser. New York: Sequence Press, 2012.
[8] Novalis (F. von Hardenberg). Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia (Das Allgemeine Brouillon). Trans. D. W. Wood. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.
[9] Fichte, Johann G. The Science of Knowledge. Eds. and trans. P. Heath and J. Lachs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
[10] Chrein, Noah. “Tweet dated June 23, 2025.”
[11] Wilkins, Inigo. Acid Hegel in K-Space? Urbanomic, 2021.
[12] Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. First French edition 1947. Translated by Emma Crawford. English language edition 1963. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
Dub Langlands: Art Theory Texts on Cybernetics (Here)
:: DIFFRACTIONS :: 