The three musketeers (recording, iteration, alteration) are actually four, and the system, to be complete, needs a fourth element – interruption, which is the essence of speculation. Teleology, i.e. having an end, is the outcome of interruption: this happens whenever a process stops (typically, a machine breaks down or a living being dies). Interruption equals crisis, i.e. the cessation of a system of recording and iteration, in either a definitive or a transitory form. As such it should not be conceived as mere negativity, because it constitutes the condition of possibility of meaning. We understand what a hammer is when it breaks, and what a human is when they die. It is at this point, at the end (as the final moment), that we recognise the end (as the purpose) of a mechanism or organism, and it is the prediction of this interruption that determines the economic and ethical system of values.

Interruption is the decisive and conclusive element of hysteresis, what stops the machine and at the same time motivates it. The fact that it can be subject to irreversible processes gives meaning to the whole. Teleology sheds light on archaeology. This affair may seem complicated, or like little more than wordplay, but it has a meaning that concerns, precisely, the meaning of history. Who we are as human beings was not written from the beginning – quite the contrary. What we are appears at the moment when we glimpse a direction, the place to which we are going. It is therefore in the future, in becoming, that we recognise the origin. Precisely for this reason it is important to look into the present, into what happens and in the directions it is taking, to recognise the essences of things.

Only that which has an end can have a time endowed with meaning and direction. It is not by chance, therefore, that final causes concern organisms and history, i.e. the two areas in which time and transience are everything. Everything, in nature as well as in technology, has an end, which manifests itself as an interruption. Alles, was ist, endet. If alterations are things that sometimes happen and sometimes don’t, there is one thing that eventually always happens: the interruption, the end.