Baecker - 2008 - Form and Forms of Communication

3.
In Society
3.1 Expecting Expectations
Sociologically speaking, perhaps the most remarkable circumstance in connection with

the phenomenon of communication is that people can communicate not solely for the
sake of communicating. The principle formulated by Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson
does indeed apply, to the effect that, as soon as we are dealing with two organisms in
their environments and in a mutually related form, that is, with mutual perception, we
cannot not communicate (Watzlawick/Beavin/Jackson 1967: 51). But it equally holds
good, that we cannot just communicate; we have to communicate about something at the
same time. Of course, there are elaborated techniques of communicating only
communication, as developed, above all, in group therapy. Yet they are, just as in the
case of meditation, a form of consciousness where consciousness perceives only
consciousness, virtuoso performances, which derive their meaning from, among other
things, making the normal case visible by going to the exterior of form and trying out the
contrary. The general rule is that, now formulated in the cybernetic tradition, we cannot
communicate without simultaneously communicating that we are controlling as we
communicate (with surprising consequences to match), or again, formulated in our
model’s conceptual mode, that we cannot stipulate degrees of freedom, if we have not
introduced them in the first place.
The step from the general model of communication to applying and testing it
sociologically is hence a step from the singular of communication’s form to the plural of
its forms. As soon as we communicate, we find ourselves engaging with particular forms
of communication, the special nature of which is incomparably more conspicuous than
the form’s general nature, so that it is accordingly difficult to observe communication as
such, or respectively, to observe it alongside the circumstances we have to deal with in
each case, noting also that we are engaged in communicating.
Nonetheless, the forms with which the following intends to deal are forms within the
form of communication, or respectively “forms taken out of the form”, as George
Spencer Brown formulates it for the case of his general calculation. Regardless of which
concrete form is of interest in what follows, we are dealing fundamentally with a form of
introducing and stipulating of degrees of freedom in the context of a combination of
indication and differentiation. We shall see that the form of communication plays with
various possibilities of much rather focussing freedom’s spaces for action or alternatively
Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

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of much rather emphasising stipulations and to that extent offers a wide spectrum
between emphasising spontaneity, on the one hand, and ritualisation, on the other. With
each individual form, it is always a question, however, of both, of introducing and
stipulating degrees of freedom, so that the result of engaging with one form always
means tying one to the other in the sense of Ronald D. Laing’s pinpointedly accurate
parables (Laing 1970). Whoever participates in communication is engaging socially,
regardless of whether through fleeting mutual notice at the bus stop, a collegial exchange
at work, watching the television with the family or reading poems alone.
The first of the forms we want to present here serves as a bridge between the general
form of communication and its concrete forms. At the same time, it is simply the
structure, that aims at concrete structures, individual themes of communication, therefore,
yet in its general nature makes sure that every concrete structure can be swapped for
another concrete structure, depending on the history of communication. This, the first of
the forms derived from form and general structure, is expectation. It is patently not
possible, so runs the thesis in this context, to engage in communication, without attaching
to it an expectation about what we are getting involved in. More acutely formulated, it is
not even possible to engage in communication, without attaching certain expectations
about what we are getting involved in. That does not have to mean that we attach certain
intentions, goals and interests to communication, but it does mean, in any case, that we
have, depending on the communication, an idea of what offers of behaviour we are going
to be involved with and what behaviour of our own is opportune and what is not. We
accept an expectation, as we engage with a communication and we look to see
subsequently what has become of it and how far it determines what is possible in
engaging with it. And from the beginning, the expectation is effective in a moderated
state; it can be amplified and weakened, emphasised and denied, shifted conspicuously or
inconspicuously and is, in this manner, already a stipulation of the degree of freedom, the
introduction of which is here the point.
An expectation becoming effective happens as a rule so peripherally that we scarcely
notice it. We enter a church and lower our voices, we greet our guests for dinner and
involuntarily become a notion jollier, we get to work and seem a touch more determined.
And if we do not, we communicate that we are not collaborating in a way then to be
defined more closely or found out, as may be.
We describe an expectation as a structure, because this concept corresponds to Alfred
Korzybski’s reflections, as it posits that there are no isolated processes, events or objects
in the world (we then would not know anything about them; they would inhabit another

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world) and hence directs each of these phenomena to its possible relations to another
phenomenon (Korzybski 1958: 55ff.). Observing the structure of something accordingly
allows examining a phenomenon for what it is not, yet for what it has in common with
others. That is always only possible hypothetically, tentatively, experimentally and
riskily, but it is possible. To avoid falling into the structuralist trap, we only have to take
care not to confuse this structure with the actual reason for a process, an event or an
object. The concept of structure only provides that traces of one thing lie in the other,
where one relates to the other through the game, as Jacques Derrida says (1970), and not
perhaps through a mutual or even directed determination. This concept of structure
corresponds sufficiently with the concept of form, which allows more exact examining of
the structure of one as indicating similarities and differences in comparison with the other
while reaching back to differentiating one thing from another.
An expectation always stands in the context of expecting to be disappointed, however
strongly or weakly this moment may indeed be marked in the particular case, and with
that, because we cannot not expect, in the context of exchange for another expectation.
An expectation is a structure on the hop, but a structure nonetheless. It defines itself in
differing from its possible disappointment, but does not perhaps use the disappointment
not to expect anything any more, but to expect something else, including the possibility
of expecting nothing. We can set down the corresponding form as follows:
That says nothing other than that expectation determines itself in a communicative
context by differentiating itself from its disappointment and uses the reflection on this
possible disappointment for determining itself through the differentiation from itself, that
is, from possible other expectations. Reckoning with disappointment is the
differentiation, which allows defining an expectation.
In a communicative context, this becomes acute in at least four respects.
Firstly, we ought not to confuse observing expectations in communication’s form with
observing them in the form of consciousness. What expectations perform in
communication’s form is, in consciousness, probably performed by attention (Markowitz
1986: 10f., 61f., 110f.), in as far as this is also a structure, which allows undertaking a
definition and at the same time leaving open, whether a definition can be maintained on

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both sides, on the consciousness side, which can be distracted and nevertheless, if even in
favour of attention to something else, thinks further, and on the object side, which really
does not merit so much attention or some other sort of attention from what we had
imagined. We are deliberately leaving open what role expectations play for
consciousness, in order instead to underline all the more obviously that the structures of
expectation dealt with by communication are expectations of communication, which
make reference to observing consciousness engaged in communication but simply not
identical with this consciousness’s possible expectations itself or with sorts of attention.
In fact, emphasising this is important, because secondly it has, since Talcott Parsons,
concerned so-called complimentary expectations (Parsons/Shils 1951; Parsons 1964).
Communication does not merely mean that participants engage in it with expectations,
however much that may be the case. On the contrary, communication means, above all,
that each of these expectations is besides expecting what the other expects. When people
enter a church, they expect that the priest expects them to behave piously in some way or
other, however multifarious, modifiable and susceptible to civilising this expectation
expected by the priest may indeed then turn out to be. That is, not least, the reason why
so many styles of belief do indeed differentiate themselves, allowing the priest in
question to offer, respectively, different frames for projecting a definite notion of what he
may indeed expect. In a school, teachers expect that the pupils expect from them that they
will teach them something. That is all that enables them to appear as authoritarian or,
respectively, antiauthoritarian and to make offers to the pupils, which make clear to them
what is expected of them. There are not a few teachers, who, not long after retiring,
cannot imagine any more how they were able to control and to fascinate twenty to forty
pupils, as they do not know anything of the structure of complementary expectations,
which came to their aid communicatively, and have all their life attributed being able to
do it to their personal capabilities, not least in order to keep going. A fine example from
Parsons (1964: 330) describes the communication between a doctor and, in this case, a
female patient, both of whom have to know exactly what they expect of each other,
namely neutral, practical treatment and examination even in the case of intimate
touching, in order to be able then, through minimally varying their behaviour, by a
somewhat stronger hand pressure, a somewhat longer look, to test if there is eventually
anything to be gained by believing the other has other expectations as well, which can be
perhaps exploited to shift the context of the medical treatment to that of a sexual affair.
Communicatively, we do not simply expect that something else is possible perhaps,
but we rely on expectations of expectation and on these being modifiable by the

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suggestion of other expectations. If the other does not engage with the expectations we
offer as available to them, we withdraw again and did not in our doubt expect at all that
the other could expect anything. Then the somewhat stronger hand pressure, the
somewhat longer look were chance, a personal idiosyncrasy of the particular doctor or
whatever, in any case something innocuous. Whoever thinks anything else in this
connection, has already engaged with the possibility of other expectations.
Our third aspect is that this subtlety of expectations of expectation relates to the fact
that it has to manage without a solid reference point outside of the particular modifiable
situation. It is indeed not only expectations but also expectations of expectation that are
structures in the sense, that they make it possible to indicate something they are not and,
to that extent, to try out for itself an ordering, which has still got to maintain itself. But
they have to do all this themselves in the framework of a reference of their own to be
justified in the situation, not in the framework of an exogenous guarantee assuring what
is to be expected in what situation for what reasons. That is why sociologists speak of
institutions (Schelsky 1970; Meyer/Rowan 1977), of arrangements, which make mutually
attributing a consensus on certain ways of behaving, on intentions and considerations
possible, and which can then be so treated as if they were given. But communication can
only decide in the situation and only for itself, if we can put it that way, with which
institutions it will engage.
A radical formulation for this outward insecurity of communication is the theorem,
likewise developed by Talcott Parson, of double contingency (Parsons/Shils 1951: 15ff.;
Parsons 1964: 89ff.), which, in his case, explicitly takes the place of the theorem of the
struggle of all against all formulated three hundred years earlier by Thomas Hobbes in
Leviathan (1651). Sociality, according to Hobbes, means having to reckon with the worst.
Sociality, according to Parsons, means not knowing what we have to reckon with and
hence relying on culture. Niklas Luhmann would then suggest replacing the reference to
culture with the reference to chance and time (Luhmann 1995: 105f.; see Baecker 2001b:
133ff.).
In any case, this means the following: when two observers, individuals, persons of
whatever (we have to keep that open here, but will come back to it) meet, they are in the
situation of not knowing what (including: which expectations) is to be expected from the
other. One of them could hence do this, but also something else (simple contingency); the
other could do that, but likewise something else (double contingency). In this situation,
the one waits for the other to do something, start something, whilst the other does the
same. Both wait for the other to declare themselves and hence open up a differentiation.

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Nothing happens. The behaviour of both, from attitude to direction of gaze, is fixed by
not allowing themselves to be fixed on anything. The situation becomes increasingly
onerous, because people do not, in fact, renounce communication whilst waiting, as this
is already communication, mutual perception. They are communicating about not
communicating with each other, because neither of the pair knows how they could begin.
When this theorem became known in the 1950’s, people liked to discuss it using the
example of the communication of two strangers in a train compartment.
Here once again, the decisive point is also that the communication is not blocked by
anything, but blocks itself. Nothing happens, because what is being communicated is that
each of the pair is waiting for the other, in order to receive an indication of what can
actually be expected in and from a communication between the two of them. That is, as
it were, the primal situation of the social, “primal situation”, because nothing else is
happening here but the social itself. Group therapies, particularly the so-called training
group (Kasenbacher 2003: 142ff.), like to exploit this, in order to make experiencing the
social itself possible. Obviously, people anticipate beneficial effects from it. The primal
situation is experienced as a problem demanding a solution. For this reason, Parsons
speaks of the “problem” of double contingency. This problem is identical with the
indefiniteness of communications, which reflects on itself. It is the indefiniteness in the
face of every differentiation, which people cannot tolerate, but which they have to learn
to tolerate, if they want to be in a position to observe, so to speak, communication in pure
form.
At the same time it is not, in fact, the case that this problem of double contingency
only appears at the start of a communication and then never again. On the contrary, it
seems to be the rule that people begin to communicate with each other in a fully defined
situation and only then do moments materialise, in which the previous expectations of
expectation are exhausted and no new ones appear, without people maybe being, for that
reason, already prepared to end the communication and go away. That is something about
which those situations concerned with initially crossing a threshold to a certain trust can
sing a refrain, for instance, when leading up to business of the more demanding kind, to
intimacy or also to belief. The problem of the double contingency accompanies
communication, never leaves it and is solved repeatedly and, depending on
circumstances, in various ways, however much organisations, marriages, confession, or
interviews with politicians, of example, also develop rituals of solving the problem,
which can be invoked almost as needed.

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Now Parsons thinks, it would be culture, understood as, for the social, the external
horizon of values and corresponding norms of what is right and what wrong, which
enables the solving of the problem of the double contingency. And in actual fact, it does
seem that there was indeed a time when people knew how to behave as a stranger in a
railway compartment, as a husband to a wife also in instances of, as it were, dropping out
of the marriage, or as a teacher to a pupil, before the latter began to learn. It is equally
certain that this knowledge, about how to behave adequately for a situation, about the
correct offers of behaviour and the incorrect intrusions within the various cultural
frictions between the generations, the sexes and the backgrounds, tends to dissolve itself,
however much fundamentalist of all kinds try to mitigate against it. It is certain in
addition, that, in any society, people cannot assume any more that they can rely on a
culture given to society out of some horizon or other. In cultural comparison, every
society learns that it has itself, its own customs, norms and prejudices to thank for its
culture and not, for instance, some nature of things, however inscrutable. With the
descriptions of correct behaviour – that is the actual drama – the differentiations, which
kept these descriptions stable, also dissolve themselves, without people believing that
they even actually knew them (Geertz 1973: 142ff.).
According to Luhmann, solving the problem of the double contingency cannot,
therefore, already exist exclusively in culture, which only has to be invoked in every
problematical situation. Cultivated behaviour can actually exacerbate the problem, just as
much as deliberately treating cultural expectations casually. So the mechanism allowing
respective problems to be solved has to be more generally, at the same time self-
referentially and more strongly related to the resources of the given situation. Luhmann
deduces that chance and time will solve the problem. Something happens; a bird flies past
the railway compartment window and one person tries a friendly smile, the other a piece
of chocolate. A particular narrative of interaction develops, however minimal it may be,
and we become increasingly sure about the sort of expectations of expectation we are
handling. We keep the disappointment of possible other expectations to ourselves or we
otherwise wait to see, if the further narrative of interaction will sometime or other offer
reference points for trying out feeding in again these other expectations about attributing
the particular complementary expectation.
It is obvious that the way interactively developing communications depend on chance
and their own narrative tends to reinforce the cultural uncertainty of correct and incorrect
behaviour rather than weaken it, because we can experience so many different things and
are directed towards finding the differences interesting, rather than the similarities. We

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can, therefore, reckon with situations involving double contingency being, in times of
cultural uncertainty, both more often noticeable and routinely covered up as well. – to the
point where we can begin wondering, if these routines do not constitute a new form of
culture. Reflections of this kind lead to combining Parsons’ solution with Luhmann’s
and, on one side, continuing to regard it as a solution to the problem of double
contingency, albeit, on the other, only as a solution among others and as a solution, which
does not refer to a resource endogenously given but in each case endogenously open to
contesting all over again.
Finally, the fourth and, in our context, last aspect, where the structure of expectations
of expectation is critical in communication and for it, is the possibility of describing
feelings as constructions arising from the amplification of expectations into demands, and
this both in the case of expectations being confirmed and in that of them being
disappointed. Whilst expectations are normally either disappointed or confirmed, and we
can then decide if we retain them and reinforce them normatively, expectations can, in
particular situations concerning the mobilisation of individual or collective effects of
solidarity, be boosted into demands, which are anchored in the participating individuals
as feelings. At least in this way we can collate those reference points towards a sociology
of emotion, which are to be found variously with Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann
(Parsons 1977: 218f., 247ff.; Luhmann 1995: 269f., 274f.; Stenner 2004; Baecker 2004).
Feelings of fulfilment intensify confirmed expectations into demands striving after
further confirmation; feelings of disappointment retain demands, and that also when the
basic expectations were disappointed and were possibly even dropped.
It is interesting that feelings only achieve this intensification of expectations into
demands under two conditions, namely, on the one hand, on condition of trying also to tie
in emotionally the complementary expectation of the respective interlocutor and, on the
other, on condition of what we feel hitting on a statement, indubitable because subjective,
on the objective situation we are in. From that, ambivalences as regards attribution can be
gained, which allow leaving it open whether subsequent communications connect with
the person of the other or with their situation. It seems that this is the only way to win
over the respective interlocutor for the feeling, without anything being too definite about
has been gained by such a win. That is because the situation invoking hatred, love,
sadness or joy is just as interesting as the person who reacts accordingly.
In this way, feelings make a differentiation, which opens a space other to that of other
differentiations. Still without knowing exactly what they denote, that is, what
expectations they make possible, they signal an indefinitely definite dealing with

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disappointments, which allows relating the situation’s resources and the participating
person’s resources in such a way that both can be newly coordinated with each other. If
feelings promote solidarity, as Parsons says, then this does not only apply to the
relationship between persons, but also to the relationship between persons and situations.
People can only come to accept things emotionally and can only decide emotionally to
risk something new. That is the case, because, when differentiating feelings, one thing, as
does another, brings new resources into play, which re-actualise the entire narrative of
persons and their situations, without having, therefore, to thematise them as well. To the
intellectual function of conscious thought, that is something uncanny. But it has to rely on
it for this feeling as well.
3.2 Number, Order, Calculus
Expectations of expectation are the structures forming the background to communications

becoming events that count themselves, that is, can be identified and connected. That
communication has happened can be established through the confirming or disappointing
of an expectation of expectation, and that consequently certain connections are more
likely, other less so.
We talk about counting communicative events, because one of the results of research
in cybernetics and systems theory is that the self-organisation of a complex phenomenon
pre-supposes that the phenomenon is in a position to decide among its own units, to count
them and to decide accordingly which further operations are possible and necessary
(Baecker 2003). In this sense, the cyberneticist Warren McCulloch has spoken about how
he engaged with cybernetics’ theoretical potential by trying to find out how a crustacean
succeeds in directing the growth of its shell, including its spiral and pattern, by adding up
the stage of growth it is in at any given time (McCulloch 2004). Communication is a
process of calculation, which posits that events can be differentiated, in order to separate
and to connect them. Confirming or disappointing expectations provides the scanning and
outlining capable, in this sense, of profiling communicative events
(Watzlawick/Beavin/Jackson 1967: 54ff.; Wilden 1972: 111ff.).
The respective unit of communication capable of being counted as an event depends
on the structure of expectation, as background to observing communication. Here we can
reckon not only in great historical periods but also to the beat of seconds, depending on
whether it concerns the imperial communication of the Roman Empire or the
micromoment management of a particular socially interactive situation (Leifer 2002).

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Beyond that, we can, with George Spencer Brown, talk about countable
communicative events, which establish certain distinctions (for instance: in the empire,
only the power of the centre counts) can be, on the one hand, confirmed by repetition,
on the other, however, can be condensed into the difference they make:
These two expressions denote in Spencer Brown’s calculations (1972: 10f.), which he
describes as calculations of quantity. What is meant by that is that distinctions once made
may be repeated without the repetition itself having to make a difference to the distinctio.
We can repeatedly put questions, give instructions, confess our love, or offer money
without the repetition changing anything about the questioning, instructing, loving or
paying. Naturally, subtle observations establishing a difference in the repetition, for
instance, increasing enthusiasm and deepening trust or also growing boredom or
gradually awakening mistrust, are not excluded with these counting processes (Deleuze
1968). But these assume an observing of form which indicates already relations of order
and not only of number. Here at least mathematics and sociology agree that not only what
is extraordinary and subtle deserves recording, but also what is ordinary and self-evident.
The two forms of confirmation and of condensation go back to the first of the two
laws, which Spencer Brown formulates in his Laws of Form, namely to the law of
calling: “the value of a call made again is the value of the call” (1972: 1), respectively:
For our reflections, this means that, taking into account the expectations, which they set
and confirm, or disappoint, communications can be repeated in their value as well as
summarised with regard to it. We can repeatedly call up what maintains them. We can,
however, also try to find out what it is actually all about. Time and again, we meet
particular friends to attend a concert together. At some point, we discover that concert

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visits concerts are nothing else than celebrating and confirming the friendship on both
sides. The differentiation is not unimportant, as it makes it possible, among other things,
to choose between regretting that, on one particular evening, a friend is not going along
to the concert again, on one side, and suspecting that this other person’s friendship has
diminished, on the other. And accordingly, we will react in various ways, and
accordingly, the friend will be well advised to look a various ways of formulating their
regrets.
He calls these two other possibilities cancellation,
and compensation,
Cancellation means that a difference already established can be abandoned through the
instruction to delete the indication and the mark in favour of the unmarked state. On the
contrary, compensation means that the unmarked state can be marked by a self-deleting
distinction. Both possibilities rest on the second of the two laws of form on which
Spencer Brown grounds his calculation, namely, the law of crossing: “The value of a
crossing made again is not the value of the crossing” (1972: 2, and see ibid.: 10),
respectively:
One of the calculation’s crucial ideas consists in the formulation of this second law. It
makes explicit what has been gained with the concept of form. The concept of form
actually implies nothing less than introducing the distinction’s initially uncertain exterior,
which an observer of the second order can define, and which hence means introducing an
empty space, and the calculation reckons with it as it does with the indicated and marked
interior of the distinction. The law of calling formulates how this unmarked space can be

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reached: by putting a cross against a distinction – or better un-crossing it. If I have just
said to my friend, “I’d like to go to the cinema”, and subsequently say, “I’d rather not go
to the cinema”, I thereby gain the possibility of not wanting anything. Communicatively,
this possibility can be shaped just as interestingly as the possibility of wanting something.
I am not committed to anything, but have to, if I want something, set up a new difference,
and with this I have, in turn, the possibility of subsequently cancelling it. I do not want to
go to the cinema, not to the concert and do not want to stay at home too: with this, the
other person is called upon to occupy themselves with the one who could want
something, but does not want anything, and first of all to find out what is causing the
unwillingness to set up one of the differences we have been so consistently establishing
up to now.
But that is not all. We can not only put a cross against what has held good up to now,
but we can also imply observations of form, which allow observing how what we
establish so successfully as differentiations compensates for the emptiness they replace.
And this possibility is always on hand, is orientated according to every expectation we
might use to profile a communication, regardless of whether it is a matter of a friendship,
a task, enjoying art, admiring a woman or socialising. We will need reasons and reference
points, complementary expectations too, in order to initiate observing form this way. But
whoever seeks, they shall find. We might only think of Gustave Flaubert’s novels, above
all, L’Éducation Sentimentale (1869), in which a society is presented, where nothing
moves it other than compensating for its own emptiness.
Against the background of the law of calling, Spencer Brown links these two
possibilities of cancellation and compensation to the concept of order in as different from
that of number. When counting, it is a question of finding out what lasts and in what
regards it can be consolidated, with ordering, it is a question of scrutinising every
difference we establish against the background of possibly also cancelling it again. Both
concepts reckon with both sides of form, as counting also functions only if the indefinite
is incorporated every time as the exterior of the definite. We cannot count without
attending to intersections. But with ordering, the outside of the form becomes an
interesting argument in its own right, if we can put it like that. Ordering only functions,
when the two possibilities of defining and of the undefined are treated symmetrically. For
only in that way can we decide for and against an order. And that is the only reason why
an order is an order.
With that, we have unobtrusively introduced the premises or the axioms of Spencer
Brown’s calculation. Anything more than the two named laws does not exist. And

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anything more than the three possibilities they nominate for dealing with distinctions:
putting a cross against them, cancelling them and re-entering them into the space of
distinction again – something we will come back to – also does not exist.
3.3 Forms of the Social
Society is number, order and re-entry of communication. It repeats, confirms and

consolidates itself (number); it deletes itself and sets itself up as an alternative possibility
to itself (order); it explores what it creates as the space of its own possibilities (re-entry).
“Society” is a title for these three forms of dealing with communication. And each of
these three forms is embedded in observing the three degrees of freedom and how they
are stipulated. It is repeatedly a matter of opening a space of differentiation and the
descriptions possible within it. It is correspondingly demanding to construct a theory of
society. Society cannot be posited as the cosmos or chaos of its communicative
possibilities any more, but has to be developed from the form of differentiating
communication through describing communication as operation.
We have fixed the possibility of counting communication through the structures of
complementary expectation, which can be fixed through every single communicative
event and allow differentiating these events, for their part, from each other. We will deal
with the re-entry of communication into the space of the society it creates in the next
chapter under the heading “meaning”. In this and the two following sections, it is a
question of the order of society, which we will describe as an ordering of differentiation
and of self-description. In this case, we are not concerned with working out a general
theory of society, but only with making comprehensible how far society can be
understood as an ordering of communication.
Society is only then the ordering of communication, when it fulfils itself as a self-
establishing and self-cancelling differentiation of communication, with which we can
engage alternately, which includes in each individual version the possibility of all others,
and these, therefore, relate with more or less severe exclusivity to each other. The
singular of this order is hence to be understood as a plural of its orders. Society always
appears as differing from itself, not least as differing from that community, which it
always has incorporated as the dream of being defined though its own definitions
(Plessner 1999). Communication is always engaged in the leap, delayed more or less, into
another possibility of being itself.

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Hence, society needs robust differentiations, which firstly denote various possibilities
for using communication, can secondly attract a sufficient number of communicative
events, in order both to hone its profile and also become structurally rich enough to
include the perspective onto alternative possibilities, and thirdly are sufficiently capable
of reflexion not to lose sight of the precarious terrain they operate on. The differentiations
have to be robust, because they accompany communication as, in the sense advanced by
Jürgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, metacommunications which are, on one side,
communicatively included on the same level as the themes of communication and, on
another, set the conditions, which describe how communication can be continued
(Ruesch/Bateson 1987: 209ff.). These conditions extend beyond the respective thematic
and material attractivity of communication and denote the respective form of the social,
which can be called on by communication and is reproduced by communication. They
establish a differentiation foreshadowing which indications can be expected.
We have recourse to Niklas Luhmann’s theory of society as developed in the book Die
Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (1997), in order to nominate candidates for such forms of
the social. These candidates are here presented exemplarily and without any claim to
completeness, even if I would find it difficult at present to imagine any more of them.
These candidates are interaction, organisation, protest movements and society itself, the
latter being further ordered into tribes, levels and systems of functioning. The following
form denotes the context of the corresponding differentiations:
It is important that society itself appears once again in its order, because it would
otherwise have no possibility of differentiating and observing itself as what it is.
However, what is more interesting than merely nominating the candidates is describing
them from the point of view of ordering communication. How do interaction,
organisation, protest movements and society cope all together with the task of
establishing and repeatedly cancelling themselves? How do they succeed in profiling
themselves as possibilities of communication, without running the risk of establishing
themselves as the only possibility and not only excluding all others (that would indeed

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contain, even if in the form of negation, a nevertheless concurrent memory of them), but
of losing sight of them? How do they enable differentiations of events, objects and states,
without neglecting to embed these in the concurrent observation of other possibilities?
Interaction performs this task through differentiating presence, the organisation
through differentiating membership, the social movement by differentiating protest and
society as a whole by differentiating communication from the viewpoint of its
extendability. These distinctions are everything we have already named: they are delay
and supplement (différance); they are opposition and contrast (différend); they are a game
with a division (partition) and they are the space, in which correcting mistakes is
possible. Amid all that, they are the attractors or the inherent values of society’s
communicative events, which can be counted using confirmed or disappointed
expectations. Distinguishing presence, membership, protest and communication itself
introduces the degrees of freedom exploited and stipulated in any particular order.
Interaction is that order of communication, which already occurs through individuals
(and in general: organisms) perceiving that they perceive themselves. Their condition is
the presence of the individuals communicating with each other, on condition that this
presence is established, that is, differentiated, that is, marked out against the possibility of
absence. We can engage with interactions when and because we can know how we can
also stop them again. Only in this way can presence in an interaction be shaped from the
viewpoint of conceivably being also absent from it, of the other person present
conceivably being absent too and of there existing absent people, whose presence is
excluded but can certainly be incorporated in this form of exclusion.
This last viewpoint has fascinated social theory from Georg Simmel to Michael Serres
under the heading of the so-called third party: how can we understand and describe
actions, when we take into account that each individual present has, as it were, a third
party at their back, who is, of course, not present but, as an absence, every time controls
what happens in the interaction (Serres 1982). This third party can be authority figures
like parents or teachers, imagined observers like spirits or gods, or also legitimisations
like ideologies, fashions and interests, whose criteria govern assessing and selecting what
happens in any given case, or whose power and plausibility respectively govern how we
test to see if things can also work differently. They are the proverbial fulfilment of our
condition of establishing and stipulating degrees of freedom, as referring to them renders
a situation autonomous vis-à-vis other demands, yet, with that, simultaneously subjects it
to this third party all the same (Miermont 1989).

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It is only from this viewpoint of differentiating presence from absence that interaction
is able, for good or ill, to order its communicative possibilities, is able to cultivate what it
can achieve and is able to describe the conditions under which repeatedly coming back to
it remains attractive despite other possibilities. That other interlocutors are present opens
up an action space for freedom, which we can only use, if we make clear what conditions
we are maintaining – and how we are willing to negotiate over these conditions. That is
what interaction in school classes, in court, in families, out shopping, on sports grounds,
or in offices and workshops lives by. From the viewpoint of presence, what we mutually
demand of each other can be intensified or also loosened; and from the viewpoint of
absence, we can give to understand that every interaction can also be ended, and it can
also become clear that reasons can also be found outside of interaction for re-engaging in
it.
Let us only imagine a moment: we had to engage in an interaction - buying a ticket for
a trip, going to the opera, taking part in a game of football - without also being able to
imagine our own absence in this interaction, and we will understand what is meant here.
But that goes for all participants; and every single interaction derives the extent of its
attraction from them actually dealing with the ensuing awareness of contingency and also
from their way of doing it. In this form, every interaction is interwoven and enmeshed
with what it is not and in this form orders the expectations directed at its
communications. The corresponding notation elucidates this point about differentiating
presence and absence and about reflecting absence into presence:
Sociology has occasionally described systems of interaction as simple or even

undifferentiated systems (Kieserling 1999). In actual fact, nothing about them is easy or
undifferentiated, because, in each case, they have include coping with what is also
alternatively possible to them in society, and because they have to be at least so
differentiated that they can succeed in profiling the grounds for communication in the
interaction within the range of choice for other possibilities of interaction itself and for
society’s other possibilities (Luhmann 1997: 812ff.). This profiling, as we can presume,
following the sociology of interaction developed by Erving Goffman, at least requires
that participants in an interaction have not only the possibility to present something

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(performance) but also the possibility to watch (audience) (Goffman 1959). In every
interaction, every participant oscillates to and fro within these two options, is sometimes
presenter, sometimes spectator and, beyond that, has also to present their spectating and
watch themselves as a presenter in the light of how long the others will indeed still accept
what they are offering.
This oscillation between presenting and spectating, both of which are forms of
observation and forms of second order observation, lends interaction, via a second
differentiation after the first one between presence and absence, a structural richness
capable of being used to cultivate the conditions of presence and differentiate the
conditions of absence. We can accelerate the oscillation between presenting and
spectating and derive from that forms of highly cultivated social life, which are not
comprehensible to anyone, who has not learned to take part in them (Gracián 1991). We
can, however, build asymmetries into the oscillation and derive authority structures form
them, which act as if only one of the participants were the presenter (authority, teacher,
artist) and all others were spectators, who keep still as long as the performance,
recognisable by certain formal signs, is running, but have at least to perform keeping still
and may at least reckon with the main presenter being at the same time a spectator of the
performance of spectating and deciding accordingly, how long to go on and how to make
certain that what they are offering remains attractive enough.
We can see that, at the latest, determining the oscillation ensures that the exterior of
the interaction has, in fact, to be incorporated in the form of staging power, the
organisation of a school or social interest in art, because cultivating the interaction would
otherwise not have any bases for what it tries out. But then the opposite also applies, to
the effect that social order profits communicatively from whatever proves itself
interactively, and then arranges its own expectations quite differently with a view to
power, education and art, as if there were nowhere to try out how long citizens, pupils
and art’s public are prepared to hold still.
All this makes interaction structurally so rich, that the view could long persist - in
Europe arguably up to the French Revolution - that society was on the whole to be
organised via that communication, which proves itself interactively. In the final analysis,
so people thought, it was a case of coming to terms within the family on the conditions
for acknowledging persons and in public, and in the political cabinets referring to the
public, of the conditions for organising society. People did not need anything more, in
order to shape society “justly” (Plato) and in harmony with its own possibilities (telos).
The French Revolution destroyed this fine hope irrevocably and, to use Hegel’s

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formulation, replaced it with the phenomenon of separation (Ritter 1965). That is because
this revolution did not allow itself to be conducted as a negotiation between enlightened
aristocrats and newly-rich citizens appearing as creditors, and with workers and peasants
interested in ascending into the bourgeoisie, but it got all the more out of control, the
more it tried doing just this, as an interaction under the guillotine.
People discovered that there are orders in society, which establish and cancel
themselves differently from those of interaction. People discovered society and initially
developed, in theories of progress (Auguste Comte), then in theories of revolution (Karl
Marx) and finally in theories of decadence (Matthew Arnold), various versions of this
entity, which were, to a greater or lesser extent, in danger of substantiating it and of
replacing the spirits and gods of the past with it. And people discovered organisation,
which counted in the 19th century as the only insurance vis-à-vis an increasingly liberated
and liberalised society (Russell 1934). For this reason, it was not only a question of more
or less technocratically organising society itself as a “State”, but also the protest against
this society in a more a less revolutionary form as a “movement”.
Meanwhile, having in turn become quite unhappily wiser through the experiences of
the 20th century, the ideological hopes of interaction, organisation, movements and
society have cooled off correspondingly. Sociology, as providing enlightenment in the
medium of differentiating systems, certainly has its share in this. In the meantime,
interaction is no longer the model for measuring the other possibilities of ordering
communication, but only one possibility among others, albeit one at least as prominent as
them.
What does organisation mean, then, if we do not understand by it the counterpart to
freedom (be it in the shape of chaos, be it in the shape of the, as it were, unorganised,
ordered cosmos), but an order of communication, which has combine freedom with
unfreedom, perhaps in the form of definiteness and indefiniteness, just like all other
orders? What sort of differentiation opens up the possibility of organisation?
Organisation, as we assume it in the tradition of organisation theory (Simon 1997;
March/Simon 1993; Luhmann 1995; Weick 1979), means quite plainly and in turn
robustly differentiating the members of an organisation from its non-members and
addressing behavioural expectations to the members of an organisation and being able, as
a premise to this end, to treat possible differentiations, which would have no chance
outside of the organisation:

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With that we take a significant step beyond interaction and one which also touches on
what we can imagine as the form of communication. That is because differentiating
members from non-members means being able to imagine a communication, which goes
on between participants, who are not present in any particular situation, yet can
nevertheless reach and also, in this sense, perceive each other. The space of this
differentiation exceeds the condition of being there. Nothing is more unlikely than this,
but, to the extent that organisation succeeds, it succeeds. A space of action for freedom
opens up, unanticipated by society and fascinating and fearful for it, yet it gains its form
only to the extent that conditions are discovered, which make it attractive to members to
feel themselves committed to the organisation also outside of control by those present. It
takes centuries, before this form of order becomes at all visible and differentiable. Until
that point, organisation had to rely on commitments to the evidence of organised
interaction and the social ideologies accompanying this evidence. It is only today that
everyone can see that organisation’s decisive degree of freedom is not its order, but
deciding the membership of this order, that is, a communication and not a practical
necessity.
This step should also be signalled here for the reason that it has been above all
sociologists who have so far been able to imagine this possibility of communication
among those absent. Many other have problems with it, which can, however, be reduced,
if we imagine absence to be, in the first instance, something capable of being indeed
present as a horizon for imaginings and, in the second, only playing a role anyway in
those respects where grounds exist for imagining those absent who are to be reached.
Hence, in organisations keeping written and electronic records plays such a central role.
These records, whatever shape at all they adopt, lay down a trace we can follow, in order
to reach those absent. Our own nameplate, our own desk, our own signing rights together
with working discussions as needed and under the conditions of being present, these quite
suffice to equip the individuals involved to be sufficiently conscious of the likelihood that
their communicating is possible.
In organisations too, structural richness is not gained by subjecting the members of an
organisation to the purpose and the goals of the organisation, disciplining and motivating
them accordingly and dismissing them again, if they do not conform (although that is

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exactly what happens), but by profiling and cultivating the possibilities of membership as
against the possibilities of non-membership (Weber 1958; Türk 1995, 2000). In an
organisation, every communication carries the condition of having to find and commit
members, who, on one side, can leave the organisation again and who, on the other, know
they are being observed by non-members of the organisation as to what they tolerate in
their organisation and what they do not. For this reason, organised communication
oscillates, albeit, in fact, in the range of micromoments too, between belonging and not
belonging to the organisation. And for that reason alone, communication in the
organisation takes on the form of a differentiation, that is, of doubly validating a sender
and an addressee of communication. It does so because only in this way can it be
focussed on the condition of membership in such a manner, as to allow the organisation
to be, in each of it moments, profiled and examined as an order, that is as it own
possibility and impossibility.
Decisions have the decisive advantage that they are meant to commit the other person
and hence have to test in advance the conditions, under which this commitment is
accepted. Under the cloak of the one-way street (“my decision commits you”), the
organisation cultivates a form, which is capable of being intensified almost at will and
recursively reinsures communication through its own possibility (Luhmann 2000b, 1997:
826ff.). This is the only reason why it could seem as if organisation were order
epitomised: in the process of the recursive communication of decisions, it has found ways
and means of committing and binding itself to those few conditions, which have proved
themselves under these conditions. Put another way, it has found convincing grounds for
excluding a world of possibilities, has developed a succession of suitable mechanisms
(hierarchy, division of labour, routine, goal-setting) for, in actual fact, inhibiting these
possibilities too, and legitimised all this under the viewpoint that the few realised
possibilities (purposes, goals, products, processes) are, should they be retained, attractive
enough for the members of the organisation and for the relevant non-members
(commissioning clientèle, customers, financiers, partners)– and can be presented to the
rest of the world as rational.
But caution: all this is, as ever, only possible within the form of communication, that
is, only within structures not only stipulating but also introducing degrees of freedom, not
only describing efficiently and effectively pursuable goals, but also opening up a space of
differentiation, which makes other goals imaginable. Hence it pays not to let ourselves be
dazzled by organisation’s façades of order and to look in every single case, were it
concerning a public authority, a university, a business, an association, an opera house, or

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a political party office, at how the participants get on with each other in their respective
orders, deemed, as they are, organisations. Karl E. Weick has presented as concept,
“double interact”, which permits describing how the perspectives of an organisation’s
members, as they participate in it, have to be related to each other even under the most
unlikely conditions of specific working practices, artificial hierarchies and as yet untested
goal-settings, in order to be able to make sense, if only communally and only by
acknowledging difference between them (Weick 1979: 110ff.). From that Niklas
Luhmann has concluded that communication in the order of the organisation would, in
principle, have to be at all times in a position to consider itself impossible, even outright
insane – and yet that is exactly what it has to be able to fortify itself against (Luhmann
2000b: 141ff.). In other words, we really cannot deal with organisations ethnographically
enough, accepting what is foreign, in order to do justice to the improbability they are
capable of realising.
In the order of society, the order of organisation makes a difference nowhere else
apparent. Here, two points are remarkable. Firstly, organisation has to be in a position to
justify its difference with a view to its members, the individuals participating in it. And
secondly, the order of society, within which this order of organisation realises itself, has
equally good grounds for espousing and allowing it, like interaction, which naturally also
occurs massively in organisation.
Interestingly, these two points are fulfilled in the form of one single condition.
Organisation, and only organisation, allows orientating communication according to
goals, that is, determining a future and, with a view to this future, treating things past
always as present, like the space of possibilities for various options (Luhmann 2000,
chap. 5). All other orders of society have to instead treat the future as open. Interactions
can as little determine, were it not through organisation, who carries on, as someone
present, having enough motives to participate in them, as societies can devise and shape
what indeed becomes of them. And protest movements too cannot determine that their
protest will be heard and abuses remedied. Only organisations determine their future by
orientating themselves according to goals. Naturally, they can only do this for the reason
that the future is unknown to them too and because they can, thanks to the channelling of
their communication towards decisions, cancel these determinations and correct them in
favour of other goals at almost any time and independently of deliberately invented
“strategic” considerations.
Fixing the organisation on a future, which is, in whatever form at all, always its
future, makes the organisation attractive both for its members and for society watching it.

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We seek employment in and through organisations, because we can in that way reduce
the uncertainty of the future or, respectively, replace it through the uncertainty of the
organisation’s future, which is possibly better, because manageable in the self-integrating
collective of the watchers. And in their social environment, all non-members of the
organisation accept it, because only in this way can it be assured that tomorrow too there
will still be possibilities for spiritual counselling from churches, provision of goods and
services from businesses, treatment of the sick from hospitals, education from schools
and warfare from the military. In this form, society accepts the importunities of organised
behaviour and in this form the organisation orders, not least, society itself as well. It is
hence not surprising, that society also takes organisation’s offer of order seriously in
forms which overtax organisation, for instance, for securing what is taxable, for securing
jobs or for securing chances of increasing income and wealth, even, in fact, for the dream
of a being able to plan society.
However, society and individual interactions intervening in the organisation’s offer of
order does not mean that we would lose sight of the difference the organisation makes in
society and vis-à-vis interaction. Admiring its order and capacity for collective action can
at any time tip into criticism of the hierarchy. Being ready to rely on its capacity for
reaching collectively binding differentiations always parallels dissatisfactions with its
bureaucratic and undemocratic structures – as if we could also have differentiations, if we
secured them recursively through assuring uncommitted participation from everyone.
Each society not least ensures that there are social buffers between the demands of the
working world over typifying communication and the rest of society’s ideas about
acceptable forms of communication, which are often not compatible with such typifying
(Udy 1959, 1970, 1990). In tribal societies, men returning from the bloody business of
hunting are, first of all, cooled off in a quarantine station outside of the camp, before they
come into contact with women, children and old people again. In the working societies of
modern times, there is the institution of going to the pub, meanwhile rendered civilised as
the “blue hour”, during which men, and increasingly women, can tell the heroic stories
about what they would like to have experienced at work, which no-one believes at home.
And if anyone finds the heroic stories too taxing, they can combine their evening errands
with a stroll around the shops, which is equally well suited to rediscover themselves as
sovereign over their own decisions, something they lost sight of in dealing with their
superior. Extending and deregulating businesses’ opening hours falls in with this need
and with the transformation of the “chill out” into an act of consuming.

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Organisation is order in the sense specified, namely in the sense of observing it

establish itself and, for that very reason, in the possibility of its being cancelled.
However, organisation’s order does show, perhaps in contrast to interaction’s order, that
the operations of form amounting to cancellation or compensation cannot be achieved at
one blow, in the framework of a stroke of the pen. Underlying each of these orders is a
more or less comprehensible number of communications, which justify structures of
expectation and are confirmed by structures of expectation reaching far beyond the
respective order, namely into the order of society. That is why observing contingency, the
possibility-of-being-otherwise of a form is one thing, cancelling it another. And that is
why observing the possibility of a form, for instance, the founding idea of an
organisation, is one thing and establishing it another. The history of revolutions, just as
that of the capital markets, is also a history of more or less successful attempts to get rid
of organisations of the state or of private enterprise respectively, that is, more elegantly
expressed, to factor in exit options for them, as soon as they have installed themselves
(Selznick 1952; Jensen 1993). We shall come back to organisation’s order in section 4.7.
The overburdening of interaction by society’s order and the more or less radical
difference organisation’s order can set, may already be enough to account for society
having sufficient cause to protest against itself. We can hence foresee also in society’s
order, alongside interaction, organisation and society as a whole (we will be coming back
to that directly), an order of protest and then we always talk about a social movement or
about a protest movement too, when communications appear, to which a protest against
society lends a profile, which, interestingly, at least presupposes the same society being
simultaneously accepted as condition for the possibility of protest.
Protest movements, in this sense, range from revolts and peasants’ uprisings to the
classical examples from modern society, namely workers’ movements, women’s
movements, peace movements and ecological movements, yet are meant to include less
welcome manifestations like racist movements, fundamentalist movements or movements
hostile to foreigners. Recently there have even been protest movements that protest
against themselves: we can describe the globalisation movement as a movement
appearing in the two mutually inimical forms of criticism of globalisation and of the
reform movement, yet wanting in both forms the same thing, the democratically secured
order of world society, about which we do not exactly know, if it is not identical with
today’s world society constituted of nations (Tilly 2004).
Just as organisation, protest movements too do not depend on those present.
Differently from organisation they do not, however, arrange to reach those absent through

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the formal condition of membership, but rather do so through the attractivity of the
protest itself, that is, through turning the reasons why into scandals, through the vision of
a better society and through the feelings of community resulting from ritualising and
already staging, right now in anticipation, the possibility of a better society (including
invoking feelings, which, as shown above, result from the intensification of expectations
into demands). They have their degree of freedom in the protest, their conditions in its
justification. Just like organisations, protest movements depend on reaching those absent
stigmergetically, that is, via an environment which animates sufficiently many
individuals, typically a mostly indeterminate number, to subscribe to the protest’s
motives and its form of expression (Grassé 1959; Bonabeau/Dorigo/Theraulaz 1999).
That purpose is served by texts we read when we turn against the same thing, just as do
chains of light, which we can join, and supporting payments, which not only help but also
put our own motives to the test.
On the other hand, it is true that protest movements order communication through
society as something we can climb into and out of again. As a rule, we take care of our
children or our parents parallel to the protest; we go to work, feed ourselves, travel and
read other books from those of the movement. The other possibilities remain attractive,
although they take place in the society we are protesting against. We can indeed then
decide, whether our own parents, some colleagues, particular destinations or forms of
nourishment actually participate in exactly that misery we are protesting against, but, as a
rule, we will not protest against everything, and we do not for the reason that we would
have to protest against our own protest. That is why we suggest setting down the form of
protest as follows:
That means the society we are protesting against is simultaneously affirmed, welcomed
and confirmed as the one to which we owe our own motives, our encounters with like-
minded others and the prospect of improvement (Adorno 1981). Describing the protest
takes place in a space opened up by the acknowledgement of our own circumstances, for
example, by describing these circumstances for what they are when seen from our own
perspective. We communicate our protest with a sidelong glance at the affirmation, which

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allows not only finding our own protest good, but also finding the society good, that
furnishes forms for protesting against it.
It may be attractive for a while to look for forms of protest, which are so radical that
the exterior of affirmation can be blacked out (for example, engaging in a terrorist
organisation), or also for forms of protest capable of being linked to affirmation so easily,
that we can live with them without the constant suspicion, we are not serious (for
example, riding a bicycle). In each case, the form of the protest movement makes sure,
that the protest against society takes place in society and is hence an option for ordering
society itself. The protest makes sure, that society is complete, as Luhmann probably
would formulate it: it now controls the possibility of its own negation as well (Benjamin
1986; Luhmann 1981b). For its part, negation has, however, to be communicated; it is an
operation by observers of the first order, who reckon, in their communicating, with
observers of the second order, the like-minded, opponents and journalists, and hence
commit themselves to society just like everyone else. But that is exactly what protest
does indeed aim at: it protests against society, in order to change it, not quit it.
Finally, the order of society itself. It epitomises the form of the social and in society
once again appears in this form among the other forms of the social itself, because the
condition of society being continued, of the social, can itself only be formulated in this
way. In each specific form, in an interaction, an organisation or a protest movement,
reflecting on the possibility of continuing communication always comes along too, as the
thesis has it, under unspecific conditions, that is, ones still to be specified. We observe
communication being limited by constellations of presence and absence, by the condition
of membership or by the blinkers of protest – and wish we could go on communicating
under other conditions. And the other way round, we discover that we cannot do what we
want with those present, that not even membership allows intervening fully and that
protest gets stuck half way – and contributes to a society, which meanwhile goes on
communicating and, as a concomitant horizon of other possibilities, does not let itself be
simply negated.
Society’s form inside the order of society is hence the how communication itself is
marked, differentiated form its indeterminate exterior, which plays a role in all specific
forms of the social only, but all the same, as exterior of the respective binary form:

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Or perhaps it is:
In this form, the indeterminate itself becomes, as concomitant exterior of communication,

an argument, that is, itself becomes an observation delineating the range of choice among
possible communications. According to the situation in which we find ourselves, and
according to the interlocutor we are dealing with, this argument can fascinate or horrify.
Society means operating in the space of a differentiation, which is indeterminate as long
as no communication is happening. Moments arise in communication, which make it
clear, that we are communicating but could also desist, and that we are for exactly this
reason moving in a space of possibilities, which do not exhaust the space of possibilities,
but let it go along too as an indeterminate world. It is only in this moment, that is, only
when looking at a society, which for this very reason appears as invisible as it is
overwhelming, does communication itself become visible as a degree of freedom, about
which no one knows who introduced it (as in the case of the world and of life, it is, with
communication too, a matter of a unique invention), but about which all argue as to how
it is to be stipulated.
This is the point of connection for all kinds of religions, which already know, but then
have to designate, who opened up or, respectively, revealed the indeterminate space,
without that enabling them to establish anything other than options of human
communication, which have repeatedly to prove themselves all over again in the face of
this indeterminate situation. This is why the theologians know better than anyone how to
designate something that at the same time has to remain indeterminate. The individuality
of an individual, the intentionality of action, the in-between of inter-subjectivity or the
risk of acknowledgement can, however, also be applied as needed. Here we presume a
sort of source of communication, without thinking it possible that indeterminacy itself is
quite enough to provide communication with motives for describing how it can possibly
prolong itself (Waldenfels 1994). This is because it is only then that communication
observes itself and will find what it needs.

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In tribal societies, what is indeterminate attracts attempts to control it by magic, in

advanced civilisations it triggers utopian schemes and in present day society it adopts the
form of insight into the future’s uncertainty. And according to situation and interlocutor,
this argument can be related, from as far away as possible, to society as a whole and,
from as close as possible, to the situation and the interlocutor themselves. People suspect
that arguing like this is the intellectual’s stock-in-trade, whether they appear as shaman
and magician, as humanist and scholar or as revolutionary and trend researcher. Each
case concerns reflecting communication’s indeterminacy into communication and
confronting communication with the outright need for continuity by unbalancing it
(Fuller 2005). If we ask, how then can this need be handled every time, certain specific
possibilities can and must be named, which in turn call other intellectuals, not satisfied
with all that, onto the scene. What is indeterminate can be determined in many ways, but
throughout it never quite loses the character of indeterminacy.
Now, it is interesting, that this overall determining of society as a form of the social, is
exploited, as an indeterminate possibility for continuing communication, semantically by
intellectuals of all colours and, however, at the same time structurally by society itself.
The intellectuals’ unsettling argument has its pendant in society’s various forms of
difference, in which what is indeterminate is accepted as such, localised and mirrored so
often, that it can be reached from every structurally determined form of society. In the
last few decades, various directions of research in sociology have described four such
forms of difference: tribal society, empires, advanced civilisations, and modern society
(Schimank 2000; Luhmann 1997: chap. 4). In individual cases, these forms cut across
each other, but, with regard to addressing and localising what is not determined to use it
for communication, they can be differentiated exactly enough. That also goes historically.
These four forms make a particular historical progression is unmistakable; conversely,
however, our historical consciousness has got used to considering simultaneous what is
not as conceivable and factual, so that we know how far the communicative possibilities
of tribal society, of empires and of advanced civilisations persist among us.
In tribal society, our own tribe is determinate and all other tribes are not. We know
they exist and we consider the other tribes’ particular forms of living barbaric and every
form of warlike confrontation, economic cheating and abducting of women justified.
Nevertheless, our most exact knowledge about the danger of boundaries, the possibility
of infection, the need for conjuration and how sensitive marking out transitional
situations and stations is, all of which together amount to a dramatics of practical, social
and temporal differentiations, where the communication of things differentiated from

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each other is less hindered than much rather orchestrated (Leach 1976). That our own
tribe is determined not only secures this, but endangers it also, because what our tribe
differs from is too indeterminate.
In an empire, a “Reich”, the centre of power is determined religiously, economically,
politically and not least bureaucratically, and the chance of building in gradations,
including the possibility of shifting the borders due to further conquests, renders the
periphery all the more indeterminate the further we progress outwards. We act in the full
awareness of our own power and we know how this power is acknowledged throughout
the empire, yet we assume, both rulers and subjects, that power ends at the border of the
empire, hence becomes impotent. In this form it can be reflected back into the empire
again, in order to find out how we can evade power, how we can subvert it or how we can
mount a resistance likely to succeed, and naturally also, how we can build power up
again. With the last of these, for example, creating addresses on the periphery can be
decisive, ones reachable for our own communications in the dimensions we consider
important and ones that, for their part, order the periphery with regard to the centre that
speaks to it (Dobbins 2003).
In advanced civilisations, our own respective social level, the level of the nobility, the
clergy and the peasants, certainly later of the bourgeoisie too, is indeterminate from the
perspective of all individuals and from that of each individual level. We know how to
behave as nobility, as priest or as peasant. However, we deem the others’ behaviour as
much remarkable as incomprehensible. The bourgeoisie is the level untypical in this
regard and it explodes the schema and hence the society’s form of differentiation, and
does comes upon the idea first that we can also then imitate the behaviour of another
level, when, beyond just laughing at the others as usual, we seriously mean it. To become
typified individually, we have to stop resembling the others in our own level any more,
yet all we have to do is copy selectively what we can use. The bourgeoisie begins by
imitating the nobility and then, however, introduces, with increasing uncertainty over the
question of what its identity is, the possibility of imitating the peasants and the workers as
well, reaching a high point in the Biedermeier idyll, which amalgamates the behavioural
forms of the nobility (social life), the peasants (bound to the soil), trade (local loyalties)
and the workers (industriousness) into a scarcely very durable form.
In the advanced civilisation of a stratified society, social inequality hence only means,
that we know the behavioural pattern by which to orientate ourselves - or not to.
Communication between the levels is limited to a few forms (the lord and his coachman,
the lady and her gardener, the duke out hunting and the girl gathering mushrooms in the

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woods), which are soon not enough any more, as society becomes more complex, and we
have to know how we can deal with teachers, judges and pharmacists, and, the other way
round, with schoolchildren, accused people and customers, without treating them
according to the behavioural patterns of incompatible levels.
But in an advanced civilisation, we naturally also communicate about two things,
about what is determinate for our level and what is not for the other, and we bring along
cosmological notions describing how one fits in with the other, they being, however,
unknown to each other and allowed to remain so. Karl Marx’s theory of the capitalist
class society is a remarkable outgrowth from this social form of advanced civilisation, as
it differentiates two classes, both of which, in a Hegelian manner, derive their
determining factors from their respective counterpart (the proletarian as non-capitalist,
the capitalist as non-proletarian), and lose sight of all other classes, above all of the
consuming, voting, managing and self-generating bourgeoisie.
What should additionally be noted is how from the beginning (Babylon) the social
form of the city cuts somewhat across society’s large scale and dominating forms of
differentiation, yet fulfils the schema of the binary form of determinacy and
indeterminacy precisely. Plat already discovers in his dialogue Politeia, that empirical
variety (equalling indeterminacy?) abides the necessity of ascertaining its just order (“To
each his own!”) only with difficulty (Politeia 427ff.). But it is only Max Weber, who first
brings up the point that challenge of but also the achievement of urban life consists in
strangers being able and having to live here with each other, in complete contrast to
relations in the tribe, the clan and the feudal hierarchies (Weber 1958). And only the
concept of the ecology of the city, which Chicago city sociology develops in the 1920s
(Burgess/McKenzie/Park 1967), formulated first of all how the social order of city
defines itself via local and functional neighbourhoods, markets and news networks
(rumours, stories, mass media), which combine perfectly with the fact that the city’s
order as a whole is indeterminable.
Hence the city also is a social order, which establishes and cancels itself. We engage
with it communicatively, that is, in our behaviour, in our observations and in our feelings,
because we tolerate living together with strangers and the way we do it, but only as long
as certain forms and rituals, described as civilised, are to hand and permit getting to know
the strangers. However, by contrast too, it then counts as particularly cultivated to treat
acquaintances as strangers again in specific respects, for example, with reference to their
political preferences, their income, their taste in art, the intensity of their faith and their
erotic inclinations. Monotheistic religions are invented, so that city-dwellers, certain

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pariahs excluded, can come together for acts of worship, which do not recall the gods of
tribal society and the ancestors of clans (Weber 1958). And queuing at the bread shop, at
bus stops and at box offices is invented so that we can tolerate situations shared together
without having to find out if the other is friend or foe. It is quite enough to be able to treat
them as strangers, whose origins are cosmopolitan and hence indeterminate and the
conditions for whose staying here are municipally determined (with liberal spaces for
action and excluding marginal groups) (Stichweh 1992).
In its social form, the city is something like the form of society re-entering into
society. That is because the city renders indeterminate what tribes, clans, centres and
social levels have just been getting into order, whilst other things are newly determined
(trade and transport, education and culture, career and individuality), which hence start
looking for their indeterminate exteriors in modern society, as it is called, perhaps for that
reason (Tilly 1992: 54ff.). With the city, the binary form of being determined and
undetermined becomes so much of a fractal, a self-identical and multiply scalable
structure of society, that city and society can finally establish themselves as
undetermined, although every individual expectation of expectation capable of
structuring a possible communicative event, that is, connecting it with others, is always
and fundamentally determined. In other words, city and society are treated as modern,
that is, as the mode, determined case by case, of their overall undetermined possibilities.
Every communication, every interaction, every organisation, every protest begins to
participate in this modernity and to cultivate it in the specific bounds of the respective
form as a welcome resource for always being determined anew themselves.
Scarcely anything could, however, be more misleading than consequently
understanding modern society, through its difference, for instance, to a feudal or
traditional society, as indeterminate, as a pure reservoir for realising unknown
possibilities, however much theories of progress and decadence do reckon with just that.
In actual fact, modern society has also to be understood as a social form, which
establishes and again cancels itself on both sides of form, on the determined interior and
the undetermined exterior. Only it does this differently from tribal society and from
advanced civilisations.
At the latest since Max Weber, modern society has been understood as a society,
which differentiates itself functionally into various social systems, into politics,
economies, learning and arts, law and religion, education and mass media, for example,
which treat themselves in each case as determinate and have to allow everything else to
go along as something, from their perspective, indeterminate. Possibilities for

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determining the social form of society are exploding, and society is flooded with
political, economic, scientific (technocratic), aesthetic, legal, religious, paedagogical and
journalistic offers of order, all of which, however, have to realise sometime or other, that
their exterior is indeterminate and that they can only be surprised at how everyone else
treats their offers, should they take any notice of them anyway. One degree of freedom
treads on the heels of another positivistically, as we, in that case, like to say too, only
they have to find out then, that, as if by a phantom hand, stipulations recolonise form’s
interior and on form’s exterior new spaces for action are already beckoning again.
We will come back to the various media of communication, which now intervene in
selecting and motivating it, because communication’s increasing improbability cannot be
managed in any other way, in the next chapter. In the frame of describing the social form
of society, we only need here to point out how society as a whole now feels like Jean-
Paul Sartre on a walk through Venice: the side of the canal that beckons every time is
always the other (Sartre 1964). Every time society is determined through one of its
systems of functioning, that is seen as a candidate for determining it as a whole, whilst
every individual system of functioning knows that only and exclusively from not
knowing its own future, in which the operations of all other systems will have a decisive
hand, enables it to derive the connective operations by which it communicates, from
decisions, quantifications, insights, works of art, legal verdicts, dogmas of faith,
educational experiments and offers of entertainment.
In the framework of so-called postmodernism we have learned to make the
indeterminate nature of all other systems of functioning into an argument incorporated
into determining every individual system of functioning. Subsequently, the heading of
arbitrariness has come to enjoy great popularity. Nothing could, however, be more
misleading. That is because being indeterminate or arbitrary is also, of course, only one
side of a binary form, the other side of which is being determinate, and, in fact,
continuing to be determinate as an increasingly subtle social calculation within the
individuals systems of functioning. That we as observers can leap from system to system,
pausing now here now there, does not mean that every individual system of functioning
operates as much on the hop as the observers do. But it becomes more difficult to
describe it. That much has to be admitted. We are slowly and hesitantly weaning
ourselves off confusing the differentiation of society in systems of functioning with an
objective order of society, and we are not only beginning to grasp and to describe how
practical, social and temporal calculations are interconnected and interwoven in each
individual system of functioning, but also to factor in systematically our own role of

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observer, equally deconstructive as it is constructive, when we deal with the offers of

order from the systems of functioning. Sometimes we, therefore, assume that
differentiating the systems of functioning in modern society all too objectively has
meanwhile retreated before differentiating society into networks. That we will have to
see. And we will have to find out what it means.
For the time being, we can assume that what emphasis networks enable is that the
social form of society has, on the basis of the difference between communication’s being
determined and undetermined, its pendant, its correlate and perhaps even its principle in
the describing of observer positions. As varied as they are, these are increasingly
knowledgeable in demonstrating how their being so determined does not derive from a
nature or substance of their own, but from their respective counterpart, which they have,
however, to posit - there is no simpler way - as just as undetermined as themselves. In
this social form of society, the communications concept we have worked out comes into
its own as a concept for describing how being determined and undetermined relate.
Whether that means anything, and what it could mean for the future of a functionally
differentiated society, we will see.
What has to be underlined is, however, once again that, with this sketch of social
forms of communication within society’s order, we are not concerned with working out a
theory of society. We are much rather concerned with describing these forms as
communication’s conditions for simultaneously entering and exiting itself. What is not
determined has to be brought along, because we could not move otherwise. Determining
something is, every time, already to stipulate a degree of freedom, where we often all too
rapidly do not notice any more how it is set up. And determining something, as in
interaction, organisations, protest movements, cities or society, is, as always, to be seen
as sequential or simultaneously as positive and negative poles of communication’s
attraction. Hegel’s unhappy consciousness is the correlate of an unhappy society, for
which every single time something is successfully determined, determining other things
immediately becomes at least just as attractive. With that, and this observation is also
infiltrating everywhere, we only get over the hill consciously, but not communicatively.
That is because praise for every single time something is determined immediately arouses
the suspicion, it might not be quite so praiseworthy, whilst only I, corrected by my sub-
consciousness (if I only knew it), know why I am happy with what makes me happy.

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3.4 Self-description
Even on the general level, on which we move in the frame of a sociological theory of
communication, it is obvious that the conceptualisations we use, not to mention the
perspective from which we observe the forms of society, are not identical with the way
this society describes itself. Of course, it is part of our theory that we maintain and try to
show via examples that society observes itself as we reconstruct it here with the aid of
our conceptualisations. And it is a part of our theory that we maintain and try to make
plausible with the aid of examples, that this self-observation of society can, through the
way it connects up its communications, be demonstrated and used for explaining the
corresponding communications. But that does not change anything about the fact that the
consultable texts, where, outside of sociology, society develops its self-observation into
self-description, do look different from sociology’s texts.
This difference between society’s texts and sociology’s needs explanation itself, when
we take into account that sociology’s texts also, as they are produced by erudition in the
sociologists’ society, are texts from society and not to be located in an imaginary exterior.
At the same time, here we do not have to be overwhelmingly interested in why
sociology’s texts read differently from other texts, where society gives information about
itself. For this purpose, it may be enough to know that sociology repeatedly tries to put
the same question about the possibility of social order, which moves society on the level
of attempting to answer it, as a precise question, to which the answer is simply not a
given of itself (Eisenstadt/Curelaru 1976). That corresponds to the function of learning in
society, which does not actually consist in exactly and objectively knowing something
that others only know subjectively and inaccurately, but in formulating something as a
question and a problem, in order to extend the range of possible answers in this way and
with that the evolutionary potential of society. Contrary to every ideology of expertise
sometimes addressed to learning, it does not increase society’s certainty but its
uncertainty, but it does so methodically, that is, by clarifying possible techniques of
searching for meaningful questions and conceivable answers, and theoretically, that is, by
an interest in what is not true. This co-develops with and parallels the interest in truth,
that is, in extending insight onto other objects, and amounts to an interest in assured
possibilities of being wrong (Luhmann 1990; de Bono 1970; Derrida 1990a).
What do society’s texts describe, however, when they thematise society? And above
all: what at the texts, in which society thematises itself? Where does society’s description
of itself take place? At the opening of this section, we so cheerfully deemed it different

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from sociology’s description and to be understood as a form elaborated by erudition,

namely tested methodically and theoretically. Where do we look, if we want to know how
a society describes itself outside of its systems of knowledge?
The circumstance, that we must have recourse to theory for the answer to this
question, is not lacking a certain irony. The very concept of self-description is, in fact,
certainly not one, that might lend itself to being identified in society without any
problem. We have to reach back to the theory of society, in order to be able to formulate
the mere assumption that society describes itself, to say nothing of the question, where
and how it does that (Luhmann 1997: chap. 5). And in the framework of our theory we
have to introduce an assumption as to why it does that.
We assume that self-descriptions take place, when the form of differentiation, within
which differentiating and denoting social forms takes place, is described for itself. In
other words, we do not already consider every incidence of the word “society” in press
texts, official notices, conversations in the confessional or at parties, or artists’
complaints to be society’s descriptions of itself, meaning we only need then to tot up how
often that appears in which contexts and on the part of which authors and addressed to
whom. Instead, we look for a thematisation of the form of society itself, which differs
demonstrably from any in a sociological text like the one at hand.
In the second place, self-descriptions, we assume, differ from sociological descriptions
in that they describe the form of society not as contingent but as necessary. They reckon
with an identity maintained as self-explanatory where sociology reckons with a
difference needing explanation (Luhmann 1995: 623ff.). Consequently, we ascribe to
society’s self-description the function of determining, as location and source of
determinacy, the same form, that in society provides society repeatedly with new
indeterminacy –namely with degrees of freedom still to be first stipulated - and of
confirming that form and maintaining it. We ascribe to that self-description the function
of not opening up the space of differentiation, in order to be able to try out as succession
of new determinations, but of delimiting and closing off, in order to clarify and normalise
the determinations, the circumstances, events and states with which it makes sense to
reckon and with which it does not. Self-description, if we might formulate it so
paradoxically, is stipulating without the attendant degrees of freedom.
However, we can then ask precisely how the form of a differentiation can be described
and verified as identity? The general answer to this question is that form is determined as
identity in the moment it is determined to be the interior of a further, new form. That,
however, does not bring us any farther, as this only repeats and reinforces the game of

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indeterminacy on a new level, that of opening up a further space for differentiation. Let
us look, then, at the concrete case we are dealing with here. How can the form of
differentiating between determining and differentiating, an arguably general, concrete
case, be fixed as identity, without risking introducing new indeterminacies? The answer
can only be, that we have to try to transform the variables of the equation
into constants, in order to observe indications in the context of such and distinctions in
the context of such and so to consider them determined on the basis of them being in
themselves indeterminate because replaceable.
In the mathematical notation of the form calculation, we transform variables into
constants by distinguishing them from themselves. The distinction is then constant, whilst
what it distinguishes continues to be variable. When we find indications considered as
determinate due to their being replaceable by themselves and distinctions where the same
applies, we are dealing, as the thesis has it, with self-descriptions by society.
And as they that seek shall find, two forms of self-description do, in actual fact, strike
us, for which what we here assume does apply on the level of communication in general:
namely, the message, produced by mass media, and the value, produced by culture. So
we maintain, that society describes itself by not, as it were, producing messages and
believing in values, that would be far too indefinite, but by cultivating the form of the
message and the form of the value, both respectively determined by the way
differentiation’s terms can interchange. Setting out culture and the mass media in the two
forms
and

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we, therefore, consider the forms, in which society itself describes the conditions for
extending its communication, an, in fact, as identical with this society and as self-
explanatory, if not even necessary.
This is, we further maintain, matched up with the form of communication, because
culture allows declaring the space of differentiations to be identical with itself and to be
where communication finds its socially stipulated continuation, whilst the mass media
allows considering all determinations used in a society for designating circumstances,
events and states to be appropriate to these circumstances, events and states. At the same
time, the differentiation between culture and mass media, capable of being intensified in
some societies as far as opposition, even mutual intolerance, allows losing sight of how
the space of differentiation verbalises the determinations and the determinations test out
the space of differentiation. Culture has to manage, if it is to function as self-description,
not to risk itself by determining concrete states, but always to reside only in the space of
values, which become indeterminate, as soon as we look at them more closely, and in this
way, however, only refer to other values, which we then consider at first glance more
durable, until we look more closely at them too. And mass media have to manage to
produce messages, which are always only surprising with regard to something already
determined, yet never with regard to something indeterminate revealing itself within
them. That is, values may not appear as messages, and messages not as evaluated.
Messages can, therefore, be bound only to facts and values only to concepts of faith.
In this form, they describe how communication swings from one determination to another
and from one non-determination to another, without ever taking the risk of letting one
become relevant for the other. We can push the game of this self-describing so far that
mass media report on culture, and culture underlines the value of mass media. But with
that, we risk discovering facts, which are not facts, and promoting values without any
value.
Both these forms of self-description achieve consolidation by taking care that each of
them only refers to itself. That is why we could also speak of “programmes” of
communication, hence of prescriptions for regulating how their operations are continued
(von Foerster 2003: 211ff.). Each message, as is the makeup of its form, makes people
curious about further messages, regardless of whether it concerns reports, advertising or
entertainment in the mass media’s sub-programmes (Luhmann 1996: 53ff., 85ff., 96ff.).

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Messages about party conference resolutions, tax increases, corrections of profit

forecasts, closing of opera houses and legal verdicts are unequivocal in referring to what
they report and at the same time unequivocal as regards to how further messages allow
determining what it is they mean. Will the government maintain the resolutions; will the
tax increases be enough to balance the budget; will jobs be able to be kept on along with
the reduced profit forecasts; will citizens again go to the theatre more; are the legal
verdicts sufficiently well-founded, in order to re-establish confidence in the law? All
these sort of questions only present themselves, because every message is determined by
what it reports.
The same goes for advertising and entertainment. All advertising is determined with
regard to providing now distinctions for consuming food, clothes, cars and travel
destinations, which, already tomorrow, will certainly have to be either confirmed and
defended or exchanged for other distinctions. And all entertainment ties a knot held taut
by us already knowing now that we will be entertained regardless of what ensues. If that
does not succeed, we are not dealing with advertising and entertainment. That is how
tautological a self-description has to be.
The same form of self-reference applies to values. Whoever has seen one value has
seen them all, which interestingly does not by any means signify them being utterly
arbitrary. Values are binding because they are arbitrary, as they maintain themselves to
the extent that they can be invoked without having to be tested (Luhmann 1997: 340ff.).
Values serve to structure a culture in the sense of an order of preferences, so that we
know what is considered important and what not, without, however, by that wanting to
exclude being, as and when, able to consider what is less important more important. This
mobility and flexibility is the important thing, not the impenetrable normative validity,
for which morality and ethics have then to set about suing, at the price of working out the
contingency of values.
Whoever says message, they stress the identity of what can count in communication as
worth designating. That is why nothing in a society is more interesting than rumour,
story, gossip, novelty. Whoever is interested in these, is interested in society and hence in
all others. Whoever is not interested in these, has to be branded an odd case, hence
marking the boundaries of communication, and so becomes conspicuous as an individual
only imperfectly integrated.
And whoever says value, they stress the identity of what differentiates a
communication from what others consider self-explanatory. We do not, therefore, know
yet what the matter can subsequently be, but we know what gestures of self-assertion and

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defence we have to reckon with. We know what is considered, in cases of doubt, right
and what wrong (Parsons 1973). We include ourselves in a culture by behaving as if we
considered self-explanatory what it considers as such. In cultures’ eyes, whoever
questions the self-explanatory, is not asking a question but making themselves into a
stranger (Simmel 1950; Schütz 1943/44), because any other reactions are not possible in
the framework of identity concepts.

4. Meaning
4.1 Functions
The previous chapter was concerned with the structures of communication. This one
concerns functions ensuring that communication can fulfil its function of reproducing
itself. Whilst structures relate one operation to another, so that commonalities and
differences can be established - in any case, however, something like a network is
produced – functions concern relations between variables, which, following Alfred
Korzybiski once again, postulate respectively, that determining a variable and
transmitting it via function brings another variable along with it (Korzybski 1958: 133ff.).
Whilst communication’s function (singular) aims at reproducing it, its functions (plural)
consequently aim at second order determinations, which respectively designate variables,
but leave open how these variables are filled in each individual case.
Here, we are leaving the level of first order operations, which we had already
augmented in the last chapter by our reflections on programmes of self-description,
producing a second order conclusion, and come to the level of communication’s re-
entering itself. That is a second order level, where communication is constantly
confirming its own possibilities, for one thing, and, for another, also extending them,
however, as it examines the possibilities and their structures already deployed and tested
for further connections. We talk about the meaning of communication, in order to
describe the results of the relations these functions establish between communicative
events. And we continue to maintain that this meaning is also, in each case, only
presented operatively, that is, dependent on how an observer actually produces each
respective relation as they let themselves be observed by another observer.
Just as little as we did with its primary function or with its structures, with the
meaning of communication we are also not dealing with substances, essences, things or
events preceding it, things communicable in Heinz von Foerster’s sense, but exclusively
with events ,which produce themselves and with things, that have, of themselves, proved
themselves as recursive reference points (von Foerster 1980 and 2003: 261ff.). Talking
about substances and essences, including asserting them as externalities, only maintains
itself communicatively and can, therefore, be observed to see in which situations and
with reference to which substances and essences it maintains itself.
We, therefore, denote the conditionalitys and results of communication’ s functions
operating as meaning, because, with that, we can link up with a tradition reaching from

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Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schütz to Niklas Luhmann and Karl E. Weick, which has
worked with the idea of every communication (and every conscious or merely perceptive
thought) denoting something determined on the horizon of possible references to
something undetermined, yet determinable (Husserl 2001; Schütz 1967; Luhmann 1990;
Weick 1995; Rustemeyer 2001). This idea is isomorphic to Shannon’s original insight,
that is, on defining information as selecting (and with that determining) a message from
an area of possible other messages. Hence, meaning is that operation, which not only
determines something, as does expectation, so that it can continue somehow, but beyond
that establishes relations, which refer the space of what is possible back to every
individual possibility and every possibility to the space of what is possible. Meaning
interconnects what is determined with what is not in a way bringing determined,
individual possibilities and undetermined, other possibilities simultaneously into reach. In
this way, meaning is the “ form of ordering human experience”, as Niklas Luhmann
declared (Luhmann 1990), and we have to leave open, whether what we observe as
establishing meaning for communication and consciousness plays a structural and
functional role outside of this human world.
Karl E. Weick has shown in his work on Sensemaking in Organisations and on
Making Sense of the Organisation (Weick 1995, 2000), how this concept of meaning,
oriented according to the horizon of what is possible, can be made fruitful for also
observing organisations by strictly noting how communication and perception, work and
decision making maintain themselves in a world of products. Technologies and
processes, which is itself not meaningfully constituted and hence operates outside of a
boundary drawn by communication and perception.
In the concepts of the form calculation, the difference between structures of
expectation and communication’s structures of meaning lies in structures of expectation
being satisfied with using the space of possibilities opened by differentiating for
individual determinations also able to be exchanged in the space of these possibilities.
Yet, beyond the structures meaning functions also observe the form of this space of
possibilities, that is, reflect the form denoted by differentiating and a determination onto
the unmarked state on its exterior. This reflection, for its part, is carried out operatively,
that is, it happens in the framework of the set differentiation and of a determination as
marking of the concomitant possible indeterminacy of this framework.
On the one hand, that means that additional indeterminacy and uncertainty become
available communicatively, but that then does not also mean, on the other, that
communication has to develop additional techniques for absorbing uncertainty, which

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anchor communication more firmly in itself, while, and for the very reason that, they
open up a greater instability. It is then less probable that anything will happen at all, and
if it does, however, happen, it has waxed much more imperative by working through and
overcoming this improbability. We are here dealing with the notion of introducing
degrees of freedom for the purpose of stipulating the degree of freedom, yet we here
augment these with the idea of uncertainty absorption familiar from the theory of
organisation (March/Simon 1993: 186ff.; Crozier/Friedberg 1980; Luhmann 2000: chap.
6). This idea refers to communication’s capacity for increasing its own seductiveness and
power by including an accompanying reference to the uncertainty we would have to cope
with, if we do not accept the communication as offered.
In this chapter, we describe five functions of communication capable, in this sense, of
deriving meaning from the presentation of uncertainty and its absorption. It may be, that
the list of these five functions is incomplete, but here as well we are not concerned with
completing a model, but with making it plausible in the framework of testing it. These
five functions are system, person, media, network and evolution, which are seen
respectively as different forms of establishing relations between variables, where
determining one variable entails determining another variable, yet how a variable is
determined in an individual case remains undetermined and hence undeterminable.
System function relates reproduction and interference, person function attribution and
situation, media function selectivity and motivation, network function identity and
control and evolution function retention, selection and variation. Uncertainty is
respectively attributed to interference, situation, motivation, control and variation and
absorbing it to reproduction, attribution, selectivity, identity and retention.
We are not looking at precisely these five functions by chance and we are certainly not
by chance describing them as happens immediately above. With that, we are taking up
five theoretical offerings, the theory of systems, of attributions, of media, of networks
and of evolution, all of which are not formulated as theses on the function of
communication, but have, right there, one of their points. In other words, we are
assuming that what are certainly the most prominent offerings of theory in the field of
social science at present are also justified by the way they respond to problems of
phenomena and order in communication. Our model of communication hence provides a
reinterpretation of these offerings of theory and an attempt to make them, as forms
paralleling and also partially cutting across each other, but not reducible to each other,
fruitful for observing communication. It makes sense to look at these functions in the
context of what they achieve in ordering communication, yet it makes just as much sense

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to differentiate them from each other, lest we demand what one can achieve from an other
one.
Each of these functions individually has the structures of communication already
covered as its basis and its argument, without hence being committed to confirming these
structures as they have proved themselves up to now. Functions relate to structures
inductively, deductively and abductively and can, therefore, also lead to producing new
structures, albeit ones in a determined relation to the old ones. In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus logico-philosophicus (Wittgenstein 2001), it says under # 5.251: “A function
cannot be its own argument, whereas an operation can take one of its own results as its
base.” We relativise this insight for the case of communication. In the context of
communication, a function must be able to appear as its own argument, because
otherwise the framework of uncertainty absorption for every individual operation cannot
be deployed. With that, the function’s relation to the operation, but also the operation of
the function are both secured, and we can concentrate on observing what results its
operation leads to. The mathematical-logical formulation of this context sounds
complicated, yet we may rely on nothing being able to be more complicated than
communication allows. Time and time again, it is only a matter of being able to look at
which differentiations, which determinations, which degrees of freedom allow
themselves to be stipulated and which uncertainty allows itself to be absorbed.
4.2 Systems
The concept of systems has a long history, which, as Peter Fuchs has recently shown
once more (P. Fuchs 2001: 61ff.), can be traced back to Hippocrates and his description
of the kósmos as the human environment, was used by the physiologist Claude Bernard
in the 19th century as a correlate to describing the milieux internes of the organism, and
continued its career in the 20th century in connection with the proposition of the capacity
for self organisation in complex phenomena and the introduction of the computer as a
new object of research and new calculating apparatus. We do not have to go into that in
detail here (Baecker 2005c).
For our purposes, it is important that the concept of systems describes the capacity of
a phenomenon to reproduce itself in the context of this phenomenon’s capacity to cope
with interference. Systems are fundamentally functions receptive to errors (that is they
accept and deal with them), because they are able to recognise errors, to correct them and
in future to avoid rather than repeat them. Yet that does not, in addition, necessarily mean

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that they are constantly learning. It can also mean that they have learned to locate for
themselves a stable, ostensibly stable environment and forthwith insist on the art of not
learning, as a book title from Fritz B. Simon has it (F. Simon 1997, and, not surprisingly,
2004).
The function of systems has the following form:
Focussing systems’ functioning on dealing with disturbance is not unchallenged in the

literature. We frequently find a preference for systemic thinking rather than systems
theory, which connotes holding onto the conception of an environment understood
cosmologically and not to be reduced to its capacity for disturbance, because that way we
lose sight of the world as whole. And besides, in ecological thinking we often get the
impression that it is rather the systems that interfere and not perhaps their environment.
We respect these views, but draw attention to how a look at interfering systems presumes
that systems are identified in the environment where this interference makes a difference
– and then we are back with systems theory rather than a systemic premise, for which
differentiating, the difference of the context, provides the starting point and not the unity
or even the identity of the context. These two premises also become confused in the
literature, because the cognitive-theoretical focus of both can be found with the same
thinker, namely Gregory Bateson, and it is, therefore, not always clear that they can be
distinguished (Bateson 1972, 1979, Bateson/Bateson 1988).
In what follows, we will continue pursuing a differentialising premise and leave to one
side what is, to our way of thinking, rather more of an ideological interest in spelling out
each difference and each form backwards to regain a comprehensive unity. For us, this
differentialising premise is also justified by the fact that we simply could not talk about
form, structure, meaning and function, leaving aside communication, in any other way.
That is because each of these concepts presumes, that accompanying every determination
is something undetermined but determinable, and that determining it makes a difference
but does not, in fact, grasp the unity of the world (with respect to two examples, art and
architecture, Luhmann/Bunsen/Baecker 1990).

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For communication, the function of systems means a double relation between the
uncertainty of ever-possible interference, represented by the concept of “environment” on
one side, and on the other, the possibility of reproducing the system, anchored in dealing
with this uncertainty, and only in that. That means the function of systems assures
communication is reproduced, on condition that interfering with this communication
either destroys it (that is possible just as much physically as psychically and socially) or
are handled by it in favour of itself continuing, however variously.
An example can make clear what is meant. Let us take tourist, as described by Dean
MacCannell (1976, 1992). Tourists communicate among themselves by reducing the
multiplicity of the unknown, more or less exotic world to a certain amount of historical
and regional schemata conditioned by certain standards of transport, hotels and
gastronomy and by, in turn, furnishing this reduced world more or less opulently with
artefacts and sights and souvenirs. MacCannell points out that this happens in two
directions in modern society: in one, (most likely northern) urbanites explore a (as far as
possible southern) country; in the other, people from distant regions explore the centres
of affluence and power. In the following, we are referring above all to the first direction.
Here, a thematically secured system of communication establishes itself in schemata,
standards and artefacts, today increasingly in shopping and wellness, in which tourists
recognise each other by certain characteristics of clothing and behaviour and identify
each other and which we can investigate to see if and how the disruptions attributable to
the environment are coped with: poor beds, inedible food, monuments covered in
scaffolding, dirty streets, rude behaviour from the locals, bad guides, terrorist attacks and,
not least, the noisy behaviour of tourists from other origins. The uncertainty in
reproducing this system can be repeatedly concentrated on the question, whether people
can still relax under these conditions (or rather what can still count as relaxation under
these conditions), whilst their absorbing this uncertainty does then once again aim, given
exact knowledge of how likely disruptions are, at characteristics, which differentiate the
respective holiday area and hotel from all other holiday areas and hotels.
The function of systems describes if and how disruptions are faced or ignored,
reinterpreted and handled by adapting the meaning of tourist communication to them and
either changing destination or cognitively revising our own stock of expectations (we
enjoy the amusements) or asserting ourselves normatively (we complain about standards
not being maintained). That is why conversations at home about holiday destinations,
before and after, belong just as much to tourism as communication system as do
ecological demands on the water quality, ethical demands on the understanding of the

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locals burdened by tourism, new forms of travel literature and legal confrontations with
travel agents. All these are individual, thematic structures for testing and asserting
possible expectations of expectation, which reproduce communication, as long as this is
possible and with that constantly confirm the system as it engages with its environment
just as much they change it. Hence, the system, as a function of itself in engaging with a
changing environment, is only the same in never being the same (see above section 1.2).
Systems theory ahs developed its own concepts to describe a how systems function
(Luhmann 1997: 92ff., 2002). Possibly the most important of these is the concept of
boundaries. This points out that a system can only then reproduce itself by handling
interference, when it recognises vis-à-vis every communicative event, that is,
differentiates, whether this communicative event can be localised inside or outside the
boundaries of the system. Via the career of shopping in tourism, we can study nicely how
providing clothes, jewellery, watches and above all, the eternally recurring T shirt (in its
borderline status between clothing, souvenir and gag), which was initially located within
the consumer society (another example!) and outside of tourism’s boundaries, gradually
migrated into the latter, as first of all things exotic and then luxurious and finally
occasional and typical became objects tourists consume. So a boundary is characterised
by the fact that is has to exist, so that it can be shifted, crossed and followed. A lesser or
greater conflict is always bound up with that, as we can see when the conflict between
protecting the environment and tourism is precariously reconciled through the institution
of national parks, or where the family agrees about shopping on holiday perhaps before
dinner, but not after (because relaxing for one person is endangered when others relax by
shopping). Boundaries, then, do not, in fact, organise a world already existing materially,
but mark various things from the outset as belonging or not belonging to it.
A further concept describing the function of systems, is the concept f operational
closure, augmented by the concept of structural linkage, both suggested in the framework
of a theory of autopoietic systems generating themselves (Greek autos poíesis) from the
two neurobiologists Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela (1980 and 1998).
Here it is a question of systems not being able either to import or export their systems,
just as, being the paradigm for this, a brain or consciousness cannot think any thoughts to
outside of itself and interestingly cannot also import any, but has to do its own thinking.
If, in the framework of its schemata, standards and artefacts, tourism does not succeed in
accessing a phenomenon operationally, that is by differentiating it in its own stock of
meanings, it remains outside, however much an external observer might assume it would
have to be attractive for tourists. Tourists trips access farms, monasteries, space, potteries

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and beauty clinics operationally, whilst we cannot holiday in schools, jails, courtrooms,
factories and boardrooms, however great the not-always-exactly-tourist curiosity may
nevertheless be about them.
The concept of operational closing means here that we cannot reckon on a possible
holiday at these still unusual locations until complementary expectations are successfully
established in them, allowing residents and natives to be differentiated from tourists and
spectators and aligning communication with this difference and so making it possible
between them.
What describes the condition governing this narrowing and broadening of the
operational closure is the concept of structural linkage. With the help of this concept, we
look to see which structures enable the system to process certain structures of its
environment, without having, therefore, to integrate itself operatively with its
environment (because the concept of operational closure has excluded just that).
Organisms are, for example, connected to their physical environment structurally via
their food intake, in as far as they can physically process (digest) this food for energy.
However, they are not, therefore, forced to go on with the life of the organisms they
consume, as much as speculations of a religious type may exist to this effect. So, in our
example, hotels, restaurants, sights and souvenirs are structural connections allowing
tourists to reproduce their communication and, with that, to relate their world to the host
country’s environment, without having to live the life of this host country because of it.
They do not have to sleep and eat like their hosts; they can allot meaning to the host’s
monuments which deviates from what the latter offer, but possibly also includes it; and
they can take something back home, without having to take anything away from the
hosts; they can even offer the hosts opportunities for economic activity, which, in turn,
make it easier for them to cope with their environment as their land is accessed by
tourists.
A further pair of concepts for describing how systems function are differentiating
augmentally and differentiating internally. The former is intended to mean that a system
copes with ever more types of possible disruptions under ever more improbable
conditions in a way which reproduces the system, whilst the latter is meant to mean that
it, therefore, possibly differentiates sub systems in turn, which react to the disruptions
they perceive in the environment (a tautological formulation: because, by definition,
unperceived disruptions do not exist) by sharing out the work. In modern society,
differentiating tourism ever more sharply has resulted in ever more phenomena being
accessed by tourists successfully in a possibly even more disruptive world. For example,

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the culture of entertainment built into tourism means that a not inconsiderable potential
(including securing against redundancy by marking the entertainment itself) for variation
in shaping daily schedules is gained, which generates noise in a way compatible with
ever more otherwise disruptive noise factors in the environment simply because it drowns
out the latter. At the same time, this entertainment culture is an example for
differentiating internally, because we can distinguish it from more placid and independent
forms of planning a holiday as soon as it has acquires sufficient form, so that we have the
choice between hotels with and without entertainment.
Two final examples of concepts, which help to describe how systems function, are
complexity and rationality. Complexity is intended to mean, that the sense of a
communication can also be reproduced, when we have to see that it is highly selective
and can, therefore, only be combined with a very limited variety of other possibilities.
Complexity means, therefore, that we are not bothered any more about being able to
relate whatever communication we have managed to only a few other communications
and have to leave the incomprehensible remainder to its own devices. In the concept of
complexity, observers come to terms with being overtaxed by a world described as
complex. One of the forms of these terms, occasionally described as postmodern, lies in
accepting how description cannot be concluded in principle and can hence be augmented
and extended at any time, in as far as it is communicated under the condition of a world
understood as complex (Rorty 1989). That connects to a considerable broadening in the
handling of possible disruptions, because we do not have to allow ourselves to be
disturbed by very many circumstances any more, as long as they do not fulfil certain
criteria of sensitivity. On the contrary, we can devote ourselves relatively securely to
working on these criteria of sensitivity and extend them everywhere we believe we can
provide answers to disruptions. So we can, to stay with our example, work criteria of
durability into a form of tourism, as soon as it has been confirmed that this tourism is
accepted politically and economically, legally, religiously and morally and we can hence
mark out regions or branches or areas, which we are concerned to preserve perpetually,
without hence having to thematise straightaway entire countries, customs and cultures,
which have already fallen visibly victim to tourism.
It is interesting that this concept of complexity is then already a condition on using the
concept of rationality too, in as far as rationality can mean, as suggested by Niklas
Luhmann, that a particular communications system begins not only handling disruptions
from its environment as and when they occur, but beyond that factors in its own operating
as a cause of possible environmental changes, which then recoil on the system as

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disturbances (Luhmann 1997: 171ff.). That does not absolutely have to lead back to
causal constructions of the world, as these formulations imply, but can also suggest loose
or respectively structural linkages between system and environment. The decisive thing is
that the system develops observations, in which the difference between system and
environment is reflected and included as yardstick for selecting further operations.
Narrowing the function of systems down to relating reproduction to interference has, in
the context of this concept of rationality formulating how differentiating between system
and environment re-enters the system, the immediate purpose that we can observe and
articulate the reproductive conditions of the environment with the assumption that our
own system disrupts this environment, in order to test if and how the potential for
disturbance in our own system can be reduced.
In this way, mass tourism becomes rational, as it does not only reflect on its own
durability but also on dealing responsibly with the conditions governing that of its
environment and, when measured against that, does not, in fact, refrain from all
disruptions, but only those with reverse effects it has cause to fear or those which it
cannot prevent being attributed to it, as the case may be.
We can see that the purpose of communication, as described in the framework of
systems functioning, displays all the signs of similarity to itself, as it again concerns
setting what is determinate in relation to what is not, here in the form of reproduction in
relation to interference. Boundaries, closure, linkage, external differentiation, internal
differentiation, complexity and rationality are manifestations of this functioning of
systems, which allows producing ever new and different relations in the way
environmental variables relate to the system’s. In each individual case, doing that is a
question, as ever, of using and stipulating degrees of freedom, now, however, extended
by observing a space for action, which is opened up through connections between several
degrees of freedom.
4.3 Persons
We have up to now avoided explicitly introducing folk, people, individuals, subjects or

persons, in order not fall into the trap of a certain humanism, which ascribes a potential to
people and makes it impossible to observe in them what we want to understand and
describe as communication in action. We have instead spoken of observers, in order, on
the one hand, to be able to observe other complex entities too (social animals, distributed
artificial intelligence, public offices, firms, associations…) for possible communication,

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that is, for the introduction and stipulation of degrees of freedom and, on the other, in
order to be capable of astonishment over folk, people, individuals, subjects or persons, so
that we can attach theoretically directed observations, which do not arise straight out of
common sense by simply positing the possibility of communication.
We meanwhile know enough about communication to be able to imagine, that people
may bring to it a gift for communication, perhaps even a sociable instinct, a certain desire
not to be alone, as Erwin Moser describes in his children’s story The Lonely Frog, yet
cannot hence be held responsible for what it expects and demands of them in social
circumstances and more or less successfully attributes to them as their capacity for it.
When two people meet in our society, so much has already happened individually and
collectively, biographically and socially, that the situations of these two people have to be
described as and integral to demands they have to handle, as enjoyable or painful as may
be, rather than as resulting from them consciously engaging with each other and deciding
on a certain way of getting along. When teachers are confronted with their pupils,
managers with their staff, mothers with their babies, patients with their doctors, voters
with their politicians, television viewers with television broadcasts, saxophone players
with a jazz audience and partygoers with other partygoers, so much has already
happened, the game is so well afoot, that it does not make sense to attribute what happens
holus bolus to the participants’ intentions.
In actual fact, nobody does that either. Persons – and it is of them above all we want to
speak in what follows – are introduced to add options to attributions, that is, to equip
them with ambivalences and hence with the possibility of as much hesitating over as
deciding on how much of what is to be attributed for how long to what and in what form.
The concept of the person already makes that clear, as it derives from the Latin persona,
the death mask, and denotes the masks used by Roman patricians to help them carry
around their dead ancestors. A sort of observation has since schooled itself on this word
person, meaning mask. It assumes something behind the mask that can only be uncovered
and that, in front of the mask (Weihe 2004), is attributed to a situation, which obviously
motivates the person to behave as they do.
According to everything we know, people talk about people primarily to separate their
own kin belonging to their tribe or clan from the barbarians they now and then do,
however, encounter for trade, war and abducting women. Later, in the course of the
European Enlightenment, they talk about people, in order to have a concept for the unity
of the historically and regionally so variously apparent species homo sapiens. “Culture”
becomes the concept for the variety of the various creatures, on condition that they are

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considered, despite and because of their contingency, as right (and all others initially as
false). “Human being” becomes the concept for the unity of these creatures, after
comparing them proves them not susceptible to comparing, and initially correlates with
religion and later with education to stipulate that people possess the potential for correct
behaviour but, nevertheless, incline to incorrect.
The concept of the individual as indivisible is enhanced in European Modernity, in
order not to denote any longer just precarious existence, mere living, which then becomes
the object of sovereign and sacred decree, as Giorcio Agamben has described in Homo
Sacer (1998), but a reference to itself, concomitant in all social situations and calculable
in this form. As individuals, human beings are themselves, bodily, psychically and
socially only known to themselves in their interests, wishes and intentions and are, in the
first instance, to be accepted, cultivated and repeatedly promoted in just this way by all
others (Luhmann 1980b).
The concept of the individual is taken up philosophically into the concept of the
subject, which now, in the Enlightenment, does not denote the underling, the bondsman,
one needing a leader and, despite all that, suspected of insubordination. On the contrary,
it is the entity underlying all thought and vision, discovering and describing itself as “I”
and anchoring itself in self observation (Immanuel Kant’s “Critique”) and loses itself in
just the same way – if it does not remain with Johann Gottlieb Fichte in preferring to
assume, rather than justify, its own self.
We only mention these conceptualisations here to make plausible how words like
human being, individual, subject and person are, on closer inspection, already so
constituted that they merit consideration as addresses for differentiated communicative
expectations, claims and impositions, even if they are, as addresses, also equipped
essentially with the ability to refuse communication, not to understand, not to cooperate,
to refuse, indeed even to be out of reach. This issue means comprehending the individual
as a complex entity, and not, for instance, taking pleasure in God’s creature and letting it
go at that, like we do the flowers of the field. “I would prefer not to”, is the sentence from
the writer Bartleby, via whom, in his eponymous story, Herman Melville focuses on this
situation of the individual as the competent address for expectations (Melville 1985). If
with every attribution, all expectations met with a full stock of preferences,
communication would be already determined and hence impossible. “Which lake do I
prefer?”, the question put by the dandy Beau Brummell to his servant in the face of the
overwhelming beauty of the Scottish Lakeland is hence the condition for invoking
communication. Whoever describes themselves through their preferences, as the concept

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of the bourgeois individual demands of its own, is already, therefore, not an interlocutor
any more, although, of course, we ought not - see Bartleby - to exaggerate this, because it
is communicatively a question of how far interests, preferences, wishes and intentions
and the individual describing themself in these are undetermined, and hence
determinable, and not one of negating them. – And in addition, we have still given too
little thought to the fact that a properly understood economic theory begins by assuming
existing preferences, as if methodological individualism were only concerned with
encouraging an estimation of individuals, where they are supposed to bring their
preferences into a balance of marginal utility, albeit with a high degree of flexibility, that
is, accessible to the changing demands of consumption and employment markets, but
have no say in these preferences (Stigler/Becker 1977; Becker 1976).
In describing a further meaning function within the form of communication, we will
concentrate on the concept of the person. We follow on from the theory of attribution
Fritz Heider set out and many psychologists further developed, as well as from Kurt
Lewin’s field theory of an individual’s living space containing the person and its
environment to understand the person as a concept of difference, relating, in the sense we
use here, environmental or situational variables respectively to variables in the person
(Heider 1958; Lewin 1982, 1948):
That means the person is taken up communicatively as a meaning function, which is

independent of the respective situation in posing a problem of attribution, the solution to
which also clarifies the type of situation we are dealing with. How the situation is
undetermined in the context of the form’s exterior amounts to an insecurity, which can
then, when persons play a hand, only be absorbed, if we decide in the course of
communication what personal attributes can be attributed to whom in order to determine
the situation.
That initially appears contra-intuitive, because persons mainly appear as something
attracting attributions, not, for instance, sidetracking them. But describing this effect is
what the theory of attributions and the field theory are concerned with. The theory of
attributions describes how each question about the cause of behaviour makes it possible
for us to see the cause either in the person wanting what it wants, or in the situation being

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what it is. In other words, it is possible for us in every situation to describe an individual
either as reacting to the situation they perceive in one way and not otherwise or as the self
determining and asserting cause of their own actions.
When we say, we have the choice, that means here: communication has the choice.
That is because individuals cannot decide this, but have to wait and see what, if anything,
is attributed to them and if, and how, their own impulses towards attribution assert
themselves. Of course, we also engage with this situation in turn and try to learn which
situation enables us to increase the chances of us playing a hand, or not, as an address for
attribution. A great deal of adept communication is employed in organisations and school
classes to have possible successes attributed to us and possible failures to the situation, or
respectively to other people as substitutes and insurances. And in the framework of its
dealings with group dynamics, field theory establishes that, for provoking and
aggravating conflicts, as also for lessening and resolving them, whether they are
attributed them either to persons or to situations makes a difference. It introduces the
field concept for this very reason: to render visible the extent to which a person is, in fact,
not only the individual but simultaneously the situation that individual finds themself in.
According to Kurt Lewin, a behaviour V is the function f of a person P in their
environment U, that is
V = f (P, U).
We can generalise this equation with regard to the theory of attributions and to the
modern concept of the individual, which cites self-reference, by writing:
P = P (A, S),
That is, the person P is its own function P by dint of attributes A in situations S.
It cannot be made any simpler, but in this form the person makes sense in
communication, whatever the individual assumed to be behind the mask may have in
mind with it, or out of it. The type of observation attuned to this meaning function is, in
addition, already considerably older than the field theory and the theory of attributions
and can probably be traced back to the rhetoric of antiquity and to the Stoics, for instance,
Epictetus’s Handbook, yet definitely to the so-called political guides to wisdom from the
16th and 17th century, following on both from Niccolò Machiavelli’s guide for princes, Il

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Principe (1532), and from Baltasar Gracián’s observations of behaviour at court,

culminating in his Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647).
In principle, this meaning function involves demonstrating the potential of action and
experience, which can be addressed, if we, in one case, want to know how a situation,
which is always a situation for some person, is constituted, and if we, in another, expect
or observe actions, gestures, messages, recognizances, measures, which make a certain
difference in a communication or are, however, more likely to be omitted with regard to a
certain communication, and should they appear, are meant much more to be ignored. The
person makes meaning, as their situation is related to them: they experience what they
experience, and without this experience, the situation would not be what it is. And the
person makes meaning, as what we now prefer to overlook is attributed to them: it is a
person who takes action, and hence we need them and observe them equally, when we
observe actions, which we are now more likely not to need. Norbert Elias’s story on the
“The Courtization of the Warriors” provides numerous examples for the latter by
showing how particularly noticeable forms of bodily behaviour, nose blowing without a
handkerchief, belching at table, spitting on the ground, are attributed as personal ways of
behaving in a wearisome process, in order to be able to bring them under control through
the supervision of ladies presumably invented for that purpose and hence to discredit
them (Elias 2000: 387ff.).
The story of how women’s gender (and in a complementary manner that of men) has
not been perceived in a multiplicity of communications offers many examples. It parallels
the story of women’s emancipation and is perhaps even identical with it, yet when
sexuality is the issue, it can then, by contrast, attribute that all the more pointedly, if not
any more to the point. This latter applies in intimate situations, but also, as we know from
research into the so-called “glass ceiling effect” by hindering women in reaching top
positions in society, in hierarchical situations still being coded in our society as
situations, in which the warrior’s masculine ability to enforce his will, above all at the
top, is what counts in case of doubt.
And not least, the person can only be addressed, if the individual dwelling in and
behind the person is experienced - and experiences itself - as different vis-à-vis the
address. That is why, as Georg Stanitzek has shown, it was so important to provide the
18th century individual, in the concept of “Blödigkeit” (English: “self-consciousness”,
according to Stanitzek, e-mail 12.12.2008) with a transitional semantics allowing, on the
one hand, depiction of the individual as overburdened, but, on the other, to provide them
with the time, amidst their hesitations, to weigh things up and to commit themselves to

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what is awaited from them, since they do not live in a class order, but in modern society
see themselves as deemed responsible individually (Stanitzek 1989).
We need persons to experience and to do things. Without their experience,
communicative concepts like pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, wishes and fears, will
and stubbornness would have no connectivity, that is, no meaning. These concepts are
meaningful in referring to this experience, and, in fact, always with regard to the
situation, where we can experience intellectually or emotionally, consciously or
unconsciously how we experience things, and with regard to the person experiencing in
this way how they experience things. And if the person were not active, we would not
know to whom we should turn, when we need actions, which can then, for their part, be
motivated, with reference to the person acting in this way or to the situation being
handled the way it, into allowing that person’s experience to become more likely explicit
or be kept implicit.
In this way, communication addresses the actions and experiences it needs to find out
what is going on just now and to be able to suggest which action and which experience is
opportune just now and which not. The individuals behind the persons can oppose that,
because they do not see themselves properly acknowledged in and by communication, yet
they have to, in turn, wait to see what communication makes of this opposition. It can
engage with it and find it interesting, because a person is taking a new and different hand
in the game. It can engage with it and find it interesting, because it focuses on a situation
possibly becoming increasingly intolerable. It can, however, also block it out, because
this person is only a nuisance (and makes sense in this form), or the situation is just
becoming really promising in another respect. Each of these options relates uncertainty to
a possibility for absorbing it and makes sense that way.
An example of this is dealing with violence. Violence is one of the few ways of
acting, in which an individual undoubtedly draws attention to him- or herself and can
undeniably claim to be active. It is quite difficult subsequently to treat someone who
bangs the table, screams, becomes violent or uses a weapon as not having been active.
That is what makes recourse to violence so attractive right when we do not know what to
do next in communication, but do not want to risk communication, as it were, passing us
by. Whoever becomes violent, stays in the game and makes certain the next moves have
something to do with them. Children fighting take advantage of that just as much as do
married couples and nations (Simon 2001). We observe or fear an increasing or lasting
isolation, physically, economically or politically, and we correct this impression through

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an offer of communication nobody can negate, a circumstance pinpointed by Jürgen

Ruesch and Gregory Bateson (Ruesch/Bateson 1987: 44).
This possibility is so attractive, that communication has had to develop its own forms
to be able to keep it under control when faced by its undesired physical and psychic
effects. Violence threatens communication, because it threatens the individuals, who
want to go on living in communication and because it poisons situations, in which going
on living like this is tested for its durability. Communication reacts to this by giving
violence a double meaning, one referring to itself, and makes the person responsible for
undertaking this split in the double meaning of violence. The person is, in other words,
enticed into the trap of working on the, in itself, open continuation of communication,
when they close it off for their own benefit.
An example of this are the pub rituals on the Tory Islands, described by Robin Fox,
which come back to violence, in order to so present an individual as a person, that
nobody can overlook them, yet at the same time set the seal on the pub situation in itself
and celebrate it in a masculine sense, so that it can subsequently carry on as ever (Fox
1977, 1978). Here, the decisive ritual is that someone looking for a physical confrontation
first makes this known when he can be sure that the circumstance will be capable of
holding him back and that mothers and sisters are watching not only in admiration but
also fearfully making it clear that violence is unacceptable: “Hold me back or I’ll kill
him”, is the sentence, which the regularly transpires and steers the situation back onto the
rails again.
Another example are the cockfights Clifford Geertz has observed on Bali, during
which the otherwise so peaceful and smiling islanders surprised him by staging not only a
bloodbath among the cockerels, but also a bloodbath for their status and their honour. In
his essay “Deep Play”, he describes how the Balinese cultivate the cockfights despite the
official prohibition, because how winning and losing affect individuals can here be
experienced and observed just for a moment and as acutely as possible (Geertz 1973:
412ff.). For a moment, the smiling mask falls. What becomes visible is a world of
feelings, which are ambivalent because related to the “I” of the individual, to his cock
(with its double meaning in English referring to the male genitals) just as much as to his
clan, and then the person is reconstituted straightaway, and everyone smiles. But whoever
wanted to see, could see. And at the same time, the families, clans, tribes are presented
and given their dues, because it is them and not the individuals, who bet against each
other on the success of the fights, although each individual cockerel belongs to a person,

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and between the fights it is apparently cherished, cared for, stroked and prepared as
solicitously as can be.
In this form of doubled violence, of ritualised violence demonstrating real violence
and keeping it in check (Baecker 1996), attributing communication to one person can be
quite clearly focussed, and this person can be simultaneously performed and invoked as a
more or less ritualised element of a collective. The meaning function of the person could
not be any clearer. The capacity for absorption itself is used to demonstrate what
uncertainty it absorbs by performing the person, and by them performing themself, as
potentially violent but, in fact, still just controllable.
Yet the same applies to all examples, where the person gains a particularly prominent
status, for instance, in families, in intimate relationships, in charismatic leadership and
not least in religious faith and in artistic genius. In each of these examples persons in
their individuality are invoked totally; no communication goes past them without
something being attributed to them, a feeling, an idea, a possible objection, a threat of
indifference, a completely new turn in the situation, an idiosyncrasy; and all the same,
families, intimacy, hierarchies, religion and art profit the most from this and hence
cultivate the person, as something capable of intensifying what they experiences and do,
precisely as long as they remain on track for being understood communicatively, where
the most important interpretation is, in turn, the person him- or herself.
4.4 Media I
Next to the observer of the theory of relativity and quantum physics and the
communication of cyberneticists and information scientists, the media belong to the
greatest discoveries of learning in the 20th century. Their discovery has been impressively
propagated in Fritz Heider’s psychology of perception, in the humanities of Harold A.
Innis and Marshall McLuhan, which, at the latest, regained prominence with that
discovery, and in the sociology of Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann. Media profit
from a threefold interest, developed along various paths but showing systematic
overlappings.
In an almost forgotten essay from Fritz Heider about Thing and Medium, the first of
these interests concentrates on the question of what we can say about perception and
insight, if we have to assume that structures of the external world (for example, light,
noise, air, that is, a certain grainy, not equally probable materiality) make this perception
and insight possible without us each time perceiving them as well (Heider 1959)?

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The second of these interests is the focus of the books The Bias of Communication by
Harold A. Innis and Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan, and is sparked not
least by the appearance of computers, yet goes beyond them to pose the question as to
whether the way communications media like writing, printing and electricity treat space,
time and human attention is not itself already part of what communication contains and as
such marks the society’s structures more extensively than other of its contents, for
example, politics and economies, art and religion (Innis 1991; McLuhan 1964;
McLuhan/Fiore 2001).
The third of these interests comes out of Talcott Parsons’s reflections on how modern
society’s difference and context (“social structure”) can be secured, when the older
society’s structure of levels is not available any longer (Parsons 1977: 220ff.). Parsons
asks: can we possibly describe media like money and power, but also, under the
impression of the student movements of the 1960s and the resistance they provoked,
intelligence, influence and emotion as achievements, in which actions can be
differentiated from and related to each other, considering how modern society is
differentiated? Niklas Luhmann will take up Parsons’s reflections and, as subsequently
described in Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, design a theory of the communications
media, which differentiates disseminating media like language, writing, print, television
and internet from media of success, like money, power, truth, belief, law, love and art
(Luhmann 1997: chap. 2).
We come in here and likewise differentiate disseminating media from media of
success. At the same time, we use the reflections of Parsons and Luhmann to describe
media as a further meaning function of communication. Parsons and Luhmann agree that
the media of success, at least, owe how they function to their being able to justify
individual actions in the middle of an incomprehensible and overly demanding society by
limiting how far they apply. Luhmann formulates it as communications media making
improbable communication probable. We obey commands, because we can avoid the
threatened alternative and still think what we like all the same. We rent an apartment and
pay for it, because this does not mean we would have to marry into the landlord’s family
too. We fall in love and accept appropriate intimacies without having to give up our
beliefs because of that. And we can be interested in erudite truths without having to
change our life because of them.
From the mass of communicative possibilities, media cut out certain ones and shape
them by making them, on the one hand, attractive and, on the other, seeing to it that they
do not compromise other possibilities we are equally interested in. Regarding money in

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particular, this has become proverbial, as the story of its success in modern society
depends on questions of love and questions of politics having been profiled successfully,
albeit precariously, in the Reformation, in Romanticism and in bureaucracy, so that
money could not really be brought into question by the practice of indulgences,
prostitution and corruption. We shall see below how this ushered in a morality and an
ethics, which oversee the extent of each individual medium critically, with an eye to the
media’s context in a society not dropping completely out of sight due to the difference
between them.
Luhmann has suggested applying the formula for the improbability of the
communication handled by media not only to those of success, but also to the
disseminators. We want to take this suggestion seriously and assume in the case of
language, pictures, music, print, film and television, computers and Internet, that their
success in communicating depends on them each time selectively justifying quite definite
communications. Yet, all the time and in principle, we talk, watch, listen, read and write,
watch tv, calculate and surf, as it were, despite that. That is, we do it, because and
although we could do other things: selectivity is what justifies it.
We do at least suggest observing mediated communication with the help of this thesis.
And we are relying on the medium of writing, in which this and all other of our
suggestions are set down, and in order both to profile the suggestion and to limit how far
it applies: I refrain from singing this book to someone; it is not, in the first instance, being
filmed (and if it were, then differently); I will not threaten my students with bad marks to
get them to learn it; I will not bribe anyone to review it; and I am not founding any
church so that there are people who believe in it; I am only writing it and I signal with its
concepts and its references to particular learnèd literature that it refers to a certain learnèd
discourse, which will find out how much truth can be ascribed to individual theses, in
order to link further and different ones to them.
Accordingly, we can set out the media function of communication with the aid of the
following form:
A medium as meaning function is based on the fact that motivating anyone to

communicate is fundamentally improbable. The possibility of refraining from both

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determined and undetermined communication increasingly recommends itself and is

always justified all too well in the light of the unpredictable consequences of each
communication too (here communication also makes sense as the counter-concept to
causality). And nevertheless, all this scarcely attracts attention in the praxis of the social,
which is more likely to presume the problem not to lie with communication’s
improbability, but with the fact that many other possibilities are more attractive. A
specifically sociological eye is needed, if the improbability of motivation is to figure at
all as that uncertainty absorbed by attractive options (Luhmann 1981a).
Therefore, we assume that, for describing communication’s functioning as media,
motivation to do it is improbable and hence uncertain and is most likely transformed in
the framework of a specific medium’s selectivity, or respectively absorbed as this
uncertainty in favour of what makes other specific possibilities so attractive.
Once again, it is important that selectivity is not only motivation’s exterior, but that
this exterior is reflected back into the difference selectivity makes. Media motivate by
raising expectations about something definite and leaving everything else open. What is
definite can then always go on being specified, and yet it remains clear that other
possibilities run parallel and are not affected by what is accepted or rejected each time.
When I fall in love, I do not have to know for a fact that it is not a case of a power
relationship for me to be motivated towards accepting appropriate offers of
communication. On the contrary, I possibly do fall in love, because it is here not a case of
a relationship of superiority and subordination, but of something quite different. With
that, however, I do risk, because I have allowed myself to be motivated to love with the
aid of this exclusion, that a power play will be the first thing to occur to me or my
partner, if things do not go as hoped. Selectivity’s uncertainty structures, in the most
rigorous sense of the word, motivation. It defines a horizon of expectation, where I can
move as planned, but also quite differently, yet I can do the latter only when I undertake a
suitably elaborate reinterpretation of both the motivation and the selectivity that make a
particular communication probable. This is where the business of family therapy comes
in. It does not perhaps have to know that it can be dealing with mediated shifts, but does
absolutely have to know that here is a case of shifts in the mutually defining
constellations of uncertainty and how it is absorbed.
In what follows, we will make this clear by citing individual media, yet we point as a
precaution to the fact that a theory of communication for individual media does not claim
to treat the phenomenon exhaustively in an historical or a systematic sense. Theories of
language and of music, of money and of power, of truth and of art, even, indeed, of

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computing and of the Internet naturally outstrip what we want to address here for the
purposes of describing its media function.
Nevertheless, in two respects we do also put forward our media theory of the
subsequently examined phenomena as a contribution to any practical theorising on them.
The first respect concerns the option of communications theory. Within philosophical,
cognitive-scientific, media studies, linguistic and other subject-specific thinking, it
presumably makes sense to examine these and other phenomena, as reference and vehicle
for communicative events, much more rigorously than has previously been the case. That
introduces an analytical resource, which promises, both in the case of the disseminating
media and in that of the media of success, not only sociological insights, but also new
options in the argument over paradigms in the particular subject areas, literary criticism,
political science, economics, aesthetics, pedagogy, theology and so on. In this sense, a
communications theory of media aims at an interdisciplinary enquiry not only enabling
thematic exchanges and discovering how varied the languages are that we speak, but
working beyond that on a new line of enquiry, which requires a new language and
challenges the participating disciplines where their particular disciplinary cores reside.
The second point concerns the suggestion of working out a concept of media along
Fritz Heider’s lines and of always talking about a medium when a loosely connected
mass of elements (light, noise, articulated sounds, letters, texts, pictures and their editing,
payments, commands, declarations of love, truths and so on) exists and can only be
observed as such (as the examples in the brackets already show), when they take on a
single form. That is why Heider talks about “things” in the essay cited. Things are firmly
connected entities consisting of elements, which constitute the medium when they are
loosely connected. We translate “thing” into “form” and have the possibility of shifting
the concept of media, via Spencer Brown’s concept of form, close to what Shannon
formulated as the range for selecting possible messages. A medium is an undetermined
but determinable body of possibilities for generating determined forms within that
medium. Only the form is determined and so it is only that which is also observable. But
when we observe a determined form, we bring along our knowledge of the undetermined
body of possibilities presupposed in this form as source and horizon for determining it.
From every form, we deduce the constituting medium thanks to the same elements being
firmly linked. Luhmann has pointed out, that this differentiation of firm and loose
linkages is also interesting because, in contrast to the traditional European ways of
thinking, it attributes robustness to the medium and instability to each individual form. It
may be that this can also explain why the selectivity of media as such can solve the

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problem of motivation, largely independent of its specific form at any given time. In
contrast to every single form, which appears and disappears, can succeed but also fail, the
medium, word, text, love, power remains for us constant as what it is.
In suggesting this concept, we simultaneously distance ourselves from a tradition in
medium studies, which links with Innis and McLuhan, proceeds from an external position
in society (technology, culture, war) and attributes to a medium a determining influence
on what is then still possible in society. We consider that exaggerates the situation and is
a conceptual dead end, without wanting to deny that this tradition, in the way it implies a
suspicion, has proved to be extraordinarily fruitful for reconstructing literary perceptions
of communication in society. Friedrich Kittler has demonstrated that convincingly
(Kittler 1990, 1999). In what follows, we are not opting for a literary critical concept of
media, which defined them as undetermined but determinable. We are not observing
communication for something within it that it knows nothing about (and how does the
literary critic know that?), to show up, but for how it constantly tests, varies and
reproduces what it has to presuppose, in order to be able to test, vary and reproduce
anything at all.
Language is a first case and a dramatic one. As Luhmann has repeatedly pointed out, it
demonstrates perception so conspicuously, that, above all, organisms capable of
language, like the human, can scarcely go past it. When someone speaks, we do not
inevitably listen, but we do hear at all events, in our own family, in the office, in the train
or on the television. When someone speaks, they are undeniably taking action (for which
reason language is a first functional equivalent, decisive for civilisation, to violence) and,
as an observer of the first order, introducing utterances into communication, the contents
of which are possibly observations of the second order. How can we be motivated to do
that? Are there not innumerable reasons for preferring to keep our mouth shut and not
commit ourselves? And do the number of reasons not increase much rather than decrease,
when we have engaged with language and gathered experience with it? It is certainly not
everyone who is eloquent enough also to have possible other utterances always in reserve
every time they say something with a specific meaning. And is not the possible main
motive of language - the trying to articulate our own ideas in such a way, that someone
else can set their own ideas to work on these of ours - equally a reason for not initially
exposing ourselves at all to the corresponding risks of being misunderstood and all too
well understood?
How does language overcome this threshold of improbability in furnishing situations
with exclamations, expressions, messages and stories, which others pick up and which

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initially linger, before time then passes over them and they are more or less dependably
forgotten again? Which selectivity can ascertain that, in the above sense, there can, all the
same, be motivation for speaking? On the one hand, it is certainly helpful, that linguistic
communication, as just indicated, is constituted as an event. Someone says something and
then falls silent again, however long we occasionally have to wait for that to happen.
Communication is an event, which appears and disappears again and in this form poses a
problem of reproduction (how will it go on?), which is at critical moments more powerful
than the problem of motivation. That is, we put something in, so that things carry on, and
we rely with that on our own contribution disappearing again, and we speak, as far as we
can, in such a way, that others can join in, without finding ourselves pinned down to
things we would not want to be pinned down to. That presumes an adeptness, which, as
Harvey Sacks has shown, participants in the most varied conversations master perfectly.
And on the other hand, it is certainly just as helpful that it has come to be understood,
perhaps not in the current theories, but nonetheless in social practice, that we cannot look
into each other’s head, and hence there is always a difference between what someone
says and what they mean, and that this can subsequently be worked out, when we notice
that communication has gone off the rails.
However, there seems to be a third circumstance, which is decisive for the motivation
to use language, alongside its nature as an event and the difference in consciousness, and
that is namely the capacity existing only in language to be able to say not only yes but
also no to everything which is uttered and discussed in the world. I can listen to
something and subsequently say no to it. I can even say something myself and
subsequently more or less elaborately mobilise conditions allowing me to negate it,
although I said it myself: “Why do I bother with my nonsense from yesterday?” We
cannot, in fact, say that very often and not to everyone, but we can say it. René A. Spitz
has traced the human capacity for saying no back to certain behavioural options in the
contact between mother and child (taking the breast or refusing it), and has described it as
an element in how the I functions as consciousness and arbitrator, which has to exist so
that anyone can turn to communication but also withdraw from it again (Spitz 1957). In
our context, we translate this into formulating how the possibility of saying yes and no
confronts participants in a communication with the pressure, which is always
concomitant and to be fine-tuned and finessed very diversely, to say yes or no. That
happens in a binary absoluteness in the rarest of cases, but is culturally coded in more or
less consolidated possibilities for saying yes when we mean no and vice-versa. Yet it
does always happen and is guaranteed to be in a form, which makes certain that we can

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employ our fine-tuning and finesse to engage with a way of speaking, in which the
implied meanings can be subsequently remodelled again, perhaps not totally but
nevertheless diversely, depending on strangers’ reactions and our own (à la Karl Weick –
or was it Karl Valentin: “How can I know what I mean before I hear what I say?”). To
open up our limited perspective regarding to the binary value of our logic (true or false)
to a view of this fine-tuning and finessing, Mathias Varga von Kibéd recommends
studying the numerous possibilities for negation in buddhist logic: “yes”, “no”, “yes,
but”, “no, but all the same” etc. (Varga von Kibéd 1990).
In other words, whoever speaks, has to decide and can subsequently, according to the
interlocutor’s patience, re-decide differently. That is the selectivity able to motivate me to
try again, and also able to motivate me to listen to someone. We are not assuming here
that we find ourselves motivated to use language, because it is, all the same, exciting to
convince somebody else. The selectivity our model is not really concerned with the
limited horizon of somebody else, whom I time and time again manipulate, so that they
have the good luck to understand what I have already understood. Instead we focus on the
assumption that we motivate ourselves into using language, because we know that, in the
undetermined space of its possibilities, we always select only determined possibilities and
can subsequently correct these and nevertheless do not have any determining influence on
how somebody else understands and corrects what they say and what they hear. We
engage with language to find out what it can do, and that we do because it is exactly what
we do not know.
It is quite a different matter with communication in the mediums of music and
pictures, which differ from communication in the medium of language, because we
cannot negate them. Since we have been using language, we have actually been trying to
say no to sounds and pictures, but then we apply linguistic operations to ones of a type,
for which this is alien. What sounds and pictures, depending on the observing
consciousness and coded by communication, allow to be heard and seen is just that.
Communication in the medium of music and of pictures is communication in the
medium of communicating perception. That is the point. Whoever hears music and sees
pictures is participating in a communication, which does not aim at subsequently being
elaborated thematically with the help of negation and affirmation. The communication of
music and pictures addresses the perceptive capacity of participating individuals. It
concerns presenting and making accessible to them something which engages their
sensory abilities and, as such, cannot be communicated. We enjoy pictures silently, as a

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classical rule of aesthetics demands; talking about them too soon only indicates,
therefore, not understanding that doing that is just not the point.
Accordingly, the problem of motivation here becomes, however, dramatically more
acute. How can I be brought to look at something or listen to it, when I am hence forced
to commit to it a - namely, my – consciousness, which I cherish jealously like the apple
of my eye and do not, for any money, put at risk of being taken over by alien subject
matter? At the latest since 18th century aesthetics, which was for that reason socially
functional, and since 19th century neurophysiology, the answer to this question has come
easily: by invoking my consciousness and by looking at and listening to what others
expect me to, I commit a resource, the obstinacy and wilfulness of which absolutely
cannot be denied any more, because it is secured in a way that makes it individually
inaccessible. My consciousness provides the selectivity, which motivates me to look and
listen. The nuance of an idiosyncratic and self-willed comment is enough to make clear to
everyone else I am just talking to, that we have indeed heard and seen the same thing, but
in irreductively different ways. By my reaction to alien subject matter, I can demonstrate
precisely that, as it is inaccessible to other people, my consciousness is mine alone. And
they are well advised to accept that, because, otherwise, motivating me to occupy my
perceptions with their pictures and sounds cannot be guaranteed.
Talking about “taste” brings this into focus. Talking about taste is a classical aesthetic
formulation defining which objects we direct our senses towards, how we do this and
how we subsequently, if at all, talk about them, whilst remaining silent on much else
(Gadamer 1989). Here what we perceive, and how, is justified and regulated, whilst
underlining at the same time, that taste is the very last thing we can take away from an
individual.
In art, also understood in this sense as a social institution (Luhmann 2000c), this is
repeatedly rehearsed anew, confirmed and varied according to the changing social
conditions. Communication in the mediums of music and pictures motivates itself within
art by making a claim on the bodies of other people, of the artist just as much as the
spectator, in a way that demonstrates how highly specifically and simultaneously
selectively they are being committed. Outside of art, we rely on this effect without
making it visible, that is, using our own communications to demonstrate it. In art, hearing
and seeing are addressed exclusively in a refined way; and “refined” means here, above
all, that perceptions are so presented that the feedback to communication cannot be
avoided and hence the capacity of communication to negate can be made fruitful for
perception as well. Hence, art begins exactly where perceptions are explicitly welcomed

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or rejected; that is why the classical formula of “beauty” was so successful and the
modern formula of “provocation” so seductive.
For that reason, Pierre Bourdieu can hang his analysis of distinction as a mechanism
for creating and delimiting social fields of belonging on the capacity for aesthetic
judgement (Bourdieu 1984). By communicating which perceptions we adopt or reject, we
communicate which world we feel we belong to. Georges Perec has demonstrated how
this mechanism of communication of perceptions is a mechanism in our lived
environment for communicating music, pictures and other things also outside of art.
Using it, we furnish ourselves and our world, and in it we work hard, more or less, at
giving culturally correct and not false signals for disassociating ourselves or for
belonging (Perec 1990; see Barthes 1997; Baudrillard 2005).
At issue with this mediated observation of pictures, music and other art works, as well
as use-objects touched by art (including architecture and fashion), is its being a
sociological observation, which does not leave the artistic value of art works untouched.
It is not a question of differentiating the use of art in society from art itself. On the
contrary, it concerns describing this use of art as the content of art, both on the reception
side and on the production side. We will come back again to art later, in the framework of
dealing with it as a medium of success, but it should already be said here that the
disseminating media of music, pictures, architecture, furniture and fashion live by
working precisely on communication, as that allows staging in a more or less elaborate
way that we are perceiving something, what we are perceiving and how.
Regardless of what music we listen to, what pictures we hang on the wall, what plays
we applaud and in what styles of building we feel comfortable, we engage with the
communication of perceptions, which go far beyond what can (and may) be said in
language, but plays functionally the same role of reproducing communication as do the
sentences we do, or do not, say. We communicate our taste and, by doing that, reckon
others, if we are addressing them, will understand. Without this disseminating medium of
pictures, sounds and other matter for perception, we could not initiate or terminate many
communications. It is unimaginable what sort of difficulties, for instance, communication
to initiate intimacy, or also communication to limit intimacy among relations, would run
into, if we could not resort to the possibility of swapping music or giving each other to
understand, via the pictures on the wall, that we live in another world, without also
having, therefore, to say it.
This sort of communication also lives by its selectivity actually doing the motivating. I
motivate myself to engage with the music of John Zorn, like in Cobra (1984), the

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pictures of Gerhard Richter, like in Atlas (1997), or a choreography by VA Wölfl, like in

Revolver (2004), because in the meanwhile many other communications are excluded,
and certain communications, the music of Frank Zappa, the pictures of Anselm Kiefer or
the choreography of William Forsythe remain within reach. We could imagine a
sociology of objects of perception, which educates itself through works of art, then,
however, involves use-objects as well and describes exactly how each of these objects of
perception acquires its specificity through differentiation from other use-objects, to which
it adopts a greater or lesser distance and creates a greater or lesser contrast. From that, we
would gain an analysis of neighbourhoods, which are highly structured, have a highly
developed sense of singularity and are nevertheless, and just because of that, interwoven
with everything going on around them.
Yet it is decisive that such a sociology of perception manages with two concepts for
its theory of the media: using the concept of the improbability of communication here
too, with the consequent uncertainty of motivation, and the concept of marking the
selectivity of the object of perception or also of its process for absorbing this uncertainty.
This is also the reason, to which only sociologists draw attention, why plays and musical
compositions do not only begin, but also cease, that pictures hang next to each other on
the wall, and that I can both open a volume of poetry or a novel and close it again. If we
had to fear being left hanging in any particular perception, we would, in fact, also have to
fear that our own resources of obstinacy and self-will would be some day used up.
Additional disseminating media of communication are writing, printing, radio,
cinema, television and the Internet. Within the present sketch of a sociological theory of
communication, we are not able to deal any more exhaustively with the above than we
are with all the other media. In all cases, the literature is comprehensive and unchartable.
However, we are here also constantly concerned with a single point, namely: describing
how the medium’s selectivity motivates communication. Again, writing is here also a
particularly significant and dramatic case, because it is particularly improbable that we
would engage in written communication, a reservation, a receipt, a genealogical table, a
hymn or story as text, a letter, a certificate, a deed and so on, because scarcely anything
can subsequently be altered once written down. In interactions, we can always work on
having meant something else from what we said. But writing makes it possible to spread
communication beyond the circle of those present, and that means that we cannot deny
either having written something or have any influence on how our writing is understood
or used. That is important for the person writing, as they have, with regard to possibly
being interpreted or represented wrongly, more and more reasons, as it were, to refrain

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from writing things down, rather than to risk it. Yet it is just as important for the reader,
who can have just as many reasons for not having read something and then not having to
know what others have written down. Kings, so it is said, were quite clear about why
they, for safety’s sake, refrained from learning to read and write and preferred to leave
the risky business of statements and reading to their clerks, and kept these in a subaltern
position, so that a sufficiently large number of filters could be used to help control the
effects of communication disseminated in writing. Still today we can observe this shrewd
dealing with writing in hierarchically formalised organisations, and as a gesture of power
vis-à-vis authors of all kinds. There are indeed good reasons for illiteracy, difficult as it
may be to maintain and affirm it in today’s world.
We will have to reckon with the fact that society does not engage with a new
disseminating medium until it has found ways and means to deal with its risks. These
ways and means consist of working out the medium’s selectivity. In case of doubt, that is
only possible by extending so far the range for choosing possible communications, that
there are always new alternatives, ambivalences and uncertainties to the new offers of
communication. These allow engaging with a communication, because it is subsequently
not just fixed, but can also be reworked. In the case of writing this happens by deeming
its advantage simultaneously a disadvantage, yet having to grant a communicative space
for action, to which no society would presumably have previously consented. We manage
one risk by the other and rely, as often, on every risk, for its part, only being accepted
when we can gauge how it can be also controlled by whoever runs it and by whoever
watches them do that.
With the aid of writing, we also reach people not present. The first risk hence consists
in writing making it impossible for us to delete what writing implicitly sets out. For that
reason, a second risk has to be set up, which is well known to us all and consists of us
simply not knowing how someone else (including the writer) will handle the statement.
Communication has to develop techniques of handling statements variably and
incalculably. Only then will it engage with writing.
The most important of these techniques is presumably isolation or, put more
circumspectly, privacy. Privacy is the space into which an individual participating in
communication can retreat, in order to communicate that they will go on participating,
but we do not know, in the first instance, how they will participate. In a private space, we
can read, without others being able to judge what we will make out of what we have read.
But it is precisely the fact of not being susceptible to judgement that we communicate by
retreating and reading in silence. Reading silently is here an extreme case, probably not

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countenanced by society until into the early modern period. Before then, people read
either aloud or not at all. But presumably receiving and reading entries, receipts, letters
and certificates presupposes a private space, in as far as we must communicate to the
sender of these messages that we do not exactly know, if and how we will reply.
Around entries and certificates there hence arise arcana, private protected areas,
organisations (firms and schools), which, for their part, control the risk of the incalculable
reaction to communication, as riskily committed to writing, but also increase it, in turn,
by transferring it onto the risk of making decisions and hence into a network recursively
controlling them. But that also presupposes protection for privacy in a sense more
comprehensive than we normally appreciate. Analysing writing as a medium of
communication suggests the hypothesis that the antique Greek society, on our cultural
horizons the most prominent product of the introduction of writing using an alphabet,
registers its essential social achievement not only in the field of developing democratic
public life on the agorá, but parallel to that in the field of developing the privacy of the
oíkos, of the house and household. We need a house, in order to be able to engage with
writing and to be able to handle writing in a communicatively connective way, that is,
ones undetermined but determinable. In the house, the individual described as
unfathomable is prepared for this purpose as the address for verbal as well as written
communication. In the house, entries and receipts, pieces of money and bonds are
compared, in order not to allow ourselves to be driven into a corner by them (that does, of
course, happen), but in order to develop options for dealing with them, which then make
the household, in turn, the object of economic observations on the market. And in the
house, technical, artistic, religious, intellectual and learned innovations are tried out,
which would have been regarded in every earlier society as breaching proper standards,
but now attract operations of curiosity to themselves, against considerable social
resistance (above all: laughter) (Blumenberg 1966, 1987).
To this extent, we can say that writing has to be introduced into society together with
houses, and we will have to add immediately that introducing houses corresponds to the
development of a public sphere, which, for its part, critically observes, but can also
encourage and welcome what individuals in their houses think up as they pore over their
texts, deeds, letters and paper money. To this extent, it is surprising that the history of the
public sphere is read as a history of emancipation and not, in fact, as a history of control
(Habermas 1989; Negt/Kluge 1993).
I am inclined to leave the question open and to let the reader devise how they can
observe the media of printing, radio, cinema, television, computers and the internet

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against the background to the sociological theory of communication sketched out here. In
any case, I can do no more here than write down my reflections and take the risk of
framing them, because I can assume that readers will see them in their own way, do their
own thinking and draw their own conclusions. Why should I not leave it up to them to
think for themselves about one or other of this book’s topics?
With that, I would, however, run a further risk, namely that of people thinking I am
making it easy on myself. This risk is inherent in the sketch offered here, because it is a
sketch (and by calling it one, I am trying to limit the risk), so that, on this very level, I am
not permitted to exaggerate. So I will add a few thoughts on the disseminating media
mentioned immediately above, before I come to the equally important and extensive topic
of the media of success.
Perhaps it will, in fact, suffice, if I focus on the already cited cases of language,
objects of perception and writing, to the effect that the form they take in differentiating
and in connecting motivation and selectivity consists in them pairing their focus on
extending addressees’ availability with extending their unavailability, and hence
compensating for the latter. We can then set down the form of the disseminating medium
as a special case of a communications medium as follows:
That is to say, disseminating media are thoroughly contra-intuitive when solving the
problem that they communicate to the “sender” as well as to the “receiver” and hence
make available people who were previously not available by making socially and
individually certain, in parallel to making availability technically secure, that just making
people available does not render communication certain. It is not until senders as well as
receivers can obviously say yes or no, can turn away or draw unintended conclusions
respectively that the appropriate disseminating medium is capable of being socially and
individually established.
We can also use this form of observation and description as a template for additional
disseminating media. We adopt a limited angle of vision again, which should not exclude
the fact that we can talk quite differently about printing, moving pictures and electronic
media.

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Introducing (which always means as well: mastering) printing as a disseminating

medium revolutionised society and produced a modern society unstably stabilised in one
of its own modes. Such diverse concepts as those of Elizabeth L. Einstein, Michael
Giesecke and Niklas Luhmann are all agreed on this assessment (Eisenstein 1979;
Giesecke 1991; Luhmann 1997: 291ff.). We are probably not going too far, when we
speculate that Niklas Luhmann’s theory of society additionally assesses the society of
printing as it shifts into that of computing, in as far as it describes the questions of social
order to which the computer society still has to find answers, as previously these
questions were answered differently by the societies of printing and of writing (Baecker
2006).
So what is it that printing disseminates? And how has society adjusted to it? What
form of selectivity motivates engaging with it? And what forms of unavailability does
social engagement with printing use to master the risk of extended availability? What
degrees of freedom have to be introduced here to stipulate printing’s degrees of freedom?
Of course, the answers to these questions depend on what we understand by printing.
Going on from the authors mentioned above, we want to specify only two characteristics,
being able to reproduce communication en masse and being able to compare
communications with each other, because it is easier to designate particular bits and treat
them as such. In letters, talks or in our own texts, we can indicate which author put
forward which thoughts on p. x of their book and give the reasons why we, referring to p.
y of the book, do not see ourselves in a position to accept these thoughts. That is what the
development of learning lives by, and that also is, however, what an initially evangelical,
then protestant, and in the end, in reaction to it, a catholic reading of the Bible too live by.
In opposition to the church and also within it, arguing over interpretations calls up a
hermeneutics, which tries to establish which statements about what the Bible says are
worth talking about and which are not. The learning, then rapidly designated pedantic
too, and hence, in turn, maintained socially at a distance, is a more or less peaceful
product of printing; it is not the religious wars growing out of the battle over how to read
the Bible, or respectively staging themselves as such.
What predetermines both this comparative praxis honed on print and the schooling of
critical capacity is the mass distribution of printed material. If we can loosely follow
Immanuel Kant and answer his question, What is Enlightenment?, with: the attempt at a
public critique of what suggests itself to people who read in their free time (and, in fact,
not just the Bible and helpful practical books, but also novels, which take as their theme
individuals’ prospects in the social world themselves) and then have nothing better to do

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in the office, on the market place and in the cafés invented for that purpose than
undertake criticism of circumstances (Kant 1996), then that assumes that the reading
material is not just available in monastery libraries any more, but has become the object
of its own, capital-intensive business of mass distribution. All the same, the effect of
printing does not restrict itself to the new dimensions of distributing identical copies of
the same book, but also particularly concerns other printed products like leaflets and
pamphlets, paper money, newspapers, reproductions and caricatures, school reports and
legal texts. For us this is all so routine that we no longer notice how much having these
and other printed products determines our everyday life and our celebrations. Is it a
matter of chance, that in the 17th century people (particularly in Leibniz’s case) got the
idea that the world could be rendered calculable and they would be able to resolve every
conflict by imitating what merchants do with coins and weighing against each other
arguments capable of being isolated by criticism working through writing? For a
moment, everything seemed to be written and hence determinable, and people overlooked
how the issue was not one of writing but of printing. That is because printing means, as
people then soon realised, at the latest with the French Revolution (Burke 1910), that
conclusions follow after each other, and holding onto anything they believed had stood
the test of time becomes extremely difficult. Then people are considered conservative,
and they have to countenance being told they have been left behind by those at any given
time moving progressively at the cutting edge of printing’s latest products.
The modern society arising out of dealing with printing’s consequences, as Niklas
Luhmann observes, looks at its own destabilisation and switches to a new principle of
stability derived from instability itself: to the second order observation (Luhmann 1998).
Politics becomes democracy, that is, politicians observing politicians as to whom the
voters will pick. Economies become market economies, that is, sellers observing sellers
to see whom the customers by from and at what price. Love becomes passion, that is,
lovers observing lovers as to what puts us among those who are loved. Education
becomes schooling, that is, teachers observing teachers as to how they can ensure it
appears that the pupils are learning something. Church becomes congregation, that is,
priests observing priests as to the form of pastoral care the believers will take up. And so
on. Behind every case lurks printing, understood as a possibility of designating every
circumstance in politics, on the market, in love, in school and in the church as in this way
(no longer) acceptable , in this way contingent (also possible otherwise) and to demand
justifications, above all values, in order to consider it a good thing nevertheless or, in
fact, to swap it for another. All we can still do is then to stay with the way others cope

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with the situation. Rivalling them by imitation becomes what, per se, holds society
together (Tarde 1962; Girard 1965, 1977).
The point here is, however, that the addressees printing makes available en mass to
communication become unavailable by being bound up with the circumstances of second
order observation. The Age of Enlightenment was also already reacting to that by not
only relying on objective arguments but additionally bringing reason into the game,
which selectively provides motives for freeing second order observers from entanglement
in the masses and gathering them anew into the respective churches of reason. In actual
fact, however, the society dependent on printing reasserts its independence by exposing
every single opinion to competition from all of them and then allowing not the individual
book but the social situation itself select what we actually engage with. That founds the
career of the public sphere with its programmes of correcting messages by messages,
which are a corrective for the all too unavailable individual and gain in modern society a
similar significance as the house in antiquity. All the same, this public sphere is only the
medium of enlightenment because it sees to it that every individual opinion dissipates “in
the shadow of the silent majority” (Baudrillard 2007).
The electronic media of moving sounds, pictures and texts (radio, cinema, television,
computers, internet) initially profit form printing’s achievements. They increase
everybody’s availability at any give time by further orders of magnitude, yet they make
every individual simultaneously ever more unavailable, because they can engage at any
time with other and alternative disseminating media and their communications. We do
not know which side of this medal is more worrying in modern society. We see ourselves
in the grasp of the mass media, but we would like to make simultaneously sure that, from
these media, quite particular ones represent the decisive corrective. At the same time,
these new disseminating media go far beyond what printing confronts society with by
tending in their multi-mediated networks to communicate what can be perceived of the
world as a whole. For that reason, critical or affirmative observers, depending on taste,
look at how society and its world is rendered fiction, immaterial and virtual through its
own simulation (Baudrillard 1993). That is a problem because mediated communication
becomes less and less subject to negation the more it approximates to the form of
perceiving the world. Moving pictures, sonorous sounds and virtual (in the strict sense of
the word: basing themselves on other, unavailable things) texts can only be negated by
changing the channel, not by attempting to undertake a critique testing the author and
their intention, the source and its dependability, the picture and its verisimilitude.

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The situation becomes more acute with computers, because we are here dealing for the
first time not only with a medium for disseminating communication, but at the same time
also with a something that can calculate, or at least, however, with a partner in the
process, that is, with producer and addressee of communication in its own right. With an
eye on computers, we begin to think it possible that not only humans can participate in
communication, and we begin, quasi in the last minute, to look round for natural partners
of communication, above all for plants and animals, but, if necessary, also for spirits,
gods and the media of spiritualism, which can perhaps strengthen the hand of humans in
the competition with the intelligent machines.
When it is connected with databases and data processing programmes on our own
server or on a server in the Internet, screen communication is, in any case, always a
communication in which computers participate in an inscrutable way (Luhmann 1997:
303ff.). It is only in the exceptional case, from which we like to draw conclusion about
all the rest, that we have any idea at all what software is doing what in what way with
what data. As a rule, we have not a clue and we rely instead temporarily on it being
enough if we test the question whether we do anything or not with the data flickering
across the screen in the form of pictures, prices, links and bits of text. In Spencer
Brown’s strict sense, we test their form by looking to see what they denote, by glancing
at which differentiations form their space for denoting anything, and we decide in and for
the time being, whether we will join in or not.
In the case of communicating in the medium of computers, the selectivity of any given
communicative offering is, thanks to the storage on our own hard disc, in the intranet and
the internet, so conspicuously present, or can be mobilised at any time, that we can hence
accept the risk of working with certain communications for a moment, regardless of
whether it is a question of speculating on bonds, mixing a piece of music, editing a video
clip of composing a text. Instead of the communication, we observe its connections, and
have to rely for that on it not only continuing constantly, but on chances always turning
up for hooking in or clicking on further. For whatever greater cost in time, then we do
always still have the other, the older media, above all cinema and text.
In conclusion, it is not superfluous to point out about the disseminating media of
communication that the mass media’s impact on society torments only a conservative
nature with the impression that through multimedia everything is now all one and the
same. That is because the old distinctions of newspapers, cinemas and civilised telephone
conversations do not get lost but turn up in a new guise. The selectivity of media also
leads to them competing among themselves and coping with that not only by imitating

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each other (that leads to the impression that everything is becoming one and the same),
but also by attempts at distinct profiling. Whoever has not yet given up on being up with
the times, usually knows straightaway what they expect which medium to do and are
hence also anytime in a position to shift for good reason out of one medium into another.
For people up with the times, the situation is never entropic (equally probable), but
always highly structured, even if it is, as Rainald Goertz has shown in his diary Abfall für
Alle: Roman eines Jahres (1999), not always easy to present it as such. Expectations and
expectations of expectation directed at cinema, newspapers, theatre, even indeed at theory
and other media of communication are shifting, are becoming more explicit and are
peeling off emotion and colours, reports and comments, gestures and stage sets, models
and descriptions, which would have scarcely found any interest a few years ago. If all
appearances do not deceive, there is no disseminating medium, apart form those become
technically obsolete (telegraph, morse code, lighthouse, the Amiga computer), that has
not succeeded in working on its selectivity such that it has managed to generate motives
for carrying on engaging with it in the context of possibilities for cultivating and stylising
its own unavailability. And even if it were a case of discovering that photography seems
to have the advantage vis-à-vis all other media of reproduction that it can age with the
depicted objects and so is the only disseminating medium equal to the melancholy of
grieving for the dead (Barthes 1981).
But the same sadness is directed towards cinema. As a gigantic entreprise de
l’apparence, enterprise of appearances, as Paul Virilio has described it (Virilio 1991),
cinema a tries to render the “aesthetic of disappearance”, of which the same author
speaks with regards to Hegel’s famous formulation of the “furies of disappearance”
(Hegel 2003), fruitful for restaging a reality, which is more real, above all: more
necessary, than this reality itself: The “fury of disappearance” is that general freedom,
which remains only negative in effect, as it cannot produce positive works or deeds
(because it would, of course, commit itself once again or, as the case may be, invest in an
all too concrete freedom, a degree of freedom). Cinema pays for this attempt by being in
its moving pictures as ephemeral as what it has to thank for its existence. No wonder,
then, that it is here not that the most exact reflections on the status of reality are to be
found since media have not been ghosts any longer, but technologies (Kardec 1996;
Benjamin 2008; Godard 1980). Of course, I allow myself to be available to cinema; but
every film makes me, like Clint Eastwood, a little bit more unavailable.

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4.5 Media II
As we have said, the media’s function consists in relating circumstances or events in the
surroundings in such a way to circumstances or events concerning individuals
participating in communication that the mere selectivity of the particular communications
on offer motivates engaging with them. In the case of the disseminating media, this
selectivity consists in a constellation, which relates availability and unavailability to each
other as the two sides of a form and stipulates them mutually. In the case of the media of
success with which we are concerning ourselves in this section, this selectivity consists in
a constellation merely contacting or respectively not contacting others and tries to
regulate conditions for accepting communication or respectively rejecting it
As we have already indicated, media of success are one of the great sociological
discoveries of the 20th century. Talcott Parsons postulated their existence after he had
observed that the traditional forms of differentiating and integrating society via social
levels had lost their influences in modern society. In the book he wrote together with
Gerald M. Platt on American universities and in parallel essays on media of interchange,
Parsons established that three revolutions have driven modern society and have brought
possibilities for action and communication within reach, for which the old social order,
where an individual’s place was regulated by birth, could not account any longer
(Parsons/Platt 1973; Parsons 1977). These revolutions are: the industrial revolution,
resulting in mass production with the inherent problem of motivating people to work; the
democratic revolution resulting in the potential power of politics increasing as control
over individual behaviour declines; the pedagogical revolution resulting in reduced
ignorance, thanks to mass schooling, together with a declining ability to behave non-
rationally and expressively. The student movement corrected the latter and then secured a
pop culture operating worldwide.
At the latest with the student protest movements of the 1960’s, which Parsons
observed precisely, it becomes obvious, because new uncertainties appear and are
absorbed, that the resources of authority rooted in the old social order in the form of
complementary roles for teachers and students, for doctors and patients, superiors and
staff are not enough any more to handle the ensuing problems in dealing with questions
of knowledge, of life and of organisation. The same authority introduced only a few
centuries previously, in order to enable opposing the power of Providence with the
philologically controlled human will (Vico 1984), now becomes transparent, as a
rhetorical resource serving to suggest through communication that statements can be

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explained on demand - and so discouraging just that. This proposition collapses across a
broad front: at work as much as in court, in the university, in politics, in the medical
practice and in the family, so that the question arises as to which resource for motivating
communication can replace it. On this score, the student movement’s philosophy bets
once again on the resource of reason (Habermas 2003), the movement’s praxis rather
more than on power and the critique of it (Bourges 1968), sociology, however, as Talcott
Parsons’s prominently formulates it, on observing several variously constructed media of
interaction taking this function over. Here, Parsons identifies particularly the media of
affect, intelligence and influence as well as money and power, and in this process,
complicated questions consequent on the architecture of Parsons’s theory arise. Each case
forces him to declare whether a medium plays a role on the level of the general system of
action or on the level of the social system, the system of personality, of the organism or
of the system of culture and to declare which of the four functions (conforming,
achieving goals, integrating, preserving inherent value patterns) these media respectively
serve.
We do not have to engage with these follow-on questions here. In the framework of
our sociological theory of communication, we formulate the theory of the media of
success by reaching back instead to Niklas Luhmann’s new version of the theory of
symbolically generalised communications media, and in that process we here leave his
theory’s architecture largely alone too (Luhmann 1997: 316ff.). Possibly the most
important of Luhmann’s premises in dealing with media of success declares that they can
only arise on the level of functionally differentiated subsystems of society (economy,
politics, law, learning, education, art, religion and so on), in which, however, not all of
these subsystems also display a medium in this sense. Certainly, Luhmann later loosened
these premises up, in order, for instance, to be able to assess values as a social medium of
communication (ibid.: 340ff.). In this sense, affects, emotions, feelings, could possibly be
indeed considered as media, in as far as it is not a matter of the psychic states themselves
but of their communication. The architectures of both theories should be cited here,
however, in order to indicate that a design for a theory predetermines sociological
discoveries and also what we get to see and what we do not.
We maintain that how the media of success function should be formulated on no less a
level than that of social order itself, in as far as it concerns creating attractive conditions
for communication through these media, which prompt what we engage with in a
communication and how far the claims of this communication respectively reach. We
leave open the question of whether it is only the media that take the place of the old

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society’s social levels, or whether we do not much rather have got good reasons for
describing more open constellations of systems, persons, media, networks and evolution,
which, as the present theory postulates, allow different ways of respectively handling
questions arising in communication over meaning from communication (see also the
“space of flows” in Castells 1996: 410ff.). In what follows, we are not dealing with
questions about allotting media to systems and not with the question of a comprehensive
architecture for a theory either, but we are illustrating through a few examples what is to
be understood by media of success as connoting functions of communication.
Before we turn to the examples, we need, however, to clarify the form of the media of
success. As already said, Parsons formulated motivation operating through selection and
Luhmann how the media of success function by transforming improbable into probable
communication through motivating acceptance of it by means of selectivity. This point
needs underlining again here, because it is typical of the sociological view. Sociology
does not assume that there are more good reasons for communication in every situation
than can ever be managed at any given time, but it assumes that in every situation there
are numerous good reasons to refrain from communicating in all respects. That means not
taking up topics, delaying with messages, not understanding what other say, not
explaining what we say ourselves, and above all: not accepting, but also not explicitly
rejecting, what others impart. In actual fact, the most probable reaction in dealing with
communication, seen sociologically, is evasion, trying to avoid it. Inherent in every
communication is the question why I should surrender what I have to others; why I
should let myself be told, what I do not know yet; why I should submit to a power forcing
me into something repellent to me; why I should find beautiful what others have painted,
composed, staged or written; why I should fall in love, when I actually do know how
much sadness can result from it; why I should accept a court’s verdict, when my sense of
justice has its being elsewhere, why I should make a truth (the world is round) into a
premise for my experiences of the world, when I experience my world as otherwise
(namely as flat); or why I should accept values and feelings, which seem to me, as the
case may be, overly complex or not complex enough. In all these and other cases,
communication’s media of success serve to motivate it nonetheless, all the while dealing
with this improbability, that is, with the good reasons for avoiding it. The more complex
society is, the more unpredictable what I let myself in for when I communicate. How,
asks the theory of the media of success, to ensure that I do go for it?
The answer to this question lies, in turn, in the form of the medium of success itself,
namely in the way the conditions for receiving a communication stand out against the

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good reasons for refusing it, or respectively in retaining the good reasons for refusing a
communication whilst accepting it. Hence, every communication receives a paradoxical
twist: we communicate on the threshold of not communicating. The sociological
hypothesis maintains this is the only way the risk of not knowing what we are getting into
can be assessed, handled and itself drawn into shaping communication. We can set this
form down as follows:
This form is constructed simply enough, yet interpreting it becomes complicated by one
and the same form not being only meant to motivate communication, but also to motivate
a third party to observe this communication, without feeling impelled to intervene with
interference or help. As we had established, every communication has to be in a position
to solve the problem of the third party, that is, on the one hand, to cite third parties who
could agree or refuse and in this form help to structure communication, and on the other,
either to include real third parties or keep them out, so that communication can be carried
out. In the case of the media of success, this means that each has to be able to regulate
communication being accepted and refused by the particular interlocutor on the condition
of it being accepted and refused by present or absent third parties observing it (and being
observed doing that).
We will explain this constellation with a few examples (see also Luhmann 1997:
332ff.). Communication in the medium of money, for instance, regulates access to scarce
goods and services under the premise that our paying can compensate for both our partner
and third parties refusing this access. That means making our own finances tighter whilst
we make goods and services less so. Only then is our partner willing to give up their
ownership of these goods and services. And only then will third parties to the process
keep quiet, although they actually might possibly need these goods and services just as
much.
As a refusal is always possible, compensating for it, in turn, twice over rests on the
premise that the access happens selectively. Whoever pays now does not commit his
partner either to future transactions, nor himself to also using his money in future for
exactly these goods and services. And in turn that means that we can engage in deals
without simultaneously accepting other offers of communication and that those who are

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observing and keeping quiet can consider how they, for their part, will enable themselves
to reduce their lack of money with the help of their own offer of goods and services or to
reduce their lack of the latter with the help of their own income. Just because everyone
can refuse at any time, the motives, on the part of buyer as of seller, for accepting must
be manipulated so that happens nevertheless. Communication focussed on a particular
form hence goes beyond its situation to become a medium for exploring and testing other
possibilities too.
Communicating via the medium of power is such that it forces others to do something
they would not voluntarily do. Here we have, on both sides of communication, as well as
on the side of the observing third party, every imaginable motive for refusing to
communicate: on the side of those subjected to power, because they are forced into
something they do not want, on the side of the powerful, because they risk resistance and
with that losing power, and on the side of third parties, because how power’s prospects
develop renders what they will have to cope with in society incalculable.
Once again, a precise analysis or evolutionary trial of the motives for refusal indicates
that the motives for acceptance can be profiled and that, in contrast to the motives for
refusal, communication in the medium of power does not become, in fact, improbable but
probable. Those subjected to power come under pressure, as alternatives are threatened,
which would be yet more unpleasant than the actions meant to be motivated and as it is
simultaneously made clear only the actions are the issue, not the concomitant experience
of the situation. That is, what those subjected think in the process is up to them, so that
their subjection is, on the one hand, not absolute, and third parties observing it, on the
other, can intervene as necessary to ensure that power experienced as power then does
nonetheless meet with resistance.
On the one hand, the powerful are motivated to exercise it by their appropriating
others’ actions, which they would not acquire otherwise and by, on the other, the risk of
resistance being reduced by those subjected, as well as the third parties, signalling that
they are ready to pay with their obedience for avoiding the yet more unpleasant
alternatives. In this way, the powerful can test and govern how power is accepted, as
described by Niccolò Machiavelli and others. And the third parties watching accept both
subjection to power and its assertion, because that brings within reach a potential way for
absorbing uncertainty, namely collective action and communication binding on the
powerful as well. Making this available in society can secure an order each individual has
to be able to depend on, because they cannot control what others do or do not do, what
they plan or try to obstruct.

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In the medium of power, the form of the medium of success takes on that of self-
limiting arbitrariness (Willkür); and in turn, a sociological assumption, formulated by
Luhmann (Luhmann 1997: 355f.), deems that limiting precedes arbitrariness: not until we
discover that we are under pressure, or respectively can put others under it, do we
discover the possibility of choice. Freedom is not the opposite of power, but its correlate.
And that goes for all three sides of communication. The powerful discover that they can
issue different orders, those subjected that they can also refuse to obey, and the observing
third parties that, once developed, the resources and potential can also be used for other
constellations of power. If it had not been for dealing with power, the possibility of
arbitrariness might perhaps never have been discovered; here, and not in unpleasantly
exercising it, lies the explosive social potential of power. Hence, communication in the
medium of power is only possible, when we take care to render the option of
capriciousness invisible enough. The critique of power has made that certain as it directs
so much attention to the powerful that everything else is overshadowed socially.
We can also describe communicating in the mediums of truth, of belief or of love in
this way. Those who produce them (scientists and/or academics), those who check them
(scientists and/or academics), as well as those who watch them do it (the public) all
accept truths on the condition that care is taken not to enter into any commitments with
them. It has taken the entire history of the modern period to assert this and to defend it
against repeated assaults by a technocracy wanting to bind truths to actions. In the
meantime – and who knows for how long –we can be sure we can investigate truths
without linking them to demands for action. Truth binds experience, not action. To the
discomfort of learning too, which is responsible for producing and critiquing truth, this
has, in principle and as a safeguard, only succeeded by demonstrating each truth to be
both theoretically and methodologically dubious and uncertain, that is, an untruth.
Seen in terms of communication, learning serves to increase uncertain knowledge. We
have already pointed that out. That is the only way to motivate scientists/academics to
engage in producing this knowledge, always freighted as it is with unpredictable
consequences. And this is the only way to motivate third parties to grant this knowledge
any room to act in society. However, the other way round, and that is the modern twist to
it, this is the only way to commit learning and its medium of truth to observing, and
describing the uncertain prospects for human society and to furnishing them with
critiques of every ostensible truth.
Something similar goes for belief. Communicating with the gods, once so closely
bound up with the media of power as with those of truth, can today, now that politics and

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learning have become independent, only be accepted by believers and by observers of

them (not to mention, in all this, the objects of belief) if and because nothing more is
bound up with it all than an individual’s state of soul. This example also shows how
highly precarious the corresponding communications are becoming. Churches struggle
against the loss of power and truth; sects are critically observed in terms of how they try
to bind the individual beyond their state of soul (and where and how are the limits to be
drawn here?); and only the congregations, as they are hence so called, seem, to be in a
position enabling them to ensure, through taking on believers’ other roles and interests,
that ministering to the soul actually does mean no more than that.
Once again also central here is the figure of how belief has be so profiled that the
priest just as much as the believer and the third parties can be motivated to accept a
ministry to the soul, of which both knows what it involves and can gauge which forms
the ministry can take and which not. In religion, in society and in every single interaction
within a belief, confrontations on that topic as subtle as they are occasionally violent
repeatedly occur, because nothing is certain about this profile of belief, and everything is
a question of coordinating with other communicative possibilities, temptations and
threats.
Love is no different. Here too, the concept of a medium as a meaning function of
communication persists. Although and because the substance of love is not to be
confused either with money or with power, either with truth or with belief, and does at
the same time, as we can see as soon as we address it, nevertheless maintain a subtle
relationship of borrowing and distance with these media. How can we be motivated to
engage with love’s bliss when faced with possible misery lurking? How can third parties
be motivated to accept that two people in love enter (as a rule) into a relationship, which
keeps all others out, although the intimate relationship and the probable satisfaction
within it are not the least motivation for similarly seeking contact? In this case, the
answer to this question lies already in its posing: participants and observers know about
the possibility of misery and hence cannot avoid considering as inherent to the
commitment how it is possible, indeed even unavoidable, that it will break up, and cannot
avoid including in the passionate avowal of excluding all others this very exclusion and
everybody else with it. That is the only reason why we commit to loving. We cultivate it
as its own motive and, with that, we cultivate the attractive possibilities of quitting it
again.
In modern society, both are assured when love is demonstrated as the medium, in
which the individuality of the other is acknowledged fully and completely in a

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communication. In as far and in as long as we want that, love can be continued. In as far
and in as long as that succeeds, third parties can be assured that with this individuality a
resource is cultivated, which cannot cause any damage outside of love, because it
immediately comes under highly specific conditions of exclusion in the family, at work
and among friends and can hence be kept under control. But we only need to assert our
own individuality, that of others, or of the intimate partner being observed, as something
escaping the love relationship in question, in order to restrict any happiness and by
moderating it to manoeuvre the relationship close to breaking point. The same thing
applies, when we begin not to rely on love itself any more, but try out instead - and at
first perhaps only as something extra - money and power, perhaps even truth and
education, or belief and ministry: love disappears, because we see that this has nothing
more to do with motives for engaging with love, which lie in the individuality of others.
Following on from Luhmann, we can also analyse values and, from Parsons, affects
too, as media of success in communication. Values, according to Luhmann’s observation
(Luhmann 1997: 340ff.), motivate us to communicate as long as they only imply
something without becoming explicit. Whoever only implies a value like friendship,
solidarity, justice, equality and so on, proposes that what counts as good communication
is possible, without defining what we should understand by it in various situations and
with changing partners respectively. By contrast, expressing such a value perforce raises
the contradiction, or at least, however, the observation that all values are relative in a
diverse society furnished from situation to situation with different horizons for what it
expects and finds relevant. Participants and observers accept communication being bound
up with values on condition nobody commits to that. This is, in turn, a paradoxical
solution, which can, however, in this form fulfil the function of motivation through
selectivity.
In the case of values, we are dealing with their peculiar quality of only being effective
by presenting themselves as absolute, that is, as non-selective. That is what their
connotation as “culture” depends on. That, however, only works contra-factually, that is,
normatively – and it can hence only be accepted as a value, if it does not itself become an
object of communication. If values do nevertheless become the object of communication,
and should they motivate it in this form too, then that circumstance only works by them
not denoting themselves, that is, how they justify themselves in themselves, but denoting
the power, the truth or the belief (and as substitute: reason) they are meant to represent.
And then other conditions for motivating communication can apply.

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Values are also an interesting case to the extent that through them we can illustrate
options for theory, which can also be, of course, observed in all other cases of what
interests sociology. Above, we had introduced values as programmes for society’s
describing of itself (see above section 3.4), here they are a medium of communication.
Both are possible. We do not have to decide, but we can declare that theory too does
present the possible perspectives not just as single ones, but as options.
Finally, affects or emotions, as a last example, are a medium of success, with which,
according to Parsons, effects of solidarity can be triggered and cultivated in all sorts of
social systems (Parsons 1977: 247ff.). These effects of solidarity are observed via the
way participants act, regardless of what they think they are doing. In this way, affects are
constructed in media in just the same way as power, which likewise aims at actions and,
with that, leaves alone what participants experience, think and observe. In the case of
affects, we act under the premise that we can and must only accept, not understand, what
we experience, and from this premise we gain the possibility of, on the one hand,
understanding ourselves as situation and, with that, acquiring distance from ourselves
and, on the other, of getting out of the affects again, as soon as we begin to understand
(see also above section 3.1).
On the one hand, we can well imagine that this results in very high expectations of
how affects commit us, yet, on the other, that a society comes about, which is on its guard
against the communicative effect of affects, feelings and emotions, whatever their
psychic reality might be. For instance, the proposition Luc Ciompi put up for discussion,
that no social system would function without feelings as its energies (Ciompi 2002), takes
on socially the form of a suspicion every social system must be able to ward off, if it
wants to be in a position to gain social acceptance for recruiting further communications
(F. Simon 2004).
That leads to the effects of solidarity generated by feelings always then being capable
of motivation by media towards communication, if and as long as it is a question of
profiling the particular communication against socially divergent observations and
expectations. Feelings result from expectations, which we elevate into demands on
fearing they will be disappointed, so Luhmann speculates (Luhmann 1995: 269f.). That is
precisely what defines how they function in communication. The effects of solidarity
from feelings stretch just as far as there are interlocutors prepared to share both the
expectations and the elevating of them into demands in the face of disappointments.
Everything else is a question of how situations and cultures code dealing with demands.
They can commit small groups just as much as entire protest movements, depending on

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what respectively causes them and specifies them, yet, to motivate anything effectively,
they depend on how convincingly and durably they can fashion the particular
confrontation with that society that has already disappointed the expectations underlying
the demands.
We must mention two more points in this section, before passing on to a further
meaning function of communication. Both points relate closely to each other. The first
point concerns qualities, as yet insufficiently elaborated, of the media of success qua
media; the second point concerns a form of socially observing these qualities qua media.
We talk about the qualities of the media of success qua media with regard to these media
being socially present, like the disseminating media, only in a loosely-bound aggregate
state, that is, in Shannon’s words, as an actually undetermined range of selection for
possible communications. Yet they never take on, for their part, a definite form, that of a
designation, for instance, precisely defined by recourse to it in terms of the question as to
which communication is possible and which not. Media are only determined by being
determinable, but they are not determining as regards which communication they render
workable and which they do not. They do not determine society, but allow it to determine
itself according to cause, situation and prospects. They gain their shape in the single form
of a payment, of a collectively binding decision, an academic thesis, a religious dogma, a
declaration of love, an implied value or a shared feeling, but each of these forms is
socially transparent regarding other possibilities it brings into reach, so that we can
imagine higher or lower prices too, politically more astute decisions, better theories and
more dependable methods, more convincing dogmas, more tender declarations of love,
more absolute values and stronger feelings. The result is society becoming extremely
unstable in all its forms, although the instability is nothing else than sounding out the
possibilities given by the same media, that is, those up for investigation. We could talk
about a stable instability, which, to take up Parsons’ speculation once again, is probably
located similarly to social levels in the past.
This is, however, a very specific sociological observation, and where sociology
equipped with a theory of communication media outstrips society. Society, as seems to be
the present state of things, uses its media but it does not observe them. About its
disseminating media, it knows something, but nothing about its media of success, with
the exception perhaps of a critique of money and power practised for centuries and just as
affirmative as it is critical. Instead, we must assume, it reacts to destabilising through
media firstly with the revolutionary expectations of the 19th century (industrialisation,
democratisation, edification), then with the catastrophes of the 20the century (totalitarian

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de-differentiating) and finally, very much subtler, but also much feebler, with attempting
a new or also a really old positioning of morality and ethics.
We get the impression that morality and ethics are developed today as forms of
observation, which develop and permanently offer a possible critique and affirmation of
the motives for refusing and accepting a communication in the face of every individual
medium (which we have to date observed via its effects not its construction). That comes
about by revisiting morality and ethics to critique society, initially across the board but
today increasingly specifically via specialities and professions. There are elaborated
economic, medical and academic ethics, which materialise on the level of codes of
behaviour, ethical commissions and concerned international conferences, and will soon
be presumably joined by the ethics of law, religion, love, feelings and, let us hope, value.
The conditionality for this functional focus of morality and ethics is, nevertheless, that it
succeed in not confusing morality or ethics with communication as a medium dealing in
values (Luhmann 1988): morality regulates the conditions, under which participants and
observers in a communication must reckon either with acknowledgement or its
withdrawal, because of their claim to selective motives. And ethics tries to blunt the
polemical edge of morality and to reconcile distributing and withdrawing
acknowledgement and the conditions of a complex society exceeding what participants in
a situation perceive at any given time.
Were differentiating morality and ethics off against the value medium to succeed, we
could understand morality and conceive of it as a situational and ethics as a cultural
control of the motives of acceptance, or respectively of refusal, as profiled through the
media.
Morality could be understood as controlling the conditions, under which we make
ourselves unavailable, that is, it reintroduces possibilities gained through media into a
communication, which is individually and socially aligned to media offers we can refuse;
and ethics could be understood as controlling the conditions, under which the availability
media makes possible can actually be imposed on people. Morality promotes imposing
the media; ethics moderates imposition. And both would apply to disseminating media
and media of success, to imposing language, sounds, pictures, writing, print and
electronic media, as to accepting power and money, law and love, feelings and values.
Morality makes it difficult to evade offers, and it is, as it only concerns a decision
attributed to each person about gain or withdrawal of acknowledgement, hence relatively
rapidly available and correspondingly prone to conflict (Honneth 1996). Ethics has,
therefore, to intervene right here in order to moderate, and it has been doing this recently

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by describing discourses, in which partners in moral conflicts find a way out, both in the
framework of their conflict and outside of it, and can arbitrate between themselves over
which impositions are accepted and which not.
With regard to ethics, we talk about a cultural control because these discourses aim at
enabling values to be weighed up among themselves, that is, bringing on the way society
describes itself and applying it to the particular problematic. With regard to morality, we
talk about a situational control, because no society, with the exception of those therefore
called “totalitarian”, would risk affording the conflictive effects of morality any spread
beyond a particular situation. But in this form it is available, and in this form morality
equips every communication with a mostly latent, often manifest readiness for conflict,
which all participants keep in view, when they try to control what they contribute to
communication.
But both morality and ethics have society’s reorientation from social levels towards
mediated communication to thanks for their careers. That is because communication
produces and absorbs more uncertainty. And both, producing and absorbing, have to be
moderated. Morality and ethics are, if this view of things can be confirmed, adjunct
institutions of a society where the media of communication have gained a prominent role.
All the more remarkable, then, is the widespread impression we can reach back via
morality and ethics to the social and individual certainties of pre-modern societies.
4.6 Networks
Networks, as we can put it following the sociological theory of networks by Harrison C.

White, allow designing, testing and controlling all manner of identities by relating them
to suitable network elements of the same and a similar nature (White 1992, 2008). “Who
am I in the web of jealousy that trembles at every human movement?”: the words of a
story by Harold Brodkey are a possibility for formulating the key question of these
networks (Brodkey 1988: 270). A network interweaves designs for the identity of
persons, institutions, ideologies and histories into an attempt at mutual control, which
constantly breaks down over the identities here at play and recruits its next motives from
just that, namely the resulting uncertainties.
We can, in turn, easily set out the form underlying this meaning function by using the
notation developed by G. Spencer Brown:

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yet this is not necessarily easy to interpret. That is because it depends on imagining how
to ensure the target value of this meaning function, the control of various contributions to
communication, by opening up a space for decision, which we here designate by the
expression “identity”. At the same time, we are well aware that this would correspond
much more to traditional European thinking, taking identity as already defined and
looking for differentiations, where, as and when, it could unfold and realise itself. A
sociological theory serves, not least, to correct such optical illusions.
We assume that the term identity enables the space of uncertainty to be extended by
allowing the way things, events and persons relate to themselves to replace relating to
something other. Introducing self-reference transmitted via the concept of identity causes
an explosion in the possibilities for self-determination and makes interrelating among
these identities-identical-with-themselves become correspondingly improbable every
time, be it a case of persons, organisations, groups, institutions or nations too (Barel
1984). Yet that is exactly what the concept of control, here to be, in turn, imagined
strictly according to the theorem of uncertainty absorption, reacts to. In a sense shortly to
be defined, control is attractive, because it responds to problems of identity in the
framework of acquiring it. That is also something not imagined in such a way by the
social metaphors of European tradition, which still tend today to understand a “control
society” as the quintessence of everything deserving criticism (see, however, a careful
correction of this in Deleuze 1995: 177ff.). The opposite, as sociological theory has it, is
the case. Control and identity are achievements referring to each other and not obtainable
without the respective other one. That means, however, that we have to look at both more
closely as to what they mean and how they function.
The concept of a network is rendered simultaneously more difficult and easier by
sociology imagining elements of it not as homogenous but as heterogeneous. A network
does not consist only of the same sort of persons and institutions or organisations every
time, but it consists of various sorts of identities, so that persons relate to institutions,
these, in turn, to ideologies and these to histories, in which the persons likewise appear,
or do not. That makes the notion more difficult, because sociological imagination and
experience are needed, in order to identify the network elements in question. At the same

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time, however, that makes the notion easier, because only the network consisting of
heterogeneous elements has enough free space to be able to conceive of the contradiction
between self-differentiation in the framework of identity formation, on the one hand, and,
on the other, mutual attempts at control as the conditionalities of this identity formation.
That is because we can hence imagine how network elements repeatedly relating anew
and selectively to each other produces identities temporarily considered beyond
comparison.
Accordingly, three aspects of these networks should be underlined. Firstly, every
identity, as Erving Goffman has demonstrated, can be, for itself, traced back to a
difference, namely to the difference of norm and deviation, including the possibility of a
multifaceted internal mirroring of this difference of such a nature that the deviation
becomes the norm and vice-versa (Goffman 1963):
No work on identity can avoid so orientating itself according to a norm that the identity-
identical-with-itself becomes recognisable from the extent of the deviation.
Beyond that, it must become so recognisable that it does not actually conceal or erase
how variously various networks lay claim to this identity, but, on the one hand,
underlines this and, on the other, reconciles it. Identity is termed differentially, so that not
only the address for transmitting network expectations can be kept constant within the
identity, but also so that the unpredictability of this address and, with that, a calculation
of how attractive it is to refuse transmissions, can be kept to the fore.
In various contexts, identities are respectively other identities, and so we never know
whether we can avail ourselves of the identity (including one’s own) in any particular
concrete situation in just the way we possibly need it. And in turn, that also goes for
persons, institutions, ideologies and histories just the same. In each of these and other
cases, work on identity is necessary and attractive, just because it does not run up against
any substance or quality, which then are at all unmistakable in what they are. On the
contrary, it always encounters only operations, relations and functions only in this way
providing dependability in the context of simultaneously observing undependability,
which is what we need in networks to be able establish meaning, discover it and retain it

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(Luhmann 2002b). Identity, and we have to get used to this idea, only prevails in as far as
it creates uncertainty. If the case is not that any more, then it is no longer one of identity.
The second aspect of a network that needs underlining is how the control of identity
here at issue is fundamentally mutual. Networks abide by the Machiavellian principle, as
reformulated by cybernetics, that we can only control what we allow to control us
(Glanville 1987). Every successful attempt at control produces situations and
circumstances making it attractive for both sides to continue undertaking similar attempts
at control, and it can attract third parties, which join in. For that reason, an attempt at
control, which is supposed to prove itself in a network, is preceded by observing the
conditions under which those to be controlled are prepared to let that happen. These
conditions govern which attempts at control are undertaken in the framework of a
network calculation.
Here it is interesting how exploring the conditions can also be undertaken
communicatively, and hence it already avails itself of the network, which is then
supposed to be tested. That is why networks consist of successful attempts at control just
as much as of failed ones. And that is why we tell each other stories in and about
networks, where the moral is always ambiguous. But that is exactly what constitutes the
communicative quality of a network: for its part, it provides a determinable
indeterminacy and not, in fact, one determined somehow materially - for example, a
structure anchored in interests or needs, with communication then only swirling around it.
Here, the concept of control is also to be understood cybernetically, in as far as it does
not only concern exercising a determining dominance, but also an accompanying
memory. Control is essentially self-control in correcting deviations by comparing them
with target values (Ashby 1956; Rosenblueth/Wiener/Bigelow 1943; Vickers 1967). We
can set out the corresponding form as follows:
We should note the – certainly not fortuitous – structural similarity with the form of
identity. Here it is, however, also in turn a question of seeing that goals are, in the first
instance, nothing other than differentiations, which open up a space of uncertainty, where
it is unclear whether the goals can be reached, are worth the effort, do not suppress other
more interesting goals and besides do arouse in third parties a resistance, which we do not

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have to overcome, if we do not pursue the goals in the first place anyway. All the same,
we engage with goals, and the reason lies in the fact that deviations would otherwise
make no difference, and we would accordingly have no guidelines for orientating our
own actions and communications, nor could we send signals to others, by which they
could orientate themselves.
And deviations are communicatively more attractive for marking attempts at control
than are determined states, because they keep open whether we, according to
circumstances, do not rather reinforce the deviation (positive feedback) than correct it
(negative feedback). In this way, we can again provide communication with that
ambivalence, to which in the past it actually got used only with difficulty, yet which has
become ever more indispensable (Luhmann 1995b: 55ff.).
The third aspect is almost as obvious as the first two: networks are not voluntary
events we could set up and change at will or join or leave again as we see fit. That we
could make networks is an opinion widespread among managers and people working in
cultural activities and it has to be corrected from a sociological viewpoint to the effect
that making networks is, for its part, an expression of belonging to one or several
determined ones.
In actual fact, we cannot make networks, but at best discover them; we cannot alter
them, but at best foster, disrupt or weaken them; we cannot join them and leave them
again as the mood takes us, but at best display how we work on identity, which can be a
point of departure and an address for new attempts at control. Here, the concept of
network is fruitful for observing how communication produces meaning, because, with
its help, we can make every nuance behind a choice of words, every shift in the intensity
of attention, every hesitation and every underlining, every confusion and every
enthusiasm legible as work on varying an identity in the context of varying attempts at
control within a network.
Here too, an example can promote understanding. Let us consider the discussion about
elites, as conducted over and over again in all societies. Elites are addresses to which we
attribute prominence - that is, we attribute observation by a more or less large number of
third parties attracted to them - and which produce communicative meaning by being
integrated with the rest of the populace in way that signals a certain immunity from its
expectations, yet profiles just that as what the populace expects (Keller 1963, 1968). The
common observation that elites integrate among themselves, or that something like elite
networks exist, is an expression of this integration with the rest of the populace and is
attributed via distancing. That is because attributing an internal integration to the elites

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allows understanding and describing both their immunisation from the rest of the
populace’s wishes, fears and interests and, in turn, restricting how far these self-
immunising elites can intervene in it. Declared elitists can only count on quite
circumscribed successes and are isolated in all other respects.
With this example, we can study engaging with identity and attempts at control as two
sides of the same coin. A political, economic, academic, sporting, journalistic, artistic or
religious elite is a group of people, whose identity consists in having convincing motives
on hand for others, the rest of the populace, so that they are prepared to limit envisaging
identity and attempting to control it to certain collective, pre-selected possibilities. The
elite provides patterns of identity, which govern the rest of the populace in a manner that
unburdens them at the same time by also signalling in these patterns that only an elite can
do them justice. The identity of an elite, in no matter what area of society, creates so
much uncertainty as to how people can individually and socially do justice to the
corresponding expectations on this elite, that not only do the elite’s problems with
recruiting, as it were, solve themselves because so few people trust themselves to match
these expectations, yet they can here at the same time also attribute an image of the elite
socially, which can, as needed, be focussed on its expected performance and on the doubt
as to whether it can do justice to this (Dreitzel 1962: 92ff.). Hence no elite exists without
constantly having to reckon with criticism, but it is in exactly this form that it can fulfil
its function.
The space allotted the rest of the populace for its behaviour, even though controlled
under the aspect of deviation, is that much bigger the more pronounced the elites a
society possesses. Regardless of what resources are commandeered, the threat of
violence, the staging of authority, the documenting of expertise or the capacity for
shouldering responsibility, in each case the function of an elite consists in making an
offer of integration to society through them, so that all other possible resources of
networking, while possibly not obviated, lose prominence and hence scope.
The four above mentioned resources for claiming elite status are not chosen by
chance. They correspond to gate keeping factors in variously differentiated societies: the
segmented (violence), the stratified (authority), the functionally differentiated (expertise)
and the self-initiating network (responsibility).
Elites integrate society by making their own fate, hence their identity, dependant on
whether what they signal as forms of communication, and their professed meanings
succeed in acquiring prominence or even dominance. When that succeeds, it results from
the elite’s power only in as far as the rest of the populace has sufficient motives for

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adopting the offer and itself propagating it, so that third parties see their chances of
opposing it with their own schemes of identity and attempts at control disappearing. And
if that does not succeed, it is because these motives do not exist. In the framework of the
network as meaning function, the existence of elites of any kind whatsoever, and the
motives of the rest of the populace for acknowledging them, are one and the same.
A theory both of conflict and of the market can be attached to this description of elites,
but will, however, be only indicated here. Conflicts result from network positions of
various kinds not seeing any other possibility for making their schemes for identity and
attempts at control known. The conflicts stages attributing communication to certain
addressees, to their interests, wishes and fears, which otherwise enjoy communicatively
no or, in the eyes of these addressees, not enough attention. Conflict, or as Georg Simmel
has described it under the heading “Der Streit” (Simmel 1950), fosters socialization
where living together can only be ensured by living in opposition. By seeking resistance,
it polemically advocates a certain form of networking, which produces a definite
connection, an intensive interrelation, where only a loose connection, if not structural
holes, would predominate (Burt 1992).
By contrast, the market, as Simmel once again has it, but now in his theory of
competition, as equally reprinted in his Sociology (Simmel 1950), is a form of conflict,
which indirectly governs confronting an opponent, namely via the attempt to gain third
parties. In the market, conflicts are waged in a civilised form, without changing the fact
that, in the market, offers are made, which have to assert themselves as new offers in the
first instance, and offers are maintained, which constantly have to ensure that other,
competing offers do not become more attractive. For their part, markets are networks
(White 2002), which reproduce by providers among themselves and purchasers among
themselves keeping, in each case, an eye on which offers hold up under what conditions
and which do not. The conflict between providers over turnover and profits and between
the purchasers over access to scarce good and prestige remains latent, because all
observable actions restrict themselves to two partners and the respectively opposing sides
of the market, which are really just not in conflict with each other (or respectively have to
veer off for that purpose to the differently housed resources of the law).
Elites are born in conflicts, yet mostly not as victors but as mediators, and they have
to prove themselves in markets. That is why markets are always status-markets as well: in
them status is sought, and markets try to defend and extend their own status vis-à-vis
other markets. Elites, conflicts and markets can only be reproduced, when they gain their
attractiveness from the comparison with other possibilities (see, for networks, also

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Faulkner 1983). They have to convince observers of the first and second orders. And at
the very least, the latter note what the respective offers exclude, be this a world, in which
other elites gain prominence, a world, in which our opponents in a conflict have already
won, or a world, in which different objects are traded in different markets. Only in order
to exclude all this do we participate in the more attractive offers and so involve ourselves
in schemes for identity and attempts at control, which are then described by sociologists
as networks.
4.7 Evolution
Since Charles Darwin, we have always talked about evolution when phenomena are
observable, which are, firstly, variable and, secondly, possess a variability traceable back
to the accumulated results of selections, that, is of selective processes (Darwin 1964).
Darwin emphasised the claim that variations, as the object of selection, are not fortuitous,
but can be traced back to what previously governed how phenomena existed, however
little we may know about it. Darwin’s picture of evolution orientated itself around
humans as breeders of plants and animals, who not only recognise variations when they
appear but can also assess them as to their possible durability. The issue here was, above
all, better productivity, higher resistance to disease and sources for new strains. Darwin
imagined that, in nature, nature itself plays a similar role to the breeder in the world of
cultivated plants and domesticated animals, and in the framework of the so-called “Social
Darwinism”, that led to reverting to social hierarchies for attempts at rendering the
general “battle for survival” asymmetrical in such a way that it can be decided in advance
who is subject to selection and who does the selecting. Today, by contrast, we assume a
fundamentally ecological model, in which hierarchies and asymmetries may assert
themselves temporarily, yet are in themselves subject to evolution, that is, have to keep
an eye on the ecological context either favouring them or not.
Evolutions are a further meaning function of communication, where uncertainties in
communication are extended by keeping it unclear how selections deal with variations:
positively, negatively or indifferently. Lack of clarity comes into the game by selection
not measuring itself against variations and its possible attractiveness, but against
restabilising the evolutionary context (or system). Here it is not only a question of
variations prevailing but also of the rest of the system being able to cope with the
selecting of variations. What is the point of installing a new stud bull on the farm, if the
cows do not get on with it (providing they have the choice)? Variations, as Stuart

– 143 –
Kauffman also has it where he develops the neo-Darwinist synthesis further towards a
complexity and systems theory of evolution (Kauffman 1993), are not only a product of a
range of phenomena organising themselves, but, when being selected, have to let
themselves be also measured against the conditions on further self-organising.
For the meaning function of an evolution, that means we can follow what Donald T.
Campbell and Niklas Luhmann formulate as the neo-Darwinian synthesis and can assume
the following form (Campbell 1969; Luhmann 1997: chap. 3):
Initially, we are here dealing with a three-part schema. The variation is determined in
three ways, namely through its own difference and through the two differentials
regarding selection and retention, quite contrary to the widespread understanding that it
involves chance. Selection is doubly determined: as a mechanism for selection, which has
to prove itself, and as differing from the system which is meant to be stabilised. And
retention is determined simply, namely solely with a view to the system, that must
reproduce itself through evolving as it engages with an environment.
Together with the central value of selection, the three-part schema could indicate that
the meaning function of evolution is a sort of metacode in communication, in as far as
every selection of a variation is observed with the aid of two differentiations of its range
of selection, with the aid of the differentiation of its variation value and with the aid of
the differentiation of its retention value. Hence, selection is doubly determined, yet gains
from this double determination its decisive degree of freedom, where it judges between
the two determinations. With an eye on retention, not only what is selected, or not, can be
decided, but also the nuances of how and when this happens, or not, can be invoked.
For interpreting this form it is, in turn, important not to deem the conjunction of the
differentiation unequivocally identical with the naming of its interior, as marked by it.
This is what one of the leading experts on Spencer Brown’s calculations, the
mathematician Louis H. Kauffman, repeatedly points out (e.g., Kauffman 1995: 164).
How individuals actually behave in their environments, what gestures and sentences they
offer and what they are observing themselves for, what energies they offer and how much
attention they have for each other, is, in each case, one thing - and interpreting this

– 144 –
behaviour and its circumstances for the purposes of communication is another. This
degree of freedom for communicatively deciding on an interpretation always exists, and
it is essential where communication arranges itself autonomously, something actually not
determined by the existing behaviour, but, in an independent manner, depending on it.
For this reason, all communication is fundamentally belated; everything it, for itself,
produces in terms of materials and energies in, as it were, anticipation is initially what it
is, and it has itself to be, in turn, translated into communication after the event, so that
communication can make a connection.
Spencer Brown’s notation focuses on this circumstance of determining what is
undetermined and only determinable through the difference between the denoting of the
cross and the denoting of the mark (the interior and exterior of differentiation). For our
form of evolution, this means that we can, in turn, speak of a meaning function in as far
as here circumstances of individuals’ acting and experiencing and the events and states of
their environments are related to each other in a way, which has its points of connection,
its addresses for intervention, if we may put it that way, in the existing material and the
potential energy, but are not identical with them.
In the case of the evolution as meaning function, it is particularly important to remind
ourselves of this complication, of this point of departure for interpretation, because
evolution as meaning function is not self-explanatory, but is, for its part, a product of
evolution. With regards to differentiation variation, selection and retention, an elaborated
form of positing communication and of dealing with it should be observed and the
appropriate sides of differentiating should be applied to interpreting and shaping it. To
date, we have only been able to observe these in the teachings of the advanced cultures
on wisdom, particularly in Chinese, Jewish and Greek and not until recently in
academic/scientific thinking on cognition. For ancient China, François Jullien describes
an art of dealing with situations relying more on not doing than doing and not measuring
this by the goals of the person acting but by it own potential, albeit still to be discovered
(Jullien 2004, 2007). For Jewish culture, Gershom Scholem describes a form of dealing
with the holy scriptures, which makes these respectively comprehensible initially in the
commentary, so that it is initially the commentary - never with the status of the holy
scriptures, however, - which says, in ways constantly subject to revision, what the
scriptures reveal (Scholem 1995: 282ff.). And the ancient Greeks, as Jean-Pierre Vernant
shows, do, in fact, allow their teaching on wisdom to integrate with a philosophy waxing
dogmatic, but all the time ascertain that the older forms of cleverness (métis) can expand
their value with rhetoricians, sophists and statesmen rather than loose it (Vernant 1982).

– 145 –
For evolution, all this is important, because it enables exchanging references in

observing and shaping communication between different contexts, in view of which
things can be evaluated. As regards assessing a circumstance, an idea, an expression, we
can, and that is something we then understand as wisdom or as chuzpe too,
simultaneously adopt what we can disparage or reject as regards possible consequences,
possible irritations by third parties, a possible bad model. Hans Blumenberg and Niklas
Luhmann have looked into the history, long and richly endowed with setbacks, of
productively and creatively engaging with what is new, something which only becomes
at all possible at the moment when the two horizons of selection for variation and for
retention were differentiated so widely, that it became possible to deal with the new by
differentiating it, judiciously introducing and rejecting it under the conditions of a society
not attuned to it (Blumenberg 1966; Luhmann 1995b: 55ff.).
The modern theory of evolution reaches the level of these lessons in wisdom only with
difficulty. The theory of communication was too undifferentiated too long to be able to
fix an evolutionary selection of meaning via individual gestures or sentences, however
much suitable and extensive material may already exist thanks to linguistic and literary-
critical investigations. In particular, Kenneth Burke’s dramatistics, the conversational
analyses following on from Albert E. Scheflen and Harvey Sacks, as well as John
Gumperz’s research into the contextual constitution of language, but also George
Lakoff’s linguistics could be fruitfully employed here (Burke 1952/53, 1969; Scheflen
1973; Sacks 1992; Gumperz 1982; Lakoff 1987).
We can always talk about evolution as meaning function, when the selections of a
communication are communicated in a way, which appears not only open as regards
possible surprises from a variation but also controlled as regards the value of the new
thing and its potential for attributions. Communication cannot be much more sensitive
towards itself. For this reason, the function of communication as evolution, as our thesis
has it, is attached to an address already known for the fact that all sensitivity of
communication schooled itself there. We are talking about the body and the
consciousness attributed to it. We are talking about how communication’s capabilities, its
receptiveness towards a possible variation, the fascination of new developments and the
irritations caused by what already exists when confronted by the new are attached to what
the body does and what it experiences. That is why sociology has recently become so
interested in individuals again (Beck 1992). They contribute bodies and consciousness.
Both are needed for all three evolutionary mechanisms, and are so in the framework of
evolution as meaning function not only in order to increase but also to absorb uncertainty.

– 146 –
That is also a point, which is neither obvious nor plausible to non- sociologists.
Consciousness and the body figure much rather as resources securing communication
than as potential factors in destabilising it. That is not completely wrong either. In actual
fact, however, one thing holds good only in the context of the other. It is sociologically
significant that the more demanding is the communication a society has to organise the
more the body goes from being not only the address of communication but also to being
something it prepares. Norbert Elias’s researches on the “process of civilisation” have
shown that in many cases (2000). Via bodies, or respectively “body traces” (our
translation), to use Karl-Heinrich Bette’s expression (Bette 1989), communication makes
legible, if we guess aright, which variations it expects, what its selections orientate
themselves on and what its retention aims at. Bodies are the design of a society, to take
up a term from the next chapter, by which this latter in each case tests what sort of
coordination between consciousness, perception and communication works for it, what
spaces for action it still has, and where a “stress” emerges, showing that demands are
being made that cannot be managed individually (Weick 1983). For this reason, it is
interesting to study the bodily posture and expression, gestures and behaviour of doctors
and patients, managers and staff, priests and believers, teachers and pupils, judges and
accused, including the erasure of these differences with a view to other differences (work
versus leisure time, young versus old, poor versus rich). In this sense, the mental state of
a populace as regards individual susceptibility to depression, anxiety states and
schizophrenia is an indicator for design problems, which point not only to anomic
problems (Durkheim 1997) but just as well to evolutionary thresholds. That means, those
problems cannot be “cured” morally but, depending on circumstances, only
communicatively, and this not only in the form of therapy (Ruesch/Bateson 1987: xiff.)
but also in the form of reorganising society’s communicative order.
Bodies and consciousness, we are assuming, do not only absorb the uncertainty of
communication that grows with its complexity, but they also produce it, albeit, on the one
hand, certainly in the context of the person as a meaning function here necessarily
concomitant, but also, however, in the context of evolution as a meaning function.
Communication’s potential for surprises (variation), but also for control (selection) and
for discipline (retention) is fixed through bodies and through the consciousness attributed
to them, and hence they also move and behave then in relation to to themselves and to
others.
What Niklas Luhmann described as symbiotic symbols of communication being
linked back to conscious and unconscious physicality have their place here (Luhmann

– 147 –
1997: 378ff.). These symbols coopt perception for scientific/academic studies, sexuality
for love, wants and needs for economies and violence for power, in order to test out
sensibilities, which are then exploited communicatively for both positively and
negatively selecting the space for variable communication to act in.
What can we bring into sight, if we cannot either see or hear, taste or feel it too? What
object can a passion develop, even if love is concentrated into ecstasy or expanded into
marriage? What do we need to satisfy our needs, if we actually had no idea of them
previously? To what politically virulent threats are we susceptible just when we feel safe,
and also when we feel unsafe? An evolutionary investigation of the potential of
communicative spaces for action, capable at any moment of being concentrated on
variations and made fruitful for retentions, establishes itself via this sort of question (in as
far as we can identify symbiotic symbols carried by the respective attributions). And this
goes for positive and negative selections, which means, for adopting and reinforcing
things as well as for tempering as much as rejecting them and for encapsulating new
developments by fashioning them into memories.
In the course of evolution, we can cling to habits and constantly gather new and good
reasons for doing that. We can, however, also regard habit as veritable original sin and be
constantly moving on, without noticing that this can also become a habit. In no case does
selection lose its selective character. In the case of selecting positively, it profiles itself
vis-à-vis the context, which has to be newly assessed in order to accept new
developments, yet by that is also readied, in turn, for other assessments. In the case of
selecting negatively, it profiles itself vis-à-vis what selection permits or requires to be
rejected, yet attracts onto itself a new and different type of observation, which perforce
deems contingent what declares itself as necessary. The example of organisation may
make clear what is meant here.
A symbiotic mechanism would also be the description for what has been understood
since Adam Smith and Karl Marx as work, what animals, humans and machines perform,
and something needing to be technically secured and communicatively formatted, so that
it can be accomplished. All work makes demands on bodies, consciousness and
communication, and all work displays the states a society has taken on (Rifkin 1995;
Tilly/Tilly 1998). The huge effort our society devotes to organisation (Perrow 2002) is
hence to be understood not least as an experiment with communication’s evolutionary
spaces for action. It is interesting how we here, while observing organisation, do,
however, come upon two symbiotic sub-mechanism aligned in parallel and alloting, on

– 148 –
the one hand, work’s demands and effects on observing how the uncertainty attached to it
increases, and, on the other, on observing how this uncertainty is absorbed.
These two sub-mechanisms are risk and technology. The category of risk permits
observing which dimensions in installing technology as the result of contingent decisions
by organisations are attributed to them by network partners, markets, staff, investors,
mass media and protest movements and ascribed to them with appropriate demands over
accepting responsibility, and which are not (Luhmann 1993; Douglas/Wildavsky 1982).
What we have to decide within the organisation of work counts, therefore, as already
uncertain for the very reason that we have to decide it. In technology, communication
between human, machine and material towards fixing certain causalities is carried out
strictly and is communicatively reproduced in this form to free up communication. What
we can accomplish technologically hence counts as secure already, because we can do it.
What the symbol of risk burdens down is what the symbol of technology unburdens.
Both symbols intend attributions regarding work, be it with the latter a case of
industrial factory work, services, the work of teachers, artists, soldiers and priests or
categories of work on the symbols themselves (Reich 1991: 177ff.). Organisations are
forms of communication about work, which constantly have to be newly invented in
parallel with a view to the two questions of, on the one hand, how far behaviour can be
proposed as work and, on the other, the possibility of appropriately allotting work in the
framework of an organisation seeking its goals. Tackling these question in parallel means
switching to and fro between the two of them and rendering one question as regards the
other both more pointed, and also less. Within the organisation, we have here the case of
enabling selection of what can be demanded from work in terms of variation and can, vis-
à-vis society, be made plausible in terms of retentions. And here too, it is the case that
both horizons for selection can only be differentiated and separated communicatively,
because work takes place, for its part, in society, but as a rule in an arcane area protected
from it (behind closed gates and doors), and what society tries to restabilise is not least
the possibility of organisation itself.
Since the 1970’s, all kinds of organisations have been the object of an extensive
process of remodelling, where the old form of collegially cushioned hierarchical
organisation of work has been exchanged for the new form of consumer organisation of
work, which is hierarchically overseen only with a view to its employment of capital and
personnel as well as to questions of product development, trademark design and
controlling the image of the entire organisation. In evolutionary terms, this means that
every communication within an organisation - that is, within a communication coded as a

– 149 –
decision about work – constantly confronts the task of assessing variations and assuring
restabilisation. The variations derive from customers, competitors, technological
developments and cost/benefit calculations; the restabilisation happens with regard to the
criteria of the organisation’s culture and control as proven so far, but in themselves
constantly in need of testing. The contemporary homeo-chaos of a large number of
organisations probably results from the criteria for restabilisation themselves being
subject to variation, whilst having to be invoked for assessing variations (Kaneko 1994).
As far as communication within these organisations goes, that means individuals are
constantly facing the task of coordinating their work with each other, whilst having to
note which variations emerge and are either attractive or unattractive (and this, in each
case, variously from various perspectives), and to orientate dealings with each other
according to the question as to whether the organisation’s patterns of restabilisation do, in
the first place, still work at all and, in the second, ought to be interpreted much rather in
favour of one position or another. Such communication, which can be brought into a
certain balance, that is, into the situation of being able to carry on, only on the level of
second order observations, and not on the level of observing variations, results in a
highly irritated form of itself, with its unsettled centre in the problem of selection, whilst
both the reasons for organised working and the assigning of tasks to it and the settings for
its framework and its self-explanatory characteristics are subject to a more or less rapid
change.
If we examine what we find when we look for ways this type of organisation can be
not only employed but also secured in an evolutionary manner, we come upon something
work has also been concerned with, the physicality and the consciousness of participants
in it, be it now a case of humans, animals or machines. Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M.
Sutcliffe have indeed formulated their concept of “mindfulness” for the time being only
with regard to humans (Weick/Sutcliffe 2001), yet nothing stops us from describing work
with draught horses, tracking dogs, and hunting falcons just as much from this viewpoint,
and from formulating, for work with machines in general and with computers in
particular, conditions about concomitant sensibility on both sides (Suchman 1987). That
is because “mindfulness” here means nothing other than that bodies, that is, perception,
are utilised to get a grasp of what organised work can do to them and to coordinate our
own physical behaviour with that, for good or ill.
We previously thought that human physicality is only a side condition of
communication. In the context of our thoughts on the function of communication as
evolution, it could be that this speculation is not only confirmed but also shifted into the

– 150 –
centre of the theory of communication. That is because then everything that constitutes
communication’s surprise, control and discipline would be decided relative to the human
body and its consciousness – nota bene: on, not in the body and consciousness, as
assumed by the most recent philosophy from neurophysiology.
However, in families too we can observe the same restless, homeo-chaotic type of
communication in the context of its impact on the bodies and consciousness of
participants. Here, the parent’s desires regarding work and leisure time are constantly
coordinated with the childrens’ need for care and their desires for activity, without the
parents’ socialisation by their parents and the perspectives of the childrens’ upbringing
perhaps providing any sort of culture and control, which would supply criteria as to
which conflicts are avoidable and how they are to be regulated. Here too, evolution
supplies a metacode, which, of course, reaches back as far as possible to persons,
systems, media and networks, but, for that very reason, faces the task of coordinating the
resulting demands for structure among themselves. Here, supporting the fallacious
assumption that variations appear fortuitously is rather more helpful, because that
obviates attributing things to these variations’ motives, and communicative energy can
concentrate instead on conciliatory tasks. What happens, happens, and we look at how we
can go on from that and at the same time retain what we would not want to do without.
In the family, the symbiotic symbol is probably the person itself, or at least its
capacity for coping with expectations and expectations of expectation, as well as with
insights and feelings, under conditions we can today only describe as stressful in the strict
sense of the word. It is a matter of conditions being irritating for the simple fact that we
are only allowed to perceive them as fulfilling and not as overtaxing. The family is
overtaxed, because it does not keep up with producing recognition of the persons in it,
who constantly have experiences in society (in the kindergarten, in front of the television,
on the street, in the office, whilst out shopping) that they cannot integrate into the family,
and it is challenged, because the only person who can exist in society is one who can
cope with this type of overload. To this extent, the horizons of variation and retention in
selecting communication come full circle here, because the family can only restabilise
what it has to handle in terms of variations, if it appears itself as a variation putting
pressure on society to restabilise itself.
Here, in the family, the persons come about, are born and also die, who are then meant
to be at society’s disposal as address where the person as meaning function operates.
They arise here, because it is only here that the integrated concept of bodies,
consciousness and communication is combined mentally, albeit under the restrictive,

– 151 –
notably solicitous - and notable for being solicitously enclosing - conditions of the
family. Here they are prepared for getting to grips with communication. Given that
society still succeeds in reproducing itself at its contemporary level of complexity, we
will have to look once again at the most recent history of the family from the viewpoint
of how it, in its many forms, also manages this preparation for communication manifestly
better than we still expect in many cases.
In any case, it is worth retaining what we have here only sketchily indicated, that a
form as demanding as evolution, composed of the three interrelated mechanisms of
variation, selection and retention, can possibly only be maintained, if it is tied to the most
fragile element, to humans, their bodies and consciousness. The fragility of this element
does not contradict the robustness this very function has to acquire in the course of time.
On the contrary, only in this fragility can it be the address for increasing uncertainty, for
absorbing it and for integrating it into the core of communication’s selection. Yet we
would not have expected that, because, since this concept arose in the 19th century, we
have readily deemed society in possession of an order not receptive towards individuals’
living and dying, to their temperaments and characters. That is certainly correct, but the
opposite applies too. And that is something a sociological theory of communication can
draw attention to. And besides, it seems to me that this is also a reason why we still read
novels, although Goethe is supposed to have established that the genre already reached its
zenith with Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. We do not do that because of the stories,
which are mostly all too contrived, and not because of the perceptions novels convey
either, because they cannot characterise their figures otherwise, but we do it, so I would
maintain, because novels interlock both with each other, as otherwise only reality can
(think of W. G. Sebald, but also, as ever, of Jean Paul).

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3.

3.1 Expecting Expectations

Sociologically speaking, perhaps the most remarkable circumstance in connection with

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

3.2 Number, Order, Calculus

Expectations of expectation are the structures forming the background to communications

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

3.3 Forms of the Social

Society is number, order and re-entry of communication. It repeats, confirms and

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Sociology has occasionally described systems of interaction as simple or even

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Organisation is order in the sense specified, namely in the sense of observing it

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

In this form, the indeterminate itself becomes, as concomitant exterior of communication,

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

In tribal societies, what is indeterminate attracts attempts to control it by magic, in

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

observer, equally deconstructive as it is constructive, when we deal with the offers of

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

from sociology’s description and to be understood as a form elaborated by erudition,

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Messages about party conference resolutions, tax increases, corrections of profit

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Focussing systems’ functioning on dealing with disturbance is not unchallenged in the

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication

Dirk Baecker, Form and Forms of Communication