Communication and Consciousness

The leading observational distinction of recent (sociological) systems theory is that of system and environment. The scandalizing power of this (sociologically understood) difference lay in the fact that it could be used to arrange psychological and social operations into a reciprocal system/environment relationship. Theory categorically separated social and psychological systems and then had to (re)develop or import pieces of theory that were able to deal with the unity of the thus separated, for example the pieces of theory of Interpenetration and Structural Coupling. In any case, the effect was a strategy that made social systems free of consciousness and psychological systems free of communication. In this way, it was possible to break the intellectually annoying relationships anchored in the classical whole/part scheme (Beinhaltungsverhältnisse) (for example: people are parts of social systems).

The price was (in a precise sense) the excommunication of the human being, the individual, the consciousness, the subject, the people. The gain was the opening up of new possibilities of analysis that were no longer dependent on the epistemological blockades of the whole/part and subject schema. However, the consequential problem was that the specification of the relevant psychological environment of social systems was not really successful. Terminologically, this difficulty can be traced in the historical sequence of terms such as personal system, psychic system, system of consciousness. Even today, all of these terms and neighboring terms such as the curious psychophysical system still haunt the relevant literature. There is talk of the personal, psychic, conscious environment, and it is already quite unclear what the body is all about, which (at least in the classical conception) would somehow be the carrier (leg holder) of the psychic. The only thing that was clear was that the compact word "human" did virtually nothing to characterize the relevant environment of social systems, just as little as the semantically diffuse concepts of the individual or the subject.

These confusions and blurs can be attributed to the turbulence in paradigmatic fault zones. They would not be tragic if the conceptual instruments that are currently lacking could be patiently developed. But there is also the possibility of tracing confusions of this kind back to deeper theoretical problems that play a peculiarly subversive role even before the splitting of the system world into psychological and social systems, problems that have to do with the concept of system itself, paradoxical problems that denote a much more massive scandal. For the time being, we call such problems ONE=TWO=ONE problems.

The combination of system-theoretical, difference-theoretical and finally observation-theoretical motifs, as which sociological systems theory can be seen today, no longer allows the system/environment difference to be understood as a difference of positions in the world, as constellations, as a this (system) and that (environment) in a kind of spatial configuration. This model was justified insofar as it made it possible to organize cognitive interests according to system references. One could concentrate on social systems or on psychological systems, temporarily leave aside the excluded as a moment of the environment and, if necessary, change the references, first this, then that, then this again ... and in this oscillation, findings that could be related to each other and presented sequentially were generated. This procedure was efficient (and still is, if necessary), but it could not take into account that the oscillation between system and environment (and systems in the environment) allows system and environment to condense, as it were, like objects to which one can align oneself. The object of systems theory was then the system-within-an-environment. One had to deal with society, politics, law, art, science, the economy, organizations and, on the opposite side, with the psychic (conscious) systems. All these systems 'lay', so to speak, in reciprocal interlocking relationships (for example, companies as subsystems of the economy, churches as subsystems of religion), all these systems 'had' environments that were handled like 'levies', as a kind of 'ambience'.

This only changed, almost unnoticed and rather timidly, when people began to understand the system as a difference. The system, according to the canonical formula, is the difference between system and environment. It is neither the one nor the other side of the difference, which is complicated insofar as the unitary concept of differentiation (the system is the difference system/environment) is differentiated once again in the difference (system/environment). This is not simply the case of a classical re-entry of a differentiated thing into the differentiation by which it is differentiated, not simply a re-entry such as in the case where someone differentiates system and environment and then checks on the side of the system how this very differentiation is treated there. Instead, we are dealing with the crude problem of a self-denying distinction, which – once served – 'twists' its unity (system) in such a way that this very unity appears as one side of a duality, in which it then represents the unity (despite being a half, so to speak). Perhaps one can also (for lovers of metaphors) speak of a 'circular' distinction, in which each designation of the system invokes the difference, within which the designation reappears, which – itself designated – functions as a sign of unity that invokes the difference, and so on.

This makes the concept of the system endogenously restless. In a pointed turn of phrase: it takes the form of a self-deconstruction. It cannot be immobilized and generates a continuous loss of information for an observer who works with it by forcing him into the quasi-ontology of object-systems. In the repertoire of rhetoric, the metaphor is the expression for a figure of meaning that cannot be 'linearized' in terms of information. And in this sense, too, one could say that the word system is a metaphor that cannot be surpassed at the moment, insofar as, as an abbreviation (with, so to speak, an inner inconclusiveness), it allows research to be carried out that refrains from this very inconclusiveness.

However, when it comes to this inconclusiveness, i.e. when it comes to what is called basic theoretical research, the expression conditioned co-production lends itself to the ONE=TWO=ONE problem outlined in the concept of system. It says (in the reading I (Peter Fuchs) choose) that – firstly – everything that appears generates its epiphany historically (this is what the adjective 'conditioned' means), and – secondly – that this generation is bound to the economy of a unity that is only a duality for one observer. As little as there is the master without the servant, the servant without the master, as little as there are neither masters nor servants, so little 'exists' one side of the difference (the system) without the other side (the environment). The metaphors of entanglement, interlocking, coupling, interpenetration, but also of the boundary are inadequate in view of this. They are already worked within the framework of an occult ontology of space.

However, this need not frighten us, insofar as we can delegate questions of unity, duality and trinity to philosophy or theories of signs. Fright is more likely to occur when sociologists operate with the system/environment distinction, separating conscious operations of mental systems from communicative operations of social systems. In the diction introduced, one would have to deal with relevant processors (mental systems) in the environment of social systems, in whose environment social systems function as relevant processors. The system/environment difference that runs between social and mental systems would then be a difference of differences of the same kind (i.e. system/environment), which would be subject to a peculiar obfuscation that can no longer be represented graphically: the mental system is the difference of system/environment, so it has no self-sufficiency, no sui-sufficiency, because in the difference by which it (? ), the environmental processors (social systems) are also labeled; the social system is the difference of system/environment, so it has no self-sufficiency, no sui-sufficiency, because in the difference by which it is labeled (?), the environmental processors (mental systems) are also labeled.

These are extremely intricate relationships that usually (without being particularly reflected upon) lead to the two differences (system/environment - social // system/environment - psychic) being drawn together into one difference (social system/psychic system). This contracture creates the counterparts communication and consciousness, which, if you like, become direct opponents. They are then each other's immediate (relevant) environment. Neither side of this difference can contain the other, but can only designate it in its own autopoiesis. There are no overlapping relationships, otherwise we would have an amalgam and no difference. And therefore a medium must be added that is neither the one nor the other system, indeed no system at all. This medium is called sense in its most abstract form. It is, if you like, a kind of unifying factor, because it instructs the formation of form on both sides of the one difference by modalizing every designation that arises in the context of psychic or social operations, or, in a slightly different turn: by using the difference of actuality/potentiality that is indispensable for every observation. Or – in a simpler mnemonic formulation: sense is this modalization.

But whatever the individual case may be: if what we have just called conditioned co-production is a valid description, then the antagonists in difference (communication/consciousness) are the as-two-observations-of-a-unified-event. This is indeed no longer fun, because a first consequence of this consideration would be to have to deny that the antagonists could play a game of their own, that they are something in-and-of-themselves. Some people will find this assumption easy when it comes to communication, but in the logic of conditioned co-production the same would apply to the opposite side, to the psychic (conscious) system. When knitting, the non-stitches accumulate with the stitches; if one erases the non-stitches, the knitting disappears along with the erasure.

In any case, the image of the wandering singular consciousnesses, to which the social systems are opposed, would not be entirely accurate if the one and the other were only what they appear as in the difference, without which there could not even be any talk of them.

The problem this refers to would have to be demonstrated by the fact that the singularity of consciousnesses cannot be observed. It would not be an empirically controllable fact. In social system reference, this thesis is evident (assuming the theoretical apparatus discussed here). It is possible to talk about singular, individual, idiosyncratic consciousness, to assert its existence, to write novels that demonstrate all this, but whether it is talked about or written about, in each case the staging is linked to the generality of the reservoir of signs used and is only possible if a minimum of standardization is involved.

For social systems, uniqueness is a paradoxical but, as it were, casually functioning (semantically now richly endowed) marker that only works because it does not work. If uniqueness were communicable (in the sense of communicating genuine, real, ontic singularity), what has been displayed, said, written could not be understood. Communication would collapse, but it does not have to, because what was intended is not possible anyway. Instead, there are observable (!) forms of (historically different) ways of dealing with talk about singularity and all its derivatives.

The problem remains in psychological system reference. It is perfectly clear that the production of occasions (noise), which can be taken up by communication as utterances, are also linked to the general conditions (or in more Wittgensteinian terms: to the impossibility of a private language) of sociality. Even for the top achievements of idiosyncratic enigmatization of occasions (works of art, modern poetry, avant-garde music), a minimum of external reference must be installed in order for understanding, however restricted, to come about.

The labeling of individuality (here always in the understanding of singularity) must then seek historically traceable paths, for example tracking down the paradox of communicated singularity in the Middle Ages or discovering and evaluating the source genre of autobiographical texts, which perhaps also originated in the Middle Ages in the context of household and merchant books. It would be no less important to pay attention to how the difference between the course of life and biography allows the course of life to be made thematic by naming the biography (in which writing is already ethymologically inscribed) and to turn it into a narrative. The narrative then becomes (for example in the novel) more and more a means of linking events with one another in such a way that it becomes clear that they can only have happened to one or one person in this way.

In this (here only very briefly sketched) differentiation of possibilities to designate the singularity of consciousnesses (under whatever titles), the principle remains that every attempt to do so takes place in a medium of generality. It is not necessary to assume in this thesis that there are no privissima of consciousness; suffice it to say that they are either communicated (and then the privacy of consciousness evaporates in the generality of communication and the media in which it is realized) or concealed (and then nobody knows anything about it). The person who remains silent can then still say that the unspeakable is bubbling and fermenting inside him, he can proclaim his je ne sais quoi, but that is then all that the unspeakable is – nothing but an understandable message that brings nothing with it that is not general, however virtuoso the form of communication may be.

Nevertheless, this message is found, and one is usually inclined to believe it. This belief is fed by internal evidences that every consciousness possesses, namely that it can keep something to itself, conceal it, and that it sometimes registers states within itself for which it lacks the words, and if the words for complicated states of consciousness do arise, one can know at the same time that they will not always be understood correctly or possibly – if spoken, written down – could evoke embarrassment, the danger of emotional injury, damage to the social address. It is almost as if consciousness, through resignations that frequently occur in this way, comes to the idea that it is unique.

But this then names the actual test case. If the singularity of consciousnesses is not observable, there remains the case of self-observation. At least in this respect something like peculiarity, selfhood, uniqueness would have to come to light, even if only in the most secretive introspection.

The central subversion of this evidence, that the intrinsic state of consciousness is encountered in its self-observation, results from the fact that the designation of the operation observation is built into the designation of this operation. This operation is not defined as the attentive and attentive keeping in view and following of a counterpart that is, so to speak, 'over there' and somehow acting (or resting). It is not bound up in the subject/object relation, it is neither Cartesian nor Euclidean. It is understood as an operation of a distinguishing designation or a designating distinction, but in any case (however the temporal accents are then set) as an operation in which distinction and designation are combined in an actuality.

In a slight modulation of relevant formulations here, I assume that the operation of observing is the concatenation of designations, to which a selection range of possible distinctions (situating the designation) is brought, so to speak, by each further designation, precisely because the further designation can be observed as a choice. This allows us to say that the operation already has the form of meaning insofar as it installs selectivity – for further observations to which the same applies. From this it follows, among other things, that there are no singular operations, they are (even if only by this definition) always: systemic. One observation without a catenation of observations is neither psychologically nor socially conceivable.

Regardless of how one sets the accents here, the important thing is that it is a matter of differentiation and designation. Distinguishing is not identical with the passing of differences, of which no one can know anything if they are not distinguished (it would be better if the German language allowed it: distinguishes). The distinguishing of differences (uno actu with the designation of one or the other side of the distinction) is already meaningful, is already linked to the possibility of meaning, to the illumination of a selection area by the designation, and ultimately, as we want to assume, to the use of signs. The externalization performance of the neuronal system (the creation of a world out there) would only lead to a smoothly compact sequence, a super-dense noise, if consciousness did not create images and events through which, for example, inside/outside or before/after would come about, or in short: a continuous modalization that would be inconceivable without signs or without meaning.

If it is the case that the operation of observation creates caesuras and events through the use of signs (this would even be its function), then in our experimental context this would mean that self-observation is exactly the same operation, i.e. it combines distinctions and designations that are conditioned by the use of signs. Consciousness would only be able to perform this operation non-privately. It would not obtain the 'material' for self-observation from itself, but would be completely socially conditioned in this respect. In this operation it would always have to use further signs (however sublimely and differentiated it might begin to do so), and at the moment in which it wanted to designate (differentiate), as it were, sign-free moments of itself, it would do what it does not want to do and yet wants to do: designate and differentiate.

This does not immediately rule out the possibility that there could be sign-free states of the mental system (essentially: perception), but emphatically states that such states and processes strictly elude self-observation. The model for this is provided by the idea of the unconscious, for which it is true that it is precisely not observed, except by effects, which are again only tapped (interpretatively) by using signs.

To put it pointedly: Consciousness is, with regard to what is chained in its observations, thoroughly: general, that is: socially conditioned. It is the inscription of the non-private into the psychic system and in this sense is not mono-produced but co-produced. It operates on socially supplied stocks. What has been traded in a long history as the proprium of the human being (the disposal of consciousness) is not the proprium, but the non-proprium. In this respect, intuitions that man is actually a social animal were anything but wrong. The metaphor of the socio-cultural (second) birth of man (or that of his plasticity, his instinctual decoupling) is also thoroughly instructive.

But that which is not one's own (the co-producer) is, as we said, the social. It would also have to be co-produced.

The basic theorem that refers to this co-production is: no communication without the participation of consciousness. If this theorem is taken literally, it definitely rules out the possibility of books communicating with books, works of art with works of art, banknotes with banknotes. It is equally clear that communication is always only actual communication, because consciousness, which is presupposed in the environment, is always only actual consciousness. Neither consciousness nor communication exist in pasts or futures, however much they may be concerned with thinking or talking about them. They are always only: present.

A very decisive consequence is that no causalities can run between different-in-simultaneity. Only this justifies an observer to consider the different (communication/consciousness) in every actuality as causally autonomous with respect to the other side of the distinction. And only this explains why an observer cannot avoid concepts of space (and consequently not the use of a time oscillating between the sides of what he distinguishes) as soon as he conceives of system and environment as something different-in-simultaneity. In any case, it is clear that traditional models of causality that abstract from the observer who attributes causalities are not suitable for specifying the role of consciousness in communication, let alone for grasping the 'welding mode' of conditioned co-production.

If one does not get any further with causality under such conditions, it makes sense to use the concept of function in the form that is typical of recent systems theory. Here it may suffice to say, in a very selective way in relation to the complexity of the concept, that the determination of the function is bound to an observer who works with the problem/problem solution scheme and constructs a reference problem in such a way that different problem solutions become instructively comparable on the opposite side of the construction. The problem to be constructed here can be formulated as a question: Why would communication disappear immediately if the conscious processors in its environment were to fail? Or: What would disappear with consciousness in such a way that communication would cease immediately?

One (usual) answer might be that consciousness would eliminate the noise producer that exposes the noise that is ordered by communication. Consciousness provides, if you will, the occasions that are brought into a selective context by the tense of communication, which would then no longer be dependent on specific (empirical) consciousness, but would very much depend on the fact that more and more noise is produced. One could thus say that consciousness 'maintains' communication by supplying occasions that are accessed temporally in such a way that they can be observed as communications of information, as utterances that are understood through subsequent utterances (through connections) or defined as connections of the same kind to previous utterances. Consciousness would provide the 'material' for this transformation into selectively related utterances and in this sense be an indispensable 'entertainer'. The idea would remain that it can only be this if it is in turn 'entertained' in the same way through communication.

The problem is that one can create a framework through thought experiments in which, for example, computers take the place of conscious systems and deliver program-controlled events (signs) that enter into a sequence in which utterance follows utterance. If this arrangement is constructed in such a way that no conscious observer is involved, the question could then be whether communications take place there (in this chamber), although the performance of conscious observers does not occur in their environment. In science fiction terms, one could also imagine that there would be no consciousness in the world at all, but that the machines would continue to play their game for eternities.

If you look at the experiment, you intuitively get the impression that the statement that communication is taking place in the computer rendezvous sounds strangely skewed and artificial. Some kind of performance seems to be missing. It is true that the computers produce noise, which gains a peculiar order in the sequence (so there is no lack of 'conversation'), and if one builds into the experiment the fact that the resulting sequences stimulate the computers to further activity of their own, then there is no lack of reciprocity in the 'conversation'. The machine constellation can also propel itself forward in time. But still, something seems to be missing, a performance that consciousness provides and that only this consciousness provides.

If we look at the autopoiesis of communication, we first find that communication cannot perceive. In this respect it is completely dead, or rather: indifferent. It can undoubtedly make perceptions the subject of discussion, and this can lead to backlash effects for conscious systems, which rearrange their own perceptions and attentionalities on the basis of such thematizations. But they themselves can neither see nor hear, neither sniff nor feel touch, and neither can they perceive themselves. This has often been said in the meantime and has become the starting point for important analyses.

A consequence that is less often considered, however, is that communication therefore cannot perceive signs. It does not say or write words, nor does it read. It holds up no flags, blares no fanfares, it has no face in which eyebrows are raised. The meaning of the signs is completely unknown to it. The operation of communication breaks down, if you will, compact streams of behaviour into the selections information, communication, understanding, and by generating selections (temporally, through incessant supplements that constitute the selectivity of lectures), it realizes the form of meaning, but the signs that are used, scattered, taken up, discarded or forgotten by not being taken up, it does not understand these signs, their meaning is not presented to it. It is precisely not: conscious. The operation projects, to use a slight variation of Sigmund Freud's metaphor relating to consciousness, a surface of meanings that mean nothing for the communication.

But this metaphor only works if it is 'circularized' in a certain way: the operation projects this surface only with the participation of consciousness, which produces this surface through a kind of 'reading out' in such a way that ordered noise is created, which can be temporally decomposed again through communication in such a way that a renewed 'reading out' becomes possible. In this consideration, the double meaning of 'reading' comes in handy. It refers to a reading (in the sense of reading a file) and to the resulting choice (in the sense of a selection). In a playful sense, one could say that we are dealing with a reading Lege (lesenden Lege) (Heidegger), perhaps even with the deep meaning of Logos.

Taken more seriously, the question arises as to how this reading out (which would then be the special achievement of the schema side consciousness in the distinction between communication and consciousness) functions. If we take these considerations to the extreme, we have said that consciousness, by reading out signs, creates meaning that communication cannot create because it does not perceive signs. On the other hand, consciousness (if we understand it as a sign-using, determined operativity) has these signs from the from-where-else of the social sphere, or – less spatially – from the opposite side of the distinction, from the co of production. It therefore does not create its meaning. And if it did, how would that work at all? Creating meaning?

Before this co of production can be concretized, it must first be made clear that consciousness does not necessarily, or even typically, perceive signs as signs. It processes signs, as we usually say, but this does not mean that it registers the sign-like quality of the signs. Someone knocks, you say "Come in!", and it does not seem at all necessary that the knocking or the word "Come in" be recognized as signs in any explicit form. The sense of the sign does not have to be specifically remembered, the use of signs is essentially schematic. All speech (with the exception of cases in which every word is important, for example in diplomacy) functions in this respect without consideration, it speaks (it thinks) in the sense of a cognitio caeca (Leibniz), a blind cognition that does not have to illuminate itself in the execution of the concatenation of signs. This largely corresponds to the system-theoretical idea that every observation operation (even and especially when it undertakes to observe the distinctions of observers as second-order observation) is always inaccessible in actu, because it is not capable of self-designation.

If one says in the diction introduced above that the sign represents the unity of signifiant and signifié, one could describe the same state of affairs as the processing of units that do not have to appear as a duality (precisely as the unity of signifier and signified). The signs function in catenation even without reference to their fundamental distinction. In Wittgensteinian terms: the signs are their use. The meaning would come into play when the explanation of the sign becomes necessary. The meaning would first be the explained sign. The explanation requires further signs, which may have to be explained by further signs, including the sign for "sign".

If one assumes (and this is already a case of application) that structure is the expression of irritability, then the sign comes to meaning through social processes of disruption, through the fact that it does not function as expected and therefore gives rise to inquiries, explications, definitions, paraphrases, context references, constructions of explanatory examples, repair processes and specifications. In this way, the distinction arises whose unit marker is the sign, the distinction between signifier and signified, between signified and signified. In observation-theoretical formulation: the second-order level of observation is introduced, on which observations become possible that do not simply use signs in the signifying function (as things), but observe distinctions (that of the sign). But to designate these distinctions, further signs are necessary that play on the first-order level of observation.

A particularly sophisticated (beautiful) case of disturbance is that what is designated by the signifier is "operationally inaccessible". This is obviously the case with the concatenation of signs themselves, to which no non-signs can be operatively inserted. No living elephants or dwarf rabbits are embedded in sequences of signs, and the "Neverending Story", which formally plays with this, also links words/images – nothing else. The operationally inaccessible of this kind can then be symbolized, and symbols are thus signs that denote this (this impossibility) and thus 'out' themselves as signs whose signifiers have collapsed, so that they stand for meaning that cannot be denoted. What is nice about this is that consciousness can only be symbolized for precisely this reason, because it falls out of every sign (as an operation).

The theory of symbolic generalization can be linked to this. Here, in the context of our investigation of this operative chiasmus of conditioned co-production, it suffices to note that the possibility of consciousness to perceive signs is obviously linked to the fact that social disturbances of the sign function occur, which give rise to consistency checks and stimulate second-order observations, in the execution of which signs impress as signs. If one prefers mystical formulations, communication and consciousness could be understood as the edges of a trace that is drawn through a wheel (conditioned co-production) – in a world that is, as it were, laid out by the trace.

Either way, assuming these considerations, one cannot apply the scheme of being when speaking of communication and consciousness. Neither the one side of the distinction nor the other can be described in terms of being, of Essence, of self-existence. There is, this is the deeply scandalous consequence, not consciousness, not communication – except for observations that pay attention to the TWO of the ONE of co-production or are already set up for the consequences of despair. This assessment is scandalous because in the course of evolution we have become accustomed, with every conceivable evidence, to at least conceiving of consciousnesses as entities circulating within themselves, as my or your consciousness, at any rate as something that is itself in its place and to which everything else is therefore opposed. And even sociology would run into decisive difficulties if it had to reject its basic theorem (namely that there are social facts sui generis), comparable in this respect to psychology, which would have to abandon the idea that it has any (reconstructible) object.

One can help oneself with regard to these specialized disciplines by seeing them as evolutionary amplifiers of this despair. They emerge because the ONE of the TWO cannot be observed simultaneously, which is why, in the course of alternating attention to one or the other side of the distinction (consciousness/communication), systems condense like things that appear to be separately controllable. The fact that this results in a loss of information is of no further importance, insofar as science tends to work under ceteris paribus conditions and systematically maintains (so to speak, substantiating) ignorance with regard to conclusion or unity formulas.

Nevertheless, the question can be asked (within the framework of controlled marginal speculations and in a clearly experimental attitude) how the idea that there exist singular (unique, independent, closed) systems of consciousness or even homines clausi could become so successful that any doubt about this assumption has long been forbidden as if by itself. In preparation for an answer, attention must once again be briefly devoted to the question of why there is nothing left but to assume for every observer that he is always a complete insider-of-himself.

With the concept of conditioned co-production, the scheme of being is rejected as a foundation for analytical possibilities. It is then no longer even a question of whether something is not what one believed it to be. The schema itself is rejected. "The very choice is rejected." Whether consciousness is the perception of what 'happens' in the mind of man (Locke), whether a distinction is made between perception (externalization function of the monad) or apperception (knowledge, reflection of what is present in perception) (Leibniz), whether Descartes is consulted or Kant, Brentano, Husserl, Sartre, whether it is about zombies or the question of qualia – at the moment when there is consistent talk of practiced difference, of co-production, objects drop out and unobjects appear. This is precisely what Niklas Luhmann expresses when he insists that the WHAT question must be replaced by the HOW question.

We have already mentioned the problem that arises. There is no possibility of simultaneously observing the sides of a form. Mesh and non-mesh, figure and ground, communication and consciousness do not permit the simultaneous designation of the inside and the outside of the distinction. Worse still: if one crosses the side, the side that he does not designate disappears for the observer, as if without transition. One reason for this is that the observer (the observation) always and only operates positively, i.e. designates and not: does not designate. This means that the observer can only arrive at opinions about different things in the world one after the other, only in sequences; he operates, to use Spencer-Brown's words, selectively blind, otherwise he would only arrive at nothing. One only smells an odor, not the non-odor, not the particular absence by which the odor impresses; one notices the pain, not the non-pain, this particular absence that is inverse to the pain. And of course you hear someone speaking, and not: the 'structured' silence that speech produces on its opposite side.

That sounds strange, but it opens up a memorable opportunity for analysis. The operation of observation is obviously always placed on the side; it is, one could say, never other than superpositive. Whatever is marked in it is, if one chooses the common expression, the inside of the form. In this respect, the operation is always acute. The crossing does not lead to the opposite side of the form (to the recess occurring in each current operation), but only generates the time (this Brownian tunnel) that allows us to move to another inner side in succession, i.e. to mark, for example, the side that was previously acutely blocked out.

In relation to our question, Spencer-Brown is helpful under these circumstances, who concludes his imperatorial starting calculus ("Draw a Distinction") with the insight (gained from the re-entry of the form into the form) "that the first distinction, the marker and the observer are not only interchangeable, but, in the form, identical". Only after going through the calculus can (should) it be recognized that the first marker has been 'confused' with the observer. The construction of the beginning by "Make a distinction" must be substituted afterwards, at the end (at the beginning) by: "Be an observer!" Or better in the future tense II: Designate, and you will have become an observer, which you already were. And: you will have seen that in the first marking (which was never the first after the game of calculation will have been played) you were already anchored on the inside of the form. You began as an inside player, you began intimately.

As strange as it sounds, all this can be taken as a calculus-like expression for the autopoiesis of meaning-based systems. Such systems (that is their definition, their demarcation) work with operations that always conclude positively. They are perfect leg-holdings, insofar as they can never access the co of production. It cannot be inscribed in them because (as one could also say) in every operation the unwritten cross cannot be designated without it disappearing: i.e. being written. This is the price that the observer pays. He introduces himself, if we take Spencer-Brown as our starting point, by being introduced, but discovers this very thing in the reentry of himself on his side.

In doing so, he discovers himself strangely doubled, because by distinguishing himself (in re-entry), he observes himself – as an Other. In re-entry, the distinction changes its meaning. This otherness, that is the thesis, is socially conditioned (when it comes to the construction of consciousness), it is characterized by communication in the precise sense.

Co-production thus ejects two things as ONE, in this case: consciousness and communication, which – in the course of time – can begin to register themselves as observers. In the course of time, this means that they have a history (an endless series of conditionings) behind them, in the course of which this registration is worked out. According to the theorem of co-production, this elaboration begins twice, internally and externally. The following sketch may illustrate this:

Since we are currently interested in the schema side of consciousness, it is obvious to look for the mechanism of this elaboration first in communication, which we understand as a time-based (différance-based) decomposition of environmental noise into the selections information, communication and understanding.

The component of communication is the selection that is understood in this process of decomposition and synthesis as the point of re-entry of the distinction between communication and consciousness in communication. No consciousness diffuses into the social system. In the communication, the processor is (re)constructed to which utterance acts are attributed. For this reason, one can formulate that in the communication, external and self-reference are combined – in a move through which the relevant other of communication (consciousness) appears operationally in the communication process: as the imputation of an acting instance, as its imagination.

But this is precisely what informs consciousness about the form in which it is capable of connection. Like communication, it combines self-reference and external reference, consciousness and communication – in one go and within itself. What it is not results from the internal imagination of communication, and what it is in each case, which self-descriptions on the basis of social attribution strategies are internally convincing as reality, results from the operations that are not connectable with regard to these strategies. They are, if you like, erased or washed out, so that consciousness appears, as it were, as something that has come to a standstill in a process of washing out, which must be imagined as historically and thus constantly varying and in principle contingent.

That is the real sociological opportunity. It is not necessary to know what consciousness is in and of itself. Instead, we can ask which descriptions of consciousness are connectable under socio-historical and socio-structural conditions and which are automatically and sharply forbidden as idiosyncratic, so much so that exclusion processes of the kind analyzed by Michel Foucault, for example, take hold. If one wishes, one can sense a peculiar Terror here, which does not prevent consciousness from developing arbitrary or even idiosyncratic self-descriptions, but with extreme rigidity cuts off possibilities of connection that would not be general, but private in the proper sense. This could probably be studied with profit if one concentrates on the scientific construction of psychopathologies, which includes the excluded privacy, deprivatizing it, in modernity.

FUCHS, Peter, 2002. Die konditionierte Koproduktion von Kommunikation und Bewusstsein. pdf