The processes of communication which, as it were, wash around it, do not only treat the child thematically, but include it (and already by its name) in their operations.
In the process, the child is not only addressed, but understood as a producer of however diffuse utterances, as someone who announces something about his pain, his pleasure, his internal intentions, pre-linguistically, but nevertheless in a way that can be connected.
Here an instructive problem arises: According to everything we can think of, the child does not communicate any information about internal states, it does not know that it is itself and the others are the others, it does not designate anything, it operates in a space, if you will, free of distinction and designation.
Communication, however, which treats its behavior as communication, assumes self-reference in the sense of an 'as if' and then runs into the difficulty of this very counterfactuality: it cannot fulfill its function of error correction without great effort.
Or in other words: difficulties of understanding occur continuously, which cannot be solved by the common techniques of confirmation, of the accompanying mental and communicative control of understanding or even by metacommunication.
The possible structure of communication is characterized by one-sided Consciousness in the environment of a non-conscious address. Or still differently: In view of the addressability of the infant, communication gets into a permanent crisis.
It is neither certain whether something has been communicated, nor whether messages have been understood. The connections shift, as it were, into the blue.
The interesting thing is that this very uncertainty leads to a process in the course of which the child (as in a self-fulfilling prophecy) gains an address and with it the possibility of establishing self-reference. The crisis, this would imply, is the instrument of its solution. It leads first of all to a difference of the 'volumes' of communication.
Communicative crises, that is, increase the attempts to achieve understanding. They raise, as one might say, the noise level in the environment of the social system. The problem of controllability of understanding, the problem of making safe connections, forces to talk more. This could be called the phenomenon of augmentation. Since this talking cannot be incessant repetition of the same, amplification is connected with augmentation. The communication, related to the uncertain address, swells and varies. It refers to the same subject, but plays it out differently in ever new attempts.
In, as Peter Fuchs thinks, good system-theoretical tradition, one can specify the concept of amplification from its rhetorical context of origin. Amplificatio as a technique belongs to the quantity figures. It is used to achieve evidence. Amplification is thus not a figure of brevitas, brevity, or economy. Contrary to what modern notions of evidence suggest, amplifying speech/writing is not about achieving a striking intuition in the shortest possible way, but rather about achieving the most vivid understanding possible. In this respect the procedure is uneconomical, because it presupposes the multiplication (augmentation) of differences. Instead, redundancies are unfolded in a precise sense and with a clear reference to perception (ad oculos ponere), i.e. to e-vidence. The procedure presupposes imagination in the addressee and differs in this from all techniques that fulfill decorative functions or appeal to the intellect. In short: amplification differentiates differences.
The system of the beginning (the infant, the small child) is covered in communication logic with redundancy and variety at the same time. The very fact that the child represents a kind of institutionalized permanent crisis forces communication into the procedures of augmentation/amplification of itself. Since this, so to speak, jumping-up communication assumes self-reference in the addressee and gains its volume from this assumption, it inevitably comes to a clear marking of the self-referential component of communication. It emphasizes the communication aspect, it reduces the information aspect. In this respect, communication with the small child becomes 'repressed', that is, endowed with strongly emphatic moments (with emotional overtones). It stamps, so to speak, again and again with one foot of its self-reference and thus chants a beat which (however then in detail) replaces the imputation of self-reference in the system of the beginning by factual self-reference, i.e. by a gradually expressing self-relation of the incessantly addressed system of the beginning. This shaping, however, is Exclusion, insofar as on this elementary level is separated what comes into question as address, and at the same time elementary Inclusion, because uno actu the possibility of participation in communication arises: the Address.
This first address usually arises in arrangements of intimacy, in families. This could justify drawing on sociological knowledge about the forms of intimacy, about the specificity of early inclusion/exclusion processes, but also knowledge about conformist and deviant address formation. Furthermore, it could be shown how the first address is gradually pulled out of the context of total inclusion in the family and included in ever new contexts, with correspondingly ever new processes of exclusion. It could be observed how the problem of having to be an address leads to the problem of 'recognition' in the psychic environment of address formation, i.e. to the fact that individuals spend their whole lives trying to be addressable and to avoid losing addressability. Even the assertion that recognition is unimportant to one is still in the service of trying to specify one's address as a superior one. The loss of addressability in a majority of socially relevant social contexts conjures up the danger of total exclusion, and it is now apparent that large social systems have set out to restore addressability. All this leads to unforeseeable horizons of reorganization of known research stocks or the establishment of new heuristics.
However, we want to ask in a more experimental stance whether the universal problem of addressability is touched by a theory of differentiation of society, or, in other words, whether the structure of address formation triggered by the particular type of differentiation has profound (possibly today novel) repercussions on the mental systems affected by it.
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