In relation to the misunderstanding that Actors are in any ontological sense subjects or acting psychophysical entities characterized by sociality, the talk of communicative address has become common, the idea that communication creates its own constructions, which impress themselves as social structures.
Sociologically, this is anything but new territory: in precisely this understanding, role theory, for example, has grasped the concept of expectation (the bundle of expectations) as a social structure, as the addressing of typical expectations to the holders of positions; in precisely this understanding, labeling theories have discovered the strong moments of constructiveness of deviant behavior and thus set themselves apart from efforts to shift causes for such behavior to the individuals.
The systems theoretical shift is found only in the fact that the primary set process, if you will, of generating communicative addresses is the autopoiesis of social systems.
It is not the subject that draws to itself the expectations emanating from other subjects, or that makes the arrangements of expectations on the background of which communication materializes, but it is communication that, in the management of its self-simplification, generates and elaborates points of attribution that then appear as acting (communicating) persons, this then in that evidence that made possible the millennia-old delusion that communication is operated by subjects. Everybody who is compelled to proclaim system-theoretical insights excessively knows the resistances which occur when that (even perceptual) evidence is disputed.
However, it is in the logic of sociological system theory that the system/environment difference (social systems/individuals) firstly forces to shift the construction of addresses into the autopoiesis of the social system, secondly to assume that the Starting Point of this construction is the selection of the communication, which has to identify a communicator, thirdly that then the connection of social address and individual (and if necessary their difference) can be treated in separate theory pieces of coupling or interpenetration. [⇒ Interpenetration and Structural Coupling (Interpenetration und strukturelle Kopplung)]
The following considerations also deal with this connection, but with a different direction of culmination: What does the communicative epiphany of a social address mean for the individual?
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In a harsh but not exaggerated formulation: the social address is a question of survival. If one assumes that consciousness and communication co-evolve, then, to put it tautologically, communication is only possible if consciousness, but consciousness is also only possible if communication is involved.
This statement is in view of evolution a well-founded speculation, which has its condition in drawing apart consciousness and communication. If one transforms this speculation down to empirical findings or even plausibilities, one quickly finds that individuals who have no contact with social systems or only minimal contact actually die or suffer from the restrictions of most severe disabilities.
One need not recall the relevant medieval experiments in which the aim was to find the primordial language and in which children were therefore deprived of the possibility of communication. The Kaspar Hauser syndrome or the wolf children would be other examples.
Suffice it to say that no individual-theoretical paradigm (not even Freud's, not even Lacan's) can do without the introduction of the OTHER when dealing with the genesis of consciousness. Without exception, the intervening variable of sociality is needed, however profoundly it is then explained.
Infant research also provides ample evidence that although even the immediate postnatal period is characterized by a finely differentiated attentionality, the infant does not yet have consciousness, the autopoiesis of a concatenation of thoughts (conceptions), which are first and foremost not simply differences, but distinctions, an autopoiesis that is linked to the necessity of being able to use the inside/outside distinction internally.
We simply hold that the autogenesis of consciousness is linked to the contact with communication. But then literally everything depends on the fact that communication treats a formation of its environment (the wriggling something infant) as addressable, as something which, although it does not yet have self-reference at all, is conceived as an instance of communication.
The thesis is that nothing would work for an individual in this world if it could not take the form of addressability, if it could not be considered as a repulsion point for address formation. Communication must be able to assume addressability. It must identify communicative action.
In a first approach, one can say that communication as a unit of social systems ubiquitously produces this problem of address formation and thus always also the problem of who comes into question as a condensation point for the attribution of communicative action.
From the inside of the theory, one could add (without wanting to address it specifically) that the problem can also be described as one that occurs when the first symmetry breaking happens in the constellation of double contingency, i.e. when communication is taken up.
The solutions to the problem vary then, but this is no surprise, diachronically and synchronically considerably: In Japan other addresses are formed than in Dinkelsbühl, Calcutta or Minsk; in archaic societies a different management of addressability is established than in stratified empires or under conditions of functional differentiation.
If the universality of the problem results from the fact that it always arises when communication is carried out, then this means in an even more radical cut: Without exception every social phenomenon has to do with it, or harder: No social fact would come about if it were not subject to the foil of addresses, i.e. if the problem of addressability had produced forms related to it. This hard position justifies to ask what kind of form the concept of addressability itself has, what it distinguishes first and what distinguishes it second.
The answer to the first question is obvious: The communicative address denotes the re-entry of the distinction of communication and consciousness on the side of communication. Accordingly, addressable world occurrences are those which can be taken by communication as a re-entry point and can be worked out as an address. The indispensable precondition for this is that addressable world occurrences (for example people, trees, computers) maintain a relation of their own, or in other words: that they can be assumed to have self-reference.
The question of the distinction by which addressability is communicatively enacted is more difficult to answer. For this is the question of a distinguishing operation which, according to our thesis, is involved in every social process.
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