‘Dense’ Address

For segmentary (archaic) social formations it can be claimed that they cultivated a very problematic, memory-consuming mode of address formation.

They were able to assume invisible self-reference in all world occurrences (i.e. also in animals, trees, stars, gods), but also to exclude invisible self-reference in humans (for example in strangers) and thus to make them objects, not addressees of communication.

This will have continued in the great imperial empires with, as one might say, a gradual thinning out of the possibility to invoke invisible self-reference to any world occurrences. The formation of addresses became in a certain sense more 'orderly' and more and more (with the introduction of writing then decidedly) independent of individual memory and orally handed down strategies in view of what can be considered an address for communication and what not.

With the time of the axes, processes set in worldwide, which bind the addressability to subjects, then, as for example in the case of Christianity, perpetuate the address beyond the life span: The psychic counter-content of the address is immortal and insofar everything depends on living here in a way, which makes it possible to be an address in the hereafter, if possible not for Lucifer, but for God.

In Buddhism, to give another example, in the great circle of rebirth the same address is endowed with the potential of total oblivion of previous states of being. It is the same and not the same. But also here the attainment of the sufferinglessness is bound to life guidance cuts, thus to strategies of immanent address formation of a certain kind.

With some vagueness in the details, one can say that the special feature of the stratified form of differentiation of society lies in the fact that the address of the individual is formed in the stratum into which he was born, i.e. in this sense it is constructed locally. We could speak of a sharply limited address with regard to possibilities of connection beyond the stratum boundary, which at the same time places possible communication within the stratum under equally sharply restrictive conditions. The stratum address largely determines which opportunities for happiness and suffering are accessible to the addressed individual and which are definitely not. This 'dense' address (as much as we retrospectively characterize it as restrictive) has a high orientational value, which allows to behave appropriately and to discriminate inappropriateness in almost all life cases. Inappropriate behavior is under the threat of exclusion, which, in relation to the stratum, can be total exclusion, in relation to society culminates in the elimination of the body, in the erasure of the immanent (not the transcendent) address.

It is this 'dense' address that changes massively with the conversion of society to the functional differentiation type, accompanied, if one may say so, by semantic thunderstorms that range from the weather lightning of increasing registry of disorientation to the registry of the loss of the subject in our century and still continue.

The central process is the differentiation of autonomous functional systems (science, economy, politics, law, education, art, intimate system, etc.), which no longer allow the inclusion of the individual to take place within the framework of one stratum, but regulate it each for itself society-wide. Access to truth, to scarce goods, to the enforcement of collectively binding decisions, to the maintenance of counterfactually stabilized expectations, to careers, to specific art-shaped processes of perception, to relationships in which idiosyncrasies are tolerated, etc., is installed in the form of universality, and this brings with it more and more the need to dislocate the communicative address. Beyond the name that minimally identifies it, it has differentiated expressions in the changing contexts (contextures) of the functional systems.

The connection to scientific communication presupposes an address in which self-reference appears extremely reduced and external reference sharply forced. The connection to the economy favors the formation of addresses in which the willingness to pay or the possibility to pay are relevant and thus disconnects from the scientific address in which the disposal of truth may not be linked to money. The coupling to political power forces the creation of an honorable address, which does not stand in the way of holding office, whereas the address in the art system rarely depends on honorability, but rather on the demonstration of untamed creativity, i.e. on a correspondence to the social description of the artist. An intimacy system cannot be approached on the basis of the economic (love cannot be paid for), the scientific, the legal, the artistic address. The modes of inclusion or exclusion by which the addresses are contoured not only vary from system to system, they are in essential respects completely different and not infrequently: incompatible.

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