Irritation

Society today depends on many environmental preconditions, but these can only have a destructive effect.

The narrow area of Communication influenced by Consciousness is the only area in which society can help itself. It is obvious that this analysis fits today's ecological situation.

In both cases, in the relation of brain and physico-chemical environment and in the relation of consciousness and communication, it is remarkable that the autopoietic system is constantly affected via Structural Coupling.

It is not just a matter of sporadic impacts that occur now and then, but the structural couplings ensure that the consciousness, the social communication system or the brain are constantly supplied with irritation.

So what exactly does it mean that there is a compatibility of structural coupling with Autopoiesis? Can we formulate this a little more precisely?

First of all, it is still and again to say: there is no structural determination from the environment into the system. The structural couplings do not determine the state of the system. They only supply the system with disturbances, one could say.

Maturana also speaks of the "Perturbation" of the system. Niklas Luhmann prefers the expressions "irritation", "stimulation" or also, seen from the system, "Resonance (cap)ability".

The resonance of the system is activated by structural couplings. If one uses the term perturbation, one must be aware that one is no longer dealing with an equilibrium theory.

Equilibrium theories, after all, had the notion of perturbation built in; the whole model of equilibrium had been formulated in two ways in terms of perturbation, on the one hand in terms of the ease and probability of perturbation. If you imagine a scale, all it takes is small forces, a few grams more on one side, and the equilibrium is disturbed.

We have already heard of these ideas, which arose in the 17th century and concerned the artificiality of the balance of trade or international equilibrium: a few more soldiers on France's side, and already the Prussians have to rearm in order to maintain the balance.

On the other hand, however, one always imagined that the equilibrium had a kind of infrastructure, a kind of apparatus, which served the self-preservation of the equilibrium, so that the disturbance would lead, on the one hand, to the restoration of the equilibrium, to the manipulation of prices, to rearmament or whatever one had in mind in the respective equilibrium model, and that these possibilities, on the other hand, had their limits and one would have to deal with a loss of the equilibrium or with destruction.

If you started from dynamic equilibria, a further development was to say that the system can find a different equilibrium. One develops a different kind of coalitional type in the European equilibrium, the balance of trade can be balanced differently than before. The equilibrium does not have to be maintained by a return to the previous state, but it can develop dynamically, for example, in terms of ideas of progress or in terms of functional equivalents.

Basically, however, the purpose of this model, which is actually a metaphor, was to provide for equilibrium as a condition for stability and to describe the system as a stable system via its equilibrium or, if you remember the introductory lesson of this lecture, to tie the structural maintenance or conservation of the system to the concept of equilibrium.

Today, this has become questionable in various respects. On the one hand, in the natural sciences, one has the idea that it is precisely the imbalances that can be stable, and in economics, one says that a system is stable either when there are too many goods on offer and too few buyers, or vice versa, when there are too many buyers and too few goods. However, an exact match would be too unstable to gain any kind of stability.

Thus, socialist systems keep goods scarce, while capitalist systems keep buyers scarce; in either case, it is an imbalance that is itself stable. This is the one tendency that challenges the old model.

On the other hand, if one starts from the notion of autopoiesis, of operational closure, of structural coupling, the equilibrium model becomes questionable for the very reason that one would regard disequilibria and equilibria as functionally equivalent, since both serve stability.

Thus, the concept of disturbance or the concept of irritation, of stimulation, of perturbation has a different meaning, and the question now is, how, if one renounces the equilibrium model, a disturbance can be understood internally in the system.

Probably the best way is to imagine that the system has certain structures, thus also a certain range of possibilities of its own operations, which is extremely limited by what can be considered as poiesis at all, but also limited by what can be dealt with within an existing structural pattern and thus without far-reaching and incalculable structural changes, so that the disturbances are always measured against the structures or, in the field of sensible processes, against the possible operations or also against the expectations, which have proven themselves in the system and give information from there.

A disturbance, an information, an irritation gives from a range of possibilities one or the other, what is actual, into the system. This can initiate search or identification processes. One may not know at first glance, when there is a dicey smell, whether it is a fire or whether it is just the potatoes on the stove that have burned or something else may have happened. Nevertheless, with certain forms of odor, there is only a limited possibility of interpretation. You don't assume that the gas tank has leaked if there is a burnt smell – or there is. In any case, the range of possibilities is adjusted to the speed and the information processing capacity of the system.

Thus, disturbance means to set an information processing process in motion, which can be handled operatively in the system, for example, can be mastered in the consciousness by deliberation or by redirecting the perception to the point of disturbance or can be treated communicatively in communication. One asks back, one thematizes a disturbance. One warns others, thus translating what can be verbally formulated in the system, even though it does not appear as a word in the environment, into a system process that cannot guarantee results, but does offer ways to get the system going and keep it going.

The term perturbation is being replaced by the equilibrium model and is being adopted to describe what might more accurately be called an information processing process. Although Niklas Luhmann is not well informed in this area,

The common denominator of these theory transformation processes is the question of how a system responds to what it perceives as a disturbance, even though in the environment of course it is not a disturbance: by restoring equilibrium, by finding another equilibrium, or by information processing processes that are tuned to the capacity of the system.

This means, not least, that the concept of Information must also be adapted to this new interpretation.

Since the 1950s, the concept of information has proliferated in a way that has affected conceptual clarity. For example, one spoke of genetic information and treated structures as informative in this term, so that, for example, genetic codes contain information according to the linguistic usage of biologists, although they are structures and not events.

Moreover, the semantic side of the term, and thus the question of what information can select from, remained unresolved.

If one keeps these two aspects in mind and wants to express them in the form of a concept of information, this would mean, first, that information is always an Event, i.e. precisely not something that is constantly present.

Bielefeld University, for example, is not information; even if you come here every day, you do not always activate new information according to the Pattern: it is still there, and tomorrow you will be surprised again that it is still there.

Bielefeld University is a Structure that has no informational value, that has meaning – after all, you have a certain idea of why you come here – but it does not yield any new information. So you have to distinguish sense or even structural, relative invariants from the surprise effect of information. Second, you have to build the concept of information again like a concept of form, that is, as a concept with two sides. On the one hand, there is a surprise, but on the other hand, the surprise exists only because one had expected something and because one delimits a range of possibilities within which then the information can say this and not that. If an acquaintance comes with a new car, there is a certain range of possibilities what kind of car it can be. One will not expect a deck chair when he says he comes with a new car.

Information always presupposes that one possibility is delimited against other possibilities and that within a range of possibilities one or the other is presented as information. Information is a selection from a range of possibilities; if the selection is repeated, it no longer contains information. If one says the same thing over and over again, the meaning remains unchanged, but the information disappears altogether or is limited to the fact that someone apparently sees a point in saying the same thing over and over again, and this is surprising because one normally expects each sentence to be followed by another sentence and not the same one, just as a record can have a groove error and then always repeat itself – but then one would at least have the interpretation of a record error in contrast to the normal functioning of a record.

Niklas Luhmann, Einführung in die Systemtheorie, hg. von Dirk Baecker, Sozialwissenschaften (Heidelberg: Carl-Auer-Verl, 2002), p. 124–128.