Sense

We designate with this word a universal, not negatable, highly mobile medium. As always, we do not assume that this sense exists, but that it is generated in every actuality and that this generation depends on the form of différance. Sense, whatever it refers to, whatever horizons it is set in, stages itself through supplementary operations which, if I may put it quaintly, an-sense respective sense post festum. We have discussed this. And we have also said that a certain despair can be connected with it, namely that sense cannot be fixed.

In the first step, we then claim that the WWW as a social system (in this perspective) naturally processes meaning, and, as you can easily convince yourself, in any fullness, concreteness, simplicity or complexity. Everything that is communicable can also be found in this net, from pornography to diploma theses, from often richly bizarre homepages to the possibility of playing games online, cybersex, poetry, politics, but of course also economics, law and religion - simply everything. One would almost have to say that this everything (except for control measures that are starting here and there, but which can hardly be kept up ubiquitously) is exactly what we already had in our discussion of the system of society: an everything as a totum, as a world, as a compendium of meaning that can be put into the WWW at will. Here, too, the suspicion arises that the world in the worldwide web (WWW) does not have the sense of a globality at all, of an extended space, because already empirically it is clear that by far not all people of mankind (and I would rather say: der Leutheit) are reached by the blessings of this web. The totum of the world arises in the net as arbitrariness of the implementation of specific sense. This means nothing more than that everyone can put any documents on the net, articles, porn, music, movies, sales offers, homepages, stock exchange prices, train schedules, bomb making instructions etc.pp.

But this means above all that on this level of setting (let's call it the level of first-order documents) there is only specific sense, there is nothing else than specific sense, but that the WWW could hardly be described as an addition of these specific utterances. On the contrary: that the net can absorb any sense, so to speak, is what is really significant. This absorption is only another word for that abstraction, where it is actually irrelevant, which ETWASSE [somethings ; R.B.] are moved communicatively. It is not about a WHAT, but about a THAT.

I therefore first assume that the WWW is socially isomorphic. We don't see it if we only pay attention to what is posted on the net, i.e. if we concentrate on content. We don't see it either, by the way, if we assume that those utterances (texts, images, etc.) are also already communications, an assumption that is a basic evil of relevant discussions that confuse communication and communicabilia in other contexts as well.

Interposed question: I myself have a homepage. If I understand you correctly, it has nothing to do with communication? That's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's true that nothing of what appears on your homepage is communication, but it could very well become a moment of communication. Documents of any kind are not communications. It would also be strange to say that there are communications standing around in a library. At the moment I hold the view, which could still change, that communications are selective references of utterances to utterances – in the time mode of différance and therefore only systemic, not identitary.

Interposed question: Then you could say that the Internet, as a constantly changing container of documents, has nothing to do with communication? You know that I don't think much of the container metaphor, but in principle you are right. In order to characterize the WWW as a social system, we still have to find the operation that relates the documents to each other. This must be communication, but in a special form. This is then the second step. In the first, we have identified a sea of documents that are simply put on the web and kept accessible there, for which purpose perhaps the most powerful search engines mankind has invented have been developed. At this level, communication is little new; it makes use of writing, the still or moving image, and more recently, the voice. The environment (i.e., consciousness) makes noise in every conceivable way, and one cannot quite see how this noise and the selectivity of the resulting communication chains should differ from what we have known anyway since writing has existed. Whether one enters something in virtual guest books or reads a virtual article, engages in bumblebee breeding, karate or Chinese cooking recipes, whether one chats, participates in discussion forums, places virtual partnership advertisements or takes part in one of the (for their part extremely interesting) Internet games, all this is communication – as usual, neither faster nor slower, at most more convenient and often more non-committal, if one has not just bought something in a virtual store. You don't see the difference that makes the difference to what we understand as communication anyway. Whether one orders a book via the WWW or goes to the nearest bookstore is at best a question of the quality of life one wants to enjoy.

But if we understand the operation of communication as selective reference, then we could see the specificity of the WWW in the fact that it uses the technique of hyperlinks, buttons that can be clicked on, passages of text or images over which the cursor turns into a hand that invites the user to press the mouse buttons. This is what the popular metaphor of surfing stands for. By clicking on hyperlinks, one can swing through the net like Tarzan on his vines through the jungle or the surfer from wave to wave. In most documents of the first level there are such minimal messages inviting to jump. And if once documents appeared, which are hyperlink-free, the browser provides that one can jump out of the document again or back. After all, the search engines present nothing more than sometimes endless series of branching possibilities.

Before we take a closer look at this strange story, however, we can state that every user puts the first-order documents into a virtual concatenation that expires when he switches off. Traces of this virtual concatenation can be traced, one can also reconstruct them oneself by means of sensible devices that record which addresses one has recently visited, but these tracings and reconstructions do not go very deep. The picture that emerges is rather one of many many users placing virtual references over the first-order document level at any moment via hyperlinks that lead to further hyperlinks. From the user's point of view, projection lines or nets are stretched, which change the document level (1) only when entries are made or the trace of a visit (for instance how many visitors someone is) is automatically recorded on a document. Of course, it is also possible to use technology in such a way that user interest profiles are stored somewhere. But the crucial point here is that the virtual linking of virtual documents is done on the basis of a click-and-click process [Anklick- und Durchklick-Verfahren ; R.B.].

Exactly this procedure could be called the operation of a reference, which selects something from a document (the hyperlink), from where another document appears, which offers the same possibility, namely to start another reference. What is interesting here is that what is referred to each other in this way could have only this minimal reference. I mean that apart from the mere reference no logical relation exists at all outside the head of the user, only the mere and arbitrary seeming consequence. I don't want to go into this in depth, but one could think that the différance we have presupposed for all sense processes, this subsequent identification of something as something, takes a kind of microscopic, almost autological form: being mere referring that sets the preceding document identity only as a document – and nothing beyond that. For the user, his surfing can be exciting and instructive, but the documents mean nothing to each other. The relationing is the switching through itself, which might therefore (but I am quite undecided) be understood as communication, but in an extraordinarily reduced, minimally sense-processing form.

You see what I'm getting at, namely that the WWW, which we haven't known that long, both ejects meaning and operationally dilutes it to an extreme. It could be exactly one of those socially functioning abstractions we talked about some time ago. It would have almost nothing to do with any specific sense (that would only apply to the users), and it would be completely indifferent to any sense - like society itself or like the functional systems. What it represents as a social system, in which rubrics or categories we should classify it, that is still open. After all, it has features of organization (memberships, but these are not mediated by it but by many other external social systems, in my case T-Online, for example), but it is apparently not decision-based. However, it is probably hard to describe as a functional system, because it would be very hard to describe the social problem in view of which it could be thematized as a solution. Therefore, I argue for thinking of it, at least in the context of this lecture, as a monstrous social system that parasitizes in a still unclear way on special problems posed by the form of society (its differentiation).

But if it is a social system, however monstrous, then we find confirmed a finding we have already discussed, namely that as a social system it presupposes in its environment only consciousness which has the ability to click and does not really need anything more. Similar to society and similar to functional systems, consciousness is, as it were, only necessary as a hypothesis, for instance in the sense that some consciousness out there realizes its own operativity. One could also say that the system treats consciousness extremely schematically, thins it out and reduces it – just to the minimal constellation that it could click, but does not have to click. It functions as a symbol for contingency, not as something in view of whose self-reference any special efforts like understanding would have to take place.

Interposed question: Isn't it then something that should be fought? I have not actually put these considerations in a culturally critical way, if only because modern society and the functional systems function in a very similar way. It does not depend on a special sense and certainly not on a special consciousness. Perhaps this is the reason why people highlighted by mass media seem so attractive, although the stories they stage or that are staged with them differ at most in terms of otherwise not widespread luxuries from the ordinary stories that happen to all of us. The mass media, however, fall under the same law that it doesn't matter whether Stefan Raab or Boris Becker or Claudia Schiffer or whoever is put in the center, the main thing is someone who is suitable.

Interposed question: So could one say that the abstractions or general abstractions you're talking about abstract or subtract consciousness, so to speak? Yes, that's what I was getting at today. The WWW was just an example I chose because I suspect you are intrigued by that system. But in principle, it's about the fact that we can also observe the tendency to attach consciousness schematically to it.

In the Weltbildhaus, which is the guiding metaphor of these lectures, consciousness was for a long time a matter taken for granted, then gradually problematic, but actually little thought was given to its being subtracted, abstracted, That does not mean that it disappears, it only means that for central social contexts it is a lively environmental given in which it is not worthwhile to distinguish singularities.

Intermediate question: Well, but in most contexts in which I am involved, I am taken seriously as consciousness, among friends, at home, in relation to teachers, etc.? Yes, maybe, let's say there, where understanding-dense contexts are socially established, for instance in families or among really good friends or in intimate systems, perhaps with pastors or emphatic psycho-therapists. But it is precisely these social formations that impress in their strong (and for other times bizarre) interest in understanding against the structures we have been talking about. And I would suggest very strongly that these structures will change our ideas about what we mean by consciousness. I remind you that we have already talked about all of this when we addressed hyperautonomous communication.

But, ladies and gentlemen, our time is running out. In the remaining lectures we want to discuss the function of society.