Suspicion

The difference- and selection-oriented concept of communication makes problems and barriers of communicative behavior understandable, which have been observed and described for centuries.

Once entangled in communication, one never gets back to the paradise of simple souls (not even, as Kleist hoped, through the back door). This is typically demonstrated by the theme of Sincerity (current only for modern times).

Sincerity is incommunicable because it becomes insincere through communication. For communication presupposes the difference between information and communication and presupposes both as contingent. One can then very well communicate something about oneself, about one's own states, moods, attitudes, intentions; but this only in such a way that one presents oneself as a context of information which could also turn out differently. Therefore, communication releases an all-embracing, universal, irremediable suspicion, and all affirming and appeasing only regenerates the suspicion. This also explains that this topic becomes relevant in the course of an increased differentiation of the social system, which then reflects more and more on the peculiarity of communication. The insincerity of sincerity becomes an issue as soon as one experiences society as something that is not held together by natural order but by communication.

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LUHMANN, Niklas, 1991. Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. 4. Auflage. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 666. ISBN 978-3-518-28266-3, p. 207

p. 223:

Only the writing enforces a clear difference between communication and information, and the printing then again strengthens the suspicion that arises from the special production of the communication: that it follows its own motives and is not only servant of the information.

Only writing and printing suggest the connection of communication processes that do not react to the unity of communication and information, but precisely to their difference: Processes of truth control, processes of articulating a suspicion with subsequent universalization of the suspicion in a psychoanalytical and/or ideological direction.

Writing and printing thus enforce the experience of difference that constitutes communication: they are, in this precise sense, more communicative forms of communication, and they thus induce reaction of communication to communication in a much more specific sense than is possible in the form of oral exchange (Wechselrede).

p. 224N48 The usual conception thinks exactly the other way round, because it interprets communication teleologically as being based on agreement. Then, of course, oral exchange (dialogue, discourse) must appear as the ideal form and all mechanization of communication through writing and printing as a sign of decay or as a stopgap.