Autopoiesis: Producing and Reproducing Systems Theory

There is a lot of talk about the United States being without credible leadership, given that our new president is not mentally sound. He seems to have Narcissistic Personality Disorder, among other problems.

But in a functionally differentiated society, government officials are not leaders of a nation. Indeed, there are no leaders. The traditional ideas of political leadership derive from the old stratified society. We may find that we can get along fine without a decent president. All he is is the chief executive of one branch of the federal government. He is not an emperor. We still have laws and a Constitution. We still have a legislature. We also have state and local governments.

We also have other function systems–not only the legal system, but the economy, the art system, the education system, the science system, the health system, the mass media, etc. Politics is  not in control because no system is in control or in a position to lead society. The other systems will push back against any effort by the political system to exert control. And the president is only one player in the political system anyway.

The idea that the president “runs the country” is just nonsense, and our president is certainly not, and never has been, “the leader of the free world.” Speaking of leaders in this way just serves to reassure people that there is someone in charge, someone with a plan, some God figure who is taking care of things. But there isn’t.

Symbolically generalized communication media, such as power, money, truth, etc., are called generalized because they can be reused. The media are accepted under the condition or trust that they can be reused. A person accepts a monetary payment because they expect to be able to use that money themselves. As Luhmann puts it,

[The] form in which the transaction is set is dissolved  immediately afterward; for once in the hands of the recipient, the money is free for other combinations at will. No other medium attains this extension and this speed of dissolution and recombination, or loose and strict coupling. And it is hence understandable that money is often seen (notably by Parsons) as a model for an effectively symbolically generalized medium. (Theory of Society, vol. 1. p. 209)

When it comes to power, if someone carries out an order or instruction or submits to legitimate power, that’s only because she expects to be able to use power when she attains a similar position–or at least expects someone else to be able to use power on her behalf. In a republic, the party out of power, the opposition, accepts the government’s power because they want their own exercise power to be accepted when their turn comes. The generalized media don’t belong to anyone; they have to circulate. In terms of money, the political system even enforces this rule through taxation. To prevent you from saving all of your excess money, the state takes some of it away and puts it back in the economy.

This trait of communication media allows improbable communication to cross a threshold of probability. For instance, it is highly improbable that the party out of power would accept the power of the party in power (the government) if they didn’t expect to be able exercise power when their time came. The boundary between the two sides of the form has to be crossable. If the opposition expected to be permanently ruled or subordinated, they would probably revolt or just stop acquiescing to power.  When people do revolt or riot, it’s because they don’t expect to ever have power in the current political system, which also implies that they don’t accept the legitimacy of the political system. They also tend to believe that the rules are enforced arbitrarily or unfairly or that they keep changing. The threat of negative sanctions or punishment is not enough to convince people to carry out orders or instructions that they don’t really want to carry out. They need to see power as legitimate.

It is the possibility of using negative sanctions that is the source of power. A negative sanction that is actually imposed decreases the stock of power. As Luhmann argued,

Precisely because it is not used and as long as it is not used, the possibility of imposing negative sanctions is a source of power. Power, therefore, comes to an end if the exercise of this possibility can be forced. (Politics and the Theory of the Welfare State, 158).

A negative sanction that is imposed (e.g., a prison sentence, job termination, slap on the face) is a form; the medial substratum, which is the storehouse of possible negative sanctions, coalesces into an actual negative sanction, which can then be resisted. The reactions to the punishment cannot be predicted.

On the level of language, a word is a medium because it can be reused. The medial substratum of words are phonemes, while the words are forms. The same limited list of phonemes are combined in different orders to make different words

In the seventeenth century, there were increasing signs that the moral code was being de-ontologized and coming to be seen as a unity. Without vice, there can be no virtues. Moral judgments were themselves judged. The cosmic struggle in Paradise Lost in which God attempts to make something good of evil, and the devil, threatened as a principle, seeks in response to discover something evil in good, in fact takes place in human souls–and ends in a draw. At approximately the same time, morality was released from the custody of religion . . .

(Luhmann. Theory of Society, vol 1. p.240)

What does it mean to say that morality was de-ontologized? It means morality was observed as a two-sided form. Evil was no longer seen as a thing-in-itself; it wasn’t some force or essence that could inhabit a person or cause things to happen. It didn’t need to be exorcised from people, and illness or criminality wasn’t blamed on things like demons.

As a two-sided form, human conduct or goals can cross the boundary from morality (or good, respectable behavior) to immorality (bad, disreputable behavior). The crossing is conditioned, but it must be possible to cross  back and forth. We can also call morality a schema of observation.

But this is not just a matter of the history of ideas. We have to look at functional differentiation, such as how the economy, politics, art, and science became autonomous systems. Machiavelli showed that there was no necessary connection between goodness and political power, and economists showed that moral disputes need not get in the way of economic exchanges. Art became about art, not about moral guidance or exemplum. Etc. Any connections are contingent.

We need to look at the distinction between medium and form. According to Luhmann,

The both specific and universal medium of morality is provided by the coded distinction between respect and disrespect. Its elements are communications that express whether certain persons are to be respected or disrespected.  (241)

Persons, in this case, are topics of communication. The moral communications (elements) are loosely coupled because there is no essence of evil or goodness. These are differences not essences.

Both reference to individual persons (one cannot respect or disrespect humankind) and the formality of the code difference guarantee the loose coupling of medium elements. The highly individualized reference to persons in modern society strengthens this loose coupling. We cannot disrespect a whole family because one member is in prison or the daughter has had a child out of wedlock. Owing to this loose coupling, the medium itself is highly stable. It would therefore be a mistake to claim that the importance of morality is diminishing in modern society (emphasis added). The medium of morality is and remains available, both in face-to-face interaction and in communication by the mass media. Television, in particular, has led to the conspicuous everyday topicality of moral communication.  (241)

So the importance of morality has not diminished; it is, however, no longer strictly coupled with persons. Nor it is strictly coupled with political communication, economic communication, artistic communication, etc.

The respect/disrespect code is stable; it has an invariant structure,  which implies that it is context-free. The positive or negative values of the moral code cannot be glued to the positive or negative values of another code. For instance, a successful business person or athlete does not have to be morally respectable; they are expected to abide by laws, however.

Modern moral communication also looks for explanations for immoral behavior. Rather than simply judging, we ask, for example, what makes a person commit a horrible crime or why someone is a “pathological liar.” Is it nature or nurture or a mixture of both? We assume that a “bad person” can learn to be good, and vice-versa. In other words, we assume that the boundary of the distinction is crossable.

Decisive changes are to be found in the relationship between the medial substratum and the forms developed with the aid of the medium and that regenerate it. Whereas the medium is stable and available for all possible communications, the conditions for respect and disrespect–the rules for the forms developed in the medium–tend to be unstable and are in any case no longer fully amenable to consensus. . . . The difference between media substratum (loose coupling) and medial forms (strict coupling) is thus fully exploited, and this leads in moral communication to the simultaneity of consensus and dissent, stability and instability, necessity and contingency. (242)

Moral communication remains acceptable (persons can be respected or disrespecte, and some behavior can be judged as better than other behavior), just as money remains acceptable in the economy. When we accept a payment we trust that we can reuse that money. Trust is necessary for any form of communication. We need to trust that communication media can be reused. But the precise forms of any communication are contingent–they can always be otherwise. Selections must be made. Moral communication is the medial substratum, and forms of moral communication are temporarily actualized, just a payments are temporarily actualized.

Trust allows improbable communication to cross an improbability threshold. Violations of trust are taken seriously because trust is necessary for communication to continue. For Luhmann, trust is a central issue in all communication. He argues that

a society that uses language and signs gives rise to the problem of error and deception, of the unintentional and intentional abuse of signs. It is not only that communication occasionally miscarries, goes astray, or takes the wrong track. The problem, since it can occur at any time, is always present–a sort of universal problem of the type discovered by Hobbes with his example of violence. With this in mind, it is understandable that society morally appreciates sincerity, truthfulness, and the like, and in the communication process it has to rely on trust. (Theory of Society, vol 1. 135)

In order to be respected (or morally esteemed), a person must be trustworthy. In a sense, to be worthy of respect means to be trustworthy. Trust reduces complexity by relieving the social system of the task of verifying every bit of information. If the social system has to verify everything before communication happens, then communication will never happen.

I thought this blog post from Tom Levold was interesting, considering my recent thinking on the question of diagnosis.

Im Deutschen Ärzteblatt ist in Heft 1/2017 ein Interview mit mir zum Thema Diagnosen und Diagnostik erschienen, das auch online gelesen werden kann. Ein findiger Lektor oder Redakteur hat dabei in den Satz „dass wir als Therapeuten nicht nicht diagnostizieren … Weiterlesen → Der Beitrag „Wir dürfen ‚Sinn‘ nicht medikalisieren“ erschien zuerst auf systemagazin.

via „Wir dürfen ‚Sinn‘ nicht medikalisieren“ — systemagazin

The term market has been monopolized by the economic system. Steffen Roth, in “Market therapy? On intervention in the consociation with non-members,” writes:

the form we commonly observe as the market is only its economic dimension, to which, however, at least nine further dimensions can be added.

I want to take up that statement and ask how markets may be observed by politics, law, art, education, science, mass media, health, religion, and sport? These are the other nine dimensions (or function systems) Roth is referring to.

In an abstract sense, we might call a market a context for making selections. There is an excess and a selection must be made. Complexity must be reduced through selection. All systems must engage in selection, so the market concept might be applied to all kinds of systems. Environments provide variety, and systems select from this variety.

The “purpose” of the economy may be said to be distribution of scarce resources, or maybe to solve the problem of scarcity so that everyone has “enough” of what they need to live comfortably. But these instrumental goals are created/observed by some other system, such as politics or some kind of moral system or organization; they aren’t the goals of the economy because the economy has no instrumental goals. It just circulates payments. Money allows the crossing of the boundary between non-payment and payment. The economic system identifies the moment when the boundary between payment and non-payment is crossed.

What counts as a market in the other function systems? This is a huge question, so we have to start with just one system. We can begin arbitrarily and look at the health (a.k.a., healthcare or medical) system. The healthcare system is not a network of hospitals, clinics, physicians and nurses, etc. It is an autopoietic communication system with a symbolically generalized communication medium.

What is the symbolically generalized communication medium for the healthcare system? Illness, which is marked by diagnosis and becomes the target of therapy or treatment. (Diagnosis and therapy may be placed under the headings of program and function.) Non-illness does not mean health; it just the negation of illness. Illness is not a thing-in-itself; it is a difference. The same may said of the healthcare system.

Every symbolic communication medium is  two-sided form, and we can write the healthcare form as illness/non-illness. Patients cross the line between illness and non-illness, and that boundary must be crossable for the healthcare system to take notice. If a patient is terminal, and thus cannot recross the boundary to non-illness, the healthcare system loses interest and offers only palliative care. As such, patients are constructed by the healthcare system. One can only be identified as a patient by the healthcare system. A politician, teacher, etc., cannot diagnose or treat illness.

If we speak of a diagnosis market, the doctor (or the healthcare system itself) make a selection from the variety of possible diagnoses. The more possibilities there are, the longer the selection takes and the greater the potential more making the wrong selection or questioning and being dissatisfied with the selection. This happens to consumers who face a huge variety or commodities to choose from–a hundred different kinds of running shoe, for instance. In healthcare, the selection of diagnosis is always contingent–a different diagnosis could always be selected.

The healthcare system continually constructs (or observes) illnesses that it can treat. Every time a patient receives a diagnosis, that is an observation by the healthcare system. That is to say, the system makes its illness/non-illness distinction, and in this way reproduces itself as a social system. The system also observes new illnesses, that is, new diagnosable condition. These are new programs. Programs are flexible and changeable, while the illness/non-illness form is stable. Thus diagnoses are formed and discarded over the years and centuries, as are new treatments.

The invention of new diagnoses (programs) represents a response to the increasing complexity of the system’s environment. In an increasingly complex world society, a healthcare system that cannot continue to make new diagnoses will succumb to entropy–that is, dissolve into its environment. Thus, conditions that in the past were just considered part of human life and not even given a name are identified and given names (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease, major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, PMS, erectile dysfunction, restless leg syndrome, insomnia, low testosterone); they are classified as treatable illnesses in order to give the health system something to work on.

Crossing is conditioned, meaning obstacles are erected to discourage crossing the boundary. Or we might say there is a lot of friction produced by trying to cross over. If this weren’t the case, the healthcare system would be overwhelmed with new diagnoses–just about anything could be considered an illness. In other words, it would also be too easy to cross from non-illness to illness and back again.

The diagnosis sets everything in motion. So we can ask, Is there a diagnosis market? How has the number or variety of diagnoses increased? If we focus only on cancer, how many new ways types of cancer have been identified over the past 50 years? And is there a treatment market? How many new ways are there to treat a particular kind of cancer?

When were different cancers identified?

Lung cancer–1761, Skin cancer-1804, Leukemia-1845

I still need to figure this out, especially the market concept. I’m not even sure I’m on the right track yet. Comments might help.

To continue a post from yesterday . . .

The famous critiques of dominant moral codes (such as those offered by Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Marquis de Sade, etc.) seem to relate closely to the functional differentiation of society. These critiques, beginning with Machiavelli, who’s been called the founder of modern political science, might be seen as a symptom of evolving functional differentiation. Machiavelli demonstrated the inapplicability of moral codes in the context of politics.

Morality has been seen by sociologists (e.g., Weber, Durkheim) a sort of glue that holds a society together, a moral consensus, or a normative schema that regulates the means and ends of action. One question, for Parsons, was,

What are the values that society uses to restrict freedom of choice concerning the combination of means and ends? (Luhmann, Introduction to Systems Theory, 9).

For instance, if winning a game, obtaining food and shelter, or something else is accepted as a legitimate end, society restricts the means of achieving that end.

But in a functionally differentiated society, various communication media (power, money, truth, etc.) hold society together, or establish a social order. Such a society is far to complex to rely on morality alone. A person can treat his friends and family terribly, but if has enough money (the symbolically generalized communication medium of the economy) he can buy a pack of cigarettes.

Moral distinctions sometimes don’t apply.

One may ask oneself when making a moral distinction is appropriate and when it is not. If you purchase something in the course of a normal business transaction you will use the distinction as to whether the purchase is good or bad or whether the seller is good or bad. What you will want to know is how much something costs or perhaps what is the matter with the goods. (Introduction to Systems Theory, 104.)

Another example: Diagnosis is a communication medium of the healthcare system. If I am diagnosed with cancer, I won’t ask if cancer is good or bad; I want to know what kind cancer I have, if it’s benign or malignant, what the prognosis is, etc.

Media codes start out as ad hoc solutions to a problem, and later, sometimes, evolve into stable codes, such as in power/out of power (politics) ill/not ill (healthcare), information/non-information (mass media) transcendent/immanent (religion), competent/incompetent (education), etc. These codes do not combine into a single code. So power doesn’t necessarily come with goodness, competence, health, etc. The code has an invariant structure and in context-free.

The facilitation of crossing from one value to an opposing value and back (without the base value changing in the meantime) makes the code itself an invariant structure. At the same time, gluing together positive values or negative values of different codes become more difficult (i.e., more contingent). Whether someone is beautiful also tells the truth, whether someone who is rich is also powerful, also good, also healthy is a question that depends on further conditions that are not systematically guaranteed and that observers have to treat as an accident, which they cannot assume to be stable. To this extent, the evolution of media codes towards schematized crossing . . . also explodes the premise important for all hierarchically stratified societies, namely, the assumption that all positive values come together at the apex (in the nobility, the ruler, God.)

(Luhmann. Theory of Society, vol. 1, pp. 216)

But because the codes are rigid, flexibility has to come from somewhere. This is where programs come into play.

Facilitation of crossing to the other value makes the operation context-free, giving it too much leeway, which then has to be restricted. In the course of evolution, codings therefore develop a supplementary semantics of criteria determining the conditions under which positive and negative values are correctly attributed. I shall be calling these conditioning “programs.” (p 217)

For instance, Luhmann lists a few program strands of the mass media system: news and documentary reports, advertising, and entertainment–each of which operates by the information/non-information code.

In a functionally differentiated society there is no unifying code. This is in contrast to a society differentiated by stratification. Under stratification, there must be an apex, as in a pyramid, where everything comes together. God is supposed to be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. The “great chain of being” ends with God at the top. Politically, the emperor, king, or pope is supposed to be perfect, infallible, and laws and moral rules are therefore unnecessary and do not apply to the ruler. The people are unified in the person of the perfect ruler.

Under functional differentiation, we have many codes without a middle ground; they are digital rather than analog. These codes serve to make improbable communication more probable. These codes are associated with symbolically generalized communication media, the purpose of which is to make improbable communication, understood broadly, more probable. For instance, I cannot simple ask a car dealer for a new car. I need the symbolically generalized communication medium of money before I can “get a yes.” The purchase of the car is a kind of communication. Power is another symbolically generalized communication medium. If a person has power, which implies the possibility of unpleasant sanctions, she is more likely to have her demands met. The car dealer doesn’t care how immoral I might be as long I can make the car payments, and the person carrying out an order doesn’t care if the person giving the order is a “good” person; the order-giver just has to have the authority to give the order. In science, it doesn’t matter if a theory make us happy or sad; it just needs to be true.

To gain possession of the car or to have the demand met, or to go from wanting to having, is to cross the inner boundary of a two-sided form. Codes facilitate this crossing.

As Luhmann writes,

The particularity of codes as compared to other distinctions [distinctions with a middle value] is that the transition from one side to the other, the crossing of boundaries, is facilitated. If a positive value such as true is accepted, there is no difficulty in determining by another operation what is consequently untrue, namely, the opposing statement. . .

What mainly facilitates crossing the inner boundary of the codes is that no moral consequences ensue. It is not that one passes from good to bad, let alone that one becomes wicked.  However, learning this is a protracted evolutionary process. As long as society is still stratificationally differentiated, thus presupposing integration at the apex to which moral qualities are attributed, the moral neutralization of media codes cannot be achieved. (Theory of Society vol. 1, p. 216)

It seems that, in the United States at least, morality is losing its importance when it comes to presidents. We were taught that George Washington could not tell a lie, and Abe Lincoln is called Honest Abe. But Bill Clinton was quite popular even when his moral failings were well known. Most people only cared about his job performance, as in economic growth and no wars. Now Trump has been elected, although without a popular majority, when morally he makes Bill Clinton look like a saint. We don’t seem to care much about “character” anymore, which seemed to be the major debate of the Clinton years. As long as serious laws are not broken, we don’t seem to care about a president’s moral character.

This apparent unlinking of politics and morality, like it or not, comes along with functional differentiation. The importance of law has not declined, but if someone is breaking a moral rule but not any laws, then other people (people other than family and friends or close associates) aren’t in a position to object. Moral rules that society feels strongly about become laws–i.e., part of the legal function system.

Of course, professions have ethical standards and policies, but this isn’t the same as a general morality that applies to everyone.  These kinds of of ethical standards for different professions and organizations seems to have filled the void left by the absence of a general moral system. People can be kicked out of an organization if they break these accepted ethical standards, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that they are considered immoral.