In response to my previous post Aaron makes some interesting observations about contemporary media theory:
In media studies these days there is a tendency to move away from the term “mass media,” as the effects of market segmentation, the niche-ification of media consumption, the decline of networks and newspapers and the rise of the internet are thought (in some corners of the discipline) to have rendered the term obsolete. But I think that the parasitical intertwinements that you point out and the global effects that they can induce provide strong arguments for the notion that there is still a centralized (or perhaps I should simply say “dominant”) mass media apparatus that is capable of organizing a common world, despite the economic and technological fragmentation effects of recent decades. There is also some pretty strong sociological evidence indicating that, contrary to popular belief, TV is still the dominant electronic medium–retaining the greatest informational and ideological reach– in most industrialized nations. Perhaps one reason that television has been able to hold its own in the face of new trends and technologies is precisely the felt need (on the part of both producers and consumers) to retain some sort of common center amidst the chaos of the exploding mediascape. Perhaps TV has cemented itself as the primary “mass media” within a proliferating forest of niches. One can only pray to the inexistent God that this particular center does not hold!
I haven’t discussed this too much, but one of the interesting features of Luhman’s media theory (and his sociological autopoietic theory in general) is that it requires difference to reproduce itself. A central axiom of Luhmann’s thought is that information repeated twice is no longer information. Systems require the production of information so that they might engage in further operations (the production of communication events) that allow them to exist from moment to moment, thereby reproducing themselves. For example, with 24 hour reporting it becomes necessary to constantly produce new stories lest the whole enterprise come to a grinding halt. Luhmann is careful to emphasize that this process has no telos or goal beyond its own self-reproduction. It does, however, require the endless production of the new. In order for this self-reproduction to take place, systems thus have to devise strategies for the production of the new so that subsequent events might occur. Take the example of the economic system. The loss of money through purchasing creates a lack of money that necessitates the accumulation of new money so that the process can repeat again. The economic system produces its own internal lack that then functions as a motor to reproduce it.
In his analysis of media, Luhmann is thus careful to emphasize that media systems do not aim to produce sameness or homogeneity of beliefs or opinions, but strives to produce differences. It’s for this reason that media particularly favor topics that are controversial and that allow for opposing and different positions. Topics are what link in the Common, are what form the shared world, not shared beliefs or positions. The value of these sorts of topics is that they allow for further communications allowing the system to reproduce itself. Now not only can the media system report on the topic (the latest research on AIDS for example), but it can produce further communication events allowing it to reproduce itself by reporting on the variety of opinions and disputes that arise within the topic.
This allows the system to get to the next round of events in the order of time, thereby continuing its existence. From the standpoint of autopoiesis, there’s a further benefit to this as well. The reporting of topics that allow for disputes and differences generates uncertainty and doubt about the truth of any particular position and what’s being reported. This uncertainty and doubt (“is the media biased?”) generates the possibility of further communications addressing worries about ideological mystification, propaganda, bias, etc. We thus get a weird sort of Common that’s produced not out of sameness of sentiment, custom, and belief, but out of a unity of differences, conflict, disagreement, debate, etc., where people are linked not by sharing the same view but by a series of topics where opposing positions are possible (evolution or creationism? democrat or republican? abstinence or pre-marital sex? etc). The unity of the world thereby becomes an antagonistic unity where this world is able to reproduce itself as a unity not through the production of consensus, but through a production of antagonism or difference. From a social and political point of view this makes questions of political engagement and intervention particularly vexed as it is precisely through opposition and antagonism that the system reproduces itself.
March 15, 2011 at 6:01 pm
I hate to admit this, but I’ve found that the opposition-based form of system replication you describe has occassionally come in handy when I’m trying to jump-start class participation among my undergrads. When the post-lecture conversation begins to flag and you still have 10 minutes or so of class time left, sometimes it really helps to bring up a pertinent controversial topic, sketchily identify a pair contrary arguments about it, and then ask for rhetorical elaborations and defenses of both sides. The resultant disagreements (if they’re stage-managed in a manner that prevents incivility) often take on a sort of self-perpetuating quality, adding enough fuel to the conversation to keep it going for the allotted time. Perhaps my work in media studies has subconsciously rendered me an inadvertant micro-political refractor of hegemonic forms!
March 15, 2011 at 6:19 pm
Hi Levy,
It seems that the question becomes: are the topics debated the ones that are important? And further: are they posed in the right way?
It might be relevant to refer to Chomsky’s Ideas regarding Manufacturing Consent. The topics chosen and their articulation tend to maintain a level of shared presuppositions between the opposing “views”. So a critical standpoint would have to keep sight of what is left out of the common debate. Chomsky’s view is obviously limited, since he thinks that the true terms of the political problems come from some “common sense”, nevertheless he can certainly show that the “production of difference” usually serves a “higher” consensus which is more fundamental.
Perhaps, then, it would be too hasty to maintain that this common element is purely formal or resulting from the functional demands of the system, because in that way we might lose sight of those shared contents repeating themselves in the guise of opposing opinions.
March 15, 2011 at 7:59 pm
I thought Luhmann’s remarks on the distinction between utterance and information in the autopoietic movement was a point that needs to be made as well.
“…communication only comes about at all by being able to distinguish utterance and information in its self-observation (in understanding). Without this distinction, communication would collapse, and participants would have to rely on perceiving something which they would only be able to describe as behavior. The difference of utterance and information corresponds precisely with the requirement of not making the progress of communication to communication dependent upon information being complete and relevant” (96-97).
Observations: http://earth-wizard.livejournal.com/79620.html
March 16, 2011 at 3:33 am
Lovely post. But I’m not sure what Luhmann would say about using systems theory to promote an undermining of the ‘hegemonic’ codes of systems. In fact, doesn’t he repeatedly warn that such gestures, by invoking a ‘we’ outside of all systems, end up reverting to romantic, Utopian forms of thought that he quite sternly repudiates.
Can we have a left-Luhmannism? What form would it take exactly? Perhaps your Democracy of Objects will address this? My very broad impression from reading sections of Social Systems is that Luhmann, actually ‘likes’ systems. He is not remotely an anarchist. He admires the capacity of systems to use negativity productively, to expand, to constellate with other systems,to overcome entropy, etc. I don’t feel his aim is to demolish the pretensions of systems or to ponder over the ‘gap’ or ‘blind spot’ that lies behind every system – in fact the thing I like most about his theory is how this blind spot is de-mythologized and naturalized: here Luhmann seems to depart quite drastically from Benjamin, Deleuze, Blanchot, Derrida, Zizek et al who emphasize and ‘approve’ in their different ways the blind spot rather than the systems built out of that blind spot.
In short I think there must be ways to use Luhmann in politically radical ways, but not through invoking some kind of ‘from nowhere’ universalism whereby we assume we have access to the blind spots or coding mechanisms of all systems and can ‘reform’ them from the outside.
March 17, 2011 at 10:54 am
Additional to your high impressive and almost coherent considerations about Luhmann’s theory of mass media I would assume, that the production of disagreement and difference by mass media forms an attractor that guarantees the coninuation of communication in that way, that improbability of continuation is transformed into antecipation (in German: “Erwartung”, also translated as “expectation”) of contunication by disseminating a high complexity of differences. This comlexity is again the pre-condiction of improbability. In one sentence: mass media are solving the problems that emerge by the emerging of mass media. But an interesting and following question is how change is possible. This means not the change of discussions and their topics, but the change of attractors that build completly new forms of experience, knowhow – a new kind of empirism that must be shared by all coupled systems. This I guess is the break that Luhmann’s theory contains: the question of how different ways of dissemination are designing new forms of knowledge. One can compare this with the evolving of modern society an the invention of letterpress and concerns the question whether the world wide web is just a comon media of dissemination supported by a technical complexity or a completly different form that will something different get to know, something of which systems are not prepared because their forms of empirism belong to their specific way of building attractors.
What do you think about this point?