Tempted to think about what a business algorithm might look like, we are supposed to talk about at Tim O'Reilley's Web 2.0 Expo at Berlin in November, I just invented one, translating, as it were, the general network synthesis algorithm into a specific business one.

Check it out here:
http://homepage.mac.com/baecker/handouts/ABusinessAlgorithm.pdf

I took care to preface it with three good reasons to do it in the first place: (1) cybernetics unsolved problems as recalled by Warren McCulloch, (2) Heinz von Foerster's invitation to do a communication formalism without any communicabilia entering into the formula, and (3), because there is no way to do it without it, a recall of Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form.

Yet, indeed, the algorithm is nothing but a further look at what should be done in the not too far future, spelling all the variables out, action (overflow), talk (culture form), group (number), grid (order), and society (re-entry), and then looking at what happens at the the-entry-levels mating, gaming, tying, switching, and knowing.

Imagine any one distinction being re-entered as a nonlinear oscillator, all of them doing continuously their work of nonlinear prediction, and producing thereby, only noticed by the communication going on itself, the statistical basis for the space of possible businesses to be imagined, created, explored, and exploited.

The business algorithm is a many-sided form consisting of eigen-functions producing their eigen-behavior. Communicabilia are lacking, yet are constantly attracted, since without them, the form of business would not gain the visibility, tractability, and accountability, we need to infer the distinctions playing its recurrence and iteration.

There is some irony in John Battelle's account in his book on The Search (2006) of how Google established the success of its search algorithms in and on the Web and how that may have contributed largely to what we are now accustomed to call the Web 2.0.
The irony is that by exactly re-instantiating the good old printing society's principle of producing and dealing with information the computer society could come of age. Reading John Battelle and the literature he is referring to, most importantly perhaps, Jon Kleinberg's paper on Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment and Sergey Brin's and Lawrence Page's paper on The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, both of them dating from 1998, you come to realize that there is no web 2.0 without the preceding construction or reconstruction of authority. Ok, it's a web authority, it's an authority which relies almost (almost!) completely on the self-organising hyperlink structure of the web. Yet, it's an authority nevertheless, which reminds the old battles of the printing society to turn the authority structure of the writing society on its head. The writing society maintained that authority belongs to the sources, holy ones, to be sure. The printing society maintained that authority belongs to the experts, they themselves controlled by further experts, all of them relying on the most recent information, the information best checked according to state of the art methodologies.
And how did search engines take off? They ranked the pages of the web according to links quoting them, to links quoting them coming from pages themselves linked to by others (Kleinberg's authorities), to pages being interlinked as being most often referred to with respect to some issues (Kleinberg's hubs), to anchors describing them, and to the notorious "random surfer" Brin and Page ingeniously introduced to avoid self-circularity.
That's just perfect. Who ever would have started to search the web if only a chaos of results would have been brought to the screen!? So it's the relevance and the reliablity introduced by PageRank and other algorithms which makes us use the search, only thereby producing the clickstreams which Google relies on to make its billions of dollars selling them to advertisers. Of course, the clickstream, once having taken off, does not rely on authority any more but on the surfer's whim. But would that whim have any chance if it could not rely on authority and have its fun circumventing it? There seems to be quite some self-organised authority at the center of the flow architecture of the web, and that's interesting because it resonates with hierarchies constituting some indispensable knots (or nodes) as a gravitational field anchoring the heterarchies (circularities) we are becoming used to live with in the computer age of the society.

The mathematical theory of categories calls morphism a function, which is able to preserve an object that belongs to certain categories. We take catjects to act as morphisms of this kind. They produce objects and subjects, entangled into some circular structure, which defines their codependency. They produce themselves, providing for a heterarchy of values, which gives space to oscillation, memory, and subversion, and to proemial relationships, which define order and exchange. Their way of reproduction is to act as an attractor state, or *eigen*-value, of recursive functions, which allow for perturbation.

Of course, this is more of a list of ideas giving way to a research program than already the demonstration of the usefulness of the notion of a catject. Our idea is that catjects are to be considered as comprising of a particular set of distinctions, an "arrangement", as Spencer-Brown would have it, which produces a network synthesis consisting of variables whose values again are codependent. Our four societies, distinguished with respect to their respectively dominating dissemination medium, are cases in point. Oral or tribal, literal or ancient, printing press or modern, and computer or next society are, any one of them in its own right, catjects, which define how values must network, i.e., prejudice their choice, in order to lend determination to the indeterminate. The overall society, which we pictured by spelling out the network synthesis of social action as such, comprising the values of the variables action, talk, group, grid, society, and the unmarked state, is another case in point of a catject.

But catjects, as I think of them, are self-similar *eigen*-values which are to be found on the most different levels of the social. They may be thought of as resembling those steady states, or plateaus, which fascinate evolutionary theory and social philosophy alike. Indeed, to allow for variation, to secure selection, and to at any instant provide for some re-entry of the selections among the variations may eventually be said to indicate what they are all about.

Yet, the reason why we are interested in the concept of catjects is not only that it may provide a shortcut to an analytically robust reintegration of all these concepts just mentioned. More importantly, it seems to me, the concept of catjects possibly offers a translation of some old puzzles of the cybernetics into the contemporary interest in search algorithms, semantic webs, and social software, which all three of them conveniently are labeled by the name, or, rather, "call to action," of the Web 2.0 (Tim O'Reilly).

Three puzzles, says Warren McCulloch, the early cyberneticians, who are Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, and himself, were not able to solve, the puzzle of the statistical, the puzzle of the coupling of nonlinear oscillators, and the puzzle of continuous nonlinear prediction. The puzzle of the statistical consists in the lack of the long runs of data under essentially constant conditions which would enable cybernetics to spell out the mechanisms and formalisms of the organization of complex phenomena such as a society social philosophers like Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson asked for at that time.

The puzzle of the coupling of nonlinear oscillators relates to the question of the design of filtering devices able to provide for a mechanism of adaptive learning. W. Ross Ashby deals with this puzzle in terms of a system consisting of an organism and an environment, which are coupled by feedbacks which are able to distinguish between goals and their states, on one hand, and disturbances, on the other, a kind of cybernetic reformulation of the aristotelean *telos*.

And the puzzle of continuous nonlinear prediction consists in decoupling a system from any physical ways to determine its states, going instead for the operational closure of information to describe its self-organization and self-determination, and then in again recoupling the system on its own terms to the physical environment. To explain how a system may be able to predict its own states, and how an observer may discover the impossibility to do likewise, given the complexity of the system, means to consider information in terms of operational closure, which comes easy enough if one thinks of neurophysiology and the mathematical theory of communication, but is hard to swallow both inside and outside academia nevertheless since it so much contradicts a common sense, which is supported by the brain's perceptions making sure that all possible impressions, save dreams, get attributed externally, if not certain indications of disturbance do suggest otherwise.

Catjects tell us that we must look not for objects guaranteed to be possibly true, nor for subjects considered able to empirically back up themselves to transcendental reason, but for arrangements of distinctions able to reproduce such that they generate their own statistics, i.e. a data set of experiences and expectations, such that they are capable of dealing with variations always coming as a kind of surprise, and such that they develop some means of foresight, the most important of which is the acknowledgment of the future being unknown not only to them but to any observer. It may indeed be helpful to look for sociology in getting some ideas on how the three puzzles of cybernetics may be dealt with.

If the web 2.0 is indeed about the organization of metadata in addition to the production and storing of data (Tom Fürstner, this journal), then this organization may well prove to be another example of catjects in that the search, the linking, and the socially distributed use of the data will only be sustainable if there is some self-reference informing the links, some reference becoming reliable, and some accounting for the network becoming visible, which make the data trustworthy. Metadata will have to be informed by knowledge, that is, they will both be drawn from, and producing, a kind of knowledge, which is no longer considered to be consisting of definite data stored away in some memory, but will emerge and disappear along with natural and artificial users producing it while surfing the data surface of the natural, social, and artificial world.

Metadata will come with catjects, which are able to capture, number, order, and re-enter social data which are in a way, and with respect to a first approach, indistinctly oral, textual, visual, acoustic, and iconic. Our model of social action tells us that catjects able to do so must provide for action overflow, ambiguous talk, cohesive group, grid address, and some knowing of the society and the unmarked state coming with it, by the latter lending social, including emotional, fascination, and relevance of matter to the data.

Again referring to Charles Sanders Peirce we may say that catjects are able to organize data with reference to metadata if they provide for terms, i.e., for means to interlink sensibly, for propositions about objects of some kind, and for arguments, which both relate to interpretation and reveal it. The most difficult piece of it may turn out to be the provision of terms. Terms indeed map catjects back to themselves, thus lending them an inner depth and void which hitherto was experienced only by human souls (Blaise Pascal). But it may turn out to be exactly that inner depth and void which enables catjects to rely, with their operation and recursion, not on certainties of reference, but on addresses of networks.

But then, propositions and interpretations abound, which is why we just have to watch ourselves dealing with their overflow if we want to collect some metadata of how we deal with data, and of how we look for more, and other, data in order to be able to double-check on our metadata. I leave it at that, having given nothing more but the roughest sketch of some theoretical ideas coming to a mind watching the next society emerging. The prove of all this will lie in the use of some or other idea of this survey of possible sociological thinking for the construction of further examples of what we may mean in text, picture, music, or code.

Network synthesis depends on units of "one," which are drawn from, and embedded within, the diversity of the "many." Action is producing an overflow of reference; talk, group, and grid are informing this reference with self-reference, thus giving it a frame, a number, and an order; and society is providing for re-entries, which do not exactly reflect the whole form, but account for the unmarked state coming with both reference and self-reference.

Neither objects nor subjects are to be considered as the *hypokeimenon*, the underlying reality of network synthesis. Neither aristotelian objects nor kantian subjects, neither the things of the literal society nor the reason of the printing press society, are able to cover what self-organization there is in any society, let alone the computer grid society. Of course, both Aristotle and Kant are well aware of this. Aristotle's categories focus on the object only to discover the elusiveness of substance, the indecision of relation, the ambiguity of quality, and the variety of movement. And Kant's categories focus on the subject only to discover that the synthesis of the manifold is to be brought about by reason only if the latter is able to distinguish between the logical functions of quantity, quality, relation (including that of the community of the actor and the sufferer), and modality, all of them adding up to a faculty of judgment, which relies on analytical separation as much as on synthetical integration. To keep the synthesis clear of loosing itself among the manifold again, it has to be anchored firmly in the transcendental, that is in the unmarked state, which here, and thereby, becomes the place for both the hopes of idealism and the despair of romanticism.

Ever since, it is questionable of where to fix possible categories, which are able to describe network synthesis. Charles Sanders Peirce is looking for categories able to capture the accidental "it" which lends quality (a ground), relation (a correlate), and representation (an interpretant) to substance and being. Frank North Whitehead quite similarly focuses on the category of the creativity, of the world taken as a process, to explain how the disjunctive many of the universe come to inform actual entities that combine self-identity and self-diversity. Gregory Bateson and Robert M. Pirsig look at the category of quality as a category to explain, or, better, call upon, both substance and relation.

Paying due respect to the many epistemological turns of twentieth century's philosophy, from the linguistic to the iconic, and from the social to the postcolonial, we propose to switch from objects and subjects to *catjects* as informing the network synthesis of social action. Objects and subjects are special cases of catjects, which describe the general case of synthesis brought about by distinctions recursively organizing themselves. This is no new idea as is witnessed by objects becoming "quasi-objects" (Michel Serres), "hybrids" (Bruno Latour), and "boundary objects" (Susan Leigh Star), or by both subjects and objects becoming "unjects" (Peter Fuchs), all of them thereby taking into account not only the manifold of relations, but also the ambiguity of meaning and the combination of reference, self-reference, and some general network value, any institution of "one" is embedded within.

Categories do not come for free, they are products of the same social action which relies on them to organize its reference, self-reference, and network value. Studies into the epistemology of the grammar of motives (Kenneth Burke), the order of things (Michel Foucault), and the semantics of social structure (Reinhart Koselleck, Niklas Luhmann) have always been explicit about this. Our idea of the network synthesis of social action with respect to the next society superposing itself to the tribal, the ancient, and the modern society proposes to look anew at the theoretical, or, as it is, sociological, foundations of any research into categories by asking what catjects are able to come from, and to organize, the overflow of reference, symbol, criticism, and memory-control.

We are here only interested in the catjects of the next society, assuming, however, that the research into relations between semantics and social structure we just quoted not by chance arises with the appearance of, first, the motion pictures attempting to communicate the whole of perception, and, then, the computer presenting society with its overflow of memory-control. We nevertheless stick with the latter and ask for catjects organizing society's dealing with the overflow of networked memory-control. Note, however, that a parallel analysis of, for instance, Russian art and architecture dealing with motion pictures could be revealing about ways to capture an overflow of control with respect to the organization of perception.

Our general idea is that, given an overflow of meaning presented with by action, all other variables of our model, that is talk, group, grid, and society, step in to organize, and thereby self-organize, the capture, number, order, and re-entry of that meaning, such that catjects emerge as selective bundles among the values of the variables of the form of social action. Action, as ever, is producing the overflow. It relies on second-order observation to receive a form whatsoever. This means that action, or, better, acting (Alfred Schütz), can be left to itself, thus constituting a micro-diversity of events that may or may not be attributed to either action or situation. That micro-diversity of action is both necessary for, and not sufficient to, the self-organization of social action, because the diversity of action informs the social action without being able to instruct it, having to wait, instead, for social action to lend it its attribution, allocation, and interpretation.

It is with the selective handling of the overflow via the frames of a *culture* form that catjects come into being. This gives any social action an air of virtuality, to begin with, which is why social systems are sometimes interpreted as symbolic systems (Helmut Willke). If they do not succeed in organizing their dealing with signs by the means of signs – remember that symbols, for us, are signs signifying signs –, they do not stand a chance to approach their reality by using degrees of freedom in selectively addressing and exploring it.

Thus, the culture form of social action, looked after by the talking taking care of the acting, throws in a selectivity of reference and self-reference which is both risky and necessary, and can only be managed by lending it arbitrariness, ambivalence, and discretion, thus reproducing, in forms rather tame in comparison with the original one, the overflow of meaning. In order to not loose out of mind the problem of selection and, coming with it, the problem of perspective, it is necessary to never really accomplish the task of numbering, ordering, and re-entering the meaning of the social, which is why so called post-modern thinking has rediscovered the virtue of the vague and unfinished, of the unknown and unknowable, all of them at any time inviting next steps, next perspectives, next considerations, at the same time as decisiveness and coolness, in dealing with them.

If talk is taking care of the culture by searching for words and gestures, by proposing and withdrawing reference, and by revealing and concealing self-reference, group is taking care of *number*. Gaming, that is, is being done in order to be able to count in, or out, a group, which comprises events, things, and persons. Group is number which adds up to calling a unit among the many by a name which recalls other units. Cultural analysis like Clifford Geertz's is best when dealing with observations of kinds of counting procedures.

Grid, then, is *order* emerging from ties. They cannot avoid to come with their own contingency, i.e. the possibility to dissolve for some other tie. Grid is order which indicates that any call can be undone, or can be cancelled, because any call is nothing but the compensation of its own improbability, if not impossibility. That is why cultural theory excels the moment it looks at fetish, taboo, and negation organizing the self-imposition of otherwise empty signs (including MacGuffins).

And society provides for *re-entries* able to invite, and organize, switchings with respect to attempts to know the unmarked state. If number and order stick, re-entries unravel such that new knots become possible. References to the unmarked state unsettle both references and self-references already found such that all kinds of therapy, including the most powerful of all, communication, may step in to propose and cultivate new references and self-references. Somehow, cultural studies just started to look into that business of the society to tie, and untie, the knots which are presented with the catjects in use. Cultural studies may well be suited to such an endeavor since it may inherit old humanities', or *humaniora's* (Immanuel Kant), task of looking into the psychophysics of the social and the cultural, thus schooling the cognitive abilities of humans.

A social action is both producing and managing an overflow of meaning. Any social phenomenon may be considered as providing for possible overflow, drawing its constraints from the need, as made thereby evident, to deal with the overflow. That is true with respect to friendship, love, marriage, and family, as well as with respect to political, economic, pedagogical, religious, military, scientific, or artistic action. Dissemination media are just a special case, yet a most prominent one because they set the stage for the problem of communication having to deal with overflows produced by the dissemination of communication. Their overflows, and the culture forms capturing them, or so our hypothesis in this essay runs, frame how the overall society is dealing with meaning.

We here propose to look at a model, which describes social action in any society, yet has a special leaning toward the next society, because it focuses on the very form of social action, taking metacommunication for granted and relegating purpose and restlessness to still important, yet subdominant themes. Social action, as in Max Weber's notion of it, combines first-order behavior with second-order observation into a kind of action, which is orientated toward a situation structured by observers observing observers, thus drawing its constraints from attempts to retain its autonomy. It is not less complicated.

Our model provides for both action and observation, noting that observation is action as well, since it has no effect whatsoever if it does not get noticed. If there is any law to social action it consists in the challenge to get observations not just in order to get noticed, which is important enough, but also in order to get definitions of the situation one is then able to work with – which is why target and content ambiguity are a necessary part of these definitions. The minimal condition of any model of social action, thus, is to provide for both constants and variables, the constants defining what social action consists in, the variables defining the space to be explored by it.

The overall idea of the model is that social action consists in drawing and exploiting distinctions. These distinctions are the constants of the model, thus leading to a theory of social action which unfolds the thesis that social action draws a specific set of distinctions. The marked and unmarked states of these distinctions, of which the unmarked states get in turn marked by second-order observation, provide for the variables of the model, whose values determine what any specific social action is about. Our model, then, is a network and communication model which means that any one variable depends on all other variables and that distinctions, as we will see, are also re-entered into the form such that not only variables, but also constants may get subverted.

This is our model:

http://homepage.mac.com/baecker/handouts/SocialAction.pdf

It seems to be simple enough, consisting, as it is, of just five distinctions and six variables, yet it already provides for some basic understanding of the complexity of social action. Note that the sixth variable is the outside of the form left unmarked, which, included as the excluded third, provides the form with the necessary indeterminacy it explores and exploits.

The model maintains that social action first of all consists in any kind of *action* occurring which is framed by a kind of *talk* which presents it with definitions of its identity, thus giving it a control of itself. The particular kind of risky, adventurous, and prestigious action depicted by Erving Goffman in his essay on "Where the Action Is" indeed actually is the most general case of any action in that less daring action just adds on constraints, which it is prepared to accept, the more daring one dropping these constraints in order to be able to explore them by playing with them.

With one eye on evolutionary anthropology we venture the hypothesis that the distinction of action as framed by the selection of talk in human behavior is managed with respect to an enhancement of chances to *mate*, that is to control possible mates and the access to them. Of course, we do not mean that all action is up for sexual intercourse, longing for intimacy, or on the money for love. But we assume that there is more to Charles Darwin's idea of the sexual selection of behavior and action than has been well received in social sciences up to now.

All social action, we try to say, is watching the distinction between action and talk with respect to chances to achieve or maintain a certain position in a pecking order of access to mates. We assume this restriction to play its role on the first re-entry-level of our form, the level of the re-entry of the distinction between action and talk into the form, such that we here deal with a reflection device which subverts the constant distinction between action and talk into a more playful version of itself. That is anyhow what a re-entry, following George Spencer-Brown's calculus, is about. That more playful version of itself, a cross turned into a marker, re-symmetrizes the asymmetrical distinction for some kinds of observation, if only to attract different determinations from the other values of the form, and then of course bounces back into the asymmetry the constant consists in.

Competing for an access to mates, that is, directs the attention of the observer to a kind of action that is either trying to change a position in the pecking order or to insist on it, and orientates the talk accordingly, tuning it in into various possibilities to boast about, or modestly hint at, one's position. Do not think that we here only deal with the heritage of primate behavior or with tribal society. If you look at it, action in ancient, modern, and next society is as impregnated with the obsession to possess a mate as it can be. Again, note that we do not say that all action is up for sexual intercourse. There is indeed all kinds of action far off the mark, so to speak, as people invest themselves into political, economic, artistic, pedagogical or other kinds of action. Yet, in defining social action, the criterion of how to relate talk to action consists in looking at the social position an actor is trying to achieve or maintain with respects to mates, including, of course, the competition among people of the same sex for the position they already have or like to attain.

The interest in mating is only indirectly dominant in social action. All societies address it as a kind of first-order overflow demanding control, yet do so guardedly. Mating for sexual behavior indeed is a well-chosen address fot the observation of action, since it combines behavioral, organic, mental, and social aspects of action, thus addressing humans in their complexity, and it the selection of behavior with self-selection, thus controlling social control with respect to humans being prepared to accept, and to enforce, it. Oscillating between orgiastic and ascetic modes of moderation, society chooses its way to go about human sexuality, as is shown, among others, by Max Weber's sociology of religion, managing, as it were, both society's distance from, and its approach to, the immediate control of mates and, thereby, of *ego* seeking its way in society.

Yet, already the second distinction and third variable of the model show how first-order action with respect to second-order observation gets bound into a determination which adds other aspect to the organization and regulation of behavior than sexuality. The distinction between *talk* and *group* specifies the context of all talk occurring which is the context of some basic cohesion framing any one individual with respect to an overall order addressing all others.

That is why we maintain that a possible re-entry of the distinction between talk and group into the form of social action might by called by the name of *gaming*, playing on the double meaning of this word, alluding both to games whose rules one may obey or not, and to the hunt one is up to searching for a prey, or is trying to circumvent, not wanting to fall prey to somebody. Gaming, thus, shall mean, that all talk, with respect to group, is up to either catch somebody else into some old or new group cohesion, or to let oneself be caught into some group avoiding some alternative group. Gaming means checking for both talk and group, yet always having to settle into a particular selection and combination of them, which is not up for a free choice by the actor but bound by known or acceptable ways to talk and all other individuals in the group to accept the new demand.

Group numbers any social action as one among others which are of a comparable, a complementary, or a parallel kind. It thereby lends it an identity which transcends and informs the talk, which captures the overflow of action. Group means to lend the talk a site, and thereby to offer action a place, providing for positive and negative sanctions in dealing with it, sanctions which flow naturally from attempts to secure, and purify, and embellish, the place. Group provides action with discipline and connectivity.

Incorporation, as Mary Douglas would have it, comes with individuation, and *group* with *grid*. So our next distinction is the distinction between group and grid, and our next variable the variable of the grid. The grid tells you which relational pattern informs the choices of the individual doing the choosing. Any one value, which inside the group determines what to talk about, who is doing the talking, who is doing the listening, who is to be interrupted by whom, and which turn-taking anybody is prepared to accept or to counter, including all kinds of tactful treatment of possible mistakes or of merciless chase of misdemeanor, do not depend on what is talked about, but on the grid position of the individual doing the talking.

Note that the grid position is not fixed but a variable as well which means that one can try to vary it by working on the way one looks for, and constitutes, group. It is the distinction which is important and, indeed, constant, which means that the variables are up for variation. The observation and reflection of grid and group we call the operation of *tying* because social action is only bound to accept a specific grid position if the group coming with it, the identities which are on offer, and the connectivity it promises, present it with means to tie itself, and to tie others, into a position which is acceptable with respect to group and leaves some space to move about with respect to grid. Tying here means action and talk are selected with respect to the selection of both group and grid. Looking at his or her group identity, the actor selects both action and talk with respect to the grid position he or she would like to opt in or out.

Our last but one variable is the *society*. By society we mean an overall variable which defines ways to proceed with social action via the provision of keys or cues of how and when to keep on with, or to change, its course. Sociology is used to such an operational definition of society, having deconstructed, as it is, all more substantial definitions of it. As noted in the previous chapter, Gabriel Tarde speaks of association, Emile Durkheim of complementarity, Georg Simmel of interaction, Max Weber of socialization, Talcott Parsons of action, Niklas Luhmann of system, and Harrison C. White of networks, just to be sure that society at any instant is considered to be the outcome of, and input back into, ways of social action to orientate itself to varying situations. There are no values, no norms, no roles, no rules, no institutions, no frames, which do not go tested by the communication of social action at any one moment, and may change accordingly. This is one reason, why social sciences' most elusive notions of all, the notion of culture, has rightly been chosen to track ways of testing, changing, and possibly confirming values and norms, rules and institutions, roles and frames.

More explicitly, society is the variable which defines that and what *switches* are possible from one group to another and how a switch might be communicated, or keyed, both inside the old group, a social action is switching out of, and the new group, it is switching into. Such keys, forks, or switches, as we already noted, are among the most elaborate structures a society is bound to provide, and sociological theory is bound to describe.

There are two reasons for this elaborateness. One is that society means orientation for action, talk, grid, and group, and space for mating, gaming, tying, and switching, and thus has to provide for consent as well as for dissent, and for conflict as well as for its moderation and settlement. And the other reason is that society, inside the form of social action, is framed by the *unmarked state* of that form. That unmarked state, depending on the social action distinguishing itself, may mean all kinds of things, for instance spirits, devils, and gods, or nature, physics, and universe, or the unconscious, desires, and instincts. As soon as it means something, it gets marked, pushing the unmarked state one variable further to the right, which is a process of semiosis that can only be stopped by a general kind of fetishism, that is by bans to proceed which attract all further attention to the both fascinating and frightening fetish itself (Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud).

We call *knowing* any way to reflect on the distinction between society and the unmarked state and to re-enter it into the form of social action. Knowing means to acknowledge the unmarked state without necessarily foregoing attempts to mark it this or that way. It means to deal knowingly with ignorance, which has of late been greatly advanced by the development of notions of a kind of anticipation which is as creative as resilient. As the next society is investing in a structure form of itself which relies on knowledge instead of on the media, strata, or tribes of earlier society, we will have to go more intently into different ways to deal knowingly with ignorance. Second-order cybernetics and systems theory have always been about this, but for social sciences this has been more of a reason to avoid them than to explore their possibilities.

Our model of social action is a network and a communication model which means that it comprises action and observation, as well as action and experience, in its notion of how the values of the variables determine each other interdependently by drawing on the values, or prejudiced choices, of one variable in determining the otherwise indeterminate values of the other variables.

Another possible way to describe this makes use of Niklas Luhmann's notion of communication as a notion of a threefold synthesis of (a) utterance, (b) information, and (c) understanding, the latter, understanding, synthesizing all three of them by drawing the distinction, and thus making the connection, between utterance and information. Understanding, to be sure, is an operation inside communication; it is not a mental act relying on human consciousness to be acted out but an event, possibly the most sharp-valued event there is in social action (Gordon Pask), to be produced, to be linked to, and to be tested by communication itself, that is by tying of behavior, decoded and encoded as action, into the domain of the social. This does not preclude human consciousness going along with it, even if being surprised, confirmed, or put at unease by it, but communicational understanding is done on its own, it does not wait for human consciousness to understand as well, since there is actually no way to know whether it did or not, given the operational closure of both consciousness and communication.

We propose to introduce this notion of communication into our model of social action by calling action the utterance, information the connection between action and talk, and understanding all six variables connected to each other by distinctions between them. Utterance, then, basically means that someone taken as an actor is behaving in a way such that attribution of social meaning is not impossible. That attribution may be intended by the actor or not. If it is intended the actor may still be surprised by just what kind of behavior is attributed to him, social action having all its way to go for words, gestures, silence, and "twitches and shifts" (Mary Douglas) in bodily action, when selecting its focus of attention, let alone the possibility to not look at the actor and his or her action at all in describing what is happening but at the situation the actor is situated to be in by the observer. The rule is that even intentions get attributed to the actor only by the communication of social action, forcing, or inviting, the actor to comply with it, or to deviate, thereby, via his or her behavior, possibly invoking social events which again are subject to social attribution. That is why socially, and mentally, most actors may prefer to sustain some content and target ambiguity, the communication of social action allowing for these preferences since only attributional ambiguity is sure to capture divergence of perspective.

What social action is about, in terms of fact and reference, is subject to the talk going on, a talk, however, which is framed by both the action it frames, and by group, grid, and society. That means that there is plenty of space for the selection of information even if nothing in that selection, due to recursive operation, is ever arbitrary. It can be presented as arbitrary, of course, but this is just a special reference to the content figured out of the values the variables are set to. Thus, information, as in Shannon's mathematical theory of communication, is defined as a selection of a message, here the token of an utterance, out of a set of possible messages, here constituted by the indeterminate space of the form of social action determining the variables to assume certain values when going for communication.

In order to distinguish between action and talk, all other variables are to be taken into account. Only then understanding, and thus both the completion and the continuation of the communication of action, is possible. Note that understanding here means cybernetic control, not hermeneutic understanding, which is impossible given the requisite variety lacking for dealing with the complexity of the matter involved.

We speak of the selection of the values of the respective variables. Note, however, that the selection we are talking about is not equivalent to some deliberate choice. Selections happen. They occur according to the variables interdependently determining each other, surprising more often than not the actor with their respective values. That is why sociological theory prefers to distinguish between action, on one hand, and experience, on the other, to account for social action being obliged to deal with action which is expected to vary with respect to the experience of a situation from the divergent perspectives of the actor and the observer.

In concluding it is perhaps important to note that the further we get in unfolding and reading, from left to right, the arrangement of the distinctions constituting the form of social action the less determined are the values of the variables to the right and the more determined are the variables to the left. This contradicts common sense which believes that action and talk are almost up for any selection one likes, while group and grid, let alone society, are almost fixed, change only slowly and with historical pace, and are certainly not up to individual selection. In a way that is right. Any one variable to the right of the variable of action adds on the determination of it, as is noted by the adding of horizontal lines above the variable. But that exactly means that we have to read the arrangement the other way around. The variables to the right get weaker and weaker in determination, yet add on the determination of the variables to the left.

An ecological model of social action is a *communication* model of social action, and communication means network synthesis out of dissemination. Any one social action is in-forming itself via the selection of its meaning among an indeterminate, yet contextualized, set of possibilities. That is, we switch not only to an ecological model for the explanation of social action, but also from a mathematical theory of communication to a sociological one. We replace Shannon's assumption of technically determinate sets of possibilities for messages to be selected with the assumption of a socially indeterminate set of possibilities, thus describing any one social action as having to opt both for a context it relies on and for a message it wants to produce.

This gives indeterminacy a central place in the social action selecting itself as well as in the communication model explaining it. Sociology captures indeterminacy via the *problem of double contingency* to be solved by actors if any action is to come about at all. Double contingency means that one actor (*ego*), looking at his or her contingent possibilities to act, waits for the other actor (*alter ego*) to select among his or her contingent possibilities, who, however, waits as well. As long as both are waiting, nothing happens save for the most uncomfortable, because paradoxical, situation of the communication of non-communication developing.

Another way to frame social action's indeterminacy is René Girard's idea of a *désir mimétique*, of a *mimetic desire*, informing any social action. Here, social action consists in both imitating, and competing with, the action of some other, thus leading not only to relation but also to conflict, which is bound to be canalized with respect to some third figure, a God, say, or money, or the horror of the atomic bomb, in order not to lead to violence among the people competitively imitating each other. Gabriel Tarde framed this problem in terms of conflicts having to be ritualized, for instance, via prices on markets, or wages in firms, in order to tell anybody how to possess the other while being possessed by him or her.

Again, as in the concept of double contingency, the double closure of communication is evident while social action is free, save for the loss of two degrees of freedom, to select its course. How to imitate the other, and to deviate from him or her in order to compete, is up to the actor, yet imitation must be. How to solve the problem of double contingency is up to the actors observing each other – and Talcott Parsons believes some cultural norms would come at their rescue, but Luhmann deconstructs this idea – yet solution, amid the reproduction of the problem for any next moment, must be.

A third way to frame this idea consists in spelling social acting out in terms of *second-order observation* (Heinz von Foerster). Here, any one action is on one hand selecting its course due to distinctions being drawn, while on the other being watched by second-order observers who call contingent, i.e. ambivalent, arbitrary, and discretionary, what the first-order observer (the actor) thinks just evident or necessary. At the same time the second-order observer turns the actor into a second-order observer of his or her own who has to observe how he or she is observed by others in order to be able to deal with the chances and restrictions of the continuation of action, or of a change of direction, coming with that observation. Here, the contingency and thus indeterminacy stems from the second-order observer watching not only the distinction drawn by the actor but also the form, in the sense of Spencer-Brown's calculus of indications, of that distinction, thereby discovering, and making to bear on the situation, both the contingent selection of it and the unmarked state coming with it.

In modern society, this structure and dynamics of second-order observation gets the upper hand, as the novel, an enlightened reason, the critique of ideology, a common sense used to apply first psychology, and then psychoanalysis, while guessing the hidden interests and motives of the behavior of others, introduce ever new ways to watch, distrust, and pressure the other. Modern society adapts to this structure and dynamics by switching from the social order of authority, which gets deconstructed by second-order observation, to the social order of the publics, which, on markets as in democratic politics, in passionate love as in the arts beginning to seek the new instead of the beautiful, by computing second-order observations help to define how to go about the appropriate selection of social action.

All three ideas tell something about the self-organization and double closure of social action inside a communication and network dynamics of its selective dealing with indeterminacy. We propose to translate this basic insight concerning the structure and order of social action into a model which gives it the concreteness necessary to possibly test it in empirical realities, on one hand, and the clearness and vividness to actually make it theoretically evident, on the other. We stick with the idea of the culture form of form becoming the dominant one in next society and, therefore, give our model the shape of a model of the form of social action, profiting, as it were, from the heterarchical and ecological network structure among the constants and the variables of such a model.

We call *form*, following George Spencer-Brown, any distinction regarded with respect to both its operation of distinction and the two sides of the distinction separated by it calling upon a space the distinction is embedded within. It is difficult to count at such an early stage of concept development, but any one form of a distinction provides for at least four values: (1) the marked state indicated by the distinction as its inside, (2) the unmarked state on the outside of the distinction indicated by a second-order observer, (3) the distinction itself, considered as the operation of an observer himself or herself who at first sight is invisible as the one who is actually doing the distinction, and (4) the space, or domain, the distinction is drawing upon, calling upon, embedded within, and exploring. These four values of the two-sided distinction make up for a constructionist epistemology which sets the stage both for the phenomenon to appear and for the observer to reflect on himself or herself as having to draw his or her distinctions while observing the distinctions bringing forth the phenomenon. It has room for a deconstructionist epistemology which watches the paradox of *supplément* coming from a connection brought forward by a separation, and from a reference hiding, and thereby revealing, for a second-order observer watching, the self-reference of the observer doing the distinction.

In sociological theory the Spencer-Brownian form is useful to model communication and network relations because it focuses on the co-dependency of the different sides of the distinction, and of the distinction and its space, without assuming any kind of causality making sure that all elements of the form correlate. Since it is the second-order observer who watches the form of the distinction, the first-order observer being at first completely absorbed, if not consummated, by it, the notion of form is protected from any assumptions as to the marked state of the distinction being the effect of the distinction, or as to the space of the distinction being the effect of its form. Instead, we deal with the neighborhood of variables and their values which self-selectively relate to each other in constituting the network synthesis of the form. Nothing could be more fragile, and more robust if the self-selections work. That is why we speak of a communication model, and not of a causal model. Because self-selection has no place in causality, despite Kant trying to call exactly the self-selection of a cause the foundation place of the free will.

Last not least, the form model enables us to concatenate distinctions, thus indeed networking them among each other inside the space they thereby bring forth. We will speak of constants, being the distinctions themselves, and of variables, being the marked and unmarked states called by the constant distinctions, and assuming different values according to the overall state of the form, standing to each other in relations of memory and subversion.

Network synthesis means to be able to deal with overflows of reference, symbol, criticism, and control. Any one social action relies on reference, self-reference, and some way to account for the unmarked state in order to be able to selectively capture, number, order, and name these overflows in its orientation to different situations. We propose to solve the venerable sociological problem of the missing micro/macro-link between action selecting its way about, on one hand, and a system reproducing its organization and its structures by the means of the selection of action which does not know about the system, on the other, by introducing the idea of self-organization via double closure (Heinz von Foerster). This idea consists in the assumption that it is the very contingency, i.e., ambivalence, arbitrariness, and discretion, of communication which is able to orientate social action. Or else, social action consists in reproducing, by solving it, the problem it at any moment solves, thereby bringing forth, and calling on, a system which is a second-order device providing for orientations connecting among each other.

All we need when trying to explain the self-organization of social action is the idea of a loss of two degrees of freedom. This loss relates to overflow by solving the problem at any one moment, by giving a specific orientation to a situation, without dissolving the problem itself, which re-emerges afresh from the very contingency inherent in any one orientation. Other degrees of freedom instantly reproduce. The first one of the two degrees of freedom getting lost due to a system's self-organization is the possibility to act arbitrarily. Social action being given, to act arbitrarily is impossible. Even if arbitrariness should be intended, or should be attributed, both intention and attribution would already partake in a social action giving meaning, and thus determination, to the action. Indeed, social action consists in acting always in a way such that any of its endings is at the same time the beginning of something else. There is no conclusion of any action which does not open up for other action to connect. Any one social action selectively not only solves its problem of selection but also reproduces some set of both determinate and indeterminate possibilities the very next action is bound to choose among.

The second one of the two degrees of freedom getting lost is the possibility to call on new criteria, or categories, or schemata, in order to self-determine, describe, and account for one's own action. Action does not only have to connect to next action, it also has to confirm a certain redundancy in its various ways to do so. It has to confirm organization in its most general sense by being able to call itself by some name which is recognized among similar people and similar situations. This loss of a second degree of freedom makes up for the double closure of the system which consists in not only operations (first closure) but also organization (or regulation) having to relate to itself. Note that there is a space of distinction between the first and the second closure. This space provides for the organization of social action being at some variance with the ties and links it actually calls upon to connect to previous and to next action. This space of a distinction, of a severance between the first and the second closure again makes up for error and correction, indeterminacy and determination, overflow and framing being possible.

The sociological conundrum is solved by not only action but also organization informing itself, both of them taken together making up for social action, giving it nevertheless quite some free play in relating action to organization, because there is at any instant a more or less indeterminate set of possibilities interfering. We may also call this the autopoiesis of social action since autopoiesis relies on ways to reproduce a system which combine available and unavailable factors of production, looking at self-reference, as it were, in order to bear with the unmarked states of the network which is about to be explored.

If dissemination of communication defines the problem social action has to deal with, while all the same reproducing it, and if the four culture forms we identified extending on Luhmann's conjecture, and the numbers, orders, and reflections coming with them, all overlap and intermingle in constituting the realm of the possible in contemporary society, we must now ask how a social action reproduces which has no other way but to look at the problem it is bound to solve. And remember that social action does not wait for sociological explanation to solve its riddles, but reproduces via self-organization.

In this chapter, we try to figure out a model of the self-organization of social action. Sticking with the problem of network synthesis we assume that the control problem of the next society is setting the stage for both the dealing with all other dissemination media and for a sociological understanding of the self-organization of social action. That is, we propose to switch from ethnological (tribes), ontological (strata), and ethical (media) explanations of social action to an *ecological* (or knowledge) model, which takes the notion of form serious and looks into ways to self-select inside networks constituted of neighborhood relations, producing a synthesis which is always beyond action and self-similarly built into it at the same time. We choose the terms of an ecological model because we think that the notion of the ecological is apt to deal with both self-organization and network, or heterarchy, without feeling obliged to assume any kind of super-system pre-establishing the social order emerging from the selection of social action. In sociology, the notion of the ecological has a certain reputation to it to be able to describe and inform on heterarchical, loosely coupled, as self-organizing as surprise-ridden, and as robust as fragile, social relationships. We here emphasize this reputation and call it, along with evolutionary thinking, the tradition we call upon for our own model.

Coming back to our problem of network synthesis and social action having to navigate its way as part of that synthesis, we may note that all of these four dissemination media, whose successful introduction defines, respectively, the tribal, the ancient, the modern, and the next society, contribute to an overall culture which consists in dealing with the overflow of meaning. To act socially means to be able to both participate in the production of overflow, and to reduce it to some measure participants are able to deal with. One insight stemming from our analysis of dissemination media extending on Luhmann's conjecture about the culture form they necessitate, consists in the usefulness of being precise about the overflow and its framing being two sided of one coin. It is not only that overflows are the rule, and framing is improbable, as Michel Callon suggests, but it is the evolutionarily improbable framing which defines the overflow it is both overtaxed by, and dealing with. It is this idea of the two-sidedness of overflow and framing which fits our sociological thinking into a constructivist epistemology, which we are indeed here looking for.

To close this chapter we may try to capture this idea of framings defining their overflow by giving each one of our four societies a particular kind of social order. To be sure, to be able to distinguish among four societies means to describe variations of one and only one society, given that the society may evolutionarily be one of those famous once and for all inventions of which we speak with respect to the world, life, language, and consciousness. So any one of these societies and of its orders may be able, given the circumstances, to turn into one of the other varieties, the presence or not of a new dissemination medium becoming dominant, being, however, a restriction which blocks any arbitrary switching of the overall states of the society and its culture.

We propose to distinguish between the culture form of a society dealing with the overflow of the meaning disseminated through a new medium, the number form of the society, which delineates the places that get numbered with respect to people, events, or actions occurring and being addressed, its reflection form, which provides for general affirmation and negation, and the social order of the society. The social order we assume to be a switching device defining, and thereby providing for, forks that serve to redistribute constancies. Let us for a moment focus on the latter because they shed a specific light on what we may mean by network synthesis. Note, that the term of social order we here employ differs from the one proposed by Talcott Parsons. What Parsons is calling "social order," we rather call the number form of a society, thereby regaining a notion of social order, which has more space for the dynamics of oscillation between different values of the same variables than Parsons perhaps thought necessary.

The notion of social order here refers to both a mechanism and a dynamism. It defines which features to address if the society in dealing with the meaning it is trying to capture has to exchange structures in order to be able to do so. It tells that variation inside a society does not stem from parameters changing, but from parameters working such that constancies get redistributed. For any one society in any one given situation that is drama enough, yet it needs, in order to be acted out, a kind of second-order social order, a social order dealing not with specific meanings, trying to get them fixed, but with the overflow of meaning, trying to manage it according to the culture form, structure, and reflection of the society. Any one of these social orders of the different societies we here distinguish, is a combination once again of reference, self-reference, and general network value, and thereby contributes to the network synthesis of social action.

In that sense, the tribal society's social order are *secrets*. Secrets, and taboos coming with them, are a kind of metacommunication which regulates what, and how, to communicate about, and what not. They define reference in that they, in order to work at all, tell about their being indications of things to be kept secret. The define self-reference in that they order the members of the tribe according to what, and how, they may be allowed to talk about. And they, by definition, account for the unmarked state in that they indicate the things kept secret as the things not to be marked, a feature which of course invites paradox and is exploited accordingly, in both attracting and frightening the tribe by calling its attention to things forbidding any attention.

The network synthesis of social action here consists in any one action being situated with respect to some secret, drawing the line, transcending the line, walking the line, obeying the line, or whatever. So whatever happens may at once be judged with respect to the secrets kept or the secrets threatened, without keeping anybody from either curiously or anxiously exploring the secrets as long as they are kept. A certain dramaturgy of the tribe is added by sorting men and women, old and young, sick and healthy according to the secrets they are initiated into, or are kept distant from. Initiation rites, *rites de passage*, make it visible to everybody what is at stake and who belongs where, any one of the boundaries drawn by the secrets inviting a more or less ecstatic and orgiastic re-entry into the communication just to be sure that both of its sides do indeed exist.

The social order of secrets does not consist in that they keep something secret, of course, but in the relationships between people, events, and situations they order by telling everybody who knows the secrets' content (which may be nil), who guards them, and who just knows about there being a secret, by defining a dramaturgy of initiation and evasion, and by marking situations with respect to the secrets which are to be kept. Switching, or redistributing the constancies, here means that people may seek for which one of the secrets available they adhere to, means that people may, via initiation, change the side with respect to knowledge of, and knowledge about, a secret, and means that people may, if need be, know which secrets to exploit or which secrets to disregard in order to frighten, fascinate, or otherwise commit, bewitch, and spellbind their fellow people.

The social order of the ancient society, in turn, seems to be *authority*. Authority helps to settle which purposes may claim what right in which situation, without keeping anybody from trying at a new, or different, authority with respect to other purposes. Authority as well defines reference, self-reference, and the unmarked state to account for, in that it defines the purpose, its owner or address, and some unknown space of possibilities, or network, where new purposes and their authority claims may come from. This unknown space of possibilities is socially produced by the authority always only claiming, but never being able to prove, its right. There is some mystery being involved with authority, a "mystery of moderation" (Xenophon, The Oikonomikos, XXI, 12), stemming from a politics of scarcity and of promises to keep it at bay, which is never solved in ancient society, yet gets exploited with respect to trials, destruction, and re-institution of authority.

The network synthesis of ancient society, thus, walks the line of authority as the tribal society walks the line of secrets. Social strata help in both securing who may challenge whose authority and who not, and in thereby singling out challenges unheard of but all the more attractive and threatening. There is no social action which does not know in which shadow of what authority it is trying to get its cover, or to which authority it should switch to in order to be able to legitimate its purpose. And there is no social action which does not try to figure out how to shed light on spots which claim authority without having the means to possibly defend it. Like the secrets in tribal society, authority in ancient society is a switching device which enables social action, without leaving the realm of authority, to challenge it, to claim for a different one, and to search for means able to institutionalize a mystery which lends authority by blocking, and thereby, sooner or later inviting, further questions.

In the case of the modern society a switching device has already been identified by sociological theory. Here, Harrison C. White calls *publics* the reference and area which enable social action to change context and content. Drawing on an idea developed by Erving Goffman that all social action needs not only perfomance but also audience, White defines publics as those addresses of reference, self-reference, and, indeed, network, which let social action both define and redefine, via decontextualization and recontextualization, which are easier to tell than to do, its situation.

Publics are perfect to both demand for and frame a certain restlessness in selecting possible action in politics or on markets, in schools or in hospitals, in the arts or in sports, with respect to both restless and scarce attention. The unmarked states which they allow to account for, are states of fact, of time, or of the social, in that to watch a public means to know that you do not know what next it may be interested in, how long its attention prevails, and who may be the one to either confirm a certain interest or to be the first to defect. Again, as in secrets and in authority, a public is a constant which allows for variation, or better, which secures the variation of social action.

The next society as well will need a kind of social order. Again we do not leave the realm of speculation. If we go by negative selection, certainly neither secrets, nor authorities, nor publics are of much help when it comes to a social order as a means to give at once an overall picture of the society dealing with the computer, and a guiding idea of how possibly to change place and site inside it. What is defining the relations between people, events, and situations, when, at any instant, an overflow of network control is to be contained by form and to be structured by knowledge? And, with respect to the next society's obsessio with *bios*, what may possibly lend social order to the reflection of the body being at risk and being at home at the same time?

I think that an emergent understanding of the notion of *space* might be suitable to denote the social order coming with the next society. Space is a category which is able to capture reference, self-reference, and a general network value via its calling for a neighborhood, for a site, and for open fringes, loosely organized via ideas about the inside and the outside of a space, yet above all defined via the possibility to relate to, and to switch, places. Space means that things and events may get together, and may be told apart. Since Kant it is the most robust category to deal with contradictions (via position), on one hand, and with fusion and confusion (via transposition), on the other. And last not least, space is even considered to be a possible category to reflect on the unity of the difference of position and transposition by thinking about a something being able to give rise to both.

Space means to reflect on place and to account for the unexpected. It conveniently encompasses the real and the virtual space as both offer places, envision a site, and are open to the unexpected. It provides for the factor of time which changes the perception and conception of the dimensions of proximity and distance, thus even playing, as a kind of re-entry of the notion into itself, with the idea of a "placeless" society, of the "abolishment" of the dimension of space, which of course both is nonsense with respect to theory and concept, yet tells a lot about the empirical experience of the multidimensionality of space.

The notion of space has room for physical, chemical, organic, mental, social, and artificial , i.e., machines', computers', and computer grids', siting, and thus provides for a multitude of topological orderings which serve as much to keep things together as to keep track of their switching and moving about. Any one place in space is considered a node, a bifurcation, a crossroad of some sense and process. It is a stable address for unstable things and passing events, an address, though, which proves to be determinate only with respect to indeterminate capturing. It has its role in self-organization, so much seems to be for sure, yet to know more about it is precluded by complexity.

So much for a rough overview of the impact of different dissemination media on the network synthesis of society. Our next chapter develops a model of social action for the next society which is considered to be the last, or uppermost, level of all other societies, along with the dissemination media they have to deal with, the culture, structure, and reflection forms they developed, and the social order they use to allow for variation, all of them still being present, even if in some supplementary, not really dominant, state. Social action of course means that one may still head for secrets, authority, or a public, and that pockets of the actual society are perfectly suitable for such ways to orientate social action to social situation. Yet, what we call the next society, the knowledge society, or the globalized, the world society, constrains each one of these received orientations to become reframed with respect to the overflow of meaning to be captured, with respect to the number form to give structure to the society, with respect to the social order providing for switches, and with respect to its reflection giving it its perspectives of negation and affirmation.

Knowledge and space, in the next society, get the upper hand over secrets, authority, and even publics, and that is why we have to account for some kind of an archeology of meaning, embedded within any one social action, on one hand, and new, or next, kinds to connect, to separate, and to move about, on the other.

And then, the *computer*. It may well be still too early to try to know what impact its introduction has on the society. Luhmann, therefore, allows for a "place of indeterminacy" in his theory of the society to account for the possible, even if barely visible, consequences of the intermingling of the computer with a kind of structural coupling which hitherto only concerned the coevolution of communication and consciousness. The challenge put forward by the introduction of the computer into the society may consist less in its possible ability to one day think as, or faster and more reliable than, humans do, but in its ability to participate in communication in a way we are only used to with respect to human consciousness.

It is perhaps only at this stage of the evolution of both the society and its theory that a theoretical perspective has to be taken seriously which is present with sociology ever since it looks at the individuality of the individual, yet somehow has never really informed sociological theory, which was and is more interested in social structure than in the social having to deal with the opaque consciousness of the individual. The latter issue was outsourced to social psychology, and somehow at best haunts sociology since then. Yet, since neurophysiology in the nineteenth century discovered the operational closure of the brain (Joseph Müller), the question is whether one could, and should, not account in terms of operational closure as well for the mind (consciousness) and the society (communication). The question is far from being settled, but its prospectives for a kind of general cognitive sciences are still promising.

Structural coupling, within such a perspective, means that operationally closed systems like the organism, the brain, the mind, or the society, relying, as it were, on their own recursive circularity, their own heterarchical networks, and their own structures, to generate information, are nevertheless and simultaneously coupled to their environment and possible systems in that environment via internal structures accounting for, or resonating with, external complexity. As Nietzsche already has it, such a structural coupling is not a causal, but an aesthetic one, as it involves not just cause and effect (which abundantly play their role nevertheless), but essentially interpretation and translation, exploiting, in order to be able to manage itself, all kinds of ambiguity and ambivalence.

It is possible to read the history of both the concepts of communication and of consciousness with respect to a dawning awareness of such a theory of operational closure and structural coupling being possible and helpful. Luhmann's notion of a "place of indeterminacy" accorded to the as yet uncertain consequences of the introduction of the computer into the society indeed asks for such a theory to be taken seriously. It is only when we learn how to account for the co-evolution of communication and consciousness, both of them increasing their complexity, i.e. analytical indeterminacy even if synthetical determination, while dealing with, and indeed sort of comprehending, the complexity of the other, that we may be able to watch as well the computer now beginning to occupy a similar place.

The computer and, indeed, the internet, and high-performance, or grid, computing in scientific research, stock markets, hospitals, and armies, begin to present us with the possibility that it is not only human consciousness, let alone the spirits and devils of earlier times, which is able to participate in communication. Participation here means that the complex units in the environment of communication iteratively and recursively reproducing itself are not just the objects, but also the subjects of communication, in that they are able to intervene into, and to influence, it. Like consciousness opaquely making up its own mind when "receiving" and "sending" communication, so the computer does its own computing when fed with data and asked to edit them on its screen.

Indeed, the wording of "sender" and "receiver" never made less sense than now because in situations of noisy communication, as Claude E. Shannon already acknowledges, which among structurally coupled systems are the rule, the essential operation is not sending or receiving messages but correcting for errors. The attribution of messages, and their errors, to senders or receivers is a secondary device of communication to deal with both these errors and their possible correction. The consent, and dissent, with respect to errors to be corrected, via their acceptance ("learning") or their rejection ("norms") helps to reproduce communication. The same, probably, applies to consciousness which as well is not sending and receiving messages, being unable, as it were, to import, via some "input", and export, via some "output", any information, but correcting for its own errors, building structure and structures out of both their approval (which is called "insight") and their denial (which sometimes is called "character"), combining approval and denial into some kind of either wisdom or pathology.

That seems to be what the computer, relying on its memory devices and being part of its grid, begins to do as well. As from its very beginning, the computer does not rely on input and output, or on what John von Neumann calls "plugged control," but on its own memory to control its operations, whence the notion of "memory-stored control", that memory being as much invisible to the user of the computer as the consciousness of an individual human being is to communication (and, indeed, to itself). The computer uses its own networked memory-intelligence to account for both breakdown and continuous operation. It may indeed begin to be intelligent, to the measure that it begins to be able to account for context, that is, for complex units populating its environment and having and letting anybody know, via approach and withdrawal, their own perspective of the situation.

That is what the catastrophe of the introduction of the computer into the society seems to consist in. The society is obliged to deal with a new kind of meaning which is brought about by computers computing their own contribution to communication without that communication having the slightest chance of understanding just what, and how so, the computer is doing. The computer grid's algorithms begin to be as complex as human consciousness has ever been. And it does not help any more to just turn the computer, any single exemplar of it, off. The grid is running anyhow.

The surplus meaning or overflow the society now has to deal with is the meaning of a communication involving opaque and complex, analytically indeterminate even if synthetically determinate, machines. Of course, one may consider also other new dissemination media surpassing the modes modern society has developed with respect to the overflow of comparison and criticism brought about by the printing press. Photography, movies, and television all play their part, and an important part, for that matter, since while photography presents us with a communication of perception which almost completely, save for the selection of the angle of view, dissimulates its being communicated (i.e., its being selected and disseminated), movies and television communicate almost all of perception, movement, sound, and color, without declaring, save in art movies, their being communicated.

That is why we deal with virtual realities ever since. They should be attributed, I think, to the communication of perception via screens of all kinds, including those of the computer and of artificial intelligence, and not just to the computer. It may well be that virtual reality is more of a problem for human minds dealing with movies, video games, online games, and decision support systems, than for the society reproducing its communication with respect to not only consciousness, but also the computer participating. There is an overflow of meaning to the mind as well as one to the society, an overflow which in the case of the mind consists in having to account for communication presenting it with contents of perception it hitherto could only produce itself. Any multimedia screen is just that, a simulation, in some virtual reality, of what the consciousness before was taken to accept as the real reality.

Sticking with the computer and its impact on communication which includes, as its excluded outside, consciousness anyhow, we may ask which culture form is able to deal with the new kind of surplus meaning. Metacommunication, for sure, is not bound to impress the computer, which is just not responding to any talk about it or about the relationships undertaken by it. Questions with respect to purpose can still be asked, as they will never go silent, but they reduce the computer to a tool which it by all means not is, witnessing the fascination released by it for both communication and consciousness. But even relentless restlessness juggling with both comparison and criticism is helpless as soon as the computer grid is faster and more surprising in the connections it makes and offers.

Luhmann's conjecture stops here. He assumes Aristotle's *telos* as the culture form of the literal society and Descartes's self-referential restlessness as the culture form of the printing press society, thus giving both ancient and modern society its way to deal with surplus meaning, and thus, its culture. We added metacommunication for the tribal society, without being able to call anybody its core inventor, and we now look for the culture form of our, the next, society which has to deal with the introduction of the computer.

At some other place in his book "Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft", Luhmann, however, gives more hints as to how to conceive of the computer and its grid. He indeed takes the computer almost literal when trying to observe its participation in communication. He starts from the distinction between the visible and accessible screen a user looks at and deals with, manipulating, as it were, both keyboard and mouse, on one hand, and the invisible machine computing the data and connecting to other invisible machines, on the other, and accounts for this distinction in terms of a relation between surface and depth.

This enables him to still compare the computer to something else, which here are religion and art, both of which having defined their own relationship between visible and accessible surfaces, on one hand, and invisible depth, on the other. Yet, with the computer it is not communication any more bound to interpret mysterious signs and to invent interpretations of these signs, as in religion, or to decipher ornaments and to enjoy their inner and outer tension, as in arts, that are helpful in managing the meaning of the society, but it is a communication of a special kind trying to catch on, to go along, to keep track of what the computer screen is offering with respect to scientific data, stock market rates, diagnostic advice, or battlefield data.

Taking account also of the pervasive problem of this computer grid communication which consists in the impossibility to know for sure who did send, and who did check on, the information rendered visible at the screen, which is the authority problem, Luhmann advances an idea which I propose to combine with his conjecture. This idea is that it may be a dealing with temporalized forms, that is, operational two-sided forms in the sense invented by George Spencer-Brown, which enable communication to navigate the grid, to surf the net, and to decide on how to work with the information presented. Indeed, his idea is that to deal with the computer means to acknowledge, first, that the computer is not a classical machine, made of lever arms, axles, wheels, and screws, but a transclassical machine, computing bits and bytes (Gotthard Günther), and, second, that it might be sensible to compare this kind of a machine, non-trivial and heterarchical as it is, to the organization and structures of the recursive operation of consciousness as well as communication.

This makes control, or, more precisely, *networked memory- control*, the overflow problem to be dealt with by the society as soon as the computer, its grid, the internet, and the web are introduced to society. The computer and its working means that there is always a type of surplus meaning around, which can only be accounted for in terms of network operations that both control, and are controlled by, what everybody else is doing, while relying on memories, and the capacity to forget coming with them, which are opaque to everybody else. The notion of control in this context captures a type of interaction between the controlling and the controlled elements, which does not rely on pre-established links of some kind, but, as Harrison C. White's notion of network precisely brings it to the point, on the elements seeking mutual contact in order to find, secure, and reproduce their identity. Networks draw their life out of identities being at stake, while reframing their memory such that both control and identity can vary and can get fine-tuned to the tasks at hand.

The overflow problem, which the computer is bringing with it, consists in an enormous increase of memory available for just about everything anybody is going to undertake. As soon as one uses the computer, or deliberately refrains from using it, there is an abundance of possibilities to control what one is doing by linking it to knowledge, to reports, to reviews, to communication which is stored by the computer and potentially brought to one's attention the very moment one considers a possible decision. The chess computer right from the beginning of the history of the introduction of the computer into the society is the very monument of this superiority of memory, but expert systems of all kinds not only support, but also threaten, expert situations in medicine, design, science, law, the military with an overflow of data to consider such that decisions become virtually impossible because it is always easy to quote some fact which contradicts the expectations cherished with it.

The search algorithms, social software, and semantic webs introduced with the web 2.0 generation of the internet are a kind of generalization of this control feature with respect to the mass dissemination of computer-aided communication. They make evident that the control problem does not consist in there being powerful authorities around which at any moment can tell everybody what to do, but instead in there being addresses and experiences available at one's fingertip which are only ignored at one's own risk since everybody else knows that they are available. That is why physicians seem to be among the people the most reluctant to use the computer as an expert system in their daily work. They are wary, of course, of the expert system's poor record in questions of the assessment of context-dependent situations and they are thinking that the very complexity of any one situation of diagnosis and therapy needs intuition and personal experience, not evidence-based knowledge and organizational control. But as expert systems become more reliable, they will have to adapt to their use. And elsewhere as well there is a need to develop new practices with respect to the selective use of networked memory-controlled knowledge, which threatens old habits, authorities, and institutions.

The question then again is how to deal with this overflow of control, that is of possibilities available to condition what one is about to do through references and support drawn from some computer programme. How is communication to deal with a kind of control which it is systematically overtaxed to control itself with respect to its source and trustworthiness? As soon as computers interfere with communication, as they do in video and online games, in expert systems relying on computer grids, and in daily search operations in the internet and intranet, communication is as stumped for an answer as in dealing with consciousness. The depths of the invisible machine are inaccessible to communication. It cannot but reach for a control of itself in dealing with the machine as in dealing with consciousness.

The problem posed by the computer, however, is worse than that posed by the human consciousness. In dealing with consciousness communication is able to rely on its own device, which is language, to both attract, frame, and manage a consciousness which is, for its part, struggling to both translate its perceptions into that language, in order to participate in communication, and keep it idiosyncratic, in order to be able to recognize itself. That is why it is so important that Edmund Husserl, via what he called logical investigations, discovered the fact that language is a feature of communication, and not of consciousness: He spoke of the "lonesome emotions" (*einsames Seelenleben*) of the consciousness which has to find expressions (*Ausdrücke*) for its perceptions, its thinking, or its ideas in a language offered to him by the communication of a society, which co-evolves with consciousness and controls itself with respect to its attractiveness for human perception, its capacity to both arouse and frame the consciousness.

Poets, of course, knew this all along, trying to find words for perceptions beyond any words, which is one reason why Niklas Luhmann ventured the idea of poetry, especially in the nineteenth century, being a theory *avant la lettre* of the society, and why it is little wonder why of all sciences literary theory delves into the question of a language prefiguring the way of how human consciousness discovers its being prefigured, yet is endowed at the same time with degrees of freedom of how to deal with these figures and their so called rhetoric (Paul deMan).

With computers the story is different. Their language is mathematical and arithmetical, possibly even physical, if we think of quantum computing. Both communication and consciousness stand no chance to understand beyond the merest principles what is going on here. Of course, there are attempts to get an idea of how the computer computes by somehow trying to observe it from a perspective of the structural coupling between consciousness and communication, talking, for instance, about the language of mathematics in terms of its own semiosis, or describing evolutionary algorithms able to construct as well as destroy information (Brian Rotman, Ray Kurzweil). But even the problem only rarely is well understood, because for all these linguistic, social, cultural, and artificial turns in the philosophy, social sciences and literary theory of the last century, a paradigmatic consolidation of cognitive sciences, which could account for the distinction between the different domains of operational closure, is still in its infancy.

That is why we stick with the metaphor of the invisible machine describing a computer and its grid, which are beyond understanding, yet not beyond interaction. This is what the notions of the overflow of meaning, or of surplus meaning, try to capture. We do not have to understand the computer in our attempt to single out a possible culture form of the next society. We just have to get an idea of the catastrophe, or criticality, its introduction is triggering and of the device invented, or picked up, by the society to deal with it. That device, to cut a long story short, seems to be the *two-sided form* invented by the mathematician George Spencer-Brown for different, yet not unrelated reasons, namely, first, to translate Boolean algebra into a calculus which gets by on just one notational token, which is the cross, and, second, to provide for a mathematics which is able to solve logics' problems in dealing with both time and self-reference. The notion of the two-sided form combines into one operation the operation of recursive, i.e., identical, or iterative, i.e., differential, connection, on one hand, and the acknowledgment and operational computation of the codependency on a marked or unmarked context, on the other.

That is what we need in our search for a culture form for the next society. Because reliance on form in that sense of a two-sided form now can mean that the communication checks on any one of its steps and links with respect to the next one in order not to loose, but to rather gain in connectivity, and keeps an eye, so to speak, on everything excluded right now but simultaneously present nevertheless, possibly intervening right the next moment. So indeed, the category of the next takes the lead, which is a category combining the next step with the next possible disturbance, both of them being calculated within any one step nevertheless to be undertaken.

That is exactly what the notion of form is able to deliver, namely a notion of a two-sided distinction whose one side, the marked state or the inside of the distinction, takes care of the value produced by the previous operation and connected to by the next one, and whose other side, the unmarked state or the outside of the distinction, accounts for the unknown world the operations are embedded within and which possibly interferes with the operation at any one moment. It is the principle of nervous operation which here becomes the leading computing device for communication as it already is apparent within consciousness, which invented it in the first place. This regard for a two-sided form including, as a kind of a general network value comprising both actual and possible links and ties, an account for the unmarked state, seems to be one of the few principles able to cope both with the speed of computing and with its tremendously increased networked memory-controlled content, which is kept in files and archives, combed through with search algorithms, and continuously updated via semantic webs and social software bringing not only humans, but humans and sensors, cameras and microphones together.

There seems to be right now just one number form observers are able to discern as the successor to the tribes of the oral society, the social strata of the literal society, and the success media of the printing press society, and that is the *knowledge* which figures prominently in terms like that of the knowledge society or, for that matter, the information age. If we define knowledge not with respect to content or stock, but with respect to operation and connection value, we may again follow Niklas Luhmann and call knowledge any kind of operation which is able to both examine certain states, their values, and their variation, and to check up on the context or environment of these states which is either assumed to be constant, or to possibly interfere, or to be some combination of these two possibilities.

Knowledge, thus, is the operation enabling a complex system not to understand, but to control, itself, if we take up the distinction of control from understanding introduced by W. Ross Ashby. If the operation called understanding demands for the system to have at its disposal a model, which is isomorphic to the system, that is, which represents all states, events, links, and aspects of the system, then this becomes impossible the very moment the system is defined as complex, that is as defying any observer representation of it. Instead, the system has to be controlled, either by itself or by some other system. And control here means that the system doing the control compares all states or events which present themselves, with some states or events that were expected, changing then, not the states or events of the system but the expectations, either changing them for some different expectation, thus featuring learning, or changing them into expectations which are maintained irrespectively of their empirical disappointment, thus turning them into normative expectations. Control, thus, means to self-correct in interaction. It does not mean to attempt to dominate a phenomenon. It is a kind of control which is termed cybernetic, since here the controller, in some circular structure, is in turn being controlled by the controlled.

As if alluding to Descartes's *morale par provision* Ashby gives three simple rules for any control to be successful in dealing with a knowledge which is both abundant with respect to memory, and scarce with respect to operation: First, Look at what happens, not at why it happens, for any attempt to causally explain what is happening may already exhaust the requisite variety you would need to account for the complex phenomenon; second, Do not collect more information than necessary for the job at hand, because that only means that you loose time and collect information which soon is of no value any more anyway; and third, Do not assume that the system does not change, that is, take into account that you can only solve the problems of today.

Knowledge would make up for a perfect number form of the next society which might right now being emerging. It just defines the blanks of examinations to be done and of check ups to be taken care for, giving a methodology or a kind of project management to focus on fact, time, social perspective, and their respective contexts without assuming that the system, or network, or form, or knot emerging right now as the state to be acted upon is the same or only similar to the one demanding to be acted upon tomorrow.

The re-entry of the form of the next society into itself is neither done via gods, nor reality, nor morals. Any affirmation and negation of this society with respect to beings beyond reference, to an objectivity beyond the symbol, or to values beyond comparison and criticism, would be insufficient. The computer is neither to be praised nor to be criticized with reference to a divine will, a cosmological reality, or the progress or decadence of a restless civilization. Of course, one may try all this, and it often is actually done, but it does not help. It does neither capture and describe what is going on, nor does it provide for an observer perspective from which the situation is to be controlled, let alone understood.

Instead, and with due reference to the computer possibly applying for another structural coupling with communication, challenging in that respect the human consciousness' unique position, the next society seems to pick up an idea which surely is not new but which gains prominence the more humans begin to realize what actually makes them unique and is both co-evolving with society and put into jeopardy by it. It is their *bios*, their organic and biological constitution, their *life and death*, which makes them unique, and they discover that ancient as well as modern society has always tried to either neutralize, even to make invisible, or to make functional, to make use of, the fact of their being alive and being mortal, insisting, as it were, on the right of the sovereign power to kill (i.e., to engage with war and to penalize) in ancient society, and on the right of the society to have access to healthy individuals (i.e., to both provide for health care and to cap its costs) in modern society. The body itself begins to become the unity of the difference between the empirical and the transcendental.

With respect to both communication and consciousness, the living organic body and its death are some kind of the radical other. Life and death occur without either the mind or the society knowing what happens. Life and death, even if visible in all their clarity, seem to be beyond our knowledge. They challenge the blanks of knowledge which the next society distributes and calculates in order to describe and monitor itself. And that is why, or so it seems, the *bios* is a reason to both acclaim what next society, not least in its health organization, is doing for humans and to their life expectancy, and to criticize it for its blindness and cruelty in dealing with the human body and its mind, as witnessed in a world-wide body politics of exclusion and in the stress, barely relieved by legal and illegal drugs, psychiatric or not, suffered by all of us.

The *printing press* presents the society with yet another overflow of meaning. The criticality now consists in the ubiquity of an audience used to be able to read books and newspapers, pamphlets and certificates, files and records, and assumed to actually do their reading, even if highly selectively and always idiosyncratically so, on the one hand, and an individualization of the selective use of printed matters, on the other. Almost anybody has read something, and not just the Holy Scriptures, but also comments, novels, and reports. Yet these are not read aloud in order to be admired and to get copied, like in monasteries before, but read silently and individually in study rooms and offices in order to be compared among each other and to be evaluated according to the possibility of different, if not divergent, opinions. The printing press is the birth of a general public which is not confined any more within the boundaries of social strata, and of the individual who is forced to learn how to move in situations which demand both education, i.e. the ability to select what to have read and what not, and diversity, i.e. the ability to surprise with different, yet interesting opinion.

The printing press disseminates communication not only among people absent and present, but also among people having to take their own stance toward the matter communicated. It is not only belief any more, and admiration, which is necessary to deal with the printed word, but also *comparison and criticism*. The overflow consists in these comparisons and criticisms being presented in places appropriate and inappropriate. The Enlightenment hoped for individuals able to draw reason out of, and re-invest into, what they read, such that the public, as a kind of supreme instantiation of this reason, both encourages reading and controls its outcome (Immanuel Kant). But this hope for reason, a sort of *telos* re-applied to itself, comes too late, if the real problem in communication does not consist in knowing what is right, or wrong, or which opinion might be justified, and which one not, but in knowing how to move from one opinion to another one, if they all have a certain right to them and all know to attract their reader.

This is what Montaigne in his essay "An Apology for Raymond Sebond" discovers, and what Descartes in his "Discours de la méthode" brings to the point: As soon as the individual reader, reading along and being alone with himself or herself, is confronted with not only divergent, but possibly contradictory opinions he or she is not in any position to decide on, it only helps to move on and to doubt everything, even while possibly enjoying it, save doubting oneself being the one who reads. The most important discovery by Descartes does not consist in a method to produce evident knowledge, which he looked for but did not find, but in the *morale par provision*, which he proposed to maintain in the meantime and which proved to be of lasting value. This *morale par provision* offers four principles which lay down the hidden ethical codex of modern society: First, do not pull down your buildings as long as you are still building a new one, since you need a place to stay in as long as the new one is not yet finished; second, be obedient toward the laws and mores of your country exactly as the most level-headed people among your contemporaries are; third, be firm with your actions, even if they are not certain, because the traveller only succeeds in leaving the forest if he keeps direction; and, fourth, overcome rather yourself, and not the destiny, change rather your desires, and not the order of the world, because it is only our thoughts which actually are within our powers. The last of these principles, of course, is the venerable one already spelled out by roman stoicism when it proposes to distinguish matters we have command over, from matters we do not (Epictetus). From these principles Descartes decides, in the middle of a winter night in 1619/20 near Ulm, Germany, where he was struck by the imperfection of all knowledge, to rather go about and cultivate his mind.

Luhmann, in his conjecture about the culture forms of different dissemination media, proposes to call Descartes' invention of a kind of restless countering of all possible situations, a kind of skeptical comparison of anything with everything else, the culture form of the modern society emerging from its dealing with the introduction of the printing press. A constant search for equilibrium and for values is just the other side of a successful, even if unhappy, because inherently divided (Hegel), adaptation to the dynamics of a society, which develops confessional wars, protest movements, science, the market economy, democracy, and bureaucracy out of its mass distribution of scriptures, pamphlets, books, letters, papers, paper money, polling cards, and files.

A relentless *restlessness* replaces, as the dominant culture form, the reliance on both metacommunication and purpose, which both stay with us, to be sure, but are refined to interaction and to organization, respectively. The overall society gets dynamically temporalized, demanding of social action to deal with the surplus meaning of comparison and criticism, and changing, therefore, to lay the appropriately nervous foundations of its social order, from a reliance on social strata to a reliance on symbolically generalized media of communication, which are money and power, truth and belief, love and art, perhaps even values.

All of these media that come to make probable the success of communication in times when due to comparison and criticism that success gets ever more improbable, are visible in their semantic foundations already in Greek antiquity, but, like evolutionarily pre-adaptive universals, they only now replace other structures to more generally order the society and become the main tracks for the selection and motivation of communication. Note, that they come to be able to motivate communication because of their selectivity: Money buys without asking for social bonds; power forces without asking for agreement; truth may convince without asking for an appropriate change of action; and love binds passionately without asking for economic or political reason. This selectivity becomes the moral scandalon of modern society, and the reason of its evolutionary success.

That is why we propose to call these *success media* of communication the number form of the printing press society, i.e. of the modern society. These media define the blanks, the empty spaces to be filled by selective action, without actually asking which individual from what social stratum is behind that action. Modern society programmatically includes everybody, which means, every individual on the basis of his and her human rights indistinct with respect to ethnical, religious, economic, educational, gender, or whatever difference. That is why exclusion only now begins to become an issue, it could not have been a social problem before.

The other side of this universal inclusion of the individual is its individualization. The structure of modern society consists in blanks being defined such as to be filled by individual decisions yet to be undertaken, and to be undertaken without recourse to any universal criteria of what is right and what is wrong. These blanks obey the social logic, so to speak, not of the individual and its needs and desires, but of their networking among further chances to buy and sell, command and obey, love and be loved, discover as true and as false, decide as legal or illegal, belief and disbelief, or percept as beautiful or ugly.

To have to do this, and to do this all day and every day, indeed demands a lot of these individuals imitating each other yet also having to distinguish themselves from one another. *Morals* come in handy to provide the modern society with a re-entry which refers to a sort of transcendental values, which allow both to affirm and to negate what is here to be decided on every day. Morals provide for values which, on the one hand, are subject to comparison and criticism just as anything else in the modern society, yet, on the other, again and again try to get beyond comparison and criticism even if that proves to be in vain. Morals gets along with any one of these success media of communication by bringing about differentiated sets of values, while at the same time applying for a unified version of the social order of the society subordinating everything to some *summum bonum*. Yet and much to the dismay of ethical philosophy such a hierarchy of values is impossible, since their very comparison is impossible due to their being based on individual utilities which are beyond social judgement (Kenneth J. Arrow). That is why morals is suitable as the reflection form of modern printing press society in the first place. Values are beyond comparison and criticism. That is why people keep to think that they can claim them to found their comparisons and criticisms on them.

Perhaps fatally this feature of morals being beyond comparison in modernity is focusing particularly on the *evil*, not only on the good. The evil is considered to be beyond intelligibility, i.e. beyond comparison and criticism. That seems to be part of a possible explanation of the attractiveness of the evil as a position to look at, and not only look at, but also to rely on for possible interventions into, the society (see Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, Joseph Conrad, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky). The evil is as restless as steady, as radically individual as beyond individuality, as critical as beyond criticism, and, above all, as attractive as repulsive. In modern society it takes the place of both the gods and the reality, wrapping these into a semantics of horror and seduction, which is neither religious nor objectivistic but searching for the impossible becoming true, thus bringing the meaning form of modern society to its vanishing point.

If anything we know about oral society is highly speculative given that nobody has been present at that time, nobody actually wrote protocols of it, and contemporary incarnations of it are already infected with their culture contact with later societies, about the introduction of *writing* we know more. Again, we will not go here into the literature in all its depth and breadth, but concentrate on a few features important for our research into the meaning forms of different dissemination media.

If language is about the dissemination of signs, writing is about the dissemination of *symbols*. Symbols are signs of signs, which means that all problems with respect to the ambivalence of reference and the double bind of paradox are increased and absorbed at the same time, increased by the signs coming in twice, a symbol being the sign signifying a sign signifying something, and absorbed by the possibility to restrict and condition the ways of how a sign may signify a sign. Metacommunication becomes overtaxed, and is relieved by the symbols becoming ritualized signs whose interpretation is restricted to the ability to comment on how to use them.

In communication, the introduction of writing means the catastrophe of the absent getting a hand on the present situation. Writing was invented some five thousand years ago, in Uruk, Mesopotamia, when people began to mark their inventories, to give receipts, and to praise the dead and the kings. All of a sudden, communication has to deal with meaning claims which refer to things and people which are absent and therefore can not be verified nor controlled in the present situation. Another kind of surplus meaning, of overflow, appears which is first dealt with by attempts to call the written communication a dead one, and therefore suspicious one, just in order to sharply restrict its impact on the present, the lively, situation. This is the Platonic solution, also drawing on a rejection of Egyptian bureaucracy in favor of Greek democracy, an attempt to be repeated for every new medium of dissemination to appear, most notably for the printing press and the computer.

Another solution proves to be more helpful. It looks more to the advantages introduced by writing, and less to the disadvantages it involves for the oral control of a social situation. Indeed, the criticality brought about by the introduction of writing may well be that metacommunication finds itself deprived of power and looses its influence to devices able to control the range and scope of writing. These devices control writing by exploiting it. They translate, and thereby restrict, it into new institutions of political administration, trade, religion, the arts, and sciences. But there is a price to all this, and that is the price of a new culture form to be adopted able to positively, as well as negatively, handle the overflow of written communication. Plato's suspicion of its dead hand is just a means to let oral communication not loose all its attractiveness to participants. The speech, talk, and argument on the *agora*, the seduction of the lover, the negotiation between the traders, and the encounter between old and young minds at the academy, all have to find, to redefine, and to maintain their place of oral communication in a society deeply impressed with writing. The society at large, however, needs more than that.

Luhmann's conjecture here consists in assuming that it is the Aristotelian concept of *telos*, or *purpose*, which proves to be suitable in handling the new kind of overflow. The Greek concept of *telos* is a combination of a place to be found with respect to the cosmos already defining which things and which individuals belong where, on one hand, and a purpose to pursue in order to confirm that place and to act in accordance with it, on the other (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 994b). This combination of place and purpose defines a boundary which becomes the reference for a kind of reason which is able to look at both sides of the boundary, keeping outside what belongs outside, and getting inside what belongs inside, all the while taking care of the boundary itself by institutionalizing it and lending it the authority it needs to keep outside what belongs outside, and inside what belongs inside.

Now any one social action just has to raise the question of purpose in order to be able to positively or negatively select among the meaning offers presented to it by oral or written communication. The nice thing about purposes is that they, first, can be preselected by written communication, yet, second, can always be redefined by looking a the situation at hand which evidently needs adaptation to, and, third, can nevertheless be institutionalized with respect to abstract rules and premises of decision which relieve the situation at hand, allow for routine, and demand a kind of legitimation which from inside and from outside the boundary can be varied upon.

The Greek concept of purpose, considered as a device to both draw and monitor boundaries, boundaries of friendship and love, of truth and law, of money and power, of beauty and strength, since it relates to place, and that means to a notion of propriety, property, and appropriateness in accordance with some preordained cosmos, comes with a notion of perfection and corruption which will prove to be influential up to our days. A good and true and possibly even beautiful purpose is one that leads man and soul, action and passion, governance and business to perfection, possible other events threatening all of them with corruption. This is a as simple as forceful distinction which will fascinate political and cultural thinking right up to our days.

The number form which is able to translate this culture form of the literal society into blanks to be filled by things, events, and people, actually by all what will come to be known as *decorum*, is *social strata*, that is, unequal distribution. Inequality proves both stabilizing and stimulating because it allows for appropriate places, for communication among equals sharing both their problems and the solutions to them, and for overt as well as covert mobility. It organizes social closure, exclusion, and control, all with respect to the perspective of purpose, since it is purpose which gives and takes legitimation. Not least, inequality is useful for the calling and crossing of institutional boundaries, because it defines prizes and privileges to be gained and to be lost, and thus a social order to be defended, and to be attacked.

More difficult to answer is the question of how the literal society re-enters its form into itself. If we go back to written communication consisting in symbols, considered to be signs of signs, and if we think of ontology becoming a main occupation for Greek philosophy, then we may assume that indeed *reality* becomes the key which seems to be able to mark the unmarked and thereby to allow for either affirmation or negation. Of course, the re-entry is not done via reality itself, whatever that is, but via the obsession with it, which, however, comes to the same, since this obsession is the basis for poetics (*mimesis*), for rhetoric (*metaphora*), for art (*techne*), and for science (*arche*), which all of them rely on references to an albeit evidently elusive reality, to control what they are doing, and to argue about it.

Take *language* first. We consider it a medium of the dissemination of communication because, compared to mutual perception communication had to rely on before, it introduces arbitrary signs which take on a sort of life of their own. Noises begin to fill the social space, which are articulated and motivated and which signify while being signs distinct from the signified. Four million years ago, in Africa, people begin warning each other, singing for each other, and courting each other, as animals do as well, using the noises of what then became called called language, in order to attract, to attribute, and to govern, attention. While articulating these noises, they begin to notice, and to use and by countless means to fill, the gap between the sign and the signified.

Dissemination begins right here. Communication goes beyond mutual perception and begins to be aware of previous and next events, of other people's wording, and of similar, yet different signs and signifieds having their impact on the selection of every one social action. Temporization, i.e., reference to time and occasion, and socialization, i.e., reference to the other and his and her mind to be guessed upon, come in with the equivocal and the ambiguous right from the beginning, the latter indeed opening the space for dealing with the former, and vice versa.

If humans are the product of the co-evolution of communication and consciousness, both separated from, and reconnected to, each other by language, then there has never been paradise for human beings. That is why they think of inventing the idea of it, troubling further their difficult dealing with one another. Yet, the catastrophe of language is not to be undone. It consists in the introduction of reference. Reference means signification, and signification means distinction of sign from signified, calling upon articulation to deal with the distinction, and upon motivation to reconnect the sign and the signified depending on context, mood, and habit.

Indeed, what is sometimes been taken as language's original drama, its introduction of the possibility to not only say Yes, but also No, may already be a kind of secondary means to deal with the complexity of signification, coding by the means of a binary distinction what actually is far richer in structure and form. This may be one reason, why mathematics and logics never quite settled for just two values, the affirmative and the negative, to describe the scope and range of both affirmation and negation. The doubling of the meaning world into a Yes-world and a No-world may already be a simplification with respect to endless variations on "Yes, but…" and "No, however…."

Thus, the network synthesis brought about by language consists in the framing of reference by the means of drama, which is another word for conflict, and which is caused by double bind. Double binds may be considered to be inherent in language communication in that all of this communication can somehow mean Yes, while saying No, and vice versa, the most evident case of this being the communication of No itself, which says No while nevertheless pursuing the communication, thereby saying Yes to the communication. Any sound communication deals with double binds without even noticing, replacing, as it were, paradox by changing distinctions, thus moving the problem to places where it hurts less. But this leaves ample space for pathologies of communication to develop, which consist in taking double binds literally.

The feature enabling communication to deal with that kind of complexity, consisting of intricate knots of affirmation, negation, and ambivalence, is *metacommunication* as discovered by communication theory (notably Jurgen Ruesch, Gregory Bateson, and Paul Watzlawick). Metacommunication means to be able to communicate on the level of the content of the communication and on the level of the relationship between the social actors at the same time, thus enabling the communication to clarify on one level what is left obscure on the other, and to stay vague as to invite the very next, or some next, move of the communication to supplement what before had been deferred to further notice.

Metacommunication enables the verbal communication to select positively, or negatively, an ambiguous meaning whatsoever without having to explicitly enter into a wording of the Yes or the No. Metacommunication, thereby, is on a par with reference, in that it is able to signify without having to identify the sign with the signified. The criteria used to judge on the communication at hand can be hold separated from the communication itself. And that is what is important when the overall social purpose consists in to not forego the scope and range of communication opened by communication.

Now even lying is possible, both as a practice and as a knowledge of that practice. Indeed, lying is only possible when people know how to deal with it, thereby giving their communication further twists in its knots of affirmation and negation. Else, any lie, all deceit and betrayal would already mean the end to the communication. Instead, they just open different avenues to it, forcing it, or indeed inviting it, to explore different tracks of how to figure out what is going on.

We propose to call metacommunication the culture form of a society, which by its adoption enables it to survive the introduction of language. The surplus meaning produced by the emergence of reference, and by the difference between the sign and the signified, including knots of Yes and No, or folds of affirmation and negation (Gilles Deleuze), is both produced and handled by a metacommunication, which has learned not to confuse itself with the very situation at hand, but to look to previous and next events, to others observing the situation, to further possible meanings of the things being present, and to judge how to proceed, or how to defer any procedure, accordingly.

The culture of the oral society is its metacommunication. As long as we use any kind of language this culture of course is sure to stay with us. That also means that there is no need to complain about ambivalence, negation, drama, double bind, and conflict, since they do not just testify our fall from paradise but our ability to deal with the structural richness of language, and to extend on it with respect not only to our factual knowledge of the world but also to our behavior inside the social structure of this world.

*Tribes* come in when the oral society has to give itself a number form. Tribes define themselves by their ability to handle communication with respect to metacommunication. The boundaries of any one tribe delimit what kind of communication is possible either inside or outside the boundary, the scope of metacommunication inside the boundary being different from that outside it. It is interesting to note that the communication outside the boundary seems to be some kind of collective action, referring to social relationships between tribes rather than between individuals or families, thus combining the number of tribes outside the focal one, with the number of families or individuals inside it. That kind of collective action allows the oral society to define, and thereby ritualize, the rape of women, trade, and war, which of course necessitate metacommunication as well, albeit of a sort different from that inside a tribe.

Perhaps we should even say that it is tribes and the boundaries between them which constitute the number form of oral society, given that the boundaries are decisive in distinguishing the tribes, and given that the boundaries, being sorts of zero states of communication, allow to count and therefrom to order the people of a tribe. Remember that out structure forms consist of blanks, or of a kenogrammar, not defining who belongs where, but defining the places, as empty places, to be filled with people. That means, if there are no places, there is no possibility to belong, as to this day is exhibited by infanticide common in societies which still rely to a certain extent on the structure of tribes.

And *gods*, or *spirits*, are the form of the re-entry of oral society into itself. A re-entry lends affirmation and negation to the meaning form of a society by providing its communication with ways to refer to both the marked states and the unmarked state of the form. A re-entry manages to mark the unmarked by referring to transcendental units, which have an empirical impact on the society.

In oral society gods are both the masters of metacommunication, always giving signs which indeed are difficult to decipher, and more or less exhausting themselves in self-referentially signifying the gods themselves, not something else, and at the same time the masters of the most literal communication, saying what they mean, and meaning what they say, and passionately engaging in whatever action they are consuming themselves in. Gods, spirits, and, let us not forget them, demons and devils, thereby enact the many possibilities to deal with communication and metacommunication, engaging with their fascination, showing possible pitfalls, and giving dire warnings of what happens to those who may choose to neglect their warning. The stories told about them, and the words attributed to them, are exemplars of what, and how, to speak about, risking reference, and what not, staying clear and clean, yet unengaged.

Gods are both the end to, and the beginning of, any possibility to interpret what is going on in communication and action, such that their observation by religion, first, and theology, later, gives a reflective picture of what to affirm, and how to negate, the societies dealing with language, and metacommunication. Most importantly perhaps, with reference to gods secrets and taboos can be defined which tell what to talk about and what not.

Ever since Marshall McLuhan sort of discovered them, we are used to inquire into the media of the dissemination of communication, the most prominent among them being language, writing, and print, painfully singled out in their distinction by comparing them to the modern media of film, television, and the computer. The knowledge, however, that communication means some kind of a circulation of meaning, seeing it getting lost and making its reappearance like some capricious river seeking to avoid the bed it is set to choose, or like a dream challenging all knowledge we thought to have about time, space, and causality, is much older. It goes back at least to John Locke, who is explicit about the distinction between man's thoughts hidden in his mind, on one hand, and the communication of these thoughts via signs, to "the comfort and advantage of society," on the other. An awareness of the necessity to distinguish between the perspectives of the speaker, the listener, and the speech, respectively, is already evident in the ancients' reflection on the scope and pitfalls of rhetoric (Aristotle 2006). It indeed stems at least from humans making up their mind with respect to the signs sent to them by spirits and gods, and to possibilities to both interpret and subvert these signs. Up to Enlightenment hopes are rampant that the circulation of ideas, as distinguished from their imperfect understanding by the human mind, might take care of a realization of reason beyond the passions and interests of human beings.

Sociology has been late to go into this kind of research. It somehow prefers to take dissemination media as an expression of a mere literary value of the "real" structures of society leading to its social stratification and inequality. This is only changing since Talcott Parsons discovered what he calls symbolic media of communication (like, as he has them, money, power, influence, affect, intellect) and ventured the thesis that these symbolic media might become as important for the social order of modern society as stratification has been for the order of traditional society, indeed replacing the latter as the primary means to secure order. Symbolic media here means that social action in its evolution discovers in some situation the value of certain signs in selecting and motivating a certain course of action, generalizes these signs, and puts them as symbols of the selection and motivation of action to the disposal of further situations. Thus, coins and bonds (assets and liabilities), the exposure of the means to threaten violence (weapons and their bearer), gestures of authority believed by others (the auspices of power), claims for the solidarity of the other (emotion), or the demonstration of abilities to adapt (learning), come to be taken as symbols of, respectively, money, power, influence, affect, and intelligence, ready to be quoted, due to the situation, in further situations, and beginning to circulate on their own, so to speak.
Niklas Luhmann is the first to explicitly distinguish between dissemination media and symbolic media, the latter of which he also calls success media, since in the general situation of improbable communication (why should anybody try to speak out, or to listen, anyway?) they provide for pointed means to single out what one is up to, and what not, thereby making it easier to receive and accept a communication. Ever since, the impact of the media of communication on the structure of society is evident, and may be taken up with respect to a general theory of social memory as well as of social meaning.

We here propose to stick with the distinction between dissemination media and symbolic media, giving the former a general status for the theory of society and relegating the latter to specific structures of modern society. That may seem a little arbitrary, but for the moment it enables us to concentrate on the effects of dissemination and to ask for possible variations in the securing of the success of communication. I venture that the function of symbolic media, in modern society, i.e., in the printing press society, is comparable to the function of tribes in oral society, of social strata in literal society, and perhaps of knowledge in our, i.e., in the "next", society.

What I would like to take up here is a conjecture advanced by Niklas Luhmann when he speculated about the possibility to indeed distinguish between writing, print, and the computer with respect to the "catastrophes" (René Thom) they released by their introduction to society, saying that the introduction of the computer may be comparable only to the introduction of writing and printing before, and that its consequences may be as far reaching for the restructuring of the society as these.

The idea, which Luhmann here is conceiving, consists in assuming that any new dissemination medium overtaxes the given structures of the society by presenting them with a surplus meaning, an overflow, which it is not used to deal with (Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main 1997, chap. 2.XIV.). This triggers a catastrophe by forcing the society to either switch to another mode of reproduction or to reduce the new media introduced to some structure which is in line with its received and established way to deal with meaning, for instance to reduce writing to a device for poets memorizing their orations, the printing press to a means to circulate holy scriptures, or the computer to a data store. Evidently, something else happened, and is happening right now, and that is what we are interested in.

Our idea is that Luhmann's conjecture about dissemination media proves to be something of a perfect way to look at the network synthesis of both received and emerging social structures, thus enabling us to learn about ways to conceive of the relationship between communication, dissemination, and social structure and to watch what is going on right now in a society dealing with the critical problem, to say the least, of the introduction of the computer.

We will extend a little on Luhmann's conjecture by adding language as a further dissemination medium producing such a criticality (Per Bak) and by not only looking at the culture form of the society dealing with any new dissemination medium, but also at the way it numbers its elements, at its respective social order, and at the way it re-enters its own form, including the unmarked state, into the form. Luhmann does not ask about language in his conjecture because we may know too little about its introduction to a society still enmeshed in structures of mere mutual perception, to really venture about the culture, which it brings forth to be able to draw upon. And he focuses on the issue of the culture form because he is interested in the way a society is controlling itself via a selective handling of the meaning produced by communication, and spares the questions of order, number and re-entry for his chapters on the evolution (chap. 3), the differentiation (chap. 4), and the self-description of the society (chap. 5).

We do here not try to work out a whole theory of the society but are only interested in the means to better watch the introduction of the computer into it. As I take it, Luhmann may well have considered his theory of the modern society as a preliminary exercise to watching the introduction of the computer, since we can only know what might possibly change if we know what actually there is, that is, which actual structures solve what kind of social problems and might be replaced by what kind of other, yet functionally equivalent structures. Yet, he was cautious enough to not present a theory of the computer society as long as there is no theory of the printing press society, i.e., the modern society, which he therefore settled to develop first, thus embarking on an endeavor which took him thirty years to accomplish it.

Given that Luhmann has written a theory of the modern society, including its evolution from previous traditional and tribal society, we may venture into a theory of the meaning form of the society with respect to dominant media of dissemination. The decisive features of any one meaning form, and we settle here to focus on language, writing, print, and the computer, are its way (1) to frame the dissemination of communication ("culture form"), (2) to translate that control into structures of the society ("number"), (3) to control what is inside, and what is outside of the frame ("order"), and (4) to reflect the risks and chances of the meaning form via a reflection device, a semantics of self-description, that allows to both affirm and negate it ("re-entry").

Note, that we do not assume the meaning forms of the different dissemination media to replace, but to superimpose, each other. As writing does not displace language, but transforms it, so the printing press and the computer do not displace all earlier dissemination media, but transform them to some new function, thereby at the same time in a way possibly toning down their criticality. It ensues a society which up to now succeeds in surviving all catastrophes of the introduction of a new dissemination medium, yet develops a complexity of dealing with meaning which certainly is as impressive as daring. And, to be sure, society does not rely on sociological knowledge to be able to hold on to this complexity. It does it all by itself, though it also does not preclude sociological observers trying to make up their mind while taking part in its communication. That is why in the next chapter we will go on from this evolution of dissemination media, dealt with in this chapter, to a more general model of social action, which will try to show how social action is able to reproduce in a situation which may be characterized by some meaning form of the computer society giving it a new kind of a network synthesis.

Even today theoretical endeavors in sociology seem to be informed by some idea of a networking going on between different elements of social action framing and thereby sustaining each other. Indeed, to talk of anything "social" always means to look at a combination of restriction and support as the characteristic features of relations. Jon Elster of late conceives of a general theory of constraints produced by the actors as a commitment and a sort of stake, which is negotiable among them. Stephan Fuchs is interested in networks that allow for variation. And Andrew Abbott looks at self-similar structures of the social that are defined by fractal distinctions which both single out certain features and use them to delimit their connection to other structures. Similar attempts abound.

What we propose here is to combine the ideas of network and of self-reference. Network synthesis means that any element of the network, referring to other elements of the same network, at some point will end up referring to itself, thereby discovering, and exploiting, the circularity, which means heterarchy (Gotthard Günther), of the network. Note in passing that David Stark has recently rediscovered the usefulness of the concept of heterarchy for the description and explanation of social organization bootstrapping itself by embedding within the network it needs as its own precondition.

The single tool most apt for the combination of network and self-reference is George Spencer-Brown's concept of the form of distinction, advanced in his 1969 book on the *Laws of Form*. Based on the idea of the distinction as an operation to be actually undertaken Spencer-Brown defines the "form" of the distinction as "the space cloven by any distinction, together with the entire content of the space" . This means that there are at least three values defining any one distinction, which are (1) the marked state, indicated by the distinction (the "inside" of the distinction), (2) the unmarked state, the state not indicated by the distinction (the "outside" of the distinction), and (3) the distinction itself, separating the two states or sides of the distinction by being drawn. Since the distinction is an operation actually being drawn it may be taken to be identical to the observer drawing it.

We take this form of the distinction to single out the minimal constellation of a network able to synthesize, in that it defines reference, as indication, self-reference, as the distinction being drawn by an observer, and a general network value, as the unmarked state being indeterminate, yet to be determined by further choice, i.e., distinction. The one idea introduced by Spencer-Brown, which is sociologically perhaps the most intriguing one, is the possibility to take unmarked states, or empty places, though being indeterminate or unknown, into account nevertheless.

Georg Simmel, in his digression on the question of how society is possible, already has a keen eye on that necessity of empty, yet to be determined places, for the synthesis of the society, in that he describes modern society as providing a place (*eine Stelle*) for the unpredictable individual, and as defining a kind of being socialized which is determined, or at least partially determined, as he says, by a kind of not being socialized. That is of course just another formulation of the century-old discovery that individuals in their thinking, wishing, and feeling are opaque to outside observers (and to themselves, indeed), thus forcing society, on the one hand, to account for the unpredictable by means of communication that are sufficiently attractive for individuals to participate in, and to provide for structures, on the other hand, which are able to socialize the individual into such a kind of being unpredictable, thus telling it how to deal with its necessity to be free, as Hegel used to say.

Network synthesis comes with reference, self-reference, and the form of any distinction including an unmarked state as a way to account for network. To synthesize a network means to indicate, to self-include, and to account for the indeterminate. We take it that accounting for the indeterminate is only possible within the distinction of reference and self-reference, thus ending up with a self-similar structure which repeats itself by having to take into account ever new unmarked states.

Sociological theory seems always to have been about the network synthesis of social action. Talcott Parsons perhaps is the first to make this evident by describing any action as to consist of behavioral, personal, social, and cultural aspects, challenging sociology to go ever deeper into the analysis of the differentiation of, the re-integration of, and the double interchanges between, these aspects of action. Niklas Luhmann already asked for that action theory to be able to take into account that it is not exactly sociological theory, but the action itself that should be able to do the synthesis, if social action is to be considered to be able to maintain itself as an element of society reproducing itself. Action is to be considered a system, distinguishing itself from everything else, maintaining itself in time, and using its own distinctions, in whatever semantical shortcut, to describe what it is about.

Niklas Luhmann then goes a step further by reframing action theory from cultural to temporal terms, proposing to consider solutions to the problem of double contingency (which consists in *ego* waiting for *alter*, while *alter* waits for *ego*, to make a first move, both of them being free to select this or that action) not in terms of values, presenting themselves as norms, called upon by one or both actors as orientations as to what to do why, but in terms of events, presenting themselves as making a distinction, thus giving one or both actors something to relate to.

Luhmann proposes to consider social systems as systems consisting of events, structuring themselves due to expectations of further events, and memories of previous ones, thus producing a temporal complexity which indeed can not be handled by action any more, but only by communication relating selected aspects of action selectively to one another. This communication of action we call social action. The theory of social action becomes a communication theory of action precisely because only communication is structurally rich enough to relate to all aspects informing it such that it is capable of becoming and being the event that makes a distinction. Luhmann's theory by the way is the first which asks for the self-reference of that communication to be considered explicitly as structurally indispensable. Without a communication of action relating to itself in order to be able to select which previous and next events to link to, social action, or so the thesis runs, would not be able to produce its effect and reproduce itself.

Harrison C. White's network theory of social action, even if it is wary of systems suspected to be a "rhetoric for culture," nevertheless proposes to look into social action building a self-similar system by always having to solve at least two problems, which are, first, to control its own and others' contribution to it and, second, in order to do so, maintain an identity such that all contributors know what and how to relate to. White appropriately puts uncertainty, in terms of both ambiguity and ambage, to the fore of his theory and looks at networks being constituted by both succeeding and failing disciplines of action identity, both of them bringing about stories, which actors mistake for ties.

Yet, classical sociological theory can be considered in terms of network synthesis as well. Gabriel Tarde talks about any society being ordered by, and ordering, structures of mutual attempts to possess each other, thereby constituting associations brought about by competitive imitation solving problems of uncertainty.

Emile Durkheim is explicit about the division of social labor constituting the unity of society, thus forcing the social actors, perhaps educated to a moral informed by sociology, to envision this unity as an abstract one, consisting in relations supporting solidarity of actors, professions, and institutions, which are dissimilar with, yet complementary to, each other.

Georg Simmel, following Immanuel Kant, considers interaction (*Wechselwirkung*) the basic term to describe the emergence and dynamics of society, and then distinguishes between the content of the society, i.e., non-social desires, inclinations, purposes, mental states, and events in all their historical richness, on one hand, and the form of the society, i.e., the interactive calling and crossing, order and exchange of this content, which constitute the conflicts, the coordination, and the cooperation between the actors, on the other.

Max Weber, last not least, equally starts his sociology with the notion of a dynamic process of socialization (*Vergesellschaftung*), thus paying attention right from the beginning to the question of which elements of social action are distinguished and brought together in which way to constitute what only then may be understood as social action, looking at the meaning describing it, and defining, it with respect to its situation, its actors, its fight or engagement, and its rationality.

And even Karl Marx, not exactly a sociologist, may be considered among those who conceive of social action in terms of a network synthesis, in that any one act of exchange, informed by the goods' and services' value of use or value of exchange, is to be analytically understood not with respect to the actor's possible intentions, which nevertheless contribute, by either interest in exploitation or false consciousness, to the network synthesis, but with respect to the productive forces and production relations it is embedded within.

Let me come back to our attempt to do a little bit of the sociological theory which might be helpful in watching what happens to modern society when first the computer, then the internet, and now web 2.0 are introduced to it. The idea is to describe a change from modern society, based on the dissemination medium of the printing press, to the next society, based on the computer, the net, and the grid. We call what is emerging "the next society" to honour Peter F. Drucker who gave it not only that name but also looked in the consequences of it for management and organization (see his book "Managing in the Next Society", New York 2003). "Next" is a perfect name, since it spells out what the next society is about: to always be able to find a next step while watching, from the corners of your eyes, what is happening next to it. That is why we think that George Spencer-Brown's notion of form is perfectly suitable to give that way of operation, iteration, and reproduction its core notion.

We start with some ideas about network synthesis.

Sociological theory has always been a theory of the network synthesis of social action. In the computer age of the society this has to become explicit. To know about the form of the network synthesis of social action means to know how our society, the next one, the knowledge society deals with its dynamics by generating specific structures able to sustain social action.

I will here present two attempts to take a closer look at the network synthesis of social action. It first will go back to Niklas Luhmann's conjecture about the structures of the society depending mainly on culture forms able to deal with the surplus meaning, or overflow, produced by the introduction of new media of the dissemination of communication. This is a conjecture about the structures of the society being the outcome of the society having to find a solution to new kinds of overflows by switching from one culture form, and the structure, order, and understanding of the society coming with it, to another one. The morphogenesis of the society depends on these dissemination media eclipsing one another, all of them staying present, however, even if changed in scope, scale, and range.

I will then try to develop a model of social action which takes into account the culture form possibly able to deal with the surplus meaning brought about by the introduction of the computer as a medium of the dissemination of communication. This model is a form model, integrating ideas from sociological systems theory and sociological network theory. It tries to be simple enough to be able to catch the complexity of social action.

We begin with presenting some general ideas on a sociological theory of social action. And we conclude with a proposal to go from objects and subjects of social action to what we will call the catjects of social action. This actually is a proposal to look at categories which are able to describe and explain what kind of underlying reality is produced and reproduced by the *eigen*-values of social action. These catjects combine reference with self-reference, and with some way to account for the unknowable, in unfolding, exploring, and synthesizing a network of variables whose values social action brings about, calls on, and subverts.

We might even talk of 'logjects', taking into account Martin Heidegger's reconstruction of aristotelian logos (in Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik / The Fundamental Concept of Metaphysics, §§ 71-74) as the formal indication (formale Anzeige) of our human way to form our world. A catject is a category relying on logos's capacity to diabolically and symbolically, via diarhesis and synthesis, differentiate and integrate the world inhabited by man. We only reach an understanding of it by looking at what we actually do, not just at how we talk about what we do and what we understand of what we are doing. What we are doing is using the space opened by logos draw distinctions inside a world formerly devoid of these distinctions, and to connect again what, via these distinctions, was separated by us. I propose to call catjects all forms of distinctions regarded with respect to both their act of separation and their act of re-connection.

Catjects are devices that search for subject-superjects, to use a category from Alfred North Whiteheads demanding cosmology. Subject-superjects are neither objects nor subjects. They are neither fixed by trying to look at the world as it supposedly is, nor are they fixed by looking at how individul consciousnesses are bound with their regulative ideas like space and time to be able to analytically synthesize what they take as their world. Subjects-superjects are universes in synthesis, they combine the determinate with the indeterminate, and that is why we are interested in them. Again, anything that helps to deconstruct the altogether rigid distinction between subjects and objects and enters complex unities somehow able to live off themselves, may help to develop catjects that grasp the way text and pictures, sound and movies feature self-similar structures, which help to identify them and catalogize them. That means, to be sure, that texts and pictures, sound and movies become a kind of beings of themselves. That is strange and we will need our time to get used to that. But the computer tells us to be cautious in thinking we know who and what is able to act and communicate, and who and what is not. So a little mystification is nothing more than an heuristic device to re-learn to see and to listen.

Talking about catjects, we are looking for morphisms. The question is, what is turning a form into a form. We had objects relying on their own, thanks to creation and nature, to define their form. We had subjects borne by reason, to bring form to about anything. Now it is catjects. Catjects define the way observers are necessary to determine the indeterminate. Catjects are about the relation of a thing to an observer, to become a thing, and to become an observer.
These catjects must be functors, framing relations. Whitehead proposes to look at 'creativity,' 'one,' and 'many' as possible candidates for that kind of functors. They seem to catch the way an entity, looked at by an observer, occasions itself, exhibiting self-identity and self-diversity in order to combine reference with nexus.
The subject is a superject in that whithout its determination of a thing nothing is actual, and nothing actually is. But this superject in turn is nothing without indeterminateness looking at it and challenging it to determinate it. Morphisms would us allow to define the network patterns any one object, and subject, relies upon to be what it is. We touch upon venerable endeavours here, since attempts to define the self-similarities of music, picture, text go back to Aristotle at least. I am not sure whether the wealth of data produced by the use of computers in searching and indexicalizing media of all kinds will help to solve that riddle.

Talking to Tom Fuerstner and looking at his blogjects an idea strikes me. What if we extend our century-old talking about objects and subjects to a talking about catjects? Looking at computers' and networks' abilities to handle multimedia quasi-objects (Michel Serres) and boundary objects (Susan Star), and not only to handle them but to indexicalize, catalogize, link and search them, we certainly deal with a new kind of -jects which take on a life almost all of its own. Remember Jacques Derrida's theory "jetties"? They are similar, being missiles send on their way and related to by observers of most different perspective.

Objects, for Aristotle, are the hypokemeinon, the underlying stuff and substance of the writing society. Aristotle, in his first book on logic, the Categories, tries to fix them such decisions can be taken whether assertions about them are true or false. Reading his text it is fascinating to observe how he has to rely, first, on forms, then, on genres, in order to fix at least our talking about them, since the objects themselves are elusive. They emerge, and vanish the moment you look at them. Ever since, we argue about the reality of our perceptions.

Subjects, for Hume, Descartes, and Kant, are the hypokemeinon, the underlying stuff and substance of the printing press society. Human reason, individual doubts, judgements become the address to which categories get attributed such that we know what and how we are able to talk about. However, these subjects are as elusive as the objects before. They have to be transcendentalized in order to fix them, framing them with respect to sensus communis, to acceptable ways of talk, in order to get them pinned down where logics need them. In fact, subjects are individuals having their own minds and hearts and bodies and memories and fears and desires. They don't accept being looked at as being in charge of reason. Let reason take charge of itself, Kant therefore had to muse. That cuts a long story short. Ever since, we argue about the truth an observer may claim.

Catjects are an idea which might be appropriate for computer society. That idea, crude as it is as yet, takes seriously that the categories that were attributed first to objects and then to subjects and didn't stick, at least underwent their own development and refinement. From Peirce to Whitehead and more recently on to Joseph A. Goguen, Bill Lawvere, and Ernst Kleinert, categories enter the center stage of mathematical and philosophical thinking. We might try to look at how they start to lead their own life, becoming catjects, based not on substance nor on reason, but on their own form, their own morphism, emerging as an eigen-value of nonlinear recursive processes in syntactical, semantic, and pragmatic computations, in pictures, sounds, texts, and gestures, a kind of sociological topology (or topological sociology) for which ideas of all kinds abound. Ever since, we love to argue about the functions of our arguments.

That is an idea spelled out at its most crude. The literature is rich, yet complicated. Maybe, we look a little closer at the authors quoted for ideas how to do what System One attempts to do, flashing out semantic webs for almost about everything.

The calculus we here present is a possibilistic one. What does that mean? It means that we leave the realm of probabilism, presupposing, as it were, all probabilities to add up to 1, that is, to be known in advance due to their being numbered, and enter instead the realm of constructivism, presupposing, as it were, the possibilities, if they are to exist at all, to be produced and brought forward out of an unmarked state of an indefinite, yet not infinite, set of possible possibilities.

A probabilistic calculus is a classical one, assuming the world to be a determined one, to be discovered by human inventiveness. A possibilistic calculus is a postclassical one, assuming the world an indetermined one, to be determined by human intelligence.

Another way to say what I mean is to distinguish a substantial and categorical approach from a relational and operational one. A determined world is discovered by appropriately applying categories (like the Aristotelian ones) to substances (notwithstanding that Nicolaus von Kues, for instance, new only one such substance); an indetermined world is determined by operationally bringing relations into it (relations that Nicolaus von Kues would still have thought to be revealed to human beings by God).

Our flow analysis of choice is describing both analytically and synthetically which distinctions (assumed to be constant) produce possibilities of world construction by determining the values of variables defined by their respective relations. It is that easy. Choosing, then, means to produce a possibility by constructing it out of an imagined space of possibilities invented by human intelligence, yet framed by the same one world that human intelligence operates in. There is nothing arbitrary in that, yet plenty of contingency.

To speak of relations bringing things into their space of contingency instead of categories telling the true apart from the false is sometimes thought to be mark of Postmodernity. If that is true, that is, possible, our calculus is a postmodern one.

Knowing, our last and most general level of re-entry in the Spencer-Brown form http://homepage.mac.com/baecker/handouts/SocialChoice.pdf, means to be able to watch the distinction between the system that promises to guarantee the iteration of your choices, on one hand, and the outside of the form (as part of the entire content of the form), which is unmarked on the other. Choice is social if and when that kind of operational closure is part of the game, an operational closure which means, as Heinz von Foerster had it, that the system looses one degree of freedom in exchange with a wealth of possibilities to explore. The removal of this degree of freedom means that any end, in any domain, must coincide with a beginning.

It is evident that only such a condition turns choice into a social one. If reproduction is the law, then networks and budgets, talk and action are guaranteed to be looked at in terms of their maintenance, even if in the form of their change, variation, revolution, and subversion. If there is any one condition that guarantees that there is something to be known, and a basis for the appropriate knowledge, it is this one.

Knowing means that any switching is a switching not only from, but also to something or someone. It means that any tying is done with respect to both causal independence and communicative interdependence. Tying generates a knowledge, and it profits from knowledge. And knowing means that gaming and mating generate their knowledge as well, as you cannot avoid making your experiences as you choose what you choose and whom.

Knowledge, therefore, is a very basic category of process, a product of the system reproducing and re-entering, while reproducing, the distinction between itself and its environment, into the system. That knowledge must not be a true one for any external observer operating under the very same conditions. But it is the knowledge of a system generated by its own choices, and its a knowledge without which no choice would be possible since it re-enters the ignorance of the unmarked state into the form such that any knowledge is recognized as a exploratory one, not until further notice, but in principle.

Knowledge means competence. And competence means use and control of doubt. System One here again seems to be the right choice. In using it you are at any one point of time in the necessary situation to have to check on your own knowledge in order to be able to evaluate the knowledge the system (one, this time) is presenting to you. And that is what brings knowledge forth, in the first place.

Figure that any one variable in our Spencer-Brown form is an interface, "action" bounding the body and the social, "talk", the mental and the social, "budget", a bureaucracy and its domain, "network", identities, and "system", an order and its noise.

Any one of these interfaces is distinguished via constants from all others, thereby tying them into a common form that defines what choices have to pay attention to, and are determined by.

Our re-entry-levels "mating", "gaming", "tying", "switching", and "knowing" are levels at which the determination of any one variable is moderated via its assimilation and accomodation (Jean Piaget's terms, thanks to Peter Krieg for reminding me of them) with all others.

Not surprisingly, that turns our Spencer-Brown form into a formalism for cognition, if not intelligence, intelligence at any instant not being a departure point, but "an arrival point" (as Piaget had it, see his book La psychologie de l'intelligènce, 1947). "Assimilation" means that all variables are to be determined with respect to the outside, the unmarked state of the form, which is, by definition, not to be known. And "accomodation" means that all variables, being determined with respect to the outside of the form, then have to be re-arranged with one another.

It goes without saying that this process, being an intelligent one, does not proceed procedurally, but uno actu, in one strike. We need procedures to unfold and unravel what is defined in single strikes. That is why consulting and coaching are indispensable to be able to look at the complexity involved (overtaxing any observer).

Yet choices are not only inspirational, they are also eventual. They have their one moment of time. It may be a long way until they are found; and they may be forgotten instantly or be reminded forever; but the moment they are taken is always a single one. That is the only way, as Niklas Luhmann emphasizes, to fix them. And only being fix, beware social paradox, you are able to then change them by taken a new one, revising the previous one.

As the model unfolds, we are tempted to do one further step and go for a more general model, which does not only cover organizational choice but social choice in general. This one would be a model of the new open access world, a network world, to be distinguished from the institutional world of formal organizations we are about to leave behind. This model sticks with the re-entry-levels we already introduced - with one exception: it talks about "knowing" instead of "creating" -, but exchanges all the variables we haven't yet introduced formally ("behavior", "communication", "organization", and "society") and which hinted to autopoietical entities of some kind, for variables exhibiting an interface characteristics. Thus, we have a new model talking about "action", "talk", "budgets", "network" (this one we keep in place), and "system". It looks like:

social choice = action || talk || budget || network || system ||

The full model you find at http://homepage.mac.com/baecker/handouts/SocialChoice.pdf.

We here go for a "flow analysis of choice", assuming that "organization" or, better, "organizing" (Karl E. Weick) is only part of it, a part, that is, that stems from "budgets" attributed to you, you then decide on to know and make sure who works with you on what. I'll come back to this later.

The important point for now is that the new model is more like a flow model then an institutional model. It has organizing as one variables among all others, yet is not necessarily limited to organizational behavior.

That makes System One's contribution to a new form of work flow implementation even more far reaching. You may now enter budget variables among the search data you routinely account for, and extend your horizons of relevance the more the better you know where and how to account for them.

Budgets, to be sure, do not only consist in assets and liabilities accounted for in money terms, but may be viewed as budgets in reputation and prestige as well as in power and influence, or in knowledge and intelligence, or even in emotion and affect.

Tying does not come without switching, at least in sociology. Tying yourself and tying others is only possible and bearable if there are any networks others or you can switch to to avoid the one where tying is without promise. Harrison C. White sometimes even seems to have invented his use of the network notion (as in Identity and Control, 1992) in order to be able to draw our attention to any one element (or node) being one among others, and any one tie (or edge) exhibiting specific qualities (as regarding frequency, intensity, reliability, convertibility, and so on) among possible others. That is why networks are and need their own cultures defining what to expect from their elements and from their ties, and what not. And that is why both identity and control of any one network depend on its possibility to manage any desire or urge to switch to other networks.

Switching comes from any one network being embedded within a society. A society may thus neatly be defined as the horizon of possible alternative networks (including the empty one, the no-network, but that is only as means of reflection), viewed from a specific network. That means that the culture of any one network must describe, emphasize, and qualify the quality of its own network in terms of its comparison with possible others. Networks therefore, stemming from their inherent perspective on switching, feature their part of schismogenesis, as Gregory Bateson (in: Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972) would have called it. Schismogenesis means that any one culture is the product of the contact between one network and another one. Culture does not refer to a deep inherent quality, to any kind of substantial authenticity, defining the identity of any one group, or network. Instead, culture refers to identities being the product of their comparison with others. It refers to your ability to meet the other without becoming him, or her, be that as attractive as it may. Culture is an identity which is able to manage, or monitor, contacts with others. That is why Bateson calls the process schismogenesis: It is triggered by a difference, by a separation between one and the other, and it assumes itself as a difference that is able to keep the one and the other in touch. Note that this touch may be both in harmony or in conflict, in competition or in cooperation.

Organizational choice must be a choice with respect to both network and society, with respect to both ties and switches, let alone its respects for behavior, communication and organization. That means quite some degrees of freedom to be both introduced and to be determined in order to determine the choice in question.

We will have to come back to the variables fitted into our equation but for now we stick with our re-entry-levels. True, how to understand "communication", "organization", or "network", let alone "behavior" and "society", all deserve a chapter of its own, yet the spirit of the model, so to speak, is revealed by looking at the re-entry-levels. If you feel familiar with these, with what they mean, I mean, not necessarily already with how they work, a sense of the understanding of the variables will develop all of its own.

So "tying" is next. What do we mean by this? Of course, it is the next step as soon as you gained some ground with respect to "gaming". Having made your game, or being hit as the game of somebody else, the next thing is to make sure that you may be able to rely and build on that. Tying comes from networks. Ties are the links between the nodes of a network. We speak of "ties", however, not of "links", because we adhere to a sociological notion of network, as the one admirably proposed by Harrison C. White in his book on "Identity and Control" (1992). Links are connections of any kind, without any hint to how they came about and may stick there for a while. Ties, by contrast, are made by the nodes tied by them, and depend for that on the identities the nodes are able to put on, and the control between them, they manage to maintain. In order to tie somebody or something, or so network theory is in full compliance with the cybernetics of control, you first of all have to tie yourself, if only to the purpose you are about to venture in.

So tying is far from evident. Tying, for us, means to enter network links and network stories into the organization in order to make it respond to demands both inside and outside it. Tying means that you have to be explicit about the professional aims, the career paths, the future of other projects, the money you are about to invest, and so on, in order to make clear what is possibly at stake. Only then some others, bound by communication and nothing else, may align with you and/or your project (you'll never know with what exactly), tying themselves, for the time being, to what you tied yourself to. Organization and society are littered, as White likes to hint at, with failed projects of tying. All stories we like to tell us, have their point, if not their punch-line, in the failing as well as succeeding of ties. White even conjectures that it is the point of stories to deal with failed ties, since working ties, you better keep with you.

Jon Elster wrote a marvellous book, "Ulysses Unbound: Studies on Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints" (2000; it is in fact a revision of, and expansion on, his earlier "Ulysses and the Sirens", 1979), on what I would prefer to call a tie, consisting, as it is, not only of precommitments in order to be able to constrain oneself or others, but of a parallel exploration of which constraints may work with whom and when. Tying is about setting frames, and about indicating both at the inside of the frame and its advantages, and at the outside of the frame and its disadvantages. That makes the notion of tying akin to Michel Crozier's and Erhard Friedberg's notion of playing in organizations (as presented in "L'acteur et le système", 1977), and akin to Niklas Luhmann's notion of power (as presented in "Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft", 1997), as in both the general idea is that you gain in action only if you succeed in block it. White has similar ideas on that in the context of his conjectures on general management.

So tying does not come all by itself, but is the product of a careful selection of which networks, and in what guise, to use in order to select what kind of organization to make sure which choices are possible. Tying is about power, but a power conceived of endogeneously. It is you who is having your part to play even in structures of power you feel to be completely subjugated to. Tying is done on both sides of the tie. It relies on communication, yet it has to anchor itself to both organization and networks, thereby determining the respective value of these variables.

Any organizational choice, or so our Spencer-Brown form tells us, is bound to find a value for the variable of communication.

Communication means that independent identities (human beings, organizational units, network nodes...) seek and structure an interdependence between them (and others), which is accounting for their independence. There are several notions of communication we may be able to work with. The first one, of course, is Shannon's probabilistic notion relying on an understanding of communication, which looks for redundancy to be observed, and for variety to be checked on, for any one information somehow produced by a process understood as a relation between a source (and a possible "sender") and a destination (and a possible "receiver"). The second notion extends on the Shannonian one by introducing semantic aspects into it and by doing this, interestingly enough, via an understanding of communication that both produces, and has to deal with, confusion and disinformation. Paul Watzlawicks became famous with and for such an understanding of communication. See above all other books he has written his stunning book "How Real is Real? Confusion, Disinformation, Communication" (New York 1976, German transl. 1976). But Umberto Eco, for instance, as well started to look at communication by starting to look at the possibilitiy of, and handling of, lies (La struttura assente, Milano 1968). And conversation analysis ever since Harvey Sacks' wonderful "Lectures on Coversation" (Oxford 1992) never did anything else but to look for procedural rules that allowed for con games (confidence games) to be conceived of and launched, as well as to be unravelled.

That is why we conceive, in our form of organizational choice, of a re-entry mechanism of "gaming", which at the same time describes what communication may be up to, and how the purpose and dynamics of communication get framed by the organization (or process of organizing) they are considered to be a part of. Gaming, here, means both playing (and playing around) and preying (catching, killing). The English language allows for this double sense of the word, and tops it by having to meanings of the adjective "game" as well, which are "brave" and "crippled", respectively.

Thus, communication in organizations (and possibly elsewhere), when it comes to organizational choice, means both playing and falling prey to somebody or something and making prey of somebody or something.

Communication varies, as processes of organizing vary, yet the distinction between communication, on one hand, and organization, on the other, being re-entered into the form via that kind of gaming is a constant of the form we are inquiring in.

System One will have to account for it. Indeed, it already accounts for it by focusing on the single user of the system to be the subject of his and her choices. Looking at the information presented to him and her by the search algorithmes and semantic webs of the computer, the user is always in the position to make up his and her mind with respect to the game he and she are, and want to be, or beware of being, a part of. Any one organizational choice, with System One, is a choice respectful for its social, material, and temporal selections of matters to be pursued, and matters to be avoided. It's like in real life. That makes it so useful.

Since "human capital" has been elected the "unwort" of the year last year in Germany, I hesitate to hint to a certain consequence of introducing aspects of behavior and mating into our general model of organizational choice. Yet, since the election of this word might not have been a good idea to begin with, we should not too much hesitate to draw conclusions, which may be helpful to flesh out our model. "Human capital", if you think about it, is a rather nice notion to capture the capability of each one of us to link to a certain number of social networks with respect to more or less central (or reputational) positions within these networks. The more human capital you are able to throw in, the more networks and the more central positions you may able to link to, and are addresses by.

If we extend that notion to an idea of "biocapital", alluding, of course, to Foucault's "biopower", we may consider any of choice, with respect to a process of organizing, as a function of the power to mate, of the power to exchange mates, or, what turns it into an interesting idea, of attempts to control the power to mate well beyond one's own capacity to mate. The most venerable ideas of a feminist critique of patriarchal dominance here enter the game as effortless as the most disturbing ideas of the "sex appeal" of decisions, products, procedures, strategies, and so on. Didn't we talk about the "fun" invested into certain projects (compare to others) all along. Wouldn't we have liked to relate ideas of organization to Deleuze/Guattarian schizo-analysis all along as well, showing how social choices differ with respect to their ability to work the "machine at the heart of desire"? Didn't we suspect all along that the "new economy" of the 1990s was all about desires turning into frenzies of possible non-fulfillment?

The biocapital invested into any one organizational choice is a heavily framed and conditioned one, to be sure. That is what is shown by our model right from the beginning. But that does not turn it nonexistent, or does it?

Take a look at the first variable, "behavior", contextualized by "communication", and at the re-entry of the distinction between behavior and communication via "mating" into the form of the organizational choice.

Behavior is the variable most often overlooked by models of organizational decision making. It is a variable whose value determines that any one decision necessarily is a decision that must find its behavioral expression and is steered by orientation towards other behavior in accordance or not with that expression. Deciding means first of all behaving. And behavior, as we know from biology, is a behavior controlled directly and indirectly by all others equally behaving or abstaining from it.

Studies of insect behavior call this "stigmergy" (Pierre-P. Grassé), assuming that behavior gets its "energy" from "stigmata" produced by other behavior (or by itself, thus providing the behavior with a fatality of its own). That other behavior and the signs (visible, hearable, smellable, tasteable, and so on) produced by it make up for the environment all behavior first of all turns to when trying to orient itself. Eric Bonabeau and others turned this into the notion of "swarm intelligence", assuming that the intelligence of a swarm consists in positive feedbacks between the behaviors coordinated via the changes which that behavior produces in a certain environment (or domain).

This means for us that decisions, to begin with, are a behavior selected via its communicative value, and reflected upon with respect to chances of mating either increasing or decreasing due to that behavior. "Mating" here is taken to be a rather general variable, stemming from evolutionary psychology and anthropology, as it were, yet including rather surprising ways to pursue it. Sociobiology's assumption that all behavior is directly determined by genes trying to reproduce is here replaced by the assumption of an eigen-behavior trying to find its values both with respect to a certain desire to reproduce (or, at least, to control the access to, and exchange of, mating partners who are the necessary, if not sufficient condition of reproduction) and to communication deemed possible or sustainable.

That is, organizational decision-making starts with the selection of a behavior, conditioned by communication, and pushed and pulled forward by the increase of chances to mate. It is males and females looking for decisions. And they do so via attempts to secure and enhance their reputation with respect to a social standing (or status) in correlation with sexual reproduction.

We may not be used to look at it this way. Yet, in trying to figure out what it means to go for Web 2.0 solutions to better handle organizational complexity, we should, I think, keep in mind the degree to which it is "sexy" to either do it the old or a new way.

The most intriguing point about a Spencer Brown form arrangement of distinctions is its relationship between constants and variables. The variables are the terms spelled out, that is, in our case, "behavior", "communication", "organization", "network", and "society". To take these as variables means that we will have to look for measurement, to be sure, but that there is plenty of room, or space, for any of these variables to assume certain values. We do not start with institutional restrictions whatsoever.

The constants, on the other hand, are there as well, but barely visible. They are hidden as the distinctions separating the variables from each other, and linking them, thereby, to each other. You have to watch the form in order to be able to see them, inclined, as we all are, to watch out for the values of the variables instead. These constants tell us that all behavior is chosen with respect to certain communication, chosen by the one who behaves and/or chosen by the one who is observing that behavior and trying to make sense of it. That is, our Spencer Brown form arrangement tells us that the behavior and the communication any organizational decision is relying on is are variables, which receive their value depending on, and determined by, the constant distinction between them defining their form. And so on for all other variables and constants.

That is, our Spencer Brown form arrangement tells us (a) for what variables we watch out observing, as it is, organizational decision-making, (b) how we consider these variables to find their respective value, namely by being contextualized via their respective outsides of any one distinction, and (c) how any one distinction is re-entered into the form, thus enriching it with indeterminacy, i.e. undecidability, the very stuff of any one decision.

The whole form arrangement is a hypothesis. The selection of the variables and the selection of the distinction of re-entry levels are chosen by a specific observer, that is, by myself backed by, what have you, sociology, economics, and systems theory.

Yet, the model will have to combine requisity variety (with respect to complexity) with, on the one hand, parsimoniousness (with respect to perspective, or overview), and, on the other, elegance (with respect to creative imagination).

Thus, we may as well provide for the old insights of evolutionary psychology, presented anew by Geoffrey Miller (The Mating Mind, 2000) and others, and start our model with a variable of "behavior" before getting to "communication", and relegate the variable of "management" to the re-entry of the distinction between "organization" and "network".

The model, then, reads as follows:

organizational choice = behavior || communication || organization || network || society ||

See for its full version the modified Spencer Brown equation at
http://homepage.mac.com/baecker/handouts/OrgChoice.pdf

That means that, even when looking at the intriguing possibilities of introducing Web 2.0 to organization, we should not forget that people like to mate, and choose their behavior appropriately. Management, that is, blocking and getting action via hierarchy, budgets, and projects, should also be viewed as yet another instantiation of the old game called "chercher la femme / chercher l'homme".

To be continued.

The general idea is to specify a limited number of variables - communication, organization, management, network, and society -, which determine how an oganizational choice is taken. These variables are distinguished by constant distinctions arranging them within a certain form, which defines a space of possibilities brought forward by any one organizational choice. So there is recursivity, temporality, and dynamics, captured by a form, which is to be considered an eigen-value of a non-linear, recursive function.

The model specifies a Spencer-Brown arrangement of distinctions, each of which is re-entered into the form via a medium of loosely coupled possibilities produced as well, and to be interpreted, by any one organizational choice.

See the model at http://homepage.mac.com/baecker/handouts/OrgChoice.pdf

The model of organizational choice assumes systems, form, and calculus. It is thus a contribution to a theory of complexity in self-organizing behavior. It is part of a more general endeavor, which regards a general model of social choice, to be undertaken some day. And it sits on a par with other more specific models of interactional choice, societal choice, political choice, economic choice, medical choice, esthetic choice, you name it, equally to be undertaken as opportunity allows.

But then, I notice that the idea of Gutenberg 3.0 doesn't have the energy that I need to pursue the project. I realize to have to add a comment to each of one the 36 chapters (introductions included) of all three volumes, and I give way. Didn't even Immanuel Kant at some point of the development of his philosophy admit that he lacked the "merkliche Lust" (a noticeable pleasure) to pursue a certain line of argument? If he did, can't I, a lesser mortal, as well?

Why don't I get right to the point I would like to make regarding Web 2.0 in organizations? Well, I keep repeating that point in this journal. But I only went so far up to now. I should get to the issue that interests me most, the way I think most valid.

That is, I should confess that I am interested in the form of the decision as a way to look at decisions, taken in organizations, as operations both producing and quoting their more or less appropriate context. I should confess that what I would like to do most is to inquire into a form like:

organizational choice = communication || organization || management || network || society ||

And please read any "|" as shorthand for Spencer-Brown's mark of distinction, and any "||" as shorthand for the re-entry of the distinction into the distinction.

I would like to inquire into that form and to do this with all necessary diligence. That includes quoting and using Gutenberg where appropriate. But it includes as well to look at Herbert Simon, James G. March, Karl E. Weick, Henry Mintzberg, Nils Brunsson, Niklas Luhmann and many others for their understanding of a decision.

What is the advantage of this compared to Gutenberg 3.0? Well, it will turn out to be Gutenberg 3.0. But it will produce a lot of dirty small models you may try to use for yourself without having to care for a frightening academic context. A "dirty" small model is a model you can start to use right away, trying to figure out what you are able to see thanks to it, and what not, and whether you would like to use it or not.

"Oft fehlt die Weite des Wurfes, die großes Können auszeichnet. Oft auch ist das Verhalten des vierten Faktors mehr passiver als aktiver Art, und selten nur steigert er sich zu ganz großem Format." (Gutenberg, Grundlagen der Betriebswirtschaftslehre, vol. 1, p. 7)

3.1.0

The world could have been so simple. Just distinguish, so Gutenberg 1.0 told us, between four factors of production, (1) labor, (2) means, (3) stuff, and (4) disposition, or leadership, and all production can be reduced to the efficient and effective combination of these four factors, taken care of by the forth, the dispositive, or leading, factor.

Without being too explicit about this point, Gutenberg 2.0 exploited the complexity brought in by the fact, emphasized by Gutenberg 1.0, that factor (4) is actually a split-off of factor (1), dispositive labor (management) being nothing else than a labor of its own.

Things turn out not to be easy at all as soon as you look at the self-implication of the distinction assumed to order the world of the firm, in that world. That is why Gerd Walger, in his book "Produktive Produktion" (Bern 1993), looked at the multiple knots of self-referentiality, of self-production, and of self-deconstruction so pervasive in any area which takes itself to get its order from an outside (dispositive factor, or planning) that turns out to be an inside (management). It is not by accident that Niklas Luhmann, in his book "Organisation und Entscheidung" (Opladen 2000, chap. 6), speaks of a good chance of any organization to psychiatrize itself if it dares to look at its own mechanisms of uncertainty absorption without taking the indispensability of the function of these mechanisms (that is, the necessity to protect them as inviolable, in a way) into account. Remember Douglas R. Hofstadter talking, in "Gödel Escher Bach" (New York 1979), about inviolate levels of systems consisting of, indeed constituted by, strange loops of tangled hierarchies?

Gutenberg 3.0 substitutes communication for production. It does not look at the world to be ordered by distinctions, but at the distinctions communicated such as to order the world. Who, for instance, is able to maintain the distinction between working labor and leading labor? Who is doing that communication? What role do hierarchy and power play in assuring the play of that distinction? And what is the reality of a firm produced by th necessity to communicate again and again just that distinction?

Gutenberg 2.0 already introduced the concept of communication, see Arnold Picot et al., "Die grenzenlose Unternehmung" (Wiesbaden 1996). Gutenberg 3.0 continues that line of the argument. Yet we have to re-interpret the concept of production as well. It has to find its place in Gutenberg 3.0 as well. Niklas Luhmann, in his book "Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft" (Frankfurt am Main 1990, p. 292), proposed to look at production in terms of the unity of the difference of internal *and* external, of controllable *and* uncontrollable factors of production. That means that you know, entering any project of production, that you have to be able to combine factors that are at your disposal, with factors, that are not, the latter being netherless essential for the possible success of your production. The weather, the market, politics, the zeitgeist among many other things have to be on your side, if any production is to become successful. How do you think to be able to combine your internal and your external factors of production? Technics and causality are of no help. You must rely on communication. What type of communication?

Add to this the nasty questions of all other factors of production being in the same situation of splitting into internal and external components, labor, means, stuff, and even leading, and you end up with a whole "plateau" (Bateson, Deleuze/Guattari) of improbable, yet to be situated, to be performed, communication your Betrieb, your firm consists of.

Maybe, we should reinvent Gutenberg, I mean Erich, not Johannes.

We have Gutenberg 1.0, the remarkable foundation of German Betriebswirtschaftslehre by one author (standing on the shoulders of Schmalenbach, Kosiol, and others, to be sure), featuring the two core ideas of technical effectivity and economic efficiency all organization, thus turning it into a "Betrieb", is subjugated to.

And we have Gutenberg 2.0, an attempt by authors like Wolfgang Staehle (Berlin) or Edmund Heinen (Munich) to reopen Gutenberg 1.0 to the complexity of both the organization and the world around it and to subjugate the organization to some principle of human decision making, which, however, was never found.

It may be time to invent Gutenberg 3.0, based on Gutenberg 1.0's fondness for the notion of information, looking at formal principles of organization, yet this time going for reliability (in work), sustainability (in organization), and responsibility (in networks), and based on Gutenberg 2.0's fondness for the analysis of decision-making, yet this time looking not only to psychology and to some complimentary social psychology and sociology but to the interfaces of the social, the mental, and the corporal.

Gutenberg 3.0 re-enters organization theory (Herbert A. Simon, James G. March, Karl E. Weick, Niklas Luhmann) into a theory of firm, administration, and management by looking straight at a possible profile of organization in the era of the computer and the internet.

Let's do this seriously. We got three volumes written by Gutenberg, the first on Production, the second on Marketing, the third on Finance. They stem from the 1950s and 1960s, with multiple reeditions since. The first volume has its 24th edition in 1983, the second it 17th in 1984, the third it eighth in 1987, which are the ones I will use and the most recent ones. A lot of authors, Horst Albach being a leading figure among them, look after the actuality of Gutenberg's ideas. See, for instance, http://www.erich-gutenberg-arbeitsgemeinschaft.de/.

I will try to find for each chapter in the three volumes of Gutenberg 1.0 one idea translating it into Gutenberg 3.0. Relevant ideas of organization theory, such as the concept of satisficing (H. A. Simon) substituting the concept of optimization, or possibly the idea of the garbage can (J.G. March) complementing on Gutenberg's concept of the "free form of cooperation" will appear as it seems appropriate.

I am not sure whether I will get through with it. And I am not sure whether you will bear with me. But I think it is a worthwhile attempt. Anyhow I hope to find some preliminarily final version of my essays on organization theory and management theory pursuing Gutenberg 3.0. It is a very, very dry stuff heading for its rediscription in terms of the computer era, so beware.

See Dirk Baecker: Die Form des Unternehmens, 1993; Postheroisches Management, 1994; Organisation als System: Aufsätze, 1999; Organisation und Management: Aufsätze, 2003.

An important feature is still lacking. The network organization, of course, is a global one. We deal with global network organizations. What does the notion of the "global" here mean? It means that the world, nothing more and nothing less, is the context of any workflow to be considered. This is a most radical notion of overtaxing immance. It is only the world we are acting in, but it is the whole world conceived of as the context of any one of my operations. ... read full article.

If you look at it, both the postclassical and the X organization reveal to be network organizations, consisting of networks and operating within networks. Networks, as Harrison C. White has it (Identity and Control, 1992, p. 253), decouple - and committees embed. ... read full article.

Imagine an organization you are a member of because it leaves your motivation to join up to you. Ready?

Now contrast this with a plethora of organizations trying to motivate you, as an employee, as a manager, as a client, as an investor, as a regulator, or what have you. Ready?

... read full article.

System One promises to be the midwife of another instantiation of the concept and the reality of the the postclassical organization, which assumes a world of ontogenetics instead of ontologies, and of undecidability instead of determinateness.

The basic idea of the postclassical organization is self-organization, still in the sense discovered by complexity research sixty years ago. If you cannot describe a phenomenon by the means of either causality or statistics, and you have good reasons to assume it exists nevertheless, Warren Weaver told us in his paper on "Science and Complexity" (American Scientist 1948), you may assume as well that the phenomenon knows something about itself, that you don't know about it. If not, it would not exist. Call, what the phenomenon knows about itself, its way to self-organize. ... read full article.

Because there is no identity without attempts to control both itself and other elements it relies on – while making sure, of course, that it gets the control (i.e., respect, attention, recognition), which it tries to merit.

I propose to use some kind of sociology in monotoring the development of System One as an antidote to technical optimism. Sociology resists, despite Henri de Saint-Simon's and Auguste Comte's attempts to do otherwise, the temptation to reduce the social to the technical. I'm not saying that even WebOS is an approach to deal with society's overall problem to exclude violence by including its threat. But I wouldn't be surprised if it were shown that is does even that. Just consider Google's "Do no evil."

The notion of communication, thanks to Gregory Bateson, Jurgen Ruesch, Paul Watzlawick and a few others (e.g., Harvey Sacks who, however, spoke of conversation; and Niklas Luhmann), is a notion central to an epistemology which is contemporaneous to the computer and during the 20th century slowly gaining the same importance as the epistemology of causality central to a whole European tradition of sciences well into the 19th century. Causality relates cause and effect. Communication relates the undetermined with self-determination so typical of "self-organisation" which, notabene, is the answer to the discovery of "complex" phenomena which are neither so simple that we can describe them by singling out two or three variables determining them (causality) nor so homogeneous that can describe them by computing a great number of elements adding up to them (statistics). Complexity needs communication which is the introduction of degrees of freedom as a necessary precondition for heterogeneous variables and elements seeking their identity by controlling each other and offering control of themselves. The latter adds Harrison C. White networks to communication.

Form is a notion proposed by the mathematician G Spencer Brown in "Laws of Form" (London 1969) as a notion comprising the two sides of a distinction, the operation of the distinction being drawn, and the space produced by that very distinction. It's the notion of a four-valued two-sided distinction, but you are invited to consider arrangements of several distinctions and end up with a multi-valued mathematics of two-sided (binary) distinctions.
That operationally self-referential notion of form may substitute the older notions of form, distinguishing it from matter (Aristotle) or content (18th century aesthetics).
We will need that notion to observe and compute communication done in the realm of computers and the computer society because its a notion able to account for the determination of the undetermined while remaining aware of the undetermined accompanying any act of determination. It is a notion placing our knowledge in the context of ignorance. And that is perfect for our dealing with WebOS.

Second-order cybernetics is Heinz von Foerster's and others' (Gordon Pask, Humberto R. Maturana, Francisco J. Varela's, Ranulph Glanville's) invitation to introduce the observer to the dealing with living, mental, social, and artificial systems. Everything said is said by an observer, says Maturana, and to an observer, adds von Foerster. Second-order cybernetics means to deal with self-reference, feedback, differentiation, and even autopoiesis on the level of observers observing observers. We know of the world what we know from observing its observers. And we must take into account that they style their observation with respect to our observing them. So, in the end, we are observing ourselves. And that introduces a lot of realism and scope for illusion.

System One is a piece of software that takes the computer very seriously. Sixty years after its invention the computer is coming of age. It starts to actively take part in communication. It is no longer trying to simulate human consciousness but acknowledges another challenge which is to deal with the form of the social.

We offer sociological insight and sociological research to monitor what is going on. We rely on Niklas Luhmann's distinction between the three cultural forms of the literal society of Greek and Roman antiquity, the printing press society of modern Europe, and the computer society of our global era (see Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Ffm. 1997, pp. 405-12; see also Dirk Baecker, Wozu Soziologie? Berlin 2004, pp. 125-149). Each cultural form is called "cultural" because it first of all has to deal with the surplus meaning offered by new mass media of distribution.

The introduction of writing means that society has to invent ways to deal with the problem that meaning is not just appearing and disappearing as in oral communication but is here to stay, to be memorized, to be relied upon when confronted with new meaning and thus to destabilize - to "displace" - a society fluid in present changes of meaning. Writing, for Platon, seemed to freeze society and thus to prevent it of its lifeliness and all forms of human responsibility coming with it.

The introduction of printing means that society gains possibilities to compare and critize manuscripts now being standardized and mass distributed well beyond the walls of cloisters and libraries thus putting all forms of classical authority in jeopardy. Add paper money, bonds, school certificates, leaflets, and newspapers and you immediately start to imagine how modern society went off for a form of social dynamics not in accordance with tradional ways of local knowledge and authority.

The computer is adding its introduction into processes of communication in ways which make it impossible for human users to know exactly what is going on, who is saying what, what sources are reliable and what sources aren't, or who is meant by certain acts of communication. The computer is adding its capacities of computing both to the content and the style of the meaning communicated thus deconstructing the ways to know our ways we were used to. ... read full article.