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.