How the World Came to Exist: Luhmann on

Mass Media
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/how-the-world-came-to-
exist-luhmann-on-mass-media/

Among the interesting observations Luhmann makes in The Reality of the

Mass Media is that of the manner in which the mass media construct a
world. Here its necessary to proceed with caution. The point is not that the
mass media produce the earth. Rather, the point is that the mass media
construct a social world that becomes the horizon of how we relate to one
another and the earth. As Luhmann writes,
the contribution of all three forms of mass media
communication [reporting, entertainment, and advertising]
and this is where they converge can be said to be in creating the
conditions for further communication which do not themselves
have to be communicated in the process This applies to being
up-to-date with ones information just as it does to being up-to-
date culturally, as far as judgments about values, ways of life,
what is in/what is out of fashion are concerned. Thanks to the
mass media, then, it is also possible to judge whether it is
considered acceptable or provocative to stand apart and reveal
ones own opinion. Since the mass media have generated a
background reality which can be taken as a starting point, one
can take off from there and create a profile for oneself by
expression personal opinions, saying how one sees the future,
demonstrating preferences etc.

The social function of the mass media is thus not to be found in

the totality of information actualized by each (that is, not on the
positively valued side of their code) but in the memory generated
by it. For the social system, memory consists in being able to take
certain assumptions about reality as given and known about in
 every communication, without having to introduce them
specially into communication and justify them. (RM, 65)

Put in Heideggerese, Luhmann is alluding to the manner in which the mass

media produces das Man or the everybody knows that underlies shared
social reality. This is not something that can be assumed to be there at the
outset, but is rather something that must be produced or built. This das
Man, in its turn, renders possible new forms of social relation. To see this
consider two villages, existing prior to mass media, existing hundreds of miles
apart. Here spatial difference is crucial. Under conditions of spatial distance
such as this theres no possibility of a world. The reason for this is that flows
of communication are highly constrained in time due to these features of
distance.
read on!

The construction of a world is thus dependent on both the emergence of

certain technologies (printing press, radio, television, satellite, internet, etc)
and the communications that flow across the flows rendered possible by
these technologies. With the emergence of these technologies a new form of
the Common begins to emerge. The Common, however, is not merely a
shared content at the level of information, but is also a spatio-temporality
that comes to characterize social existence. With respect to content,
Luhmann is careful to emphasize that mass media do not produce the same
in the form of shared propositional contents or beliefs. Indeed, the topics
favored in the news, for example, are those that embody difference because
these topics enhance the possibility of further communications, allowing the
media system to autopoietically reproduce itself. We thus get a strange
differential unity.
The Common produced by media technologies surmounts the time
differentials produced as a result of space. If our two mythological villages in
a pre-media period do not belong to the same world, then this is because the
time that elapses to surmount their distance prevents them from interacting
with one another. This point can be driven all the way home in the case of
societies that are completely isolated from one another due to their
remoteness as in the case of Easter Island. With the emergence of media
technologies, by contrast, the nature of social space-time changes. What we
get as a result is the emergence of new social hyperobjects. Now events that
are geographically remote from one another can become nodes in a shared
network, such that simultaneity is possible where it wasnt possible before.
We can live the meltdown of the Japanese nuclear power plants along with
the Japanese, just as we can live the Libyan and Egyptian revolutions along
with the Egyptians and Libyans. Indeed, the repressive governments of both
Libya and Egypt revealed that they understood this when they attempted to
shut down various communication technologies. If they could shut down
these communication technologies, they reasoned, then they could shut
down these revolutions. And if they could shut down these technologies of
communication, they could shut down the Common or prevent it from
taking place. Along these lines, debates about open access publishing,
blogging, citizen media, etc., are also debates about the Common or what
should or should not be a node in the network of the social world. They are
questions about who should participate.
However, it would be a mistake to wax utopian about the production of the
world or the Common. While the surmounting of time does indeed open the
possibility of new forms of political engagement, organization,
emancipation, and insurrection (think about the role that the Common is
playing in Wisconsin), it also generates new forms of power and capital.
Luhmann observes that,
A further reason for the reproduction of the difference of
news/in-depth reporting, advertising and entertainment can be
said to be that with these strands the mass media are maintaining
different structural couplings at the same time and thus also
reproducing different dependencies on other function systems.
Advertising is without doubt a market in its own right within
the economic system, with its own organizations oriented
towards special markets. But that is not all it is. For advertising
has to make it product a reality via the auto-dynamics of the
social system of the mass media and not merely, as is typically the
case with other products, via technological or phsycical-
 chemical-biological suitability for the satisfaction of a particular
need. Within the strand of advertising, then, the economy is just
as dependent upon the system of mass media as the latter is
upon it; and, as is typical in cases of structural coupling, no
logical asymmetry, no hierarchy can be detected. (RM, 66)

Structural coupling is Luhmanns term (drawn from autopoietic theory)

for what Harman calls vicarious causation. It refers to the way in which
operationally closed systems interact with each other. Each function system is
governed, according to Luhmann, by a code that governs how it relates to
perturbations from its environment. Two systems are structurally coupled
when they become dependent on one another for perturbations used in their
own ongoing autopoiesis or operations. Like a vampire, one system draws
irritations from another system so as to continue its own operations. In this
case, economy becomes dependent on mass media for peturbations
determining its own ongoing operations, just as advertising and reporting
become dependent on economy for their own operations. In the case of
economy, without the Common produced by mass media, a number of its
operations are impossible.
We see exactly this dynamic in the case of Japan and Libya. Events in Japan
and Libya are no longer over there, isolated in the region where they occur,
but now resonate throughout a variety of different hyperobjects remote in
space from these locations. Thus, for example, we see the price of oil rise in
response to these events. This speculation on energy prices would not be
possible without a system that produces the Common allowing these events
to become simultaneously with other regions of the earth at great distances
from one another. As a consequence, what we get are entanglements of
objects (economy entangled with media, media entangled with economy)
and the entanglement of human lives with these hyperobjects and the
common. Now those looking for a freer life find that it is not enough simply
to tackle the despots in their village, simply to vote for those candidates that
might support their interests. No, insofar as we become entangled in the
Common we find that we must target these hyperobjects massively
distributed in time and space that seem to be everywhere and nowhere.

Aaron Says:
Great post, Levi. In media studies these days there is a tendency to move
away from the term mass media, as the effects of market segmentation, the
niche-ification of media consumption, the decline of networks and
newspapers and the rise of the internet are thought (in some corners of the
discipline) to have rendered the term obsolete. But I think that the parasitical
intertwinements that you point out and the global effects that they can
induce provide strong arguments for the notion that there is still a centralized
(or perhaps I should simply say dominant) mass media apparatus that is
capable of organizing a common world, despite the economic and
technological fragmentation effects of recent decades. There is also some
pretty strong sociological evidence indicating that, contrary to popular belief,
TV is still the dominant electronic mediumretaining the greatest
informational and ideological reach in most industrialized nations. Perhaps
one reason that television has been able to hold its own in the face of new
trends and technologies is precisely the felt need (on the part of both
producers and consumers) to retain some sort of common center amidst the
chaos of the exploding mediascape. Perhaps TV has cemented itself as the
primary mass media within a proliferating forest of niches. One can only
pray to the inexistent God that this particular center does not hold!

larvalsubjects Says:
Thanks Aaron. I havent discussed this too much, but one of the interesting
features of Luhmans media theory (and his sociological autopoietic theory in
general) is that it requires difference to reproduce itself. A central axiom of
Luhmanns thought is that information repeated twice is no longer
information. Systems require the production of information so that they
might engage in operations (the production of communication events) that
allow them to exist from moment to moment. For example, with 24 hour
reporting it becomes necessary to constantly produce new stories lest the
whole enterprise come to a grinding halt. Luhmann is careful to emphasize
that this process has no telos or goal beyond its own self-reproduction. It
does, however, require the endless production of the new. In his analysis of
media, Luhmann is thus careful to emphasize that media systems do not aim
to produce sameness or homogeneity of beliefs or opinions, but strives to
produce differences. Its for this reason that media particularly favor topics
that are controversial and that allow for opposing and different positions.
The value of these sorts of topics is that they allow for further
communications allowing the system to reproduce itself. Now not only can
the media system report on the topic (the latest research on AIDS for
example), but it can produce further communication events allowing it to
reproduce itself by reporting on the variety of opinions and disputes that
arise within the topic. This allows the system to get to the next round of
events in the order of time, thereby continuing its existence. From the
standpoint of autopoiesis, theres a further benefit to this as well. The
reporting of topics that allow for disputes and differences generates
uncertainty and doubt about the truth of any particular position and whats
being reported. This uncertainty and doubt (is the media biased?)
generates the possibility of further communications addressing worries about
ideological mystification, propaganda, bias, etc. We thus get a weird sort of
Common thats produced not out of sameness of sentiment, custom, and
belief, but out of a unity of differences, conflict, disagreement, debate, etc.,
where people are linked not by sharing the same view but by a series of topics
where opposing positions are possible (evolution or creationism? democrat
or republican? abstinence or pre-marital sex? etc). The unity of the world
thereby becomes an antagonistic unity where this world is able to reproduce
itself as a unity not through the production of consensus, but through a
production of antagonism or difference. From a social and political point of
view this makes questions of political engagement and intervention
particularly vexed as it is precisely through opposition and antagonism that
the system reproduces itself.