Transcription
So, let me start this video with a preamble, for clarification. Niklas Luhmann’s media theory is outlined in his book, *The Reality of the Mass Media*. This was written in the 1990s, toward the end of his life, and is exclusively about traditional mass media, like print media and TV. Luhmann neither knew the Internet nor social media in the forms we use them today. However, I think most of his mass media theory is very much applicable to social media as well. Often, his theory seems even more relevant for social than traditional mass media. That’s why I regard it as a general media theory and not just as a theory of the mass media.
In the previous video on some basics of Luhmann’s social theory, we saw that he agrees with the common-sense insight that mass media “manipulate.” But, unlike many mainstream mass media theorists, his aim is not to “complain” about this and to formulate the impossible demand that the media should either stop manipulating or manipulate only in a proper way. Moreover, Luhmann is no fan of media manipulation theories like Chomsky’s, which seek to identify some secret… manipulators “who pull the strings behind the scenes like in gothic novels of the 18th century,” as Luhmann says. Yes, there are manipulators, but they don’t steer the media from the outside; they are part of the system, and they are not hidden in the dark. Chomsky, for instance, informs us about these manipulators in his books, films, and YouTube clips—that is: on the media. The manipulators are in the system, not outside.
Rather than fixing manipulation, or the manipulators, Luhmann wants to understand this peculiar fact: on the one hand, we use the media to inform ourselves about our world, but on the other hand, we know there’s something fishy about them. And Luhmann suggests, this is precisely what makes them interesting and very “modern,” or postmodern. As an aside, Luhmann doesn’t really like the distinction between modernity and postmodernity; he prefers calling today’s society modern rather than postmodern, but actually his theory of today’s society is quite postmodern.
The first sentence of *The Reality of the Mass Media* is: “What we know about our society, and, indeed, about the world we inhabit, we know through the mass media.” That’s an exaggeration, obviously. Actually, we don’t know everything through the media; you don’t know your parents, or what you had for lunch, through them. But we know through the media that which is “known to be known” (als bekannt bekannt)—not just to us, individually, but at least, potentially to everyone. Thanks to the mass media, we can talk to a stranger who happens to be sitting next to us on the plane about movies, politics, or the weather at our destination. As Luhmann says, the mass media produce a sort of vague global “background reality” (Hintergrundrealität) or “memory.” Luhmann says what’s known to be known resembles the knowledge about Atlantis in the ancient world: people were told about it, but no one ever saw it. Or as Horatio says in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “So I have heard and do in part believe it.” Like the ancient knowledge about Atlantis, today’s media knowledge is based on second-order observation. In the media, we observe the observations of others, and this results in the “suspicion of manipulation” (or Manipulationsverdacht). This suspicion of manipulation, however, doesn’t make the media less important; to the contrary, they emerge almost miraculously as a “self-reinforcing configuration.”
What is known to be known through the self-reinforcing media is not just suspicious, it’s also unstable—as Luhmann says, it is “varied from moment to moment.” There are always new news; there is always another movie you haven’t seen yet; and everything online is updated all the time. We are provided with differing perspectives, new opinions, and opposing views. That which is “known to be known” is never complete; it’s dynamic and debatable. It enables people to communicate in a way that “provokes agreement or disagreement,” and this is why media are useful, for instance, for a conversation with a stranger in a long flight. Since the knowledge spread by the media is always incomplete and inconsistent, their prime function cannot be—unlike enlightenment thinkers had hoped—and unlike the media themselves sometimes proclaim—to educate society. The media can’t really “generate more knowledge” or raise conformity to norms, says Luhmann. For such education, the media are too contradictory and too partial.
Different from his main theoretical opponent Jürgen Habermas, Luhmann insists that modern society neither is, nor ought to be, geared towards some sort of basic agreement on what is true, or what is right. The media, in particular, cannot bring about such a “consensus.” Instead, Luhmann says, a prime function of the media is to “irritate” society. The media, he says, make society “restless” and force it to cope with an always evolving “background reality.” “The function of the mass media lies in the constant generation and processing of irritation.” Inconclusive social restlessness and constant irritation is neither good nor bad, but modern. Whichever modern social system: politics, the economy, academia, you name it—they are all nervously fueled by what is “known to be known” through the media. A social system, is, next to its function, defined by its code. For Luhmann: “The code of the mass media system is the distinction of information and non-information.” This is to say that media are not best described as concerned with “facts.” More precisely speaking, media provide information; this is how they make a distinction between that which is known to be known and that which is not. That the media are not just about facts is obvious in advertising and in movies, but it’s the same in news. That which is not reported in the news may equally be a fact, but since it’s not reported, it’s not known to be known and thus not information. Although we can expect that if something is reported in the news it’s a fact, that something is a fact on its own is not yet enough for it to become news. The same is the case in this video. I am providing you not simply with “the facts” about Luhmann; I’m informing you about what I wish to become known to be known about him and not about that which I think isn’t needed to be known to be known. When writing this script: I focus on distinguishing between facts I’d like to inform you about and those I don’t want to talk about. This is to say: I apply the code of the media system.
Luhmann states that even though the media spread information about the world, “the world” as such, in any definite, objective, or complete sense, is precisely not what they represent. This is why the pretentious titles of some newspapers, like *Le Monde* or *Die Welt*, are actually quite manipulative. A half-sentence in *The Reality of the Mass Media* expresses one of the most basic—and most common-sense—insights in Luhmann’s theory: “The world can never be observed… because every observation is generated from… an ‘unmarked space’ that it does not observe.” That the media code is information/non-information is especially obvious on social media: On Instagram, people select what they post and look at not primarily based on how “factual” something is, but on how interesting they find it. The media generate not just a lot, but also very different kinds of information; news information is different from fictional information in a movie or commercial information in advertising. I will discuss these differences in the next video in more detail. But here is how Luhmann describes the crucial feature of the media code: “The probably most important peculiarity of the code information/non-information is its relation to time. Information cannot be repeated. Once it is out there, it becomes non-information. When news are reported a second time, they retain their meaning but lose their information value.” This indeed very peculiar characteristic makes media communication different from most other systems. In religion, the same prayer can be repeated over centuries without losing its magic. What is legal needs to remain legal for quite a while; otherwise, we’d get confused. This is not so on YouTube; I need to publish new videos all the time, to keep this channel alive. As Luhmann says, the media system is, quite paradoxically, busy with “making itself obsolete.” Nevertheless, Luhmann admits repetition is possible in some cases; advertisement is the prime example here; non-information is recycled as information to achieve some sort of memorability. But normally, once information is known to be known, it creates the desire for updates. Luhmann writes: “Just like the economy… generates the need to replace spent money, the mass media generate the need to replace redundant information with new information: Fresh money and new information are central motives of the dynamics of modern society.” Because of the peculiar ways in which the economy, and especially the mass media work, they become the accelerators of society. The irritation of all other social systems by the media system is temporal: it forces the other systems to adapt to the speed it creates. Luhmann writes: “The almost neurotic compulsion in the economy, in politics, in academia, and in art to be innovative—although no one knows anymore what the novelty of the new consists in, or how big its supply is—are impressive evidence (of the acceleration of society by the media).” The media system is the stimulant of modern society that keeps its on its toes. Luhmann writes: “The mass media, it can be said, keep society awake. They generate the continuously renewed readiness to be surprised or disturbed.” The media system imposes insomnia on all of society—it becomes the global village that never sleeps. I want to wake up♫ in a city that doesn’t sleep ♫♫♫ ♫ and find I’m King of the Hill ♫ ♫Top of the heap♫♫♫♫♫♫
The media system makes fear of missing out and the desire to be on top of things endemic. To briefly summarize the basics again: so far, I used the media code to inform you about Luhmann’s media theory in the hope that the media system, in the form of YouTube, fulfills its function and makes this theory known to be known. This prepares us to take a closer look at Luhmann’s media theory from a philosophical perspective. I want to discuss its “ontology,” the peculiar structure of “being” it constructs. This is going to be a bit complicated; I’m afraid. In our modern (or postmodern) society, a doubling of reality is common—no longer as in the old days thanks to Plato’s theory of forms, but to the media. Today, the media make everyone—not just philosophers—familiar with a peculiar ontological split between two levels of reality that depend on one another. Children start getting used to this reality split as soon as they start looking at a computer or TV screen. This doubling of reality is expressed by Luhmann in the ambiguous book title *The Reality of the Mass Media*.
By the way, Luhmann typically used ambiguous titles for his books on social systems, *Das Recht der Gesellschaft* (*The Legal System of Society*) or *Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft* (*The Academic System of Society*), for instance. These titles indicate, on the one hand, that the legal system or the academic system are subsystems included in the largest system of society, but on the other hand, the titles also indicate that the legal system and the academic system are social constructs, generated by society. Luhmann’s ambiguous book titles are similar to both Kant’s *Critique of Pure Reason* and Hegel’s *Phenomenology of the Spirit*, that also have double meanings of a grammatical genitive. It seems that Luhmann might have wanted to signal the connections of his “super theory” with those “super philosophies” of German Idealism in this way. The title “The reality of the mass media,” can, firstly, refer to the fact that the mass media are real: There are real newspapers and books, real news on TV and movies in the cinema, and real videos on YouTube. Luhmann says that this “real reality” consists in “the communication that goes on in or through the media.” Importantly, though, for Luhmann, unlike for McLuhan, technologies are not part of the media system; they are the environment that conditions the media system. The paper on which newspapers are printed, or TV sets, or computer software and hardware, are, for Luhmann, not in society. Media technology is technological and not social, similar to how human bodies are biological and not social. This, of course, doesn’t mean that technology or human bodies are not important. They are both; human bodies and media technologies condition media communication.
Now, let’s look at the second level of the reality of the media. Luhmann writes: “We can also speak of the reality of the mass media in a second sense, namely in the sense of that which appears as reality for them, or, through them for others.” When you watch the news, the first reality is the journalist you see talking about events; the second reality are the events the journalist talks about. Similarly, the first reality of this video is me talking about Luhmann, and the second reality is Luhmann’s media theory that I’m presenting to you. Since early childhood, we learned to distinguish these two realities; it’s simple. But, although, as Luhmann says, “this may seem completely trivial,” it is philosophically quite significant. Let’s look at these philosophical implications for a moment, which leads us beyond media theory and toward the relation between Luhmann’s systems theory and Kant’s “transcendental idealism.” When Luhmann describes the second reality of the mass media as “that which appears as reality through them”—he actually refers explicitly to Kant. Kant said that whatever we know “appears” to us in the way human reason—that is the mind or consciousness—constructs it. The purpose was by no means to dismiss these appearances as unreal, but to the contrary, to describe the cognitive means by which an apparent current reality is generated. Luhmann makes a very similar move. However, he does not analyze the generation of an apparent reality by means of consciousness (or the mind or reason), but by means of communication, and in this case the media system.
Luhmann, however, doesn’t just agree with Kant. He goes decisively beyond Kant. Especially in modern society, Luhmann states, we observe in the mode of second-order observation; the reality that appears to us is often not a simple reality but the reality we see as being observed. When you watch this video on Luhmann right now, you are aware that you see me re-constructing Luhmann’s theory and not the “thing in-itself,” not Luhmann’s theory “as such.” However, while you can see that I am “constructing” Luhmann’s theory, you cannot see how you construct your own construction of my construction of Luhmann’s theory. In other words, using Luhmann’s terminology, you can see how my “frames” condition my understanding of Luhmann—but while you do this, you cannot see the frames that condition your understanding of me. While we cannot see our own frames when observing the frames of others, we can, as Luhmann often says, “autologically” conclude that our own conditions are always at work. And this has philosophical consequences. Unlike Kant, who claimed that his own “Critique of Pure Reason” was not itself subjectable to a further “Critique of the Critique of Pure Reason,” but somehow fundamental—or, in Kant’s words, transcendental, Luhmann never claims to reach such a “transcendental” ground. His media theory, too, doesn’t claim to be a definite, fundamental, or “transcendental” description of the reality of the mass media. In his own words, Luhmann says that his constructivism “does not deny that reality exists. But it does not conceive of the world as an object, but rather, in the phenomenological sense, as a horizon—and thus as unreachable.”
Returning to media theory from these philosophical and methodological reflections, Luhmann states: “Our question now takes on this form: ‘How do the mass media construct reality?’ Or, in a more complicated way…: How can we (as sociologists…) describe the reality of their construction of reality.” And this means: “The question is not: How do the mass media distort reality through their specific way of representing it. Asking this would presuppose an ontological, objectively accessible reality at hand which could be known without construction.” Here’s a short conclusion of this video: For Luhmann, the media system is one of many operationally closed, autopoietically self-reproducing, evolving communication systems that construct reality in the mode of second-order observation; another such system is the academic system. From the perspective of this system, Luhmann’s theory observes how the media system observes. Interestingly enough, right now, you, in turn, look back at Luhmann’s academic observations of the media system through this very media system. In our complex, modern—or postmodern—society, we do such complex second- and higher-order observations all the time. In the next, and final episode on Luhmann’s theory, we’ll climb down from these “meta-media-theoretical” reflections and get back to some very concrete analyses of the media. We’ll look at news, entertainment, and advertising—and a few other things.