No More Learning

As an art form, then, the novel departs from the sphere of entertainment around the middle of the nineteenth century, with Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale, with Melville's The Confi- dence-Man, and gives it over to the mass media. Indeed, twentieth- century art can no longer be described as fictional at all, since fictionality presupposes that we can know what the world ought to look like in order for the fiction to be able to count as a correct description of the world. 17 It is precisely this description, however, which is systematically boycotted in modern art - and, as we can say once more, is left to the mass media which thus fulfil the re- quirements for entertainment.
As is always the case with operational closure, differentiation generates surplus possibilities in the first instance. Forms of enter- tainment therefore differ according to how these surpluses are re- duced. The basic pattern for this is the narrative, which in turn has differentiated itself into a considerable abundance of forms. Ap- parently there are only a few functional equivalents to this (always
? from the perspective of entertainment and not, for example, of art). One example would be competitions of all kinds, such as quiz pro- grammes or broadcasts of sporting events. We do not need to go into detail here, but the question remains as to how this imaginary variety of events is linked back to external reality.
It seems that knowledge which viewers already have must be referred to copiously. In this respect, entertainment has an amplify- ing effect in relation to knowledge that is already present. But it is not oriented towards instruction, as with news and in-depth re- porting. Instead it only uses existing knowledge in order to stand out against the latter. This can come about when the individual viewer's range of experience - always random - is exceeded, be it in terms of what is typical (other people are no better off than I am) or in terms of what is ideal (which, however, we do not have to expect for ourselves), or again in terms of highly unlikely combina- tions (which we ourselves luckily do not have to encounter in every- day life). In addition, it is possible to engage body and mind more directly - for example, where erotica is concerned, or detective stor- ies which initially mislead the viewers who know they are being misled, and especially foot-tapping music. By being offered from the outside, entertainment aims to activate that which we ourselves experience, hope for, fear, forget - just as the narrating of myths once did. What the romantics longed for in vain, a 'new mythol- ogy', is brought about by the entertainment forms of the mass me- dia. Entertainment reimpregnates what one already is; and, as always, here too feats of memory are tied to opportunities for learn- ing.
Films in particular use this general form of making distinctions plausible by having distinctions arise sooner or later within the same story. They condense them even further by including distinc- tions which can only be perceived (not narrated! ). The location of the action, its 'furniture', is also made visible and, with its own distinctions (elegant apartments, speeding cars, strange technical equipment etc. ), simultaneously serves as a context in which action acquires a profile and in which what is said explicitly can be re- duced to a minimum. One can 'see' motives by their effects and can get the impression that intentions behind actions are only a part of the whole series of events and that those engaging in action do not
? have a clear idea themselves of what they are doing. Almost imper- ceptibly viewers come to understand themselves as observers of observers and to discover similar or perhaps different attitudes within themselves.
The novel itself had found its leitmotifs in the bodies of its pro- tagonists, especially in the barriers to the controllability of bodily processes. 18 This explains the dominance of the erotic and of dan- gerous adventures in which the reader can then participate voy- euristically using a body-to-body analogy. The tension in the narrative is 'symbolically' anchored in the barriers to controlla- bility of each reader's body. If the story is also filmed or broadcast on television, these emphases on the erotic and on adventure do not need to be changed; but in pictures, they are capable of being presented in an even more dramatic, complex and simultaneously more impressive way. They are also complemented in specific ways - for example, by time being made visible through speed or by boundary situations of bodily control being presented in artistic film components and in sport, through which boundary cases the problem of the sudden change from control to lack of control be- comes visible. This is why sports programmes on television (as opposed to the results which one can read) are primarily intended for entertainment, because they stabilize tension on the border of controlled and uncontrolled physicality. This experience makes it clear in retrospect how difficult, if not impossible, it would be to narrate the course of sporting events - of horse races through to tennis matches. One has to go there oneself or watch it on televi- sion.
The artistic form of the novel as well as fictional forms of excit- ing entertainment derived from it posit individuals who no longer draw their identity from their background but who instead have to shape it themselves. A correspondingly open socialization, geared towards 'inner' values and certainties, appears to begin amongst the 'bourgeois' classes of the eighteenth century; today it has be- come unavoidable. No sooner than he is born, every individual finds himself to be someone who has yet to determine his individu- ality or have it determined according to the stipulation of a game 'of which neither he nor anyone else back to the beginning of time knew the rules or the risks or the stakes'. 19 It is extremely tempting
? to try out virtual realities on oneself - at least in an imagination which one can break off at any time.
The form of narrative entertainment gained as a result of the novel is no longer the sole dominant form today. At least since television became widespread, a second form has appeared along- side it, namely the genre of highly personal experiential accounts. People are put before the camera and asked all kinds of questions, often with interest focused on the most intimate details of their private lives. Whoever agrees to get into this kind of situation can be assumed to be willing to talk; the questioner can proceed freely and the viewer can enjoy feeling no embarrassment whatever. But why?
It seems that interest in such programmes lies in being presented with a credible reality, but one which does not have to be subject to consensus. Despite living in the same world (there is no other), viewers are not expected to join in any consensus of opinion. They are at liberty to agree or to disagree. They are offered cognitive and motivational freedom - and all this without any loss of reality! The opposition of freedom and coercion is dissolved. One can make a choice oneself and is not even obliged to stand by what one thinks of oneself if things get serious.
Entertainment performances, therefore, always have a subtext which invites the participants to relate what they have seen or heard to themselves. The viewers are included as excluded third parties - as 'parasites', as Michel Serres puts it. 20 The sequences of distinc- tion, which develop from one another by one providing the oppor- tunity for another, make a second difference in their world of imagination - the difference to the knowledge, capabilities and feel- ings of the viewers. The issue here is not what impression the text, the programme, the film makes on the individual viewer. And nei- ther can the effect be grasped with the simple concept of analogy formation and imitation - as if one were trying out on oneself what one had read in a novel or seen in a film. One is not motivated to align one's own behaviour (this would quickly place too much strain on one's own capabilities and, as we know, would look ridicu- lous). 21 One learns to observe observers, in particular, looking to see how they react to situations, in other words, how they them- selves observe. 22 At the same time, as a second-order observer one
? is cleverer but also less motivated than the one whom one is ob- serving; and one can recognize that the latter remains largely non- transparent to himself - or, with Freud, not only has he something t 0 hide, but he is for himself something that remains latent.
What goes on in each individual viewer, the non-linear causali- ties, dissipative structural developments, negative or positive feed- back messages etc. triggered by such coincidental observations, can simply not be predicted; neither can they be controlled by pro- gramme choices in the mass media. Psychological effects are much too complex, much too self-determined and much too varied to be capable of being included in communication conveyed via the mass media. What is meant here, rather, is that every operation that goes on in the fictional sphere of the imagination also carries with it an other-reference, that is, the reference to real reality as it has always existed - known, judged and always having been there as the topic of normal ongoing communication. And it is above all this orienta- tion of the distinction of real and fictional reality that produces the entertainment value of entertainment communication. The 'trick' with entertainment is the constantly accompanying comparison, and forms of entertainment are essentially distinguished from one another in how they make use of world correlates: confirming or rejecting them, uncertain of the ending right until the very last moment or calmly with the certainty that: that kind of thing can- not happen to me.
Psychic systems which participate in communication through the mass media in order to entertain themselves are thus invited to make the connection back to themselves. This has been described since the eighteenth century by the distinction of copy and authen- tic 'being oneself',23 and there are certainly imitational self- stylizations which are more or less unconscious, whose widespread existence can only be explained in this way - for example, a gesture of casualness or of brashness, expressing autonomy in the face of expectations. But this imitation/authenticity distinction does not adequately explain how the individual identifies herself within this bifurcation as an individual. This seems to happen in the mode of self-observation, or to put it more precisely, by observing one's own observing. If the imitation/authenticity option is given, one can opt for both sides or sometimes for one and sometimes for the
? other, so long as one is observing oneself and is looking to find one's identity therein. Reflection can only yield up a characterless, non-transparent I which, however, as long as its body lives and places it in the world, can observe that it observes. And only thus is it possible, in determining what everyone is for oneself, to do with- out indications of background.
This discussion has made plain the special contribution of the 'entertainment' segment to the overall generation of reality. Enter- tainment enables one to locate oneself in the world as it is por- trayed. A second question then arises as to whether this manoeuvre turns out in such a way that one can be content with oneself and with the world. What also remains open is whether one identifies with the characters of the plot or registers differences. What is of- fered as entertainment does not commit anybody in a particular way; but there are sufficient clues (which one would find neither in the news nor in advertising) for work on one's own 'identity'. Fic- tional reality and real reality apparently remain different, and be- cause of this, individuals remain self-sufficient, as far as their identity is concerned. They neither must nor can communicate their iden- tity. Therefore, they do not need to commit themselves in any par- ticular way. But when this is no longer required in interactions or when it fails time and again, one can resort instead to materials from the range of entertainments offered by the mass media.
In this way, entertainment also regulates inclusion and exclu- sion, at least on the side of subjects. But no longer, as did the bour- geois drama or the novel of the eighteenth century, in a form which was tied to a typified expression of emotion and thus excluded the nobility (not yet having become bourgeois) and the underclass. Rather, it does so in the form of inclusion of all, with the exception of those who participate in entertainment to such a small extent that they are unable in certain cases to activate any interest and have, through abstinence (often arrogant abstinence), become ac- customed to a Self that is not dependent upon it and thus defines itself accordingly.
? Unity and Structural Couplings
The three programme strands which we have discussed separately can be distinguished clearly in type one from the other. This does not rule out the possibility of there being mutual borrowings. Typi- cal journalistic opinion has it that reports ought to be written in an entertaining way (but what does that mean? easily readable? ); and many sensationalistic news items published in the tabloid press are selected for their entertainment value;1 but here too entertainment should be understood in a broader sense and not in the sense de- scribed in detail above of the deconstruction of a self-induced un- certainty. Advertising especially, which relates to the less than inspiring reality of the market, has to come up with something, that is, take up entertainment and reports about things already known about. The American press had initially secured its inde- pendence in the nineteenth century using advertisements, subse- quently inventing news and entertainment as well. 2 The effects of this historical genesis are still making themselves felt. A common example is how individual papers, the New York Times in particu- lar, use this typifying effect to distinguish themselves from it. Nowa- days it is especially in trade journals, or in dedicated newspaper pages given over to computer technology, cars, ecological garden- ing methods, holiday travel etc. , that one finds advertising being dressed up in factual information. Last but not least, the popular iconography of television produces a knowledge of images and re- call which encourages transfers from one strand to another. Within the individual programme strands, then, one can observe borrow-
? ings from others. Jokey advertising in particular plays with the re- ceiver's implicit knowledge without recalling it in a straightforward, direct way. Reports too are spiced up with elements of entertain- ment in terms of style or of how images are put together, in order not to bore. Nonetheless, it is normally easy to tell (if the produc- tion is not out to mislead) which programme strand is directing the product. If this assumption were to be doubted, it could easily be tested empirically.
Having said this, particular signals are needed that frame the programmes if the programme strand is to be recognized. In the case of newspaper advertisements, it must be clearly recognizable that the item is not news but an advert. In television, it may be unclear at any particular moment (for example, when 'zapping') whether one has happened upon an entertainment programme or news or an in-depth report. The reader may recall the famous con- fusion which arose around the radio programme 'War of the Worlds', in which many listeners believed that extraterrestrial be- ings really had landed on the Earth. Typically, films are marked as such at the beginning and at the end. Advertising can almost al- ways be recognized immediately as such. External framing elements are only recognizable at the moment of their broadcasting, but for the experienced viewer there are abundant internal signals which enable a correct categorization. 3 The problem only arises, though, because a single technological medium is being used which can be used for very different forms.
In spite of this, it will not be easy to accept the theory of the unity of a mass media system based on three such different pillars as news/in-depth reporting, advertising and entertainment. What is striking in the first instance is how different these ways of commu- nicating are. It may indeed be possible to be quite easily convinced empirically that all three strands use the same technology of dis- semination and can regularly be found in the same newspaper or within a single broadcasting hour on radio or television. But if one starts out from the coding of information/non-information, what is impressive is the variety of kinds of realization, the variety of ways in which irritation and information are generated in the indi- vidual spheres of the media.
News, advertising and entertainment certainly differ according
? to how they can be used in further communication. If people are well informed from the news or from in-depth reports, they can pass on this information or perhaps talk about it instead of about the weather in order to get further communication going. There is not much point in doing that in the case of advertising, and even writh entertainment further communication does not consist in the stories being spun further or in learning lessons and proclaiming them. People may exchange judgements about taste and prove them- selves capable of making a judgement. But on the whole the contri- bution of all three forms of mass media communication - and this is where they converge - can be said to be in creating the condi- tions for further communication which do not themselves have to be communicated in the process. This applies to being up-to-date with one's information just as it does to being up-to-date cultur- ally, as far as judgements 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 one's 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 expressing 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. 4 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 the communication and justify them. This memory is at work in all the operations of the social system, that is, in every communi- cation, it contributes to the ongoing checks on consistency by keep- ing one eye on the known world, and it excludes as unlikely any information that is too risky. In this way, the extracts from reality that are dealt with (themes) are overlaid with a second reality that is not subject to consensus. Everyone can, as an observer, expose himself or herself to observation by others without getting the feel- ing of living in different, incommensurable worlds. A kind of spotti- ness in the communication of unconventional judgements might
? then come about, which can still be based on a reality that is as- sumed by both and does not run the risk (or does so only in border- line cases) of being interpreted psychiatrically. Direct references to the information communicated may vary and relate mainly to cur- rent news; but with the generation of a latent everyday culture, and the constant reproduction of recursivity of social communicating, the programme strands work together to water the same garden bed, as it were, from which one can harvest as necessary.
So mass media are not media in the sense of conveying informa- tion from those who know to those who do not know. They are media to the extent that they make available background knowl- edge and carry on writing it as a starting point for communication. The constituting distinction is not knowledge/lack of knowledge, but medium and form. 5 The medium provides a huge, but nonethe- less limited, range of possibilities from which communication can select forms when it is temporarily deciding on particular topics. And this is precisely where news/in-depth reporting, advertising and entertainment contribute in very different ways.
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 sys- tem, with its own organizations oriented towards special markets. But that is not all it is. For advertising has to make its product a reality via the auto-dynamics of the social system of the mass me- dia and not merely, as is typically the case with other products, via technological or physical-chemical-biological suitability for the sat- isfaction of a particular need. Within the strand of advertising, then, the economy is just as dependent upon the system of the mass me- dia as the latter is upon it; and, as is typical in cases of structural coupling, no logical asymmetry, no hierarchy can be detected. One can only establish, as with a thermostat, a cybernetic circle, where it then depends on the observer whether he or she thinks the heat- ing is regulating the temperature of the room by means of the ther- mostat, or the temperature of the room is regulating the heating system by means of the thermostat. 6
? What is less clear is the same set of facts in the case of entertain- ment. The principle of resolving a self-induced uncertainty via information sequences can also be found in art, especially in the novel, but also in music, dance and theatre. This is why it seems obvious to think of entertainment as a trivial form of art. But then what does the distinction trivial/not trivial imply? The distinction probably lies in the problematization of information or, to be more precise, in the question as to whether or not the self-reference of the information is also being observed. If it is self-referential, then the information is acknowledged in the recursive network of the work of art, that is, it is related to what the selection of this par- ticular piece of information (and no other) contributes to the play of forms of the work of art. If it is trivial, then the information is merely experienced as a surprise, as a pleasant resolution of indeterminacies that are still open. Accordingly, it is very possible to experience works of art as trivial or to copy them trivially with- out including any reflection of the possibilities excluded by the sequence of information. And this is supported not least by the fact that much entertainment is worked using building blocks which had initially been developed for works of art. 7 One will hardly be able to speak of mutual structural couplings here, since it is not clear how art might benefit from its trivialization as enter- tainment - unless it were in the sense of a drifting towards forms which are progressively less suitable as entertainment, that is, in the sense of a compulsion to insist upon difference. But a depend- ence of entertainment upon the system of art can be observed, along with a more or less broad zone in which the allocation to art or entertainment is unclear and is left to the observer's atti- tude.
A different situation again is encountered in news and reporting. Here, there are clear structural couplings between the media sys- tem and the political system. Politics benefits from 'mentions' in the media and is simultaneously irritated by them (as was Andreotti by Forattini's cartoons). News reports in the media usually demand a response within the political system, and this response generally reappears in the media as commentary. So to a large extent the same communications have at once a political and a mass media relevance. But that only ever applies to isolated events and only ad
? hoc. This is because the further processing of communications takes a quite different route in the political system, especially where con- ditions of democracy and of an opposition in the form of parties exist, from the route it takes in the media, where it becomes a kind of story in instalments. These different networks of recursion ulti- mately imply that those events which might appear to the first- order observer as just one, as a 'political piece of news', are in fact identified quite differently depending on the system in which the identification occurs.
Similar structural couplings can be found in the relationship of media and sport. Other thematic areas (art, science, law) are only relatively marginally affected - law typically being irritated (but only in isolated cases) by a pre-emptive judgement in the media or by a kind of reporting whose consequences can hardly be ignored in the further course of the formation of legal opinion, coming un- der the heading of 'responsibility for consequences'. 8 An exemplary case is the trial for the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles 1992- 3. At any rate, the division of the news portion follows not only a kind of generic logic, but also the types of concerned response which it generates in other systems in society, typically in the form of a system-to-system allocation.
Last but not least, in all the programme strands the mass media do not seem to be aiming to generate a consensual construction of reality - or, if they are, to no avail. Their world contains and repro- duces differences of opinion in plenty. This does not only happen when conflicts are being reported, when suspicions of manipula- tion come to the fore or when purely private views of reality are presented 'live'. The mass media are always also working continu- ously at discrediting themselves. They comment, they dispute, they correct themselves. Topics, not opinions, are decisive. There is so much talk of the 'dying of the forests' that in the end we know that we do not know what the causes are, but we do know that there are a variety of opinions about it. In view of the complexity of topics and contributions, it is not even possible to allocate differ- ences of opinion to fixed pre-given structures, such as class or ideo- logical factions. We just learn to observe the observing and to experience the conflict itself as reality, since differences are to be expected. The more information, the greater the uncertainty and
? the greater too the temptation to assert an opinion of one's own, to identify with it and leave it at that.
What conclusions can theory draw from this description?
We can rule out the possibility that the programme strands named above form their own, operationally closed (! ) function systems. 9 But the idea that all we are talking about in each case is an annexe to other function systems which make use of the mass media as a technical means of dissemination is not particularly convincing ei- ther. This would not take account of the media's own dynamic and their 'constructivist effect'. As an effective form of social communi- cation they cannot simply be reduced to mere technology. Such problems can be avoided if one starts from the assumption that we are dealing with a differentiation of the system of the mass media at the level of its programmes.
This leads to the suggestive idea that the system uses its pro- grammes in order to diversify its relationships to other function systems in society; and it does this at the structural level, because contacts at the operational level are not possible. We are familiar with such arrangements from other function systems. For example, the legal system differentiates its programmes' sources of validity according to judiciary, legislation and contract, in order to be able to keep separate its relationships to itself, to politics and to the economy. 10 And the art system has very different kinds of art (sculp- ture, poetry, music etc. ) depending on which environmental media of perception are being used. In all these cases we find the same difficulty in grasping the system in this differentiation as a unity. The jurists have the problem of grasping 'judges' law' or even the contract as a legal source, and the art system is only described as a system 'of fine arts' at all in the second half of the eighteenth cen- tury, and even then with the dispute, still continuing today, about whether literature is a part of them or not.
The divisions of the mass media into programme strands and then also within the programme strands, make visible the collapse of the order once described as the class society, and contribute for their part to the dissolution of class structures. This does not mean that no more differences of social prominence are conveyed or that a levelling process has set in. But the fractioning of the suggestion of meaning destroys the illusion of a thoroughgoing superiority or
? inferiority of parts of the population. The production of the mass media is not based upon a quasi-feudal class structure, but rather on a complementarity of roles of organizers and sectorally inter- ested members of the audience.
This is the way in which the names that are mentioned and the faces shown again and again in politics and in economic life, in sports and in show business are distin- guished. One can see houses and furniture which have obviously been bought and not inherited and which prevent any conclusions being drawn regarding education or influence. Classes based on social origins are thus replaced by fractioned prominence. And all that remains of the mythology of the modern is that an invisible power is at work 'behind all this' - which explains to the viewers why they themselves have not been rewarded in this way. If this is construed and confirmed again and again as social reality, then no power has the power to assert itself against it. Needs are diverted away into that qualitas occulta using simplifying explanations, ena- bling perceived reality to be reduced to a schema of power and victims.
We can summarize this analysis by saying that function systems are identified as a unity at the level of their code, that is, by means of a primary difference, and they differentiate their relations to the environment at the level of their programmes. The difference of coding and programming is simultaneously the difference of iden- tity and difference in the reflection of the system. The extent to which programme differentiation can still occur and remain viable, and the shape this takes, depends on the specific function of the system and on the social conditions of its differentiation.
? 10 Individuals
If, therefore, there is every indication of a differentiation of the programme strands news/in-depth reporting, advertising and en- tertainment, what evidence exists for their coming together in one and the same function system?
Reasons related to printing and broadcasting technologies could be put forward, for the mass media use the same technology in every instance to differentiate themselves from the contexts of in- teraction of everyday life. Further reasons can be found in the in- formation/non-information coding common to all three, and in the function of the system. These are important, but extremely formal, characteristics which shed little light on the meaning of programme type differentiation. The question remains: why like this and not differently?
When seeking an explanation that is more concretely applicable, it becomes apparent that differentiation brings out forms in which modern society makes individual motivational positions available for communication. This explanation presupposes that what is meant by 'motive' is not causal factors operating on a psychic or even neurophysiological level, but rather that it is exclusively a matter of communicative representations, in other words, of how attribution to individuals is dealt with in communication. 1 For com- munication about motives must accept the fact that it cannot really discover and verify the causalities implied. So there can only be talk of the 'reasons' for action which refer explicitly or implicitly to individuals, but which, viewed from an operational perspective,
? are artefacts of social communication and can only contribute as such to generating further communications - whatever the indi- viduals involved might be thinking at the time.
News and in-depth reporting start from the assumption of indi- viduals as cognitively interested observers who only take note of things that are presented to them. At the same time, the media bal- ance this implied passivity by singularizing individual actors being reported on as the cause of their own action. What is thereby regis- tered is that only socially allocated prominence empowers an indi- vidual towards influential action, or, alternatively, some kind of conspicuous, strange, often criminal individual behaviour is in evi- dence. In either case, viewers are implicitly kept from drawing any conclusions about themselves. Their passive role as one among many billions is confirmed for them, as is also, in the case of exceptions, their individuality.
Advertising starts out from the assumption of an individual as a being who calculates his profit. In doing so, it assumes a standard pattern of motives that describes all individuals, one which has proved its worth since the seventeenth century in theories of politi- cal economy and then in the modern monetary economy. These theories have to make abstractions, since in order to explain the economy they need concepts of motives which are able to describe individuals in very different positions in relation to transactions - both as someone who fulfils his desires directly, and as someone who merely receives money; and both as someone who buys and as someone who does not buy and keeps his money or prefers to spend it differently. In spite of its standardization, the motivational posi- tion taken on flatters the individual, because it describes him as the master of his own decisions, as the servant of his own interests alone.
Entertainment is a different matter altogether. Here, the me- dium of narrative fictionality is chosen to individualize motiva- tional positions. Individuals appear here with a biography, wTith problems, with self-generated life situations and sham existences, with a need (understandable to an observer) for suppression, for unconsciousness, for latency. The medium of fictionality has the advantage of being able to bring about or at least allude to con- crete realities, whilst at the same time being able to leave it to the
? readers or viewers whether or not they wish to draw any conclu- sions for themselves or for people known to them. The historical models for this begin as far back as in early modern theatre, then in the modern novel and in the bourgeoisification of narrative cul- ture, and, at the end of these traditions, they feed into the metanarrative of psychoanalysis, into the narrative of the 'economy' (! ) of the household of psychic energy which has to cope, not per- haps with 'debts', but certainly with suppression and disturbances from the subconscious. With this apparatus, the mass media can present offers - 'subject to alteration' - at every level of triviality and refinement, from which individuals can select (as they can from what is offered by advertising) what they need psychically and what they can cope with.
The significance of personal individualization becomes even more clearly visible if one observes the temporal relations of narratives loaded with tension. On the one hand, the people who appear in the narrative gradually come to be known, they have names, they act, one finds out a little about their past. They are individualized through their own history. On the other hand, one still does not know how they will act, especially in situations that are as yet un- familiar and in the face of unknown provocations from others' ac- tions. In people, then, a known or at least knowable past, at any rate one which is unchangeable, encounters an unknown future. People symbolize the unity of the known/unknown schema, inter- preted through the temporal difference of past and future. They thus absorb, as it were, attentiveness to time, they serve as tangible symbols of time. They integrate past and future in their actions, and they have to be individual, that is, distinguishable, so that it becomes visible that this can happen in very different ways. But another aspect of this form of observation of time thereby remains ^explicated, namely, the fact that there might also be quite differ- ent ways of separating and reintegrating the past and the future, for example, by means of organization. Although this does not ex- plain why these different forms of calling individual motives to ac- count in the different programme strands have developed historically, a structure can be recognized. In each case there is an 'interpenetration', that is, a possibility of taking account of the com- plexity of the formation of individual consciousness within social
? communication. 2 And in each case the solution to this problem takes on what is ultimately a paradoxical form. The individual who par- ticipates in communication is, in one way or another, simultane- ously individualized and de-individualized, that is, standardized or fictionalized such that communication can continue to make refer- ence to individuals without being able to include the operations which cause each individual for itself to come into being as a unique, operationally closed system. The differentiated offerings of the mass media allow social communication to be furnished with an ongoing reference to individuals, without having to consider the specificities of other function systems. The media need neither outdo the personalizations of family systems nor the anonymizations of the economic system. Standardizations suffice which are chosen in order to allow the participating individual to determine and select the meaning of his or her participation - or to switch off.
'The person' is therefore implied in all programme strands of the mass media, but not, of course, as a real reproduction of his or her biochemical, immunological, neurobiological and consciousness- related processes, but only as a social construct. The construct of the 'cognitively more or less informed, competent, morally respon- sible person' helps the function system of the mass media constantly to irritate itself with regard to its biological and psychic human environment. 3 Just as in other function systems, this environment remains operationally inaccessible, it cannot be divided up piece by piece, and for precisely this reason must constantly be 'read'. The 'characterization' of people,4 constantly reproduced in the way de- scribed, marks those points on the inside of the system boundaries of the mass media where structural couplings with the human envi- ronment come into effect. The billionfold igniting of psychic events is brought into a form that can be reused within the system and which in turn is psychically readable in the sequence of differences which arise from them. As is always the case with structural coup- lings, these relations are far too complex to be represented in the conceptual terms of linear causality or representation. Nonetheless, they have neither arisen randomly nor can they be modified at whim. The co-evolution of social and psychic systems has taken on forms which reproduce highly complex systems with their own dynamics on both sides and which keep themselves open to further evolution.
? In the system of the mass media this construction of the person reproduces the myth of service to the person. This person is 'in- terested' in information, indeed is dependent upon information in vital ways; so he must be informed. He is morally prone to tempta- tions; so he must constantly be taught the difference between good and bad behaviour. He drifts out of control in the flow of circum- stances; so he must be presented with a range of possible decisions - or, to use the catch-phrase of one media company, 'mental orien- tation'. These meanings have by no means become obsolete now that there are image media as well as print media. But more and more they also serve the fulfilling interpretation of familiar faces (often also of bodies and movements) and names. Although we have too little empirical knowledge about it, this may lead to a simplification and a simultaneous nuancing of the constructs used.
It would be a serious misunderstanding if one were to conceive this 'constructivist' representation of the system/environment prob- lem as pure self-delusion on the part of the mass media. Indeed, this would presuppose that beyond illusion there is still a reality to which one could reach out. It is, if anything, a successful attempt at keeping self-reference and other-reference in harmony under very strict system-specific conditions.
? The Construction of Reality
We now return to the main problem of this treatise, to the ques- tion of the construction of the reality of the modern world and of its social system. In everyday life one normally assumes that the world is as it is, and that differences of opinion are a result of different 'subjective' perspectives, experiences, memories. 1 Mod- ern, post-theological science has reinforced this assumption and has tried to support it methodologically. Whereas the natural sci- ences of this century placed a question mark over it, the social sciences still seem to be on the lookout for 'the' reality, even when they speak of 'chaos theory' and suchlike, and to allow only for a historically, ethnically or culturally conditioned relativism. 2 For research to go on at all, some kind of 'object' has to be presumed, so the argument goes, to which the research refers; otherwise one is always talking about everything and nothing at the same time. But in order to meet this objection, is it not enough to assume that the system has a memory?
In that case, then, it cannot only be the system of science that guarantees the materialization of reality for society. Instead, we should think of the knowledge of the world that the system of the mass media produces and reproduces. The question now goes: which description of reality do the mass media generate if one has to as- sume that they are active in all three programme strands? And if one were able to reach an opinion about that, the next question would immediately present itself: which society emerges when it routinely and continuously informs itself about itself in this way?
? If we ask about commonalities in the process of selection, we initially come up against the widespread assumption of a standard 0r normative prior selection. This is where Talcott Parsons, for example, saw the condition for the possibility of actions and sys- tems of action. Of course, we should not reject this possibility out of hand, but it explains too little; it would work too coarsely, be too easily recognizable and it would soon provoke opposing cri- teria. There are other forms of selection which work in more hid- den ways and are simultaneously unavoidable. This is true of categorizations of every kind, that is, for the representation of con- crete facts in more general terms, and it is true of causal attribu- tion, that is, for the co-representation of causes and/or of effects of each phenomenon being dealt with. Just as meaning is only ever communicable in the context of generalizations which can, of course, vary between being relatively concrete and relatively general, so also causality can only be represented by singling out particular causes or particular effects. In the case of causal attributions, it is by no means only an issue of leaky assumptions in comparison with other, equally possible explanations. Instead, the selection also necessarily excludes any causes of the causes and effects of the ef- fects. 3 The perspective from which the issue is illuminated can be varied according to ideological or normative prejudices, but even with the most strenuous efforts at neutrality it is unavoidable, given conflicts of values with which we are familiar. Conflicts of opinion negotiated in the mass media therefore operate frequently with di- verse causal attributions and thereby lend themselves the appear- ance of a compact relationship to facts which can no longer be unpicked. The same is true the other way around, however (and this is perhaps the more common instance), where simplifying causal attributions generate judgements, emotions, calls, protests. Both apply to news and in-depth reports, but also to the staging of nar- ratives and to a kind of advertising which, where causality is con- cerned (if it is mentioned at all), only mentions things which speak m its favour.
Generally speaking - and this is just as true of interaction among those co-present as it is of mass media communication - we can say that the economy and speed of communication always require a reference to complexes of meaning (to 'Gestalts', as in Gestalt
? psychology) and that communication can therefore never recover the meaning which it lets receivers understand, so that it is not usually possible to work out which elements are attributable to information and which to utterance. And this ultimately means that whilst the suspicion of prejudices or manipulation is constantly re- produced, it can never really be eliminated in communication by a corresponding distinction.
Any more precise analysis and empirical research in particular will surely have to start from that part of the media which provides the most direct portrayal of reality and is indeed declared and per- ceived in this way: news and in-depth reporting. Here the selectors named above take effect, especially those which are geared towards discontinuity and conflict. If we conceive of such selectors as two- sided forms, it becomes apparent that the other side, their anto- nym, remains unilluminated. In the representation of society it is the breaks in particular which appear then - whether along the temporal axis or in the sphere of the social. Conformity and assent, repetition of the same experience over and over, and constancy of the framing context remain correspondingly underexposed. Unrest is preferred to peace for reasons to do with the media designers' professional skills. The fact that this particular axis and not some other is chosen for the self-description of society is curious, and when it is chosen, it is barely possible to opt for any side other than 'where the action is'. It is with this kind of self-observation that society stimulates itself into constant innovation. It generates 'prob- lems', which require 'solutions', which generate 'problems' which require 'solutions'. This is precisely how it also reproduces topics which the mass media can pick up on and transform into informa- tion.
This one-sidedness can be compensated for by the mass media themselves, by way of preference for moral judgements. In the United States context, the result of this tele-socialization has been charac- terized as 'moral intelligence'. This includes the call to defend oneself against circumstances, to stand firm in the face of difficul- ties and if need be to break rules. 4 But ultimately it has to be clear who are the goodies and who are the baddies. Whatever is not shown to advantage as reality is offered up as morality, it is de- manded. Accordingly, consensus is better than dissent, conflicts
? should be capable of being resolved (since it is, after all, only a question of values), and the reference to reality, oriented princi- pally towards quantities (where possible more, and not less, of the aood), should be neutralized by the 'question of meaning'. It then looks as though it were the very essence of morality to opt for peace, for balance, for solidarity, for meaning. However, seen from a historical and empirical perspective, this is by no means the case. There are no reasons whatever intrinsic to morality why struggles against enemies, in-group and out-group distinctions, dissent should not also be morally rewarded in relation to other kinds of atti- tudes. 5 Here too the mass media seem to determine the way in which the world is read, and to assign moral perspectives to this descrip- tion. The emphasis, marked by tones of regretful loss, on consen- sus, solidarity, values, the search for meaning, does not appear until the second half of the nineteenth century, in a time of the mass press and the full inclusion of the underclasses in literacy, as a kind of pasteurization of the totality of society - or of what it is thought to be.
One might suppose that this overpowering insistence on moral- ity is connected with the coding information/non-information or with the one-sided presentation of forms whose other side, although presupposed, is not represented along with it - in other words, with the concealment of unobtrusive normality, with the paradox of the other, included in meaning but included as being excluded. In normal everyday interaction, after all, morality is not needed anyway; it is always a symptom of the occurrence of pathologies. Instead of orienting itself towards givens, communication chooses the form of morality as something which is simultaneously both fact and not-fact, as something which has constantly to be subject to reminder, as something that is lacking and can therefore be as- signed neither to the inside nor to the outside. Once the transition, the diversion towards morality, is achieved, it carries on as if of its own accord, as if on castors, sometimes too quickly. Morality, then, serves as a kind of supplement to selectivity, offered by way of compensation, as Odo Marquard describes it, that is, 'instead'. 6
This might explain that morality and even its reflexive form, ethics, makes an aged, furrowed impression nowadays and is clearly in- terested only in pathological cases. Isolated cases thus mount up
? under catchwords such as 'corruption', and we can only confirm what Jean Paul suspected long ago: 'Angels may still fall and the devils multiply. '7 Morality needs the obviously scandalous in order to have occasion to rejuvenate itself ; it needs the mass media and, specifically, television.
Even if this is a balance which equalizes out within itself, it is based on a highly selective schema. Reality is described - quite pos- sibly in the mode of researched truth - in a way that is felt to be in need of being balanced. The continual reproduction of the 'is' is set against how things 'actually ought to be'. Party opposition, which is provided for institutionally and enables the political system to substitute government for opposition, is represented so strongly in the daily news that the continuous values of the domain for which politics is responsible come across as deficient and have to be sub- ject to reminder. The 'political class' (as is dismissively said of late) fails in the face of the great tasks of the age. The hunt for more money, better career values, greater reputation, higher ratings, bet- ter-quality training courses appears to be so dominant that, as in evolution, the recessive factor 'meaning of life' has to be brought back into play via morality. But deficits in reality, even if they are imaginary ones, cannot be balanced out in the normative. If a topic is treated in moral terms, the impression is given that the topic requires it because real reality is different.
The description of society that happens via news and in-depth reporting, though, is not the only one to take effect. Both advertis- ing and entertainment contribute as well, mediated as they are by individual attitudes and degrees of willingness to communicate, in other words in a very indirect way. Advertising inevitably scatters its communication over so many objects and so many receivers that each has the impression that there is something better and more beautiful than they can achieve for themselves. The limits to what can be achieved are no longer experienced as divinely ordained tri- als and tribulations, and neither are they regulated by rigid class barriers that set a framework restricting with whom and in what respect one can meaningfully compare oneself. The religious and stratificatory regulation of conflicts of imitation in Girard's sense no longer apply. 8 Instead, limitations are experienced as the result of a lack of purchasing power. This might initially be an impres-
? sion which irritates individual systems of consciousness and is proc- essed within these systems of consciousness in highly diverse ways depending upon the system concerned. But since what is involved
r e massive and standardized influences, one can assume that the conditions of plausibility of social communication are also influ- enced in this way. As it is, in order to be able to enter into commu- nication, individuals have to assume that there are similarities of experience between them and others in spite of their systems of consciousness operating in fully individualized, idiosyncratic ways. The global dissolution of agrarian-artisan family economies and the increased dependency on money for the satisfaction of every need offers an experiential background which readily takes up the range of presentations offered by the media. Society then appears to be an order in which money is available in vast quantities - but no one has enough of it. What could be more obvious than to infer unjust distribution? 9 And then explanations are demanded along with proposals as to how it could all be changed.
Entertainment via the mass media might also be expected to af- fect in this indirect manner what is constructed as reality. Over a long period of time, at any rate during the seventeenth and eight- eenth centuries, the reading of novels was treated as a distraction, a diversion, and its only danger was considered to be that it made one unfit for an active life. 10 The prototype was Don Quixote, and, time and again, women at risk from reading novels. 11 It was al- ready a common topos in critiques of novelistic reading matter that the division of real reality and fictional reality was not being main- tained; but precisely this point was reflected again within the novel and was set up in contrast to an authentic relation to the world, as if it were not precisely thus that one ran the risk of advising the reader by means of such reading matter that he or she should en- deavour to be authentic. 12
These problems have become more acute with film and televi- sion, and even the diagnostic novel (unlike the experiments of the avant garde) seems to be aimed at suggesting to the reader that certain experiences are his own. Whoever gives himself over to this is then able to communicate as if he knew this himself. The differ- ence of the inside and outside of fiction, the difference of a narra- tive or a film story on the one hand and an author, machinery of
? publication and receivers on the other, is undermined by a constant crossing of the boundary. The one side is copied over into the other, out of which opportunities for communication are won whose ba- sis is the artificiality of the experiences common to both. Complex entanglements of real reality and fictional reality occur,13 which are, however, reflected as entertainment, experienced as an episode and remain without consequence. The more 'that which is per- ceived', say, television, plays a role in this, the more communica- tion is based on implicit knowledge which cannot even be communicated. Whereas the Enlightenment assumed that commonality consists in a communicable interest based on reason, and whereas transcendental theory even implied that self-reference could be extrapolated as a general a priori of subjectivity,14 com- munication today seems to be borne by a visual knowledge no longer capable of being controlled subjectively, whose commonality owes itself to the mass media and is carried along by their fashions. It can more or less become a programming consideration on the part of the entertainment industry to win and keep the (short) attention span of participants by offering them references back to their own life, or, one might say, 'yes, that's exactly it' experiences. The at- tempt to approach the individuality of individuals' own conscious- ness will then be made by way of programme diversification.
The fact that mass media produce those three programme strands of news/in-depth reporting, advertising and entertainment simulta- neously with very different kinds of reality construction makes it difficult to recognize any overall effect and to trace it back to the system of the mass media. Perhaps the most important common trait running through them is that, in the process of producing in- formation, the mass media simultaneously set up a horizon of self- generated uncertainty which has to be serviced with ever more information. Mass media increase society's capacity for irritation and thus also its ability to produce information. 15 Or, to be more precise: they increase the complexity of contexts of meaning in which society exposes itself to irritation through self-produced differences. The capacity for irritation, it will be remembered, is generated by horizons of expectation which may provide expectations of nor- mality but which in isolated cases can be shattered by coincidences, incidents, accidents; or by spots of indeterminacy,1' which are re-
? produced as being constantly in need of completion. What is hap- pening in each case is autopoiesis - the reproduction of communi- cation from outcomes of communication.
For this (as for any) autopoiesis there is neither a goal nor a natural end. Rather, informative communications are autopoietic elements which serve the reproduction of just such elements. With each operation, discontinuity, surprise, pleasant or unpleasant dis- appointment is reproduced. And the structures which are repro- duced in this process and which tie it to what is known and capable of repetition (otherwise information could not be recognized as difference) simultaneously serve its reproduction and are adapted for it in the meanings they hold. Thus time becomes the dominat- ing dimension of meaning, and in this dimension the distinction of future and past becomes that distinction which defines time, start- ing with the before/after distinction. The connection between past and future is now nothing but an artificially arranged chronometry - and nothing more than would be necessary or impossible in terms of its natural essence. The present - the differential of the two tem- poral horizons which itself is neither future nor past - becomes the place where information solidifies and decisions have to be made. But the present is in itself only this point of change or only the position of the observer distinguishing future and past. It does not occur within time. One might suppose that it takes the paradox of a time which is no time from what was thought of before moder- nity as eternity, as the omnipresence of the God who observes all times at the same time. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that this modalization of time has a retroactive effect on communi- cation itself, above all in the dual form of fears and expectations.
We can take it that whatever people know about society and therefore about the world - and especially whatever can be com- municated with some prospect of being understood - comes about in this way. But thematically this does not say very much - apart perhaps from the fact that every statement draws the suspicion upon itself of wanting to say too much. It would not be enough to speak of a universal suspicion of ideology here,17 as even every scientifi- cally supported assertion is subject to the same suspicion as soon as it projects itself as an ontological assertion. But perhaps one can say that the mode of second-order observation has generally set-
? tied into place. Everything that is uttered is deciphered in terms of the one who utters it. News and in-depth reporting is likely to en- courage suspicions of underlying motives (which rarely take on any definite form), while entertainment encourages self-observation in the second-order mode, observation of one's own observing. Both the world and individuality are still perceived even then as a con- crete whole consisting of common characteristics; but always in such a way that one has mentally to include an observer w h o says that this is the way it is.
What is at issue here is no longer the old ontological duality of appearance and reality, which was thought of in principle as being ontologically separable or which as religion made reference to the hidden God. Rather, what is at issue is an understanding of reality which takes reality to be a two-sided form of the 'what' and the 'how' - of the 'what is being observed' and the 'how it is being observed'. And this corresponds precisely to the observation of communication with regard to a difference of information and ut- terance. Only when one takes this difference as a basis can one un- derstand anything - and "understand" is used here in the sense of endless possibilities for further exploration on the side of informa- tion or on the side of schemata (frames) and the utterer's motives.
Of course, all this is not to maintain that every participant in mass media communication reflects that he is experiencing thus. But neither is it a matter of a reserve for the 'educated classes'. Every empirical study will establish that there are different degrees to which this ambiguity of knowledge is processed, and the most easily accessible irritation may assume the form of mistrust. What- ever the psyche makes of this form of irritation is its own business; and an additional part of the picture is that there is no prescribed rule for this which would not immediately invite the same mistrust.