Having had writer’s block for days, a spark to light the tinder in my mind finally occurred when I was faced with a question of the difference between action and communication. The question may seem spurious but it has ramifications for how we observe the world around. If society comprises of various systems (we all know about the economy and legal systems, the path towards truth that is science can be counted as another) then what are they in relation to the actions that actually take place? Actions are actions: this should need no further elaboration. How does the action of writing a cheque though buy one a house? Why do the words of a judge condemn a man to a lifetime in prison? The communication that takes place through these actions is very different from the actions themselves. A social system is a system of communication meaning that it can only process communications. They are not ‘action’ systems: they cannot ‘do’ anything, they can only observe action and attribute meaning to it through their own rationale. This would mean that, as social systems are not action systems, they require a more nuanced understanding than the action-based logic we are used to using in the realms of reality we usually engage in.
A social system can be considered as a communicative rationality which incorporates certain mechanisms of understanding within it which operate around a central point and with a fixed medium. More specifically, it constructs these mechanisms of understanding itself which then through repeated self-reference find form. The construction of the economic system (from a hypothetical, not a historical or genealogical angle) may illuminate this process. The economy is centred on the concept of exchange with the medium of exchange being money. One can argue this and that spurious counter-argument here but this is essentially the underlying mechanism of the world’s economy. Goods and services are traded, as are various currencies whose relative values all play off against each other. The centre of the economic system is the banking system (which is an action system). We have central banks which issue currencies and attempt to manage a currency’s value through interest rates and inflationary policies, commercial banks which manage everything from investments to social security payments, and customers who take money from and place money into the commercial banks. This hierarchy of central/commercial/customer defines the banking system and the economic exchanges which take place within it. All other actions (consumers buying from private retailers, industrialists buying land, etc.) is peripheral to the banks as at some point the transactions will return to the banking system. At any rate as money has no intrinsic value and is merely a promissory the banks underwrite all economic action outside of small-scale bartering (thus the self-referentiality of communication systems: money only means something because we have a track-record of it being accepted as something). From this hypothetical then the communicative rationality of the economic system is the contemplation of an action as an economic one. To put this another way, the economic system judges actions as economic if it can describe them within the distinction of payment or non-payment and through the medium of money.
Actions though speak louder than words. No action has an intrinsic meaning; one can only assign meaning to an action through communication. A base example of this would be a thief who sells an iPhone to somebody. One can claim this is an economic communication (albeit one on the black market), a legal one (if we consider the law to deal with the distinction between legal/illegal then this is clearly illegal), or perhaps even an immoral one (if we consider morality as a system of communication). The legal system operates around the courts with its medium being legal judgements whist morality (and I hypothesize here as I am not a theologian or moral philosopher) operates around transcendental norms with its medium being (divine?) judgement. Hence the thief, depending on the communicative rationality of the system one employs to describe the action, can be described as having received a payment for a sale, conducted himself in an illegal manner and thus liable for prosecution, or an immoral heathen who has sinned. Note the action is the same in all cases, only the description has changed and thus the meaning and understanding. One can consider the thief to be all three of these descriptions but one has to consider these at different moments: one cannot hold all three descriptive candles to the action simultaneously. Depending on which meaning you wish to attribute to and communicate with also affects the future outcome of things. One can ask for a cut of the money, call the police or ask the thief to consider what sort of person they are. The communicative rationality here underwrites how the speaker deals with the situation and proceeds to voice their reaction to the observed event. Of course, one can change one’s rationality and one’s distinction (for example one may view this as a moral act as the iPhone owner was rich then switch this view back to one involving traditional morality and then decide it is a legal matter after all) but all this takes time. A phone call to the police to communicate the action is understood by the police as a legal issue and thus instigates the action of the thief being arrested. The judge’s words are a communication to the guards to keep this man at her majesty’s pleasure until such time as the courts communicate otherwise. Action leads to the need to understand the action rationally and this, if it is to be acted on, is then communicated to others who act on this communication with further actions.
There is much more to this, the notions of observation (seeing somebody pay for something) and the cybernetic principle of second-order observation (seeing that somebody has taken part in an economic communication through monetary exchange, instead of seeing an act through another competing mode of rationality) have not been mentioned for example. Neither has the notion of self-referentiality been explored (the legal system decides what is legal or not, not the economic one: this leads to systems constructing their own elements and meaning). All these though shall have to wait for another day.
ssptmusing 