Attributing action to selections produces social complexity by both enabling and limiting differentiation.

Evidence

The categorizing of selection as action must therefore be evaluated as a mechanism which releases systems from the imposition of equality and which makes differentiations possible. As this cannot happen on an unlimited scale, action has, as it were, again to be made captive and domesticated. The primary function of the social construction of the possibility of acting, and the specialization of control mechanisms related to this, lies in the emergence of an indirect avenue leading to the production of increased social complexity. This consists of the creation and limitation of the possibility of different selections in an intersubjectively constructed world of meaning. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 616

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to Luhmann’s complexity-reduction thesis that the reader wants to map onto Stevens’s role-deference in The Remains of the Day — the ‘captive and domesticated’ action is exactly Stevens’s narrowed repertoire of choices.