Binary value-pairing is the precondition for all symbolically generalized communication codes

Evidence

Successful communication media can achieve only the form and selection capacity of a code if they institute a binary schematism which prestructures the possible operations by assigning them paired values. Value pairing is a precondition for the formation of symbolically generalized codes, because only in this form can universalism and specification be combined. In other words, only then can every relevant item have another concrete item unequivocally assigned to it. For example, if truth is to be more than a shared construction of reality, it has to be structured by a paired-value logic. The possibility of science depends on this – science in the sense of a chain (in principle infinite) of progressive operations with selectivity involved in each connection. In the code of love the demand for exclusivity and its institutionalization in marriage have the same function. In the case of the money-code, property (including freedom in the sense of the right, in economic terms, to dispose of one’s own labour power) fulfils the function of a definite separation of property and non-property as an assumption for guiding expectations in economic calculations and transactions. Property can only be institutionalized with the help of the binary schematism of right/no-right. There is the same dependence on the legal system in the case of power. ‘From its very nature’ power is diffuse and unevenly distributed. It can only be brought into a clear either/or situation with the help of differentiation between lawful and unlawful power. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 661

Categorization

• DEFINE: Operationalizes ‘binary schematism’ — the paired-value precondition for codes like truth, love, money, and power — precisely the kind of exact definition needed to anchor a Luhmann reading.
• XREF: This binary schematism (truth/untruth, power/lawful-unlawful) is the structural machinery behind Giddens’s ‘faceless commitments’ — the system delivers prestructured either/or choices that relieve individuals of facework. Directly usable in the Ishiguro argument.