Each societal subsystem’s binary code is imposed and presupposes completeness.

Evidence

Binary paradigms serve as components of a medium-code to differentiate societal subsystems. They facilitate negations and bring them into line with a specific schematization and thereby make possible a system-specific operation of relevant functions which have a universal societal status. At the same time, however, such schematizations, like some other code elements, have and maintain something artificial and problematical. As such, they must be imposed (ignoring the question of how – and among whom – property/non-property, right/no right, love/ hate, truth/untruth are then distributed). On the other hand they have functions which they cannot give up, so that a mere protest against binary paradigms – for instance in love or in relation to property – must remain ideological unless equivalents are developed for the medium itself or for the function of binary schematization. The problem lies in the presumptive completeness of the scheme, in the claim to construct the totality of the possible by means of a dichotomy. The degree of institutionalization of a communication medium can be recognized, among other things, by how far the imposition of its binary schematization is recognized independently of the concrete distribution of opportunity. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 663

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the medium-code binary paradigm — the core mechanism through which system trust and power operate.
• XREF: Directly connects to Giddens’s faceless commitments: the binary truth/untruth, right/no-right codes are the expert systems Stevens trusts.