Power transfers reduced complexity and grows more critical as the world complexifies

Evidence

The function to be performed is the transfer of reduced complexity, which becomes more critical the more complex the intersubjectively constituted world turns out to be. The conditions for increasing this transfer of reduced complexity are institutionalized in the code of the medium. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 636

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definition of the function of power for Luhmann: transference of reduced complexity, institutionalized in the medium’s code.
• XREF: This is exactly the mechanism the reader’s thesis maps onto Giddens’s ‘faceless commitments’ and Stevens’s deference to the Darlington institutional hierarchy.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does the code of the relevant medium (power) interlock with the code of trust in the Ishiguro context — is Stevens’s deference really a power-code or a trust-code phenomenon?