Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

347Civil Society and the Political Public SphereThe reflexive spiral of the reciprocal observation of the other'sself-observations does not escape the circle in which both externalobservation and self-observation are always a system's own observation;it does not penetrate the darkness of mutual opacity.:Jg To"understand" the mode of operation and the self-reference ofanother system and not just "observe" it, to be able not just to forma "picture" of this according to their own respective codes, thesystems involved would have to have available an at least partiallyshared language. But this is excluded ex hypothesi:Successful communication presupposes that the parts present one anotherwith reciprocally relevant information in such a way that it can be"read," i.e., can be understood even in the context of basic criteria thatare different and foreign. The challenge is to establish compatibilitybetween different "language games," whereby different realities andprojections of the world are linked with the "language." It is thus true evenof complex societies that the deep structure of their order is bound to the grammarof the transfer of comprehensible information. 40The "transference rules" making up such a grammar, however,cannot be given simply by the grammatical rules of an ordinarylanguage circulating throughout society. Rather, following themodel of international private law, they must first be constructedas collision norms that, from the perspective of each system, set upbridges of mutual understanding with other systems. But to theextent that the involved systems generate such rules for themselves,they have not yet overcome their semantic perspectivism. At bestthey have created the basis for a new stage of development. Therequired intermeshing of perspectives must, therefore, wait for a newsystem of rules to emerge.In the end, Willke has to conjure the conditions for theintersubjectivity of possible mutual understanding out of the hat ofsocial evolution: "A new kind of rule comes into play here. For thefirst time, these rules are no longer anchored in subsystems butarise at the level of [whole] systems from the active and intentionalinterplay ofthe parts, which want [!] to combine into an emergenttotal system. This type of rule is the material from which decentralizedcontext-steering can develop as procedures of political supervision."41From the reciprocal observation and mutual groping ofsemantically closed systems, therefore, a language is supposed to