Baecker, D. (2007), Wozu Gesellschaft?, Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos.

In this book, Dirk Baecker writes about society, its operational mechanisms, and its systemic manifestations. According to Baecker, society is not a static entity or substance but a continuous, recursive process; an operation that oscillates between order and chaos, perfection and corruption.

Society is reproduced solely through communication. Unlike action, communication is a synthesis of information, message, and understanding that produces ambiguity and ambivalence, allowing society to regenerate from its own decay.

Violence is a systemic forced attribution where communication is reduced to a singular, irreversible action. Society simultaneously excludes physical violence while being fascinated by and dependent upon its symbolic presence.

Politics functions by making collectively binding decisions. This is structurally supported by the differentiation of offices, which separate individuals from institutional roles, and is practically sustained through networks of contacts.

The public sphere serves as a medium for self-organisation, utilising neutralisation and thematisation to transform private concerns into general opinions, thereby exposing the contingency of all social boundaries.

Concepts like gender serve as boundaries between the social system (communication) and its environment (consciousness and biological life), acting as an ironic check on the community's claims to totalisation.

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1. The Nature of Society: Order and Chaos

Baecker redefines the nature of society by bridging ancient Aristotelian concepts (perfection vs. corruption) with modern scientific frameworks (order vs. chaos).

1.1 The Operational Process

Society is understood not as a state of being but as a process of perturbated recursion. Each social operation (communication) simultaneously:

• reproduces society by following previous communications.
• introduces uncertainty and the need for interpretation, creating the chaos necessary for new order to emerge.

1.2 Three Thinking Figures of Operation

To understand how one operation manages both order and decay, Baecker introduces three conceptual frameworks:

• Temporalization: Operations are events that appear and disappear instantly. Order is gained in the emergence; chaos follows in the disappearance.
• Medium and Form: Using Fritz Heider’s distinction, a form (a tight coupling of elements, like a sentence) is created within a medium (a loose coupling, like language). The decay of the form releases elements back into the medium for future use.
• Distinction (Laws of Form): Following George Spencer-Brown, every operation is a distinction that creates a marked space (inside) and an unmarked space (outside). The form is the unity of this difference.

Communication is the elementary operation; a synthesis of information, utterance, and understanding.

Complexity is the condition where every selection implies excluded possibilities that remain irritable in the background.

Self-Similarity is the recursive nature where the observer (sociology) uses the same distinctions as the object (society).

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2. Systemic Violence and Terrorism

Violence is analysed not as an external intrusion but as a specific type of social communication built into the system.

2.1 The Forced Attribution of Action

Violence occurs when the inherent ambiguity of communication is forcibly reduced to a single action.

• The Trap: While communication is usually reversible and flexible, violence eliminates action through action.
• Systemic Function: Violence is used to force an attribution (Zurechnung). It signals that a specific intent or outcome is unavoidable, thereby raping the open-ended nature of communication.

2.2 Terrorism as Communicative Strategy

Terrorism is identified as a strategy that uses physical violence to achieve symbolic effects. Terrorism is an act of powerless power. It challenges the state's monopoly on violence by forcing the state to react, often triggering an escalation dynamic that the state cannot easily control. Terrorism serves as a negation formula for world politics, similar to how Utopias functioned in the past. It forces society to face the conditions under which global order is or is not possible.

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3. The Public Sphere and Mass Media

The public sphere is characterised as a medium of self-organisation that infects society with the awareness of its own contingency.

3.1 Mechanisms of the Public Sphere

• Neutralisation: The public sphere strips away the specific private requirements of homes, schools, or businesses to look at them through a general lens.
• Thematisation: It controls social attention by switching themes, allowing for the polemic nature of public opinion to move from one target to another.
• Self-Organisation: By observing boundaries (e.g., between state and private life), the public sphere reveals that these boundaries are undecidable but decided, highlighting that things could always be otherwise.

3.2 Public Sphere vs. Mass Media

Backer distinguishes between these two often-conflated entities:

• Mass Media is a functional system that produces objects (facts, stories, news) through a mode of communication that separates senders from receivers.
• Public Sphere: A broader form of social self-description. It provides the form-contingency knowledge that the mass media uses to populate its reports.

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4. The Political System: Offices and Networks

Politics is defined as the system responsible for collectively binding decisions. Its influence is pervasive even in a deregulated global society.

4.1 The Evolution of Offices

The office is a critical evolutionary achievement that allows politics to function by:

• Separating Person and Institution: It allows for impersonal authority. One can respect the office even if the office-holder is disliked.
• Enabling Continuity: Offices allow for files, hierarchies, and long-term planning independent of individual biographies.

4.2 The Role of Contacts

Baecker posits a phenomenology of contacts as the reality-principle of politics.

• The Interface: While the office provides the formal structure, contacts provide the informal network through which decisions are actually accepted and implemented.
• The Dirty Business: Political decisions are not just about solidarity but about managing these networks. A politician’s power is often measured by the quality and exclusivity of their contact network.

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5. Gender and the Penates

Drawing on Hegel, Baecker explores gender as a fundamental social distinction that preserves the irony of the community.

• The Penates: Named after the Roman household gods, these represent the inner, lower gods of consciousness and biological life.
• The Irony of Femininity: Femininity is described as an ironic check on the community (masculinity/government). It represents the private and singular that can never be fully absorbed by the universal claims of the state or society.
• Ecological Boundary: The difference between man and woman acts as a boundary between communication (the social) and the reproduction of life/consciousness (the environment). This difference ensures that society remains irritable and prevents it from becoming a closed, totalising system.

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6. Sociological Methodology and the Observer

A recurring theme is the necessity of self-similarity in sociology.

• Observation of the Second Order: Sociology does not just look at society; it looks at how society looks at itself.
• Re-entry: Following Spencer-Brown, the re-entry occurs when the distinction used by the observer is the same as the distinction used by the object (society).
• Objective Neutrality: The sociologist must remain neutral even toward monstrous social possibilities like violence, as these are just as much a part of social constitution as desirable outcomes. Sociology’s value lies in its counter-intuitive insights that bypass everyday understanding.