Having just read Niklas Luhmann's Ecological Communication, I find myself again mulling the question of the binary code. In a previous post, I briefly flushed out Baudrillard's postmodern lament against the digital and its imposition of the code; for Baudrillard, it signaled the end of difference, and thus, the end of meaning. In Luhmann's systems theory, however, the binary code not only allows for meaning, it is the very precondition for it. Luhmann describes it like this: for him, any social system, being communicative, is inherently self-referential. It has limited access to what he terms the environment which is exterior to the system. The system can only communicate internally about the environment and about itself. As social systems further differentiate themselves into various sub-systems: i.e. religion, law, politics, sciencethe internal systems communications continue to be self-referential, and for this reason, tautological. For instance, he points to law, where the basic binary code through which its communication is channeled is legal/illegal. In reality, there is only unity, but to say that legal is legal is a tautology. Introducing the binarism, you introduce difference, i.e. the very condition for meaning that Baudrillard seeks. This also allows for the attribution of positive and negative valuations.

For Luhmann, rather than being a regressive slip into an undifferentiated murkiness, the binary code is a progressive march toward a kind of communicative clarity; he declares that "the codes are highly successful and important evolutionary achievements that have only attained their contemporary degree of abstraction and technical proficiency after a long development" (EC 38). So the first question that necessarily arises is: who is correct? Is the binary code a progressive or regressive mechanism? For the post-structuralists who attempted to dismantle the dualisms bequeathed by Cartesianism, it is a regressive structure that excludes intermediary positions (i.e. the purpose of Gremias semiotic square to visualize those extra relationships).  And, speaking of stucturalism, this Luhmannian reading of binary codes is rather structuralist in that it acknowledges the basic dualisms organizing society: the old raw/cooked having been replaced, perhaps, by something like analog/digital. Which leads me to my second question: if the binary code ultimately determines a degree of closure in the system (which Luhmann agrees that it does), and if the code only masks a larger unity, what are the codes underlying the structure of our contemporary sub-systems (i.e., education: tenure/adjunct?) and what tautologies do they obscure?