Page 107 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

90 A. Ziemann

Sustainability discourse is less about interpersonal contacts and social relationships
and more about global living conditions, as well as social values and structure. The
foundation for communication theory outlined below is then based not only on gen-
eral principles but is also embedded in a theory of society.

Communication Theory

In contrast to a techno-scientific understanding of communication, which has yielded
a number of complex transmission models (essentially of information transmission
between sender and receiver through a given channel), the social and human science
description of communication begins with face-to-face contact. Communication is
defined as the human and technologically based activity of the reciprocal use of signs
and the reciprocal interpretation of signs for the purpose of successful understanding,
coordinating action and shaping reality (Krallmann and Ziemann 2001: 13).
Communication is thus a social process in which at least two open-minded,
spatially bound actors are involved. With the help of signs, language and symbols –
whose effect on themselves and on others the participants observe – social orientation,
reciprocal control and informative action take place. The necessity of communica-
tion can be found in the human condition: each consciousness is isolated, our neuro-
physiological, cognitive, emotional processes are mutually unobservable and there
is no direct access to the thoughts, attitudes and intentions of the other. It is through
communication that ‘the interior is exteriorised’, that we can inform each other, that
we become social creatures. Communication is thus the principle of societal organ-
isation itself.
As a completed event – and in comparison to the attitudes, motives and goals of
those involved – communication is then something socially separate – in systems
theory we would say that it is ‘emergent’. That is why the meaning and effect of
communicative events cannot be attributed to one of the participants, nor can they
be mentally inferred. Interpersonal sequences of events, relationships, conversa-
tions and discourses have an immanent momentum and self-organisation. Out of
joint talk and action arises a social event that displays an asymmetric relation
between self and other, as a dialectic interrelationship.
Following Luhmann (1995, 1997) we can formulate this more radically. No human
subject is the author or transporter of communication and no single consciousness can
purposefully order communication. Communication itself constructs information,
mutual understanding and its recursive network. Between humans and society,
between consciousness and communication there is in fact a fundamental dependency
and causal relationship, but at the same time they both operate autonomously and in
different (psychic versus social) dimensions of reality.
If we inquire into the conditions of how others can be successfully understood
and what the common basis is for taking action and changing reality, then it becomes
apparent that, depending on the situation, we resort to common orientation schemes
and stocks of knowledge. On the one hand the sign and symbol systems, the rules