The Mediality of Looseness

摘要

This article investigates the status of looseness for media theory. It explores what might follow if we conceive of looseness not only as the imaginary construction of an observer, and not only as the logical prerequisite for thinking tightness, but as a positive category of its own. Taking looseness seriously produces theoretical and analytical challenges: theoretically, it questions relational theories, pointing at a moment of the elementary that cannot be dissolved into relations;2 diagnostically, this leads us to the question of how the looseness of media inscribes itself in social systems. It first turns to the concept of media outlined by the Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider in the 1920s (I). Influenced by gestalt psychology, Heider introduced the distinction between media (loose coupling) and things (tight coupling). For Heider, the defining characteristic of basic media-such as air, water, or the hand-is the loose coupling of their elements or digits. This approach, based on a physical understanding of media, has been surprisingly influential in sociology, but with significant shifts. Niklas Luhmann has introduced Heider's concept of medium as a core concept into his sociological media theory (Ⅱ). He turns looseness-along with the notion of medium-into an observational category. I will discuss how this observational transformation works and what effects it entails for looseness. Drawing from Karl Weick's usage of loose coupling in organization theory, in the next section I argue for understanding looseness not simply as the construction of an observer (Ⅲ). My reading of Weick focuses on how he turns looseness into a social analytical category. The final section of the essay (Ⅳ) discusses how looseness can be used as a diagnostic category for contemporary society that is not restricted to organizations.