Intercultural Communication in Confessional Legal Relations (Common and Particular in Russia and Japan)

The study of particularities of regional cross-country images of confession and intercultural communication as well as the semantic image surrounding these concepts is vital in today’s social life. The article analyzes denotations and connotations of the terms confession and intercultural communication in the Russian and Japanese sociocultural contexts from the point of view of a new research discourse — glocal religious studies with the focus on vernacular specifics of religiosity in Russia and Japan. The case study methodology includes description and analysis of how various views on certain aspects of religiosity correlate. It makes possible to adjust the theoretical understanding of the problem and weigh it against the variety of real-life communicational practices. The article investigates the complexity and dramatism of communication between members of the ingroup and others. The study bases on the materials from the history, media and academic discourses where in the internal and external of particular communities in the given historic circumstances may not only vary significantly, but also be intentionally marked to divide one from the other. Sometimes this demarcation takes a form of stigmatization that label one’s perspective as not-true or lawless. The paper describes two major types of culture: the first one (ethnocentrism in terms suggested by M. Bennet) derives from the idea that other’s statements are sealed and cannot be translated thus must be destroyed. The second type — ethnorelativism — comes from the idea of affinity and openness. It is presumed that taking one a different perspective and accepting diversity is empowering and gives start to an intercultural dialogue. Common and particular are the two basic viewpoints on any identity, when both positive and negative promotes understanding. The phenomenon of unity as similarity of indistinguishable (like grains of sand) on the one hand, and systemic unity of the different (like people) on the other hand, are considered within the framework of distancing extralinguistic social facts from the term that stand for them. The latter shown as special imaginary unities and descriptions of autopoietic systems.

The Death of Newspaper in the Perspective of Autopoietic Systems Niklas Luhmann (Case Study of Sinar Harapan Newspapers)

Recently in Indonesia, the number of newspapers keep declining while at the same time, more online media emerge. One of the newspapers that has stopped publishing was the legendary evening newspaper Sinar Harapan, which stopped printing in 2016. This study aims to analyze the “death” of the evening newspaper Sinar Harapan from the perspective of Niklas Luhmann’s autopoietic system. Luhmann considers mass media as an autopoietic system that must have certain characteristics in order to survive. This research using case study methods with history perspective. The data were collected using the literature study method. This research shows that the evening newspaper Sinar Harapan as an autopoietic system has to stop operating because of the complexity of the environment that Sinar Harapan cannot compensate for. Although Sinar Harapan has carried out an evolutionary process on the selection stage, it has failed to stabilize itself. On the other hand, Sinar Harapan also failed to carry out its function as a media system to always present novelties irritating the social system.

Autopoesis in on line learning

Conception of autopoesis has an important place among conceptions of self-organization. Biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela consider living beings as self-referring and self-constructing autonomous systems, namely, as autopoietic systems. They proclaimed: “All doing is knowing. All knowing is doing” in their famous book “The Tree of Knowledge”. It concerned all living beings, including human beings with the biological roots of their cognition. Author of the article choose this conception of self-organization as working model of on line teaching and learning just because the lack of such biologist roots in on-line communication. Unconsciousness but influenced features of live communication by humans with their “embodied mind” just loose in communication on line. Analyzing own experience of off line and on line teaching in frame of autopoetic approach, author tries to seek the means to overcome the restrictions of on line teaching and learning. The idea by Maturana and Varela about continually recurrent interactions between participants of doing and knowing which provide their creation of common world in common linguistic field became the main point of conclusion. Active communications between lector and students and between students in workshops can partly compensate an absence of live communication. It means that standard obvious relation between quantity of lectures and workshops have to be changed with free choice by lector among new special forms of on line learning. Original work of students for solving the tasks are preferable, especially if the tasks are connected with scientific or technologic researches. In any case supporting the discussions and debates, teachers can stimulate those recurrent interactions which guarantee the autopoesis as self-construction of common world in which self-organization of young persons is possible in their becoming the young specialists. The concept of autopoesis is able to maximize the success of communication between teachers and students and students to each other to provide feedback in the joint actions of cognition, creating the effect of sustainable self-organization in learning.

Luhmann's theory of psychic systems and communication in social work practice

Summary The aim of the article is to increase interest in the social systems theory of Niklas Luhmann among practicing social workers. The enigmatic statement from Luhmann that only ‘communication can communicate’ is explained with reference to his autopoietic systems theory which identifies three distinct types of systems: systems of communication, systems of life and systems of consciousness. The article proceeds to describe the meaning and nature of autopoietic systems before discussing the place of the individual in Luhmann’s theory and how it is relevant for practicing social workers. The concepts of psychic systems, structural coupling and communicative codes are described and discussed. Findings The conceptual framework derived from Luhmann’s systems theory is applied to a description of the social worker/client encounter. Communication in social work practice is polyphonic: it is structured by a hybrid of communicative codes which the practitioner must draw on depending on the auspices of the communicative context. The key conclusion of the article is that Luhmann retains a conception of the individual as an active agent in systems theory aiming ‘noise’ at the function systems with which the individual interacts. Applications The article suggests that the systems perspective presented provides social workers with a useful and nuanced framework for reflective practice because it makes the components of the practice system explicit and visible.

Autopoietic Cognitive Systems in Management Applications

This chapter presents the study of available literature describing autopoietic systems using the systematic mapping study method. Using the knowledge domain visualization technique, the areas of application for management cognitive systems and described therein self-sufficient processes responsible for the success of an organisation were presented. In the study, the research domains considered from the perspective of autopoiesis, such as cognitive computing (CC), information system (IS), communications systems, and Social Systems, were isolated. The study demonstrated that systems implemented based on CC in connection with IS are recommended for management systems. Research confirmed that CC applications using cognitive systems in autopoietic cognitive systems solutions constitute a developing field. Finally, specific and practical applications of cognitive technologies capable of being translated into the economic success of enterprises were indicated.

CRITICISM OF CERTAIN PROVISIONS OF THE PERFORMANCE THEORY BY ERIKA FISCHER-LICHTE (on the example of participatory performances)

The article attempts to critically analyze the performance theory created by the German scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte. The theory is applicable to some performative art practices, but nevertheless its key provisions do not fully meet the objectives, capabilities and the very specifics of participatory performance. Instead of such concepts as “strong presence”, “liveness”, “authenticity” and the idea of “energy exchange”, the author suggests to analyze participatory practices using the method of “choragraphic communication”, which is understood as individual and collective generation-test of the possible, constant reinvention of the action figurativeness, re-shaping of the participants’ physicality, co-joint transformation of meaning-making. Comparison of the performances by J. Ono and M. Abramovich allows us to distinguish the key differences between the two approaches to the analysis of participatory performance. It is anticipated that the effect of a performance is to provoke in every viewer an affective experience of the diversity of the undone, of the unmanifested, which, however, might become possible through the realization of one of its incarnations in a specific action. The peculiarity of performative involvement is that the processes, triggered by the actions of the performers and the responses of the participantsspectators, make accessible the affective test of the possible as being in potency. Using the works of the modern performance artist Tino Sehgal as an example, the author shows that spectator’s participation as a special communication instrument appeals to a different culture of knowledge transfer, which is based not on presentation, documentation and archiving, but on the situational self-configuration of autopoietic systems, on the living muscle “memory” of the participants, actualizing such phenomena as “bodily knowledge”, “morethan- human” perception and procedural assemblage. Participatory performances create conditions under which “random” and unexpected actions of participants turn out to be a condition for (self) recreation of the form of the assemblage machine through constant reincarnation of the invariants of the whole. Sehgal’s works reveal each participant-spectator as a kind of an “actant machine” capable of reconfiguring the entire system by their actions, and offer an interface for realizing the possibilities of “electracy communication”. At the same time, the processes of joint reconfiguration themselves become available to the affective experience of each of the participants. They make the assemblage machine generate its own “proto-subjectivity”; and, probably, it is in the individual perception of each participant and in the experience of the stages of its formation where the aesthetics of participatory action may lie.

“None’s Reflex”: Enactivism and Observational Philosophy on Consciousness and Observation

The paper is dedicated to the reconstruction of Alexander Piatigorsky’s observational philosophy within the context of the confrontation between two versions of the transcendental project of man-in-the-world. The first project accentuates the invariant functional organization of cognitive systems by abstracting from bodily, affective and phenomenological realization of this organization. On the contrary, the second project emphasizes the phenomenological perspective of the experience of givenness, always already dependent on whose experience this is and how the cognitive system living this experience is organized. The first project can be called functionalist, and the second – phenomenological. Ontological and epistemological positions of these projects are specified in the problem of the observer, its status in the world and cognitive practice. The observational philosophy possesses an intermediate position between these two programs since, aiming to disclose the invariant structure of observation, it proceeds from the factual experience of the embodied subject placed into the situation of self-observation and observation of the other subject. It is concluded that Piatigorsky’s philosophy borrows from the functionalist project the commitment to self-objectivation (observation of thinking is always the observation of the other thinking) and rejection from the spatiotemporal localization of cognitive activity (thinking is always “none’s” and does not belong to any kind of individual). With the phenomenological project of enactivism Piatigorsky shares the aspiration to disclose the invariant cognitive structures during the empirical observation of the real enactment of cognitive agency (the organization of cognitive systems is the same while its structural realizations are multiple), abandonment of substantialization of the self (“none’s” thinking is considered as the emergent effect of interaction among two or several observers – the autopoietic systems) as well as the refusal from theoretical formulation of the problem of consciousness (observational philosophy develops metatheoretical prolegomena to theory of consciousness, which in turn is considered as lived and essentially practical in phenomenology).