Stabilization through Instability:
Ganymed as an Epistemic Environment for Observing the Operative Structure of Meaning in Luhmannian Systems Theory
This paper examines the play Ganymed (Steindor, 1974–1975) initially as an epistemic instrument for second-order observation of the structure of meaning within Luhmannian systems theory – and shows, in the course of the analysis, that this description falls short. While a companion paper analyzes the stabilization of modern democracies through conformity regimes and procedural alignment, this contribution examines their micro-structural foundations in psychic systems.
Seven requirements for an epistemic instrument, derived from Luhmann’s concept of meaning – meaning must operate rather than represent, keep contingency open, prevent closure, generate recursion, preserve paradoxes, enable self-observation, and, as an extension of classical systems theory, include the observer – are demonstrated on the play itself: in the failure of description, the oscillation between part and whole, and the experience of Zwischenzeitlichkeit (interstitial temporality).
In doing so, the analysis exceeds its own starting question. Ganymed does not measure the conditions of observability but generates the space of meaning in which they first become experienceable – the play thus appears less as an instrument than as an epistemic environment. As a theoretical touchstone for this theory of epistemic observability, a comparison with large language models then follows: AI systems, too, continue meaning without understanding it – a structure that Ganymed had already made experienceable fifty years before its technical realization. Finally, this micro-structural dynamic is related, as resonance rather than causality, to societal conformity regimes.
The paper’s contribution lies in a twofold epistemic gain: knowledge from a system – the operative processes of the play itself – and about systems in general, gained through an epistemic rather than a hermeneutic reading. Literature thus becomes not evidentiary material for an already-fixed thesis, but itself a site of knowledge, precisely in the spirit of the conference theme “Meaning. Observed with …”.
