Semioses and Social Change. The Relevance of Semiosis on the level of Social Structure and the case of the Generative Metaphorization of Educational Communication Franz Kasper Krönig 1. Society and Semiosis Societal events can be described as sign processes in sign processes. More precisely they must be described in sign processes (how else?), but not necessarily as sign processes. Whereas it can be argued that “every thought is a sign” (Peirce CP 1.538), a commensurably categorical assertion with reference to society seems to be problematic. Even if we understand society as a “communicatively closed system” (Luhmann 1995: 403) in the sense that every societal operation is communicative, this does not necessarily mean that we describe society when we describe communication. One would not be including the structures of society, its type of differentiation, its devices for the increase of communicative probability, its organizations, its structural couplings, to name but a few examples. Hence, the sociologically decisive question “which selection of signs will be successful in the communicative process” (Luhmann 1995: 160), is not being posed within a semiotic frame but within a theory of symbolically general- ized communication media. 1 This media theory seems to provide exactly what sign theories lack in this regard: “Sign systems are far from possessing either an infrastructural or hypostructural virtus” (Rossi-Landi 1992: 248). It is quite clear that a sign theory which has not developed observation instruments for these structural processes in sign systems is unable to find them. However, the theory – or rather: the theories – of symbolically generalized communication media can show how social systems influence or even regulate the probability of communication by means of asymmetrical coding. When, for instance, the coding of legal communication works with the code »legal/ illegal«, the clear preference character of the code side »legal« is a substantial factor in the operativity of the law system. The preference value of this media code not only increases the motivation to participate in legal communication but also carries a reference to the function of this system in every single communication. All cases of change, modulation, or transforma- tion of the preference value would at once be cases of societal change. As soon as the prefer- ence orientation of a certain social system (economy, law system, politics, religion, art, education, science) changes, this system focuses on a changed societal problem, delivers a changed performance for the other systems in its environment, increases the probability of the connectivity of other communicative offers and produces different self descriptions. KODIKAS / CODE Ars Semeiotica Volume 33 (2010)  No. 1 – 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen