At the heart of humanity’s oldest stories lies the Tower of Babel, a monument not of stone but of ambition.

In the Book of Genesis, people shared one tongue and one purpose: to build a tower that reached the heavens, a structure that would anchor their unity and defy their dispersal. But God intervened, not by toppling stone, nor by silencing voices, but by fracturing language itself.

Words that once bound became noise to one another; understanding dissolved, and with it the possibility of collective action. Humanity did not lose speech, but something deeper: the shared horizon of communication. What fell at Babel was not the tower, but the capacity to be “we.”

In Niklas Luhmann’s view, their togetherness is not sentimental; it is structural. Communication is not a thing that moves between people. It is an event that happens when three selections coincide: a selection of information (what is being marked as relevant), a selection of utterance (how it is presented), and a selection of understanding (how it is taken up, including misunderstanding). If any one of the three is missing, there is no communication.

Life and consciousness, utterance and word, information and understanding.

None of these components can be present by itself.

None of these can exist alone. Only together do they create the fragile basis from which communication arises.

Communication does not rest upon essence, nor upon substance, but upon selection:

the selection of information,

the selection of its utterance,

and the selection of understanding, or misunderstanding.

Each is meaningless in isolation. Only together do they form communication.

Just like life and consciousness, communication is an emergent reality, a state of affairs.

Sui generis.

At the deepest level, there is emergence through closure and communication that appears as a process of self-selection.

A closure within the boundaries of language itself. The world cannot be described outside their own lineage of naming.

Life itself becomes visible only through symbols that stabilise meaning, through words that distinguish and preserve.

Thus, communication belongs neither to the body, nor to thought, nor to nature, nor to society in any absolute sense.

It belongs to its own closed circle of relations, a self-sustaining autopoietic system that creates itself through its own repetition.

The reality of communication lies not in matter, not in energy, but in form. Words become relations. Every form presupposes its environment.

Spoken language alone cannot sustain communication. Tone, hesitation, rhythm, gesture, and silence all serve as paralanguages that anchor meaning.

Paralanguage emerges as an embodied supplement, a horizon of trust that undergirds words.

Without it, communication collapses into ambiguity.

Yet paralanguage too is selective a nod, a pause, a lowering of the eyes.

Each introduces new layers of interpretation, new risks of misunderstanding.

But communication turns environment into system, transforming contingency into necessity.

Therefore, it is never the stone, nor the sound, nor the gesture that communicates, but the distinction that separates them as signs, and the recognition that these signs are selected for communication.