The aesthetic mode of communication is not only used in the art system. It appears, for example, in a variety of rhetorical figures in everyday speech and is present in language games that operate with ambiguity in advertising or journalism. It also manifests itself in discourses in which speakers or writers want to draw attention to certain issues and use the poetic to emphasise an utterance.

Within a paradigm of guidance, aesthetic communication aims to entertain recipients through 'distraction'. Perceptual processes are triggered, of which no one can say with certainty where they direct the readers. In the case of literature, it is the text that defines a framework, thereby determining what is being talked about and what is not talked about.

In contrast to forms of management that are geared towards increasing efficiency or defining objectives, literary texts are not expected to have a fixed impact; a view that is also supported by systemic management theory in relation to communicative events in organisations. The fluidity of meanings must always be taken into account. This is the risk of any language game.

Text by Serge Honegger: Excerpt from the study «Lenkung und Ablenkung» (Control and Deflection), Schwabe-Verlag Basel, 2019, p. 12, 13 and 16