PHILOSOPHY/SOCIOLOGY OPEN COURT Luhmann Explained

Luhmann Explained2/19/112:30 AMPage xiIntroductionIn their “revolutionary” bestseller Empire, authors Michael Hardtand Antonio Negri (2000, 13 and 15) state that Niklas Luhmann,along with John Rawls, was a main influence on their work. Just asHardt and Negri’s project does, Niklas Luhmann’s social theorypresents a challenging, avant-garde view of contemporary society.The present book will highlight its unique relevance in regard tocurrent social and political issues. At the same time, it attempts toprovide English-speaking readers with a comprehensive introduction to his work, for it is not yet as accessible in English as it is inGerman, Spanish, and Italian. This is not to deny that majorachievements have already been made. Luhmann’s earlier magnumopus, Social Systems, was translated into English as early as 1995,and in the past few years a good number of other works havebecome available. In addition, there are also some very fine secondary studies, for example, by William Rasch (2000), and MichaelKing and Chris Thornhill (2003). There is also the highly recommended introduction to Social Systems by Eva M. Knodt, and a concise synopsis of Luhmann’s theory by Gotthard Bechmann andNico Stehr (2002).No single work, including this one, can pretend to exhaustivelypresent all of Luhmann’s ideas—that would be too much to coverin a brief introduction. My special focus will be not only the avantgardism and relevance of Luhmann’s social theory, but also themore philosophical issues touched on by his writings. I will, moreover, concentrate to a great extent on the later Luhmann, particularly on his grand treatise The Society of Society (Die Gesellschaft derGesellschaft , 1997), on Introduction to Systems Theory (Einführungin die Systemtheorie, 2002, a posthumously published transcript ofa 1991/92 lecture series), and on The Reality of the Mass Media(Die Realität der Massenmedien, 1996).xi

Luhmann Explainedxii2/19/112:30 AMPage xiiIntroductionThis book proceeds from simplicity to complexity. Part 1 beginswith a general description of systems theory as it was understoodand adapted by Niklas Luhmann. The first two sections in chapter1 are written for those who struggle with the difficulty ofLuhmann’s theory and concepts. I myself have gone through thisstruggle for many years, and I do not claim that it is over—I hope,however, that my experiences may have led to an exposition thatmight ease the struggles of others. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of part 1are a little more advanced and specific; they deal with how somemore or less traditional philosophical topics—reality, humanity,and the distinction between good and evil—are seen from aLuhmannian perspective. Part 2 is a case study of one ofLuhmann’s case studies that I find particularly interesting—it is areflection on the mass media as a social system. Part 3 describes thephilosophical context of Luhmann’s thought.The appendix contains three articles by Luhmann in Englishtranslation. I chose to include these three relatively short essaysbecause they directly relate to the issues discussed in this study andbecause they are—quite atypically for Luhmann’s otherwise notoriously difficult, lengthy, and sometimes even rather associativestyle—relatively concise and reader-friendly while still theoreticallydense and of a general significance. I have also provided a bibliography of works by and on Luhmann in English and a few notes onLuhmann research materials in German.

Luhmann Explained2/19/112:30 AMPage 1PART IA New Wayof Thinkingabout Society

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Luhmann Explained2/19/112:30 AMPage 31What Is Social Systems Theory?(a) Systems TheoryIn recent years complaints about an increasingly less humane worldseem to be on the rise. When dealing with institutions, even withinschools or hospitals, one often feels reduced to a mere number.Economically, all that matters is money—but what about the individuals behind the monetary figures? Politically, many people, evenin the “free world,” decry the lack of “true” democracy, a lack of atrue rule by the people. Organizations such as multinational corporations—or at least the political parties influenced by their donations—seem to be gaining increasing control of the governmentsat all levels, from local to global, and to be taking power out of thehands of individual citizens. And then, of course, there is the issueof technology and the mass media; computers and TV sets occupymore and more human space and time. It seems as if highly sophisticated machines are finally pushing human beings toward thefringes of society. All this is topped off by the rising fears of a biological dehumanization of humankind: genetic engineering seemsto be able to take reproduction out of the hands (or more precisely: the reproductive organs) of the human body. In the not toofar future, birth and death may no longer be individually contingent events of human life, but rather well planned technical operations. Facing all these “problems,” people are calling more loudlyand intensely for ethics and religion to come to the rescue ofhuman values. This is, for instance, evidenced by the emergence of“applied” or “professional ethics”—a new academic “metaprofession” created to reintroduce humaneness into all professions!13

Luhmann Explained42/19/112:30 AMPage 4Part 1: ANew Way of Thinking about SocietyInterestingly, and paradoxically, such a negative outlook on thefuture of humankind is paralleled by more optimistic and sometimes enthusiastic assessments. In the view of many, the impending progress of genetic engineering may finally put an end tohuman pain, sickness, and even death. Creating the biologicallyperfect human being may become possible. Likewise, computertechnology may immensely increase the intellectual abilities available to humankind. And communication technology has alreadybuilt the “global village” envisioned by Marshall McLuhan, theCanadian technology apostle of the 1960s. McLuhan viewed newtechnological developments as extensions of human capacities,and, in the same vein, current technology advertisement, be it forcommunication or bio-technology, hails great prospects for thefull realization of human potential in a new information age.Similarly, there is continued hope that the expansion of the market will eventually bring prosperity to everyone, that more effective education programs and health systems will enable futuregenerations to live better lives, that more professional governments and refined social institutions will increase our freedom andwell-being.Both attitudes, a pessimistic gloom in the face of waninghumaneness and an optimistic embracing of human prospects, areoften found in the same person. An American president, forinstance, may in the same speech appeal to the humanist and religious values of his subjects and praise the new achievements oftechnological and social engineering. One and the same movie orTV character may well be, on the one hand, a thoughtful personwho cares about family and human warmth and, on the otherhand, uses a computer to conduct overseas financial transactions.The humanist pessimist and optimist are only mutually exclusivewhen it comes to newspaper editorials or academic articles: hereone has to take sides. But, in real life, both attitudes seem to gotogether quite well. There is a fair share of both humanist optimism and pessimism in most of us. This may simply be becausethey have more in common than what is obvious at first sight—they are both “humanist.” Both attitudes somehow realize theimmense gap between present-day society and the traditional conception of it as a “human” world. In order to close the gap, thepessimist in us, feeling a certain nostalgia, longs to change theworld—it should be more human again to fit our good old con-

Luhmann Explained2/19/112:30 AMPage 5Chapter 1: What Is Social Systems Theory?5ception of it. The optimist in us takes another road and wants tochange the attitude—why can’t we be a bit more welcoming toour age and simply “extend” our understanding of what is humanso that we may see the wonderful possibilities in store for humanity? Neither of the two, however, seems to be willing to do awaywith the traditional conception of a human society and replace itwith a new one. This is left to social systems theory.Systems theory recognizes that the world—or rather: society—can no longer be aptly understood as a human one. Unlike the cultural pessimists, it does not blame society—or any of its individualagents—for this. And, unlike the optimists, it is not willing to celebrate the dehumanization of the humane as the greatest humanperfection.The primary starting point of social systems theory—or its “turning point” in comparison to its humanist predecessors—is that itno longer holds that current society can be successfully analyzedon the basis that it is (or should be) fundamentally humane, andthat it is, on principle, an assembly of individual human beings.This sounds, at first, rather counterintuitive. But this oddness mayturn out to be due to the fact that traditional (“Old European”)descriptions of society still dominate public education and the massmedia more than our actual experiences of social life.Old European philosophy (one may think of, for example,Plato’s Republic) tended to define society in terms of a group ofpeople: the polis was, in the words of Allan Bloom, “a communityof men sharing a way of life” (1991, 439–40). This did not substantially change in early modern social theory, when notions of asociety based on a “social contract” between its individual members were put forth (Hobbes, Rousseau). Nor did it change in latermodernity when thinkers, like the famous British utilitarian JeremyBentham, rationalized (or “technicized”) the idea of a communityof individuals so that it became a mathematical sum of individualswhose interests could be calculated with the help of statistics. Evenin the twentieth century, consensus theories of “communicativeaction” (Habermas) or of “fairness” (Rawls) still conceived of society on the basis of the group model and of communication betweenhuman beings. There is a strong “anthropocentric” tradition inEuropean and North American social philosophy that is certainly

Luhmann Explained62/19/112:30 AMPage 6Part 1: ANew Way of Thinking about Societyhard to overcome and informs the “common sense” understanding of what a society is.However, is it really more convincing to describe what happenswhen one buys a chocolate bar at a store or stock on the Internetas instances of “human interaction” than to describe them asevents in the function system of the economy? On what factualgrounds can one hold that zapping to a TV channel or acting in asoap opera is a way of taking part in the life of a community ratherthan taking part in the systems of mass media? And to what extentis the mechanical counting of a vote in an election more an act ofrecognizing the individual intentions of a citizen than an elementof a social procedure to distribute power? If one opts for the second description in each case, one steps towards social systems theory and one of its most basic assumptions: human beings do notand cannot communicate—only communication can.As opposed to the traditional Old European attempt todescribe society on the basis of its members (that is: a group of people or a community), systems theory tries to describe society onthe basis of its events: it looks at what actually happens. Whensomeone buys a chocolate bar or stock, this is understood as economic communication; when someone watches TV, this is understood as mass media communication; and when a vote is cast andcounted, this is understood as political communication. Theseexamples already show that communication is not restricted to language; often one can communicate equally well, for instance, withmoney or ballots. (While social systems theory is certainly influenced by the “linguistic turn,” it is also strongly influenced bysemiotics. Ferdinand de Saussure and George Herbert Mead are atleast as important to it as Richard Rorty and Ludwig Wittgenstein).But, isn’t it—as not only traditional European social theory suggests, but also, and maybe even more importantly, Indo-Europeangrammar suggests—still “one,” that is, an individual being, whocommunicates? When “one” casts a vote—isn’t it in the final analysis the “one” that counts rather than the vote?Once I had lunch at a self-service restaurant in downtown SanAntonio. I had just paid for my meal when the next customerapproached the cashier. Coincidentally, both the customer’s andthe cashier’s cell phones rang, more or less, at the same time, andboth men started a phone conversation. I could not overhear theirconversations, but let us assume that the well-dressed customer

Luhmann Explained2/19/112:30 AMPage 7Chapter 1: What Is Social Systems Theory?7was speaking with a client of his law firm, while the cashier wasspeaking with his wife. The two phone conversations went on forquite a while, and both men kept talking while the dinner was paidfor. So both men were simultaneously taking part in two communications. The customer was communicating economically (payingfor his food) and, at the same time, in the legal system (assumingthat he was talking to a client). The cashier was communicatingeconomically with the customer and, in the intimacy system, withhis wife (if it was her who called). As a matter of fact, it can be saidof both men that, at the time I saw them, they each were “one whocommunicates economically” and “one who communicates otherwise.” They both were ones who were, systemically speaking, two.I do not expect that either of these men later suffered an identity crisis and felt the need to consult a psychoanalyst. On the basisof the traditional social models mentioned above, they would,however, have undergone a severe personality split. They both hadlost their in-dividuality for a short time and turned into “dividuals.” The communication-performed-by-individuals model canexplain this short scene in only one way: both men quicklyswitched back and forth between communications. While suchswitching may have happened in their minds, so that their respective mental individuality was preserved, it did not emerge in thecommunication I observed. In fact, all communications, betweencustomer and cashier, and between them and their respectivecallers, went on smoothly. There was no rapid back and forth, noshort break between segments visible in the communications. Theeconomic communication was at no time interrupted by the phoneconversations, it did not even seem to be obstructed or prolongedby them—and vice versa.What I am trying to demonstrate with this example is that individuals and their thoughts are not an integral part of the events ofcommunication. If individuals and their thoughts were an integralpart of communication events, then the three communications inthe cell phone example could not have gone on simultaneously.They could only have unfolded in turn. But this was not the case,at least it was not what I observed. I witnessed two individuals eachperforming two separate and uninterrupted communications atthe same time. This observation illustrates the previously mentioned assumption of social systems theory. It is, empirically speaking (from an observer’s perspective), communication that

Luhmann Explained82/19/112:30 AMPage 8Part 1: ANew Way of Thinking about Societyconstitutes communication, and not human beings as individuals.Of course, human beings are necessary for communication to takeplace—but it is not they who are “operating” within communication. They are, rather, the external condition sine qua non of communication, but not an internal element of communication andsociety. What went on in the minds of the two men when theywere having their phone conversations was quite irrelevant inregard to the economic transaction that I saw—they were preoccupied with other things, but that did not prevent the economicexchange from functioning well. To explain what was going oneconomically, it would not help much to investigate the two men’sthoughts—instead one would have to describe the structures anddynamics of the exchange that took place.Niklas Luhmann therefore states:Within the communication system we call society, it is conventional toassume that humans can communicate. Even clever analysts have beenfooled by this convention. It is relatively easy to see that this statementis false and that it only functions as a convention and only within communication. The convention is necessary because communicationnecessarily addresses its operations to those who are required to continue communication. Humans cannot communicate; not even theirbrains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate. (1994a, 371)When we talk to each other or when we buy something or whenwe vote in an election, we say that “we” communicate—but it is,empirically speaking, always only the communication that communicates. When two people talk to each other—even the most intimate lovers—their minds and bodies are still outside of thecommunication, not inside it. In her foreword to the Americanedition of Luhmann’s book Social Systems, Eva M. Knodt illustratesthis point with the following example from literature:In the opening scene of Danton’s Death, the nineteenth-centuryGerman playwright Georg Büchner dramatizes what is easily recognized as the primal scene of hermeneutic despair. In response to hislover’s attempt to reassure herself of the bond of understandingbetween them, the protagonist makes a silent gesture toward her forehead and then replies: “—there, there, what lies behind this? Go on,we have crude senses. To understand one another? We would have to

Luhmann Explained2/19/112:30 AMPage 9Chapter 1: What Is Social Systems Theory?9break open each other’s skulls and pull the thoughts out of the fibersof our brains.” (Luhmann 1995a, xxiv)This is the perennial empirical problem—the “hermeneuticdespair”—with the traditional semantics of communication andsociety being “interpersonal.” We can, in communication, onlyconnect to the communication of others, but never to their mindsor brains, much less to the “human being” as such in any givencase. While communication cannot take place without humanbeings, human beings are, paradoxically enough, still totally inaccessible within communication. This is true even for the singleindividual: “I don’t know if I mean what I say. And if I knew, Iwould have to keep it to myself” (Luhmann 1994a, 387).Systemically speaking a theory that conceives of society as thesystem of communication has to locate minds and bodies—and, ofcourse, “human beings”—outside the operational realm of society.This is the “scandal” of social systems theory when looked at fromthe perspective of traditional “Old European” humanisms.By excluding minds and bodies from society, systems theoryestablishes three main types of systems: systems of communication(social systems), systems of life (bodies, the brain, and so on), andsystems of consciousness (minds).2 Each system is in the environment of others. Communication needs the environment of livingand psychic systems, just as a fish needs water. But this is also truevice versa: To be

David Ramsay Steele, Atheism Explained Luhmann Explained 2/19/11 2:30 AM Page ii. Luhmann Explained From Souls to Systems HANS-GEORG MOELLER OPEN COURT Chicago and La Salle, Illinois Luhmann Explained 2/19/11 2:30 AM Pag