# Luhmann Explained  ## Metadata - Author: [[Hans-Georg Moeller]] - Full Title: Luhmann Explained - Category: #books ## Highlights - When someone 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 and counted, this is understood as political communication. These examples already show that communication is not restricted to language; often one can communicate equally well, for instance, with money or ballots. ([Location 161](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=161)) - While minds, bodies, and communications can be “individual,” a human being cannot. The “human being” does not exist as a singular entity. ([Location 243](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=243)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added May 19, 2023 at 10:37 PM - Maturana then found the bridge between the two concepts and spoke of autopoiesis, of a poiesis as its product—and he intentionally emphasized the notion of a product. Autopraxis, on the other hand, would be a pointless expression, because it would only repeat what is already meant by praxis. No, what is meant here is a system that is its own product. The operation is the condition for the production of operations. (2002a, 110–11) ([Location 270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=270)) - Reality is not an all-embracing whole of many parts, it is rather a variety of self-producing systemic realities, each of which forms the environment of all the others. There is no common “world” in reality, because reality is in each instance an effect of “individual” systemic autopoiesis. Reality is transformed from created oneness to constructed difference. ([Location 293](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=293)) ## New highlights added May 21, 2023 at 9:18 AM - Social systems theory borrows not only the concept of autopoiesis from biological systems theory, but also the concept of operational closure. The theory views social systems as operationally closed because, like biological systems, they are self-producing “organisms” of communication that consist of the connecting of system-internal communication with system-internal communication. ([Location 321](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=321)) - The external complexity of the environment is reduced by systemic operations, and this reduction is accompanied by an internal increase of systemic complexity. ([Location 371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=371)) - Social systems theory denies both a biological and a “spiritual” grounding of society. Life and consciousness are not parts of society. They operate, so to speak, outside the “membrane” of society (again, a biological metaphor) that is constituted by operations of communication. Social systems theory assumes that communication can—analogously, but independently—establish its own systemic autopoiesis through its own operational means. ([Location 440](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=440)) - Organizations can also be called “systems of decision.” ([Location 607](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=607)) ## New highlights added May 21, 2023 at 9:19 PM - In the time before functional differentiation (I will discuss the historical dimensions of social systems theory in the next chapter) a quotation from the Bible could prove a scientific truth claim wrong, and when accused of a crime, one could represent oneself in court. This has thoroughly changed and the theory of functional differentiation and operational closure explains the results of this change. ([Location 633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=633)) - Structural coupling establishes specific mechanisms of irritation between systems and forces different systems to continuously resonate with each other. The two concepts of irritation and resonance are used by social systems theory to explain how operationally closed systems “interact.” Through taxes, for instance, the political system irritates the economy. The economic system resonates with these irritations by adding taxes to sales prices. Under the conditions of structural coupling, irritation and resonance gain the status of permanent influences between systems. In this way, the structural development of both systems is interrelated. ([Location 723](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=723)) - a continuous irritation-resonance relationship between two systems is established, then increases in the structural complexity of one system will bring about increases in the structural complexity of the other. If politics irritates the economy with more complex tax regulations, the economy will “resonate” by producing more complex methods to maximize profits. This will in turn “irritate” politics, possibly resulting in the development of still more complex tax policies. ([Location 732](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=732)) - Society is not made up of small units that constitute a larger unit, it is rather based on differences that constitute more differences. ([Location 759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=759)) - Modern society is a complex multiplicity without a center, an essential core, or a hierarchy. It is a complex multiplicity of a wide variety of system-environment realities. Systems change, they come and go, and the same is true for the “deep structures” of society. Functional differentiation is not the telos or goal of social evolution. Just as other types of differentiation preceded it, still others may follow. ([Location 777](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=777)) - This passage makes reference to all four types of differentiation discussed by Luhmann: segmentary differentiation, center/periphery differentiation, stratified differentiation, and functional differentiation. ([Location 797](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=797)) - Segmentary differentiation is defined as the equal differentiation of social subsystems “on the basis of descent, of communal living, or by a combination of these two criteria” (1997a, 613). Many societies that were formerly called “archaic” or “primitive” were based on segmentary differentiation. They were also sometimes called tribal societies. ([Location 798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=798)) - An example of a society with a significant center /periphery distinction would be ancient Rome. ([Location 829](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=829)) - Stratified differentiation, as pointed out in the above quotation, characterizes medieval Europe and the Indian caste system. Its definition is rather clear-cut: “We only want to speak of stratification when society is represented as an order of rank and when order without differences of rank can no longer be imagined” (1997a, 679). ([Location 839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=839)) - In a society based on functional differentiation human beings can no longer be identified in reference to a singular subsystem. ([Location 883](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=883)) - Functional differentiation cannot simply be steered or changed by good intentions. Society is much too complex and polycentric for such illusions. No person can steer a society of autopoietic function systems. Systems steer themselves (Luhmann 1997c). Of course, politicians of various ideologies, ads from the multinational companies, and the global mass media still vehemently cling to this illusion. ([Location 1165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1165)) - Sense is therefore technically defined by Luhmann (again in connection to Husserl) first as the “unity of the difference between the actual and the possible” (see Baraldi, Corsi, Esposito 1997, 170–73). Or, more extensively: ([Location 1196](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1196)) - ship locates itself within its horizon—but thereby realizes that it can move. The ship is not bound only by its actual location; its horizon is a horizon of possibilities. It could also be elsewhere. Sense-making is this interplay between the actual and possible. What we think makes sense within a horizon of possibilities. Without a context of sense, thoughts cannot make sense. Similarly, communication without a context of sense cannot make sense. Our minds and communications operate within a sense-horizon like a ship operates on a body of water. These operations take place on the basis of a distinction between what is actual and what is possible. ([Location 1204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1204)) - First, a system can observe an environment and make sense of it by producing the distinction between system and environment. Then, secondly, it can also perform a re-entry by relating that distinction to itself and, so to speak, be self-referential in the way it used to be other-referential. ([Location 1225](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1225)) - 152). Or, in Luhmann’s words: “The difference system/environment occurs twice: as the difference produced by the system, and as the difference observed within the system” (1997a, 45). ([Location 1228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1228)) - one accepts this theoretical disposition, one can neither assume that there exists a world at hand (vorhanden) consisting of things, substances, and ideas, nor can one designate their entirety (universitas rerum) with the concept of a “world.” For sense-systems the world is not a giant mechanism that produces states out of states and thus determines the systems themselves. The world is rather an immeasurable potential for surprises, it is virtual information that needs systems to produce information, or more precisely; to ascribe to selected information the sense of being information. (Luhmann 1997a, 46) This passage sums up quite nicely Luhmann’s constructivist theory of reality. ([Location 1233](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1233)) - Once more: reality is a product of (cognitive-constructive-observational) differentiation—not of a singular world that is given “at hand.” ([Location 1283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1283)) - If reality is conceived as a cognitive construct, as an effect or correlate of observation, then descriptions of reality become descriptions of observation. When observation becomes an integral part of reality, it can no longer be understood as a kind of Archimedean Point—such as the one Descartes claimed to have found in his Meditations. There is no one place where all that is certainly real can be grounded. Observation loses its simplicity—an observer can no longer observe reality without taking into account its very observation as a generating element of reality. A constructivist view of reality directs the attention of observation to the observation, so that the observation of reality becomes an observation of the observation of reality. It becomes second-order observation—and the theory of second-order observation is called second-order cybernetics. Second-order cybernetics is concerned with the reality-construction of observing systems—and here the expression “observing systems” has a double meaning: second-order cybernetics observes systems that are themselves systems of observation, it is observing systems that are observing systems. ([Location 1285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1285)) - The unconscious is an unconscious that marks the blind spot of a person’s consciousness that can only become conscious to someone who deals with this person. (2002a, 158–59) ([Location 1355](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1355)) - We . . . follow the legitimizing systems such as science, economy, politics, or mass media of which we are not independent but who themselves are also only observing observations. (2002a, 140–41) The virtuality-effect of the social reality in which we currently live and in which the social subsystems exist can be explained by second-order observation. Social systems observe—and thereby, of course, construct reality—by observing how others observe. Functional differentiation plus second-order observations are two main characteristics of the present. ([Location 1367](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1367)) - Practically all modern function systems “observe their own operations on the level of second-order observation” (Luhmann 1997a, 766). Science, for instance, has developed the medium of academic publication for processing its second-order observations. What primarily counts for these publications is not to come forward with a completely new first-order observation—this would hardly be understood, and even less likely accepted—but to show one’s familiarity with the publications of others (as I do in the present book in regard to Luhmann’s publications). The researcher must “demonstrate in the medium of publications that he has considered the state of research, that is, that he has observed what others have observed. He must show that he has put his own presentation together with a care that enables others to observe how and what he has observed” (Luhmann 1998, 58). The ability to follow this systemically legitimizing pattern of scientific second-order observation (that is, the ability to write something that can be published) is what students are primarily taught once they reach the level of graduate studies—because here education basically becomes systematic training for the pursuit of an academic career. In a systemically hybrid organization like a university, the switch from the education to the science system takes place when it is no longer grades but publications that matter. In the humanities and the social sciences, this usually happens somewhere around the Ph.D. level. ([Location 1381](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1381)) - Each mind is an individual psychic system, and therefore each will develop individual structures that resonate with its environment—especially, of course, with its social environment with which it is structurally coupled (or, in the older Parsonian terminology: is in “interpenetration”). ([Location 1497](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1497)) - How we structure our own consciousness is ultimately decided by our own consciousness; mental structures are “the result of an individual system history” of the mind (Luhmann 2002a, 137). ([Location 1504](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1504)) - (segmentary, center/periphery, stratified, and functional) ([Location 1535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1535)) - Note: Tribal Rome caste system - Or, to put it more dramatically: the individual is torn apart as a social being—as Luhmann writes, “in any case, the unity of the multiplicity of possible self-identifications becomes the greatest individual problem that everyone has to resolve for him/herself and that is no longer resolvable by conformity to morality and consciousness, by repressing the worse ego” (1989, 225). The father confessor who had to take care of the sanity of the individual souls of Old European individuals is replaced by New European psychiatrists and therapists who now look after the multiple selves. Instead of falling apart into multiple selves the subjective individual has another choice that is, according to Luhmann, preferred by most as a reaction against these individuals’ paradoxical situations. It can become, in Luhmann’s terminology, an homme copie, an “imitational person.” “This means: to admit from the first the failure of the programme of individuality and to establish one’s principle of life on the opposite. To be able to be different then means: to be just like someone else” (1989, 221). In living a “copied existence,” one borrows one’s originality from others. Just like in the world of fashion, one becomes special by copying what others present as being special. ([Location 1601](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1601)) - It is important to stress once more that social systems theory by no means denies the impact of social theory and social activism. This impact, as in the case of Marxism, can be immense. But it does not believe that such an impact can be predicted or decided by a theory or the political groups that claim to represent it. In a society based on functional differentiation, social developments cannot be imposed by one system on another. Society as a whole cannot be directed. Function systems are operationally closed and function autopoietically. No human being and no academic theory can guide them. Thus social systems theory does not claim to know how to make the world better—and it does not claim to be able to predict the future shape of society. It can hardly be translated into any kind of immediate activism—but it can give an explanation of how activisms communicatively function within a society of functional differentiation. ([Location 1799](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1799)) - Society is a communication system; it can only communicate about its environment. Society cannot act more or less ecologically—it can only have a more or less ecologically communicating politics, law, economy, and so forth (Luhmann 1986a, 218). Today, movements, protests, and activisms are, after all, communications within a functionally differentiated society and can never be immediate “action.” ([Location 1867](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1867)) - These kinds of activism seem to much more readily accept functional differentiation than, for instance, the ecological movement in Germany. They have harmonized their aims and their semantics with a “principal” goal of functional differentiation: all-inclusion. ([Location 1904](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1904)) - Such human rights movements are not antagonistic to society, they are in more or less perfect accord with functional differentiation. It is no wonder that their semantics are shared by most politicians, by the mass media, and even by the economy. They might even turn into a new type of social system itself. In The Society of Society (1997a, 847–65) and in the volume Protest, Luhmann reflects extensively on this possibility. It is highly questionable, though, whether one should still call these movements “protests.” They do not oppose society and do not change it—they contribute to functional differentiation and represent a further increase of its complexity. Modern “protest” movements are possibly among the best adapted and systemically conformist developments in society. ([Location 1922](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1922)) - Morality means, so to speak, the conditions in the market of social esteem (Luhmann 1990b, 19). Luhmann distinguishes between “approval” and “esteem” by following Talcott Parsons’s usage of these terms. While approval is distributed according to achievements in limited contexts (such as good results in sports, arts, or education), esteem concerns the acceptance of the whole person as a communicative agent (Luhmann 1990b, 17–18). ([Location 1986](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=1986)) - History attests to the fact that wars and crimes against humanity were often accompanied by moral communication. ([Location 2012](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2012)) - One should, Luhmann says, be very cautious with morality and “only touch it with the most sterile instruments,” since it is a “highly contagious substance” that easily infects communication (1989, 359). ([Location 2021](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2021)) - If, taking into account the above deliberations, one could imagine that if Luhmannian theoreticians were invited to take part in the now popular deliberations on Applied or Professional Ethics, they might come up with a suggestion like the following. Public broadcasts and performances that contain a high dose of morality—for instance, many movies, journalistic commentaries, and not a few televised political speeches—must be supplemented with an obligatory warning, just like the ones we find on cigarette packs: “This product is full of morality and may therefore lead to unwanted communicative overengagement, possibly resulting in damage to both personal and social health.” ([Location 2039](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2039)) - Note: Trigger warning - This is what social systems theory tries to do. It tries to enlighten society—not about the slumbering potentials of rationality—but about the limits of rationality in a society of function systems. Seen in this way, the claims of systems theory are very modest or, at most, rather subtle: we cannot do much, but at least we can know why the opposite claim is presumptuous. ([Location 2059](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2059)) - effects. I think the subversive effects Luhmann hints at in the quotation above are related to the blind trust that the humanist semantics still often enjoys in our nonhumanist society. ([Location 2067](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2067)) - To what extent do career options and the options for social inclusion provided by functional differentiation correspond to the humanist semantics of individuality? ([Location 2092](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2092)) - It is potentially more subversive than many of the current protest or human rights movements regarding the distrust it has of the currently dominant social self-descriptions. Therefore it may have the potential to influence protests to go beyond the imagination of current or recent social criticisms. ([Location 2095](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2095)) - In a certain sense, the mass media are among the most “modern” of all modern function systems. Therefore, they may be especially well suited for demonstrating the decisively modern aspects of Luhmann’s theory of modern society: its nonhuman, global, polycontextural, and radically constructivist features. In addition to this, the mass media may demonstrate more drastically than other systems a certain facet of the meaninglessness of contemporary sense-production. ([Location 2114](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2114)) - Like every piece of information it becomes information (or more precisely: general information) only by being selected by the mass media as information rather than as noninformation. If it is the American president in question, it is likely to become information; if it is you and I, it is not. The code of the mass media operates by making these distinctions. ([Location 2187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2187)) - personalities have to be refreshed again and again. Again: exceptions can be made. The body parts of Pamela Anderson can be displayed more than once, so there is “the possibility of repetition.” This is especially the case in mass media advertising (Luhmann 2000a, 20). Still, Luhmann says, this can be well interpreted in accordance with the code information/noninformation: “The same advertisement is repeated several times in order thus to inform the reader, who notices the repetition, of the value of the product” (2000a, 20). Repeated advertisement and continuous display of the same body parts only state: Okay, this is not new information, but you should understand that the presented information is something you cannot get enough of. ([Location 2219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2219)) - Luhmann names news (and documentary reports), advertising, and entertainment as the three program strands that again each have a variety of programs or “fields of selection.” ([Location 2231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2231)) - Luhmann defines advertising as the “self-organization of folly”: “How can well-to-do members of society be so stupid as to spend large amounts of money on advertising in order to confirm their belief in the stupidity of others? It is hard not to sing the praise of folly here, but it obviously works” (2000a, 44). Advertising fools us—we all know this, both the advertiser and the consumer, but no one cares. Advertising “seeks to manipulate, it works insincerely and assumes that that is taken for granted. It takes, as it were, the deadly sin of the mass media upon itself—as if in so doing all other programs might be saved” (Luhmann 2000a, 44). Advertising is the Jesus Christ of the mass media—by its humility and its willing acceptance of being looked down upon, it grants salvation to the other program strands. Okay, we all know this is just a stupid commercial—thus it is not real and not even very entertaining (we have already seen it a hundred times), but if this is so, then the previous news was really real and the following movie will be truly entertaining. Luhmann grants advertising another merciful feature. Among its most important functions is one of well-needed charity: it provides “people who have no taste with taste” (Luhmann 2000a, 46). ([Location 2249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2249)) - Instead of rules, the second reality created by entertainment makes use of information. A film, a song, or a novel is a second reality that is constituted by a sequence of information that creates a “world.” A film or a novel begins with information—in Luhmann’s and Spencer Brown’s technical language: with the drawing of a distinction. It then goes on from there. It may begin with the distinction between the woman in love and the man who does not love her—and then a whole world is constructed by a sequence of further information. ([Location 2306](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2306)) - The mass media fuel social dynamics by the constant irritation of society. They inject speed into society. ([Location 2351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2351)) - Public opinion is, after all this, neither the mere fashion of opinions as it was believed in the seventeenth century nor is it the medium of rational enlightenment or the “puissance invisible” which were expected in the eighteenth century to leave tradition behind. It is the medium of the self-description and the world-description of modern society. It is the “Holy Spirit” of the system, the communicative availability of the results of communication. (1997a, 1108) ([Location 2404](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2404)) - This is somewhat similar to the confusion one might experience when coming back to a soap opera after missing several weeks of it. ([Location 2445](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2445)) - The mass media obviously cannot “distort” reality—because there is no such “essential” thing that is simply distorted. All social function systems are observing systems—in the double meaning of the term. All social function systems construct the reality they observe by developing themselves as autopoietic systems of “cognition.” ([Location 2543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2543)) - We must observe the mass media as an observing system that produces both its own reality and the reality of what it observes by its observations. ([Location 2574](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2574)) - In order to explain the specific structural coupling between the mind and the mass media, Luhmann makes use of psychological terminology and borrows the notions of cognitive map, prototype, frame—and, in particular, of schema and script.42 ([Location 2668](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2668)) - Schemata are not the storehouse of cognitive impressions, but rather the cognitive tools for the production of information—and thus for the performance of cognitive autopoiesis. ([Location 2673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2673)) - Schemata are rather the “thermostats” that link the mind and the mass media together. ([Location 2682](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2682)) - The mass media present us with the schemata for “self-realization.” In order to be a modern personality we have to have a personality that goes beyond our functional identities. It is not enough to simply be a mother, a lawyer, and on the city council—one has to be something “unique” as well. ([Location 2695](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2695)) - There are only meanings, in the plural—contingent constructs within horizons of sense. ([Location 2713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2713)) - If, however, one were to trace the larger theoretical context out of which Luhmann’s theory arose, one would also have to mention sociologists like Parsons and Gehlen, biologists like Maturana and Varela, the cybernetics of von Foerster and von Glasersfeld, the logic of George Spencer Brown and Gotthard Günther, and the “ecology” of Bateson. ([Location 2731](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2731)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Radical constructivism, however, begins with the empirical assertion: Cognition is only possible because it has no access to the reality external to it. A brain, for instance, can only produce information because it is coded indifferently in regard to its environment, i.e. it operates enclosed within the recursive network of its own operations. Similarly one would have to say: Communication systems (social systems) are only able to produce information because the environment does not interrupt them. And following all this, the same should be self-evident with respect to the classical “seat” (subject) of epistemology: to consciousness. (1988b, 8–9) ([Location 2753](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2753)) - Tags: [[pink]] - While it was still assumed that there was a reality independent of cognition, it was granted that the realization of this reality was contingent upon cognitive structures. Thus the realization of reality was a process of cognitive reality construction. ([Location 2767](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2767)) - Cognitive systems establish themselves by operational closure. By differentiating themselves operationally, they construct themselves by establishing a difference between themselves and an environment. Cognition is based on the establishment of this difference—it does not happen in spite of this difference, but because of it. There is no “ontological” necessity of cognition, but if it is there, and it obviously is, it depends on the differentiation of a cognizing system. ([Location 2779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2779)) - This “radicalization” of cognitive constructivism leads, in summary, to several major differences from the Kantian theory: • Cognition is not per se an act of consciousness. It can take on any operational mode. • There is no a priori, transcendental structure of cognition; cognition constructs itself on the basis of “operational closure” and this is an “empirical”45 process, which varies from system to system. • No complete description of cognitive structures is possible because these structures are continuously evolving. • Reality is not singular—there is not one specific reality, but a complex multiplicity of system/environment constellations. • A description of reality is itself a contingent construction within a system/environment relation. ([Location 2788](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2788)) - Luhmann strictly denies any application of the traditional concept of subjectivity in regard to social theory. Here, he completely leaves Kantian terrain and thus remains in sharp opposition to later post-Kantian theoreticians of spirit (Hegel), intersubjectivity (Husserl), or rational consensus (Habermas) as will be shown in the following sections.48 ([Location 2813](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2813)) - a main difference between Hegel and Luhmann—the shift from “world spirit” to a theory of differentiation—but ([Location 2833](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=2833)) - Luhmann reflected more systematically on science than on technology—since, unlike technology, is a social system and consists of communication. Luhmann dedicated one of his lengthy monographic case studies to the analysis of this system (Luhmann 1990c). The outcome is at times very reminiscent of Thomas Kuhn’s analysis of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, although Luhmann refers only sporadically to this book (see, for instance, Luhmann 1990, 342). Both Kuhn and Luhmann look at science sociologically and historically. The evolution of science is not so much an evolution of the knowledge of objects, but the evolution of a certain type of communication about objects. An analysis of the history of science therefore becomes for both authors an analysis of the communicative production of truth. ([Location 3154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=3154)) - With supertheory, the world does not become morally better, more rational, or spiritually complete. It only becomes more distinct. ([Location 3197](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=3197)) - 1990c. Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. ([Location 3374](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=3374)) - Accordingly, cognition is manufactured by operations of observing and by the recording of observations (description). This includes the observation of observations and the description of descriptions. In any case an observation of the distinction takes place and, depending on the distinction, the indication of something. The concept is indifferent in regard to the system’s type of autopoiesis, i.e., indifferent to the form of operation that may be life, consciousness, or communication. It is also indifferent with respect to the type of recording (memory); it may be biochemical fixations, but it may also be written texts. The observing and describing itself, however, always has to be an operation that is capable of autopoiesis, i.e., of the performing of life or actual consciousness or communication, because otherwise it could not reproduce the closure and difference of the cognizing system; it could not take place “in” the system. ([Location 3868](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=3868)) - Tags: [[pink]] - One then easily sees that one still has to distinguish the distinguishing of the distinctions with which observers work and which can be observed in the observations of observers from the indistinct which once was called God, and today, if one distinguishes system and environment, is called world, or, if one distinguishes object and cognition, reality. ([Location 3962](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=3962)) - Tags: [[pink]] - But, on the other hand, language is also not the system that enables the construction of cognition as a real operation. It is no system at all. Its efficacy lies instead in the structural coupling between consciousness and communication. ([Location 4078](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=4078)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The guiding question is then, which (autopoietic) operations close a system? And further, which form of structural coupling takes the connection between system and environment on when such a closure emerges? Such a switch has far-reaching and currently hardly predictable consequences. For epistemology it leads to the radically constructivist thesis that cognition is only possible when and because systems close themselves operationally on the level of their distinctions and indications and thus become indifferent towards that which is thus excluded as environment. The insight that cognition can only be gained through interrupting all operational relations with an external world does not therefore say that cognition is nothing real or that it would not indicate something real; it only says that there can be no correspondences to the operations in the environment from which a cognizing system differentiates itself, because if this were to be the case the system would steadily dissolve itself into its environment and thus make cognition impossible. ([Location 4102](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=4102)) - Tags: [[pink]] - One would no longer have the possibility of doing what is attempted in the following: to investigate the problem that came to expression with the distinction between barbarians and Hellenes—a problem which, under the conditions of present-day social structures, is likely to take on a very different shape from Greek antiquity. A supposition arises that this new shape may be the distinction between inclusion and exclusion. ([Location 4126](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=4126)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Already the idea (that emerged from Europe, and that Husserl had sketched in his renowned Vienna Lectures in May 1935 )bb that the life-style of the rationally enlightened, socially responsible human being who only worships reason represents the telos of humankind ought to be terrifying. This would amount, as stated above, to a totalitarian logic that could no longer recognize any “outside,” and that would therefore lack another side which it needs merely on mathematical grounds in order to be a form and to offer possibilities of observation. ([Location 4193](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=4193)) - To the surprise of the well-meaning it must be ascertained that exclusion still exists, and it exists on a massive scale and in such forms of misery that they are beyond description. ([Location 4241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=4241)) - In order to survive they have to have capabilities of perceiving dangers and of making available what is most needed—or resignation and indifference with regard to all “bourgeois” values: including order, cleanliness, and self-respect. And if one adds up what one sees one can conceive of the idea that this may be the guiding difference of the next century: inclusion and exclusion. ([Location 4249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=4249)) - Moreover, the mutual-increase connection between culture (Bildung) and freedom predicted by neo-humanists did not come true, but has rather been dissolved. In modern supply-society, freedom is not restricted by coercion, but rather structured by supply in such a way that the enacting of freedom can no longer be attributed to the self-realization of the individual. One buys for a good price, watches the advertised films, chooses a religion or not as one likes—just like the others. Even God is a supply-God. ([Location 4272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004URM390&location=4272))