Niklas Luhmann

"On Amazon.com, a reader of my book Luhmann Explained wrote "... if your teenager is bad, don’t ground him; make him write an essay on the sociological theory of Niklas Luhmann.” I sympathize with this reader’s point of view. Having read texts by Luhmann for about twenty years, I have increasingly asked myself why, even though I find the theory very appealing, its inventor did not manage to express it in a reasonably enjoyable manner. Sometimes, particularly in his later works, Luhmann’s irony and humor interrupt his otherwise extremely dry, unnecessarily convoluted, poorly structured, highly repetitive, overly long, and aesthetically unpleasing texts."

"Die folgenden Untersuchungen wagen diesen Übergang zu einem radikal antihumanistischen, einem radikal antiregionalistischen und einem radikal konstruktivistischen Gesellschaftsbegriff."

"We are still spellbound by a tradition that arranged psychological faculties hierarchically, relegating ‘sensuousness’ — that is, perception — to a lower position in comparison to higher, reflective functions of reason and understanding. The most advanced versions of ‘conceptual art’ still follow this tradition. By refusing to base themselves in sensuously perceptible distinctions between works of art and other objects, these works seek to avoid reducing art to the realm of sense perception."

"The activity of observing establishes a distinction in a space that remains unmarked, the space from which the observer executes the distinction. The observer must employ a distinction in order to generate the difference between unmarked and marked space, and between himself and what he indicates. The whole point of this distinction (its intention) is to mark something as distinct from something else. At the same time, the observer — in drawing a distinction - makes himself visable to others. He betrays his presence - even if a further distinction is required to distinguish him."

"The art system operates on its own terms, but an observer of art can choose many different distinctions to indicate what he observes."

"In the twentieth century, one encounters artworks that seek to cancel the difference between a real and an imagined reality by presenting themselves in ways that make them indistinguishable from real objects. Should we take this trend as an internal reaction of art against itself?"

"Unlike philosophy, art does not search for islands of security from which other experiences can be expelled as fantastic or imaginary, or rejected as a world of secondary qualities or enjoyment, of pleasure or common sense. Art radicalizes the difference between the real and the merely possible in order to show through works of its own that even in the realm of possibility there is order after all. Art opposes, to use a Hegelian formulation, “the prose of the world,” but for precisely this reason it needs this contrast."

"Whatever we know about society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media. This is true not only of our knowledge of society but also of our knowledge of nature."

"The effect if not the function of the mass media seems to lie, therefore, in the reproduction of non- transparency through transparency, in the reproduction of non-transparency of effects through transparency of knowledge."

"By representing themselves as a system [the mass media ] generates boundaries with an inside and an outside that is inaccessible to them. They too reflect [or represent] their outside as public life, so long as specific external relationships, such as to politics or to the advertisers, are not in question."

"The second-order cybernetics worked out by Heinz von Foerster is rightly held to be a constructivist theory, if not an a manifesto for operational constructivism. The reverse doesn't apply, however. Constructivist epistemologies do not necessarily have the rigor of a cybernetics of cybernetics. One can observe cognitions as constructions of an observer, without linking with this the theory that the observing observer observes himself or herself as an observer."

"Niklas Luhmann is remembered as the most important social theorist of the 20th century. Yet in much of the Anglo-Saxon world he is virtually unknown among professional social scientists."

"Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate."

"Does knowledge rest on construction in the sense that it only functions because the knowing system is operatively closed, therefore: because it can maintain no operative contact with the outside world; and because it therefore remains dependent, for everything that it constructs, on its own distinction between self-reference and allo-reference?"

"No matter how abstractly formulated are a general theory of systems, a general theory of evolution and a general theory of communication, all three theoretical components are necessary for the specifically sociological theory of society. They are mutually interdependent."

"It had always been clear to me that a thoroughly constructed conceptual theory of society would be much more radical and much more discomforting in its effects than narrowly focused criticisms—criticisms of capitalism for instance— could ever imagine."

"Im Gegensatz zu den abgedroschenen Melodien des intellektuellen Kanons von gestern weist Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme das angenehme Manko auf, daß sich aus ihr keine revolutionären Lehrsätze ableiten lassen. Sie verschmäht den fast immer allzu billigen Gestus der Weltverbesserer und Weltveränderer."

"Ohne zu schreiben, kann man nicht denken; jedenfalls nicht in anspruchsvoller, anschlußfähiger Weise."

"Erziehung ist eine Zumutung, Bildung ein Angebot."

"Menschenbilder, sowas Grausliches. Also der Mensch interessiert mich nicht, wenn ich das so hart sagen darf."

"Durch Schrift wird Kommunikation aufbewahrbar, unabhängig von dem lebenden Gedächtnis von Interaktionsteilnehmern."

"Aber gerade Bürokratie ist bekanntlich ein System mit sehr geringer Störempfindlichkeit."

"Jedes Reden wiederholt das Schweigen."

"Die 'invisible hand' hatte, schon im 17. Jahrhundert, eine Fortschrittsgarantie symbolisiert. Nachdem sie zunehmend unter Arthrose zu leiden begann, übernahm das Desiderat des wirtschaftlichen Wachstums selbst diese Funktion. […] Den Politikern und der öffentlichen Meinung wird folglich suggeriert, Wirtschaftswachstum sei notwendig, sei eine Bedingung gesellschaftlicher Stabilität."

"Zu den wichtigsten latenten Funktionen der Werbung gehört es, Leute ohne Geschmack mit Geschmack zu versorgen."

"Kommunikation ist unwahrscheinlich. Sie ist unwahrscheinlich, obwohl wir sie jeden Tag erleben, praktizieren und ohne sie nicht leben würden."

"Die Kommunikation hat keinen eigenen Zweck, keine immanente Entelechie. Sie geschieht, oder geschieht nicht. Das ist alles, was man dazu sagen kann."