The Radical Luhmann

Hans-Georg Moeller

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231527170
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) was a German sociologist and system theorist who wrote on law, economics, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love. Luhmann advocated a radical constructivism and antihumanism, or "grand theory," to explain society within a universal theoretical framework. Nevertheless, despite being an iconoclast, Luhmann is viewed as a political conservative. Hans-Georg Moeller challenges this legacy, repositioning Luhmann as an explosive thinker critical of Western humanism.

Moeller focuses on Luhmann's shift from philosophy to theory, which introduced new perspectives on the contemporary world. For centuries, the task of philosophy meant transforming contingency into necessity, in the sense that philosophy enabled an understanding of the necessity of everything that appeared contingent. Luhmann pursued the opposite—the transformation of necessity into contingency. Boldly breaking with the heritage of Western thought, Luhmann denied the central role of humans in social theory, particularly the possibility of autonomous agency. In this way, after Copernicus's cosmological, Darwin's biological, and Freud's psychological deconstructions of anthropocentrism, he added a sociological "fourth insult" to human vanity.

A theoretical shift toward complex system-environment relations helped Luhmann "accidentally" solve one of Western philosophy's primary problems: mind-body dualism. By pulling communication into the mix, Luhmann rendered the Platonic dualist heritage obsolete. Moeller's clarity opens such formulations to general understanding and directly relates Luhmannian theory to contemporary social issues. He also captures for the first time a Luhmannian attitude toward society and life, defined through the cultivation of modesty, irony, and equanimity.

THREE

THE FOURTH INSULT

A REFUTATION OF HUMANISM

In the first chapter of his later magnum opus Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (The Society of Society), Niklas Luhmann candidly declares, in a highly programmatic and uncompromising way, that his theory is to be understood as an attempt at a “transition towards a radically anti-humanist, a radically anti-regionalist, and a radically constructivist concept of society.” He flatly denies the common assumption “that a society consists of concrete human beings and relations between human beings.”¹ Such a rhetorically conspicuous and unhidden declaration of the radicalism of his antihumanist intentions is quite unusual for Luhmann, at least in his earlier works. It seems that in his last major work—probably already aware of his fatal illness, Luhmann must have considered that this was his last chance to present his theory in a general and summarizing fashion—he wanted to depart, at least on this occasion, from his trademark obscurity, hidden irony, and sarcasm, and intended to position himself as straightforwardly as possible so as not to be misunderstood.

Luhmann’s antihumanism positions him in direct contradiction to common sense and mainstream political thought and makes it rather difficult to “propagate” his version of social systems theory, particularly in North America. More so than in any other region, the discourse in North America, both academic and political—and even the public discourse of the mass media—still relies heavily on the semantics of the “old-European” Enlightenment tradition of the eighteenth century. It often seems to me that the American Revolution has not yet really ended. A similar observation was made by the Italian sociologist Danilo Zolo. Zolo advocates a “realist” theory of contemporary democracy and explicitly distances himself from the “fruitless (and inevitably moralistic) resurrection of the ethico-political prescription of classical democracy in the old European tradition” as represented by a number of Anglo-American authors such as John Rawls. He states very pointedly that those prescriptions “add up to little more in substance than a harking back to the puritan individualism of European proto-Capitalism, whose political ideals, it has been said, extended no further than the intellectual horizon of the eighteenth-century ironmonger.”²

I believe Zolo’s point can be nicely illustrated by simply looking at what is perhaps the most often cited representative phrase of American revolutionary thought, namely the famous words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”³ These words programmatically express the optimistic political humanism of the Enlightenment. They ascribe, based on a supposed divine creation, specific rights, qualities, and goals that were perceived to be “self-evident” in the sociocultural context of “the puritan individualism of European proto-Capitalism,” to humans in general and posits them at the center of a social and political agenda. These half divine, half human rights, qualities, and goals are still widely revered, publicly and privately, both in the United States and in the Western world more generally, and it is believed that, while they are not fully realized, they are still among the most important ideals informing any civilized society. From a Luhmannian perspective, however, nothing in the quotation from the Declaration of Independence is of any theoretical value for explaining how present-day society (and, I think, particularly North American society) actually operates.

I think it makes no sense to present a “Luhmann lite” and to understand him as a representative of a “weak posthumanism” that would somehow try to preserve some humanist values while going beyond humanism as such. He labeled himself differently and took himself as a radical antihumanist, and it has to be expected that this radicalism will not be very palatable to many readers, particularly not in a culture like North America that holds on so dearly to the concept of a civil society.

Luhmann did not conceive of social systems theory, to put it in McLuhan’s terms, as a theory that deals with the “extensions of man.” He did not aim at a new understanding of what it means to be human in the wake of a technological revolution. Luhmann can be considered a “strong posthumanist”⁴ (unlike McLuhan and his followers) insofar as he does not suppose that society has somehow stretched itself beyond its human limitations. Instead, he thinks that the value of conceiving of society in human and subject-centered terms has become limited. Luhmann does not discuss the modifications of being human in a technological age; rather, he discusses the social modifications that went along with technological change. He characterizes himself as a radical antihumanist because he thinks that the humanist self-description of society has been fundamentally flawed from the start. The world has never been human, and thus there has never been a shift from a human to a posthuman world.

According to Luhmann, we do not live in a postmodern world. Modernity, as the period of functional differentiation, is still ongoing. The recent technological changes are, theoretically speaking, external to society. Like human bodies and minds, technology is not a part of society, but belongs to the environment of the social system.⁵ Neither humans nor computers communicate, only communication does. This is not to deny the profound social influences of recent technological developments (which have been successfully traced, for instance, by N. Katherine Hayles and Donna J. Haraway), but to treat them strictly as external influences on society. Society, according to Luhmann, was never human—the notion of the “human being” has always been theoretically problematic, and a sociology based on humanist terms has always been misguided.

In his critical—and seminal—essay on Luhmann in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Jürgen Habermas calls Luhmann’s theory “metabiological.” Habermas defines this term in the following way: “However the expression ‘metaphysics’ may have chanced to arise, one could attribute to it the meaning of a thinking that proceeds from the ‘for us’ of physical appearances and asks what lies behind them. Then we can use the term ‘metabiological’ for a thinking that starts from the ‘for itself’ of organic life and goes behind it—the cybernetically described, basic phenomenon of the self-maintenance of self-relating systems in the face of hypercomplex environments.”⁶

Contemporary systems theory is concerned in general with the “for itself” of systems, with self-generating and self-reproducing (i.e., autopoietic) entities. These entities construct themselves within an environment by differentiating themselves from this environment. As Habermas correctly stresses, the paradigmatic example of such autopoietic systems are biological systems (such as cells, immune systems, etc.). An autopoietic system that is “for itself” consists of the operations that constitute the self-reproduction of the system. Biological systems consist of their internal biological processes. Analogously, psychic systems (i.e., minds) consist of internal psychological operations (such as thoughts and feelings). Brains are biological systems, and minds are psychic systems. Brainwaves are continued with further brainwaves, not with thoughts. Similarly, thoughts have to be continued with more thoughts, not with brainwaves. The brain and the mind are systemically separated. They cannot mutually interfere with one another’s operations; they are environments for one another. Similarly, communication cannot be continued with either thoughts or brainwaves. Neither minds nor brains can speak. We have developed the linguistic habit of confusing these three empirically distinct systemic realms.⁷

If we want to understand how the brain works, we have to describe physiological and biological processes, not thoughts and social phenomena, which, while they may well influence these processes as environmental factors, remain operationally distinct from them. Analogously, if we want to describe how the mind works, we have to focus on psychological processes. If we want to describe society, we have to focus on communicative processes. It is not helpful scientifically to say that human brainwaves are primarily human rather than cerebral. If we want to be scientifically precise, we have to say that human brainwaves are a phenomenon of brain activity and not of human activity. In the same way, we have to say that feelings are a phenomenon of psychic activity, and that communications (such as, for instance, this written document) are phenomena of communicational or social activity. Social systems theory is “metabiological” in the sense that it looks at society as a complex assembly of communication systems, just as bodies are complex assemblies of biological systems. The emphasis is, in both cases, on the operational for-selfness of the systems. To say that humans are “brain-active,” think, and communicate is not wrong, but imprecise. None of these activities are exclusively or essentially human.

Luhmann famously (or infamously) claims that humans cannot communicate, instead only communication systems can: “Within the communication system we call society, it is conventional to assume that humans can communicate. Even clever analysts have been fooled by this convention. It is relatively easy to see that this statement is false and that it only functions as a convention and only within communication. The convention is necessary because communication necessarily addresses its operations to those who are required to continue communication. Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.”⁸ This statement, in my view, is meant “metabiologically,” that is, it is analogous to the statement that humans cannot produce brainwaves, only brains can. It does not deny the existence of human beings, but says that humans are as little in control of social functions as they are of brain functions. In other words, it aims at making sociology as little (or as much) humanist as brain physiology in order to allow for a more adequate terminology and thus a better theory of social mechanisms.

As human beings, we have a biological body, a mental mind, and are addressed as persons in communication. However, there is no discernable systemic unit that could successfully combine these three operationally differentiated realms. Society is a system in which, following the biological metaphor, communicational organisms emerge and are able to maintain themselves in symbiosis with biological and psychic systems. In a functionally differentiated society, these communicational organisms are the different social function systems. Sociology can observe and describe how these systems function, what structures they develop, which codes they apply, how they are coupled with other systems, and so on. Within society, the human being is merely an all too convenient traditional notion, a communicational tool that remains obscure and confused. Just as in science we call people who do biological research on humans biologists, and not humanists, we also acknowledge that people who do research on society are sociologists rather than humanists. In the end, Luhmann’s radical antihumanism does not amount to much more than a theoretical confirmation of this perfectly common academic self-designation.

This outline of Luhmann’s “dis-humanization” of sociology has far-reaching consequences when it comes to an analysis of the dominating humanist self-descriptions within society. Here, I look briefly at one aspect of Luhmann’s theory that rather clearly shows that Luhmann rigorously departs from humanist social theories and aims at deconstructing commonsense humanist notions of how our society works. This aspect is Luhmann’s conception of politics.⁹

The dominant semantics of both public discourse and social theory assume that humans can somehow intervene in society and, in some instances, even steer it. After all, we have a specific social system that is supposed to fulfill this role, namely the political system. The government is meant to steer society—like a captain steers the ship (to refer back to the ancient Greek root of the verb “to govern”). Luhmann, however maintains: “Although all steering takes place within society and therefore always executes the autopoiesis of society (i.e., communicates) there is, in the strict sense of the word, no self-steering of society on the level of the entire system.” Under the conditions of functional differentiation and operational closure, there is no institution, organization, system, or group in society that can steer society as a whole. Systems steer themselves, and the political system can, strictly speaking, only steer itself. It can “irritate” or “perturb” other systems, but it has no immediate causal power over other systems. Luhmann categorically states: “Steering is always self-steering of systems.”¹⁰

There is no central steering agency in a society that is constituted by a multiplicity of (self-steering) systems that have no particular hierarchical order. Many “mainstream” theoreticians in the tradition of the Western Enlightenment, from Kant to Habermas, used to assume that politics and political institutions are the instruments by which people or human beings can control, steer, or guide society. One may trace this tradition back to Plato’s Republic. According to Plato, the philosopher kings, due to their superior wisdom and understanding, are supposed to rule society just as the mind is supposed to take control over the body. Already with Plato, there appears a threefold concept of society as a unified body that, by making use of human rationality or reason, can be politically steered. This threefold supposition has remained highly influential in social and political thought up to the present day. Luhmann’s theory shares none of the three aspects of such a supposition.

First, Luhmann denies that society is based on unity. Rather, he finds that it is based on distinctions and differences, on the internal differences between social systems and the differences between society and its nonsocial environment. Second, in line with such a focus on multiplicity and difference, Luhmann denies the concept of a general (human) rationality. Instead, he claims that rationality is always the contingent product or construction of a system and that there is no such thing as universal reason. Luhmann pointedly, provocatively, and sarcastically states: “No distinctions-logical concept of rationality would ever lead back to this position of unity and authority. Reason—never again!”¹¹ Luhmann is here alluding to a famous slogan of the leftist protest movement of the 1970s and 1980s, namely “War—never again!” (Nie wieder Krieg!), as well as to Habermas’s (who is sometimes perceived as an intellectual spokesperson of this movement) insistence on reason as the universal cure for all social wrongs. Thus, Luhmann ridicules ideological hopes of establishing a new, peaceful, and equal society on the basis of rational politics.

Third, Luhmann attacks the idea that one system in society, namely the political system, can take on a guiding function for all of society. This would imply that the political system or political institutions somehow represent society within society. A political governing body would assume a privileged position within society that would allow society, or, more traditionally, the people, to rule themselves. Luhmann categorically denies such a possibility: “In functionally differentiated societies there is not… one unrivalled representation of the society in the society. The political system is thus only able to steer itself by a specific political construction of the difference between system and environment.”¹²

Luhmann gives a simple example of the incapability of the political system to steer other systems: “Even relatively simple systems like families pose insurmountable problems to politics if their self-steering is not working. If the family is not able to minimize its differences sufficiently… politics is even less able to do so. It can provide the administrative implementation of its own programmes, finance women’s refuges, make divorce more or less difficult to obtain, distribute the financial burdens of divorce and by this create deterrents to divorce or ill-considered marriages—in short: do politics. The families themselves cannot be steered in this way.”¹³

Politics cannot steer families. While this is perhaps something that even traditional theoreticians might agree with, Luhmann’s claim is far more general and does not view the relation between the state and the family as an exceptional case. He is particularly opposed to the idea that society, by means of politics, can steer what politicians in election campaigns (not to speak of socialist and communist states) always promise to be able to steer, namely the (capitalist) economy. Most politicians believe, or at least claim, that, if elected, they will be able to make...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface
• I: Introduction
• II: From Philosophy To Theory
• Appendix
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index