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Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems
What are systems? What is society? What happens to human beings in a hypermodern world? Niklas Luhmann addressed these questions in depth. This book introduces his social systems theory which explains specific functions like economy and mass media from a cybernetic perspective, integrating various schools of thought including sociology, philosophy, and biology. Luhmann Explained explores the great thinker’s radical analysis of “world society.” The book gives special attention to the present-day relevance of Luhmann's theory with respect to globalization, electronic mass media, ethics, and new forms of protest.
312 pages, Paperback
First published August 30, 2006
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November 5, 2013
So many sociologists, so little time… The problem is that my memory for names is so bad that I might have heard about this guy a dozen times before, but as far as I know I first really heard about him about a week ago. He became a bit urgent to read as he has a pretty influential theory of media – and my thesis has to sorta, kinda do a kinda sorta nodding acknowledgement towards media theory.
The problem is that he is also reputed to be insanely difficult to read – so, I thought I would just start with a how-to Luhmann, rather challenge him to an arm wrestle with no other background information than his name. This was good, but Luhmann’s ideas are so out of the ordinary – and so opposed to our standard prejudices – that I’ve a feeling no matter how they are expressed they are unlikely to really be heard by many people.
Our main prejudice is that we are individuals and this is something at the very core of Luhmann’s ideas and it is something he denies. This sounds like it might be just the sort of daft things you might expect from a sociologist and basically wrong as it is going against Descartes and his idea that the one thing we cannot doubt is our own consciousness (I think, therefore I am), but Luhmann’s point is a bit more subtle than this.
Individual derives from Medieval Latin meaning indivisible. Now, we may well like to imagine that we are indivisible, but Luhmann’s point is that we live in a society where we adopt roles that rely on the functions we are called upon to perform in that society. We have economic roles, family roles, political roles, roles related to our work and entertainment, educational roles – and so the list goes on. The people that we are while performing any or each of these roles could hardly be said to be ‘indivisible’. In fact, for some of them they are more than likely to be actually contradictory. And it isn’t as if we necessarily perform these roles like an actor, peeling off one mask just in time to pop on another. The author gives a wonderful example of a man paying the cashier at a restaurant, but as the transaction is about to happen both men receive mobile phone calls which both of them then answer. Their economic transaction continues while they are simultaneously a lover to the person on the end of one phone and perhaps a parent on the end of the other. Does it really make sense to talk about these two people as being indivisible? Are they two people or four? To Luhmann they are defined by the roles they are playing in all their complexity, rather than assuming some ‘essential element’ that exists somewhere beneath it all.
There was a time when people could be defined more or less once and for all time – in the pre-modern age people were allocated a position in society prior to their birth and there was no escaping that role except by death. A peasant was a peasant and a lord, a lord. That world no longer exists. In a functionally differentiated world, you get to be what you do – but no one really gets to do only one thing, everyone has multiple functions to perform and so have multiple identities.
Luhmann’s key vision of society comes from biology and the structure of the cell. The essential part of a cell is the cell wall. It is this that divides what is cell from what is not cell and therefore allows the cell to be something. Cells can then start to differentiate and start to have different functions from other cells that can then coordinate to make a more complex organism – but they can’t do that if they have not created a border around themselves defining what is in and what is out. For Luhmann society is made up of functional units that are much the same. So that there is a legal function within society and this is different from the economic function or the political ones. And in some ways similar to Saussure’s arbitrary nature of the sign, many of these functions are also somewhat arbitrary too. We know this because there are many ways societies can organise their legal and political structures, but once an organising principle has been applied, once a structure has been built upon those foundations, they are no longer arbitrary but, to all intents and purposes, necessary.
What is particularly interesting here is that each of these functional systems, each of these necessary components of a fully working social order, are based on communication. The example given is economics – where an economic exchange means entering into a communicative relationship with someone else and playing by the rules of the economic functional system. If I do not recognise the use of money – a key component in the communication system of economics – I am hardly likely to exchange my goods for your grotty little bits of paper. Each of the functional systems within society are likewise based on communicative exchanges, but Luhmann stresses that the communication systems are primary and the actors secondary – that is, it isn’t humans that communicate within these roles, rather the other way around, we humans are made via the roles we play within these communicative functions. (I did warn you that you weren’t going to like this)
I guess you can see why Luhmann might be interesting in the mass media. The mass media is something we immediately associate with communication – so we are not likely to react negatively when someone tells us that its central purpose is communicative in the way we might for say dentistry. But it is important to remember that Luhmann is only seeing the media as a hyper-example of the fundamental role of all functional roles in society.
Before I go on, I want to mention Luhmann’s view of political activisms. He discusses the Green movement – a movement dedicated to conservation of the environment. However, Luhmann did not believe that to be the case. The Green movement became a political movement and as such its real point was to create politicians, which it did with abandon. Our functionally differentiated society reproduces itself, his term for this is that it is an autopoietic system. Autopoiesis is made up of the Greek words meaning ‘self-production’. For Luhmann it is almost impossible to truly act outside of the functional units a society creates. There is no ‘outside’ and all positions reproduce the relationships that already exist – this is the tragedy of the modern, the tragedy of living in a functionally differentiated society. This is also why Luhmann doesn’t believe we are living in a post-modern world – because what was true about society two hundred years ago is still true of it today.
What is particularly interesting is that issues such as Native American rights, Civil Rights, Gay Rights, Women’s Rights and their relationship to social change. Let’s pretend for a second that all of these were granted – Luhmann’s point isn’t that this would be a bad thing, but rather that all it would achieve would be an extension of the already existing order. This isn’t a bad thing, in fact, more strength to your elbow – it just also isn’t a ‘revolutionary overthrow of the existing order’. It is the existing order. None of the existing functional units would be overthrown if gay marriage rights were granted.
Now, onto the media. What is particularly important about the media is that it functions in somewhat similar ways to how the board game ‘trivial pursuit’ functions. To play the game you need to know a series of background facts about how your society exists. These facts are the common knowledge of anyone actively engaged in that society. The media provides a similar function because it delineates what is worth knowing from what is not. As the New York Times reminds us, the media provides – All the news that’s fit to print. Luhmann’s media is quite different to Chomsky’s media model. Chomsky proposes that since the media are increasingly held in the hands of fewer and fewer media interests – huge corporations – it is inevitable that they will present a picture of the world that is in the interests of those corporations. Chomsky’s model is one of manipulation. This doesn’t need to be explicit manipulation – there is no need for a Rupert Murdoch to tell a Bill O’Reilly what to say or think. Bill is employed because he can be assured to say and think the right things. Chomsky’s model is based on selective promotion of people certain to think the ‘right way’ and of the self-editing of everyone else so as to keep their jobs. Luhmann doesn’t agree or disagree with this, per se, he just doesn’t believe it is necessary in the way Chomsky suggests. To Luhmann this idea is based on a false premise, that there is an underlying truth that is both simple and can be uncovered if the manipulation is removed.
This book refers to the Communist Manifesto here – which had me going to check and it seems he is probably right. Interestingly, Part III of the Manifesto is called Socialist and Communist Literature. The author says, “One can find in the Communist Manifesto the belief that the newspapers would finally emancipate the masses and liberate the workers.” It does seem that Marx and Engels did have a belief that when communist newspapers became available to the masses the masses would realise the true nature of their position in society and overthrow their oppressors. In a sense this is the role of any manifesto that must at some level believe in the power of words to affect change.
In this sense then, Luhmann sees both Marx and Chomsky as naïve. The media has both more and less power than they assert in their beliefs. The media doesn’t merely justify power, it enters into a dialogue with the various functional units of power and thereby creates the narratives that help to explain these structures, as much to themselves as to the world. One of the things the media does – perhaps its most important role – is to create the illusion of personal agency. We believe things like President Bush launched the Gulf War, but if push came to shove we would probably have to concede that it took one or two more people than just this one guy to do such a thing. In fact, so many more people that any rational interpretation of what happened would probably only see President Bush as a kind of media figure head and representative of the various socially functional units whose interactions made the Gulf War happen. The media also turns us into individuals, constantly reaffirming our essential individuality. Hell, how could you think for a minute I’m not an individual, I drink Coke rather than Pepsi and I prefer Apple to IBM – I make choices, if that doesn’t make me an individual, what would? His point, of course, is that the choices are so constrained that the differences they make are virtually meaningless.
The media are interested in information. But this means something a little different from what we take information to generally mean. Here it means the eternally new. As the book points out, as soon as we learn that the president has had sex with someone we immediately want to know who? Then we want to know how often? Then we want to know what kind of sex? Did she enjoy it? Is she prepared to tell us what he was like? But this obsession with the new implies the media’s role as the trivial pursuit game of our lives. There is no time for detailed background for any stories, there is only room for what is new, what is information, and assumed common knowledge. What is interesting about this is that after decades of watching news programs documenting the conflicts in the Middle East few of us could say anything meaningful about the differences between Shiites and Sunnies. There is no background track – the background is either assumed as the price you are supposed to have already paid to be a part of our society, or it is irrelevant. If you don’t know, hide the fact as well as you can, if you do know, assume everyone else does too.
As I’ve become less and less interested in popular culture there are a whole class of people I sort of see about the place, but can’t quite work out who they are or what they do. My favourite being Kim Kardashian. I’ve no idea what she is famous for, literally haven’t a clue, surely it can’t be ‘having breasts and a surname that sounds like a Soviet Asian Republic’ – but when I’ve said that to people they have told me that is actually pretty accurate description. I figure they are taking the piss.
The point being you are not really allowed to not know this stuff. Knowing these ‘individuals’ and keeping up to date with the improbable twists and turns of their lives confirms ourselves too as individuals in waiting.
What I like about all this is that it doesn’t require a malevolent superhuman force manipulating everyone from afar – although, that said, I’m going to go on hating Murdoch all the same. If I'm not an individual I can't see why I have to be consistent. In fact, the problem is much more frightening than mere manipulation – it is that the matrix exists without the need for machines programming our dreams. It exists because of the interactions we are compelled to enter into. And worse yet, we are created out of those interactions – not the other way around. They existed before us, and will continue after us – seeing them as ‘our creation’, as extensions of our wills, is to completely mess up the order of horse and cart.
The problem is that he is also reputed to be insanely difficult to read – so, I thought I would just start with a how-to Luhmann, rather challenge him to an arm wrestle with no other background information than his name. This was good, but Luhmann’s ideas are so out of the ordinary – and so opposed to our standard prejudices – that I’ve a feeling no matter how they are expressed they are unlikely to really be heard by many people.
Our main prejudice is that we are individuals and this is something at the very core of Luhmann’s ideas and it is something he denies. This sounds like it might be just the sort of daft things you might expect from a sociologist and basically wrong as it is going against Descartes and his idea that the one thing we cannot doubt is our own consciousness (I think, therefore I am), but Luhmann’s point is a bit more subtle than this.
Individual derives from Medieval Latin meaning indivisible. Now, we may well like to imagine that we are indivisible, but Luhmann’s point is that we live in a society where we adopt roles that rely on the functions we are called upon to perform in that society. We have economic roles, family roles, political roles, roles related to our work and entertainment, educational roles – and so the list goes on. The people that we are while performing any or each of these roles could hardly be said to be ‘indivisible’. In fact, for some of them they are more than likely to be actually contradictory. And it isn’t as if we necessarily perform these roles like an actor, peeling off one mask just in time to pop on another. The author gives a wonderful example of a man paying the cashier at a restaurant, but as the transaction is about to happen both men receive mobile phone calls which both of them then answer. Their economic transaction continues while they are simultaneously a lover to the person on the end of one phone and perhaps a parent on the end of the other. Does it really make sense to talk about these two people as being indivisible? Are they two people or four? To Luhmann they are defined by the roles they are playing in all their complexity, rather than assuming some ‘essential element’ that exists somewhere beneath it all.
There was a time when people could be defined more or less once and for all time – in the pre-modern age people were allocated a position in society prior to their birth and there was no escaping that role except by death. A peasant was a peasant and a lord, a lord. That world no longer exists. In a functionally differentiated world, you get to be what you do – but no one really gets to do only one thing, everyone has multiple functions to perform and so have multiple identities.
Luhmann’s key vision of society comes from biology and the structure of the cell. The essential part of a cell is the cell wall. It is this that divides what is cell from what is not cell and therefore allows the cell to be something. Cells can then start to differentiate and start to have different functions from other cells that can then coordinate to make a more complex organism – but they can’t do that if they have not created a border around themselves defining what is in and what is out. For Luhmann society is made up of functional units that are much the same. So that there is a legal function within society and this is different from the economic function or the political ones. And in some ways similar to Saussure’s arbitrary nature of the sign, many of these functions are also somewhat arbitrary too. We know this because there are many ways societies can organise their legal and political structures, but once an organising principle has been applied, once a structure has been built upon those foundations, they are no longer arbitrary but, to all intents and purposes, necessary.
What is particularly interesting here is that each of these functional systems, each of these necessary components of a fully working social order, are based on communication. The example given is economics – where an economic exchange means entering into a communicative relationship with someone else and playing by the rules of the economic functional system. If I do not recognise the use of money – a key component in the communication system of economics – I am hardly likely to exchange my goods for your grotty little bits of paper. Each of the functional systems within society are likewise based on communicative exchanges, but Luhmann stresses that the communication systems are primary and the actors secondary – that is, it isn’t humans that communicate within these roles, rather the other way around, we humans are made via the roles we play within these communicative functions. (I did warn you that you weren’t going to like this)
I guess you can see why Luhmann might be interesting in the mass media. The mass media is something we immediately associate with communication – so we are not likely to react negatively when someone tells us that its central purpose is communicative in the way we might for say dentistry. But it is important to remember that Luhmann is only seeing the media as a hyper-example of the fundamental role of all functional roles in society.
Before I go on, I want to mention Luhmann’s view of political activisms. He discusses the Green movement – a movement dedicated to conservation of the environment. However, Luhmann did not believe that to be the case. The Green movement became a political movement and as such its real point was to create politicians, which it did with abandon. Our functionally differentiated society reproduces itself, his term for this is that it is an autopoietic system. Autopoiesis is made up of the Greek words meaning ‘self-production’. For Luhmann it is almost impossible to truly act outside of the functional units a society creates. There is no ‘outside’ and all positions reproduce the relationships that already exist – this is the tragedy of the modern, the tragedy of living in a functionally differentiated society. This is also why Luhmann doesn’t believe we are living in a post-modern world – because what was true about society two hundred years ago is still true of it today.
What is particularly interesting is that issues such as Native American rights, Civil Rights, Gay Rights, Women’s Rights and their relationship to social change. Let’s pretend for a second that all of these were granted – Luhmann’s point isn’t that this would be a bad thing, but rather that all it would achieve would be an extension of the already existing order. This isn’t a bad thing, in fact, more strength to your elbow – it just also isn’t a ‘revolutionary overthrow of the existing order’. It is the existing order. None of the existing functional units would be overthrown if gay marriage rights were granted.
Now, onto the media. What is particularly important about the media is that it functions in somewhat similar ways to how the board game ‘trivial pursuit’ functions. To play the game you need to know a series of background facts about how your society exists. These facts are the common knowledge of anyone actively engaged in that society. The media provides a similar function because it delineates what is worth knowing from what is not. As the New York Times reminds us, the media provides – All the news that’s fit to print. Luhmann’s media is quite different to Chomsky’s media model. Chomsky proposes that since the media are increasingly held in the hands of fewer and fewer media interests – huge corporations – it is inevitable that they will present a picture of the world that is in the interests of those corporations. Chomsky’s model is one of manipulation. This doesn’t need to be explicit manipulation – there is no need for a Rupert Murdoch to tell a Bill O’Reilly what to say or think. Bill is employed because he can be assured to say and think the right things. Chomsky’s model is based on selective promotion of people certain to think the ‘right way’ and of the self-editing of everyone else so as to keep their jobs. Luhmann doesn’t agree or disagree with this, per se, he just doesn’t believe it is necessary in the way Chomsky suggests. To Luhmann this idea is based on a false premise, that there is an underlying truth that is both simple and can be uncovered if the manipulation is removed.
This book refers to the Communist Manifesto here – which had me going to check and it seems he is probably right. Interestingly, Part III of the Manifesto is called Socialist and Communist Literature. The author says, “One can find in the Communist Manifesto the belief that the newspapers would finally emancipate the masses and liberate the workers.” It does seem that Marx and Engels did have a belief that when communist newspapers became available to the masses the masses would realise the true nature of their position in society and overthrow their oppressors. In a sense this is the role of any manifesto that must at some level believe in the power of words to affect change.
In this sense then, Luhmann sees both Marx and Chomsky as naïve. The media has both more and less power than they assert in their beliefs. The media doesn’t merely justify power, it enters into a dialogue with the various functional units of power and thereby creates the narratives that help to explain these structures, as much to themselves as to the world. One of the things the media does – perhaps its most important role – is to create the illusion of personal agency. We believe things like President Bush launched the Gulf War, but if push came to shove we would probably have to concede that it took one or two more people than just this one guy to do such a thing. In fact, so many more people that any rational interpretation of what happened would probably only see President Bush as a kind of media figure head and representative of the various socially functional units whose interactions made the Gulf War happen. The media also turns us into individuals, constantly reaffirming our essential individuality. Hell, how could you think for a minute I’m not an individual, I drink Coke rather than Pepsi and I prefer Apple to IBM – I make choices, if that doesn’t make me an individual, what would? His point, of course, is that the choices are so constrained that the differences they make are virtually meaningless.
The media are interested in information. But this means something a little different from what we take information to generally mean. Here it means the eternally new. As the book points out, as soon as we learn that the president has had sex with someone we immediately want to know who? Then we want to know how often? Then we want to know what kind of sex? Did she enjoy it? Is she prepared to tell us what he was like? But this obsession with the new implies the media’s role as the trivial pursuit game of our lives. There is no time for detailed background for any stories, there is only room for what is new, what is information, and assumed common knowledge. What is interesting about this is that after decades of watching news programs documenting the conflicts in the Middle East few of us could say anything meaningful about the differences between Shiites and Sunnies. There is no background track – the background is either assumed as the price you are supposed to have already paid to be a part of our society, or it is irrelevant. If you don’t know, hide the fact as well as you can, if you do know, assume everyone else does too.
As I’ve become less and less interested in popular culture there are a whole class of people I sort of see about the place, but can’t quite work out who they are or what they do. My favourite being Kim Kardashian. I’ve no idea what she is famous for, literally haven’t a clue, surely it can’t be ‘having breasts and a surname that sounds like a Soviet Asian Republic’ – but when I’ve said that to people they have told me that is actually pretty accurate description. I figure they are taking the piss.
The point being you are not really allowed to not know this stuff. Knowing these ‘individuals’ and keeping up to date with the improbable twists and turns of their lives confirms ourselves too as individuals in waiting.
What I like about all this is that it doesn’t require a malevolent superhuman force manipulating everyone from afar – although, that said, I’m going to go on hating Murdoch all the same. If I'm not an individual I can't see why I have to be consistent. In fact, the problem is much more frightening than mere manipulation – it is that the matrix exists without the need for machines programming our dreams. It exists because of the interactions we are compelled to enter into. And worse yet, we are created out of those interactions – not the other way around. They existed before us, and will continue after us – seeing them as ‘our creation’, as extensions of our wills, is to completely mess up the order of horse and cart.
May 7, 2016
Yes, very nice. I thought I had a comprehensive understanding of Luhmann already but Moeller's book does a splendid job of giving philosophical and sociological contexts for Luhmann's work which much enhanced my appreciation for that work's ambition and its accomplishment. Very readable; recommended.
January 13, 2020
I had stumbled upon this book after reading some Luhmann directly. I tried reading 'Theory of society' and 'Introduction to systems theory' of Niklas Luhmann. Those books were really difficult to comprehend. Moeller does an awesome job of explaining Luhmann's theory. The five stars given to the book go to his style of writing which makes really complex ideas easily comprehensible. Coming to Luhmann's theory of society itself, it has a huge shortcoming. By placing humans and material culture outside the society/social system, Luhmann's theory falls short of explaining various phenomenons in society satisfactorily. What Luhmann provides isn't actually a comprehensive theory of society, its a theory of communication.
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