Great conference in Liverpool
and it was a pleasure to contribute to Robert Jackson’s thoughtfully convened
panel (see his report here). His own paper and Charlie Gere’s were excellent and a good discussion
followed involving Levi Bryant who is using Luhmann in his own way in an Object Orientated Ontology
context.
This is the rough version of the conclusion to my paper
(with quotations included). The first half was a brief introduction to Luhmann,
so I’ve left it out here. My main arguments are that System can be thought of
as: (i) a non-human but non-divine transcendental ground of the
world (ii) a form of intentionality that is non-human; an Alien or Occult
Intentionality which is, ultimately, unknowable.
Occult Systems
The process of secularization of modernity comes about from
the move to a functionally differentiated society. The functional
differentiation of society in modernity leads to a loss of reference grounded
in a transcendental reality. As Luhmann says:
“Self-referential autonomy on the level of individual societal
subsystems was first established in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Previously, the religious positioning of the world occupied this functional
site. Perhaps one can say that the reference to God intended in all experience
and action functioned as the secret self-reference of the societal system. One
said, perhaps, that without god’s help no work could succeed. Societal as well
as moral demands were fixed thereby. But the religious semantics was not
formulated as society’s self-reference; it was (and still is) formulated as
other-reference, as transcendence.” (Social
Systems, p. 461)
The function of religion in premodern society was to offer a
solution to the problem of observing the indeterminate complexity of the world.
The world appears as a meaningless chaos of entropy and utter contingency (that
is, it could always be otherwise). However, the religious system, with is
binary code of immanence/ transcendence, ensures that this chaos is
neg-entropic; this is, is observable and can be meaningful. Tropes such as God
and The Sacred thus functioned to deal with the paradox of the unobservable and
to: “transform indeterminable into determinable contingency” (Function of Religion, p. 189)
The System of Religion, thus, guaranteed the transcendental
conditions of the world. God offered a guarantee of the world as a unity of
being. It was a divine absolute that underwrote a totality of relations.
But, as Luhmann argues the world is never graspable as a
totality because any observation [Beobachtung] of the world is always partial.
The world is an undifferentiated totality; an unmarked state that can only be
observed within a system through the marking of differentiation and drawing of
distinctions.
Even if everything could be observed this would still
occlude the observation of the observation; hence the blind-spot in
observation. In theological terms this blind spot was occupied by god – who
played the role of a positionless observer that could observe the totality of
all relations including their own
observation. God was both part of the world and able to observe it.
This function, however, disappears in modernity when society
becomes functional differentiated into a number of autonomous and operatively
closed sub-systems (such as the money system, the media system, the legal system,
the science system and so on) none of which has priority over the other. Hence,
in modernity, a transcendental condition of the world is lost. This resonates
with similar arguments made by both Lyotard in Postmodern Condition regarding the loss of contextualizing
meta-narratives in modernity brought about by the dominant narrative of
science; and Husserl’s earlier analysis of the Crisis of the European Sciences which describes the historical
erosion of the loss of a transcendental grounding for knowledge.
Luhmann’s account of this is more wry and . He says:
“God is dead’, they said – and meant the last observer
cannot be identified.”(Reality of Mass Media, p. 119)
Hence: my first claim that in terms of observation Luhmann
seems to be suggesting that the system/environment distinction occupies a place
once filled by God; that is as an expression of The Absolute in which the
totality of relations in the world are observable from a positionless position.
In doing so he also draws a direct parallel between the
radical constructivism of his own systems-theoretical approach and certain
theological concerns. For example he talks of a “holy trinity” in modernity of
God, World, Reality as functional equivalents of Totality, The Absolute or The
Real. He states:
“The partner for radical
constructivism is therefore not traditional epistemology, but traditional
theology… 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 was once
called God and today, if one distinguishes system and environment, is
called world, or, if one distinguishes object and cognition reality…
This also means that the form of a theory described on the basis of its ability
to resolve paradoxes allows for the question about functional equivalents, or,
if it presents the paradox of observation as the observer, the question about
God,”
And so we return to
the question of whether...undifferentiated [differenzlose] (and therefore: paradoxical) concepts are
necessary. The traditional concept of God acted as an attracter for and thereby
absorbed this question. For some, this may suffice. Without committing
ourselves, we wish to present three further concepts that could, very faintly,
resemble the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. We will speak of World to designate the unity of the
difference between system and
environment. We will speak of Reality
to designate the unity of the difference between knowledge and object. We will speak of Meaning to designate the unity of the difference between actuality
and possibility.
All these concepts are indifferent [differenzlos]
in the sense that they include their own negation.”
(Luhmann, Erkenntnis
als Konstruktion, 41–2. quoted in Rasch, ‚Luhmann’s Ontology’)
So; system appears as a non-human but non-divine ground for the transcendental. But this is a
transcendental that eludes total observation perhaps resonating with Zizek’s
discussions of a “Less Than Nothing.”
My second conclusion points to a weirder, occult reading of
Luhmann. This runs counter to standard receptions of his work in which he is
cast as an arch-instrumentalist and his sociology as a post-modern cynical one.
As already mentioned, neo-cybernetics is a source for
systems theory. This is seen particularly in his later work (from the 1980s
onwards) when he’s influenced in particular by Gregory Bateson’s cybernetic
biology and Maturana and Varela’s evolutionary biology. This lead to the
adoption of neo-cybernetic vocabularies in describing the functioning of
systems; and Habermas’ celebrated criticism of Luhmann’s systems theory was that
it: “effects a shift in thought from metaphysics to metabiology” (Juergen
Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity, p 372). For example systems are
complex (as opposed to complicated) and non-linear.
In quasi-biological terms, systems
are autopoietic (that is self-organising.) For a system to be autopoietic means
that its reproduction and perpetuity is sustained by its own internal
operations through which it reduces the complexity of its environment.
This means that the operations of a system are not as
rational as might have first appeared. They are, for example, not predictable.
One consequence of this is that it is not possible to “steer”
society through rational activities; there are limits to human interventions in
social systems precisely because systems are autonomous and operatively closed.
Hence forms of intersubjectivity grounded in collective rationality become
impossible.
Autopoesis (that is self-organization), thus, functions as
an animating, first cause in his systems. This is, after all, Habermas’
complaint that Luhmann’s systems theory relies on a principle of irrational
“life” as its organizing principle.
Systems, thus, demonstrate a purposiveness but one that is
non-rational. It is not available to human reason and is not subject to human
steering. In other words it is a form of intentionality that is non-human; an
Alien or Occult Intentionality which is, ultimately, unknowable.
