Niklas Luhmann Quotes

The following investigations attempt this transition to a radically anti-humanist, a radically anti-regionalist and a radically constructivist concept of society.

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?

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

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.

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.

Luhmann (1991) “Wie lassen sich latente Strukturen beobachten?,” in , Peter Krieg (eds.), Das Auge des Betrachters: Beiträge zum Konstruktivismus. Festschrift für Heinz von Foerster, Piper, München-Zürich, p. 71; cited in: Heinz von Foerster (1993) "For Niklas Luhmann: “How Recursive is Communication?” ". Translated by Richard Howe.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.