No matter how abstractly formulated are a general theory of systems, a general theory of evolution and a general theory of communication, all three t… - Niklas Luhmann

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.

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.

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.