Society as Communication, Art as Communication, and the Paradoxes of Autonomous Systems

Gregory Eiselein

Niklas Luhmann. Art as a Social System. Trans. Eva M. Knodt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. x + 422 pages. Notes and index. $65.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

In an era in the academy marked by suspicion toward grand narratives and grand theory, the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) developed a theory of society breathtaking in its reach, its rigor, and its confidence about its universality. By universal, Luhmann never means an exclusive claim on the truth, nor does he attempt to comprehend society as a totality. His emphasis on the position of the observer and the paradoxical blindness that enables sight precludes any such privileged view on society. Instead his theory is universal in the sense that it deals with everything social, including the theory itself, and not parts or sections of society. Thus Luhmann is both the successor to the great social theorists of the early twentieth century, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, and also a characteristically late modern thinker whose project consistently emphasizes difference, contingency, improbability, and relation (rather than substance) as constitutional. His work is as post-humanist as Michel Foucault's, as non-substantial as Gilles Deleuze's, and as anti-foundationalist in its epistemology as Richard Rorty's.

Combining diverse intellectual traditions such as Talcott Parsons's functionalist sociology, Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, cybernetics, scientific research on self-organizing systems, and George Spencer Brown's recondite mathematical logic of distinctions and forms, Luhmann gives us an account of modern society as functionally differentiated. As society grows increasingly complex, it forms subsystems dedicated to the specific functions of society (such as law, the economy, education, science, and so on) to handle the expansion in complexity. Each of these functionally differentiated subsystems is operatively closed, autonomous, and autopoietic (that is, self-organizing and self-reproducing).

He began his ambitious project with a kind of theory of a theory of society, Social Systems (1984, translated 1995). On his way to a theory of society, which appears in his magnum opus, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft [The Society of the Society or Society as a Social System] (1997), the astonishingly prolific Luhmann generated several detailed analyses of society's individual functional systems, including science, law, the economy, education, and religion. Art as a Social System (1995, translated 2000) is another volume in this series. For any ordinary theorist or academic, however, such a book—covering several centuries, drawing on multiple disciplines from evolutionary neurophysiology to second-order cybernetics, and taking on the most important art theorists from Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and Johann Winckelmann to Jacques Derrida and Arthur Danto—might represent the culmination of a rich, productive career.

At the center of Luhmann's theory of society and his theory of art is the notion of communication. He does not, however, conceptualize communication in any ordinary way, as the transmission of messages or information from one living being or consciousness (a sender) to another (a receiver), for example. Abandoning the metaphors of transmission and any reliance on a notion of the subject, Luhmann sees communication as the unity of a three-part process: the distinction between (1) information and (2) utterance, and (3) the observation of the information/utterance distinction. With this definition at the core of his theory, social systems become simply communication systems, and they are operatively closed, self-organizing, and self-reproducing. Psychic systems—distinguished from social ones by the use of consciousness rather than communication as the basic operation—are similarly autopoietic. Meaning [Sinn] is the essential medium for both kinds of systems, and both psychic and social systems have co-evolved in such a way that neither is possible without the other.

It is a mistake in Luhmann's theory to imagine that minds or people communicate. Only communication communicates: “Communication recursively recalls and anticipates further communications, and solely within the network of self-created communications can it produce communications as the operative elements of its own system. In so doing, communication generates a distinct autopoietic system in the strict (not just “metaphorical”) sense of the term” (9). Likewise, communication is unable to produce, reproduce, transmit, or receive perceptions, which are operations of consciousness: “Consciousness cannot communicate, communication cannot perceive” (47).

Although flawlessly rigorous in its discernment of the mutual inaccessibility of social systems and consciousness, Art as a Social System is very much a book about the relationship between communication and consciousness. Art here is strictly a type of communication, never escaping the circuit of the social, yet Luhmann emphasizes that the way art communicates is “by using perceptions contrary to their primary purposes” (22). Though operatively incommensurable, communication and consciousness depend on each other. Perception might be said to frame communication (see 15). And, in general, communication has the ability to focus the restlessness of perception and direct attention. Nevertheless, art seems to function in “the medium of perception” (25) itself. Even literature communicates not through its propositional content (the information of an utterance) but through its self-referential indication of sounds, images, and “the sensuous perceptibility of words” (26). Art thus appears to exploit the gap between communication and consciousness, bringing the two into a relationship of “mutual enhancement” (13) or mutual irritation (see 23). As he elaborates in chapter 4, the function of art is to make the imperceptible perceptible, to communicate about the incommunicable, to render the unobservable observable. Yet in drawing our attention to and then troubling an understanding of the distinction between information and utterance, art reminds us that communication can refer to information about which consciousness is unaware and that consciousness can be aware of things that are not communicable. Hence art seems to thematize the difficulties of communication itself.

Luhmann devotes much of Art as a Social System to an account of the evolutionary development of art into an operatively closed, functionally differentiated social system. With a remarkable grasp of details, facts, and histories from antiquity to the 1990s, he traces the beginnings of art's autonomy in the ornament (§ 6, sec. II), away from notions of art as imitation (see § 7, sec. II), and toward the art system's self-description in the romantic (§ 7, sec. IV) and modern (§ 7, sec. V) eras. Along the way he provides numerous provocative, counter-intuitive perspectives on art as communication: for example, the hypothesis that art's fundamental code is not the traditional beautiful/ugly distinction but rather fit/not fit (§ 5, sec. I), or the perfectly consistent but not exactly self-evident notion that the materiality of an artwork is external to art as a communication (§ 2, sec. VII). Despite—or rather because of—the abstract, mind bending, counter-intuitive nature of Luhmann's work, Art as a Social System is filled with insights that appear to have potentially broad usefulness to scholars in communication, literature, and the fine arts. Take, for example, his theory of medium and form in chapter 3. Medium is a loose coupling of elements and form a tight coupling. The relationships between media and forms are not, however, static but evolutionary arrangements, and hence relative distinctions. Thus sounds become the medium for words as forms, and words the medium for language, and language the medium for myths and narratives, and so on. An actor's script is both a form in the medium of language and a medium for its performance. From such a distinction, Luhmann proceeds to discuss redundancy and variety, memory, illusion and disillusionment in art, space and time, atmosphere as an effect of the object, the unity of art, the medium of art as the freedom to play with medium/form relations, poetry, the paradox of invariance and variability in art, the improbability of art, and much more. His conception of medium/form relativizes and expands the distinction, while also providing an understanding of the developmental connections and communications between various forms of art.

While Luhmann is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant and original social theorists of the twentieth century, Art as a Social System will not suit all tastes. His thorough-going avoidance of any normative basis for his theory and his deep suspicion of moral approaches might make him appear cynical to some. The high level of abstraction and the relentless paradoxes will bewilder many, if not most, readers. The absence of critique—his insistence that his theory will neither diagnose social ills nor recommend cures—might leave others wondering what the point is. Moreover, in a period when cultural approaches to communication, society, and the arts have flourished, Luhmann refers to “culture” as “one of the most detrimental concepts ever to be invented” (247) and regards art as a closed, autonomous, self-referential system. Still, there are perhaps reasons to refrain from hasty accusations about the socially legitimating, anomie inducing, or surreptitiously conservative consequences of Luhmann's work. Such claims might be tossed out easily enough, but they probably miss the mark. What Art as a Social System makes clear is that Luhmann's emphasis is on complexity, diversity, and change. Luhmann's fusion of social theory with the notion of autopoiesis (in which events, rather than matter, constitute the elements of a system) has produced a powerfully complex understanding of the layering and interdependencies among systems—an understanding whose social or political implications we have not yet fully grasped. Art as a Social System is as much about the coupling or interpenetration of systems as the autonomy of art. Luhmann teaches us, perhaps more effectively than any other theorist, that one of the paradoxes of the social is that the closure of autopoiesis increases dependencies (see 314, for example), just as boundaries mark the couplings between systems (see § 1, sec. IX). Like Robert Frost's restless, fluctuating wall, the fences that divide people or trees also bring them together, making them perhaps “good neighbors,” though Luhmann would see no need for the moralizing adjective.

Gregory Eiselein is an associate professor of English and member of the Program in Cultural Studies at Kansas State University.