Luhmann wrote a few things, too

2024-09-04

I was going to write something about Unwissen (which is German for ignorance or not knowing). But while reading Niklas Luhmanns essay on the Ecology of Ignorance¹, I got sidetracked by some of his thoughts on ethics and morality, which made me think of a text by Peter Sloterdijk that calls him the advocate of the devil², which in turn made me think about the significance Luhmanns work holds today.

On the Internet, most People (if at all) know Luhmann for his Zettelkasten, an interesting way of organizing notecards by association. Luhmann called it his "publication-machine" because it made him a very productive writer³, so naturally the productivity-people tried (and try) to adapt his concept.⁴ Now there are thousands of articles and videos about Zettelkasten and linked note-taking, but in popular culture (and not only there), knowledge about and interest in Luhmanns thought seems to be relatively scarce.⁵

There is an easy explanation for this: His work was and still is largely inaccessible to anglophone readers.⁶ In 2020, only a third of Luhmanns text had been translated into English and his most important books, Soziale Systeme and the Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft⁷, were translated only ten years after their initial publication. However, this explanation is boring and does not give me the chance to actually write about Luhmanns theory.

His goal was to formulate a universal theory of society, a theory to deal with everything social. To meet this goal it had to be highly abstract and highly complex, and it had to divorce from a sociology that seemed stuck.⁸ There are references to the classics, but Luhmann also draws heavily on biology, mathematics, decision-theory and a variation of systems-theory called second-order-cybernetics that does not simply demand an observation of reality, but an observation of how other observers observe.

To reach the required level of abstractness, Luhmann decided to exclude humans from his theory.⁹ The basic element of social systems are not acting individuals, but communications.¹⁰ Social systems then are autopoietic (self-creating) systems of communications that elude all attempts of control by humans. Instead, they evolve through socio-cultural evolution. This off course only scratches surface. I wanted to write a paragraph on the importance of media in Luhmanns theory, but I bored you enough already.

Understanding Luhmanns concepts does not get easier with his writing style. Comprehensibility, as he writes in "Unverständliche Wissenschaft"¹¹ (Incomprehensible Science), cannot be a principle that prevents things possible to be said from being said. Even so he meticulously constructs concepts and explains every step he takes. But he does not care for straightforwardness, his theory is non-linear, his argumentation is auto-logic and circular.

Convoluted writing and weird ideas did not keep Lacan and Derrida and Deleuze from being widely known and read, so there might be more to it. In contrast to the French philosophers, Luhmanns theory is apolitical. It is not a critique of society, but a description of its self-description. For Luhmann, this is much more radical than any "narrowly focused criticism" ever could be¹² (and it really is), but as I wrote before, Twitter does not care for nuance, let alone poly-contextuality.

In the end it is not hard to understand why Luhmanns theory is, to this day, quite unknown. It is hard to read, hard to understand and hard to apply. It requires a shit ton of work to even begin to get a grasp of its concepts. In trying to engage with Luhmanns texts one always feels inadequate, almost small.¹³ Regardless, it is amazing to feel like you understand society a little bit better than everyone else. Likewise, society might profit from a complex, prominent understanding of itself, but sadly there are no luhmannian e-girls¹⁴ to popularize Luhmanns ideas, only productivity gurus to monetize the concept of Zettelkasten. In the end, it may be enough to know that the Zettelkasten guy wrote a few things, too.

Reading Luhmann is like running Arch Linux. People think its hard when you just can read the manual¹⁵ (it still is not easy), most people absolutely do no need it, and anyone (some nerds) still doing it will tell you about it unsolicited in any conversation. I read Luhmann, btw.