Theory of Society by Niklas Luhmann

Author:Niklas Luhmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press

On the other hand, and to this extent the concept of circulation is deceptive, this does not mean that connective operations are foreseeable. Circulation is not a concept that offers prospects of calculation and planning. Whoever pays cannot foresee what the recipient will do with the money, and if under certain circumstances, this is nonetheless factually or legally under control, what at the latest the following recipient does cannot be predicted. Even the conditional programs of law hardly extend our field of vision.350 Consider only the difficulty of estimating how a change in divorce law will affect power relations in marriages. Although the circulation of media symbols serves system formation, for symbols can circulate only in systems, it would be wrong to conclude that the system can be controlled. The technical efficiency of the medium in the structure of its codes and in the dispersal of binding effects speaks against rather than for controllability.

These differences in the capability of various symbolically generalized communication media to form systems shape modern society. Together with other factors, they lead to uneven growth among functional systems and hence to the uneven operation of functions as regards communication effort and visibility without any covert rationality or hierarchy of functions being responsible. Society does not rise like dough; it does not grow evenly, become evenly more differentiated, more complex, as nineteenth-century theoreticians of progress believed (and were able to believe because they saw society only as the economic system). Rather, it complexifies certain functional areas and allows others to wither. This imbalance has repeatedly given rise to critiques of civilization—whether in terms of religion, like [post-Napoleonic Hegelian] “Restoration philosophy” [Restaurations-­philosophie], or in terms of reason, like Jürgen Habermas. Recent cybernetic and systems-theoretical research has, however, shown that this is a quite normal phenomenon, which can be corrected only by evolution.351

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