Luhmann Quotes

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

Communication is improbable.

[...] Menschen können nicht kommunizieren, nicht einmal ihre Gehirne können kommunizieren, nicht einmal das Bewußtsein kann kommunizieren. Nur die Kommunikation kann kommunizieren.

Was wir über unsere Gesellschaft, ja über die Welt, in der wir leben, wissen, wissen wir durch die Massenmedien

Since it has no boundaries, the world is not a system.

What are we to do with what we have written down? Certainly at first, we will produce mostly garbage. But we have been educated to expect something useful from our activities, and soon lose confidence if nothing useful seems to result. We should therefore reflect on whether and how we arrange our notes so they are available for later access.

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? … No ordinary object insists on being taken for an ordinary thing, but a work that does so betrays itself by this very effort. The function of art in such a case is to reproduce the difference of art. But the mere fact that art seeks to cancel this difference and fails in its effort to do so perhaps says more about art than could any excuse or critique.

My project: theory of society. Duration: 30 years. Costs: zero” (Luhmann, 1997, 11). In sociology, a “theory of society” is the mother of all projects.

The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann once observed that the simple act of asking yourself, “Where did I put my keys?” performs unexpected magic: it transforms the world into a catalog of possible key locations.1 Under the couch, somewhere the dog or the baby moved

Man kann zwar nicht widersprechen, aber man kann auslegen.

No se puede pensar sin escribir.

A própria sincera, ao expressar-se, torna-se insincera.

Ideology claims to be binding for the whole society. This development leads to typical problems. As the complexity of society increases, so do the demands upon ideology as a schema for solving problems; in particular, there occurs an unsurveyable increase in the interdependencies among the individual components of an ideology, whose consistency must continue to be maintained. Changes, accommodations, and renovations in an ideology become markedly dífficult, because every small step can have unforeseeable repercussions upon the premises appealed to. The burdens upon the reflexive and opportunistic mechanisms anchored in ideology then become excessive.

We see today, as if scales were falling from our eyes, that even nature, that great conferrer of talent and ally of bourgeois ascent, was itself conceived of rather like a court in which there were still protégés and favorites. Thus, when exposed to the light, nature is as unjust and capricious as the absolute ruler, nay, even more: it is the absolutism of chance in its purest form. With this insight, talent and genius become offensive to all those who, as Niklas Luhmann so finely (and maliciously) put it once, must also live off their looks. First there is discontent, then comes hatred, and hatred, as always, is followed by a codicil of good reasons.

But within the framework of an ideology such pluralism cannot be so enlarged as to incorporate into the political system and submit to political arbitration radical structural conflicts between family life and economic development, religión and culture, personality and the need for governmental administration, or between the expected motives of agents and the methods of recruiting. In such States, political pluralism remains on a technical and instrumental level; the problem-solving capacity of the political system is built on the premise that, in the last analysis, all critical problems can be reduced to economic problems. For this reason (and because of the political ideologization of all publíc life) limits are set to the level of complexity such a society can reach.

The books written by Paul Valéry, Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marshall McLuhan, Gilles Deleuze, Douglas Hofstadter, and Niklas Luhmann can be understood as attempts to do justice to the New Media world at a level of technical depiction. And what is more: these books are no longer books in the strict sense of the word, but mosaics consisting of quotations and fragments of thought. They perform an art of writing which might be called cinematic - composing books as if they were movies. These books try to burst through the limits of the book form. Of course, most of these attempts have failed. But even this failure is instructive. The information processing system ‘book’ is clearly no longer up to the complexity of our social systems. For this reason, authors who are aware of this and yet want to remain authors, organise their books according to structures and patterns taken from nonlinear information processing systems (BoIz, 1994, p. 2).

Postmoderniteit is voorlopig de meest recente samenlevingsvorm die zich ten tijde van de anomische technische arbeidsverdeling heeft gemanifesteerd. Ze is de opvolger van de moderniteit die zelf de opvolger van de traditionele samenleving was. Postmoderniteit mag niet worden verward met postmodernisme dat een periodecode in de kunst was, ook een (trieste) manier van filosofisch denken dat zich vooral heeft verspreid tussen 1970 en 1995 in Frankrijk – een idiote manier van denken die voorhield dat in de wetenschap algemene theorieën niet langer mogelijk zijn en dat er in een gedicht meer cognitieve waarheid verscholen zit dan in het complete Standard Model van de Fysica. De postmoderne filosofie is, met enige recul bekeken, een staaltje van hoogdravende nonsens geweest, ware het alleen nog maar omdat ze ontkende dat in de menswetenschap algemene theorieën onmogelijk zijn, als had het baanbrekend werk van Jürgen Habermas en Niklas Luhmann geen cognitieve betekenis.

El surgimiento del Estado soberano moderno basado en el monopolio de la toma de decisiones sobre el uso de la violencia física, y su inflación a un grado de complejidad que difícilmente puede controlarse, es el ejemplo más significativo de su desarrollo en el ámbito social general. Al mismo tiempo, esta teoría del poder explica el modo en que esta situación es propicia para la revolución, es decir, para el recurso de la violencia con el objeto de modificar un sistema incontrolablemente complejo, por medio de la progresión regresiva.

Societies to be integrated politically through an ideology are typically planned with a concern for the “output” of specifíc, politically desirable effects. For example, planning takes place with an eye to the goals of pow er politics or today especially with an eye to the goals of economic development. Such societies favor goal programs. Goal programs can be meaningful and successful only if the input of the political system can be varied and selected in conformity with the desired results— that is, only if the political system is relatively free to determine what kinds of information will influence it. The social expectations, demands, and conditions of political support must then be regulated ideologically, as soon as they are loosened from the unchanging bonds of tradition through the process of civilization and freed for a greater mobility. “Public Opinión” must be regulated in such a way that the dominance of ideological values and goals is not put into question and that there is only a technical and instrumental discussion about the best means by which to realize them.

Luhmann’s slip-box contains about 90,000 notes, which sounds like an incredibly large number. But it only means that he wrote six notes a day from the day he started to work with his slip-box until he died. If you, by any chance, don’t have the ambition to compete with him in terms of books per year, you could settle for three notes a day and still build up a significant critical mass of ideas in a very reasonable time. And you could settle for less than one book every twelve months. In contrast to manuscript pages per day, a certain number of notes a day is a reasonable goal for academic writing.

Luhmann, working with pen and paper, would put a note behind an existing one and number it accordingly. If the existing note bore the number 21, he numbered the new note 22. If note number 22 already existed, he would still add it behind 21, but number it 21a. By alternating numbers and letters, he was able to branch out into an infinite number of sequences and sub-sequences internally with no hierarchical order.

Even though digital programs lift the physical restrictions on the length of a note, I highly recommend treating a digital note as if the space were limited. By restricting ourselves to one format, we also restrict ourselves to just one idea per note and force ourselves to be as precise and brief as possible. The restriction to one idea per note is also the precondition to recombine them freely later. Luhmann wrote notes on A6 paper (4.1 x 5.8 in or 105 x 148 mm). A good rule of thumb for working digitally is: Each note should fit onto the screen and there should be no need of scrolling.

As a central distributor of goods, the welfare state necessitates high levels of taxation, and it must institute extensive programmes of economic regulation in order to ensure that sufficient tax revenue is generated. Excessive taxation, consequently, always occurs where the political system inadequately manages its ‘opening and restriction’ towards the economy, and where it assumes co-ordinating power in influencing the economic conditions in which citizens live. High-level taxation, however, inevitably leads to economic problems – to problems registered in the medium of money, but caused by the medium of power. These problems might, for instance, take the form of possible underproduction, flight of capital, loss of investment potential, or increasing prices, imbalances in the relation of supply and demand in the private economy, difficulties in the circulation of capital, worsening international competitiveness of firms, or excessive regulation of available capital by central banks. All such tendencies, in Luhmann’s view, characterize societies which are drifting away from the ideal condition of realized plural differentiation towards a more authoritarian (less differentiated) mode of political economy.

Luhmann would add the number of one or two (rarely more) notes next to a keyword in the index (Schmidt 2013, 171). The reason he was so economical with notes per keyword and why we too should be very selective lies in the way the slip-box is used. Because it should not be used as an archive, where we just take out what we put in, but as a system to think with, the references between the notes are much more important than the references from the index to a single note. Focusing exclusively on the index would basically mean that we always know upfront what we are looking for

Der Weg zum Konkreten erfordert den Umweg über die Abstraktion. Die Soziologie ist derzeit noch zu wenig theoretisch und zu wenig abstrakt für erfolgreiche historische Forschung.

How does the slip-box, the heart of this system, work? Strictly speaking, Luhmann had two slip-boxes: a bibliographical one, which contained the references and brief notes on the content of the literature, and the main one in which he collected and generated his ideas, mainly in response to what he read. The notes were written on index cards and stored in wooden boxes.

Zettelkasten (meaning “slip box” in German, coined by influential sociologist Niklas Luhmann),

Die Grünen haben also völlig recht, man kann ihnen nur nicht zuhören.

Vielmehr ist die intellektuelle Skepsis und mit ihr die Bereitschaft zu platten Moralisierungen gewachsen oder auch, wenn man auf Frankreich sieht, die Flucht in eine literarische Arcanistik.

Die Diskrepanz wird konkret faßbar, wenn die Auffassung vertreten wird, daß Frauenforschung nur von Frauen adäquat betrieben werden könne (ein Argument aus dem Antiquariat der ciceronisch-quintilianischen Rhetorik), oder wenn die Aufschreiqualität von Aussagen neben Wahrheit und Unwahrheit gleichsam als dritter Wert angeboten wird.

If I want something, it’s more time. The only thing that really is a nuisance is the lack of time.” (Luhmann, Baecker, and Stanitzek, 1987, 139)

Only communication can communicate

That which occludes and that which is occluded have different sources, sites of intractability, forms of appearance, and temporal effects. They derive from geopolitical locations as much as they do from conceptual grammars that render different objects observable, that shape how we observers observe our chosen observers (as Niklas Luhmann might put it), and thereby construe the proper “lessons of empire” and what count as the salient “historical facts.

Nunca me esfuerzo en hacer algo que no me apetezca. Si me atasco hago otra cosa.

No es posible pensar sistemáticamente sin escribir.

En mi ensayo Der starke Grund zusammen zu sein [La fuerte razón de estar juntos], 11 describí sociedades modernas (pero ahora en plural, a pesar de Luhmann) como cuerpos de estrés psicoacústicamente sensibles, afectados por emociones sincrónicas causadas por los medios masivos de comunicación en lengua nacional. La transmisión de emociones comunes dentro de una esfera de medios regional ocurre, principalmente, sobre la base de noticias diarias. Por lo tanto, una nación no es educada por el ejército, sino por el periodismo. El producto artificial “nación” no requiere de una dosis diaria de guerra, pero sí de una sensación de intranquilidad tanto por las señales de estrés como por sus antídotos: la distracción y el entretenimiento como signos del cese de alarma.

La confianza refleja la contingencia. La esperanza elimina la contingencia.

While other systems start with a preconceived order of topics, Luhmann developed topics bottom up,

I only do what is easy,” he said. “If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.” This attitude reflects the findings of various studies of highly accomplished people. They apply a martial-arts mentality to avert “resistance” instead of pushing through it. Luhmann developed simple way to work that added value to every step, especially when connecting complex ideas.