After not getting accepted to Waterloo, I figured it would been greatly advantageous if I had published something. That's my goal for this post; developing some ideas for a possible article. I have two things I think I'm ready to explore at a level asked for by peer-reviewed journals: a look at Luhmann and where the idea of 'culture' fits into his social systems theory, and a proposal for using Luhmann's social systems theory to explore the 'nation' as a social system and how we can go about doing this.
Culture has an unsatisfactory presence in Luhmann's Theory of Society. In the third chapter, titled 'Evolution', Luhmann goes into a detailed analysis of culture and what it does for a social system's, well, evolution. Culture is presented as having two functions; memory and scientific orienting. Speaking on memory, Luhmann sees culture as the tradition a social system observes itself as propagating/protecting. It's the conservationist part of the system, the worry-wort. It's the mechanism that a system uses to remember what's worked previously when confronted by a problem present in its environment (btw, I'm severely undercutting the brilliantly complex rationalities behind Luhmann's arguments). The second way Luhmann approaches culture is through its adaptation into a scientific method of comparison. This is something I'm familiar with given my concern with Herodotus after reading Richard J.F. Day's Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity. Culture in this case becomes a term for scientific observation. Culture is the site for observed behaviour and social patterns that can be put against another culture for comparative conclusions. Culture has since evolved since its earliest uses to include patterns of reason and communication, but nevertheless maintains this comparative functioning inside the world of ethnography and anthropology (some might see these two fields as synonymous, but I don't).
To be completely forthright, I'm not entirely sure how to go about this. All I really know is that, for some reason, I don't like it. The idea of culture as memory is far too limited for me. Certainly, there's no debating this fact and the same goes for its use as a scientific means for the comparison of 'different' groups of people, this difference becoming all the more shrunken in Luhmann's conception of contemporary society, which he sees as there being only one. This idea of one society can be jarring at first, but it has its merits. When Luhmann says that there is one society, he certainly wants it to be taken with a grain of salt. Luhmann doesn't really concern his theories with ontology. Luhmann doesn't want to convince you that there's only one society, What society is for Luhmann is what God is for Spinoza; it's the thing that must be taken for granted in order for anything to be understood, or rather, it's the thing that must be assumed in order to come to any kind of satisfactory understanding of the kinds of questions that concern Luhmann.
Thus, in a society theorized as one, culture becomes a place for science to demarcate through a concern that is far too reliant on methods that presupposes an ontological weightiness for its validation. I would agree with this in principal, but hardly think that it's where the conversation should end. In his collaboration with Tobias Rees' book Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, wherein Rees presents a collection of conversations between himself, George Marcus, Paul Rabinow and James D. Faubion, Rabinow says assertively that culture is the main concern of anthropology and is the concept that separates it from the other humanities. I completely agree. So, if culture is still something that is being discussed by other anthropologists in terms of what it means and what it does, than surely we should be hesitant to say that Luhmann has closed the book on what culture is.
This article might become a place moreso for the airing of my grievances and posing of questions, than it is for providing answers. That's fine. But what Luhmann thinks of culture is as something that limits. This is one of the few areas where the breakage between Parsons and Luhmann becomes less prominent. Luhmann's idea of culture is very similar to Parsons in that it's a concept that only describes. I like to think that 'culture' is also something that produces. So what does culture then become within a theoretical model that respects Luhmann's? This is what I wonder.
I'll be coming back tomorrow with a look at how Luhmann's ideas would be helpful in how we understand the 'nation' as a social system.
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