I swear, I won't talk about this book again until I've finished it, but there are things that have been nagging me about Moeller's presentation of Luhmann's theories in The Radical Luhmann. I don't want to get into a discussion regarding the right and wrong ways of interpreting Luhmann. Nothing sounds more boring. But I do think it worthwhile to get out there the ways in which I understand Luhmann and how they differ from the way that Moeller seems to understand him.
The first thing that gets to me is the way that Moeller describes politics. Moeller seems to be under the impression that politics is solely a social system. Personally, I think this is a grave mistake and one that goes against the ethics Luhmann draws on for his theories. Nothing is a social system. Luhmann is constantly pointing towards not only the irony and paradoxes of origin seeking, but also of understanding itself. That's why I think it's incredibly significant the ways in which Luhmann's books have been named. Art as a Social System, Economy as a Social System, etc. The first thing to do in understanding social phenomena at a certain scale is not to prove something is anything. It's to hypothesize that this or that is a social system and see how your hypothesis is proved or rejected. The important part, however, is to recognize that the hypothesis itself is an imaginative leap. This is the paradox. We've gone from assuming something through an imaginative effort and from that imaginative effort have begun to develop a scientifically valid analysis. With this in mind, the goal of research shifts. It goes from proving something exists into engaging with it as it is, which is often something too complex to be fully understood.
One may be disillusioned with this, the idea that something like politics, economy, culture, nation, can't be understood. That's not what's being said. What's being said is that the only way we can come to any kind of conclusion regarding these things is by, one, taking an imaginative leap, and two, for the sanity of the scientist pursuing these endeavours, to come to the realization that you will never be able to fully understand these systems. This is one of the most important aspects of Luhmann's work for me. Luhmann brought back into the fold the scientific imagination; a grounded wonderment. Science's linearity from observing to analyzing becomes troubled, and the relationship between the two takes on what I think is a beautiful circularity.
My second and last nag with Moeller continues from this to a degree. There's a strictness to the way Moeller presents Luhmann's understanding of the individual, and I see this happening a lot from other people using Luhmann. Luhmann never suggests that the economy, politics, nation, family, art, what have you, are social systems. What Luhmann suggested is that we look at them as such. This, to an extent, was my first point. But, tucked within this is the also the realization that the 'individual' is isolated from considering these systems as social. Luhmann never posits that these systems are solely social systems. Politics is not just a social system. Politics is a system with social aspects and the way to get to these social aspects is to analyze politics as a social system, which also means to look at what within politics functions without the constant input of individual actors. It would be absurd to suggest that art, economy, politics or what have you are pure social systems where individuals have no effect in the ways that these systems operate and function. It's as absurd as saying that an individual effort can change an entire system on their whims.
The individual, as far as I'm concerned, is of no interest to developing a notion of a social system unless the individual is evoked for the continuation of that social system. To even consider the individual's role within the social system without having been prompted to by the respective social system's own observation, is to stray away from sociology because you're placing the individual outside of one's consideration for the system and placing it within one's own scientific concerns. Any sociology considering the significance of the individual in a social system has already lost the battle that Luhmann proposed, which is a sociology that imaginatively isolates the individual from sociological concerns without engaging in conversations regarding its presence. When a sociologist is asked "But, what about individual agency, or will?" I believe it would be apt to not shoot the concern down, but simply say "That is no concern of mine." When asked "How can you do sociology without considering individual agency or will?", I think the best answer would be "That's what I'm trying to figure out."
The way that Moeller positions Luhmann alongside Freud, Copernicus, and Darwin as four scientists that 'insulted' the human through a kind of displacing of its position in the natural hierarchy, seems to me far-fetched. First of all, and Luhmann says this in his consideration of Freud's theory of evolution for his own purposes, that the idea of evolution cannot be proven; it's simply the best theory we have at the moment. Secondly, yes, Luhmann does hold a mirror up to human hubris, but this hubris is, paradoxically, what is allowing the theory of social systems to take shape in the first place.
There's a certain omnipotent characterization of Luhmann's ideas that Moeller ascribes to them. I suspect that him being so convinced by the ideas of Luhmann has clouded over what Luhmann was attempting to achieve. Not good science, not a better science, but a science that was able appreciate its own paradoxes. An honest science, perhaps.
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