Andrew's Wiki
Observations Modernity

Basics

• Takes of from Keats’ Negative Capability
  • “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (in Keats’ words)
• Add to this a feeling of uncertainty: that our actions might ruin the world, or a lack of action might; we can “impinge” on the external world but not entirely understand it; a feeling of potential catastrophe
• And add to that consciousness of consciousness: “an individual in the modern sense is someone who can observe his or her own observing” (7)
  • As a result, you can understand the limitation of your knowledge due to your understanding of your narrow perspective: that we know perspective changes our understanding
    • Only other systems of thought show you the blind spots of a particular system of thought (“a system can only see what it can see. It cannot see what it cannot.”)
  • Saussurean belief that meaning you find is shaped by the structures you use to “find” it
• Modernity
  • Uncertainty
  • Relativism
  • Language’s gap from rest of world

Objects of Inquiry

• autopoietic functions systems: each one has its own “linguistic” structure making it tick (for example, a legal language for lawyers and judges); if you do not speak the language you are thrown out of the system: in this sense it is closed.
  • organization v structure (taken from Manturana and Varela): organization includes only the RELATIONS that make its class distinctions clear; structure includes everything that makes it real, including components and relations
  • autopoietic organization: “they are continually self-reproducing” – that is, it’s a closed system
  • whereas structure is open
  • operational closure: a system is neither representational nor solipsistic
    • nervous system metaphor: not solipsistic b/c it does depend on the signals coming from environment and therefore interacts with the outside; not representational b/c the system itself determines what is admissable as data and how these changes will affect it
    • thus it’s neither objectivism nor idealism, in terms of the inside/outside relations… and thus you’re not in complete chaos, complete arbitrariness
• Luhmann’s “observation”
  • this is how he adapts Manturana and Varela to the social system (b/c the former were interested in natural systems)
  • autopoiesis: system building under the rule of self-referential closure; he also calls autopoiesis “self-reference”
    • so the systems are structurally closed but operationally open, so that systems change and react but still retain high degree of autonomy
      • “whatever they use as identities and as differences is of their own making” (that is how they determine relations) but they “do not create a material world of their own”
  • “we have to admit that there are nonliving autopoietic structures”
• Operation v observation
  • Operation: “the actual processing of the reproduction of the system
  • Observation: “the act of distinguishing for the creation of information”
  • Why does this distinction matter? he says it replaces the old need for unity with a recognition of difference: “occupies the place that had been taken up to this point by the unity-seeking logic of reflection. (This means, therefore, a substitution of difference for unity.)”
• And then there’s self-observation
  • Self-referential systems can observe themselves by “using a fundamental distinction schema to delineate their self-identities, they can direct their own operations toward their self-identities”
  • There is no need to distinguish between “internal observation” and “External” therefore b/c observation is really the same thing as self-observation
  • Observation ALREADY REQUIRES the tools of self-observation; the capacity to “handle distinctions and and process information” is part of the autopoietic system already (the distinctions they make are of THEIR OWN MAKING, remember)
• Uses Marx to explain why knowledge is situated within a social context
• this is more active in sociology: he is a writer of sociology and within for example Habermas and Giddens
  • most sociological definitions, “sought to salvage the Enlightenment legacy that first explicated the ‘modern’ as the triumph of rationality (as the motor force of progress) in the long-term emancipation of the human condition in the face of formidable foes: custom, ignorance, and religion in the eighteenth century; subjectivism, deconstructionism, and postmodernism in more recent times.” (Review, Contemporary Sociology)
• Why is this modern? B/c he grounds his system in distinction, determining X from not-X, which has been an important topic since Russell and Whitehead
  • Luhmann: tautologies “Are distinctions” that do not distinguish: the brain says that the distinction is not relevant; a negation of difference
  • between tautology (this is this) and paradox (this is not this), you have the creation of difference
• Why is this neat? Anti-Kant
  • No transcendental subject-observer: b/c the observer is contingent, could have explained things otherwise (points out Cary Wolfe in New German Critique)
  • All observation is very complex, an irreducible complexity
  • Contingency for Luhmann really means that you could make a diff distinction, a diff observation: you could alter your observation
  • SO CONTINGENCY DOESN’T NECESSARILY COME FROM THE OUTSIDE. It’s not just that modernists observed a chaotic world, but that they recognized as a result that their minds are contingent too.

More Topics

• “Contingency as Modern Society’s Contemporary Attribute”
• “Society develops figures of thought with which it can endure the unobservability of the world and allow the intransparency to become”
  • no period after this sentence and the book ends whoa!
• The more you know, the more you’re stuck: because once systems become self-conscious, you see that there are other possible explanatory systems, and that makes the world incomprehensible again