All posts filed under: Concept Alley

Contingency and Double Contingency

Published by

Here is a useful and brief description by Luhmann of the core concepts of ‘contingency’ and ‘double contingency’, taken from an essay entitled ‘Generalized Media and the Problem of Contingency’. A Contingency:  If I understand correctly the English term contingency in its present use, it has its core meaning in dependency and draws the attention primarily to the fact that the cause on which something depends performs itself a selection from other possibilities so that the contingent fact comes about in a somewhat chancy, accidental way. If we look into the theological and philosophical tradition of the term, our findings confirm this interpretation.[1] In scholastic philosophy the term contingens belonged to the theory of modal forms. Used to translate the Aristotelian ευδεχοϕυου (=possible) and mixed up with the classical Latin sense of accidens or eveniens, it was narrowed down to signify a special type of possibility i.e. ‘possibility not to be’.[2] This ‘possibility not to be’ was attributed to a world created by the unlimited will of God. Only a contingent world, as the nominalistic …

Constructivism

Published by

Cognitive constructivism of operationally closed systems is explained succinctly by Knorr Cetina: ‘Closed systems are systems which operate entirely within their own medium and machineries of world construction. An example is the brain, which the biology of cognition sees as informationally closed towards its environment. Perception, for example, is accomplished by the brain, not the eye, and the brain can only construe what it sees from signals of light intensity which arrive at the retina. In order to form a picutre of the nature of the source of these signals, the brain makes reference to its own previous knowledge and uses its own electro-chemical reactions. Phrased differently, in perception the brain only interacts with itself and not with an external environment. The brain reconstructs the external world in terms of internal states, and in order to accomplish this the brain ‘observes’ itself (Maturana and Varela, 1980). … Closed systems cannot build, with the environment of interest to them, a shared life-world. They lack the possibility of co-presence postulated by Schütz (1970) as an important feature …

Autopoiesis

Published by

Autopoiesis – from the Greek ‘poiesis’ meaning reproduction – means simply self-reproduction. The concept was developed by the evolutionary biologist Humberto Maturana to describe a system capable of reproducing itself using only its own elements; elements produced by the system itself. Luhmann redefines the concept so that it is capable of describing self referential systems. In the following short passage he states that autopoietic systems can be identified by: ‘… their ability to reproduce the elements of which they consist by using the elements of which they consist. Autopoietic systems are not only self-organising systems, able to form and change their own structure; they also produce their own elementary units, which the system treats as undecomposable, as consisting of an ultimate “substance”. Hence autopoietic systems are closed systems dependent on themselves for continuing their own operations. They define and specify their own boundaries. The environment, of course, remains a necessary condition for self-organisation and for autopoiesis as well, but it does not specify system states. It interpenetrates as “noise”, as irritation, as perturbation, and may or …

Structural Coupling

Published by

This is another concept derived from Humberto Maturana. It is probably most simply understood initially in terms of two functional sub-systems who come to rely on each other for certain inputs. The unusual choice of image accompanying this piece is intended to convey the ongoing independence of each system. In no sense do the systems ‘merge’, nor does one become subordinate to the other. Luhmann gives the example of the structural coupling between the media and politics: ‘Politics benefits from “mentions” in the media and is simultaneously irritated by them. News reports in the media usually demand a response within the political system, and this response generally reappears in the media as commentary. So to a large extent the same communications have at once a political and a mass media relevance. But that only ever applies to isolated events and only ad hoc. This is because the further processing of communications takes a quite different route in the political system, especially where conditions of democracy and of opposition in the form of parties exist, from …

Operational Closure

Published by

Writers often use the example of the brain to illustrate the concept of operational closure. Luhmann provides the example of consciousness. Consciousness is a closed system that operates only internally, something we should be grateful for because ‘…it would be terrible if someone could enter someone else’s consciousness and inject a few thoughts or a few perceptions of his own into it’. Explaining how to understand operational closure in the context of social systems, Luhmann reminds us that the system is not to be understood as an ‘entity’, as a ‘unity’, but rather as a difference. The system is the difference between the system itself and its environment. Therefore, the question becomes who is drawing this distinction?  ‘The distinction between system and environment is produced by the system itself. … [T]he important issue consists in the fact that the system draws its own boundaries by means of its own operations, that it thereby distinguishes itself from its environment, and that only then and in this manner can it be observed as a system.’ Operations within …

Self-Reference

Published by

Self-reference is closely connected to ideas of self-organisation and autopoiesis. The concept is detached from notions of consciousness or the subject. Self-reference is a multi-faceted concept but in a brief introduction we can note that for modern functions systems – law, politics, science – understood as autopoietic and operationally closed systems, there is no recourse to ‘an all-embracing world system, no ultimate world guarantee of rationality’. Accordingly, the system must operate in a self referential way, returning recursively to its own previous operations in the process of producing new operations: ‘The system itself produces and observes the difference between system and environment. It produces it by operating. It observes it in that this operation in the context of the system’s autopoiesis requires a distinction to be drawn between self-reference and other-reference, which can then be ‘objectivized’ to a distinction between system and environment. The system can as always connect its own operations only to its own operations, but it can obtain directive information either from itself or its environment. There can be no doubt that …