William Rasch

Niklas Luhmann's modernity : the paradoxes of differentiation

A note on translations Introduction: paradise lost, modernity regined 1. Theories of complexity, complexities of theory 2. Injecting noise into the system 3. Constructivism as a two-front war 4. In search of the Lyotard Archipelago 5. The limit of modernity and the logic of exclusion 6. Immanent systems, transcendental temptations, and the limits of ethics 7. Locating the political Appendix Notes Index.

Sovereignty and Its Discontents

Just when you thought it was safe to go into the water again, the principle of sovereignty, that Great White Shark of liberal polemics, has raised its menacing head one more time and bared its razor-sharp teeth. The reappearance of this beast—or rather, to telegraph in advance one of the points of this section—the staged projection of this holographic apparition is most certainly odd. One would have thought that a century—the twentieth—filled with Wilsonian dreams of international legal and policing organizations that were designed to oversee the gentle implementation of universally acknowledged—or, at any rate, rigorously justified—human rights would have done away with the obstinate and arbitrary exercise of state sovereignty for good. After all, we live in an era when the once longed for withering away of the state is thought to be happening, an era in which the state’s traditional functions are optimally taken up by civil society—that is, by law and the economy, do we not? In place of lofty sovereign power, the highest underived power, as tradition defines it, we now have the calculable and transparent self-organization of global society, do we not? Instead of what is traditionally called “authority,” in other words, we have law and money—and is that not all we need? The liberal order has triumphed and in that order there is no sovereign head, only a kid-gloved, invisible hand.

Conflict as a Vocation Carl Schmitt and the Possibility of Politics

Carl Schmitts critique of liberal pluralism (of individuals and associations) was conducted in the name of a different pluralism, a truer pluralism, according to him, namely, the pluralism of equal and sovereign nation-states. His friend/enemy distinction dictates that conflict is the only legitimate model for politics, at least on the international level. By translating Schmitts theory of politics as conflict into terms derived from the work of Lyotard and Luhmann, this article asks whether Schmitts concept of the political has any relevance for the contemporary world, especially considering that the liberal pluralism of associations (or social systems) seems to have carried the day. Such a transposition requires that the modern, horizontal structure of operationally closed (but internally bifurcated) social systems be thought of as sovereign states fiercely fighting to maintain their autonomy. Thus, the common battle fought by the anti-modernist, Schmitt, the ultra-modernist, Luhmann, and the post-modernist, Lyotard, is the one against de-differentiation and the expansion of a universalist morality and economy.

Locating the political: Schmitt, Mouffe, Luhmann, and the possibility of pluralism

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Luhmann’s Ontology

The title of this chapter is perverse.1 We know that for Niklas Luhmann, ontology is not a perennial puzzle to be solved anew, but a historically-determined category to be dismissed.2 Synonymous with the Western metaphysical tradition that is anchored by Aristotelian logic, ontology is correlated with the pattern of social organization characterized by the epoch of regional high cultures, namely the hierarchically ordered form of differentiation for which Luhmann uses the sociological and anthropological label ‘stratification.’ That the word ‘ontology’ first appears in the sixteenth century, now marking a subset of metaphysics, is taken by Luhmann as a sign of crisis, or, less dramatically, a sign of transition; and that the semantics of ontology, along with a host of other traditional concepts (such as ontology’s necessary cohort, reason), continues to play an acknowledged or unacknowledged role to this day is, for Luhmann, simply an indicator that some people have not been paying attention. What they have not been paying attention to is the emergence of a new form of social structure, functional differentiation, which, Luhmann claims, is planetary and no longer associated with regional differences. Accordingly, the stable ontology of old Europe must necessarily be replaced by a way of thinking more in tune with our complex, contemporary form of social organization.

Anger Management: Carl Schmitt in 1925 and the Occupation of the Rhineland

Some years ago I taught a graduate seminar on Carl Schmitt, the perceived relevance of his ideas to the contemporary global situation, and the anxious reaction to the revival of interest in his work. Schmitt’s justly famous analysis of the political uses of the term “humanity” were among the themes discussed, and within this context I pointed to a footnote in Th e Concept of the Political containing a caustic aside that I assumed would be puzzling to some of the students. As readers of Concept will recall, Schmitt maintains that the term “humanity” lays claim to universal validity and thus is, as he writes, “an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion,” because:

Introduction: The Form of the Problem

Abstract In asking the question about indispensable norms, Luhmann does not look to give a normative answer, but rather explores what he sees as the »form of the problem. « This introduction places Luhmann’s discussion of undecidability and the aporias of communication media of the various function systems within the larger »form of the problem« of modernity as Luhmann sees it, in particular the dissociation of reason and moral order. This introduction then uses this larger picture to examine the arguments of the various contributors to the volume.

Uncovering their Stories: The Rubble of Memory and the Bombing War

In A Foreign Affair (1948), Billy Wilder’s wonderfully satirical film about the American occupation of postwar Germany, an Army officer, Colonel Plummer from Indiana, takes a group of fact-finding representatives from Congress on a tour of destroyed Berlin. While conscientious Congresswoman Frost sees what to her are disturbing signs of GI fraternization with German women at every turn (including the sight of a woman pushing a typically German baby carriage bedecked with two crisply fluttering American flags, looking eerily like those cars of more recent vintage celebrating support for American troops in Iraq), the male members eagerly watch young boys play baseball among the ruins. “This is one of our youth clubs”, Plummer tells his charges: