Abstract
In Luhmann’s discussion of the political system, democracy, as foil for the guiding distinction, allowed for the system’s self-observation. The scope of political variability was thereby delimited, the scope of what could change arrested in that depiction. This means more than that the system sanctions a certain order of affairs. What is at stake here is meaning, the possibility that something registers as politically meaningful. For Luhmann, the ‘government/opposition’ distinction opens up the contingency space in politics in the sense of delimiting what can be done politically in terms of operations. In terms of observation it allows not simply an understanding of how things are but also a glimpse of how things could be different (the opposition could come to power). It is in that limiting way that the conceptual space of political possibility is semanticised.
A picture kept us captive. And we could not get outside of it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. (Wittgenstein)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Luhmann, 1991a, 225-6. Systems, that is, perceive each other all the time without automatically becoming second-order observers. They only become that when what one system-say law-thematises another’s-say the economy-way of observing, say people as profit maximizers. It is obvious in this context why theory is the second-order observer par excellence.
Luhmann, 1986e, 23
Luhmann, 1990a 139
uhmann, 1990a, 168
‘If a system is able to discover new “inviolate levels” that serve to deparadoxise its identity, semantic systems deemed necessary may become contingent.’ (1990a 138-139)
(1986e 25)
Luhmann ascribes the contingency of the social world to his discussion of functional differentiation. Functionally induced reductions of social complexity compete as contingency. Luhmann says: ‘die Universalität der Kontingenz an die Spezifikation der Funktionsysteme gebunden ist.’ And ‘In diesem Sinne ist das Beobachten zweuter Ordnung mit seiner Semantik, seinen Eigenwerten der Kontingenz, methodologisch gesprochen, eine Intervenierende Variable, die erklärt, dass die Gesellschaft in eine an Funktionen orientierer Differenzierungsform übergehen kann.’ (1992a, 114, 119)
Luhmann defines as contingent that which is neither impossible nor necessary 1984, 152. For the problems of defining the term through two negations, see 1992a pp96ff.
In a previous paper (1991) I had attempted to establish a connection between first and second-observation, such as would allow the political system (first-order) to “learn from political theory. How was political theory to ‘resonate’ at the level of the political system? I hesitate to follow this as a possible-or at least not incompatible with systems-theory-route. On the one hand I think, now, that this connection between levels of observation flies in the face of too much of systems theory. There cannot be an adequate feedback, recursive or not, between levels of observation. On the other hand, Luhmann recently seems to re-affirm the possibility, by treating theory not as a different system, but at the level of system’s programming. “The entire system [can] operate at the level of second order observation, and only secondarily is observation of the first order activated once again …” And “[I]n the case of self-observation of the second order [the observing system] can be the system itself.” (1991a, 220, 225). I will leave the question open because given the contingency of guiding distinctions around which worlds of political action build up, a notion of reflexive politics need not seek its internal leverage from such a connection between levels of observation.
In systems theory, contingency is tied to second-order observation. ‘Alles wird kontingent, wenn das, was beobachtet wird, da von abhängt, wer beobachtet wird.’ (1992a, 100)
Luhmann takes the concept from Gunther (See Luhmann, 1986a, sections V, VII and n13). To take a simple example. The use of one system code operates as a rejection value for all other codes. Once a true/false code is opted for, given the incompatibility of encodements, the criteriality of all other codes is precluded. In the above sense, rejection values are congruent with the differentiation of autopoietic systems. Problems begin to arise when the rejection value is introduced not as the privileging of one system coding over another but internally within one and the same system, “adapting it to being three-valued, and giving it the possibility of throwing out its own code” (1986a, p24). Luhmann undertakes a complex analysis of this possibility with regard to the legal system and concludes that rejection values would require a degree of differentiation of levels that is unrealistic in the legal systems of the present day.
Luhmann, 1986a, 187
ibid., 189
Luhmann himself does not connect his discussion of political theory with the rejection value.
This, his earlier position in (1986e) is tempered in his more recent analysis of protest movements in (1991a). Here he says: “The form of protest remains a form that presupposes the other side that is to react to the protest. The collapse of this difference entails the collapse of the protest.” (1991a, 126) To the extent only that this difference refers to “the very institutions from which [the protest] is taking exception” (ibid), the difference again becomes an opposition to the political system itself. In my eyes Luhmann remains ambiguous on this point.
Luhmann, 1988a, 139
Smitt, 1976
Luhmann maintains that with the transition from stratification to functional differentiation, the critique of arbitrariness and despotism was made redundant.
“There is a plurality of subjects of resistance, each the product of highly differentiated social processes and exemplifying its own discrete and peculiar rationality. Their opacity and incommensurability is such that there is no privileged position from which their reactions can be predicted and channeled, least of all the institutions of parliamentary democracy. Subterranean political groupings engage in a form of guerrilla warfare against the state … they become visible only infrequently and unexpectedly, and their relationship to the state is one of ‘reciprocal incitation and struggle; less of a face to face confrontation which paralyses both sides than a permanent provocation.’ [Foucault]” (Barron, 1990, 122-123)
“The Nation-State has been replaced from above by a tightly interdependent system of transnational relationships and subdivided from below into a multiplicity of partial governments, defined both by their own systems of representation and decision-making and by an ensemble of interwoven organisations which combine inextricably the public and the private.” (Melucci, 1988, 257)
Jean-Louis Moynot, confederal secretary of the CGT and member of the communist party, urged in his writings that the party neither ignore nor take over the new social protest but try to push them beyond corporatist formulations. Similar appeals not to stifle the political dynamism of class and autogestionnaire action, were heard by the radical labour lawyers in Germany in the thirties (Frankel) and Otto-Kahn Freund in Britain.
See Glasman’s excellent (1994)
Luhmann, 1990a, 101
Offe (1985)
ibid., 69
ibid., 70
Barron, 1990, 122
Luhmann, 1990a, 33
Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 353
Luhmann, 1971, 21-22
For a defence of reflexivity as rationalization see Eder, who alludes to Habermas. Eder writes: “Reduced to its procedural form, the ultimate ground of the rationality of modernity is that we can choose our symbolic orders, that we are not stuck with any one type of rationality, and that we can at any time abandon what we have ceased to accept rationally. (1993, 34)
The allusion is to Luhmann’s Kontingenz als Eigenwert der modernen Gesellschaft (In 1992a)
Luhmann, 1990a, 105
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Christodoulidis, E.A. (1998). Contingency as Eigen-value of Politics [Reflexivity as second-order Observation]. In: Law and Reflexive Politics. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 35. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3967-0_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3967-0_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-0283-0
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-3967-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive