Roma Reason:
Luhmann's Art as a Social System

Art & Language

* Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2000. 421 pp., £47.50 hb., £17.95 pb., 08047 3906 4 hb., 08047 3907 2 pb. All page references in the text, unless otherwise indicated, refer to this book.

Niklas Luhmann, who died in 1998 (see Obituary in RP 94), is not widely discussed by social and cultural theorists outside Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Scandinavia and Italy. Yet in Germany his influence rivals and even exceeds that of Habermas in certain reaches of social theory, extending also to philosophers and logicians. More surprisingly, perhaps, he is a pervasive presence in the writing and conversation of art theorists and artists. Surprising, because Luhmann's loci classici are to be found in cybernetics, communications theory and the calculus of the British mathematician George Spencer-Brown. Luhmann's is a sociological systems theory. One might indeed think that he proposes a systems-theoretical approach to the entire range of geisteswissenschaftlichen products. And systems-theoretical approaches have stirred up the humanities more or less since the former have borne the name. Luhmann's argument, however, is that his critics are wrong: this theory is not another attempt at a nerdy putsch by technocratic imperialists, but an investigation of communication rather than agents and actions. And while he thinks that communication (which he conceives operationally) is somewhat improbable, he suggests that it is the very stuff that is transformed into social structures.

We have attended two conferences that share the title `Art & Language and Luhmann'. The first was in Vienna in 1995 and was addressed by Luhmann himself. The second was after his death and was held in Karlsruhe in 2000. These conferences were not organized by Art & Language. They were organized by Christian Matthiessen of the Institut für Soziale Gegenwartsfragen, and included performances by its alter ego, `The Jackson Pollock Bar'. It all began as something of a mystery to us, but Matthiessen wrote and explained that `there were many parallels between Luhmann's theory of autopoietic systems and the artistic practice (of reflection) of Art & Language'. These were not conventionally academic conferences, in so far as they were both accompanied by exhibitions of Art & Language work. Indeed, the first conference took place in the same room as the exhibition. At the second, a facsimile of Luhmann's Zettelkasten (card-file system) was exhibited in juxtaposition to Art & Language's Index 01 of 1972 - filing cabinets of Art & Language writings and fragments of writings indexed by a set of three relations. We left both occasions with a solid sense of working camaraderie, even though a good deal of the Luhmann talk was opaque to us. This is how we came to read some of his work.

For ourselves, we can say that Luhmann writes from a world in which we do our work - or rather from within a world in which we can recognize ourselves as doing our work. While his is a `social theory', it will present difficulties to and bring disappointments to the confident professionals of the Social History of Art. It will be even more of an irritant to the academy of Cultural Studies. Luhmann's sense of `the social system' - and certainly of art as a social system* - is explained at a high level of abstraction in sometimes relentlessly technical language. It uses very few of the building materials which are normally used to construct the themes and motifs of `art and society', `the social history of art' and (a fortiori) `the art world'. Art as he conceives it is an autopoietic system that knows a bit about the world which it must treat as its background. For him art is made of the communications within and presumably out of such a system. At the same time, art does not reduce to systems-theoretical formulae. It is the mystifying but unmystificatory remainder that interests him. `Even if it (art) employs text as an artistic medium its "communications" cannot be adequately rendered through words (let alone concepts).' The upshot of all this is that artistic practice can resist meltdown into hopeless spectacle and manipulative barbarism in so far as it works hard on its own indeterminacy, its endless project of self-description. This is art without purification or police. It is art borne of the practice of bad citizenship in the state controlled by the academy of Cultural Studies.

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