What Society? Invisible Machines, Control, and Niklas Luhmann's Theory of Society

The essay provides a concise introduction to the epistemological structure of Luhmann’s systems theory and offers a primer to evaluate the conceptual tools it develops to address the problem of how meaning is integrated in a society that is increasingly more complex, and whose complexity is increasingly processed through digital communication. In the modern, functional society described by Luhmann self-reference as a systemic device for maximizing environmental control by maximizing systemic distinctions depends on a communicational structure based on the difference between information, utterance and understanding. But when communication – i.e. society – becomes thoroughly digital, those very “modern” structures of integration seem ineffectual, if not altogether obsolete, to process the difference between utterance/information, because they function within a scale of complexity processing (understanding) that is irreducible to the scale of knowledge generated in the era of the digital media.