Niklas Luhmann Quotes
1927–1998 Germany
Niklas Luhmann (December 8, 1927 – November 6, 1998) was a German sociologist, and a prominent thinker in sociological systems theory.
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Random Niklas Luhmann quote
9 quotes
The art system operates on its own terms, but an observer of art can choose many different distinctions to indicate what he observes.
Art As a Social System (2000)
The following investigations attempt this transition to a radically anti-humanist, a radically anti-regionalist and a radically constructivist concept of society.
Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (1999)
Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.
Luhmann (1988)
Whatever we know about society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media. This is true not only of our knowledge of society but also of our knowledge of nature.
The reality of the Mass Media (2000)
The effect if not the function of the mass media seems to lie, therefore, in the reproduction of non- transparency through transparency, in the reproduction of non-transparency of effects through transparency of knowledge.
The reality of the Mass Media (2000)
No matter how abstractly formulated are a general theory of systems, a general theory of evolution and a general theory of communication, all three theoretical components are necessary for the specifically sociological theory of society. They are mutually interdependent.
Luhmann (1982)
Does knowledge rest on construction in the sense that it only functions because the knowing system is operatively closed, therefore: because it can maintain no operative contact with the outside world; and because it therefore remains dependent, for everything that it constructs, on its own distinction between self-reference and allo-reference?
Luhmann (1991)
It had always been clear to me that a thoroughly constructed conceptual theory of society would be much more radical and much more discomforting in its effects than narrowly focused criticisms—criticisms of capitalism for instance— could ever imagine.
In the twentieth century, one encounters artworks that seek to cancel the difference between a real and an imagined reality by presenting themselves in ways that make them indistinguishable from real objects. Should we take this trend as an internal reaction of art against itself?
Art As a Social System (2000)