The theory of love and the theory of society: Remarks on the oeuvre of Niklas Luhmann

Niklas Luhmann’s work has been gaining popularity in the Anglophone world. With a number of his books recently translated into English and distributed by notable publishers, the author’s audience continues to grow. However, these translations are predominantly of minor works from disparate periods of his oeuvre. Therefore, for the reader who is unfamiliar with the overall development of Luhmann’s version of system theory, his translated works provide a fragmentary presentation of his thinking. Thus, this review seeks to articulate the central theoretical changes in Luhmann’s version of systems theory by way of the author’s elaborations on love. Luhmann’s process is marked by three theoretical developments: the reduction of the complexity paradigm, the concept of self-reference and the concept of observation.

The first part of this review will introduce Luhmann’s reduction of the complexity paradigm, as well as discuss the importance and acceptance of one’s particular decisions or selections regarding communication and love. Luhmann’s reduction of the complexity paradigm emerged out of a combination of systems theory (including the work of Talcott Parsons, Norbert Wiener and Ludwig von Bertalanffy) and Husserl’s phenomenology. The paradigm holds that the general life of ‘human beings is characterized by an excessively complex and contingent world’ (Love: A Sketch [LaS], p. 4). This complexity is due to the fact that the world presents more possibilities to an individual than they can ever actually realize. In turn, these possibilities suggest that any given action could have potentially been different. However, attempting to take all possibilities into consideration at every opportunity would stunt individual and social progress. The question for Luhmann is, therefore: How is it that this problem is naturally solved in social life? How can the world’s sheer and limitless complexity be transformed into order?

In contrast to Parsons and other sociologists, Luhmann does not propose that a transcendental subject or a pre-existing normative consensus is the solution for the overall formation of order and structures. The creation of order does not result from such external qualities, but is solved by the social world itself. Theories of self-organizing systems and early theories of communication are the theoretical means by which a solution to the problem of complexity is formulated. ‘Creating order’, Luhmann notes, is done through ‘meaningmaking’ (LaS, p. 4). Meaningmaking is achieved through communication between humans who collectively reach an understanding of similar things. In what sense can communication create order? The answer to this, and the core of the reduction of the complexity paradigm, is to create order through selection. Selection means that out of a vast number of possibilities one aspect is chosen.

When one can always opt for a different possibility in a given situation, how is it that individual selections become intersubjective? To cope with this problem, what Luhmann calls ‘media of communication’ have evolved in society through which both selection and motivation occur (LaS, p. 6). These media of communication ‘motivate acceptance of [a selection] … through the manner of their selection’ (LaS, p. 6). Here ‘manner’ means that the selection obeys certain conditions. Media of communication reduce complexity by formulizing or conditioning a particular form of selection. For example, taking love as one such conditioning factor, a boy might write a text message to a girl asking, ‘Will you go out with me? Yes, No, or Maybe?’ With its indirect delivery and laconic tone, the message does not simply ask for a particular behaviour or even a straightforward ‘Yes’ in response, although this might be possible. However, the girl being asked the question brings meaning to it as well, understanding it either as flirtation or a sign of love, and based on this understanding, may choose to respond in a loving way. The medium of love thus conditions one’s motivations and selections by heightening their relation to the particular perspective of a person. The distinctive quality of love transmits specific selections (reducing complexity) ‘by means of orientation towards the individual’s own understanding of themselves and the special world-view of the other person’ in an ‘individualized mode of experiential processing’ (LaS, p. 14).

The reduction of the complexity paradigm, however, is ultimately not concerned with the particularity of selection or the structural organization of a selection, but with how the latter corresponds to the overall complexity and differentiation within a society. This reflects the early stages of Luhmann’s thinking, where the relationship between a society and the complexities of its internal organization is described from a functional perspective. Functionalism, which does not have a normative orientation, nor is based on an equilibrium model, possesses a much more empirical or heuristic quality. The reduction of the complexity paradigm raises the question as to how certain complex structures develop and how they are made possible. Luhmann’s answer is that these structures organically emerge as resolutions to structural problems in society. In the case of love between two people, both parties engage in a common world and find agreement in a particular worldview that gives order to their complicated environment and contingent futures (LaS, p. 18). Love assists to block out the storms of the surrounding world.

This understanding of love represents the core idea of Luhmann’s Love: A Sketch. The introduction to the book presents a short, dense outline of key theoretical terms concerning love. The book’s chapters do not follow a cumulative order towards any grand theory, but rather assemble a great deal of empirical phenomena and secondary sources (there are 69 footnotes that fill roughly 20 pages, nearly one-third of the book) that are interpreted from the reduction of the complexity paradigm along with additional theoretical terms. Although synthesizing different theoretical means towards a theory of society throughout, the book’s later chapters detail a wider application of the medium of love and the reduction of the complexity paradigm regarding various empirical phenomena, such as the semantics of love, feelings, sexuality, marriage/family and passionate/romantic love, which will be briefly discussed in the following.

Luhmann’s discussion of the semantics of love focuses on the history of the word dating back to its Latin and Greek predecessors (LaS, pp. 22–36). Different interpretations of love are discussed as they were understood in different historical societies. Luhmann argues that it was not that those in previous societies could not conceive of love as a private or intimate matter, but that the structural organization of their societies did not cater to the possibility of loving a random other person, the notion of two people being destined for each other, or the freedom of individual fulfilment through love. Luhmann thus concludes that the institutionalization of marriage and intimate relationships founded on romantic love is a decidedly modern development.

Throughout the text, Luhmann focuses on how emotions ‘function within [a] social system’ (LaS, p. 4) rather than their biological or psychological functions. He states, for instance, that the principle of intimacy requires related feelings to exist exclusively between two people. Feelings of love are influenced according to this semantic, leading individuals to feel helplessly gripped by emotion or destined to fall in love with another person, or to believe in the miracle of meeting a loving other, everlasting love, or the freedom of being oneself in love (LaS, p. 25). Each of these different arousals, affects and emotions can be experienced as love through being linked up under the medium of love (LaS, p. 36).

With love becoming a medium of communication in modern society, a new semantic of sexuality arises in response (LaS, p. 37). Whereas older societies stressed the role of sexuality for procreation, in modern society sexuality acquires the basic function of a symbiotic regulatory mechanism in relation to love (LaS, p. 38). Symbiotic mechanisms refer to the relationship between communication media and the body, or, in other words, to the manner in which communication media make reference to the body. In love, the relationship between communication media and the body signifies ‘the directness and closeness of the relationship and its restriction to one partner’ (LaS, p. 38). In other words, because I love you, I will not have sexual intercourse with another person. In such a context, the semantic of sexuality refers to one’s individual commitment to another through which the fervour of love can be ignited (LaS, p. 46). Luhmann notes, however, that sexuality alone is too vague to invoke love. Additional sources of arousal developed that offer more than the prospect of sexual satisfaction. In this sense, Luhmann refers to a wide array of commercially organized excitations (Illouz [1997] has conducted intense research in this area).

The establishment of love as a medium of communication, Luhmann argues, has had a significant impact on the social role of marriage and family. He points to the historical decline of predetermined spouses in families or particular social groups. Love today ‘means the freedom to choose a partner … if [a] family is founded on love, [this] means the freedom to choose [one’s] spouse’ (LaS, p. 29). Although freedom here refers to being free from things like political or legal restrictions, this does not mean that all social influences vanish, such as those of class, in cases of love. Nonetheless, such choices are made self-reflexively according to one’s own feelings, which are considered as ends in themselves (LaS, p. 30). For love, marriage is a risky decision, because any clear deviation from love endangers the bond. Thus, considering this notion in a broad sense, Luhmann writes that love ‘[a]s the structuring principle of a social system [family, intimate relationships] … enhances both opportunities and risks at the same time’ (LaS, p. 51).

The editor of Love: A Sketch suggests that this work is easier to digest than others in Luhmann’s oeuvre because it was written for a seminar, and therefore for lay sociologists and theoretical novices. However, the text does not exhibit the theoretical consistency of the author’s other works. Concepts remain loosely defined and connected, and Luhmann’s formulations lean far towards the experimental. The text might be best understood as a testing ground for Luhmann’s thinking, as it is likely that he used these writings more as sources for discussion than to elaborate a fully defined theoretical system. Thus, readers should embrace the communicative method of the book and share it in similar communication with others.

In the second book of this review, Love as Passion, Luhmann’s concept of the self-referential system is highlighted. Here Luhmann discusses how a system reproduces and differentiates itself from an environment. In what follows, this differentiation will be considered from a historical perspective with a focus on the formation of systems of intimate relationships and families. Beginning in the late 1970s and continuing into the early 1980s, Luhmann’s thinking began to shift again, culminating in his theoretical text, Social Systems (1984). At that time, several theories were emerging in interdisciplinary research on the cybernetics of self-referential orders, general systems theory, autopoiesis, information and communication (Love as Passion [LaP], p. 3). Within these areas, Luhmann was specifically interested in the self-reproducing capability of a system by means of communication (LaP, p. 4). For Luhmann, society is neither based on an external subject and its cognitive principles nor an external normative integration. Instead, society produces its own rules itself. Aside from the philosophical question of self-referential ordering and its paradoxes, the important theoretical shift in Luhmann’s version of systems theory lay in the concept of the system itself.

Luhmann’s concept of self-referentiality concerns how a system defines itself as different from others, as well as how a system’s reproduction demands that it reproduce its own rules to operate effectively. Luhmann uses the term ‘system/environment’ to stress that a system constitutes itself through differentiation, and in this text his focus concerns the binary codes of the borders of social systems as the main mode of differentiation. Luhmann raises the question as to how the production of elements is enabled by the very elements of a system (communications). To put it simply, this is done through a particular form of self-coding, in a kind of +/– form that sorts what belongs to a system and what does not. To illustrate this point, consider a door-to-door salesman, for instance, who knocks on one family’s door and means to sell a Hoover vacuum. ¹ He explains all the advantages of the machine and is, of course, trying to sell it. Suddenly, the mother in the family, after carefully observing the man, says to the salesman, ‘John is that you’ (John being a son who left the family 20 years ago). It is suddenly revealed that a brother and son has returned home, and the family begins to hug each other in tears. Here the coding of the communication in this situation as economic has completely different implications than when the communication is codified in terms of a family. Depending on the coding of the situation, different modes of being are opened up.

Luhmann’s Love as Passion explores the formation of self-referential systems, yet with a more historical mode of examination. Within the text, the transition from traditional to modern societies is conceived by Luhmann as a transition from a primarily stratified society to one of functional differentiation, with the transformation being marked by the societal installation of media of communication as symbolic codes via which the differentiation and reproduction of different systems can occur:

… the differentiation of the economy is a consequence of the use of money; the differentiation of politics is a consequence of the use of power; the differentiation of science is a consequence of the use of truth – and in each case this takes place once a sufficiently effective semantics has become available by means of which one can distinguish between the use of money and the use of power, etc. (LaP, pp. 6–7)

Love as Passion takes as a particular focus in this regard the semantics of love and its implications for social coding that lead to self-referential system formation. Rather than attempting to explain the book in its entirety, I will elaborate on Luhmann’s notion of the formation of codes and codification in relation to notions of self-reference, as well as point to some implications for other phenomena and theoretical terms.

When Luhmann speaks of a code, he refers to a symbolic or semantic complex (LaP, p. 6): ‘[L]ove as a medium is not itself a feeling, but rather a code of communication, according to the rule of which one can express, form and simulate feelings, deny them, impute them to others’ or ‘[t]he enhancement of the meanings anchored in the code which enables love to be learned, tokens of it to be interpreted and small signs of it to convey deep feelings; and it is the code which allows difference to be experienced and makes unrequited love equally exalting’ (LaP, p. 20). According to Luhmann, such codes form according to the functional orientation of each symbolic medium. In the case of love, the central focus is that of highly personalized communication: ‘A special “code” for love is created once all information is duplicated in terms of the meaning that it possesses on the one hand in the general, anonymously constituted world, and on the other for you, for us, and for our world’ (LaP, p. 22). The code or codification works as a differential principle. Meaning is produced through the code processed into two informational sides: that of the general and anonymous outside, and the highly personal (us, our world) inside. If communication is processed through such a codification, it identifies as belonging to a particular system. The code is then unlike a ‘secret code’, but akin to a computer code, with the latter referring to a particular language (with all its signs and symbols) in which a system operates. This notion is based on a differential conception of information (LaP, p. 24, and see, in particular, LaP, p. 84). Information can only take place if something is experienced ‘this way and not that way’ with semantic codes specifying the differences being processed (LaP, p. 84). So why are these symbolic codes integral to the formation of self-referential systems? The formation of a system requires that in each instance a communication can be identified as such. Here lies the function of the code, which formats the communication of the system through a binary principle that is reproduced by the system while reproducing the system. In other words, through the code a system can specify what belongs to the system and what not and thereby reproduce itself and the mode of producing itself (cf. LaP, p. 30). That is, the coding of the communication enables the process to become self-referential.

The self-referential formation of love requires a mechanism through which love can differentiate itself from other social phenomena. According to Luhmann, this differentiation becomes possible through the concept of passion: ‘the differentiation and special treatment of love and also the internal order of a corresponding code was provided by the concept of passion’ (LaP, pp. 59–60). The crucial aspect of passion is that it affords one the opportunity to conduct oneself in affairs of art and being free from social and moral constraints (LaP, p. 60). This semantic notion was not prevalent in the Middle Ages, when the term had the more mental and medical connotation of passive suffering. However, with the decline of the theological context in early modernity, the term was freed from its religious sense and employed in other social contexts to emphasize one’s individuality. The semantic notion became more closely tied to one’s unique personality or character. As a consequence, a kind of behaviour is formulated through passion that marks itself as different from normality, with a coding of immoderateness and excessiveness (LaP, p. 67).

Throughout history, excessiveness had to be regulated by love itself, due to its ‘threat’ of social disruption due to passions, through a game of devotion and rejection between lovers. As generations played this game over time it became more sophisticated. The acts of one person in the game could suggest future implications. Luhmann discusses this cultural development with the example of the new woman in the late 17th century, who now ‘had to weigh up whether she could allow herself to accept letters or even answer them, receive visitors, express wishes or lend out her coaches … such acts might have led to the conclusion being drawn that her intentions allowed for more’ (LaP, p. 91).

As a consequence of this game of passions, Luhmann states, events obtain a self-referential quality because current acts become related to later developments and one can no longer account only for his or her own actions, but must also take the actions and experiences of others into account. For Luhmann, this type of mutual observation and joyful experience of one’s individuality allows for the formation of a medium of love, which in turn becomes socially institutionalized through a binary code of plaisir and amour (LaP, p. 84). The code plaisir and amour enables ‘genuine and inauthentic modes of behavior to be detected in amour, a distinction which then informs each person’s concrete sensibility for information in factual love affairs’ (LaP, p. 90). The code allows for an exclusive process (LaP, p. 97) where love isolates itself from other social interactions (friendship in particular) and is directed towards a unique individual. This exclusivity is assisted by the inclusion of sexuality, which excludes sexual contact with anyone other than one’s partner (LaP, p. 109). Thus, intimacy and sexuality are close companions. For Luhmann, the final development of this semantic of love and intimacy occurred at the time of German Romanticism in the late 18th century (LaP, p. 129) when the sociality of love was transformed into the chance of improving and forming one’s identity. One was understood to realize oneself in another. This social coding of love became the main mode of social reproduction for intimate relationships.

The introduction of the concept of observation in Luhmann’s body of work represents the third development in his thinking, which began in the mid-1980s and progressed into the early 1990s. This development was motivated to achieve what Luhmann called the ‘ “meaningful” revolutionization of the theory of society’ (Theory of Society, Vol. 1 [ToS 1], p. 28). This revolutionization for Luhmann meant that systems and communications should not be understood as objects, but as observations (ToS 1, p. 28). For Luhmann, observations should not be understood as existing facts (differences) or shapes, ‘but as boundaries, as markings of differences’ (ToS 1, p. 29). An observation can therefore be defined as a distinction and indication. Something is distinguished, an object or a subject from something else and is indicated; for instance, a cat is distinguished from non-cats. Observations are therefore not vehicles, but the operations that constitute a system: ‘The system can constitute operations of its own only further to operations of its own and in anticipation of further operations of the same system’ (ToS 1, p. 33). With this, Luhmann adds to his earlier autopoietic phase a more empirical orientation, because through the concept of observation it is possible to distinguish between different forms of observations or different selections from a self-constructed selection area (ToS 1, p. 33). In other words, the question is raised as to how a system observes itself as a system in contrast to its environment, or through what particular type of observation the distinction between a system/environment is constituted (ToS 1, p. 34). In the following review of Luhmann’s Theory of Society, I will focus on the consequences of the concept of observation for the concept of love.

According to Luhmann, intimate relationships or families constitute themselves through a form of observation regarding a particular person or personalized communication. In the case of intimate relationships or families, through the medium of love ‘one can find agreement and support for a personal worldview over and beyond the anonymous world of truths and values’ (ToS 1, p. 206). In other words, one can say that the observational form in these two cases is that of us/rest-of-the-world (couples) or we/rest-of-the-world (families). The concept of the personal is based on a complex mode of observation: ‘love requires a loving ego to adapt action to what alter experiences; and, above all, of course, to how alter experiences ego’ (ToS 1, p. 206). The personalized mode of intimate relationships and that of families concerns how one individual is seen by the other. One can confirm a view not just by accepting it, but also in freely wanting to be the person another expects one to be. In such a context of mutual observation and concern, ‘every gesture, bodily and verbal, has to serve to observe, even to observe the observation of love’ (ToS 1, p. 206). Love and thereby intimate relationships and families differentiate themselves through constructing a world where one’s arbitrariness is seen through the eyes of the other and vice versa (ToS 1, p. 207).

The paradoxical nature of the observational mode of love has become of interest for Luhmann. Regarding the paradoxical nature of love, Luhmann emphasizes the roles of sexuality and therapy. For Luhmann, sexuality is conceptualized as a symbiotic mechanism. ‘Symbiotic mechanism’ means that within communication there is a constant reference to the bodily basis of the other person (ToS 1, p. 228). However, this notion of sexuality is reformulated through the aforementioned concept of observation, where sexuality becomes a source of irritation in social relationships (ToS 1, p. 228). How can someone know that another person desires them and gain knowledge of this without imposing anything? This paradox is often solved through innuendo or subtlety. However, the paradox of mutually knowing about the sexual desires of the other also holds the possibility that one does not know and that something that can normally be expected goes unfulfilled. It has become increasingly apparent in modern culture that at large individuals seek external help in this regard, whether through consulting relevant journals or professional therapy (ToS, p. 434, n. 111).

For Luhmann, akin to intimate relationships, families are also based on the modus of personalized communication (Theory of Society, Vol. 2 [ToS 2], p. 79), but in a very particular way that differs considerably from older conceptions of the family as an economic household or political unit (ToS 2, p. 27). Although Luhmann provides abundant references on the historical transition of the family, his thinking has much application in discussing families in contemporary society, because they are marked by a kind of complete accountability of the internal and external behaviour of each member of the family (ToS 2, pp. 140, 392 n. 415). For example, a father might have an awkward opinion of politics and religion that disturbs his teenage children. A teenager may constantly come home late from their chess club, provoking their parents for an explanation. In each of these situations, life outside of the family is relevant inside the family.

This review has introduced the reader to the important stages in the development of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of society with a particular focus on the topic of love. Luhmann’s thinking provides abundant concepts and terms to describe the social phenomenon of love in our everyday lives. One might not become a better lover by reading this review, but it is hoped that people might be able to broaden their understanding of love from the perspective of system theory.