| Chapter 1: | Distinctions: Observation, Meaning, and the Reduction of Complexity |
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According to Spencer Brown's innovative “calculus of indications,” observing any form of difference always entails two steps: drawing a two-sided distinction and, in the same operation, selecting or indicating one side or the other.
Although his work received mixed reviews from his own peers, Spencer Brown's impact on the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann was critical. One of the most prominent, creative, and prolific sociologists of the twentieth century, Luhmann acknowledged the method of observing through distinctions as a guiding principle in his scholarship. The pioneer of contemporary social system theory cited no more than a few selected pages from Laws of Form, but Luhmann repeatedly returned to the problem of how an observer draws a distinction to produce a world. For instance, in his book, Art as a Social System, Luhmann wrote,
The first cut made by an observer of society divides communication from its environment, from all that is not communication. Society is communication, as we will make clear, and it is the superset that contains all social systems. An observer of a social system identifies unities of sequential communicative operations, operations that successfully establish connectivity, one observation at a time, with the emerging history of society. This technique of observing with reference to a clear distinction