Observing Society: Meaning, Communication, and Social Systems By ...

values, or ontology. This makes contemporary social system theory very different from both the general systems approach of the 1950's and from other mainstream sociological paradigms.

Within social system theory, individual human observers are viewed as psychic systems, self-conscious unities of thoughts that are operationally closed to everything outside of consciousness. Thoughts remain trapped inside each individual's awareness and cannot make a difference or take the form of information outside of the mind. To participate in society, psychic systems assert themselves as part of the environment of communication. The theory criticizes sociological paradigms that attempt to solve the problems of operational closure and double contingency with presumptions of intersubjectivity, collective conscience, communicative rationality, or normative consensus. There is no inherent order that supports modern society or guarantees understanding among humans. Social system theory emphasizes the improbability of successful communication and yet explains how society still manages to reproduce itself.

In this book, we depict modern society as a complex unity with functionally differentiated parts. Various societal systems (the family, the economy, politics, religion, science, art, and others) produce and organize special forms of differentiated communication that may be distinguished by their own self-constructed boundaries. Each societal system functions in an exclusive way, seeking only to combine its own problems and solutions. Every social operation, however, happens inside the boundary of communication. Social system theory unravels this paradox of unity in difference by depicting society not as a whole composed of parts, but rather as the difference between everything that is communicated and everything that is not. Sociology, from the perspective of social system theory, is the science devoted to describing and understanding the second-order observations of observers of society. Sociologists observe participants in society to understand how participants observe communication processing meaning to recursively index differences in the world, maintain its various boundaries, and construct the information used in its selective operations.

Contemporary social system theory offers a highly original description of modern social conditions and the possibilities of communication.