| Chapter 1: | Distinctions: Observation, Meaning, and the Reduction of Complexity |
|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
types of meaning-based systems in much more detail, but this chapter concentrates on explaining the general concept of observation.
Psychic and social systems are observers that operate by recursively connecting their own observations. Psychic systems handle distinctions within the medium of consciousness, but social systems, as Luhmann asserted, “must acquire their own possibilities of observation” (Luhmann 1995: 36–37). Without the ability to construct possible connections between successive observations, a meaning based system would confront only chaos resulting from the world's overwhelming variety. Put in stronger terms, a psychic system that could not observe a distinction between “world” and “everything else,” would not be able to perceive “a world” and establish connections between phenomena attributed to its world. Observations of difference make identification possible. In the words of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “Synthesis and analysis require each other” (1959:26). Things are what they are because they refer to other things. That is, things are what they are because of what they are not. Meaningful observations construct and refer to this difference.
Before we expand on the connection between making observations and social system theory, let us briefly return to Spencer Brown's notion of “severance” and his own illustration of the theory of observation with reference to the circumference of a circle in a plane (Spencer Brown 1979). Imagine drawing a black circle on a white piece of paper with the help of a compass:
What makes the circle a circle? The circle we see is not formed by the space inside the line, the space outside the line, or by the line itself. Identifying a circle requires a synthesizing unit of meaning that consolidates