Niklas Luhmann: Art as a Social System (1995/2000)

This is the definitive analysis of art as a social and perceptual system by Germany’s leading social theorist of the late twentieth century. It not only represents an important intellectual step in discussions of art—in its rigor and in its having refreshingly set itself the task of creating a set of distinctions for determining what counts as art that could be valid for those creating as well as those receiving art works—but it also represents an important advance in systems theory.

Returning to the eighteenth-century notion of aesthetics as pertaining to the “knowledge of the senses,” Luhmann begins with the idea that all art, including literature, is rooted in perception. He insists on the radical incommensurability between psychic systems (perception) and social systems (communication). Art is a special kind of communication that uses perceptions instead of language. It operates at the boundary between the social system and consciousness in ways that profoundly irritate communication while remaining strictly internal to the social.

In seven densely argued chapters, Luhmann develops this basic premise in great historical and empirical detail. Framed by the general problem of art’s status as a social system, each chapter elaborates, in both its synchronic and diachronic dimensions, a particular aspect of this problem. The consideration of art within the context of a theory of second-order observation leads to a reconceptualization of aesthetic form. The remaining chapters explore the question of the system’s code, its function, and its evolution, concluding with an analysis of “self-description.”

Art as a Social System draws on a vast body of scholarship, combining the results of three decades of research in the social sciences, phenomenology, evolutionary biology, cybernetics, and information theory with an intimate knowledge of art history, literature, aesthetics, and contemporary literary theory. The book also engages virtually every major theorist of art and aesthetics from Baumgarten to Derrida.

Originally published in German in 1995 under the title Die Kunst der Gesellschaft, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main

Translated by Eva M Knodt
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2000
Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series
ISBN 0804739072, 9780804739078
422 pages

Publisher
Google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)

Seth Price: Dispersion (2002–) [EN, ES, BAQ, FR, IT, PL]

“A provocative essay in which artist Seth Price examines the classical model of conceptualism, calling for a new public art, and arguing for less of a rupture between artistic interventions and distributed media.”

“This work bears a deep debt to numerous conversations with Bettina Funcke… Without her ideas and inspiration it would not exist.”

First published in 2002
Publisher 38th Street Publishers, New York, 2008
[14] pages

Author

Dispersion (English, 2003, added on 2017-2-1)
Dispersion (English, 2008 facsimile of 2002 booklet, updated on 2012-8-14, PDF)
Dispersion (Spanish, text only, PDF)
Dispersion/Sakabanatzea (Basque, text only, PDF)
Dispersion (French, added on 2016-6-6, PDF)
Dispersion (Italian, added on 2016-6-6, PDF)
Dispersion/Rozproszenie (Polish, trans. Marcin Czerkasow, added on 2016-6-6, PDF)