For reasons I shan't trouble anyone with, I am working my way through Niklas Luhmann's grand opus Social Systems (trans J Bednarz Jr & D Baeker, Stanford University Press: Stanford CA, 1995). Luhmann is unique amongst European social theorists in that (i) he owned a pub, and (ii) he owned a brewery. But, God alone knows, he found it hard enough to write an engaging sentence.
I bought Social Systems last week in the wonderful Munro's Books on Government Street in Victoria, BC. There are some things to be said about Social Systems, however. It's not so much a book about social theory as a giant casting press, imposing its great weight on smaller more fragile objects and crushing them into unwilling shapes.
Against Luhmann, Parsons on The Social System and Habermas on Communicative Action both seem to be formed from satirical and succinct prose (which they are very definitely not, incidentally). Even Foucault pales into simplicity next to the violent disregard that Luhmann has for the reader. Luhmann's book is utterly relentless; incomprehensible in some parts; grindingly dull in others. Trying to make sense of it is like working a large and very heavy electric polisher over an uneven strip of parquet flooring.
No comments:
Post a Comment