Luhmann (2) Systems and Environments

Abstract

The previous chapter dealt with Luhmann’s ideas of meaning, subject, and communication. This chapter details how autopoietic systems use differences to create themselves, develop their structures, and establish their identities.

Organic, psychic, and social autopoietic systems use differences to create their identities and boundaries. They create their meanings by differentiating themselves from their environment, information from noise, and useful actions from useless ones. In so doing, the entities become meaning-processing systems.

As they create boundaries and selectively process their inputs and outputs, systems create themselves as centers of their worlds. They come to relate to each other through the processes of structural coupling, which is also called interpenetration. In interhuman relationships, the process of binding, which creates these structural couplings, is aided by binary schematisms in the forms of morality and socialization.