This article is concerned with Niklas Luhmann's theory of art which he formulated in the 1990s, based on his general theory of autopoietic systems. This theory regards modern society as a functionally differentiated formation whose sub-systems operate according to their inner principles of communication. According to this, the domain of art can also be seen as an operationally closed and self-referential communicative system. The basic problem in these notions lies in the way in which their description of the relationships existing (...) between different systems is only in very narrow terms. Consequently they partially ignore the present process of de-differentiation which has noticeably changed the status of art in society. Instead, Luhmann's ideas expressly emphasize that functional differentiation is an ongoing process. In order to describe the process of de-differentiation, social theory does not need to abandon the concept of autopoiesis, but it does need to understand social systems as interlaced formations which, to an increasing extent, contain common normative and organizational constituents. Because social systems are not altogether self-referential formations, the concept of autopoiesis can describe them only in part. This particular concept of system has been developed in particular by Richard Münch, and as such it forms a productive alternative to the theory of autopoietic social systems. (shrink)

In contrast to other approaches, `modernity' in this article is not dealt with as a historical concept but as a normative-aesthetic term and as a mythical narrative in the sense of Nietzsche's `eternal recurrence of the same'. Paradoxically, there still exists a semantic shift between different historical concepts of modernity beginning in late antiquity and the Middle Ages up to the present confusions about `postmodernity'. However, the aesthetical bias of the discourse of modernity prevents any serious interpretation which is able (...) to refer these semantic shifts directly to some clear and incontestable socio-structural facts and developments. In its contemporary sociological form this discourse overlaps on the contrary with some main trends in aesthetic theory and practice: the exchangeability between `old' and `new' and the permanent suspension of the boundaries between `art' and `life'. Consequently, aesthetics as well as sociology are describing modernity as a cultural system which is `playing' with its own fundamental differentiations between `in' and `out' or self-reference and other-reference. (shrink)