The article offers a critical but sympathetic reflection on the development of classical and post-classical French sociology. From Comte onwards, I suggest, the modern French treatment of the social has been preoccupied with socio-theological questions; and even with the radical deconstruction of any society-god, this continues to be the case. There are distinctive historical reasons for this (including the Catholic inheritance and an enduring legitimacy problem for the Republican state); but the significance of the issues raised by this intellectual tradition (...) as a result goes beyond the limits of national context. In an age of post-histoire and the `death' of everything, the `French' travails of social ontology, including the quasi-religious register in which these have occurred, have deep and continuing import for any would-be progressive social theory as such. We need to rethink the `we'. With such considerations in mind, the body of the article considers Comte's concept of Humanity and Baudrillard's `end of the social' as exemplifying key aspects of the beginning (reconstructive) and ending (deconstructive) phases of the French sociological story. What began as a detour in the `death of God', I argue, has terminated in a `second death of God' in which a replacement divinity and the rationalist faith associated with it have disintegrated and become impossible to think. But the logic of this development has not been straightforward. It is marked by a double paradox. An interrogation of Comte's `Humanity' reveals it to be a semi-conscious exercise in simulation, haunted by the implications of its own emptiness. On the one hand, then, the attempted religious founding founded nothing (it made a transcendent of its own intended re-socializing effects). On the other hand, as exemplified by Baudrillard's pronouncements about the end of the social, the moment of disintegration has itself seemed to offer a new socio-theological opening. Rather than mourn the anomic or hyper-real impossibility of a transcending `we', Baudrillard would shift terrain in a quasi-Nietzschean (or Bataillian) transvaluation. This implies (against Baudrillard himself) not the definitive end of the French `sociological' project, but the possibility of its continuation, albeit under erasure and in a new key. (shrink)

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)