Art as a Social System

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.