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| How Do Systems Fall in Love |
How Do Systems Fall in Love?
This essay explores Niklas Luhmann’s contemporary
sociological theory of love from the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It proposes a reading of its underlying systems approach according to what
Jacques-Alain Miller names ‘ordinary psychosis.’
These perspectives expose a number of difficulties inherent to Luhmann’s approach. First, Luhmann’s
communicative systems are not structurally diverse.
Indeed, only the internal codes and their subsequent
communicative elaborations give rise to external
points of difference. Second, there are relative problems with sufficiently stabilising any given system.
Third, love is always conceptualised as a distinctive
system with its own code rather than as that which
describes a universal systemic potential.
Keywords: Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Niklas Luhmann,
Sociology of Love, Communications, Talcott Parsons,
Systems Theory, Discourse Analysis
1. Decoding Love
Niklas Luhmann’s communicative theory of society
has persuaded many sociologists that love should be
understood as a mode of symbolic communication
(see Morgner, 2014). Thus, he wrote that ‘love will
not be treated here as a feeling (or at least only secondarily so) but rather in terms of its constituting a
symbolic code which shows how to communicate effectively in situations where this would otherwise ap
pear improbable. The code thus encourages one to
have the appropriate feelings’ (Luhmann, 1998: 8-9).
This passage should be scrutinised on the basis of its
presumption that a primordial code gives rise to an
appropriate affection, since this implies that love is
not a compensatory response to underlying feelings
whose enigmatic content cannot be properly assimilated. This theory proceeds on the basis of a single
point of structural determination — an apparent signifier, that is, a ‘code’ — which only secondarily gives
rise to associated feelings
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