Love

A Sketch

Niklas Luhmann, André Kieserling, Kathleen Cross

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745694719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Love seems like the most personal experience, one that touches each of us in a unique way that is more personal than social, and hence it is not surprising that it has been largely neglected by sociologists and social theorists. While it has long been a central preoccupation of writers and novelists, love has rarely attracted anything more than the most cursory attention of social scientists. This short text, originally written in 1969 by the eminent German social theorist Niklas Luhmann, goes a long way to redressing this neglect. Rather than seeing love as a unique and ineffable personal experience, Luhmann treats love as a solution to a problem that depends on a wider range of social structures and forms. Human beings are faced with a world of enormous complexity and they have to find ways to order and make sense of this world. In other words, they need certain facilities for action Ð what Luhmann calls 'media of communication' Ð that enable them to select from a host of alternatives in ways that will be understood as meaningful by others. Love is one of these media; truth, power, money and art are others. With the development of modern societies, greater demands are made on this medium of love, altering the relationship between love and sexuality and giving rise to the distinctive difficulties we associate with love today. This short text by one of the most brilliant social theorists of the 20th century will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities. It is a concise and pithy statement of what is still the only sociological theory of love we have.

Love as Passion*
Summer Semester Course 1969

Despite being a social fact of indisputable significance and a literary theme with an age-old tradition, the phenomenon of love has attracted little noteworthy attention from sociological research to date. One can – and we shall – draw on relevant work that has already been done. It is possible to unearth a few empirical studies on particular aspects of the topic here and there, along with some clever reflections that reveal perceptive insights. But there has been no sophisticated theoretical treatment of the topic – probably because there are no theoretical ideas available that might offer grounds for claiming that they are able to do justice to such a complex, tangible and yet far-reaching phenomenon of daily life.

The following considerations represent just such an attempt. They are based on proposals, published elsewhere, for a theory of social systems.¹ Our focus will be on the term ‘medium of communication’ found there. Part I is devoted to explaining and applying this term to the specific case of love. Rather than dealing with love in isolation as a specific, unique phenomenon, this approach treats it as a solution to a problem that is dependent on systemic structures and is comparable to other solutions.

On this basis, we shall show in Part II that, in the course of societal development, greater demands are made of this medium of communication, love, so that it becomes societally differentiated and institutionalized with regard to its special particularity and specific function. We shall also show how this occurs. The relationship between sexuality and love (III) thus acquires an altered meaning. An attempt is then made in Parts IV and V to elucidate some of the difficulties arising from these structural changes.

By using the category ‘medium of communication’, it is also clear that we are not seeking to address love in this context as an objectively identifiable feeling of a particular kind or to determine its occurrences, provide causal reasons for them or render them functional in terms of individuals' organic or psychological system. For our argument, the reverse is the case: a certain ambiguity and plasticity in emotional state is essential (although, of course, love as a medium of communication is not compatible with each and every motivational structure). It may well be that the breakthrough leading to one's first taste of independence from one's parents, the excitement experienced during one's first tentative encounters or the first experience of mutual recognition with a sexual partner is, with the aid of a cultural cliché, interpreted as love – and is then turned into love. Rather than forcing ourselves to treat this as self-deception regarding ‘actual’ feelings, we see in such interpretations of feeling the more or less far-reaching effects of cultural socialization. What is of interest to us is not the way they are processed within the psychological system but rather their function within the social system.

I

The general life situation of the human being is characterized by an excessively complex and contingent world. The world is complex insofar as it presents more possibilities of experience and action than can ever actually be realized. It is contingent insofar as these possibilities become apparent as something that could be or could become different. The most important human means of creating order in this world is meaning-making, including communication, which is what humans use to reach an understanding between one another that they mean the same thing and will continue to mean the same thing. Communication, through structured language, acquires the degree of efficacy that enables a person to cope with such a world and make a great variety of selections within it. In addition to linguistic communication, however, non-linguistic communication exists as an aid to interpreting the spoken word and indeed as an independent means of conveying meaning. It is precisely in matters of love that non-verbal modes of communication are important and indispensable.

Neither linguistic nor non-linguistic communication on its own is capable of making another person accept the meanings being conveyed, that is, of making them adopt these meanings as a premise for their own experience and action.² The real feat of meaningful communication – the selection of certain experiential perspectives from a broad range of other possibilities – is the very thing that makes acceptance of the meaning thus selected uncertain: that is to say, the other person might make their selection differently. Maintaining an intersubjectively constituted, highly complex and contingent world as a realm of choice for making selections from a host of alternatives presupposes, therefore, that mechanisms exist in interpersonal intercourse through which both selection and motivation occur. We call such mechanisms media of communication. Thus communication media are initially defined merely through the naming of a function (and not yet through actual structures or processes). They link selecting mechanisms with motivational mechanisms; they motivate acceptance of the meaning thus chosen through the manner of their selection.

How this is possible remains an open question at first.³ There are several, fundamentally different, forms of motivation via selection, which appear equivalent in this highly abstract, functional perspective. Love is one of them. Truth, power, money and art are others.

In an initial rough-and-ready classification one can distinguish communication media according to whether the meaning conveyed relates to experience or action. Experience is the processing of meaning in which selectivity is attributed to the world itself. Action is the processing of meaning in which it is attributed to the person acting. In actual fact, of course, all action presupposes experience and all experience action. The distinction is of analytical value in the first instance. However, beyond this, it also refers to reality to the extent that systems become differentiated and attributions regarding the reduction of complexity can be divided between the world, on the one hand, and a system, on the other.

Some communication media, namely power and money, are primarily concerned with motivating the adoption of selections which present themselves as a decision about actions or behaviours. One accepts an order or a selection from those potential possibilities which society makes available for economic satisfaction. Other media, by contrast, regulate acceptance of the world by establishing a determinate – or at least determinable – meaning: that is, world as a cosmos, as an ordered entity in which not everything is any longer possible. This is the general direction in which the function of the media, of truth, of art and of love can be found. This is not to deny the relevance of these media for behaviour; it is just that this relevance is steered not directly but indirectly by the medium – mediated via persuasive experience.

These distinctions lend an initial and highly important shape to love as a medium of communication. Love would not be conceived adequately if we sought to interpret it merely as a motivation for a specific behaviour – such as sexual fidelity – whether such behaviour is held to be prescribed by the concept of the medium or to be chosen (‘desired’) by one's partner. Love colours experience in the first instance and thereby changes the world as a horizon of experience and behaviour by means of its own characteristic totality. It gives certain things and events, people and communications, a special persuasive power. Only in the second instance does it motivate a person to behave in a way that is chosen for its symbolic-expressive significance as an expression of love, or in a way that is suggested by the particular world in which one knows oneself to be united with the person one loves – a world of common tastes and a common history, where issues are discussed and events judged in terms of love. The pivotal point of the medium is not the potential for action or the choice a person makes on that basis according to the situation in which they find themselves, but rather the existence of another person and the way in which this other person gives meaning to their own experience.

Social systems which are structured according to love impose on themselves a requirement of communicative openness for topics that have not been fixed in advance. They thus leave themselves open to considerable risk. The entire experience of the partners should be an experience shared in common. Each partner should tell the other what they experience every day, each should tell the other all about their problems and resolve them through a joint effort. There should be no ‘façades’, no contrived stories, maintained and defended, behind which secrets are concealed. Indeed, this is a condition of a realistic (not projective) expectation of the other's expectations, the significance of which we shall return to later on. The institutionalization of non-specific, communicative openness presupposes discretion. Discretion relies on recognizable system boundaries and also, in this case, on both partners being aware of and respecting the same system boundaries. It also depends on each knowing that the other does so and being able to expect this of them. These requirements find expression in the predicted marital type known as ‘companionship’, an ideal cultivated by American sociology of the family, which the same sociology tests with regard to the limits of its realization in practice. Such requirements can be considered to be thoroughly institutionalized in modern marriages – which does not mean that one pays attention to them throughout, but only that the expectations associated with them cannot be openly contradicted. A wife does not run the risk of open rejection (‘That's none of your business’) when she asks: ‘Why are you home so late today?’ Albeit the institution of marriage alone provides no guarantee that she will hear the truth.

Compared with other media by which experience is steered, the peculiarity of love lies in the manner in which it links the form of selection with motivation. With regard to truth as a medium, the condition of communication is that everyone must accept the meaning conveyed if they do not wish to be dropped from the circles of reasonable people. Regardless of the individuals concerned, truth connects all those involved in the experience (this does not necess...