Niklas Luhmann

"By representing themselves as a system generates boundaries with an inside and an outside that is inaccessible to them. They too reflect their outside as public life, so long as specific external rela…"

"We are still spellbound by a tradition that arranged psychological faculties hierarchically, relegating ‘sensuousness’ — that is, perception — to a lower position in comparison to higher, reflective f…"

"The art system operates on its own terms, but an observer of art can choose many different distinctions to indicate what he observes."

"The activity of observing establishes a distinction in a space that remains unmarked, the space from which the observer executes the distinction. The observer must employ a distinction in order to gen…"

"Does knowledge rest on construction in the sense that it only functions because the knowing system is operatively closed, therefore: because it can maintain no operative contact with the outside world…"

"No matter how abstractly formulated are a general theory of systems, a general theory of evolution and a general theory of communication, all three theoretical components are necessary for the specifi…"

"Whatever we know about society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media. This is true not only of our knowledge of society but also of our knowledge of nature."

"The effect if not the function of the mass media seems to lie, therefore, in the reproduction of non- transparency through transparency, in the reproduction of non-transparency of effects through tran…"