The chapter engages with Niklas Luhmann’s understanding of the concept of culture, from his critical examination of Talcott Parsons’ concept of a normative culture to ideas about a specifically modern notion of culture. It includes discussions of his ideas about culture forms of different media epochs of human society and about culture as memory of society. Luhmann’s sociology of culture remains a fragment, but it can provide inspiration for a media-theoretical derivation of culture forms of society, as well as for a social theory of values. Luhmann remained sceptical about the concept of culture throughout his life, since any attempt to ‘register’ a social phenomenon, for example, religion or art, ‘as culture’ runs the risk of infringing upon the necessary protection of its latency.

Introduction

Niklas Luhmann tried to get rid of the concept of culture. His relationship to this concept was not only sceptical but also polemical. In the 1980s, he had succeeded in neutralising Talcott Parsons’ use of culture as a set of values able to normatively solve problems of double contingency. He pointed out that mere coincidences, that is, time, would do the same. But in the 1990s, he experienced a rebirth of so-called cultural studies, which did not seem inclined to draw their lessons from the failure of cultural studies in the 1920s; when culture was thought to possibly provide the a priori values, by then lacking, ever since ontological metaphysics had lost its grip (Max Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann). Luhmann tried to limit the concept of culture as merely ‘historical’, as the product of a specific constellation of modern society – belonging to the past more than to any present, let alone future – but in the process of his examination began to conceive of culture as a memory function of society, to which he devoted ever greater attention. Luhmann’s description of so-called ‘culture forms’ of ancient, modern and postmodern society does not lack irony in being highly speculative, but could nevertheless develop into a fruitful paradigm of future research and teaching in cultural sociology.

Culture versus System

Niklas Luhmann had a not-entirely tension-free relationship with both culture and the concept of culture. Culture is ‘what one finds in the soil not belonging there’.