Depression and Capitalism and Luhmann and Communication

No one does the philosophy blog essay better than Levi. In fact, I think he’s nearly alone in being able to tie together his general intellectual position, his reading interests of the moment, and recent reader comments into a coherent response piece. He’s created a genre of his own, in my opinion.

Anyway, here’s ANOTHER OF HIS FINE BLOG ESSAYS. The parts on capitalism, depression, and clinical psychiatry are interesting enough. And by the way, I share his distaste for the knee-jerk reaction against psychiatric drugs in many humanities-type circles: I agree that this must be based on a bad Cartesian ontology. If getting drunk or even drinking coffee are already enough to change your mood, why shouldn’t small chemical imbalances in the brain have similar effects that deserve to be rectified? My only gripe is with the scientistic view that statements about emotions and feelings in the usual sense are automatically “folk” statements and those about chemical imbalances are automatically of a more rigorous sort.

But that was a digression… My actual favorite part of Levi’s post is the latter part about Luhmann. Read it and see why:

“What, then, according to Luhmann, are the elements that society constitutes, that compose a society (self-reference), and what is excluded from society? Luhmann’s hypothesis is surprising: Society consists entirely of communications. The autopoietic activity of society through which society reproduces itself is communication. Put in negative terms, society consists of communications alone and persons, psychic systems, are outside society, belonging to the environment of society.”

In similar fashion, an object’s “foreign relations” and even its own pieces are merely a part of the environment of that object.