You will be 'pleased' to know that Stanford University Press has published a number of Luhmann's books in English: Social Systems (1995), Observations on Modernity (1998), Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy (1998), Art as a Social System (2000), The Reality of the Mass Media (2000), Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity (2002), and A Systems Theory of Religion (2012) - plus his last two volume monstrosity, Anyone wanting a look at this particular goobledegook could look for free here -http://www.anci.ch/_media/beitrag/ancilla2006_66_kjaer_systems.pdf
My view is most of this material and all of economics beyond a few counting tricks is supplication and jobsworth. On Tuesday, March 3, 2015 at 4:15:56 PM UTC, frantheman wrote: > > I'm still here - in some sense anyway. More passive, thoughtful, watching, > listening and thinking. As they say on Facebook; it's complicated. There's > such a volume of *stuff *out on the web now that I find my reluctance to > contribute to it growing ever stronger in the past years. Do I have > anything to say that thousands are others aren't saying? Is any attempt we > make to say something not drowned out in a cacophony of of puppies, > selfies, mindless chatter and incivility? In a world where significance > seems to have become dependent on reduction to a viral hash-tagged tweet, > or a five-second video on Vine, what happens to depth, complexity, the > possibility of real interaction? Has communication finally reduced itself > to atomic brevity and superficiality? Otherwise - tl;dr. > > "There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, > plausible, and wrong." What Menken actually said was a little different; > "Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a > well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong" > (*The > Divine Afflatus*, 1917). Even within the same language quotational drift > occurs. Interpretative drift is a constitutive element of discourse. Our > communication is always a hit-and-miss thing, or maybe, better, a > constantly creative process. What you say, what I understand. Each of us > culturally in our own particular place, but sharing enough to bring some > kind of communication into being - a wonderful, organic, continually > self-creating kind of thing, with all sorts of levels, eddies, > side-effects. An orchestral symphonic symbolic performance of memes and > tropes. And that's just when it's carried out between people who "share" a > common language. > > Accurate, one-to-one translation/conveyance of meaning is impossible; even > between two speakers of the same language. Communication becomes something > else, something independent. The German theorist, Niklas Luhmann > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann>, has some interesting ideas > in this area. It's a deeply counter-intuitive way of seeing things - and > useful as an instrument to challenge one's own assumptions, even if you > don't go all the way with him. > > Nobody - as far as I know - has translated Luhmann's major works from > German into English. Understandably - it's hard enough trying to figure out > what exactly he's saying in one language without trying to express it in > another, and when you move to his discussions and arguments with Habermas > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas> (another German > master of the complicated obtuse) ... forgeddaboudit! > > Though translation programmes have improved in the past decade, they're > still a long way from being good. Because "meaning"/"sense" is always > contextual (human subjective contextual), therefore always fluid and > shifting. This is more than just "fuzzy logic." I suspect we will need > genuine AI as the basis of operating systems to make them really work. Two > people from different lingusitic backrounds with very limited vocabularies > can communicate better - agree that they have achieved some kind of > understanding - than a programme which has access to comprehensive > dictionaries. > > For the past months I've been formally studying - in the academic sense - > in German. *Kulturwissenschaft *at that. It's a weird experience - > there's stuff I can understand better in English, other stuff works better > in German. There isn't even a good translation of the subject I'm doing my > Masters in. A literal English translation of *Kulturwissenschaft *would > be "cultural science" but English academia generally calls it "cultural > studies." Which, when you think about it, means something else. Well, it's > a post-modernist phenomenon anyway, which, arguably, allows one to be > multidimensional with reference to meaning! > > And sometimes it can be enormously productive to take an ordinary, > everyday word in a particular language and twist it, mine it, pummel it, > *rape > *it, alienate it. Poets do this all the time. Sometimes even academics (a > pretty mediocre lot for the most part) manage it. The use of the German > word *Verstehen <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verstehen> *["to > understand"] is one example. > > > > Am Sonntag, 1. März 2015 01:56:27 UTC+1 schrieb Chris Jenkins: >> >> Was passiert, wenn der einzige Weg, wie wir kommunizieren konnte, war >> durch Fremdsoftware nicht in der Lage zu verstehen, unsere Emotionen? Die >> digitale Kommunikation nicht Ton jetzt vermitteln, sich vorstellen, wenn >> sie verloren auch Nuancen in der Übersetzung? >> >> Ich denke an das, weil ich die Gespräche in dieser Gruppe häufig brechen >> in zwei Menschen aneinander vorbei sprechen. Ich frage mich, wenn sie die >> anderen Lautsprecher verstehen überhaupt. Wenn unsere Worte verloren nicht >> nur ihr Ton, sondern auch ihre heimatlichen Dialekt; wenn sie etwas wurde >> noch der Sprecher nicht verstehen, bevor sie von einer anderen Person >> erhalten, würden wir in der Lage, überhaupt zu kommunizieren? >> >> Ich wünschte, Fran waren hier, um zu wiegen; er würde haben Einblick Ich >> würde wertvoll wie ein englischer Muttersprachler, die so viel Zeit in >> einem Land mit einer anderen als seiner Muttersprache verbracht hat, zu >> finden. Gabby hat ähnliche Einsicht gegeben, wie viel Zeit sie in >> englischer Sprache bei uns verbringt, (und wie oft habe ich gefragt, ob ich >> einen Sinn in der Übersetzung verpasst), aber ich nehme an, sie werden >> meist nur Spaß meines schlecht übersetzt machen Deutsch. : D >> > -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
