Contending Regimes: Antagonism, Economy and Law. Insights from Luhmann’s Theory of Social Systems.
The global world is undergoing the effects of overlapping forms of social differentiation. N. Luhmann’s s theory of social systems allows to elucidate the current situation of multipolar globalization and concomitant crises. Furthermore, functional differentiation overlaps with previous forms of differentiation which increase derived complexity. Functional differentiation is unstable, enduring the contradictions arising from the varying communicative powers of its distinct social systems. Today, society faces contending regimes of governmentality characterised by the prevalence of restricted cognition: politics as antagonism, friend/enemy; the economy building on the complementary codes of (payment/not payment) and (profit/not profitable); technology as a system first advising then replacing outdated forms of agency. Each media of communication has distinct capacities, allowing for separate communicative proficiency. My research studies the communicative capacity of “power” in the parasitic form of antagonist politics as a major driver for the dedifferentiation of global functional systems. Because the code friend/enemy is simpler it can transgress the cognitive boundaries of other systems, including the level psychic systems. Nevertheless, antagonist politics is totalitarian and entails constitutive paradoxes that threaten both social communication and human existence. What could halt the communicative power of antagonism?