Volume 8, Issue 1

Adopting a comparative approach, the article discusses patterns of inclusion and exclusion such as property, nation and religion from a historical viewpoint. According to Luhmann the concept of inclusion and exclusion is about taking into account persons in social systems; according to Foucault it is related to deviance and abnormality. The transition from stratified to functionally differentiated societies is analysed, emphasising the transformation of ›Inklusionsindividualität‹ to ›Exklusionsindwidualität‹. Property and nation are both treated as transient semantics: for a short time after its emergence, private property guarantees inclusion and brings about new forms of identity and exclusion. Without the nation state the autonomy of subsystems would not be tolerable. The idea of a nation temporarily compensates for exclusion rates resulting from this new form of differentiation. While religion grants access to anyone and everyone even in stratified societies, thus anticipating the new pattern of inclusion, it also turns into a reservoir for unplanned, non-functionary exclusion in modern society.

In Niklas Luhmann’s later works on social exclusion, his concept of environment is no longer strictly epistemological but becomes increasingly ethnographic. From a systems theoretical point of view, environments are mere effects of social systems and their need to distinguish constantly between essential operations and operations that are of no consequence for the continuous reproduction of the systems’ identities. However, under certain circumstances environments turn out to be spatial. One could even say that on the analytical agenda the spatial dimension of exclusion takes precedence over the temporal dimension of sociality to the same degree that sociality becomes a primarily temporal reality - and systems theory describes its own approach as a turn to radical temporalization of all social structures. In these spaces or territories it is not communication that can be observed but human beings reduced to their bodily state. Having become a kind of container for socially unadressable bodies, this environment of the functionally differentiated world society does not require empirical social research or complex explanations, but the evidence-producing strategies of ethnographic fieldwork or simply travel notes.

The paradox of the excluded middle - namely, that the proposition »All propositions are either true or false« can itself be proven neither true nor false - is presented as the logical figure for the exception or self-exemption at the heart of the political principle of sovereignty. Whereas Carl Schmitt maintains the necessity of the sovereign exception to the rule, Giorgio Agamben wishes us to push beyond the logic of exclusion that defines the political within the Western metaphysical tradition. Contrasting Schmitt with Walter Benjamin and thus the Messiah with the katychon, Agamben seeks a »completely new politics« that would release us from guilt and return us to a »natural innocence.« Conversely, this paper argues that the katychon, with its consequent infinite deferral of the parousia, is indeed the appropriate model for the political in the terrestrial City that can never aspire to the status of the City of God.

Resurgence of interest in theories of sovereignty reflect both the availability of theoretical models capable of handling the paradoxes of inclusion and exclusion and historical sensitivity to the ways in which sovereignty develops in tandem with experiences of intercultural contact and conflict. The essay argues that one striking historical example of the interrelation of concepts of sovereignty, inclusion and exclusion, and cultural contact, lies in early American attempts to process the Native American »other.« Using a widely influential speech recorded by Thomas Jefferson, the essay proposes first a literary interpretation of the text’s power, and then suggests the way in which the theoretical argument about sovereignty delineated by Agamben (1998) can help elucidate the »anomaly« of Indian sovereignty in the American archive. A final section proposes that sovereignty, as developed in this intercultural context, promotes confusion between social and psychic systems, for which reason Luhmann’s systems theory may fruitfully be supplemented by the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan as interpreted by Zizek (1991).

The article investigates into one of the most essential tropes of political thought: the figure of ›drawing a line‹. The many ways are described in which this figure appears and is modulated in the works of Mao, Carl Schmitt, Paul Goodman, the Red Army Faction as well as in popular culture. Yet ›drawing a line‹ is more than a rhetorical figure. What is argued in the article is that this figure invokes further reaching political questions as to the groundless nature of society, the necessity of decision, the impossibility of inclusion without exclusion, the problematic of the subject along with questions of identity construction in general.

Identity may be modeled by Spencer-Brownian qualitative mathematics, introducing identity as an argument agreed upon by communication taking place between first-order and second-order observers. The paper uses this notion and its mathematics in order to present a model of the role of Lenin’s Bolshevik party in the Russian revolution and the institution of a Soviet state. The idea is to test the provision of sociological systems theory with a calculus of form representing the concatenation of observations acted upon in social intercourse. Lenin’s twist consists in the invention of an exclusive, conspiratorial, and professional political party as the main actor of revolution. His knot, which strangles the idea of the revolution and many of its proponents, is the necessity of having to accept the state as the battlefield of that party and as the institution that has to fight a war, reorganize a national economy, reinvent Russia, and promote the socialist revolution in a capitalist environment.

The paper examines from a historical and theoretical point of view the interrelation between the sociological theory of inclusion and exclusion and the classical sociology of the stranger. Inclusion/exclusion is a new theoretical perspective which mirrors the increasing prominence of communication in modern social systems and the pluralization of reference systems in which any psychic system in modern society is involved. Sociological theorizing on inclusion/exclusion thinks about how social systems include persons via addresses and the formation of expectations or exclude them by not creating addresses and expectations referring to them. In contradistinction to this general analytics of inclusion/exclusion, the sociology of the stranger theorizes a special case. It belongs to those corpora of sociological theorizing closely coupled with a historical semantics which we find in nearly every society we know anything about. There are at least three important social structural premises of the sociology of the stranger: participation in social systems is thought as membership; social systems are characterized by social closure; and, finally, persons as members are compact social objects, unifying diverse participations from a core identity attributed to persons. As all these three characteristics are no longer valid in modern society, the paper postulates that the sociology of the stranger and the analytics of inclusion/exclusion are successive historical models for the participation of psychic systems in society. From this results the concluding discussion of structural changes in concepts of identity. Identities in modern society are characterized by atomization; they are decoupled from authenticity; they are multiple identities, all of which imply part-time engagements. The network metaphor is interpreted as an apt description of these transformations. All these changes in identity concepts are related to a societal structure in which the participation of persons is particularized by multiple inclusions.

The paper suggests a concept of the popular which understands itself as an alternative to mainstream Cultural Studies which refer to the Popular in terms of hegemonic articulations of socio-cultural identities such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality or class. In contrast, my contention is that the Popular is intrinsically linked to the universalism of functionally differentiated systems. The popular then describes how functional systems use the distinction between a universalistic semantics of inclusion and its seductive, hyper-universalistic exaggeration. At the turn of the century, it was crowd psychology (e.g. Le Bon) which provided the semantics to deal with the new forms of hyper-universalism. The paper uses this redefined notion of the popular for analyzing discourses on speculation and the stock exchange. It focuses on those semantics which implicitly problematize the process of inclusion by trying to make it more attractive. The inclusion of the speculator becomes a process of seduction, resulting in a precarious expansion of inclusion. It is discussed how such a ›massive universalism‹ is produced by stock market communication itself and how it relates to the modern ideal of a more and more inclusive society.

The contribution begins with some remarks on the unavoidable deconstruction of the concepts of subjectivity and of the autonomuos subject as the key concepts of modern western philosophical thought. A sociological perspective has to start where the strong concept of subjectivity ends. It has both to emphasize the societal background of the empirical underdetermination of the individual and to describe this as a new form of social determination. A sociological perspective begins with the description of the conditions for that what the philosophical concept of subjectivity treats as its uncondonditional foundation. That means that sociology begins with the discovery of the empirical individual within social structures. After this the paper reconstructs the theoretical figure of individuality and individualization from the perspective of Luhmann’s systems theory. The second step shows that individuality is more than what is meant by exclusion individuality. This includes a reflection on the individualizing effects of inclusion routines of the function systems in modern society. The last point makes some brief conclusions concerning empirical research on individualization processes.

Since the eighteenth century what is known as the ›body politic‹ has duplicated itself in a very specific way. Alongside the models of the social contract we can observe, under the label ›police‹, the emergence of political knowledge dealing with the regulation of social, economic, medical and moral spheres. This tension between sovereign representation and the empirical ›body politic‹ became critical after the French Revolution. The works of Friedrich Schiller may serve as an example of the intense exchange between aesthetic and police-theoretical problems: a quest to mediate between the laws of reason and the scope of empirical forces; and to grasp the economics of a political power which converts the inclusion of the excluded into a new form of degenerate life.