Writing science

"Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late nineteenth century, past theoretical discussion of the responses to these media - including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, as well as elaborations by Edison, Bell, Turing, and other innovators - Gramphone, Film, Typewriter analyzes this momentous shift using insights from the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan. Fusing discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis, and media theory, and the author adds a vital historical dimension to the current debates over the relationship between electronic literacy and poststructuralism, and the extent to which we are constituted by our technologies."--BOOK JACKET.

A major challenge confronting contemporary theory is to overcome its fixation on written narratives and the culture of print. In this presentation of a general theory of systems, Germany's most prominent and controversial social thinker sets out a contribution to sociology that reworks our understanding of meaning and communication. Luhmann responds to the theory crisis in sociology with a genealogy of his own, which includes a cybernetician (Heinz von Foerster), two evolutionary biologists (Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco Varela), and an obscure mathematician (George Spencer Brown), not to speak of the Devil Himself. This list of names defines a set of problems that explodes the boundaries of sociology by linking social theory to recent theoretical developments in scientific disciplines as diverse as modern physics, information theory, general systems theory, neurophysiology, phenomenology, and cognitive science. In these fields, the erosion of classical paradigms suggests, not the end of science, but a fundamental revision of its theoretical premises.