Luhmann and New Materialism in Practice

We are talking here about Luhmann and his social systems and how I see it apply to practice. I’m exploring the contributions of new materialism and will come back to it when I learn more. Looking at Barad, for example, there are interesting similarities and, of course, radical differences.

Affordances Beyond the Physical

I was walking in a park in Japan with a dear friend and we arrived at a nice structure on the edge of a lake. Inside the structure there was a bench—or so I thought. But when I declared my intention to sit on it, I was told that it was a table. Apparently, the object affords both, just not to the same person.

“Conventional affordances are possibilities for action, the engagement with which depends on agents’ skillfully leveraging explicit or implicit expectations, norms, conventions, and cooperative social practices. Engagement with these affordances requires that agents have the ability to correctly infer (implicitly or explicitly) the culturally specific sets of expectations in which they are immersed—expectations about how to interpret other agents, and the symbolically and linguistically mediated social world. Thus, a red light affords stopping not merely because red lights correlate with stopping behavior, but also because of shared (in this case, mostly explicit) norms, conventions, and rules.” (1)

Let’s say we are in a room in an organisation with people looking at a budgeting spreadsheet on a big screen. First, we must acknowledge that the physical landscape of a room, spreadsheet, etc., is already part of a landscape of affordances, more or less consciously perceived by individuals.

If we didactically zoom in on the spreadsheet, what it affords goes beyond the structural tool and how it’s been designed; it also reverts to the expectations of the people sitting in the room. In an organisation, besides overall societal norms, there are also created practices to deal with the organisation’s complexity that are structural in social terms: modes of organising, heuristics of decisions, etc.

Here is where Luhmann’s functional differentiation can support the work. When an organisation grows in complexity, we create separations (subsystems) to cope with its operations. Looking at that screen, we might have people from HR, Finance, and Compliance, for example.

Not only will different people see and interpret a budgeting spreadsheet differently, but those functions will also receive and respond with their own type of communications. Here are some everyday interpretations of what is on that screen:

• To Finance, it affords structural control, fiscal visibility, and predictability.
• To HR, it affords constraint, and the reduction of human potential to expense lines.
• To Compliance, it affords risk mitigation and accountability.

We can look at a spreadsheet as a tool that affords all of the above, but like my experience with a bench in Japan, affordances are filtered by the possibilities of action we can see. That’s why mapping abstract affordances of tools and objects is far from enough—they are also deeply contextual. Such mapping has to include the interpretations of multiple people and, in the case of our organizational operations, the interpretations of its different functions.

But wait! Sometimes the work is to break out the silos of those subsystems and re-interpret from another, common perspective, right? That is possible, but the fact is that we created those functions and separations for a reason. By separating, we can better cope with a complex organisation through reduction. At the same time—another Luhmannian contribution—we increase complexity by such reduction. There is no free lunch. A forced ‘alignment’ is simply a discourse change with no affordance change: a common pitfall which we will address later.

This is a practical use of Luhmann’s functional differentiation—a way to listen to the interpretations of the organisation’s own separate functions. When you step into an organisation that claims they have a communication problem, do not create a communication workshop or teach them the Enneagram. Instead, look at what their own distinctions afford by listening to how they interpret events and make decisions, specially when those are not contained within their self containers. In our example, when HR needs to make interpretations and decisions that can’t be implemented only internally, how are those interpreted by others? How do decisions irritate other functions?

New Materialism’s Challenges to Discourse

From what I’ve learned from new materialist intentions, it makes complete sense that changing the discourse (communication) without paying attention to material affordances is an old trap. People are verbally invited one way, but what is physically present does not afford what is declared.

I remember a client project in a Pharma company where the regional leaders were invited to test their field representatives for a period of probation and let them go if they did not seem to fit. That was a clear directive that made sense, but reality was less obvious. With a high demand from clients and a strict quota to deliver, regional leaders would rather have any field representative than none at all. The strict monthly quota simply did not afford the luxury of testing.

The monthly quota and the budgeting spreadsheet are both material apparatuses. Following Barad, they are not neutral, passive tools but participating agents performing ‘agential cuts’—dictating what is made visible and what is hidden, which actions are naturally invited, and which ones are hindered.
This allows for an important de-personalisation of the challenges in both cases. It is not about psychological traits or functional attitudes (“the leader is like this ”, “ HR is like that ”), but rather a response to what has been afforded by the entanglement of material and discourse.

Here there is more to learn. It takes me immediately to Weisbord’s ‘structure invites behaviour’ and Fritz’s ‘the path of least resistance’, but of course the background is different and worth digging into.

My initial response—sort of Luhmann’s revenge on new materialism—is that agential cuts are selections that include the material as an agent but, as we discussed, cannot be separated from the socio-cultural entangled cuts inherent to social systems. Because the agentic in this case does not mean intentional, it also presupposes using languaging to generate new ‘cuts’ in our organisational context.

Complex Matters Turn to the Linguistic Act

One assumption of discourse is that it is used only to describe and select, but discourse is as generative as materially changing settings, templates, tools, or room layouts. In fact, in complex social situations, languaging is central. A declaration of war is an impactful change in geopolitics—much more than building more tanks and planes. It instantly reconfigures the boundaries of what is possible.

Despite that, it is a fair challenge that we can’t change affordances by pure re-interpretation, which is a common critique misdirected at radical constructivism. Luhmann and others do not claim the world is all about communication; that is just a common strawman. But if we bring New Materialism into it, we can see that this loop runs both ways. The material world constantly irritates and limits our social systems, forcing us to respond. But our social system of communications also turns around and ‘irritates’(2) the material world. Our linguistic acts—our agreements, quotas, and decisions—are not floating ideas; they are forces that ultimately lead us to rewrite the software, change the templates, and physically reconstruct the tools left behind.

We will then agree that material change is crucial. But how does material change come about in complex organisations? Will a 90-minute convening in a room with different people magically re-configure the budgeting spreadsheet into a tool that allows for something else?

Or is it more likely that, understanding affordances and what can potentially change, those 90 minutes will afford the coordination of actions needed for such change?

So communicating here shows up twice. First, we need to communicate our diverse interpretations of what a tool affords and map the potential alternatives, adjacent possibles, and so on. Secondly, to change the material, we likely won’t start a hackathon on the spot. Instead, we use language to coordinate the actions needed for both material and discourse change.

Discourse as generative action precedes new material change precisely because the issue at hand is complex. Of course, the material world was already present, already providing the landscape of affordances that allowed us to gather and speak in the first place. But in the intentional timeline of a change process, the linguistic act comes first. It requires a coordination of actions—or, as Maturana would put it, the coordination of the coordination of actions—to deliberately decide how we will reshape that material landscape.

Discourse isn’t a cheap lecture or a vague change of mindsets; it is the highly sophisticated, messy, political work of using language to negotiate a future reality.

When we are in the room, change is the linguistic commitment—the offers, requests, and promises that are made. Over time it cannot be confined strictly to the linguistic act, and in rare cases it might not rely on it, but that’s another very practical use of Luhmann’s ideas: we can look at communications as the primary elements of social change.

Communications as shared rituals and stories, communications of interpretations of the past, making sense of the present, and projecting the future. Communication in general—language, linguistic acts, and stories in particular—is deeply entangled in our social realm, and as such can beautifully support the frame of the work for change.

(1) Ramstead MJ, Veissière SP, Kirmayer LJ. Cultural Affordances: Scaffolding Local Worlds Through Shared Intentionality and Regimes of Attention. Front Psychol. 2016 Jul 26;7:1090. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01090. PMID: 27507953; PMCID: PMC4960915.

(2) A strict systems theorist might argue that communication can never directly irritate matter because they don’t speak the same ‘language’. But taking New Materialism’s invitation to see the entanglement, we can interpret structural coupling as the mechanism that allows communication to leverage human beings as physical bridges to the material world. When our collective communications reach a decision, that discourse acts as a physical force—traveling through human bodies and clicking fingers to irritate and reshape the software, the quotas, and the tools we live by.