Armin Nassehi is a sociology professor at a prominent German university in Munich. He is one of Germany’s most well-known and successful public intellectuals. His 2019 book Muster: Theorie der Digitalen Gesellschaft received much praise in numerous book reviews in Germany’s major newspapers and weekly news magazines.788 There were also a few interesting critical reviews, such as the one by Rudolf Walther in Die Tageszeitung (taz).
According to Walther, Nassehi has taken the position that “the left” is no longer necessary or relevant to contemporary politics or society. Nassehi is a top advisor to the German Green Party and to vice-chancellor and economics and climate protection minister Robert Habeck. Contrary to leftist critical theory, the primary way to understand today’s world, for Nassehi, is not through thinking about the world as capitalism, but rather as complexity.
Nassehi is a proponent of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, and especially of the idea of the “functionally differentiated society.” Society consists of many differentiated self-referential systems which function through “autopoiesis.” It is the statistical methods and “pattern recognition” analyses of empirical sociological research that Nassehi wishes to elevate to the status of chief paradigm leading the way forward to deal with society’s formidable problems. As a non-German living in Germany (an American who has spent half his life living in Europe), I find it to be striking and uniquely German that a spotlight would be shined on the methods of an academic scientific field as the model
for “what is to be done.”
The “theory of the digital society” that Nassehi asserts in his title and at the start of his book that he is going to elaborate can be summarized as a pair of related claims that “modernity has always been digital” and that digitalization has been so successful because it solves some very glaring problems of the pre-digital society. Complexity is the key. He writes: “The function of digitalization is established in the complexity of society itself.” Digitalization is inherent in social structure. Yet the aspects of digitalization that Nassehi considers in his study boil down to data and statistical patterns. This is more limited than the aspects which I have considered in the present work. I began with the idea of the technologies of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution as enumerated by Klaus Schwab. Then I interpreted how these technologies affect society, culture, and our lives when one adapts as thought experiments the three cultural theory concepts of hyper-modernism, hyperreality, and post-humanism. I emphasize the media technologies which are visual (VR, AR) and the textuality of code.
Writing to dissuade his German academic colleagues from their Kulturpessimismus, Nassehi seeks to assure his readers that “modern society,” beginning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, always already sought the acquisition, collecting, structuring, and analyzing of data to regulate, control, and predict human behavior. This is good and necessary because modern society is complex. For Nassehi, Big Data is only the latest version of the “quantitative recording and measurement of society” that began in the late eighteenth century. We were digital before there were computers. Society was structured digitally before technologies were architected digitally. In “functionally differentiated societies,” there was always a statistical pattern recognition approach to tackling problems (on the part of governments and big organizations) and for the sake of management and economic efficiency. Statistics were recorded to help in planning and forecasting. Digitalization is merely the latest technical solution to the perennial problem faced by modern societies of “how do we deal with invisible patterns?” What was analog is now coded into the discrete logic of informatics.
Despite his celebration of data, databases, database “records” (Datensätze) and their use for the statistical analysis of society, Nassehi expresses a certain affinity for post-structuralist semiotics and the “paradox of the sign.” He feels close to the sciences of literature and the text. His theory is indeed something of a “cousin” perspective to the theory of the simulacrum and hyperreality, and perhaps parallels my interrogation of how simulation and virtuality get implemented in the context of the digital. Nassehi writes: “Just as Derrida describes it, signifier and signified distance themselves more and more from each other.” Like the simulacrum, “the contexture of data refers to nothing other than itself.” The original of the world is only accessible through its duplication or doubling (Verdopplung). Yet Nassehi does not want to go too far with such “postmodern” or “hyper-modern” speculations about the virtualization of the world. On the contrary, he constructs a philosophical argument the unspoken intention of which is to abort any thinking or research
in that direction by declaring it to be impossible:
If we wanted to know whether our consciousness perceived the world correctly, we would have to be able to assume perception-free perception of the world to be able to conceptualize the difference between perception and what is perceived, between consciousness and the world.
I agree with this statement. Yet there are many possible directions in which one can go after that. One could study the distance between rhetoric and truth-claims without throwing up one’s hands in despair. Nassehi chooses to make the insight a justification for pure pragmatism:
Since such a possibility is not available to us, we are always dealing with a doubled reality whose difference between the original and the image is a difference whose identity we presuppose, but whose difference cannot be bridged… The paradoxical situation arises that the limit cannot be overcome, but in practice it is always overcome.
Is this the “systems theory” version of poststructuralism? The semiotic insight about the gap between signifier and signified is to be academically respected. It is something to be noted. Yet it is more than that. It is a paradox. It is an impossible paradox. Yet systems resolve it anyway. Pragmatically through their self-regulating autopoiesis. The semiotic poststructuralist insight is to be locked in the closet because pursuing its consequences is an epistemological impossibility. It is better, for Nassehi, to crystallize it into pragmatic resolution. The world is doubled by data. The world only comes to exist via this doubling because that is the only practical way to have a world at all. This duplication is how we stabilize life-worlds. Data stand for nothing but themselves, and it is good.
Digitalization is, for sociology, a fantastic opportunity to gain knowledge (according to Nassehi). Patterns can be extrapolated from digitally generated data and even by autonomous AI generators. What remains hidden in the analog becomes visible in the digital. But how in the world will sociology get access to this data? Is not the data in the hands of the big corporations and the big online (surveillance) platforms?
It is possible to see an affinity between the theory of hyperreality and the systems theory of Luhmann. They can be combined. The definition of the hyperreal as the generation of models without origin is consistent with the analysis of a system that intrinsically generates its own methods. Since Luhmann views society as an information processing system, it is possible that his theory could help to see how hyperreality is constructed by digital code.
In “autopoiesis,” a system maintains its separation from its environment dynamically via its awareness of external disturbances. The system knows its border from the surrounding environment while at the same time executing its own procedures. In the hyper-modern society, digital technologies are simultaneously the result of the key systems theory properties of differentiation and complexification, and the catalysts of intensifications of both characteristics. To state the obvious, the digital is both a continuity
and discontinuity with what was before.
Nassehi’s position has commonalities with the position of the present study. However:
(1) Nassehi looks at more narrow aspects of “the digital society” than does the cultural theory approach of my work.
(2) Nassehi oddly ends up recommending the methods of statistical sociology as the answer to the “what is to be done?” for all of society.
(3) Despite declaring his affinity to semiotics and post-structuralist thinking, Nassehi excludes all thinking about hyperreality on the grounds that it is epistemologically impossible to overcome the gap between perception of the world and how the world really is. This valid axiom could lead in any of several possible directions. It leads Nassehi spuriously to the pragmatic position that data and databases are, by (anti-) philosophical default, the proper explanations of the world