Social Theory of Love: Niklas Luhmann on the System of Intimate Communications

Love is analyzed as a social phenomenon within the framework of systems theory. Starting from Niklas Luhmann’s complex formulation defining love as a “symbolically generalized communicative medium”, the author deciphers its meaning: love is understood as a specific language (code) that structures communication in dyadic relationships, making improbable mutual understanding and coordination of behavior possible amidst growing social complexity and individualization. The first part of the work provides a critical analysis of prior sociological conceptualizations of intimacy in the theories of Georg Simmel, Michel Foucault, and Anthony Giddens. It demonstrates how Simmel viewed love and marriage as a dialectic of “vital content” and “social form”, Foucault — as a sphere for the exercise of power and constitution of subjectivity, and Giddens — as a “reflexive project” of identity formation in the era of “plastic sexuality” and “pure relationships”. The second part offers a detailed reconstruction of Luhmann’s theory on the evolution of the semantics of love — from the courtly tradition and “amour passion” to modern romantic love. Love is analyzed as an autopoietic system employing the binary code “love/non-love” and relying on the symbiotic mechanism of sexuality to stabilize highly improbable communication. In conclusion, the article examines contemporary debates on the status of the intimacy system in world society. It challenges Peter Fuchs’s thesis of its fundamental closure and non-network character. Using the example of digital dating platforms (“dating-and-rating”), it argues that intimate relationships, despite their apparent privacy, are integrated into a global communicative network and subject to the same processes of technologization and mediatization as other social systems.