The Individual in the Environment of Social System

ABSTRACT

To address the question of the individual's position in modern society, it is necessary to move beyond the traditional opposition between methodological individualism and holism. Drawing on the social systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, this paper reassesses the relationship between the individual and society through the system/environment paradigm. It argues that the individual is not a constituent part of society but exists in the environment of the social system. Only when an individual's bodily behaviour transforms the structural device constructed by the system within communication—the person—can the individual be perceived by the social system as an irritation, thereby influencing its autopoietic operations. On this basis, the paper further identifies four dimensions of individual irritation of social systems: direct individual irritation, indirect individual irritation, direct emergent irritation and indirect emergent irritation. These correspond to distinct mechanisms through which social systems, while fulfilling their fundamental function of stabilizing expectations, either maintain existing structures or undergo structural transformation.