Excerpt: I am pleased for the occasion afforded me by Revue Internationale de Sociologie to formulate a few thoughts of mine on Lucio Castellano’s book, Il Potere degli Altri (The Power of Others) indeed, this provides me with the opportunity of committing to writing a few points deriving from the informal discussions in which I have had the pleasure to take part with its author over the past few years in the room we share at the Faculty of Statistics at Rome’s “La Sapienza” University. What follows is not meant to be a review of the above book, but deals exclusively with the clarifying of the terms of a question which I posed myself over the course of the long journey on which the text conducts us, linking politological themes (sovereignty, democracy, government of the res publica, decision-making power, obedience to the laws of the State, equal rights, juridical-procedural rules etc) with issues concerning the “theory of society- (the formation of societal identity, societies’ environment, the nature of social norms, common sense, institutionalization, the measurement of strength relationships, symbolic representation, emancipation from the constraints of domination etc) and the philosophy of science (truth, contradiction, natural language, scientific theory, paradigm, objective || construct, formal universe, Wertsfreiheit, symbolic generalization etc). My question is: is it acceptable, given the present state of the social sciences, to make epistemology directly or indirectly dependent on forms of political decisionism? The book’s answer to this question is affirmative.

Problem: The underlying assumption of all feminist theories is that in order to achieve our emancipatory goals we have to resolve the so-called female subjectivity problem first. That is, we have to answer the question of what is (is not) the nature/essence/main feature of being a woman. The debate about where and how we should look for that essence seems to be endless and it still continues in contemporary feminist theories. This stalemate blocks the initial political and social power of the whole feminist movement. It also seems to contradict the idea that philosophy can serve practical purposes, which was a driving force behind feminist theories as such. Solution: While analyzing contemporary feminist theories we can discover that they are dualistic with respect to the cognitive situation. Using tools taken from Josef Mitterer’s philosophy and the idea of emancipation developed by Bruno Latour, I want to consider the idea of avoiding stalemate situations in discussions on female subjectivity. I claim that this strategy can be more effective in achieving certain practical goals that are important from a feminist point of view. Benefits: We are able to show that the aim of our theoretical activity is not to agree about what a woman is and what kind of woman we are going to emancipate, but rather to define which problems should be solved in order to improve the situation of women. We just have to learn how to formulate the description from now on of initial matters of concern that is acceptable to all those involved in a given dispute.

Key words: anti-essentialism, identity, feminism

Besides their skepticism about universal reason and universal morality, the Frankfurt Schools of Critical Systems Theory and Critical Theory share basic assumptions: (1) the thinking in societal-systemic, institutional concepts, which transcend simple reciprocal relations by dint of their complexity; (2) the assumption that society is based on fundamental paradoxes, antagonisms, antinomies; (3) the strategy to conceptualize justice as a contingent and transcendental formula; (4) the form of immanent (and not morality-based, external) critique as an attitude of transcendence; (5) the aim of societal (and not only political) emancipation in an ‘association of free individuals’ (Marx). The article focuses on those parallels and aims to conceptualize a critical turn-around of autopoietic systems theory.

Key words: autopoiesis, critical systems, critical systems theory, global law, justice world society.

In the spirit of second-order cybernetics, human communication is reconceptualized by including in the process not only its theorists but also their observed Others without whom social reality is inconceivable. This essay examines several versions of otherness, how the voices of Others survive social scientific inquiries, the dialogical spaces made available for people to build their home, and the kinds of citizenship encouraged. The essay draws attention to the epistemological limits of different inquiring practices and seeks to expand the range of possibilities for humans to see each Other.

Key words: cybernetics, human communication, languaging, embodied practices, re-entry, accounts, social theory, social inquiry, otherness, observer, i, it, you, thou, trivial/ nontrivial machines, dialogue, agency, emancipation, epistemology, methodology, politics o

The book features 18 of Klaus Krippendorff’s key papers on constructivist, second-order cybernetics, and dialogical approaches to social phenomena, organized in four sections, named in the title of the book. Part 1 offers a sketch of social constructivism, epistemological and conceptual issues of communication. Part 2 concerns the otherness that theorizing creates, the use of pronouns in social relations, power and emancipation. Part 3 critiques semiotics from a constructivist perspective, develops conceptions to come to grips with cultural artifacts and proposes a theory of discourse. Part 4 reviews information theory, and applies it to research processes, the internet and cyberspace more generally and to social memory.