Abstract
This paper aims to formulate the relation between culture and society from the viewpoint of Niklas Luhmann's theory of self-referential social systems. Traditional sociological theories, for example, those proposed by Talcott Parsons and Alfred Schutz, considered the social to be realized on the basis of a common culture among people. According to this idea, the society must be defined as a "society of culture" because it is a product of culture. On the contrary, the theory of self-referential social systems does not presuppose such a common basis for the social. Culture is not an eternal entity that cybernetically controls the social system from the outside. A social system emerges on the basis of mutual intransparency, that is, double contingency among people, and subsequently begins to control itself by remembering and forgetting the memory of its own operations. This memory is called culture and results from self-referential system operations. Therefore, as a product of the social system, culture can be described as the "culture of the social system." This formulation is also applicable to the destatized world society, which is not represented as a geographical unit. The world culture, or the culture of society, means nothing other than contingency. As the eigenvalue of the world society system, contingency results from the system operations and gives the orientation of further system differentiation to the world society. Consequently, by placing the social prior to the cultural, a theoretical framework can be established for describing and analyzing the current world situation, where cultures are differentiating with many associated issues.
