At the most abstact level, Luhmann's social theory offers a systemic analysis of the social ordering of chaos through the reduction of complexity into a contingent cosmos. This reduction of complexity is effectuated through communication. Through comunication contingency is reduced. Some possibilities are realized, others are excluded, and, thanks to communication, the world becomes relatively predictable. Communications produce communi-cations, and when those can be linked to each other and structured in a relatively predictable way, society emerges.
Society is made up of communications and nothing but communications.
Elephants, fish and chips or cars do not belong to society. What is not a communication does not belong to society but to its environment. At this fateful point, systems theory takes an anti-humanist turn. If society is made up of communications, people are definitively not. They thus belong to the environment.