Contribution short abstract

If we take the functional differentiation of society seriously, then no unified affective orientation can be socially communicated. Attempts to reorient society around ecological concerns requires taking ambivalence as a structural condition of communicating across different orientations seriously.

Contribution long abstract

Society, we could say, has a deeply ambivalent relationship to its ecological environment. Political ecologists often seek to resolve this ambivalence through critique—affirming hope, diagnosing failure, or calling for transformation. But if we are to “think like a system,” or “see like a system” metaphorically, then ambivalence may be where we must begin.

Systems theory, especially Luhmann’s second-order variant, invites us to observe how meaning is produced through recursive operations that do not resolve contradictions but organise them. There is usually more than one way of making sense of, let alone deciding about, a situation (Harste, 2021). There is no ultimate meaning or shared normative orientation that can unite a functionally differentiated society. To presume otherwise is to invoke political theology, not political ecology.

This paper contributes to efforts to give systems theory “a critical edge” (Jessop, 2008; Moeller, 2012; Overwijk, 2025) by asking: what happens if we orient critique not around a unified “we,” but around operationally closed systems whose self-referential logics continually undermine ecological viability? If such systems are structurally inoculated against affective and moral critique, how does this reshape what counts as ‘political communication’?

Ambivalence in a systems-view becomes more than a mood: it is a socio-structural condition of orientation. Thinking ambivalently with systems might allow political ecology to inhabit its own limits, and, in doing so, may just thicken its capacities for meaningful intervention.