Huh? Part Two

Thought I'd make a sequel to my original Huh? post. This one is from Niklas Luhmann, another legendarily difficult thinker, but though I don't expect this to make sense outside if its (considerable) context, the gist of it is pretty close to what Heidegger says in my original post. At the very least, it will give you an idea of what it is like reading a very interesting and fairly unknown thinker at the moment:

The system is formed out of unstable elements, which endure only for a short time or even, like actions, have no duration of their own but pass away in their very coming to be. Viewed chronologically, every event, of course, takes up a certain amount of clock time. But the system itself determines the length of time during which an element is treated as a unity that cannot be further dissolved; that period has a conferred, not an ontological character. Accordingly, an adequately stable system is composed of unstable elements. It owes its stability to itself, not to its elements; it constructs itself upon a foundation that is entirely not "there," and this is precisely the sense in which it is autopoeitic.

Whew! To be honest, though, that's one of the least difficult passages. Luhmann is a strange writer. He uses exclamation points more than any other philosopher (and I insist on this term for him) I have read. He seems to find his whole theory to be vaguely amusing (a bad sign?). On the other hand, I find reading him to be strangely pleasureable, and I believe someone somewhere said it's like a cold shower.