Systems theory replaces "subject" with "system," "object" with "environment," and conceptualizes the subject's ability to know and to deal with objects as systemic achievements that consist in registering and reducing the complexity of the environment. When systems learn to relate reflexively to their own systemic unity, this is merely an additional step in heightening their own complexity in order to be a better match for the hypercomplexity of the environment; this "self-consciousness" also remains within the logical sphere of the self-maintenance of systems. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, p.396

Whether the tendencies toward bureaucratization described by Weber will ever reach the Orwellian state in which all integrativeoperations have been converted from the - in my view, still fundamental-sociative mechanism of reaching understanding in language over to systemic mechanisms, and whether such a state is at all possible without a transformation of anthropologically deep-seated structures - these are open questions. I see the methodological weakness of an absolutized systems functionalism precisely in the fact that it formulates its basic concepts as if that process, whose beginnings Weber perceived, had already been concluded - as if a total bureaucratization had dehumanized society as a whole, consolidated it into a system torn from its roots in a communicatively structured lifeworld, and demoted the lifeworld to the status of one subsystem among many. For Adorno, this "administered world" was a vision of extreme horror; for Luhmann it has become a trivial presupposition. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.312

The propelling mechanism of the economic system has to be kept as free as possible from lifeworld restrictions as well as from the demands for legitimation directed to the administrative system. The internal systemic logic of capitalism can be rendered in social-theoretical terms by the formula that the functional necessities of systemically integrated domains of action shall be met, if need be, even at the cost of technicizing the lifeworld. Systems theory of the Luhmannian sort transforms this practical postulate into a theoretical one and thus makes its normative content unrecognizable. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.345