Acrobatics, that means as much as 'going on the top'. It is a circus word, a word for artists, also a word for the aesthetic fascination with something publicly performed, for 'disinterested pleasure'.
And this is exactly what this theory is often said to be: It is a glass bead game, a pleasure arena for intellectuals who perform tripping tricks on each other. Reality is different, more robust, denser and more visible. In the everyday business of, say, educating, what is one to make of systems-theoretical terms such as system and autopoiesis, medium and form, operation and observation, with structural coupling and interpenetration?
These terms have no direct correspondence to the terms we use to access the world in everyday pedagogical life. In addition, the theory proposes to dispense with common guiding terms such as 'subject' and no longer allows us to imagine that the strategies of education are still a matter of person-to-person, but rather allows them to be shunted into the consciousness- and subject-free play of the educational system, into the play of codes, symbolically generalized communication media, symbiotic mechanisms, contingency formulas, zero methodologies, and a peculiar operativity that the personnel of the system (i. e. its environment or co-environment) in a certain way trains and drives them into systemically fitting self-descriptions.
An answer to this question is old. It understands 'theoria' as a distant view, as 'visio', as a look. The 'theoros' is the observer of Olympic games, the ancient sports journalist, who looks from high above [⇒ God's Eye View] and therefore no longer sees the details, not the sweat on the bodies, the black under the fingernails, but the context of the events. He is really an acrobat, insofar as he stands on a height, through which the details escape his observation.
The performance is then: creation of order as an overview on the basis of the absence of the details. The motive (classical) is the interest, the being there and in between, not in the meaning of a (North German) 'Mittenmang', but in the sense of a sympathy that wants to overlook and understand the 'Whole'. It is about an extremely distanced 'supervisio'. It is about seeing connections that remain invisible to those who are involved in the respective practices.
It is clear that this answer is not so convincing today. Typically, we conceive theories as programs of medium scope for empirical research. All higher trimmed claims to cognition are transferred to philosophy, which knows how to 'ponder': in the (rigid) view on undecidable (and nevertheless and therefore always pending) questions. Super theories are observed with suspicion. But one could also run down the idea of the all-overseeing theory the old expression cleverness and thereby probably hit pretty close what Luhmann himself (in his art of modest-dry irony) thought of this theory. It is clever in the traditional sense of 'separating', of 'distinguishing'. In its own special way, it provides labyrinthine networked distinctions that can be used for purposes of designation. Or in other words: It is an observation instrument enriched with high complexity, with which the fields that someone wants to observe can be 'mixed up' and swirled (verwirbeln) within the framework of an abundance of distinction finesses, which even allow to observe the observer as well.