N. Luhmann and satire ala Pynchon.....my emboldening....

[Mark Kohut]

In trying to learn more about the sociologist N. Luhmann, whom Kai mentioned, I found this below which seems very interesting for Pynchon
readers......for hsi satire and the vision behind it, perhaps?

But I found my mind revisiting Farber’s wonderful idea recently in reading about radical constitutional satire in early 19th century England. One of the defining features of this satire was a (feigned) extreme naiveté on the part of the satirical observer, a naiveté that took the government and its vision of the English constitution at its word and then sought to reconcile that word with actual state of society around it. (Obligatory legal reference: this naiveté originally emerged as a way to protect writers against charges of seditious libel.) The genius in the satire was found in the absurdity of the reconciliation. Interestingly, this description of satire resonates very closely with Nicholas Luhmann’s and Gunther Teubner’s famous description of the law as an ‘autopoietic system’, by which they meant that the law is ‘normative closed’ – i.e., the law takes its own nornative pronouncements as given and uncontestable – and yet
 ‘cognitive open’ – i.e., it is still able to perceive empirical events of the society around it.


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