N. Luhmann and satire ala Pynchon.....my emboldening....
Michael Bailey
michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Wed Jan 16 23:13:45 CST 2008
seems to me Glenn Scheper posted some interesting
references to Luhman awhile back.
I'm in the (much-interrupted) process of pulling the whole WASTE archive into
Glenn's WordsEx and hope to find them...couldn't use
the WASTE search engine dextrously enough
On 1/12/08, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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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"Smith Jones asked me if the halibut could fit inside the mailbox. I
said I didn't think so" - Elizabeth Kolbert
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