Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

52Chapter 2implementation research lead one to be generally skeptical of thebehavior-steering effects of legal interventions.13 I cannot go intothe critique and the avoidance maneuvers in detail here.14 However,I will note a conclusion that Gunther Teubner draws from thefragmentation of society. He shares Luhmann's view of society as amultiplicity of autonomous subsystems that, conducting their ownseparate discourses, must get by in each case with their ownmutually incompatible constructions of reality. At both the theoreticaland the empirical level, legal constructivism faces the problemof what the self-referential closure of the legal system impliesfor the possibilities of communication with other "epistemicworlds":"Is there something like an epistemic minimum in modern society,i.e., something that serves as a common denominator for socialdiscourses despite all autonomization? Does one find covariationor even coevolutionary trends among autonomous social epistemes?Or can the connection only be established in such a way that oneepisteme is reconstructed inside the framework of anotherepisteme?"15 Teubner addresses this question from two sides. Onthe one side, he examines the receptive processing of alien economic,technical, psychiatric, and scientific "knowledge of facts."This knowledge must be translated into the legal code and reconstructedthere without the legal system itself being able to assume"full epistemic authority" for the reliability of the foreign knowledgethus incorporated. On the other side, he addresses thequestion as it bears on the legal "influencing" of other socialspheres, however indirect it may be. For both sides of communication,he considers it necessary to posit a medium of"general socialcommunication." With regard to the regulatory "influence" onforeign subsystems, discourses, epistemes, and the like, he uses theterm "interference" between law and society (which he distinguishesfrom "coevolution" and "interpenetration"), thereby openingautopoietic law for real contacts with the economy, politics,education, family, and so on, that go beyond mere "occasions."Because such subsystems come into contact with one anotherthrough the same (i.e., identical, dasselbe) communicative event,actions that have different system references should be able to"intersect" in the same act of communication.Thus the legal act connected with a rental agreement, for example,"intersects" with an economic transaction and with pro-