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

53--------- ----- --------- ---------The Sociology of Law vs. the Philosophy of justicecesses in the participants' lifeworld: "Through the system interferencebetween law, lifeworld, and economy, subsystems can do morethan observe one another or regulate merely themselves."16 Theycan communicate with one another, for "all forms of specializedcommunication . .. are always at the same time-literally uno actuformsof general social communication as well."17 For systemstheory the expression "lifeworld" has a dissonant ring, whichreveals that Teubner must assume a shared medium of communicationoperative throughout society and underlying the specialcodes of the subsystems: "Social subsystems use the flow of [general]social communication, and extract from it special communicationsas new elements."18 In addition, the interferences attachedto individual acts of communication can structurally solidifY intothe role interferences of multiple memberships.I do not think that this proposal is consistent with the architectonicof systems theory. On the one hand, legal discourse issupposed to be trapped in its self-reproduction, constructing onlyits own internal image of the external world; on the other hand, itis supposed to use "general social communication" so that it can"influence" general social constructions of reality, and in this wayinfluence those of other discursive worlds as well. It is difficult toreconcile these two statements. If the first statement is correct, thenone and the same act of communication can belong to two or moredifferent discourses, but the identity of the corresponding utterancesin these discourses would be recognizable only from anobjective standpoint, and not from the perspectives of the involveddiscourses. Otherwise one must postulate the possibility of a translationbetween them-a hermeneutic relation that would explodethe closure of each of the mutually impenetrable circuits of communication.This interpretation finds support in an odd formulation:Any legal act is at the same time-uno actu-an event of general socialcommunication. One and the same [i.e., similar, gleiche] communicativeevent is linked to two different social discourses-specialized (and institutionalized)legal discourse and diffuse general communication. Interferencebetween law and other social discourses does not mean that theymerge into a multi-dimensional superdiscourse, nor does it imply thatinformation is "exchanged" between them. Rather, information is constitutedanew within each discourse, and interference adds nothing to the