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This chapter examines production regimes and their idiosyncracies, with particular reference to the co-evolution of economic and legal institutions in the varieties of capitalism. It first considers two theories that explain the institutional varieties of capitalism, namely, the theory of production regimes and the theory of institutional co-selection. It then looks at the theory of self-organising social systems as well as its critique of the theories of production regimes and co-selection. It also discusses the theory of autopoietic social systems and its emphasis on self-organisation and self-reproduction, together with the multi-polarity and cyclicity of production regimes. The chapter concludes by outlining the main assumptions of autopoiesis theory, focusing on just-in-time contracts in the United States and Germany.

Legal closure implies diverse but interconnected understandings of law. This chapter sets out to defend the utility of a sociological perspective, or set of perspectives, on legal closure. It distinguishes two approaches to legal closure: normative closure and discursive closure. The aim here is not to show that conceptions of normative or discursive legal closure are misguided in the particular contexts in which these conceptions have been developed, but that they can be reconsidered in a broader sociological perspective. Such a perspective ultimately denies that law is adequately understood as a ‘closed’ system, knowledge field, intellectual discipline, or discourse. But it recognises the social conditions that may make law so appear, or which seem to impel the ‘legal’ to seek to achieve ‘closure’ in a variety of ways. Viewed sociologically, legal closure can be treated primarily as a means by which various forms of legal or political practice attempt to enhance their own legitimacy. Autopoiesis theory, developed in relation to law by Niklas Lubmann and Gunther Teubner, postulates a form of legal closure as radical as any to be found or implied in the literature of legal philosophy.

Chapter 8 begins with close reading of a powerfully kinesic passage from Proust’s novel of phenomenal experience in time. The passage contains one of a number of references in the work to infusoires or protozoa. These microscopic creatures, saturating the atmosphere—especially the marine atmosphere—with smells and colours, are what prompts the release of involuntary memory in the famous episode of the madeleine soaked in an infusion. More broadly, they also afford a vision of sensory experience as essentially and prolifically granular. Inversely, the literary artefact itself, by using what one might think of as a protozoan language, takes on the character of a living thing. The second part of the chapter outlines the biological theory of autopoiesis—life as a self-protecting, self-nourishing, self-reproducing process—in order to characterize literary artefacts as features and products of the cognitive environment.