Interpenetration and the town and gown divide: A systems theoretical reading of <i>Porterhouse Blue</i>

This article offers a novel exploration of the relationship between ‘town’ and ‘gown’ through the theoretical lens of interpenetration within the context of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems. My analysis is interdisciplinary in character and transdisciplinary in methodology. For illustrative purposes, Tom Sharpe’s fictional work, Porterhouse Blue , is analysed in a conventional fashion of literary criticism as a point of departure to advance my argument on satire as an entropic force, typified in the novel by Sharpe’s portrayal of absurd events and larger-than-life characters. I then apply Luhmann’s theoretical concepts to observe Sharpe’s representation of absurdities in Porterhouse Blue . By employing second-order observation, these hyperbolic portrayals can be interpreted as manifestations of entropic force that arise during the process of interpenetration between social systems such as organisation and society, or gown and town, communicating values of tradition and modernisation, respectively. Although these fictional events are overexaggerated for dramatic and comedic impact, they are not entirely improbable in the real world, reflecting the inherent unpredictability of complex systemic interactions that characterise modern society. This transdisciplinary study therefore demonstrates the wide applicability of Luhmann’s theory of modernity across a range of social domains such as higher education institutions. The theory of interpenetration can yield particularly fruitful outcomes when used to analyse the deeper and more complex interconnectivity of societal systems in the age of globalisation.