An authority that answers to itself, that derives its power not from an open system, but from a closed system is a tyranny and prone to a failure-denial cycle in which each failure is then covered up by greater abuses of power until the resulting disaster can no longer be covered up.

The ‘structuralist’ strand of literary theory tends to deploy close – sometimes microscopic – readings of a text to see how it functions, almost like a closed system. This is broadly known as a ‘formal’ mode of literary interpretation, in contrast to more historical or contextual ways of reading.