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Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen______ Literaturwissenschaft Herausgegeben von Reinhold Viehoff (Halle/Saale) Gebhard Rusch (Siegen) Rien T. Segers (Groningen) Jg. 18 (1999), Heft 2 Peter Lang Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften SPIEL Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft SPIEL: Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft Jg. 18 (1999), Heft 2 Peter Lang Frankfurt am Main • Berlin • Bern • Bruxelles • New York • Oxford • Wien Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Siegener Periodicum zur internationalen empirischen Literatur wissenschaft (SPIEL) Frankfurt am Main ; Berlin ; Bern ; New York ; Paris ; Wien : Lang ISSN 2199-80780722-7833 Erscheint jährl. zweimal JG. 1, H. 1 (1982) - [Erscheint: Oktober 1982] NE: SPIEL ISSN 2199-80780722-7833 © Peter Lang GmbH Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2000 Alle Rechte Vorbehalten. Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft Herausgeber dieses Heftes / Editor of this issue:____________ Reinhold Viehoff Inhalt / Contents SPIEL (1999), H. 2 Joachim Linder (München) Fahnder und Verbrecher in Fritz Längs Deutschen Polizeifilmen 181 Helmut Kreuzer (Siegen) Zu frühen deutschen Hörspielen und Hörspielkonzeptionen (1924-1927/28): Hans Flesch, Alfred Auerbach, Rudolf Leonhard, Oskar Moehring 216 Für Karl Riha zum 65. Geburtstag Kison Kim (Seoul) Die Rezeption des deutsprachigen Gegenwartsdramas der 70er und 80er 229 Jahre auf koreanischen Bühnen Dietrich Löffler (Halle/Saale) Thematische Planung - Druckgenehmigung - Zensur 246 Planung und Kontrolle von Literatur in der DDR Kathrin Fahlenbrach (Berlin) & Reinhold Viehoff (Halle/Saale) Der Aufstieg des „Beat-Club“, sein Niedergang - und die Folgen 259 Protestästhetik und Jugendkult im Fernsehen der 60er Jahre Charles Forceville (Amsterdam) Art or ad? The influence of genre-attribution on the interprétation of images 279 Rainer Leschke (Siegen) Die Doppelungen der Ästhetik und das Spiegelkabinett der Theorie 301 Henk de Berg (Sheffield) Systems Theory, Romanticism, and Reception Research 320 Heiko Hungerige (Wuppertal) & Anke Hillebrandt (Wallerfangen) Kommunikation, Verstehen, Missverstehen 330 Andreas Heftiger (Hechingen) Wie Kriegsveteranen sich erinnern 348 Methode und Analyse einer Gedenktopik 10.3726/80985_320 SPIEL 18 (1999), H.2, 320-329 Henk de Berg (Sheffield) Systems Theory, Romanticism, and Reception Research Lecture at the Vlth International Conference on the Empirical Study of Litera ture, Utrecht, 26-29 August 1998. Im Mittelpunkt des vorliegenden Beitrags steht die Frage nach der Fruchtbarkeit der soziologischen Systemtheorie Niklas Luhmanns für die Literaturhistoriographie. Diskutiert wird diese Frage mit tels des Vergleichs einer systemtheoretisch-literaturwissenschaftlichen Analyse der romantischen Ästhetik, einer an Luhmanns kommunikationstheoretischen Überlegungen orientierten Kritik der traditionellen Rezeptionsforschung und einer soziohistorischen Studie Luhmanns. Introduction Speaking on the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann at an international conference on the study of literature is a somewhat hazardous enterprise. To begin with, outside Ger many Luhmann’s systems theory of society is not very well known. In the past few years a number of important journals such as the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (24.1, 1997), Modern Language Notes (111.3, 1996) and New German Critique (61, 1994) have devoted special issues to Luhmann’s ideas, and his magnum opus Soziale Systeme was translated into English in 1995, but these (and other) publications seem to have made little impact. Any discussion of the application of Luhmann’s ideas to literary studies therefore runs the risk of playing blind man’s buff with the audience. This prob lem is aggravated by the fact that the word „systems theory“ tends to trigger connotations such as „structuralism“ or „Talcott Parsons’s version of systems theory“ - precisely the theoretical options Luhmann wants to move away from.1 Finally, the highly abstract - one is tempted to say „Teutonic“ - nature of Luhmann’s theory does not help either. Yet speaking on Niklas Luhmann and his ideas is exactly what I intend to do. For the minimal impact of Luhmannian systems theory outside Germany makes it not only very problematical, but also very attractive to discuss these ideas - and their application to the study of literature - in an international context. In what follows, then, I would like to introduce you to Luhmann’s theory of society, and to discuss a couple of ways in which it has been put to use in German literary studies. My lecture will of necessity not be on 1 See especially Luhmann 1995, chapter 8 („Structure and Time“), and de Berg 1997. Systems Theory, Romanticism, and Reception Research 321 the high level of Luhmann’s own work, but I hope to compensate for this lack of Luhmannian subtlety with a higher degree of clarity. More specifically, I want to do four things. First, I want to have a look at Luhmann’s theory of society, and I shall try to get across as much of this complex theory as I possi bly can in, say, five minutes. After that - and this will be my second item - 1 shall discuss the application of this theory to German Romanticism. Third, I shall compare this appli cation of Luhmann’s systems theory with one which focusses specifically on Luhmann’s theory of communication and which has been applied, among other things, to reception research. Fourth and last, on the basis of this comparison I shall draw some conclusions and indicate some problem areas and questions for further research. Society from the Perspective of Systems Theory Turning, then, first of all to Luhmann’s sociological systems theory. Central to this the ory is a specific conceptualisation of the functionally differentiated nature of contempo rary society: Luhmann conceptualises the various functional areas of society such as politics, religion, the arts (including literature), the economy, etc. as self-referential - in Luhmann’s preferred jargon „autopoietic“ - systems, that is (to put it in slightly more concrete terms) as autonomous communicative processes.2 I shall come back to the con cept of self-reference, of systemic autonomy, in a moment. Functional differentiation slices up society’s complexity, thereby making it more manageable. Focussing on one specific function allows a social system to ignore all prob lems and questions related to other functional areas (i.e. to other systems) and to deal much more efficiently with its own problems and questions.3 In that sense, every social system is an island of reduced complexity. However, to describe a social system as an island of reduced complexity is perhaps misleading. First, a system is not something static but a process. Second - and related to this -, all systemic reduction of complexity always also increases complexity. For instance, science (Wissenschaft) differentiates into disciplines in order better to manage the complexity of its task; but each of these disci plines then starts generating its own questions and problems, i.e. starts generating new complexity, which results in subdisciplines, or interdisciplinary co-operation, and so on. It is this self-propelling interrelation of decreasing and increasing complexity that accord ing to Luhmann is behind the evolution of society. 2 See Luhmann 1995. 3 The use of the word „efficient“ here should not be taken to mean that Luhmann glorifies the status quo. This may be a popular criticism of Luhmann’s theory (and of systems thinking in general) but Luhmann has always made it clear that the differentiation of society has both seri ous advantages and serious disadvantages See the interviews with Luhmann in Bae- cker/Stanitzek (eds.) 1987, especially 139: „It seems to me that our society has both more positive and more negative characteristics than any previous society. So today things are better and worse at the same time. This is something that can be described much more adequately than has hitherto been done, but not something that allows for a definite evaluative judgement“ (my translation). See also footnote 5. 322 Henk de Berg The elements of social systems, says Luhmann, are communications. A social system can therefore be defmed as a function-specific autonomous communicative process. The autonomy of a system consists in its self-referential („autopoietic“) closure. This means, first, that the system reproduces itself by continually generating new system-specific communications and, second, that this is a process with an internal dynamics that cannot be influenced causally by any of the other systems or the people involved. This may sound an overly radical idea, but it is not actually too removed from everyday experience. We know that, say, a political decision to raise certain taxes can change the parameters within which the economy operates but not make the economy flourish. The state the economic system is in is related to the operations of the other systems but cannot be causally influenced by them. The same thing applies to the people involved. They con tribute to communicative processes

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