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 (and of course without them there would not be any communicative processes) but what happens to these contributions is subject to the inter­ nal dynamics of the system in which these communications take place. The communica­ tive process that is society takes place over the heads of the individuals (and groups of individuals) concerned.4 This operational closure does not mean that systems are like autistic children. Systems are operationally closed but “informationally” open. The po­ litical system observes how well the economy is doing; the economic system monitors political developments, etc. However, both the things that can appear on the „screen“ of a system and the way these things appear and the way they are dealt with all depend on the internal dynamics of the system. Neither does operational closure mean that systems are self-sufficient, independent of one another. The political system is bound by all kinds of legal requirements; the legal system works with laws passed by Parliament; art and literature depend on the economic system for distribution and merchandising, etc. So every system is both dependent and independent of other systems but - and this constitutes its self-referential nature - it deals with dependencies and independencies in an autonomous, that is, system-specific, way. In short, social systems continuously limit and extend each other’s area of manoeuvre but no system can change the internal dynamics of systemic self-reproduction.5

4 A topic Luhmann likes to discuss in the (in Germany highly controversial) context of protest movements in general and the ecological movement in particular. See Luhmann 1989 and 1996. 5 We are now in a position to identify the most serious threats to society arising from systemic functional differentiation (see footnote 3): 1) as no system can take over the function of another system, problems in one system affect society in a way which is difficult to remedy; 2) the high (and increasing) degree of interdependence between the function-systems entails the danger of a system being seriously hindered by the problems of another system. (In this sense, contempo­ rary society is not, as is frequently claimed, threatened by a lack of integration, but by overinte­ gration.); 3) the autopoiesis of function-systems entails not just more individual freedom but also more challenges and problems for the individuals concerned (the precarious need for indi­ vidual self-realisation, the threat of unemployment, etc.); 4) systemic differentiation makes problems which are not specific to any one system but concern society as a whole (such as envi­ ronmental pollution) extraordinarily difficult to deal with; 5) finally, all these problems enhance each other in a way which is impossible to control. For example, the increasing functional dif­ ferentiation creates a need for, and enhances, individualism, which generates all kinds of claims and demands („1 have a right to ...“ - specific consumer goods, a specific education, etc.), which accelerates the various system-specific internal dynamics, which in turn makes the tackling of Systems Theory, Romanticism, and Reception Research 323

Romanticism from the Perspective of Systems Theory

Having looked, albeit cursorily, at the main points of Luhmann’s theory of society, we are now in a better position to understand and analyse the way this theory has been used to interpret German Romanticism. For the sake of brevity and clarity I shall restrict my­ self to Gerhard Plumpe’s interpretation of Friedrich Schlegel’s aesthetics.6 One of the problems scholars trying to interpret German Romanticism have been faced with is its strange mixture of modem and antimodem elements. Thus, some Ro­ mantics espouse the ideals of the French revolution, of individual freedom and equality, whereas other Romantic authors - sometimes indeed the same authors - embrace irration- alist conceptions of Volk, defend the divine right of kings, etc. Traditionally, scholars have dealt with this Romantic ambivalence through classification, by distinguishing be­ tween various individuals and schools, between Early German Romanticism (FriXhro- mantik) and Late German Romanticism (Spatromantik). What Plumpe wants to show is that it is not possible to parcel out these progressive and conservative elements through a neat categorisation, but that the ambivalence of Romanticism must be seen as constitut­ ing a dialectical unity. The way he does this is by linking Romanticism to social devel­ opments which he interprets from the perspective of systems theory. Following Luhmann, Plumpe views the period around 1800 as the time in which the transition to a functionally differentiated society, to a society consisting of autonomous function-specific systems, has just been completed. As both Romantic literature (as part of the art-system) and Romantic aesthetics (which, according to Plumpe, is primarily a philosophical discourse and thus part of the Wissenschaftssystem) are inevitably caught up in this new, heterarchical social order, they must somehow come to grips with the newly acquired systemic autonomy of the arts. The way Romanticism reacts to this chal­ lenge, says Plumpe, is ambivalent (an ambivalence which he sees as peculiar to Moder­ nity as such): it simultaneously embraces functional differentiation and shies away from it. For example, Plumpe interprets Friedrich Schlegel’s idea of a „progressive Univer- salpoesie“ - which aims at the integration of art and life through the elimination of the differences between the various genres, and between literary and other forms of commu­ nication - as an attempt at „aesthetic retotalisation, which seeks to undo, by literary means, the differentiation of society into function-systems and system-specific dis­ courses“ (Plumpe 1993a: 166/167; my translation). Now for Schlegel this new super art is „progressiv“, by which he means that it is a Sisyphean process, an endless series of attempts which can never be consummated. Thus, Plumpe concludes, Friedrich Schle- gel’s „progressive Universalpoesie“ is not just an attempt to reintegrate the various sys­ temic discourses but also the implicit acceptance that, in modem society, such an attempt at dedifferentiation is doomed to fail. I do not claim that this little sketch does justice to the full complexity of Plumpe’s ideas, but it does capture at least the essence of this particular strand of systems-

general social problems more difficult (cf. the clash between economic efficiency and the pro­ tection of the environment). 6 See Plumpe 1993a, especially 151-172. 324 Henk de Berg theoretical literary studies. It also helps us to identify its main problems. The first prob­ lem is a methodological one. Plumpe links literary and aesthetic texts to social develop­ ments but he does not explain why and how the texts he analyses can be seen as correlates of a specific social structure. He simply does a close reading of the texts, which are then seen as reflecting a specific social structure. This - secondly - produces a strange incon­ sistency in the line of argument: the postulated link between social developments on the one hand and literary and aesthetic communication on the other hand is at odds with the idea of systemic self-reference, which is central to Plumpe’s conceptualisation of these social developments. The third problem is related to the way Plumpe uses, or rather ne­ glects, Luhmann’s theory of communication. As, by contrast, this theory is central to the other strand of systems-theoretical literary studies I want to talk about, I shall discuss this other application of Luhmann’s ideas first and then come back to Plumpe.

Reception Research from the Perspective of Systems Theory

According to Luhmann, communication produces meaning through difference. Meaning is always differential meaning. This is reminiscent of Saussurian structuralism, but in contrast to Saussure Luhmann views the differential quality of meaning not as resulting from a covering language-system but as a communicative event. Communication re­ ceives its meaning against the background of a differential foil which is not pre-given but is constituted in and by the communicative process itself.7 The implications of this theory of communication and meaning become clear when we take a look at reception research. Traditionally, reception research has interpreted the utterances of readers - be they so-called ordinary readers or authors reacting to the work of other authors - as an expression of their feelings and opinions, as an expression of what they think of a particular author or book. Thus, everything that, for instance, Hein­ rich Heine writes on Goethe is seen as a manifestation of his (Heine’s) view of Goethe. Reception research then sets itself the task of finding out what this view is by condensing Heine’s statements into a coherent picture. Admittedly, this is a heavily simplified cha­ racterisation of reception research but it will do to highlight the main premise underlying it: the idea that there is a linear relationship between the readers and their statements (between recipients and reception documents). From the perspective of Luhmann’s theory of communication, however, this idea must be considered untenable. To view reception documents as expressions of their au­ thor’s opinions is to overlook their differential quality.8 It eliminates their communica­ tive dimension, which they possess not as expressions of a pre-communicative state of mind, but through a communicatively constituted difference to other communicative positions. To be sure, this systems-theoretical critique of traditional reception research is

7 For a more extensive discussion of Luhmann’s theory of communication see de Berg 1995a. 8 Of course this holds true for literary texts as well. But whereas literature is usually regarded as a special, „autonomous“ kind of language-use and severed from authorial intention, reception do­ cuments are still widely seen as direct expressions of the views and opinions of their authors. Systems Theory, Romanticism, and Reception Research 325

by no means equivalent to a simple plea for the historical contextualisation of reception documents. For different texts will have different communicative positions even within the same historical context. Let me illustrate this with an example: Heinrich Heine’s reception of Goethe. Heine’s reception of Goethe has always been considered ambivalent and inconsistent. More charitable critics have interpreted the contradictions between the many statements on Goethe that Heine made during his lifetime - ranging from high praise to devastating criticism - as reflecting a complicated development on Heine’s part, or else as the expres­ sion of an unresolved psychological dilemma, a continuous inner struggle between the push of political engagement and the pull of artistic autonomy. Less charitable critics have ascribed the frequent changes in Heine’s position simply to a lack of principle and political and literary opportunism. Perhaps the most striking (and the most frequently cited) example of Heine’s alleged inconsistency is the radical dissimilarity between the negative view of Goethe in Die Romantische Schule (1835) and the positive evaluation of Goethe in the book on the writer Ludwig Börne (Ludwig Börne. Eine Denkschrift, 1840). In Die Romantische Schule (a short literary history, with emphasis on the period around 1800) virtually the whole of Goethe’s oeuvre is rejected as mere aestheticism, and Goethe’s way of writing is dismissed as a thing of the past. In Ludwig Börne, by contrast, Goethe is showered with praise, his work being held up as an example of literature at its best. Heine even goes so far as to describe himself as a successor of Goethe. But are we really dealing with an inconsistency here? Are these two different recep­ tions of Goethe really as incompatible as they seem (and as critics have hitherto as­ sumed)? To answer this question we must do what critics have consistently failed to do: we must take into account the discursive (communicative) position of these two texts. For there may not be any significant changes in the historical (political, economic, social, etc.) context that could have prompted Heine to revise his opinion of Goethe, but the communicative function of the texts under consideration is radically different. Central to the discourse in which Die Romantische Schule functions is the theme of the artist’s political commitment. At issue is the question whether literature should or should not be littérature engageé. Now Heine’s book on the Romantic School is directed against any attempt to take politics out of literature, and from this perspective Goethe is found want­ ing. The discursive position of the Denkschrift, by contrast, is a very different one. Here the differential foil against which Heine’s text receives its semantic profile is a type of literature which is concerned with political message only and neglects form and style. In this discourse, Heine’s text represents a defence of aesthetic beauty as indispensable to true literature. At issue in this particular discourse, then, is the importance of the artistic dimension in literature, while the necessity of political engagement - an idea shared by all parties involved - is simply presupposed and so does not play a role in the discussion. Thus, the Denkschrift thematises Goethe from a perspective which highlights the rele­ vance of formal aesthetic criteria - and so Goethe emerges as the author of truly exem­ plary works of art. For an adequate evaluation of the radical dissimilarity between Heine’s receptions of Goethe in Die Romantische Schule and Ludwig Börne. Eine Denkschrift, then, it is not 326 Henk de Berg sufficient to read these works against the background of general historical developments. Rather, they must be interpreted as positions within a communicative forcefield.9

Systems-Theoretical Literary Studies from the Perspective of Sys­ tems Theory

Let me now return to Plumpe, i.e. to the third problem of his approach I mentioned. If all meaning is differential meaning, that is to say, if texts possess meaning only through a differential relationship to specific other texts, then literary historiography cannot be founded on close reading - not even on a type of close reading that takes a text’s histori­ cal context into account. For what is at issue is not the relationship between a communi­ cative utterance and its historical context, but between the various communicative utter­ ances within the same historical context. Contrary to what Plumpe seems to assume, then, a text’s semantic identity does not result from this text somehow being the expression of a particular stage of historical development, but from its communicative position. Postu­ lating stages of historical development is possible only ex post facto, as an histo­ riographical construction. But communication cannot „wait“ for the (literary) historian to come up with a meaning for it, but must be meaningful at the moment it occurs - other­ wise no one would be able to (mis)understand it. Its meaning, in other words, must lie in the text being a particular stance, a particular position, in a contemporaneous (damalig) discourse. This point can also be formulated in terms of Luhmann’s concept of systemic self­ reference („autopoiesis“). If, as Luhmann postulates, social systems are self-referentially closed discourses, then every communicative utterance can acquire meaning only as an element within this stream of communication, i.e. as a specific position within this dis­ cursive force-field. Of course, a communicative utterance within any given system can react both to events within the system and to events outside the system, but it remains a systemic position.10 This does not mean that it is impossible to establish a connection between Romanti­ cism and functional differentiation. What it does mean, however, is that the Romantic texts should not be linked up with the problem of functional differentiation (as Plumpe does) but with problems generated by functional differentiation. Required, in short, is an approach which sees texts not as embodiments of a general social development, but as communicative positions within discourses that are part of this social development but

9 A fuller treatment of this example (including extensive literature references) can be found in de Berg 1995b. 10 For instance, the legal system can react to scientific communication, but only on the basis of its own criteria, i.e. only by transforming a scientific position into (part of) a law-specific position. Thus, what from the point of view of science is hard physical evidence of a person’s guilt may not be so before the law. In Luhmann’s jargon: social systems are capabe both of self-reference (Selbstreferenz) and of external reference (Fremdreferenz), but all external reference takes place on the basis of self-reference. (Both „brain-internal“ operations just as introspection and observation are.) Systems Theory, Romanticism, and Reception Research 327

not reflections of it. Social systems are not Leibnizian monads mirroring the unity of a world outside, but autonomous and heterochronous11 communicative processes. A short discussion of Luhmann’s study of the changing patterns of communication in the upper strata (Oberschichteri) of 17th and 18th-century Western Europe may serve as illustration.12 In this study, Luhmann is mainly concerned with the semantics (Semantik) of communication - a word he uses, rather idiosyncratically, to denote the various ways by which the communication facilitates its own flow. All communication - especially the communication that involves not just two or three people but has a wider social (discur­ sive) relevance - generates themes, interpretative frameworks and other „semantic“ forms which create and stabilise communicative expectations and so enhance the possibility of a smooth13 communicative follow-up. What Luhmann is interested in is how the changes in these semantic forms are related to the evolution of society as a whole. In the study under consideration this is a question as to the relationship between the communication of the upper strata - essentially the aristocracy - of 17th and 18th-century Western Europe and the transition from a stratified to a functionally differentiated social structure. In a stratified social structure the discourse of the upper strata is of vital impor­ tance to society as a whole. With the emergence of functional differentiation, however, what counts is no longer the communication between the members of the aristocracy, but the communication within functional areas (law, politics, education etc.) that have cut themselves loose (or are in the process of cutting themselves loose) from specific strata. This is the situation the upper strata that Luhmann analyses are faced with. Now the question that Luhmann asks is not: how does the aristocracy’s communica­ tion and its semantic forms react to this process of emerging functional differentiation?14 He does not ask this question, because - as he makes clear - to do so would be to substi­ tute historiography for history, would be to take an ex post facto perspective for historical reality. What is registered (what the aristocracy’s communication reacts to) is not „the process of functional differentiation“, but the fact that - again and again, and in many different ways - the aristocracy’s communication becomes difficult, problematical, even useless at times, because it increasingly fails to achieve the goals it has set itself It is in reaction to this that new semantic forms are generated. Any genuinely historical analysis, Luhmann points out, must take this „factual limita­ tion“ in what such as „transitional semantics“ (Luhmann 1980, 83) is able to register into account. For the function of the new communication-facilitating forms hinges precisely on the fact that the communicative process does not have full knowledge of what is going on. The communicative process generates new semantic forms to deal with communica­ tive hurdles and hick-ups that it does not really understand. It does not generate ready­ made solutions to the problems it is faced with (because it has no adequate understanding

11 I use this word to refer the co-existence of contemporaneous and non-contemporaneous events (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen). 12 See Luhmann 1980, especially 72-161. 13 In the sense of „easy to achieve“ (i.e. not in the sense that consensual follow-up is more likely than dissensual follow-up). 14 This, in effect, is the question Plumpe asks: how does the Romantic communication react to the functional differentiation of society? 328 Henk de Berg of them) but is continuously forced to try out modifications to the existing semantics. It is by negating the existing semantic forms that the new semantic forms change the commu­ nicative expectations and so contribute - potentially, for this is what is being tested out - to a smoother flow of the communication. Whatever form these negations may take (slight alterations, outright rejection, or something in between), it is clear that the new semantic positions must gain their specific profiles through a differential relationship to existing semantic positions. So what emerges as semantic evolution is a stream (or vari­ ous streams) of differentially related semantic positions. Semantic evolution exhibits the pattern of a game of dominoes (or maybe several games of dominoes being played at the same time15). At stake, again, is therefore not the problem of functional differentiation as such. At stake are very concrete contemporary (damalig) problems generated (as we know now) by functional differentiation such as - to mention only two - the question of knighthood and knighting (which by generating upward social mobility acted as a valve to the pressures on the structure of stratification) and the increasingly excessive dueling (which secured one’s continued „communicative suitability“ and so became a solution of sorts to the increasingly difficult and troubled communication in society’s upper strata). To summarise, by postulating a direct link between Romantic communication and functional differentiation, Plumpe, as we have seen, eliminates both the open and hetero- chronous16 nature of historical development and the historical uniqueness of the texts he interprets. Luhmann, by contrast, focusses on the communicative positions he analyses as answers to problems that actually existed at the time. It is this genuinely systems- theoretical approach that deserves to be taken up in literary studies, whereas the interpre­ tation of texts as reactions to developments that can only be identified with hindsight cannot but lead to anachronism.

References

Baecker, Dirk and Georg Stanitzek (eds.), 1987. Niklas Luhmann. Archimedes und wir. Interviews, Berlin: Merve. de Berg, Henk, 1995a. A Systems Theoretical Perspective on Communication, in: Poetics Today 16.4. 1995a, 709-736. de Berg, Henk, 1995b. Kontext und Kontingenz. Kommunikationstheoretische Überle­ gungen zur Literaturhistoriographie. Mit einer Fallstudie zur Goethe-Rezeption des Jungen Deutschland, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, de Berg, Henk, 1997. Communication as Challenge to Systems Theory, in: Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 24.1, 141-151. Luhmann, Niklas, 1980. Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur Wissenssoziolo­ gie der modernen Gesellschaft 1, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, Niklas, 1989. Ecological Communication. Transl. and intr. by John Bednarz, Jr., Cambridge: Polity Press.

15 Namely within the various social discourses, and within the co-existence of the contemporane­ ous and the non-contemporaneous within every single discourse. 16 Cf. footnote 11. Systems Theory, Romanticism, and Reception Research 329

Luhmann, Niklas, 1995. Social Systems. Transl. by John Bednarz, Jr., with Dirk Baecker, Stanford: Stanford UP. Luhmann, Niklas, 1996. Protest. Systemtheorie und soziale Bewegungen. Ed. and intr. by Kai-Uwe Hellmann, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Plumpe, Gerhard, 1993a. Ästhetische Kommunikation der Moderne 1. Von Kant bis He­ gel, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Plumpe, Gerhard, 1993b. Ästhetische Kommunikation der Moderne 2. Von Nietzsche bis zur Gegenwart, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. 5 Plumpe, Gerhard, 1997. Kein Mitleid mit Werther, in: Systemtheorie und Hermeneutik, ed. by Henk de Berg and Matthias Prangel, Tübingen/Basel: Francke, 215-231. Werber, Niels, 1995. Evolution of Literary Communication instead of Social History of Literature, in: Empirical Approaches to Literature. Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature, IGEL, Budapest 1994, ed. by Gebhard Rusch, Siegen: LUMIS (= LUMIS- Publications Special Issue VI), 157-163.

* author ’s address: Henk de Berg The University of Sheffield, Dep. of Germanic Studies Arts Tower SheffieldS10 2UJ e-mail: [email protected]