KOMMUNIKATION UND KUNST AUS SYSTEMTHEORISCHER PERSPEKTIVE

Niklas Luhmann ś Systems Theory aims at describing a whole variety of social spheres by making use of a rather small terminological toolkit. Its fundamental theoretical notion is communication: all spheres, or rather “systems”, are described as being built upon communication. As a notion of primal importance in the architecture of Systems Theory, though, communication is conceived in a way distinct from common sense. For this special issue on Literary Communication, the following pages focus on this particular theoretical configuration of communication with a special regard to art and literature as a social system. It will be shown that phenomena of communication do not so much depend on a code rather they emerge out of the interaction of psychic systems, only subsequently having the evolutionary possibility of deploying codes for communication. The difference between distinctly coded modes of communication and less formal ones has some pertinence to the language of Systems Theory as well.