Kommunikation und Kunst aus systemtheoretischer Perspektive
Communication and Art As Seen From the Perspective of Systems Theory

Summary/Abstract: Niklas Luhmann’s Systems Theory aims at describing a whole variety of social spheres (economy, education, religion, art, law and other) 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 (such as language and literature) and less formal ones (as in modern art) has some pertinence to the language of Systems Theory as well.

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