FROM LITERARY COMMUNICATION TO LITERARY SYSTEMS. 'SYSTEM' AND 'OBSERVER': TWO KEY CONCEPTS IN (FUTURE) LITERARY STUDIES

General systems theory has offered various options about how to conceptualise systems. Opposing Luhmann's narrow conception of system, I propose to combine systems- and actortheoretical approaches in order to model social systems (including literature) as nonlinear, interrelated complexes of systems where causal structures depend among other things upon the decision of goal-oriented subsystems, namely actors whose sociality is introduced into the system via culture. The second part of this chapter is devoted to some consequences arriving from the observer problem; e.g. the mutual construction of system and environment, the relation observer: meaning vis a vis the operational closure of cognitive systems, and a constructivist reading of the concept of the 'empirical'.