Die Kontextualität des Textes

Why do texts have contexts at all? Why can contexts be assigned to texts? What property of the text makes it possible to set text and context in relation to each other? With the help of heuristic questions such as these, this article aims to question productively some common paradigms for conceptualizing text-context relationships that can be identified on the basis of prominent attempted definitions, such as the relevant influential entries in handbooks and reference works (e. g. those by Lutz Danneberg and Moritz Baßler). Where Danneberg seeks to extend the scope of the extratextual context while at the same time characterizing it in terms of its function for the interpretation of texts (the use and construction of contexts), Baßler moves in precisely the other direction: he develops, following in the footsteps of the ideas of New Historicism, a concept of culture whose textual dimension makes it a possible context for literature. Both positions attempt, albeit in opposing ways, to make the concept of context at once narrower and wider: either an all-encompassing context (which includes reader, author, and culture) is characterized as a component of interpretation (Danneberg), or conversely the concept of culture is textualized through-and-through in such a way that archives and discourses govern the relations between text and context(s). These positions are themselves, in turn, heuristically interesting for two reasons. First, they show that the concept of context becomes interesting for literary studies, for the concept of literature, and for the understanding of textual interpretation when recent approaches reach out in the direction of cultural media studies (Schönert). Second, they are heuristically interesting when they concurrently, implicitly or explicitly, set themselves the aim of finding new, flexible accounts of the relation between text and context. In this respect, the applications of systems theory in literary studies can be considered; they go through models for determining this relation and seek, for instance, to understand a text in terms of its difference from context. Here, in essence, there emerges a logic of text and context that is reminiscent of the hermeneutic logic of question and answer (Gadamer). In this way, texts become able to be understood as contexts of texts. In the process, the problem of how to distinguish culture from literature while still relating it to it becomes inescapable. The present article outlines an answer