Abstract

In late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century German texts on the nature of understanding, language is represented as an autonomous, complex system which is never wholly comprehensible and always beyond intentional control. Friedrich Schlegel uses the notion of irony to register this irreducible complexity of language, a complexity that forces the generation of meaning to be seen not as the product of an author, but of an auditor in the act of reception. For this reason, reading, as an activity qualitatively effected by print technology and as a mechanism for the reduction of complexity, becomes a focus of concern. J. G. Fichte, distrustful of the materiality of the Buchstabe, seeks to subordinate reading to oral discourse, and oral discourse to reason. He views self-reflection to be logically and chronologically prior to language and therefore the arbiter of truth in language. Wilhelm von Humboldt, on the other hand, sees reflection to be linguistic in nature. If reflection is constitutive, then the world is linguistically created, and the act of reading becomes an act of self-construction. Humboldt uses this model of reflexive reading to serve as an applied anthropology, managing linguistic and social complexity by way of an ideal self-organization of human nature. In this way, authority shifts from the object to be read--the text--to the autonomous act of reading itself