Studium: Perspectives on Institutionalized Modes of Reading

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

T HE MODERN WORLD has developed understanding to the highest virtuosity. It has made understanding itself a subject of understanding. When understanding becomes problematic it must try to find a new ground for understanding what understanding is. But there can be no stopping at this point. Understanding always has, as it were, to take a step back in order to be aware of itself. In due course it will be drawn into a regressus ad infinitum; it will have to understand the understanding of understanding and so forth. It can never grasp itself completely. If understanding is dynamic in nature, it can never reach a point from which it could really become transparent to itself; its only chance to get an insight into its own nature lies in leaving the magic circle of pure reflexivity and in looking for the connection between understanding and the concrete situation where it takes place. Only when understanding conceives of itself in relation to the place where it unfolds can it become aware of its own historicity. If we want to arrive at a historical typology of understanding, we must ask for the places of understanding, its institutions, and discursive formations. Such an approach to the problem of understanding sheds new light on the reader, to whom the aesthetics of reception has drawn particular attention. The aesthetics of reception refers mainly to the reader of the printed book and particularly to the reader of fictional literature, which seems to have become the paradigm of reading in general. The reader presupposed by the aesthetics of reception is, as it were, an ideal recipient, to whom neither the text nor the language of the text seems to pose any difficulties and who seems to have immediate access to the meaning inherent in the text. Such a reader is as sure of the text as of his own interests, in the horizon of which he is consciously or unconsciously appropriating the text. Up to now the theory of reception has, however, not paid much attention to that mode of appropriating literary texts which