Zu einer Semantik von unten: Medien-, material- und diskursphilologische Studien zu Schrift und Schreiben in der Zeit von 1770 bis 1834 by Sebastian Böhmer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Zu einer Semantik von unten: Medien-, material- und diskursphilologische Studien zu Schrift und Schreiben in der Zeit von 1770 bis 1834 by Sebastian Böhmer Joseph D. O'Neil Sebastian Böhmer. Zu einer Semantik von unten: Medien-, material- und diskursphilologische Studien zu Schrift und Schreiben in der Zeit von 1770 bis 1834. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018. 338 pp., 7 illustrations. Sebastian Böhmer's ambitious study purports to distinguish high and low semantics in the time from 1770 to 1834 based on levels of reflection on form and medium. The Semantik von unten of the title refers to a kind of writing that includes or thematizes the media and materiality of writing and the writer, who thereby becomes, in an adaptation of Niklas Luhmann's phenomenology, a second-order writer (Schreiber zweiter Ordnung). This semantics is contrasted with a Semantik von oben, the idea of writing as unimpaired communication or transfer without loss or interference, particularly of inner contents, intentions, or affects that are ready-formed and simply awaiting expression. The Semantik von unten therefore disconnects writing from meaning—the reiterated thesis of the book—and disrupts the channels of communication and expression. The book is divided into three large sections framed by an introduction, preliminary chapter, and an epilogue. The main part of the book, chapters 3–5, labeled "Wege" I–III, contain paths by which the semantic contrast of the title is exemplified. Section I, on efficiency, discusses media of writing and technological [End Page 354] developments in writing and printing as well as dictation. Section II covers the crisis in expression in various areas: epistolary writing of Empfindsamkeit, gendered relations in writing practices (Goethe and Charlotte von Stein in this case), Wieland's discovery of the "pure signifier," and Goethe's Orientalist work. Section II also serves as an exemplary prologomenon, illuminating what is no longer Semantik von oben and not yet quite Semantik von unten, which section III elaborates with the examples of Lichtenberg, Wieland, Forster, Schiller, and Tieck while venturing a rather acerbic criticism of persistent, quasi-hagiographical understandings of Goethe's writing practice under the rubric "Goethes Apostel." Böhmer's study is illuminating because it distinguishes its premises from those of a transition "circa 1800." The plasticity of the two semantics is marked by their use in the same author across this boundary: Goethe's lyric poetry is an example of Semantik von unten, whereas Goethe's dictated writings invoke the interference-free communication that marks the Semantik von oben. Visual representations of Goethe dictating his work, Goethe's own reflections on dictation, and the persistent attribution to Goethe (by his apostles and subsequent generations of researchers) of a more general dictation practice than it seems that he used (according to Böhmer) are central components of this study that will interest researchers in Goethe and this age, even if they find themselves included among the master's flock. In spite of Goethe's standing astride the divide circa 1800, Böhmer's account tends to distribute the Semantik von oben and the Semantik von unten on either side of the transition between Enlightenment and Romanticism. In chapter 5, references to the period circa 1800 as a cultural watershed come thick and fast, whether in the transition identified by Luhmann from certainty to possibility; or in the usual evocation of a transition to Romanticism as the discovery of new semantic possibilities, a "neue[s] Schreiben" or "neue Worte" in a "romantische Schreibszene" (oddly enough, Böhmer seems to attribute the term Schreibszene to Rüdiger Campe, at least at the outset, even as he cites Derrida sporadically throughout). Typical for the later chapters is the statement that "Dichtung um 1800 [basiert] auf die Semantik von unten." Even as Wieland or Goethe's early poetry stand for a Semantik von unten because of their inclusion of the writer, Romantic evocations of chance and uncertainty seem to show that the Semantik von unten points to an "ereignishafte Wirklichkeit," and so on, giving the impression that Friedrich Schlegel should have patented the concept. Even Georg Forster's pre-Romantic Schreibszene, which introduces Ansichten vom Niederrhein, can be assimilated to the Romantic transition...