No More Learning

This is one way o f configuring the problem o f intentionality as aesthetic (moving outsideofalogicalpictureoflanguage). Butthisisnotanaestheticofrecognition(asin Goodman) where our problem is to recognize the intentional object, existent or not, about whichwespeak. Thereisnothingtorecognizeandnorulesorpracticesorprejudicesthat can apply in a way that makes sense. When something makes temporary sense, we have not recognized a version of the world or an example of meaning or aesthetic expression.
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? Asking when the Wake makes sense picks out the means we use to make sense of it not the sense o f the Wake.
This allows Joyce to picture the relation between the body and the soul as between the mind and the soul as between divinity and deity. By this I mean the condition o f being between in Finnegans Wake does not hypostatize a betweeness as somehow more actual, but describes our being towards a shifting set of limits whose meaning is enacted in both ourcommitmentstothoselimitsandtheshiftingbetweenthem. Thisshiftingbetween constitutes the grammatical humor o f the Wake. The problem o f intentionality, therefore, describes the distance between the soul and god, both allegorized as the body: "Ah, did you speak, stuffstuff? More poestries form Chickspeer's with gleechoreal music or a
jaculation from the garden o f the soul. O f I be leib in the immoralities? " (FW145. 24-26). 'Whether' (Du of) to "be leib", 'to believe' and 'to be flesh' (G. leib), or to be confused with love (G. lieb[e]), in the "immoralities" (immortals as immoralities) or in immortality (to be flesh in immortality) is the speech o f the body ("stuffstuff'); and yet the poetry (or pastries) of Shakespeare articulate an ode to joy, angels singing, or an ejaculation of (or being cast out from) the garden of the soul. This confusion of soul and body turns language into jest, and thus this confusion is God: the Flesh made Jest.
This picture o f vanishing intentionality can be analogized as unintentional intentionality. "Willed without witting, whorled without aimed. Pappapassos, Mannamanet,warwhetswutandwhowitswhy. "(FW272. 04-06): willuncontrolledby cognition is energy without telos or form, so that the doubleness o f being Father and child (Pappa and pappoose) and Mother (ma; manna) and man as names and descriptions are
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? equivalent to the following question(s): what is what? where what is what and who is it? who is why? who thinks (wits) why? how it is why? Wow! it's why? ! and so on. These questions respond to and constitute 'Pappa passes', the dissolution o f identity within the aesthetics ofthe Wake, and 'Mamma remains' (L. manet). Such questioning is a terror: "Terror ofthe noonstruck by day, cryptogram ofeach nightly bridable. But, to speak broken heaventalk, is he? Who is he? Why is he? Howmuch is he? Which is he? When is he? Where is he? How is he? " (FW261. 26-31).
The question "what does a 'sentence' mean? " fails to lead to any answer. If we persist in reading we find ourselves waiting for something to crystallize out of the text into clarity. And thus we begin to ask "when does it mean? "; "If it doesn't mean now, then when? " We always remain in the grip of this question. The book becomes this question. But this question has a curious structure. Strictly speaking it is not a question at all. What would count as an answer? At half-past ten it meant something? or when I read the word "X" or when I read the word "vivlical" (FW183. 13); what criteria or rules describe the text or its use o f words? Every word puns into something else pushing against grammar and syntax, referring to unstable identities within unclear contexts. No answer is adequate
tothetext. "Whendoesitmean? "isariddle. 10
The most comprehensive and forceful attempt to investigate the ontological and
theintentionalstatusofthe Wake'slanguageisJohnBishop'sJoyce'sBookoftheDark. He argues that one cannot force the Wake's verbal linguistic word play into the rational andcomfortablepatternsofconsciousness. ForBishop,Finnegans Wakebecomesavast nocturnal riddle, describing the "'freeley masoned' dreamwork of the night. " One must
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? abandon reading the Wake like a linear narrative; for Bishop, as well as for Joyce, "nobody's 'night-life' makes sense as a continuous whole. " Reading Finnegans Wake, for Bishop, does not involve shaping the night-world ofthe Wake into conscious rationality. We must, instead, transform our conscious perspective into one that recognizes the logic andthesignificanceofthenight-world. Critics,includingDongahueandAdamsintheir reviews ofBishop's book, would rather let the world of consciousness and of unconsciousness struggle against each other in the text, as if they were coequal, and betrayed nothing more than a play of perspectives, a play between night and day. 11 As Bishop realizes, however, Joyce has not created an equality between two states of consciousness, rather he describes the transformative chaos of a nocturnal reality in which we can find only the dim memory of consciousness. He understands the Wake as a kind
ofcounter-Freudian psychology.
In making sense o f such a claim I think one must understand the Wake as an
attempt to configure our involvement within language, biology, history, logic, desire, etc. , our form of life, within a complex shifting set of languages, interpretative frames, and states o f being, mind and grammar that do not function allegorically. Even mapping 'sense' and 'nonsense' onto 'consciousness' and 'unconsciousness' misses how we use all o f these words and how we inhabit any o f these worlds.
In such ignorance and chaos, the ordinary is not the world outside the window; the skeptical temptations prompting us to ask 'how does this mean that? ' or 'does this really mean that? ' or 'how do we know that? ' becomes 'How can I still be, or still think, or still experience, since this doesn't mean? '. In not knowing this I do not know myself.
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? Thisnightworldisfundamentallyasymmetricwithourwakingworld. Thenegationof our knowledge, meaning, identity does not create a context, a world in which further negation leads back to identity, knowledge, or meaning. If it did one should read the Wake as a mistranslated story or description or life, instead of a religious and a theological riddle. In other words, if it is mistranslated then the mistranslation itselfmeans nothing once the meaning has been recovered. But then why the mistranslation? In this sense Joyce is competing with Freud (and paralleling Wittgenstein within temporality), asking if this mistranslation functions within or as our biology, psychology, social world, history, or of physics, and if so then what does the mistranslation in itself mean? What does our distortions of sense mean as a part, a function, a temporary ground, a possibility, and obligation of our form of life? Such distortions describe a limit to what we can understand as meaningful and suggests a condition in which coherence and referentiality mutate or are lost in the "infrarational" o f this transformational grammar, whether it is a mistranslation ofourconsciousorunconsciouslifeorsomethingelse. Thenocturnalworldismorethan our dreams; it is our night-life as the limit of and limited by both our being (conscious or anything) and the world.
Inthisnot-lifewedonotrecognizeidentities. Ifourwakingmemorymeans anything it might suggest how we construct identities, including our own identity: our form of life is not determined by our common sight, nor our falling into confusion because we lose this agreement. This lack of agreement is the condition o f our being at this time. Our own being as something is not continuous, nor is the stability o f our agreement about what exists, for Aquinas, the dimension of being guaranteed by God, opposed to essence
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? or identity, which for Aquinas is variable depending on our perspective within a scale leading towards God. Extracting allegories, character and plot reads toward 'what something is'; reading back toward the ontological and intentional status of Wakean language pursues 'that something is. 'Finnegans Wake articulates and investigates the structural aspects of our own being, our nocturnal life, that finds its home, whose ordinary state is not doubting as such but the actual existing o f our person (whatever that is) within
the continual negation o f possibility and identity and ground, on a scale directed toward the unknowable.
The logic of the Wake, while appearing to be a masque of characters, points always to a single unconsciousness. Once we enter into the associative, non-narrative logic of the dream we find that any paragraph ofFinnegans Wake provides us "with a set of vectors that point to an absent content- 'the presence (of a curpse)' --into the 'eyewitless foggus' o f whose 'trapped head' the process o f reading the Evening World
leads"(315). The(un)consciousnessofour"humbptyhillhead,"our"onestable somebody" "aslip" in the text, as Joyce calls him, becomes the underlying organizational locus (a locus betrayed by absence, however, not presence) around which the text can be understood, and around which it was written.
I think that Bishop's presentation is convincing. All that I require here, however, is the acknowledgment of our inability to offer any interpretation about Finnegans Wake that provides an intentional object (existent or not) and at the same time provides the meaning o f the indeterminacy, nonsense, and mutations o f any particular word, phrase or sentence as essential to that intentional target. Wakean language remains radically
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? intentional. This intentionality, however, cannot articulate the content of its aboutness. We are left with the structure of intentionality without its object(s). In other words, the referential targets have been subtracted not only from the 'world' but from language, and leaves only an intentional structure. Freudian dream interpretation replaces these lost targets with a primal allegory. One could organize the intentionality of"nat language" by any number o f allegories. 12
I do not want to provide another allegory, but to continually turn around within the allegorical possibilities marked by 'the distance between mind and soul'. Such a turning around, while it will leave a tale, will not provide a description of the difference between the animate and inanimate (biology can do that), but will subtract the content from this distinction as a way o f highlighting the constituting o f this kind o f distinction as a particular kind o f limit. I do not think that the distinction between mind and body, consciousness and life, mind and soul, soul and God, human and animal, divinity and deity, animateandinanimateareallthesamedistinction. Theyareexamples(andinthisthey describeanaesthetic)ofatheologicalinhabitationoflanguage. Thistheology,inthis
case, however, must emerge from the difficulty o f describing our investments in language,
meaning and interpretation within the nomological boundaries described in science. Finnegans Wake and in a different way Philosophical Investigations correlate the limit between the animate human and the inanimate thing as a limit between sense and nonsense figured as the limits between interpretation, meaning, seeing, knowing, and process (being caused). These limits are not clear, in fact what counts as these limits is exactly what is at issue in building or modeling a mind. To triangulate the grammar of linguistic and
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? aesthetic meaning, the logic of the mind, and the theological description of being human cannot begin outside o f the problems o f language, literary texts, philosophies o f mind, or theologies. Theconfusionofdemandsandlogicsofthesepursuitscannotbeavoided,and while the clarity o f engineering is one o f the limits I am trying to approach, the work remains to make such clarity as a limit to being human amidst the claims of language, art, philosophy, science, and theology. There is no reason to think being within any limit of clarity involves being clear, or rather it is not clear what will count as clarity; My goal is
to think within, at and towards the limits ofmind and being articulated through the triangulation o f language, mind, and the enactment o f the totalities o f sentences, persons, worlds, and divinities (or let's say ultimate limits). Finnegans Wake involves exactly this kind oftriangulation. It would be a failure to synthesize the Wakes nonsense into sense or clarity or plots or characters and so on. But neither should we describe nonsense with nonsense. Translation and representation are not the point only because that is not the problem ofFinnegans Wake. The problem is instead the preservation and analysis (as a peculiar kind of self-reflection through the transformation of our reading into a thinking along the Wake) of the question 'why read? ' 'Why read' enacts the philosophical wonder
that anything exists as a choice embodied in our stance toward ourselves toward the world. Thisistheproblemofaestheticjustification.
InFinnegans Wakethetheologicaldemandofthetextisnotjusttoconstructan aesthetics within which it can be recognized as art nor to construct the context for any sentence to make sense. Both context and aesthetic assume that a language game or a set o f criteria or a stance can be constructed in which the text will make sense (or be
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? sensible). I think, for example, that this is the case for The Waste Land. Finnegans Wake, while it is not absolute nonsense, generates a theological stance (a kind o f theology without God). The demand is more like one for prayer. Could a prayer cause God to act? If a prayer reconstructs me and not God, opens me up to the possibilities described by our versions o f divinity, then how would I be constructed through a prayer towards the nonsense of the Wake and Investigations! Artificial Intelligence becomes a way of investigating the ways we can remake ourselves toward the ontological limits against which both texts operate (they both expose logical and aesthetic limits as functioning with ontological force).
Neither text defends anything like the assumptions of AI, or ofa computational model o f the mind (far from it in fact). The intentionality o f prayer, the theological demands o f the texts articulate the relation between how we function and why we function: the demand that the application of our ontological resources, as a way of determining how we enter into allegories, interpretations, meanings, and possibilities, the intentionality that they both continually destabilize. This destabilization opens us up to the demands o f the limits within which we live (and commit ourselves), and thus the destabilization (or play) cannot be an end in itself.
IfFinnegans Wake enacts the world ofan absent sleeper, then our failure to read backwards into his or her life or consciousness, into a mind that we would recognize as our own, forces us to place our mind, our life, as the intentional target o f the text. But thiswouldmeanthatwedonotunderstandourselves. Howcouldthisbeournight-life, our dreams, our absence? If we resist this move then why read the text? Before you'
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? answer that you will not, consider that in tempting us to stop reading so continually Joyce forces to the surface of every line Conrad's claim that for anything to be art it must justify itself in every line. Intentionality delimits in a negative beyond an absent dreamer, maybe a version of ourselves, through which we recreate ourselves as the target of its language, or thisintentionalitydevolvesintoastructurethatrequiresconstantjustification: intentional structure becomes a self-reflexive aesthetic, and thus an investigation ofmimesis itself, of
the kind o f realism described by Ulysses.
Thegrammarofthe Wake,therefore,functionsasasyntaxatthatextensionless
point that Wittgenstein articulated in the Tractatus as the "metaphysical I", the limit o f the world marked by "the fact that 'the world is my world'". This does not mean that the metaphysics ofthe Tractatus and ofthe Wake are the same. The shifting limits within the
Wake are more like the relation between language games and forms oflife in Philosophical Investigations. The structure o f intentionality in the Wake, however, is akintothekindoflimitdescribedintheTractatus. Themetaphysical'I'describesidentity as a kind of uniqueness or the point of independence that necessarily cannot be described within the world which is its vision. That is, it is shown by its configuration o f the world as its own, but it cannot see itselfonly its effect in how it sees the world. The 'I' cannot be pictured, as Wittgenstein suggests at 5. 6331, not even as the following:
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? The ellipse describes the world. The eye ( T ) is included in that world. Such an inclusion is impossible:
Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be noted?
You say that this case is altogether like that of the eye and the field of sight.
But you do not really see the eye.
And nothing in thefield o fsight can it be concluded that it is seen from an eye.
(5. 633)
The limit ofthe world cannot be seen and remain a limit. How does the T enter into this world or involve itself across this limit?
There is therefore really a sense in which in philosophy we can talk o f a non- psychological I.
The I occurs in philosophy through the fact that the "world is my world".
The philosophical I is not the man, not the body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit--not part ofthe world. (5. 641)
The T enters the world through the world being 'mine'; but such an entrance is only to say the world is formed in relation to a limit. The justification o f this model is tied to both the limits of logic and the contingent arrangement of the world, of the underlying atomic propositions that define a state o f affairs. The limits o f logic work out o f the Scholastic distinction between existence, that something is, described ontologically as a tautology andsemanticallyaswhatcanbepredicatedofit,andessenceoridentity. Wittgenstein says at 5. 552:
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? The "experience" which we need to understand logic is not that such and such is the case, but that something is] but that is no experience.
Logic precedes every experience--that something is so.
It is before the How, not before the What. Wecannotexperiencethelimitsofexistence: experiencepresupposesexistence. IfLogic precedes experience, what something is, the particular configurations and identifications of particular states o f affairs, it does not precede existence itself.
I take the Tractatus to show that any form of realism depends on a limit to the world. This limit always determines the world as mine. Realism can then move in two directions: toward the world through the application o f logic and toward this limiting point, a constitutive 'my'. This point existing beyond the world cannot be said or describedbutonlyshown. Itisinthisseconddirectionthatrealismbecomessolipsism. Realism is not false at or about this limiting 'I', it simply becomes indistinguishable from solipsism. Realismisdeterminedbytheidentityofexperience(phenomenalism)withthe world(therepresented). SolipsismisnotaboutanyT wecanknow,butaboutthislimit.
Realism can be turned around so that it is not only about the world, but so that the world acts as a limit on what counts as me, but only in a negative way. If the relation between language and facts follows from language picturing these facts, which are structured through tautological relations, then time or change does not exist as a logical possibilitywithintheworld. InWittgenstein'slogicallfollowsfromtheanalysisof symbols, and thus there can be no surprises because all possibility is determined by the logical possibilities defined by these symbols. Wittgenstein is here extending Frege's
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? exposition ofall logical relations through logical notation, where the rules oflogical notationdetermineandexpressallpossiblelogicalrelations. WhereFrege'snotation works in order to define thought, Wittgenstein's symbols function as facts not o f thought, as such, but ofthe world. Wittgenstein's logical facts make ontological claims, but only about what is, that is, within the world. But they make these claims in a special way: "What signifies in the symbol is what is common to all those symbols by which it can be replacedaccordingtotherulesoflogicalsyntax"(TLP3. 344). Thepossibilityof replacement defines identity as it does for Frege. But what is being replaced? Wittgenstein distinguishes between the accidental and the necessary in a proposition--the mode o f producing the prepositional sign, that is, the psychology and sociology and history that determines the shape and sound ofEnglish, or what phrase or idiolect is used inaparticularsituationareaccidental. Theessentialiswhatis"commontoall propositions. " This is again a curious extension ofFrege. Frege's distinction between sense and reference picks out the difference between the different senses attending the "Evening Star" and the "morning star" and the identity of their referent. For Wittgenstein thecommonalityiswhatiscommonto"allpropositions(TLP3. 341). Thiscommonality definestheessentialasadomainofpossibility: "Aparticularmethodofsymbolizingmay be unimportant, but it is always important that this is a possible method of symbolizing" (TLP3. 3421). Symbolizingitself,therefore,becomesameansoftranslation:
Definitions are rules for the translation of one language into another. Every correct symbolism must be translatable into every other according to such rules. It is this which all have in common. (TLP3. 343).
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? Inthe Tractatus,Wittgensteinseesthisasanecessitytounderstandtheworldasmylimit. But the collapse between the solipsistic 'I' and the world as represented is resisted by the distinction between saying and showing; the limit between the tautological domain described by what can be known, and therefore said, and the metaphysical 'I', which can only be shown, cannot be reconfigured within another meta-language game. This absolute limit becomes a ground in exactly the way denied in Investigations, where every transcendent claim is always already a language game. The power ofWittgenstein's vision in the Tractatus, however, uncovers the structure of this 'myness' that determines what is the world. It is being a limit that defines 'myness'. Wittgenstein argues against that "no partofourexperienceisalsoapriori. Everythingweseecouldalsobeotherwise. Everythingwecandescribecouldalsobeotherwise"(TLP5. 634). Injettisoningthe Kantian a priori he retains the limiting T as an End, but not o f itself, rather o f the world. Perceived from this point, from itself as an End the configuration o f what is is also an End: the limiting 'I' assures possession as my world, gives me the world as my experience, but it remains "independent o f my will" (TLP6. 373). Thus the world as mine is not a solipsistic claim, but a formal limit (not transcendental because it is not understood as
enabling our knowledge; such a claim would presume to picture the T . The T as a formal limit means that the world shows the T as the world, and thus the limit is not bound by anyone's will. ).
In Investigations sense is not determined through tautologies, and thus Frege's replacement principle that determines sense as identity cannot alone describe meaning:
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? We speak o f understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other. (Any more than one musical theme can be replaced another. )
In the one case the thought in the sentence is something common to different sentences; in the other, something that is expressed only by these words in these positions. (Understanding a poem. ) (PI? 531)
Uniqueness is built out o f exclusion (x is not a, b, c , . . . n, constituting the totality o f the world,oratleastsometotalitywithinwhichxfunctionsorexists). Thiskindofexclusion requires the establishment of criteria by which the limit between x and those elements in opposition to which it is constituted can be determined and maintained (grammar as essence).
The Wake pushes both o f these criterion for understanding or meaning or identity (replacability and uniqueness) into each other: any word seems random and thus immensely replaceable and any word seems to carry a unique significance built from the puns which compose it (as if embodying or enacting a secret meaning or reference). Uniqueness picks out the essence o f what something is, the configuration o f tones or words that describes a musical theme or a poem as a limit to the rest o f the possible tones humans can hear or the possible words that constitute any particular language (or all
languages). Replacabilitydescribesthefundamentallevelsofbeingsomething,ofbeinga wordatall,thatsomethingiswithinanorganizedsystemofcategoricalunities. IfIcall
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? this the level ofexistentia, I mean an existentia of forms that structure language as a set of possibilities that make words visible as words.
You can find yourselfalong this tangent intersecting realism and idealism not only by waking up from reading in Hume's A Treatise o fHuman Nature "that an object may exist, andyet be no where" (I. IV. V), and in waking up wondering where you have been, as if you were unsure whether our limits of knowing constitute a ground for thinking or a despair. I initially read Wakean grammar and the later Wittgensteinian grammatical investigations as linguistic redactions ofAquinas' linking of intentionality to existence through descriptions ofthe limits ofknowing, ofself-observation, ofbeing (explaining the use of sleep as the means and world through which we develop a theology describing death) (in the section ofthe Summa Theologica called the "Names ofGod"). Discovering the limit ofthe ontological claims ofourthinking (or being), our intentional failures, entailed a theological expansion of our self-reflection as, what we confusedly call, the ground for this thinking. These intentional limits describe the possibility of self-reflection
in such a way as to re-enact a theology not in conflict with materialism. This might be like finding God in (a) sentence(s), and not in the word. Do we imagine nothing o f such import is at stake in Frege's appeal to meaning as a function of a statement and not a word? Does a theology built on such a semantic reorientation function in a domain not limited by substance in a way a theology ofthe word cannot, susceptible as it is to the claimofthingsonwordsasnamesandtruthasreferentiality? Wittgensteinastheinheritor ofthisFregeansemanticsbuildssuchatheology. Thelogicofnonsenseconstituting Finnegans Wake proceeds along similar semantic assumptions, and thus becomes another
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? version ofthis theology. Why 'theology'? Theology is the language ofthe meaning of those limits which we recognize as unshakable, as ontological limits determining my possibilities as my possibilities.
WhatIamlookingforisnotatheoryoforaboutnonsense. Iaminvestigatingthe ways in which the relation between sense and nonsense can make us imagine that we are, as Ashbery says, "some point o f concentration around which a person can collect itself' (Flow Chart, 11):
And you know,
he said, sure, that's the way to hell and its conundrums if that's the way
you want to go, and they all said we know, we are going that way
cautiously approved o f in the introduction, only it seems so full o f asperities now. And he said that's the way it was, it was a tangle and will never be anything
more than a diagram pointing you in a senseless direction toward yourself.
(Flow Chart, 109)
This way to hell and its conundrums, regardless of ones' best intentions or of what one might read "in the introduction" as the promises of "Love that lasts a minute like a filter/ on a faucet", as itself a "diagram pointing to you in a senseless direction toward yourself, builds its sense partly in a kind of self-reflection that offers truth through what under one reading might be a democratic tautology of acting: we are all acting as and through each other:asrepresentativesofthelimitsofnonsensetowardwhichwemove. One'sbestlaid plans like those best intentions fail "and the listing tundra is revealed" (108) as the limit of
the inanimate to all forms of meaning which we inhabit. A kind of nonsense attends the
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? loss ofjustice, but the history ofthis "senseless direction" organizes the world not toward the source o f this nonsense, as it does for Job where all senselessness leads toward God, but toward the consequence ofthis nonsense, that is, "toward yourself. " The second person force o f this "yourself, having already been abstracted as a kind o f limit to the diagram o f nonsense, a limit to language itself) gets taken up as an hypothetical, including boththepoetandthereader. Ifonewritesthisnonsensethediagramandwhatitpointsto invert the intentionality of language away from the world, the diagram ends up not being able to be read as a diagram ofthe world, toward oneself. Self-reflexive intentionality is a particular kind o f self-reflection: in that it writes the failure o f events to conform to a moral logic into a kind o f verbal nonsense. I will call this embodied self-reflection as opposed to self-reference. Thus it is not like the following:
[1] "This 'word' is a word. "
[2] "I am that I am. "
Does Wittgenstein mean the following to describe forms of self-reflection? :
Asking what the sense is. Compare:
"This sentence makes sense. "--"What sense? "
"This set o f words is a sentence. "--"What sentence? " (502)
Compare what? Compare each statement and its question, or compare statement and question with statement and question? "This sentence" animates the sentence; can sentences use demonstratives? "This sentence makes sense" interprets itself. An interpretation ofwhat? "This set ofwords. . . " looks like a description--but ifit is not a description o f a sentence, but rather an example, is it a description o f itself? I f asked what
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? is the sense o f a sentence, and I answer "this set o f words is a sentence" what have I shown? Only questions which betray an ignorance o f language would generate a question where this might be the answer. "How many words make a sentence? " "Well, this set of words is a sentence. "
An intentionality that recovers an T , as opposed to the world, refigures the disjunction between self and world worrying the skeptic with a comma between an initial realm o f intention that leads to personal action ( 'building up a graduated series o f studies') and a realm o f possibility implied by this intentionality but which loses its referent ('I can do that'; but who said this? or can say and do that? '):
My first concern (in any case) was to build up
a graduated series of studies, leading to the alchemical perfection of one who says, I can do that. The fabrication o f it lasted nearly a lifetime,
leaving me, at the end, unable to perform the most banal act such as tying my
shoelaces
in a double knot, and vulnerable to the japes o f skeptics
who would have preferred to die a thousand deaths rather than undertake the course o f study I had so painstakingly elaborated. (150-51)
Why-questions ('why do I suffer? ' for example) can become confused with questions about not only "who" speaks or is referred to or exists ('I suffer because o f who I am? ' or 'I didn't do anything to deserve this! ' who did then? Who is responsible for my actions? ), but how this "who" either crystallizes out of the world, out of a context, or conversely how any 'I' can know or believe speak beyond the limits of the who which he or she find
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? themselves to be. Has Ashbery's (or Joyce's or Wittgenstein's) writing constructed a golem of such animate perfection that it can, as Flaubert claimed ofMadame Bovary, be the artist, in this case a converted, transformed selfthat speaks ofits own creation as if Ashbery has yet to create it? But underlying the metaphysics of this creation is a comic undercurrent that allows any nonsense to be read, and marked as nonsense, by the exclamation of some discontented reader "That's not art, or there's nothing to that; I can do that! "
Nonsense emerges under the pressure some missing 'I', like the missing intentional target in Finnegans Wake, exerts on the categorical structures o f langauge. This produces what Ashbery calls "slippery harmonies":
slipperyharmoniesabound. Infact,Ican'tbesureI'mnotaddressingmyself to one or within one right now, but that's no matter. I've got to tell this
in whatever time remains to me. (126)
For the moment the confusion in the poem lies not only in the obscurity o f context, to be "in" or addressing a "slippery harmon[y]" or in the obscurity of what this "this" is that he musttell. The"fact"ofthisobscurityisitselfslippery,andifitis"nomatter"tohis telling, it is slippery also because such a fact can be without matter. If facts, as expressions o f truth, do not matter, what does? But what fact is captured by pointing to "slippery harmonies abound' as a fact? Is this a fact like H(2)0 is the chemical formula for water? Why would someone write within or to such slippery harmonies through such a slipperypoeticsifneitherthepossibilitynorimpossibilityofbeingunderstoodmatters. He pushes himselftoward, into, and through the senseless under the pressure ofthe shrinking
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? time available to him. How is the certainty of the approaching limit of death like or unlike the uncertainty bound in questions about Others or the world? We can say at least that this isakindofpoeticshighlightingtheexpressiveaspectsoflanguage. Suchexpressivenessis nonsense. This kind of nonsense replaces our skeptical temptations to lose the world and others with its own "no matter" that offers a strengthened 'I' that can say "I can do that". This kind of expressiveness borrows on a performative force that allows it to act without reference to its context or addressee, but it is not an action of doing, language as some pure actuality, but rather a kind of possibility-actualizing promise or recognition marked by saying "I can do that. " In this it is an attempt to push language into an extreme (it is meant to fail, so it is not a "pure") subjunctive:
. . . 1sat naked and disconsolate at a comer o f a crevice, hat in hand, fishing,
for who can tell what God intends for us next? And if a little girl can call and run, her dog twirl, why not be able to slide a leg over the board barrier that disconnects us from all that is really happening, that hive
o f activity as you think o f it? (121)
A catechism of questions: the mythic problem of The Waste Land ("I sat. . . fishing, for who can tell what God intends for us next? " answered with another possibility, an allegory not unlike the riddles of Alice in Wonderland, where this sliding a leg into another realm works through the ambiguity of our language; saying I can do that--where 'know' reduces back to can, the beyond ofthe thing in itselfis for us ("as you think ofit") a "hive ofactivity"andthusonlyaccessiblebycomparableactivity. "[Njakedanddisconsolate"
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? this T fishes, ifwe believe the punctuation, because ("for") we are the victims ofGod's intentions. God's absence leaves only our ignorance pushing against what from any human end (telos), where chance can seem fate, our lives have suffered and become under the pressureofexternalintention. Howmightthisdescribelanguage,oratleastAshbery's and Joyce's language? What counts as an end when reading 'nonsense' is moments of sense, where understanding organizes at least in a local way a bit oftext. Thus, in commenting on his own kind o f nonsense, Ashbery writes that he is a poet "whose
personal-pronoun lapses may indeed have contributed to augmenting the/ hardship/ silently resented among the working classes? "13
PronounconfusioninFinnegans Wakesketchesthesymbolicstructureof'our' through which it invokes the limit o f being human by being a form any human can claim andoverwhichwecanfight. Thisispartofthestructureofrightsandjustification:14 "The soul o f everyelsesbody rolled into its olesoleself' (FW329. 18-19). 15 This means that Finnegans WakeenactsaplayofmasksakintothatwhichKierkegaardusedtoexpose their emptiness, without, however, an underlying God to mark a limit to these masks: "One single word o f mine uttered personally in my own name would be an instance o f presumptuous self-forgetfulness, and dialectically viewed would ensure with one word the
ft guiltofannihilatingthepseudonyms"(Po/<</ofView,40). InFinnegans Wakethis
annihilation is resisted by reading oneselfinto the interrogative fragments that sketch the limits o f the forms o f life through which we inhabit language.
Sense organizes the previous words into an order that transforms what seemed randomintodeterminedandthereforeintentionallanguage. Suchclaritymightaccompany
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? the emergence or imposition of an interpretative frame, an attachment of language to a secure pronoun, the application ofan allegory. Such moments of sense are temporary, and the pressure o f nonsense within language combines the demand for clarity, the assumption o f intentionality with the pressure o f dissolution or dissipation that tempts us atthosepointsofinterpretativeambiguity. Thebreakdownofthemeaningofasentence,
if it is not at the service o f communication but is framed as an aesthetic object, as an object or a language demanding a commitment to its significance, to its exemplary status, modulates into a demand to justify what kind of sense we make in relation to this nonsense (to whatever nonsense claims 'us'). This dissertation is an example of such an attempt.
' This would require some defense, but nothing critical hangs on this here. I think Aristotle's analysis of the soul is as coherent as Aquinas' (as one would expect),,but the pressure of Augustine's conception of the will, o f the conceptualization o f identity and substance in the Trinity, and o f the fact o f a linguisitc limit (in the Bible) transforms the conception of the soul in ways that I think are essential. A lot does hang on this, but I am not cosntructing as soul within the Christian tradition, but am instead trying to recapture a functional theological stance within the boundaries marked by something like Aquinas' soul and a causal picture of the mind as these boundaries (understood conceptually, and thus not tied to their particular history nor their detailed form in Aquinas or in particular scientific pictures) figure the picture of our invovlment in language in Finnegans Wake and Philosophical Investigations. In this I am responding to the claim these texts have on figuring the boundaries against which modem science works. 2 Cited in Kretzmann.
3This list is Gearld Edleman's (Neural Darwinism).
4 In Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, ed. Alvin I. Goldman.
5 M. H.