Art, in its attempt to approach Thoreau's fantasy of seeing through another's eyes as if
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Constructing a Replacement for the Soul - Bourbon
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self- consciousness knows the nothingness of the object,.
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, because it externalizes its own self --for in this extemalization it posits itself as object, or the object as itself, in virtue of the indivisible unity o f being-for-seIf.
"[788]: the relation between self-consciousness and its object, between us and our object, is defined by its meaning, i.
e.
its significance as an expressionofourbeing.
Thisisaxiologicalontology,inthattheobjectgainsatruthvalue
through its significance [Bedeutung] and relation to us: its value as our reality.
This extemalization is a representation in otherness, that is also the object itself, necessarily an element in both its being and our being, and thus within the "unity o f being- for-self'. The movement from meaning to representation ignores the conceptual aporia separatingrepresentationandintentioninHume'scritiqueofinfiniteregression. Instead, Hegel understands that our movement is a movement into the subjective constructs o f our
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representation. Time arises through our representation ofwhat lias been' as 'now1, which must be surrendered to our memory in order to be replaced by the now that is but which we cannot know as now except when translated into a representation.
Self-consciousnessisin"communionwithitselfinitsothernessassuch. Thisisthe movement of consciousness, and in that movement consciousness is the totality of its moments. " Consciousness is constituted by the temporality that it creates within the fissure between intention and representation.
Thus in the Encyclopedia Logic Hegel can construct Being beyond representation: [Being] is not to be sensed, not to be intuited, and not to be represented, but rather, it is the pure Thought and, as such it constitutes the beginning. (86)
Being is not an object to be grasped: it cannot be sensed, intuited, or represented as Being. The "Knowing1in Consciousness "is to be indicated only in its process of coming-to- be"(789). EvenwhenBeingapproachesthinghoodin"ObservingReason",itis"thebeing o f the T" that is a "Thing, and, moreover, a sensuous immediate Thing"(789): "The Thing is T; in point of fact, in this infinitejudgment the Thing is superseded; in itselfit is nothing; it has meaning only in the relation, only through the T and its connection with it"(791). Thus our object, knowing itself, is a 'Thing' through its creation of our knowledge of it, its relation "through the T" and its "connection with it, "which is our, really Hegel's, representation of it.
For Wittgenstein, in the Brown Book, temporality cannot be represented as a thing (as a log); which means that the essence or the form of time is not expressed in language, in the interaction of identities, which after all define thingness. Thus when we speak of
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time we do not say what we mean. Wittgenstein has extended Hegel's examination o f the failure o f language to capture the being o f objects to its failure to capture beings in general. The object fails to materialize in our saying. It exists within our knowledge only as our intention or criterion. Apparent meaning (the criterion for truth or actuality) defines the object as a potential, that which is meant and is to be actualized in our knowledge through our representation of it. As a criterion it picks out what it would mean for a particular object to be that particular object. Saying translates what meaning points to (not the object itself) into the realm of what can be known. Meaning constructs the realm of what can be said.
The failure to say what is meant assumes that meaning is prior to saying; we can ask what is meant because this meaning is understood to exist (because it asserts the existence of a real object that is marked by our intention but not our saying), although it hasnotyetbeensaid. Onemustassume,asHegelcertainlydoes,thatoursubjectivity contains a realm o f intention separate from the realm o f manifestations, which somehow picks out an object and acts as the criterion for determining the truth o f our representation ofthis object.
In the initial stages of the Phenomenology knowledge grasps the object not through representation but through this criterion, the intention informing our language. This criterion is grounded in an identity between our being, our existence as such, and our knowing: being = knowing (74). Our knowing will be actual if the object is actual within, or as, our representation. The criterion becomes a field o f potential that defines Being and knowing within a grammar of intention activated by the subject.
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11. 2 Inhabiting time
We begin to see here the significance ofWittgenstein's formulation ofthe problem ofTime. The present is mistaken for its manifestation in the transformation ofthings or identities, and then translated into the metaphor o f movement. These manifestations, the logs rambling down the river, are mistakenly read as the meaning or realization o f Time, which functions as the potentiality (the condition) o f Being: Time = potential Being. For Wittgenstein this movement from potential to actual, because it equates two different conceptual genres, is unjustified.
We experience and know temporality, however, through the particularity of our being. This particularity should not be simply understood as our subjectivity. It is more importantlythespecificconditionsthroughwhichTimeismademanifest. Withoutthis particularity it would be impossible for us to recognize Time as change. Being becomes the relating o f this particularity to this condition o f change in order to construct the "reality" of things. (To deny this is simply to deny "things". ) Being itselfis the mediation o f this relating. Thus the log is not simply the false embodiment o f the present. It manifests the Criterion (the standard defining what qualifies as real) determining the form ofourownsubjectivityorpresencewithinTime. Andassuchitdefinesasystemof meaning; it defines the Criterion defining our inclusion within what Hegel calls the Absolute, but which is simply Actuality or reality. Time, therefore, functions as the potentiality o f form: the manifestation o f formal identity in the conceptual structure o f the
present, the limit and necessary condition ofBeing, whereas the formal identities of
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language function as the potentiality ofcontent: the feigned manifestation ofcontent in form, being in identity, which establishes the potentiality o f this content.
Any conception of time is limited by the fact that it cannot be observed as a real entity, but can only be seen to exist through extrapolation from its effect on space and matter:timeiscontingentonmaterialityandconsciousness. Inspiteoftheabstract, contingent, immaterial, non-substantive essence and nature o f time, it functions as the absolute condition and limit on our existence. Finnegans Wake transforms time (both as interpretative descriptions and enactments o f change) into grammatical shifts in order to elide this limit. Opera, in a kind of inversion, transforms time, music itself, into the forms o f plot and character, what is and can be lost through death, and, therefore, being, in order to elide this limit.
I would like to chance another excursus in Opera, not only as a counterpoint to the musicality of the Wake (the form of its nonsense), but as an investigation of how the picture o f time (a log on a river) that Wittgenstein undoes can be lodged within an introjection o f ourselves (variously conceived) within the systematic force o f change and time.
What is the seduction ofthe mind? Ivan Nagel, after identifying the thematic conflict in Opera Seria as menace and entreaty, expands their power to thematically organize opera, by analogic extension, into the ontological structure organizing the universe o f Opera:
Space and time: they stand for domination and freedom. But they also stand for a pureandimpurerelationshipintheworld. Timeisimpure,becauseinitevery
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object, every man is one thing and then an other. Thus disloyalty, betrayal become the clock o f freedom, and finally the madly accelerated hour stroke o f the modem age. ThatisperhapsthedeepestthemeofDonGiovanni. (118)
The impurity o f time is judged from the perspective o f Being understood as the ideal form o f identity. In this equation, Space (the realm o f Being as identity) symbolizes Society, butinthisitmustalsogird,standfortheWomen. Time,althoughanabstractionbuiltout ofperceived effects (and thus impure), unsheathes, bares (? ) Don Giovanni in order that he might run through space(? ), slash it(? ), defeat its dominion. For Nagel, Don Giovanni, in spite o f Catherine Clement's protest that his rapes cease to be rationalized as rebellion, represents the excess and the promise o f the French Revolution.
Don Giovanni is built on a temporal logic, but one in which such symbolism is less neat. I'm not sure that Space and Time can function as symbols unless this symbolism is builtoutofanontology. Nagel'sspace/timefictionisclosertoananalogywhichgathers its rhetorical strength from the ease by which any small set o f events and characters can be mapped onto a set o f oppositions.
Don Giovanni, when confronted by the Commendatore, rejects his demand that he renounce his life, his identity and his history. He rejects change, if that change includes himself. Hisrejectionofsocialnormsismorelikeanattemptatbecomingpurebeing(as opposed to impure time), in the same sense that opera itself attempts to replace the temporalrelations,outofwhichpolyphonyisbuilt,withmonodicidentities. Although Don Giovanni protects himselfas a pure identity (as opposed to change), he reduces the woman around him, the women he conquers to temporal markers. They are, as
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Kierkegaard assures us, without psychical individuality, that is, without content or subjectivity--so long as they are on this list. Don Giovanni is the Being that creates Time.
Don Giovanni's power, contradicting Kierkegaard's fiction, can certainly fail (as it does repeatedly in the opera). In being desire he can only succeed with desire: if he cannotreducethewomantonothingbutdesirehewillfail. Tobuildasouloutofthis Opera one would have to reduce it to an ontological network in which feminine repetition and negation would dissolve the form of serial time described by Don Giovanni's list into spirit.
The oddness of finding Opera as an enactment ofthe creation or dissolution ofthe mind reflects the kind o f pressure the tension between the conative forces describing animation (often figured as love, lust, desire, dread, fear, and so on) and the organizing formsquantityincreasinglycapturedinmodemepistemologicalmodelsofthinking. Music and voice or silence and singing or noise and melody can serve to enact in the kinds of unities o f form they produce to enact the analogies o f animation that philosophy and literature picture. (One could do a history of this. )
Don Giovanni values woman as woman. A woman is a piece of wax on a stove. If she melts the properties by which I knew her, her coloring, her smell, her shape have disappeared. Is it still a woman? Don Giovanni offers a woman, as a gift o f his desire, the certainty that she is not only a woman no matter what her shape or social status, but that her value is absolute, essential to her being. Don Giovanni desires the essence ofthe being ofwomen. For a woman to be transformed into her essence, however, is for her to lose her being, to become a mark on a list, to exist as this essence within serial time.
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Ifwe can believe the list, then Don Giovanni by trading a woman the certainty of absolute value for the being (her name, her identity) reduces her to serial time: Ontological map of Being creating a Serial Temporality
ife of DG: serial progression
Names of women: moments in time
Donna Elvira, one o f Don Giovanni's past lovers, refuses to be reduced to pure form, a mark on a list. She exclaims, "I must hasten . . . I must go . . . All I can feel within my breast is revenge, rage and contempt. " This refusal generates a conflict between Don Giovanni's history o f succession, where memory consists o f nothing but names on this line and the future consists o f nothing but further conquests o f women with regard to shape or size or personality, and a Donna Elvira's new history of redemption or revenge. If we place Donna Elvira's temporal path on the map ofDon Giovanni's temporal path it describes a temporal loop:
Temporal Loop (DE) and Serial Time (DG)
DE
Past
ofdesireanimatinghim. Massettosaystohim,"Letyourgentlemanmakeyouintoa
DG
Now
Giovanni pretends to be a chameleon, each mask a host for the parasite algorithm
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gentlewoman. " Everyone at first assumes that being, or identity, what a person is, is determined by the form someone takes. This mistake is what allows Giovanni to at first seduce his victims. They believe his exterior; they accept the promises and thus the offer o f transformation he gives them (to be a bride, a gentlewoman, etc. ). Clement is making the same mistake when she claims that Don Giovanni's is nothing but the clothes which Leperello puts on to fool Donna Elvira. Don Giovani is not his cloak, he is his desire. Elvira's failure to expose Leperello arises because she holds on to an ontology of identity which is conserved over time. She recognizes the real Giovanni when he speaks to her. She assumes the voice and body is the same after Don Giovani has left. Don Giovani's
formal identity is tied to the immediacy of his desire, but the identity he defends against the Commendatore and which determines his actions remains constant over time. His essence is constant. This essence can be expressed through particular formal identities (in particular moments), but it cannot be represented by those same forms. In this way Don GiovannidoesdescribetheessenceofmusicasSchopenhauerdefinesit: asa representation o f what cannot be represented in itself (the Will).
Donna Elvira's ability to return and confront Don Giovanni, attributed as it is to heaven, is predicated on a ability to act over time outside o f the immediacy o f form and desire in which Don Giovanni operates. Spirit, or heaven, functions, therefore, as the guarantor of identity over time. Donna Anna and Don Ottavio both sing,
Heavens, what a noble sight! What refined dignity!
. . . . Within my heart I feel a strange emotion. . . about this unhappy woman (DE).
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Another temporal loop is exposed as Donna Anna recognizes in Donna Elvira a similar pain to her own. In recognizing herselfin Donna Elvira, she uncovers the identity of her attacker. Although Don Ottavio resists this identification because he recognizes himself in Don Giovanni (he acknowledges him as his kinsman). Don Giovanni's exposure takes place through the appearance o f Donna Elvira, but this appearance is conditioned over time, and is not constructed in the immediacy o f desire. The recognition o f pain as opposed to desire "assails" Donna Elvira "with doubt", such that the "words uttered so softly, the way he changes colour, these signs are all to obvious, they have quite convinced me. " The frame or grammar in which the actions and identities o f our characters function has been transformed into a meta-temporal grammar founded upon the collision of not just Donna Elvira and Don Giovanni, but ofthe two temporal patterns and the identities these patterns generate. When Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Don Ottavio call on heaven to "protect the zeal within my heart" and to avenge my betrayed heart" they are calling on an ontology opposed to the serial time built o f moments without content. An ontology constructed out ofthe immediacy ofdesire claims, as we all might, that the only reality exists in the now. The past and the future are not physically real. An appeal to Heaven constructs a reality that because it includes both past (the memory o f Don Giovani's
crimes) and the future (his punishment) recognizes a reality beyond the physicality of the physical. We recognize memory and justice as a function o f the biology o f our brains, the social and cultural structures, grammars, rules etc.
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The end, even at this point, is determined by the dissolution of Don Giovanni's temporal ontology into that of the women. This happens when a woman of the past flying
on her temporal loop intersects every new woman marked by Don Giovanni's desire: The Dissolution of Don Giovanni
DE DA [past]
moments when DG meets a woman
Once every serial moment is frustrated by a temporal loop, the woman have in effect dissolved being defined in the immediacy o f its physicality into a meta-being that transcends time: the soul. This soul is represented in the opera as the Commendatore. It is this final intersection that exposes the essence o f Don Giovanni, demonstrating that this essence, which defines his identity, is also trans-temporal, and as such is a form o f being similar to that being (spirit) which is the Commendatore. Don Giovanni materializes as a form o f spirit and thus can be captured and taken away by the soul o f Donna Anna's father.
For Don Giovanni being(s) [women] are potential markers in time. His desire and power (identity) dissolves being into temporality. The temporal loops described by the women attempt to re-constitute being within a subjectivity greater than any moment. They identify this subjectivity with Heaven, but it is simply the frame from which contradictorygrammarscanfunction. Inthiscasebeinggeneratedoutoftemporality represented by the women following their temporal loops and the temporality generated
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out o f being defined by the serial time o f Don Giovanni's list. The women's identities are not self-contained within the immediacy ofthe moment as is Don Giovanni's. They exist overtime,suchthattimeisre-configuredasafieldcreatingbeing. TheyforceDon Giovanni to fail and in that failure to cease to function as the immediacy o f desire and form. In order to overcome the immorality ofDon Giovanni they must function as logs on the river. A log built out of our subjectivity is a temporal loop dissolving along the serial
progression o f a river.
The possibility for our separation o f time and space is a result o f their mutual
dependence and indeed their unity. This unity requires that space, as substance, function as ifit were a subject moving into the objectivity oftime (the women onto Don Giovanni's list), while time gains an overarching subjectivity that asks as a great maw dissolving the identity of being (the temporal loops that finally suck Giovanni into Hell). For matter to exist at all requires a scale o f relation that cannot be defined tautologically by matter itself. Differenceisnotchange. Wereachthelimitsoflanguage,becauselanguagewhatever difference and deferral it might entail, cannot construct within itself, as anything meaningful, change itself. Language makes change a necessary pre-condition for its own
meaning. It can display it, point to it, call it names, enact it but it cannot describe it (language itself is already such a description; this is why attempts to embody time appeal to nonsense). And yet temporality is not the unutterable; it is what we utter although not what we mean. Just as narrative, or even a sentence, needs a temporal 'space' in which to unfold its meaning, being itself exists through its movement through moments. The nature of the moments cannot be described as/or through being: it defines their outline or their
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content. Music does not come closest to grasping temporality, in grasping the limits of our existence. Change cannot be expressed as a syntax. I take it as the conclusion o f Don Giovanni, Finnegans Wake, and Philosophical Investigations that our investment in time functions through the way we figure meaning (and thus semantics) within grammatical (and syntactical) shifts.
Temporality and being, 'now1and 'here', become different because they each function through a contingency with the other that the other cannot itself determine. If "consciousness is the totality o f its moments" (as it is in Hegel), it must understand itself at any particular moment as not all there; its past and its future, and its movement toward itself in otherness is itself what we call time stringing being into our knowledge. Our knowledge, under the rubric of skepticism, consists of nothing but forms. It is out of theseforms, outofthepotentialityofcontentimplicatedinformbytheplayofconflicting grammars and logics, that poetries, philosophies, and operas construct bodies and souls. We might as well call this body and soul a mind.
Finnegans Wake, Opera, and, as will become clear, Philosophical Investigations, construct a mind as a shifting set of limits. They construct a mind not simply as or by an analogy, but in order to negotiate between and among inwardness and exertiority, type and individual, language and music, sense and absurdity. We recognize ourselves within the forms o f art, including philosophical art, because they can successfully construct an aesthetic entity equivalent to our subjectivity, which performs a similar negotiation between different grammars and worlds in order to construct a continuous temporality.
Art, in its attempt to approach Thoreau's fantasy of seeing through another's eyes as if
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through the eyes of God, by presenting us with the subjectivity of an other that is not fully human, cannot help but suggest that the confusion we need to fear is not that between an automaton and a human, but between and automaton and God.
Hegel recognizes a similar limit in the a trans-subjective frame, the continuity from Sense-Certainty to Absolute Knowing, providing the continuity in temporality (becoming) that Being conceived within formal identities cannot give. For Hegel this trans-subjective frame is Spirit, the condition ofBeing as Becoming that marks existence as necessarily historical. Spirit is generated as a necessity out ofthe interaction between our subjectivity, or cognition, and change translated into language and representation.
The present is neither a mystic point, nor, as Wittgenstein demonstrates, a thing or anidentity. Itisaconstructionofoursubjectivity;itistherealmofbecomingbeyondthe objective form of language but within our intention, within the criterion of meaning used toconstructknowledgeandmeaning. Thisrealmofintentionenfoldsthemovementof subjectivity between self and text--and thus between moments. The present offers itself as Spirit, not simply as the frame o f temporal continuity but as the substance o f being as
becoming.
AtthispointHegel'stheologyconfrontsBenjamin's: spiritastemporalityagainst
spatialtheology. ThetheologyanimatingBenjamin'smaterialismplaysbetweenhis messianic need to redeem the past in memory (the completion o f the dead) and in action (toward utopia) and his spatial conception o f the mystic configurations and monads communicatingtheinorganicandmysterioussubstanceofhistory. Benjaminwritesin"Re the Theory ofKnowledge, Theory ofProgress" that
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. . . historyisnotjustasciencebutalsoaformofmemoration. Whatscience has "established," memoration can modify. Memoration can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. Thatistheology;butinmemorationwediscovertheexperiencethat forbids us to conceive o f history as thoroughly a-theological. . . (61)
Historydoesnotexistwithinanoumenalrealmbeyondoursubjectivity. Historyas "memoration" moves life beyond the present, beyond the phenomenal plane oftexts, into
the realm of ontological values that Benjamin calls theology and into our own subjectivity constructing these values. In Benjamin these values are embodied in messianic logic empowering the dialectic o f history, which is our becoming (i. e. our creation o f ourselves as history and therefore through memory, action, and hope). By ontological values I mean the necessary axiological hierarchies generating any criterion for determining actuality which we recognize as real: the values that attach a 'reality' to our subjectivity in spite of the irrevocably unbridgeable epistemological estrangement. (Hegel's chapter on "Sense- certainty" demonstrates this estrangement, and within its logic invokes a double hierarchy ofvalues: essentiality/inessentialityandimmediacy/mediacywhichempowersthe dialectic throughout the entire Phenomenology). We construct and function within a continuity of substance that exists beyond the present, much like our brain constructs a
very elaborate visual field from limited visual stimulus. Theology is a faith beyond the knowing of sense-certainty, beyond immediacy and essentiality, that re-constitutes knowing within the continuity of Spirit: the creation of Being out of the temporal fragmentation of our subjectivity in successive moments. We exist beyond the immediate
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in the mediacy oftime. This theological mediation allows for the possibility for the present to redeem the past (Benjamin, Origin, 34-36). This present functions like Hegel's subjectivity (or Heidegger's hermeneutic circle): it serves to structure the continuity of temporality out of our cognition, dissolving the separation between subject and object, phenomenal and noumenal in the becoming of history. Thus Benjamin's theology is reconciled to the logic underlying Hegel's use of Spirit.
Benjamin will not override the dialectical movement o f history in anything resembling what de Man calls a "synchronic juxtaposition. " Benjamin constructs a history of power broken into discontinuities that can only be reconstructed in diachronic
juxtapositions, where the mystic unity ofthe moment, the identity ofthe individual, of subjectivity in its singular date, exists in the silence between these juxtapositions. Benjamin cannot ultimately replace becoming with being, and must rely on the silence, in which voices occasionally crystallize as words, as the trans-subjective medium in which memory can be invoked and can redeem the oppressed.
The dynamic between the realm o f intention and representation, between meaning (criterion) and truth, becoming and being, subjective and objective cannot be epoxied into thematerialityoflanguage. Thecontext,grammar,anduseandthesubjectivity,intention, and silence in which meaning is enacted transform our thinking into temporality itself. To ask whether time exists beyond our cognition, beyond ourselves is to ask nonsense; it is to think of temporality as an object like a log.
What I mean to say by this, but which I could only pretend to prove in some other essay, is that our cognition o f time simultaneously and necessarily constructs the paradigm
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through which meaning is possible. Meaning organizes reality within an axiological hierarchy determining ontological value and significance in order to define a realm of actuality in relation to a subjectivity challenged by the minatory presence o f its own dissolution.
Time is the creation of art just as it is the construct of our cognition. Temporality, disguised as the Phoenix ofBeing, becomes an aesthetic image ofour subjectivity simulating the play between intention, where the text becomes the realm o f intention pointing toward some beyond, and representation, where it becomes the verbal effect of someintention. Farfrombeingsimultaneous,thisdoubleness(asonlythebeginningofa multiplicity of conflicting vectors) brings the diachronic beasts of change and loss into our perception as the condition of our existence. Representation and art bring death into our own subjectivity, and thus can be said to generate the cognitive reality o f time.
Derrida interprets Celan in relation to this threat and its dramatic transformation in language into the redemption of communication:
The name September arises in a poem, a poem which "speaks"; it is readable to the extent that it is caught up within a network o f marks which signify and are, by convention, intelligible; it has its share in the poem's beauty. But to the same extent, it pays for its readability with the terrible tribute of lost singularity; what is encrypted, dated in the date, is effaced in it, the date is marked in marking itself off. (330)
A date marks the singular moment by translating this singularity into a standardized convention which can then be exchanged and understood within a social community.
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Thus Derrida claims that the date effaces itself in a kind o f "synchronic juxtaposition. ". Derrida structures the moment as an identity (engaging in the disanalogy o f the moment as a log), whose content is mired in paradox but whose identity remains constant and reiterable. This iterability forms the trans-subjective frame providing the continuity between moments. This iterability, however, is predicated on the effacement ofthe singularity the date refers to (337). This singularity, the 'actual' date, if we follow the logic o f Derrida's use o f "effacement", is encoded within the semiotic date only to be markedoverandlosttotherecurrent"modernity"ofthesignifier. Derridascrupulously avoids reinstituting a Kantian noumenal realm. But he also avoids Hegel's subjective realm o f intention. The 'now' that 'has been' is marked as that which is effaced, and the signifier becomes a palimpsest. By avoiding the notion o f a subjective Criterion, Derrida dissolves any notion o f a temporality generated through subjectivity. The real becomes restricted to the immediate: the signifier and the moment.
The date, however, can neither be effaced nor communicated: it is not a thing but a condition o f being circumscribed and defined by the movement o f subjectivity between identities in different moments. A date refers to time by representing things understood as identities,whicharesometimesstableandatothertimeschanging. Torecapturethe temporality of texts one must not construct reading within an atemporal mode of renewal and ossification (interpretation and assertion), but one must negotiate between the diachronic unfolding of the text and the diachronic realm of meaning, or intention, the text reticulates through its representations of identity. Ultimately it is the not that time provides the possibility for poetics, but that art actualizes the possibility o f time: Art
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becomes the origin and the answer to our existential terror, but always within the logic of history, always within this very terror as a kind of irony. The irony of terror is built out of the contiguity of tradition translating the individual (a particular) into the context of history (recognizing oneselfas the exemplar or expression ofthe Volk, for example) or in translating the individual into the self-redeeming continuity ofmemory that protected the Jews in their diaspora and which preserves destroyed lives and cultures, if preservation can be so immaterial, tenuous, and tragic.
1In Wittgenstein's Lectures: Cambridge, 1930-32, ed. Desmond Lee (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). 2Thejustification for Wittgenstein's hostility to science is poorly understood. He does not in general concernhimselfwithhowscientiststhink(intheirdifferentfeilds),butwithwhattheythink. Heidegger makesthissamemove. ForWittgenstein,thislimitationispartlytheresultofhisconcernsabout mathematics and psychology, both describing the limits ofscience.
3 See the last two chapters of his Wittgenstein on Mind and Language.
4For Stem's discussion of the history of Wittgenstein's anempts to construct a phenomenological language and then his abandonment of this attempt see both chapter 5 and chapter 6 in his Wittgenstein on Mind and Language.
5"(Augustine: Manifestissima et usitatissma sunt, et eadem rusus nimis latent, et nova est inventio eorum. )"
6The separation between noumenal and phenomenal reality is predicated on equating Being with a conceptofobjecthood. Thisseparationisthustheresultofobjectification,andthusis notthecauseofa subject/object economy but a result
7In Gottlob Frege, Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy.
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12
The T in the nature ofPhilosophicalInvestigations
Models of time are invariably models of animation. We invest ourselves in the marks oftime ('now', 'date', 'today', and so on) in the same way as we invest ourselves in our use o f 'I'. These investments lead to philosophical confusions and serve as vehicles of redemption. This redemption can proceed through a model o f thinking which is often a model of animation (as with Benjamin). Under philosophical pressure, however, this investment can seem to describe the principle o f life as dynamism plus identity. Such a picture o f life erases the grammatical investment from which it was extracted.
Wittgenstein courts this danger in the preface to Philosophical Investigations. Following a list o f the philosophical subjects he investigates, Wittgenstein describes the shape o f his
writing or of his thinking in relation to these subjects within a picture of animation (one can take this as one picture among many o f the soul o f Investigations) -.
I have written down all these thoughts as remarks, short paragraphs, o f which there is sometimes a fairly long chain about the same subject, while I sometimes make a sudden change, jumping from one topic to another, (be)
The list o f philosophy is ballasted by a length o f chain, local areas o f continuity matching in some sense the objects ofphilosophy, and rocked by "sudden change," from the inclusion of"other things. " One could imagine this description ofthe book functioning as a kind ofjustification for the form ofthe list of his philosophical topics. This description can read like a philosophical picture ofthinking, ofthe world or ofphilosophy built out of
Notes for this chapter are on page S31
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metaphorsofdynamismandidentity. Thebookisorganizedthroughcontinuity(local identity) and change, founded on the relation between identity and change that finds philosophy in between the fragments o f (change) Amdmander and Heraclitus and (identity) ParmenidesandZeno. OneofWittgenstein'sstrategiesincombatingourphilosophical extraction o f ourselves from our language games is to transform philosophical theories and concepts into aesthetic pictures and justifications. This is true o f his own philosophy as
well: he unwinds the Tractatus and other earlier philosophical temptations and models into apoeticsoflanguagegames. Thispoeticsbothgroundshisanalysisofconceptsintheir everyday use and picture our involvement in language and philosophy through our interpretive allegories and our allegorizations o f ourselves into language. Animation is one ofthe central motifs for such allegorization. PhilosophicalInvestigations could as well be calledapoetryoffragmentsandapoeticsoffragments(orfragmentation). Thiscollapse of poetry and poetics marks Wittgenstein as a modernist.
The preface describes Wittgenstein's involvement in language as his involvement in philosophy. Philosophical Investigations begins (with the preface) with an aesthetic
justificationforthefragmentedformofthebook. Fragmentsrequirejustificationbecause they require the construction of (an) interpretative frame(s). This means that a fragment (or its justification) must teach us how to read it, and thus the preface attempt to teach us how to read Investigations. Consequently, I will analyze (through a kind o f exegesis) the preface as a fragment o f Philosophical Investigations that begins and enacts our involvement and investment in language as bound by aesthetics: metaphors, fictions, conversation, fragments and so on.
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Wittgensteincallshimself'I'inthepreface. IntheTractatus,Wittgenstein describes a non-psychological or metaphysical 'I' that forms the limit to the propositions that constitute the facts ofthe world. Is there a non-psychological 'I' inPhilosophical
Investigations? Investigations is organized to dissolve our metaphysical attachment to this kind of question into nonsense. One of the ways, however, this non-psychological 'I' emerges (as a local, not a metaphysical limit) is in the failure o f language games. There are a number o f ways in which language games fail and succeed. The peristalsis o f this movement in and out of language games describes a kind of temporality enacting a kind of theological limit (one ofthe ways grammar becomes theology: ? 337). Another kind of language game failure, however, is philosophy understood as metaphysics:
Whenphilosophersuseaword-- "knowledge","being',"object","I", "proposition", "name" --and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? (PI? 116)
A lot rests on how "original home" is understood here, and how the appeal to ordinary language accommodates the different kinds o f sublimation o f the word "knowledge. " Knowledge can be sublimed in a theory of knowledge where we might presume the requirement for knowledge is absolute identity, or it can be sublimed as in Steven's use of "knew" (and "self' and "song" and "maker") in "The Idea of Order at Key West":
And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
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As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing made.
Wittgenstein suggests that the expressiveness o f poetry (as a version o f self-interpretation) resists the philosophical attempt to link necessity with essence as a way o f describing the conditions, the given, of our being human. 1To explore the relation between poetry and philosophy is to investigate the nature and role o f what counts as the given in poetry (a poem). Iunderstandsuchaninvestigationtomeanthatourpoeticuseoflanguage,our investment in language or poetry, articulates a relationship to the ontological limits (what is given as the real) in relation to which we live. The sense o f poetry would then be a function ofthis relationship, that is, its sense could be understood as meaningful or true, whatever these might mean, through the analysis and articulation o f this relationship and these limits).
What counts as a limit is continually at issue: "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably" (PI ? 115). Philosophy, in Wittgenstein's hands, becomes a poetic response to what seems like logical necessity in order to break the hold these picture and false analogies have on us, and an attempt to present the correct (at least in particular circumstances)grammarofourlanguageuse. Wittgensteinassertsthat"Philosophyought really to be written as a poetic composition" partly because it is a response to a logical aesthetic, at best, or, at worst, to a logical prejudice (CV24). But what kind of poetic composition?
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Wittgenstein utilizes a number o f recurrent metaphors and analogies throughout Investigations. ThedominatemetaphorsinthePreface,however,"[d]rawingtheirlight and currents o f the air/ [i]nto their mass and depth" revolve around 'nature' (and landscape). 2 The grammar o f 'nature' opens up a site o f contestation between metaphysics, in which nature can be understood as essence, and science, in which the natural is understood as defined by causal connections, and Wittgenstein's method, in which nature describes our ordinary embeddednesss within language, language games, human practices, and forms of life. Does Wittgenstein's use of nature, or let's say the
justification o f his philosophy described in the Preface, describe a poetics or philosophy of fragmentation that addresses the motives and effects ofthe fragmentation oftime, identity and world described in Keats, Adams, Eliot, Heidegger, and Joyce?
Wittgenstein provides a list of many of the subjects of his Investigations in the preface: "[t]heconceptsofmeaning,ofunderstanding,ofaproposition,oflogic,the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things. " This is a description ofphilosophy that clanks into the vagueness of "other things" [undAnderes] in a way exactly at odds to the demands oflogicjustifying these other problems as philosophical problems. The anti-climax ofthese "other things" can be read as a diminishment or a promise. What are these other things, at least? Do we imagine that
thinking can be described by a list of traditional things to think about?
These philosophical subjects do not form a given set ofquestions and responses,
determined by clear conceptual boundaries, towards which someone thinks. Investigations could never have been called 'The Problem ofMeaning' or 'Of
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Understanding'or 'Logical Propositions'and so on. It consists of"the precipitate of PhilosophicalInvestigationunified not by a specific subject (although there are rough limits: o f Wittgenstein's two major concerns it concerns the philosophy o f psychology more than the philosophy o f mathematics, but this is a way o f saying it concerns the limits ofthe mind as opposed to the limits oftruth). A precipitate [Niederschlag] is a kind of resultoreffect,atraceofthinkingthatisitselfanotherformofinvestigation. Thevery first sentence of the Preface, therefore, describes the kind of self-reflexive form organizing the book. The investigation ofthese subjects takes place from within the language of these problems. And thus this investigation is another version o f this language (not the language of theory, however, but a description of how one might be gripped by how or why something means, for example). Each remark, therefore, remarks on itself as a redescription of a previous picture (this is one way of explaining why Investigations
begins with a quotation, a picture of language-learning, from Augustine). How does this self-reflection take place?
Wittgenstein's philosophical self-reflection proceeds through the invention of primitive and specialized language games as objects o f comparison with our misleading and our everyday language games, through the description of our ordinary usage of language, through metaphors and analogies, through grammatical jokes, and so on. He pressures those points or moments when a language game fails (the point at which we start to theorize for example). This pressure shifts incoherence not simply back into coherence but from one point of incoherence to another, describing the distinctions in our languageusageastheshiftinglimitsbetweenlanguagegames. Oneoftheways
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Wittgenstein describes these limits is as and through invented "intermediate cases": language games that simplify an aspect o f our use in order to highlight the logic o f our ordinaryusage. Hesays
A main source o f our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view oftheuseofourwords. --Ourgrammarislackinginthissortofperspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in 'seeing connexions'. (PI? 122)
These connections are made visible by intermediate cases because they sketch the limit of the frame through which we view something in relation to another frame: "We predicate ofthe thing what lies in the method of representing it. Impressed by the possibility of a comparison, we think we are perceiving a state ofaffairs ofthe highest generality" (PI? 104). In what sense is language or the world fragmented? Our language games or rather their grammar provide frames through and in which we and the world are figured as sensible. Investigatingthegrammar(thelogicoraestheticsofourusage)ofourlanguage means to make these frames visible, to configure language as a complex set o f shifting frames. This in effect means to display our language as a set o f fragments within which and in relation to which we figure ourselves and the world.
Wittgenstein suggests that the kind of necessity that can lead to Kant's transcendental deduction, where the question is what is necessary for cognition or knowing to be possible, can not be described or captured in rules (that is, this necessity cannot be said). The problem of knowledge is translated into how we understand language. The site o f this understanding is within or in relation to language games.
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Wittgenstein explores the nature of how words function within these language games, in a typical self-reflexive move, by describing the grammar o f the word 'game' in order to show that it has no essence, but is rather part ofa complex set ofuses that mark any particular use o f 'game' (as in 'a game o f chess') as related to another usage (a guessing game or football) as if by family resemblance. Wittgenstein distinguishes between the demands of philosophy for the definition or the essence of concepts and our everyday use of concepts in differing degrees ofexactitude and vagueness. If one looks at the examples of how we use a word like 'game' to describe our games we cannot find nor describe the essence of being a game, nor can we determine or describe the essential criteria for using the word 'game'. We find instead "family resemblance"; "for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross [kreuzen] in the same way. --And I shall say: 'games' form a family"(PI? 67). Ifwords"haveafamilyofmeanings"(PI? 77),thenonecannotdiscover an essential meaning o f a word. Meaning is not a function o f a word having a particular meaning or essence which we then grasp. He suggests that the "concept of a game is unbounded", that what a game is cannot be determined by a rule or expressed as an essence (gameness).
The interlocutor responds, "But then the use o f the word is unregulated, the 'game' we play with it is unregulated. " This assertion is answered by, "It is not everywhere circumscribed by rules; but no more are there any rules for how high one
throws the ball in tennis, or how hard; yet tennis is a game for all that and has rules too" (PI? 68). One can imagine that a coach might invent rules for how high and hard to throw
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through its significance [Bedeutung] and relation to us: its value as our reality.
This extemalization is a representation in otherness, that is also the object itself, necessarily an element in both its being and our being, and thus within the "unity o f being- for-self'. The movement from meaning to representation ignores the conceptual aporia separatingrepresentationandintentioninHume'scritiqueofinfiniteregression. Instead, Hegel understands that our movement is a movement into the subjective constructs o f our
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representation. Time arises through our representation ofwhat lias been' as 'now1, which must be surrendered to our memory in order to be replaced by the now that is but which we cannot know as now except when translated into a representation.
Self-consciousnessisin"communionwithitselfinitsothernessassuch. Thisisthe movement of consciousness, and in that movement consciousness is the totality of its moments. " Consciousness is constituted by the temporality that it creates within the fissure between intention and representation.
Thus in the Encyclopedia Logic Hegel can construct Being beyond representation: [Being] is not to be sensed, not to be intuited, and not to be represented, but rather, it is the pure Thought and, as such it constitutes the beginning. (86)
Being is not an object to be grasped: it cannot be sensed, intuited, or represented as Being. The "Knowing1in Consciousness "is to be indicated only in its process of coming-to- be"(789). EvenwhenBeingapproachesthinghoodin"ObservingReason",itis"thebeing o f the T" that is a "Thing, and, moreover, a sensuous immediate Thing"(789): "The Thing is T; in point of fact, in this infinitejudgment the Thing is superseded; in itselfit is nothing; it has meaning only in the relation, only through the T and its connection with it"(791). Thus our object, knowing itself, is a 'Thing' through its creation of our knowledge of it, its relation "through the T" and its "connection with it, "which is our, really Hegel's, representation of it.
For Wittgenstein, in the Brown Book, temporality cannot be represented as a thing (as a log); which means that the essence or the form of time is not expressed in language, in the interaction of identities, which after all define thingness. Thus when we speak of
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time we do not say what we mean. Wittgenstein has extended Hegel's examination o f the failure o f language to capture the being o f objects to its failure to capture beings in general. The object fails to materialize in our saying. It exists within our knowledge only as our intention or criterion. Apparent meaning (the criterion for truth or actuality) defines the object as a potential, that which is meant and is to be actualized in our knowledge through our representation of it. As a criterion it picks out what it would mean for a particular object to be that particular object. Saying translates what meaning points to (not the object itself) into the realm of what can be known. Meaning constructs the realm of what can be said.
The failure to say what is meant assumes that meaning is prior to saying; we can ask what is meant because this meaning is understood to exist (because it asserts the existence of a real object that is marked by our intention but not our saying), although it hasnotyetbeensaid. Onemustassume,asHegelcertainlydoes,thatoursubjectivity contains a realm o f intention separate from the realm o f manifestations, which somehow picks out an object and acts as the criterion for determining the truth o f our representation ofthis object.
In the initial stages of the Phenomenology knowledge grasps the object not through representation but through this criterion, the intention informing our language. This criterion is grounded in an identity between our being, our existence as such, and our knowing: being = knowing (74). Our knowing will be actual if the object is actual within, or as, our representation. The criterion becomes a field o f potential that defines Being and knowing within a grammar of intention activated by the subject.
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11. 2 Inhabiting time
We begin to see here the significance ofWittgenstein's formulation ofthe problem ofTime. The present is mistaken for its manifestation in the transformation ofthings or identities, and then translated into the metaphor o f movement. These manifestations, the logs rambling down the river, are mistakenly read as the meaning or realization o f Time, which functions as the potentiality (the condition) o f Being: Time = potential Being. For Wittgenstein this movement from potential to actual, because it equates two different conceptual genres, is unjustified.
We experience and know temporality, however, through the particularity of our being. This particularity should not be simply understood as our subjectivity. It is more importantlythespecificconditionsthroughwhichTimeismademanifest. Withoutthis particularity it would be impossible for us to recognize Time as change. Being becomes the relating o f this particularity to this condition o f change in order to construct the "reality" of things. (To deny this is simply to deny "things". ) Being itselfis the mediation o f this relating. Thus the log is not simply the false embodiment o f the present. It manifests the Criterion (the standard defining what qualifies as real) determining the form ofourownsubjectivityorpresencewithinTime. Andassuchitdefinesasystemof meaning; it defines the Criterion defining our inclusion within what Hegel calls the Absolute, but which is simply Actuality or reality. Time, therefore, functions as the potentiality o f form: the manifestation o f formal identity in the conceptual structure o f the
present, the limit and necessary condition ofBeing, whereas the formal identities of
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language function as the potentiality ofcontent: the feigned manifestation ofcontent in form, being in identity, which establishes the potentiality o f this content.
Any conception of time is limited by the fact that it cannot be observed as a real entity, but can only be seen to exist through extrapolation from its effect on space and matter:timeiscontingentonmaterialityandconsciousness. Inspiteoftheabstract, contingent, immaterial, non-substantive essence and nature o f time, it functions as the absolute condition and limit on our existence. Finnegans Wake transforms time (both as interpretative descriptions and enactments o f change) into grammatical shifts in order to elide this limit. Opera, in a kind of inversion, transforms time, music itself, into the forms o f plot and character, what is and can be lost through death, and, therefore, being, in order to elide this limit.
I would like to chance another excursus in Opera, not only as a counterpoint to the musicality of the Wake (the form of its nonsense), but as an investigation of how the picture o f time (a log on a river) that Wittgenstein undoes can be lodged within an introjection o f ourselves (variously conceived) within the systematic force o f change and time.
What is the seduction ofthe mind? Ivan Nagel, after identifying the thematic conflict in Opera Seria as menace and entreaty, expands their power to thematically organize opera, by analogic extension, into the ontological structure organizing the universe o f Opera:
Space and time: they stand for domination and freedom. But they also stand for a pureandimpurerelationshipintheworld. Timeisimpure,becauseinitevery
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object, every man is one thing and then an other. Thus disloyalty, betrayal become the clock o f freedom, and finally the madly accelerated hour stroke o f the modem age. ThatisperhapsthedeepestthemeofDonGiovanni. (118)
The impurity o f time is judged from the perspective o f Being understood as the ideal form o f identity. In this equation, Space (the realm o f Being as identity) symbolizes Society, butinthisitmustalsogird,standfortheWomen. Time,althoughanabstractionbuiltout ofperceived effects (and thus impure), unsheathes, bares (? ) Don Giovanni in order that he might run through space(? ), slash it(? ), defeat its dominion. For Nagel, Don Giovanni, in spite o f Catherine Clement's protest that his rapes cease to be rationalized as rebellion, represents the excess and the promise o f the French Revolution.
Don Giovanni is built on a temporal logic, but one in which such symbolism is less neat. I'm not sure that Space and Time can function as symbols unless this symbolism is builtoutofanontology. Nagel'sspace/timefictionisclosertoananalogywhichgathers its rhetorical strength from the ease by which any small set o f events and characters can be mapped onto a set o f oppositions.
Don Giovanni, when confronted by the Commendatore, rejects his demand that he renounce his life, his identity and his history. He rejects change, if that change includes himself. Hisrejectionofsocialnormsismorelikeanattemptatbecomingpurebeing(as opposed to impure time), in the same sense that opera itself attempts to replace the temporalrelations,outofwhichpolyphonyisbuilt,withmonodicidentities. Although Don Giovanni protects himselfas a pure identity (as opposed to change), he reduces the woman around him, the women he conquers to temporal markers. They are, as
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Kierkegaard assures us, without psychical individuality, that is, without content or subjectivity--so long as they are on this list. Don Giovanni is the Being that creates Time.
Don Giovanni's power, contradicting Kierkegaard's fiction, can certainly fail (as it does repeatedly in the opera). In being desire he can only succeed with desire: if he cannotreducethewomantonothingbutdesirehewillfail. Tobuildasouloutofthis Opera one would have to reduce it to an ontological network in which feminine repetition and negation would dissolve the form of serial time described by Don Giovanni's list into spirit.
The oddness of finding Opera as an enactment ofthe creation or dissolution ofthe mind reflects the kind o f pressure the tension between the conative forces describing animation (often figured as love, lust, desire, dread, fear, and so on) and the organizing formsquantityincreasinglycapturedinmodemepistemologicalmodelsofthinking. Music and voice or silence and singing or noise and melody can serve to enact in the kinds of unities o f form they produce to enact the analogies o f animation that philosophy and literature picture. (One could do a history of this. )
Don Giovanni values woman as woman. A woman is a piece of wax on a stove. If she melts the properties by which I knew her, her coloring, her smell, her shape have disappeared. Is it still a woman? Don Giovanni offers a woman, as a gift o f his desire, the certainty that she is not only a woman no matter what her shape or social status, but that her value is absolute, essential to her being. Don Giovanni desires the essence ofthe being ofwomen. For a woman to be transformed into her essence, however, is for her to lose her being, to become a mark on a list, to exist as this essence within serial time.
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Ifwe can believe the list, then Don Giovanni by trading a woman the certainty of absolute value for the being (her name, her identity) reduces her to serial time: Ontological map of Being creating a Serial Temporality
ife of DG: serial progression
Names of women: moments in time
Donna Elvira, one o f Don Giovanni's past lovers, refuses to be reduced to pure form, a mark on a list. She exclaims, "I must hasten . . . I must go . . . All I can feel within my breast is revenge, rage and contempt. " This refusal generates a conflict between Don Giovanni's history o f succession, where memory consists o f nothing but names on this line and the future consists o f nothing but further conquests o f women with regard to shape or size or personality, and a Donna Elvira's new history of redemption or revenge. If we place Donna Elvira's temporal path on the map ofDon Giovanni's temporal path it describes a temporal loop:
Temporal Loop (DE) and Serial Time (DG)
DE
Past
ofdesireanimatinghim. Massettosaystohim,"Letyourgentlemanmakeyouintoa
DG
Now
Giovanni pretends to be a chameleon, each mask a host for the parasite algorithm
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gentlewoman. " Everyone at first assumes that being, or identity, what a person is, is determined by the form someone takes. This mistake is what allows Giovanni to at first seduce his victims. They believe his exterior; they accept the promises and thus the offer o f transformation he gives them (to be a bride, a gentlewoman, etc. ). Clement is making the same mistake when she claims that Don Giovanni's is nothing but the clothes which Leperello puts on to fool Donna Elvira. Don Giovani is not his cloak, he is his desire. Elvira's failure to expose Leperello arises because she holds on to an ontology of identity which is conserved over time. She recognizes the real Giovanni when he speaks to her. She assumes the voice and body is the same after Don Giovani has left. Don Giovani's
formal identity is tied to the immediacy of his desire, but the identity he defends against the Commendatore and which determines his actions remains constant over time. His essence is constant. This essence can be expressed through particular formal identities (in particular moments), but it cannot be represented by those same forms. In this way Don GiovannidoesdescribetheessenceofmusicasSchopenhauerdefinesit: asa representation o f what cannot be represented in itself (the Will).
Donna Elvira's ability to return and confront Don Giovanni, attributed as it is to heaven, is predicated on a ability to act over time outside o f the immediacy o f form and desire in which Don Giovanni operates. Spirit, or heaven, functions, therefore, as the guarantor of identity over time. Donna Anna and Don Ottavio both sing,
Heavens, what a noble sight! What refined dignity!
. . . . Within my heart I feel a strange emotion. . . about this unhappy woman (DE).
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Another temporal loop is exposed as Donna Anna recognizes in Donna Elvira a similar pain to her own. In recognizing herselfin Donna Elvira, she uncovers the identity of her attacker. Although Don Ottavio resists this identification because he recognizes himself in Don Giovanni (he acknowledges him as his kinsman). Don Giovanni's exposure takes place through the appearance o f Donna Elvira, but this appearance is conditioned over time, and is not constructed in the immediacy o f desire. The recognition o f pain as opposed to desire "assails" Donna Elvira "with doubt", such that the "words uttered so softly, the way he changes colour, these signs are all to obvious, they have quite convinced me. " The frame or grammar in which the actions and identities o f our characters function has been transformed into a meta-temporal grammar founded upon the collision of not just Donna Elvira and Don Giovanni, but ofthe two temporal patterns and the identities these patterns generate. When Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Don Ottavio call on heaven to "protect the zeal within my heart" and to avenge my betrayed heart" they are calling on an ontology opposed to the serial time built o f moments without content. An ontology constructed out ofthe immediacy ofdesire claims, as we all might, that the only reality exists in the now. The past and the future are not physically real. An appeal to Heaven constructs a reality that because it includes both past (the memory o f Don Giovani's
crimes) and the future (his punishment) recognizes a reality beyond the physicality of the physical. We recognize memory and justice as a function o f the biology o f our brains, the social and cultural structures, grammars, rules etc.
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The end, even at this point, is determined by the dissolution of Don Giovanni's temporal ontology into that of the women. This happens when a woman of the past flying
on her temporal loop intersects every new woman marked by Don Giovanni's desire: The Dissolution of Don Giovanni
DE DA [past]
moments when DG meets a woman
Once every serial moment is frustrated by a temporal loop, the woman have in effect dissolved being defined in the immediacy o f its physicality into a meta-being that transcends time: the soul. This soul is represented in the opera as the Commendatore. It is this final intersection that exposes the essence o f Don Giovanni, demonstrating that this essence, which defines his identity, is also trans-temporal, and as such is a form o f being similar to that being (spirit) which is the Commendatore. Don Giovanni materializes as a form o f spirit and thus can be captured and taken away by the soul o f Donna Anna's father.
For Don Giovanni being(s) [women] are potential markers in time. His desire and power (identity) dissolves being into temporality. The temporal loops described by the women attempt to re-constitute being within a subjectivity greater than any moment. They identify this subjectivity with Heaven, but it is simply the frame from which contradictorygrammarscanfunction. Inthiscasebeinggeneratedoutoftemporality represented by the women following their temporal loops and the temporality generated
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out o f being defined by the serial time o f Don Giovanni's list. The women's identities are not self-contained within the immediacy ofthe moment as is Don Giovanni's. They exist overtime,suchthattimeisre-configuredasafieldcreatingbeing. TheyforceDon Giovanni to fail and in that failure to cease to function as the immediacy o f desire and form. In order to overcome the immorality ofDon Giovanni they must function as logs on the river. A log built out of our subjectivity is a temporal loop dissolving along the serial
progression o f a river.
The possibility for our separation o f time and space is a result o f their mutual
dependence and indeed their unity. This unity requires that space, as substance, function as ifit were a subject moving into the objectivity oftime (the women onto Don Giovanni's list), while time gains an overarching subjectivity that asks as a great maw dissolving the identity of being (the temporal loops that finally suck Giovanni into Hell). For matter to exist at all requires a scale o f relation that cannot be defined tautologically by matter itself. Differenceisnotchange. Wereachthelimitsoflanguage,becauselanguagewhatever difference and deferral it might entail, cannot construct within itself, as anything meaningful, change itself. Language makes change a necessary pre-condition for its own
meaning. It can display it, point to it, call it names, enact it but it cannot describe it (language itself is already such a description; this is why attempts to embody time appeal to nonsense). And yet temporality is not the unutterable; it is what we utter although not what we mean. Just as narrative, or even a sentence, needs a temporal 'space' in which to unfold its meaning, being itself exists through its movement through moments. The nature of the moments cannot be described as/or through being: it defines their outline or their
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content. Music does not come closest to grasping temporality, in grasping the limits of our existence. Change cannot be expressed as a syntax. I take it as the conclusion o f Don Giovanni, Finnegans Wake, and Philosophical Investigations that our investment in time functions through the way we figure meaning (and thus semantics) within grammatical (and syntactical) shifts.
Temporality and being, 'now1and 'here', become different because they each function through a contingency with the other that the other cannot itself determine. If "consciousness is the totality o f its moments" (as it is in Hegel), it must understand itself at any particular moment as not all there; its past and its future, and its movement toward itself in otherness is itself what we call time stringing being into our knowledge. Our knowledge, under the rubric of skepticism, consists of nothing but forms. It is out of theseforms, outofthepotentialityofcontentimplicatedinformbytheplayofconflicting grammars and logics, that poetries, philosophies, and operas construct bodies and souls. We might as well call this body and soul a mind.
Finnegans Wake, Opera, and, as will become clear, Philosophical Investigations, construct a mind as a shifting set of limits. They construct a mind not simply as or by an analogy, but in order to negotiate between and among inwardness and exertiority, type and individual, language and music, sense and absurdity. We recognize ourselves within the forms o f art, including philosophical art, because they can successfully construct an aesthetic entity equivalent to our subjectivity, which performs a similar negotiation between different grammars and worlds in order to construct a continuous temporality.
Art, in its attempt to approach Thoreau's fantasy of seeing through another's eyes as if
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through the eyes of God, by presenting us with the subjectivity of an other that is not fully human, cannot help but suggest that the confusion we need to fear is not that between an automaton and a human, but between and automaton and God.
Hegel recognizes a similar limit in the a trans-subjective frame, the continuity from Sense-Certainty to Absolute Knowing, providing the continuity in temporality (becoming) that Being conceived within formal identities cannot give. For Hegel this trans-subjective frame is Spirit, the condition ofBeing as Becoming that marks existence as necessarily historical. Spirit is generated as a necessity out ofthe interaction between our subjectivity, or cognition, and change translated into language and representation.
The present is neither a mystic point, nor, as Wittgenstein demonstrates, a thing or anidentity. Itisaconstructionofoursubjectivity;itistherealmofbecomingbeyondthe objective form of language but within our intention, within the criterion of meaning used toconstructknowledgeandmeaning. Thisrealmofintentionenfoldsthemovementof subjectivity between self and text--and thus between moments. The present offers itself as Spirit, not simply as the frame o f temporal continuity but as the substance o f being as
becoming.
AtthispointHegel'stheologyconfrontsBenjamin's: spiritastemporalityagainst
spatialtheology. ThetheologyanimatingBenjamin'smaterialismplaysbetweenhis messianic need to redeem the past in memory (the completion o f the dead) and in action (toward utopia) and his spatial conception o f the mystic configurations and monads communicatingtheinorganicandmysterioussubstanceofhistory. Benjaminwritesin"Re the Theory ofKnowledge, Theory ofProgress" that
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. . . historyisnotjustasciencebutalsoaformofmemoration. Whatscience has "established," memoration can modify. Memoration can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. Thatistheology;butinmemorationwediscovertheexperiencethat forbids us to conceive o f history as thoroughly a-theological. . . (61)
Historydoesnotexistwithinanoumenalrealmbeyondoursubjectivity. Historyas "memoration" moves life beyond the present, beyond the phenomenal plane oftexts, into
the realm of ontological values that Benjamin calls theology and into our own subjectivity constructing these values. In Benjamin these values are embodied in messianic logic empowering the dialectic o f history, which is our becoming (i. e. our creation o f ourselves as history and therefore through memory, action, and hope). By ontological values I mean the necessary axiological hierarchies generating any criterion for determining actuality which we recognize as real: the values that attach a 'reality' to our subjectivity in spite of the irrevocably unbridgeable epistemological estrangement. (Hegel's chapter on "Sense- certainty" demonstrates this estrangement, and within its logic invokes a double hierarchy ofvalues: essentiality/inessentialityandimmediacy/mediacywhichempowersthe dialectic throughout the entire Phenomenology). We construct and function within a continuity of substance that exists beyond the present, much like our brain constructs a
very elaborate visual field from limited visual stimulus. Theology is a faith beyond the knowing of sense-certainty, beyond immediacy and essentiality, that re-constitutes knowing within the continuity of Spirit: the creation of Being out of the temporal fragmentation of our subjectivity in successive moments. We exist beyond the immediate
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in the mediacy oftime. This theological mediation allows for the possibility for the present to redeem the past (Benjamin, Origin, 34-36). This present functions like Hegel's subjectivity (or Heidegger's hermeneutic circle): it serves to structure the continuity of temporality out of our cognition, dissolving the separation between subject and object, phenomenal and noumenal in the becoming of history. Thus Benjamin's theology is reconciled to the logic underlying Hegel's use of Spirit.
Benjamin will not override the dialectical movement o f history in anything resembling what de Man calls a "synchronic juxtaposition. " Benjamin constructs a history of power broken into discontinuities that can only be reconstructed in diachronic
juxtapositions, where the mystic unity ofthe moment, the identity ofthe individual, of subjectivity in its singular date, exists in the silence between these juxtapositions. Benjamin cannot ultimately replace becoming with being, and must rely on the silence, in which voices occasionally crystallize as words, as the trans-subjective medium in which memory can be invoked and can redeem the oppressed.
The dynamic between the realm o f intention and representation, between meaning (criterion) and truth, becoming and being, subjective and objective cannot be epoxied into thematerialityoflanguage. Thecontext,grammar,anduseandthesubjectivity,intention, and silence in which meaning is enacted transform our thinking into temporality itself. To ask whether time exists beyond our cognition, beyond ourselves is to ask nonsense; it is to think of temporality as an object like a log.
What I mean to say by this, but which I could only pretend to prove in some other essay, is that our cognition o f time simultaneously and necessarily constructs the paradigm
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through which meaning is possible. Meaning organizes reality within an axiological hierarchy determining ontological value and significance in order to define a realm of actuality in relation to a subjectivity challenged by the minatory presence o f its own dissolution.
Time is the creation of art just as it is the construct of our cognition. Temporality, disguised as the Phoenix ofBeing, becomes an aesthetic image ofour subjectivity simulating the play between intention, where the text becomes the realm o f intention pointing toward some beyond, and representation, where it becomes the verbal effect of someintention. Farfrombeingsimultaneous,thisdoubleness(asonlythebeginningofa multiplicity of conflicting vectors) brings the diachronic beasts of change and loss into our perception as the condition of our existence. Representation and art bring death into our own subjectivity, and thus can be said to generate the cognitive reality o f time.
Derrida interprets Celan in relation to this threat and its dramatic transformation in language into the redemption of communication:
The name September arises in a poem, a poem which "speaks"; it is readable to the extent that it is caught up within a network o f marks which signify and are, by convention, intelligible; it has its share in the poem's beauty. But to the same extent, it pays for its readability with the terrible tribute of lost singularity; what is encrypted, dated in the date, is effaced in it, the date is marked in marking itself off. (330)
A date marks the singular moment by translating this singularity into a standardized convention which can then be exchanged and understood within a social community.
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Thus Derrida claims that the date effaces itself in a kind o f "synchronic juxtaposition. ". Derrida structures the moment as an identity (engaging in the disanalogy o f the moment as a log), whose content is mired in paradox but whose identity remains constant and reiterable. This iterability forms the trans-subjective frame providing the continuity between moments. This iterability, however, is predicated on the effacement ofthe singularity the date refers to (337). This singularity, the 'actual' date, if we follow the logic o f Derrida's use o f "effacement", is encoded within the semiotic date only to be markedoverandlosttotherecurrent"modernity"ofthesignifier. Derridascrupulously avoids reinstituting a Kantian noumenal realm. But he also avoids Hegel's subjective realm o f intention. The 'now' that 'has been' is marked as that which is effaced, and the signifier becomes a palimpsest. By avoiding the notion o f a subjective Criterion, Derrida dissolves any notion o f a temporality generated through subjectivity. The real becomes restricted to the immediate: the signifier and the moment.
The date, however, can neither be effaced nor communicated: it is not a thing but a condition o f being circumscribed and defined by the movement o f subjectivity between identities in different moments. A date refers to time by representing things understood as identities,whicharesometimesstableandatothertimeschanging. Torecapturethe temporality of texts one must not construct reading within an atemporal mode of renewal and ossification (interpretation and assertion), but one must negotiate between the diachronic unfolding of the text and the diachronic realm of meaning, or intention, the text reticulates through its representations of identity. Ultimately it is the not that time provides the possibility for poetics, but that art actualizes the possibility o f time: Art
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becomes the origin and the answer to our existential terror, but always within the logic of history, always within this very terror as a kind of irony. The irony of terror is built out of the contiguity of tradition translating the individual (a particular) into the context of history (recognizing oneselfas the exemplar or expression ofthe Volk, for example) or in translating the individual into the self-redeeming continuity ofmemory that protected the Jews in their diaspora and which preserves destroyed lives and cultures, if preservation can be so immaterial, tenuous, and tragic.
1In Wittgenstein's Lectures: Cambridge, 1930-32, ed. Desmond Lee (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). 2Thejustification for Wittgenstein's hostility to science is poorly understood. He does not in general concernhimselfwithhowscientiststhink(intheirdifferentfeilds),butwithwhattheythink. Heidegger makesthissamemove. ForWittgenstein,thislimitationispartlytheresultofhisconcernsabout mathematics and psychology, both describing the limits ofscience.
3 See the last two chapters of his Wittgenstein on Mind and Language.
4For Stem's discussion of the history of Wittgenstein's anempts to construct a phenomenological language and then his abandonment of this attempt see both chapter 5 and chapter 6 in his Wittgenstein on Mind and Language.
5"(Augustine: Manifestissima et usitatissma sunt, et eadem rusus nimis latent, et nova est inventio eorum. )"
6The separation between noumenal and phenomenal reality is predicated on equating Being with a conceptofobjecthood. Thisseparationisthustheresultofobjectification,andthusis notthecauseofa subject/object economy but a result
7In Gottlob Frege, Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy.
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12
The T in the nature ofPhilosophicalInvestigations
Models of time are invariably models of animation. We invest ourselves in the marks oftime ('now', 'date', 'today', and so on) in the same way as we invest ourselves in our use o f 'I'. These investments lead to philosophical confusions and serve as vehicles of redemption. This redemption can proceed through a model o f thinking which is often a model of animation (as with Benjamin). Under philosophical pressure, however, this investment can seem to describe the principle o f life as dynamism plus identity. Such a picture o f life erases the grammatical investment from which it was extracted.
Wittgenstein courts this danger in the preface to Philosophical Investigations. Following a list o f the philosophical subjects he investigates, Wittgenstein describes the shape o f his
writing or of his thinking in relation to these subjects within a picture of animation (one can take this as one picture among many o f the soul o f Investigations) -.
I have written down all these thoughts as remarks, short paragraphs, o f which there is sometimes a fairly long chain about the same subject, while I sometimes make a sudden change, jumping from one topic to another, (be)
The list o f philosophy is ballasted by a length o f chain, local areas o f continuity matching in some sense the objects ofphilosophy, and rocked by "sudden change," from the inclusion of"other things. " One could imagine this description ofthe book functioning as a kind ofjustification for the form ofthe list of his philosophical topics. This description can read like a philosophical picture ofthinking, ofthe world or ofphilosophy built out of
Notes for this chapter are on page S31
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metaphorsofdynamismandidentity. Thebookisorganizedthroughcontinuity(local identity) and change, founded on the relation between identity and change that finds philosophy in between the fragments o f (change) Amdmander and Heraclitus and (identity) ParmenidesandZeno. OneofWittgenstein'sstrategiesincombatingourphilosophical extraction o f ourselves from our language games is to transform philosophical theories and concepts into aesthetic pictures and justifications. This is true o f his own philosophy as
well: he unwinds the Tractatus and other earlier philosophical temptations and models into apoeticsoflanguagegames. Thispoeticsbothgroundshisanalysisofconceptsintheir everyday use and picture our involvement in language and philosophy through our interpretive allegories and our allegorizations o f ourselves into language. Animation is one ofthe central motifs for such allegorization. PhilosophicalInvestigations could as well be calledapoetryoffragmentsandapoeticsoffragments(orfragmentation). Thiscollapse of poetry and poetics marks Wittgenstein as a modernist.
The preface describes Wittgenstein's involvement in language as his involvement in philosophy. Philosophical Investigations begins (with the preface) with an aesthetic
justificationforthefragmentedformofthebook. Fragmentsrequirejustificationbecause they require the construction of (an) interpretative frame(s). This means that a fragment (or its justification) must teach us how to read it, and thus the preface attempt to teach us how to read Investigations. Consequently, I will analyze (through a kind o f exegesis) the preface as a fragment o f Philosophical Investigations that begins and enacts our involvement and investment in language as bound by aesthetics: metaphors, fictions, conversation, fragments and so on.
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Wittgensteincallshimself'I'inthepreface. IntheTractatus,Wittgenstein describes a non-psychological or metaphysical 'I' that forms the limit to the propositions that constitute the facts ofthe world. Is there a non-psychological 'I' inPhilosophical
Investigations? Investigations is organized to dissolve our metaphysical attachment to this kind of question into nonsense. One of the ways, however, this non-psychological 'I' emerges (as a local, not a metaphysical limit) is in the failure o f language games. There are a number o f ways in which language games fail and succeed. The peristalsis o f this movement in and out of language games describes a kind of temporality enacting a kind of theological limit (one ofthe ways grammar becomes theology: ? 337). Another kind of language game failure, however, is philosophy understood as metaphysics:
Whenphilosophersuseaword-- "knowledge","being',"object","I", "proposition", "name" --and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? (PI? 116)
A lot rests on how "original home" is understood here, and how the appeal to ordinary language accommodates the different kinds o f sublimation o f the word "knowledge. " Knowledge can be sublimed in a theory of knowledge where we might presume the requirement for knowledge is absolute identity, or it can be sublimed as in Steven's use of "knew" (and "self' and "song" and "maker") in "The Idea of Order at Key West":
And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
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As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing made.
Wittgenstein suggests that the expressiveness o f poetry (as a version o f self-interpretation) resists the philosophical attempt to link necessity with essence as a way o f describing the conditions, the given, of our being human. 1To explore the relation between poetry and philosophy is to investigate the nature and role o f what counts as the given in poetry (a poem). Iunderstandsuchaninvestigationtomeanthatourpoeticuseoflanguage,our investment in language or poetry, articulates a relationship to the ontological limits (what is given as the real) in relation to which we live. The sense o f poetry would then be a function ofthis relationship, that is, its sense could be understood as meaningful or true, whatever these might mean, through the analysis and articulation o f this relationship and these limits).
What counts as a limit is continually at issue: "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably" (PI ? 115). Philosophy, in Wittgenstein's hands, becomes a poetic response to what seems like logical necessity in order to break the hold these picture and false analogies have on us, and an attempt to present the correct (at least in particular circumstances)grammarofourlanguageuse. Wittgensteinassertsthat"Philosophyought really to be written as a poetic composition" partly because it is a response to a logical aesthetic, at best, or, at worst, to a logical prejudice (CV24). But what kind of poetic composition?
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Wittgenstein utilizes a number o f recurrent metaphors and analogies throughout Investigations. ThedominatemetaphorsinthePreface,however,"[d]rawingtheirlight and currents o f the air/ [i]nto their mass and depth" revolve around 'nature' (and landscape). 2 The grammar o f 'nature' opens up a site o f contestation between metaphysics, in which nature can be understood as essence, and science, in which the natural is understood as defined by causal connections, and Wittgenstein's method, in which nature describes our ordinary embeddednesss within language, language games, human practices, and forms of life. Does Wittgenstein's use of nature, or let's say the
justification o f his philosophy described in the Preface, describe a poetics or philosophy of fragmentation that addresses the motives and effects ofthe fragmentation oftime, identity and world described in Keats, Adams, Eliot, Heidegger, and Joyce?
Wittgenstein provides a list of many of the subjects of his Investigations in the preface: "[t]heconceptsofmeaning,ofunderstanding,ofaproposition,oflogic,the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things. " This is a description ofphilosophy that clanks into the vagueness of "other things" [undAnderes] in a way exactly at odds to the demands oflogicjustifying these other problems as philosophical problems. The anti-climax ofthese "other things" can be read as a diminishment or a promise. What are these other things, at least? Do we imagine that
thinking can be described by a list of traditional things to think about?
These philosophical subjects do not form a given set ofquestions and responses,
determined by clear conceptual boundaries, towards which someone thinks. Investigations could never have been called 'The Problem ofMeaning' or 'Of
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Understanding'or 'Logical Propositions'and so on. It consists of"the precipitate of PhilosophicalInvestigationunified not by a specific subject (although there are rough limits: o f Wittgenstein's two major concerns it concerns the philosophy o f psychology more than the philosophy o f mathematics, but this is a way o f saying it concerns the limits ofthe mind as opposed to the limits oftruth). A precipitate [Niederschlag] is a kind of resultoreffect,atraceofthinkingthatisitselfanotherformofinvestigation. Thevery first sentence of the Preface, therefore, describes the kind of self-reflexive form organizing the book. The investigation ofthese subjects takes place from within the language of these problems. And thus this investigation is another version o f this language (not the language of theory, however, but a description of how one might be gripped by how or why something means, for example). Each remark, therefore, remarks on itself as a redescription of a previous picture (this is one way of explaining why Investigations
begins with a quotation, a picture of language-learning, from Augustine). How does this self-reflection take place?
Wittgenstein's philosophical self-reflection proceeds through the invention of primitive and specialized language games as objects o f comparison with our misleading and our everyday language games, through the description of our ordinary usage of language, through metaphors and analogies, through grammatical jokes, and so on. He pressures those points or moments when a language game fails (the point at which we start to theorize for example). This pressure shifts incoherence not simply back into coherence but from one point of incoherence to another, describing the distinctions in our languageusageastheshiftinglimitsbetweenlanguagegames. Oneoftheways
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Wittgenstein describes these limits is as and through invented "intermediate cases": language games that simplify an aspect o f our use in order to highlight the logic o f our ordinaryusage. Hesays
A main source o f our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view oftheuseofourwords. --Ourgrammarislackinginthissortofperspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in 'seeing connexions'. (PI? 122)
These connections are made visible by intermediate cases because they sketch the limit of the frame through which we view something in relation to another frame: "We predicate ofthe thing what lies in the method of representing it. Impressed by the possibility of a comparison, we think we are perceiving a state ofaffairs ofthe highest generality" (PI? 104). In what sense is language or the world fragmented? Our language games or rather their grammar provide frames through and in which we and the world are figured as sensible. Investigatingthegrammar(thelogicoraestheticsofourusage)ofourlanguage means to make these frames visible, to configure language as a complex set o f shifting frames. This in effect means to display our language as a set o f fragments within which and in relation to which we figure ourselves and the world.
Wittgenstein suggests that the kind of necessity that can lead to Kant's transcendental deduction, where the question is what is necessary for cognition or knowing to be possible, can not be described or captured in rules (that is, this necessity cannot be said). The problem of knowledge is translated into how we understand language. The site o f this understanding is within or in relation to language games.
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Wittgenstein explores the nature of how words function within these language games, in a typical self-reflexive move, by describing the grammar o f the word 'game' in order to show that it has no essence, but is rather part ofa complex set ofuses that mark any particular use o f 'game' (as in 'a game o f chess') as related to another usage (a guessing game or football) as if by family resemblance. Wittgenstein distinguishes between the demands of philosophy for the definition or the essence of concepts and our everyday use of concepts in differing degrees ofexactitude and vagueness. If one looks at the examples of how we use a word like 'game' to describe our games we cannot find nor describe the essence of being a game, nor can we determine or describe the essential criteria for using the word 'game'. We find instead "family resemblance"; "for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross [kreuzen] in the same way. --And I shall say: 'games' form a family"(PI? 67). Ifwords"haveafamilyofmeanings"(PI? 77),thenonecannotdiscover an essential meaning o f a word. Meaning is not a function o f a word having a particular meaning or essence which we then grasp. He suggests that the "concept of a game is unbounded", that what a game is cannot be determined by a rule or expressed as an essence (gameness).
The interlocutor responds, "But then the use o f the word is unregulated, the 'game' we play with it is unregulated. " This assertion is answered by, "It is not everywhere circumscribed by rules; but no more are there any rules for how high one
throws the ball in tennis, or how hard; yet tennis is a game for all that and has rules too" (PI? 68). One can imagine that a coach might invent rules for how high and hard to throw
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