No More Learning

One can follow the mineness of knowing a word (which does not mean of course that it is private) into the mineness of pain and enter Wittgenstein's discussion of pain. Can I ask someone if I am still in pain? Since I can't my pain seems private. I can also forgetmypain. Imightgethitagain,harder,sothatwhateverwasbrokenbeforegets maskedbyagreaterpain. Thismightbeafunctionofthelimitationsofmynervous system, but we find the same effect in our emotional distress. This is what drives us into homeopathy. I might listen to Chopin's B flat minor Sonata (with its Funeral March) after my wife has left me. This might seem at the time a tragedy, and at least call for catharsis, as Milton says in the Preface to Samson Agonistes "to purge the mind o f those and such like passions, . . . , by reading or seeing those passions well imitated. Nor is Nature wanting in her own effects to make good his assertion: for so Physic things of melancholic hue and quality are us'd against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humors. " The passions transformed in tragedy are reduced analogically to a physiologicalprinciple. Weentertheworldthroughthisanalogy. Thesepainsmightbe mine. If I lose this pain have I lost something of mine? Pain, excitement, depression all can be temporally limited to a particular duration. They are contained within time. The mineness of these sensations is my experience, my investment or identification of myself with these mental states. Can I experience the meaning o f the word "wissen"? If not then
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how is it mine? Should we not construe it, after the model in the Tractatus, as a limit of my experience and thus of my world? We want love to be like understanding a world as myworld,notlike'knowing'transitorypain. Inthissensewewantlovetobeamind. 4
The "between" in Finnegans Wake is marking off in negative space these two uses o f 'knowing,' not as logical distinctions tied to theories about first or third person discourse, but as grammatical distinctions organizing our investments in the forms o f our languageasmeaningful. Thisislikeaestheticizinglogicorlinguistics,notassublime(as in metaphysics), but as I suggested as grammatical jokes. The fragments generated by these jokes form a "monthage stick in the melmelode hawr, I am (twintomine) all thees thing"(FW223. 08-09). Thisislikesaying,"Iamallthesefragmentsincludingthis fragment and that and this 'I'. " In my previous discussion of fragments, this self-reflexive turning expresses a demand forjustification, or a configuration ofthe condition ofbeing human within the world as between what Wittgenstein marks as justifications and rights:
"When I say 'I am in pain' I am at any rate justified before myself. " --What does that mean? Does it mean: "If someone else could know what I am calling 'pain', he would admit that I was using the word correctly"?
To use a word without justification does not mean to use it without right. (PI? 289)
This last sentence is either contradictory (an appeal to rights is an appeal to justification) or is a picture of the limit ofjustification. If the latter, justification operates outside first- personclaims: itscriteriaarevisibletoothers. Thusjustification,inthispictureofuse,is not required when expressing pain because how would I be mistaken about my own pain
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(not my own hurt). But does the concept o f right, describing my statements as without justification but with right, attach itself differently to my first person claims? Justification
functions through an interpretive stance from which judgments can be made. Justification operatesinrelationtonormativecriteria. DerivedfromLius(thatwhichisbinding,right, justice, duty), 'justification' or 'justify' configures something or someone in relation to the
interactive order organizing the domain in which this something or someone operates and exists. But this re-ordering requires a mark to express its success. Such a remark, however, is the prime means by which this reordering can take place, and thus from ius is derived iurare, to pronounce a ritual formula or swear an oath. Justice arises not only as an effect o f our promises and betrayals, but it is constituted as such promises through whichwebecomecapableofjusticebecausewecanbejudged. Justicerequiresspeech, because justice is a form of speaking. This speech, however, must be a speaking of a community, an invocation of the particular (an individual or an expression or a sentence) by requiring that it express the whole (thus the standardization of ritual pronouncements and the strictures of tradition). There is, therefore, at least an isomorphism between language and the function ofjustice: both require that the whole be present in the particular. This relation is marked in the derivation o f L iudex, he who points to or show
the law (from whence our judge). Iudex derives from ius and diet (dex), to speak, say, etc. The collapse in our word judge of the act ofjudging (judge as verb) and the person who judges (noun) recalls the same need for the normative to be expressed fully in a particular,inthiscaseasthegroundofauthority. Andthuswespeakoftherighttojudge ('right' cognate with L. rex).
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As I suggested earlier, rights can be given, and thus they are not a given, a ground. Ifjustification is the application ofcriteria ofjudgment, rights are gained when these criteria are given as yours to apply to yourself. In giving rights one is giving recognition ofthoserights. Ifwecompare'Ihavetheright'with'Ihavethejustification'wecansee that the appeal to rights is a first person appeal, while the appeal to justification is an appeal to either second person (as if in a monarchy) or third person (as if in a democracy). Thus we can say "I am justified by my right to X". In this case justification is the applicationofaright. Butthisright,especiallyinWittgenstein'sdescription,isan expression whose self-sufficiency is only determined by our judgment that one is speaking by right (and without justification). How does one conceptualize oneself if one could not speak about, let's say, spiritual pain by right?
This third person appeal underwriting justification reifies rights away from the particularity o f persons and communities. The appeal to right by Wittgenstein is, however, an appeal to the normative usage of language. Normative criteria, whether embedded in language (or any formal structures) or in one's person (through social recognition of self-sufficiency, which therefore involves a self-recognition), erase the differencebetweenfirstpersonandsecondorthirdpersonappeals. Thedifferencewould seem to be the requirements for the application o f the language o f description determined asjustificationofright. Myquestioninghereisnotaboutthefirstpersonstatusofpain (the fact that one could not not know one's own pain), but is about determining what's at stake in Wittgenstein's invocation o f a difference between justification and rights.
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If one can separate the application of criteria from the criteria themselves, then criteria are inadequate to describe the relation between personhood (to which are attached rights) and any totality determining normative standards (towards which justification operates). Becausetheappealtorightswantstoconceptualizepersonhood(or particularity) as a totality determining normative standards personhood is both stabilized (as a ground) and destabilized (as normative). Thus the questions "when does something mean" or 'when do I know how to play chess? " arise when we view ourselves as simultaneously a particular and a universal, as a fragment or at night, or in our attempts to conceptualize both the language games we use to describe dreams and the language games about our self-loss at night. .
The following is another version ofthe Wake which is another version ofthis self- loss:
"Yet it is but an old story, the tale of a Treestone with one Ysold, of a Mons held by tentpegs and his pal whatholoosed on the run . . . drop this jiggerypokery and talk straight turkey meet to mate, for while the ear, be we mikealls or
nicholists, may sometimes by inclined to believe others the eye, whether browned or nolensed, find it devilish hard now and again even to believe itself. (FW113. 18-29)
The elm and stone are telling a tale of ALP as Isolde (compare this story with Eliot's telling of this story) and of HCE as Gulliver, where the Lilliputians tentpeg him down like sleep and its fragments and details. Someone asks (the text or the reader) to speak "straight turkey", but even in this request a metaphor for plan speaking can become the
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plainfleshof"turkeymeet"(meat). Whynotbuildachurchonthispuninsteadofthepun onSt. Peter? Ordinarylanguagepausesthe"jiggerypokery"ofthisnight,likethelove potion Isolde drank, so that to meet is to mate. Do we believe the evidence of our ears over that of our eyes? Language of the eye or the ear cannot establish certainty. It is a fact about ordinary language just as it is a fact about ordinary life that we might "find it devilish hard now and again even to believe itself', where this itself might be language animated into the form of our understanding or ourselves as bodies unsure of our status as animate beings.
In justification the criteria used, the totality invoked (society, language, law), functions as a limit to the particular. In rights the particular (individual, sentence, claim) functions as a limit to the totality. Epistemological justification is therefore an application ofcriteria. Aestheticjustification,likewhenepistemologicalbecomesontological
justification, when knowing ifthe bird is a goldfinch becomes the skeptical problem of determining if the bird is a hallucination, cannot be satisfied by any criteria because these criteria are missing or themselves require justification.
Ifanylinedidjustifythewholewritingwouldcease. Thedemandforjustification is not necessarily met by success. To use it by right opens up the complexity in the use of possession as a justification for freedom, an appeal to citizenship, the community, in this case the community of speakers, the normative conventionalism determining the criteria of language (games) expressed as personhood. The appeal to right here pretends to undercut the demand for justification, but the appeal to right rests on the collapse ofjustification into personhood. Personhood is not something that can be denied; by this I mean even the
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denial of the right to personhood that defined American slavery or describes ethnic and religious conflicts are tacit recognitions ofwhat is being denied. Wittgenstein's arguments that we respond to the pain in another as if to their human physiognomy is true in these cases as well. But is not the case that a right is an expression of personhood? It can only function as such an expression through a logic ofjustification that attaches the right to personhood and not to the land or to gods or to power. (What is a right? Is it like an arm? Do I have the right to my own body? Who says? Why them? Because they have power? what legitimates their power? Their power? And yet the stability o f communities is a function ofthe recognition ofthe legitimacy ofpower). To say that 'rights are human' can be answered by 'so are justifications'. Human rights are nonsensical: 'human rights' would not be called rights at all. All rights proceed through the inclusion within a community where these rights can be acknowledged. Rights, therefore, in their ambiguous relation to justification, describe a way in which we attach our interpretations (about what isjust) to what we are.
What does the demand to justify our words entail, demand, require? Modernism might require that the words themselves justify their sense, answering questions: does this mean? should I read this? is this art? which is to ask what value do these words have? At any point in the Wake none of these questions can be answered. Thus nothing within the textcancountasajustificationbeforethesequestionshavealreadybeenanswered. Thus if the text could offer a justification that would count as a justification it would have already been justified.
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The demand for justification before this text requires the interpretation o f what it means to justify in this case. Every text demands and performs its own justification. If we canjustify the Wake as art, we assume that we have criteria determining what art is, in the way we use criteria in evaluating knowledge claims. But this determination of art is exactlywhatjustificationissupposetoprovide. Soagainthedemandseemsnottomake sense because we do not know what the demand means. Y et without justification art seems vague, blind or pointless.
You say to me, 'You are not justified in thinking that. ' 'Thinking' here means something like 'believing'. The criteria for justification here will be partly dependent on what'that'refersto. Thelegitimacyofmythinking,likemyknowledge,seemsdependent on justified true belief. This justification describes a rationale adequate to the facts or logic or the rules o f discourse or of evidence. Although I cannot make the truth o f any particular claim transparent, I should be able to articulate the facts and reasons that would
justify my belief. I can even show how a belief, my own or someone else's, is a prejudice (of course again this does not make my belief either true or false, just not justified except as a prejudice).
Compare this use o f 'justify' (knowledge) with Milton's self-purported, putative 'motive' in writing Paradise Lost
what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
I may assert Eternal Providence, AndjustifythewaysofGodtomen. (1. 22-26)
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Do we read "And justify the ways of God to men" as a promise to show that God is right? To give God his due? To recognize or establish his rights? No. Is this instead a promise to show that the form ofthe world and ofhumanity is correct? By what standard? How does one determine the criteria by which to judge God and the world (if one already questions God's ways and, therefore, his word)? This goal I think, therefore, should be understoodironically. TheironyofthisgoalrestsonthehumansubsumptionofGod's right tojudge: the human ascension to the possession or the creation ofthe criteria of
judgment. Miltonmusttransformwhatitmeanstojudge(andjustify)sothatwe understand our lives (our very humanity) as a manifestation of God's demand that we
justify our ways to God. Such ajustification, however, requires the acceptance of God's criteria o f evaluation, even though these criteria remain unknown by human beings.
Justification goes through the request that our education be a form of purification. Milton did use justify like this in Areopagitica:
This justifies the high providence of God, who, though he command us temperance, justice, continence, yet pours out before us, even to a profiiseness, all desirable things, and gives us minds that can wander beyond all limit and satiety. (733)
Thisjustification ofthe ways ofgod is meant to suggest that we must act against these temptations in order to make ourselves (or express ourselves as) virtuous: "that which purifiesusistrial,andtrialisbywhatiscontrary"(728). Thispurification,however,isan attempt to justify ourselves before God.
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In his discussion ofthe theology ofLuther, Barth argues that "the center ofthis theology, then, is the demand for faith as naked trust that casts itselfinto the arms of God's mercy; faith that is the last word that can be said about the possibility of
justification before God" (Calvin 46). Calvin followed Luther in this even more strongly, tying justification to obedience to God by virtue of God's sovereignty (expressed through predestination). Bydescribingjustificationasakindofeducation(orpurification),Milton forces justification from an interpretation into an act. But we must be careful about what this means. A human life becomes itself an interpretation towards God's criteria of
judgment. Interpretation is embedded within a meaning which emerges through the act of transforming oneselftowards God (the totalizing form ofmeaning). Ajustification, as an interpretation,gainsmeaning(andadeterminingscope)initsuse. Thisusemustalsobe
justified in acting toward the good. This may mean nothing to us if we do not imagine ourselves inhabiting moral totalities (in the way we might imagine inhabiting linguistic totalities).
I think my sketch ofMilton's use ofjustification is cognate with Wittgenstein's description o f the grammar o f shame. First, Wittgenstein describes an expression o f hate and derives its meaning as an interpretation o f the total scene:
"At that moment I hated him. " --What happened here? Didn't it consist in thoughts, feelings, and actions? And if I were to rehearse that moment to myself I should assume a particular expression, I think of certain happenings, breathe in a particular way, arouse certain feelings in myself. I might think up a conversation, a whole scene in which that hatred flared up. And I might play this scene through
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with feelings approximating to those of a real occasion. That I have actually
experienced something ofthe sort will naturally help me to do so. (PI? 642)
This is clear enough for my purposes. It is important to see that the sentence "At that moment I hated him" is a judgment or interpretation. It's meaning is, therefore, part of thatinterpretation(meaningisnotalwayslikethis). Therecognitionofthishatredandthe fact ofthis hatred can be interpreted further: "IfI now become ashamed ofthis incident, I am ashamed of the whole thing: of the words, of the poisonous tone, etc. " (PI? 643). Wittgensteinthenaskshowdoesthisshameattachtothishatred. WhatexactlyamI ashamed of? "I am not ashamed of what I did then, but of the intention which I had. " -- And didn't the intention lie also in what I did? What justifies the shame? The whole historyoftheincident. "(PI? 644;underlineadded). Whatisincludedinthis"whole history" changes and shifts according to how it is embedded in our lives when we remember this incident.
Our moral education might be learning how to describe the limits o f our "whole history" as a manifestation o f a set o f values.
Wittgenstein suggests that what we call our intentions are rather interpretations of what we remember o f our "thoughts, feelings, movements, and also connexions with earlier situations" (PI? 645). Learning the correct interpretation not o f our intentions alone but o f how we figure ourselves with intentions, with shames, with hatreds does not entailremakingourlanguage. Itentailsremakingourselveswithinourordinarylanguage figured within organizing limits (for Wittgenstein often normative limits). One might still expect a battle over what these limits are, for example, over what the limits of the ordinary are or over how we learn or use particular language games. This debate (one o f the
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debates inFinnegans Wake,or rather the pressure deforming language in the Wake, describesalanguagenotyetformedaroundaparticularhumanbeing. Ourreadingofthe Wake puts on these words as ours directed at the limits formed by nonsense, negation, materiality, causation, interpretation, sense, substance, and so on. Seeing the world as consisting o f these limits [and at times as nothing more than these limits] means thinking theologically).
The figure which Milton uses to describe how interpretation and meaning are embedded in each other, how we manifest ourselves in the interpretive histories we use to describe the totalities we inhabit, is animation. Milton animates books: "For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction o f that living intellect that bred them" (720). These books are not to be judged by men, who have invented "new limbos and new hells wherein they might include our bookswithinthenumberofthedamned"(725). Thejustificationofbooks,liketheir meaning, is a function of their use, for even bad books may allow "the judicious reader. . . to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate" (727). Such a use is a justification o f the books and the reader, but a justification different from the judgment about someone'sorsomething'snatureasgoodorbad. SuchjudgmentisreservedforGod. Books are animated through their potential use as manifest inhabitations (a "vial") of our moral stances. Is this a version o f a use by right without justification?
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Can we find ourselves within a community in which what counts as a justification becomes unclear? I f the Wake continually requires justification, is it the justification like that which James meditated upon for America?
"Oh, yes; we were awfully dear, for what we are and for what we do"-- it was proud, but it was rather rueful; with the odd appearance everywhere as of florid creations waiting, a little bewilderingly, for their justification, waiting for the next clause in the sequence, waiting in short for life, for time, for interest, for character, for identity itselfto come to them, quite as large spread tables or superfluous shops may wait for guests and customers" (American Scene, 90)
James diagnoses this demand for justification as a waiting for completion in which Americans are thingified as spread tables or superfluous shops, which are then animated by their waiting, by an intentionality directed toward this future completion. Justification, itselfj is enacted as "the next clause in the sequence," life, time, interest, character, and identity. This is a kind o f picture o f being-within. The analogic reduction o f justification to the continuation of the linguistic context within which meaning emerges (a model of James' style) is further analogized back into a psycho-philosophical description of a human being bordered by "life" and "identity". The terms connecting these limits o f soul and mind are well chosen. Life, both the principle of animation (something like energy here)
and the totality o f a life, is in the following "time" abstracted and specialized as the form ofthisdynamismandasthelimitonanyparticularlife. Thisdynamismandlimitisrefined in 'interest', an intentional stance expressing value (priorities) and possibility (a moving toward). Thecontentofthispotentialdynamismandvaluationonesuspectsconstitutes
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character,bothasapsychologicaltermandamoraljudgment. Thispsychologyis stabilized into metaphysics by Identity: I am. This T am' describes the formal limits o f a particular, and is, therefore, in relation to the generality of life stabilized as a mind. In this model justification requires and is constituted by a model of the relation between the limit described by the soul and that described by the mind.
Aestheticjustification means not ajustification ofany particular word, but that each word justifies the whole. Consequently, it is not that each sentence o f the Wake is a microcosm of the Wake, a holographic reflection as are the heterocosoms of romantic art or Schlegels romantic fragments. The appearance ofmimicry is a way ofjustifying the Wake by offering an interpretation of a particular moment, character, or set of words as an interpretation of the entire book (or let's say of an entire life). Projecting forward towards our death means within the logic ofthe Wake projecting ajustification toward that end, the dreamers, ours, or the books. These justifications are all limited and incomplete, but not because of a limit to our knowledge or understanding. The limitation is a function of
justification proceeding through interpretation. Ajustification is never simply an interpretation that simulates the text. W. Wimsatt and M. Beardsley's are wrong when they claim that "judging a poem is likejudging a pudding of a machine. One demands that it work. It is only because an artifact works that we infer the intention o f an artificer" (4). Thispictureassumesapoemworksandexistsasanartifact,asamechanism. Howdoesa poem work separate from its interpretation? What is the output of a poem that can be
judged. Forbothapuddingandamachinewecanclearlyarticulatethecriteriabywhich
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to judge if its performance is successful or not. No such articulation is possible for a poem.
A text like Firmegans Wake, consisting o f a continuous commentary on itself is nothing but enveloping facts and no text: "Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content o f any document to the sore neglect o f the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is hurtful to sound sense (and let it be added to the truest taste) a s " (FW109. 12-16). What follows from the ellipse is nonsense, so that one can determine in any sensible way what ignoring the enveloping facts would mean. What constitutes these facts is also not clear (nor is the literal or psychological content). A
justification of the Wake must include a version of the Wake but in this it is not the Wake, not only because each interpretation will not be able to include itself as an interpretation, butbecauseinterpretationalwayspointselsewhere. Thedetectivedoesnotsolvethe crime in the same way as the criminal commits it. The detective and the criminal might seemclose,andyetintheirdifferenceliestheentireworldof"envelopingfacts. " Wecan more easily see that the diagnoses o f the disease is different from the disease; but do we imagine a virus as a criminal? The historian writes history, and in this makes history, but not the same history he writes about:
The boxes, if I may break the subject gently, are worth about four pence pourbox but I am inventing a more patent process, foolproof and pryperfect (I should like to ask that Shedlock Homes person who is out for removing the roofs o f our criminal classics by what deductio ad domunum he hopes de tacto to detect anything unless he happens ofhimself, movibile tectu, to have a slade off) after
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which they can be reduced to a fragment oftheir true crust by even the youngest of Margees if she will take place to be seated and smile if I please. (FW165-66. 30-. 02)
The Sigla used by Joyce to describe Finnegans Wake was a box: ? . "These boxes," invented into inscrutability, contain his kiribis pouch filled with litterish fragments lurk dormant in the paunch ofthat halpbrother ofa herm, a pillarbox" (FW66. 29-. 31). A 'herm' is a Greek four-cornered pillar on which is placed a head, usually of Hermes.
Again the Wake. Trying to open the shedlock, a make a home a home, is Shedlock Homes whose reductio ad absurdum is also a deductio ad domunum, leading to the Lord. How can we touch {de iacto) god, enter into domum dei, unless we have a slate off our own roof (a chip of the old block; a part for whole)? If we remove a slate we can see inside, if not another's head, then into our own, if we discover ourselves (or not) in our children for example. Are these boxes, our minds, our world, our god, fragments like pieces of crust once they are "foolproof and pryperfect", or will the youngest o f Margees reduce these
boxes of ourselves and the world to fragments of the true cross, or the crust of the bread ofthe body ofChrist. Would this 'youngest ofMargees" have a slade offher roof, or is it that having taken a place in the world her smile if the text pleases (or more insidiously if the text or the author decrees) reduces these promises of sense and benediction to crusts?
These boxes, the targets of our interpretation that form new boxes to interpret, are equivalent to the grammatical soul Keats generated, except that these grammatical markers have no inside. Keats "soul-making" produced a becoming within a single grammaticalentity. ThereisnosuchstabilityintheWake,whereanybox,anysentence
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marks a becoming in relation to another box, another sentence. This means in effect that Finnegans Wake (and Philosophical Investigations) do not satisfy one of Keats' criteria for poetry: "They will explain themselves--as all poems should do without any comment"(2 January 1818: Letters, n, 21). They constitute new criteria.
1In his Disputed Questions on the Soul, Aquinas asks "Can the human soul be both a form and a real particular (hoc aliquid)T
2 Sir Edward Sullivan in his Introduction to The Book o f the Kells, cited in McHugh (1980).
3". . . speeching, yeh not speeching noh man liberty is, he drinks up words, scilicet, tomorrow till recover w ill not, all too many much illusiones throgh photoprismic velamina o f hueful panepiphanal world spectacunun o f Lord Joss, the o f which zoantholic furniture, from mineral through vegetal to animal, not appear to full up together M ien man than under but one photoreflection. . . " (FW611. 10-16).
4 Wittgenstein's second note about this on page 59 makes this clear:
Supposeitwereasked: Whendoyouknowhowtoplaychess? Allthetime? orjustwhileyouare makinga move? --Howqueerthatknowinghowtoplaychessshouldtakesuchashorttime,and a game so much longer!
The translation hides the conflation o f "to know" with "can" exploited in the German--"Wann kanst du Schachspielen? ". Wittgensteinremarksontheclosenessofthegrammarof"toknow"and"can"at150 (on page 59) in order to bring out the sense of "mastery' tying knowing and understanding to how we use language. Ifoneaskswhencanyouplaychess? IfIknowhow,allthetime. Whatconstitutesknowing here? being able to play the game. One might ask how many rules can I forget before no longer knowing howtoplay. Thatmightdependonmyopponent Ifmyunderstandingoftheruleswouldnotmakeit even possible for me to win a game then this might constitute a dividing line. If asked "when did you stop understanding that word? " I might not understand this as asking for a time but a criterion like "when I could no longer use it". This possibility for misunderstanding is highlighted in the question about chess. "When"knowinghowtoplaychessisacaseofatonement Atonementwouldbetheconditionwhenone could not ask of oneselfor look with some stupefaction at someone who asks "do you know how to play the whole of chess during each move? " This is notjust a knowing how opposed to a knowing that The playingofchesstakestime--itisconstitutedbyaseriesofmoves. Asking"when? "asksforatimeseries andforanarticulationofthecriteriaallowingforplayingchess: forpossibility. Thispossibilityisnot present in our knowing but in our form of life, in the knowing how, training, social practice, having an opponent or a board. This temporal dimension is brought out by Wittgenstein's "How queer that knowinghowtoplaychessshouldtakesuchashorttime,andagamesomuchlonger! ". Whatconstitutes knowing how can be found as if holographically in every moment of playing chess, if one does indeed know how to play. This present in every moment is the "short time". This knowing how 'now' is not experienced as such, and thus it seems not to be in time at all, rather this taking "such a short time" seems a joke for it doesn't take any time at all. Is this knowing how then a transcendent realm? Each move is not only a fragment of the entire game, but a fragment enacted and implying the possibilities of move and counter-move that constitute the finite system of chess.
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n
THE SEMANTICS OF IDENnTY AND THINGS
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7
The Semantics of Identity and Mind
Both Wittgenstein and Joyce describe thinking toward the limit between the animate and inanimate and sense and nonsense through our involvement within the grammarofourlanguagegames. FinnegansWakeandPhilosophicalInvestigations describe a dynamic grammar that constructs a non-psychological T as a shifting marker throughwhichweinvestourselvesintheselanguagegames. Howweinvestourselvesin these language games and in the world as our world is one way o f understanding how language can animate the world, resuscitate a soul, or construct a mind. I might ask these questions in a number o f moods, for any number o f reasons, most o f which begin in a sense that the world is dead or inanimate, the soul moribund, and the mind unmade or something to make. Beginning here is, however, misleading. Pursuing animation, resuscitation, and construction asks, at some fundamental level, how we inhabit the forms of our experience as if we ourselves are inanimate. In asking this we are led to the edge of nonsense, in search o f manuals describing either how to animate ourselves or how to animate things.
T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Heidegger's "Das Ding" want to re-animate the world. Thustheyarestudiesinwhatitmeanstobeanimateandinwhatconstitutesa world. WhenIbegananalyzingEliot'sandHeidegger'smethodsofanimation,Iimagined they would articulate inverse ways of conceptualizing being as identities or things within, respectively, subjunctive and semantic modes. What I understood as Eliots's subjunctive
Notes for this chapter begin on page 247
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aesthetics, working out a semantics o f identity, I thought would provide a target for Joyce's figuration o f what I have called the distance between mind and soul. Similarly, Heidegger's attempt to translate the real into the meaningful, I thought, would describe an ontological grammar akin to Wittgenstein's enactment of time in Philosophical
Investigations, but in a form that fails to provide a way for human beings to invest themselves within this grammar (and thus it fails as a description of our involvement in the world and in language). This limited investigation ofboth Eliot and Heidegger, however, was soon eclipsed by the possibilities for understanding how the rejection o f substance as a description o f what is real can lead to the hypostatization o f identity as a void (in The Waste Land) or as a grammatical principle from which things and meaning enfold along fragments o f time (in "Das Ding"). After I had breached the walls o f their texts, the work of both Eliot and Heidegger seemed two pear trees whose fruit I could not stop picking.
A direct comparison between Eliot and Heidegger and Joyce and Wittgenstein is no longer manageable within the confines ofthis dissertation. My analysis ofEliot and Heidegger, however, is still meant to demonstrate what is at stake in describing the limits of the mind and soul within and against the conceptual and grammatical limits Joyce and Wittgenstein expose. Butwhoiscirclingwhomhasbecomeunclear. Thefollowingchaptershouldbe
read as a preface to both what is at stake in the animation of things and identities attempted in Eliot and Heidegger, and as a prologemenon to the grammatical descriptions o f time and being I will examine in Joyce and Wittgenstein.
In his latter work, Heidegger reconstitutes the ontological claims the world makes on us as semantic functions, as following a conceptual pattern o f meaningful relations. In
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otherwords,heattemptstoreconstitutewhatsomethingisaswhatitmeans. These ontological claims and semantic possibilities determine Being, not simply as existence, but as the functional condensation o f all meanings o f the verb (to be' into those aspects o f our experience we recognize as things, ourselves, and the world. "Das Ding" enacts the question 'What is the qualitative aspect ofthings? from within a language that can enact
the answer as our re-education; the ontology ofthings in their participation or inhabitation ofBeing can look like a psychology ofthings. Heidegger begins his essay with the question "What is a thing? " He takes this question to be asking something like 'How do things exist? ' or 'What exists for us? '. His answer to these question, however, proceeds tlirough asking 'what does "existence" mean? ', questioning the verb o f 'to be' into its ontological and functional force. We inhabit this force through a redemptive semantics which transforms the concepts o f identity and predication determining existence, 'being' and 'is', from a world both containing and against us, into the categorical semantic ambiguity of the word 'weilen' (dwelling, staying, abiding, lingering) under the pressure of
this re-education.
The Waste Land exposes as its own animating principle of order or meaning
something like the following conditional: If we are dying, our living is counterfactual. The counterfactual or the subjunctive is both what is given as possible, determined within and by language and history and society, and what can be made or created beyond. The relation between quality and quantity is articulated in The Waste Land through an exploration o f how to make the subjunctive real, ontological.
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Coleridge, commenting on the mental schema articulated in Wordsworth's Prelude, re-describes the reciprocal relation between the senses and the world that constructs the mind. Following what he believes was "partly suggested by m e . . . He [Wordsworth] was to treat man as man--a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses" (188). 1 What has changed between Coleridge's Wordworth and Eliot when he writes in "Gerontion"? :
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch: How should I use them for your closer contact?
Such poetry is not simply an expression o f personality. Age and terror and revulsion and the failure of our knowing and knowledge, the realization that not only can the mind and the world be confused with each other, but that a failure of courage or of sense or of meaning can tempt us to deny our mind. What kind o f questions are these? : "Do I dare disturb the universe? "2or "After such knowledge, what forgiveness? " or "I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use them for your closer contact? "3 or "Shall I set my lands in order? " or '"What! areyou here? "'. 4 We can say at least that questions about the limits of knowledge can be understood as questions about redemption (ofour knowing, ofour language(s), ofourselves). The possibility ofredemption in The Waste Land underwrites a theory of animation (a set of embedded assumptions) that
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displaces the site of our mind or soul (the between in Finnegans Wake) into the subjunctive. How does one animate possibility? This sounds like a nonsense question. I think, however, that one should understand it to mean that Eliot's use o f possibility highlights the failure o f knowledge, such that the demand to reanimate mind and world is not a rejection o f this failure (skepticism), as in pantheism, but a demand to reanimate
mind and world from within or as this uncertainty.
"What The Thunder Said" in The Waste Land does not promise the sound of
thunder, but the meaning o f a particular burst o f thunder-talk. Joyce gives the thunder a voice as well, but Wakean thunder is not yet caught up into fragmented allegories: it structures the world o f "broken heaventalk" (261. 28) as a semantic/ syntactic/ phonetic limit between the body o f the dreamer, whose turning in the night is signaled by these thunderous peals, and the mind or language he finds himselfbeing or in, which we call the book Finnegans Wake:
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarr hounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthumuk!