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The T in the nature ofPhilosophicalInvestigations
Models of time are invariably models of animation.
The T in the nature ofPhilosophicalInvestigations
Models of time are invariably models of animation.
Brett Bourbon - 1996 - Constructing a Replacement for the Soul
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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?
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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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? a tennis ball--but would this rule have to include a description ofwhen it is allowed to throw a tennis ball and not hit it with a racket? Even if invented these rules do not determine the rules that make tennis a game--but are really rules for a particular player in relation to his coach. The game will not be forfeit ifthe player breaks these rules of serving (even if he loses the point). One could also describe the laws of physics (which are themselves descriptions) as rules determining what kind of games can be played. Within this picture the laws of physics function as ontological limits (along with our
biology, the construction of the court, the economics that makes such courts and such games [or leisure] possible, and so on). We can not ask, sensibly, however, how the relation between physics and human biology makes tennis possible as a human activity which we call 'a game. ' We can ask what makes the activities we perform in playing tennis possible, but the concept o f 'game' is not meaningful as an expression o f physics or biology. Learning a word is always learning a language, or rather one must already function within language games in order to understand what counts as a word let alone whatitmeans. Thismeansthatonealwaysfindsoneselfwithinlanguagebecauseoneis always within a human form oflife.
In dictation to Alice Ambrose, Wittgenstein claims that "In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say 'Let's get a rough idea', for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads. So I suggest repetition as a means of surveying the connections. " Investigations consists of following and escaping these roads (or paths) in a search for clarity:
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? The same or almost the same points were always being approached afresh from different directions, and new sketches made. Very many ofthese were badly drawn or uncharacteristic, marked by all the defects of a weak draughtsman. And when they were rejected a number oftolerable ones were left, which now had to be arranged and sometimes cut down, so that ifyou looked at them you could get a picture o f the landscape. Thus this book is really only an album, (ix)
The "result" of his Investigations of family resemblance shows that our uses of a word (or words), the language games in which they function, describe "a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similaritiesindetail"(PI? 66). Thislandscapeofcriss-crossingpathsleadstoconfusion: "Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and you no longer know your way about"(PI? 203). I f these paths are language games, then how 'consciousness' means (or appears) in the sentence "I was conscious of my fault" is not the same as in "The patient regainedconsciousnessatthreea. m. " Istheproblemofconsciousnessalwaysaddressed by the word "consciousness"?
The degree o f vagueness and clarity in our use o f words is not stable. This instability undermines the picture o f learning language as learning essences or names. Such learning takes place already within language: "nothing has so far been done, when a thinghasbeennamed. Ithasnotevengotanameexceptinthelanguagegame. Thisis what Frege meant too, when he said that a word had meaning only as part of a sentence" (PI? 49). Wittgenstein analogizes philosophy's attempt to stabilize meaning as the demand
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? tosketchasharplydefinedpicture"corresponding"toablurredone. . . ifthe colours in the original merge without a hint o f any outline won't it become a hopeless task to draw a sharp picture corresponding to the blurred one? Won't you then have to say: "Here I might just as well draw a circle or heart as a rectangle, for all the colours merge. " Anything--and nothing--is right. --And this is the position you are in ifyou look for definitions corresponding to our concepts of aesthetics or ethics. (PI? 77)
Wittgenstein's analogy describes an incommensurability between a demand o f clarity associated with a method of drawing and the object to be represented. The fact that color and shape are related as visual properties o f objects (forms which our eye is built to recognize or construct) suggests that such an incommensurability should be resolvable. The contradiction, however, is a grammatical one.
Wittgenstein extends this grammatical incommensurability to aesthetics and ethics. He claims that definitions do not capture our aesthetic and ethical concepts. While this is unsurprising for words it might seem surprising for art and morals. Words seem both more amenable to definition (one can give a list o f common usages), but because one understands that one can use language often without being able to give definitions of the words one uses (a definition of'the', for example), the limits ofdefinition are obvious. Moral and aesthetic definitions are seldom understood as descriptions (as is a definition of a word), but more often than not as prescriptions (moral maxims or proverbs). This is confusing. Moral and aesthetic definitions are interpretations of our practices within particular communities (whether we think that this implies a relativism or not one should
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? still be able to recognize that morality and art arejudgments of actions or of particular cases). The meaning ofthese interpretations orjudgments cannot be encapsulated in a definition ofthe objects ofjudgment, but onlyinthe process ofmaking thejudgment. We cannot say what is good, but only how it is good. Would the criteria for particular
judgments constitute a definition? Sometimes colored squares form lines o f demarcation between them, and sometimes they do not. There are always questions about application. Unlike in the Tractates, in Philosophical Investigations this incommensurability is
not a dividing line between language and silence. In some cases our confusion is a functionofmisappliedcriteria. Wittgensteinaskshimself(oranyone)tocompare knowing and saying in the following cases:
how many feet high Mont Blanc is-- how the word "game" is used-- how a clarinet sounds.
One's initial comparison might conclude that one cannot say what a clarinet sounds like, but one can both know and say how high Mont Blanc is. Wittgenstein, however, says that "if you are surprised that one can know something and not be able to say it, you are perhaps thinking of a case like the first. Certainly not of one like the third"(78). Of course we cannot say how a clarinet sounds. Our failure is surprising if we imagine that knowing this sound is like knowing the height o f a mountain.
Incommensurability of one kind arises ifwe fail to recognize the limits of our mediaofdescriptionandrepresentation. Theselimitationsaretiedtotheformsofour
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? sensoryexperience. Languageseemstoofferthepossibilityofsynesthasia,andsuch synesthasia seems to describe who we are as the nexus ofour sensory inputs.
Describe the aroma of coffee. --Why can't it be done? Do we lack the words? And for what are words lacking? --But whence comes the idea that such a description must after all be possible? Have you ever felt the lack o f such a description?
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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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? a tennis ball--but would this rule have to include a description ofwhen it is allowed to throw a tennis ball and not hit it with a racket? Even if invented these rules do not determine the rules that make tennis a game--but are really rules for a particular player in relation to his coach. The game will not be forfeit ifthe player breaks these rules of serving (even if he loses the point). One could also describe the laws of physics (which are themselves descriptions) as rules determining what kind of games can be played. Within this picture the laws of physics function as ontological limits (along with our
biology, the construction of the court, the economics that makes such courts and such games [or leisure] possible, and so on). We can not ask, sensibly, however, how the relation between physics and human biology makes tennis possible as a human activity which we call 'a game. ' We can ask what makes the activities we perform in playing tennis possible, but the concept o f 'game' is not meaningful as an expression o f physics or biology. Learning a word is always learning a language, or rather one must already function within language games in order to understand what counts as a word let alone whatitmeans. Thismeansthatonealwaysfindsoneselfwithinlanguagebecauseoneis always within a human form oflife.
In dictation to Alice Ambrose, Wittgenstein claims that "In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say 'Let's get a rough idea', for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads. So I suggest repetition as a means of surveying the connections. " Investigations consists of following and escaping these roads (or paths) in a search for clarity:
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? The same or almost the same points were always being approached afresh from different directions, and new sketches made. Very many ofthese were badly drawn or uncharacteristic, marked by all the defects of a weak draughtsman. And when they were rejected a number oftolerable ones were left, which now had to be arranged and sometimes cut down, so that ifyou looked at them you could get a picture o f the landscape. Thus this book is really only an album, (ix)
The "result" of his Investigations of family resemblance shows that our uses of a word (or words), the language games in which they function, describe "a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similaritiesindetail"(PI? 66). Thislandscapeofcriss-crossingpathsleadstoconfusion: "Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and you no longer know your way about"(PI? 203). I f these paths are language games, then how 'consciousness' means (or appears) in the sentence "I was conscious of my fault" is not the same as in "The patient regainedconsciousnessatthreea. m. " Istheproblemofconsciousnessalwaysaddressed by the word "consciousness"?
The degree o f vagueness and clarity in our use o f words is not stable. This instability undermines the picture o f learning language as learning essences or names. Such learning takes place already within language: "nothing has so far been done, when a thinghasbeennamed. Ithasnotevengotanameexceptinthelanguagegame. Thisis what Frege meant too, when he said that a word had meaning only as part of a sentence" (PI? 49). Wittgenstein analogizes philosophy's attempt to stabilize meaning as the demand
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? tosketchasharplydefinedpicture"corresponding"toablurredone. . . ifthe colours in the original merge without a hint o f any outline won't it become a hopeless task to draw a sharp picture corresponding to the blurred one? Won't you then have to say: "Here I might just as well draw a circle or heart as a rectangle, for all the colours merge. " Anything--and nothing--is right. --And this is the position you are in ifyou look for definitions corresponding to our concepts of aesthetics or ethics. (PI? 77)
Wittgenstein's analogy describes an incommensurability between a demand o f clarity associated with a method of drawing and the object to be represented. The fact that color and shape are related as visual properties o f objects (forms which our eye is built to recognize or construct) suggests that such an incommensurability should be resolvable. The contradiction, however, is a grammatical one.
Wittgenstein extends this grammatical incommensurability to aesthetics and ethics. He claims that definitions do not capture our aesthetic and ethical concepts. While this is unsurprising for words it might seem surprising for art and morals. Words seem both more amenable to definition (one can give a list o f common usages), but because one understands that one can use language often without being able to give definitions of the words one uses (a definition of'the', for example), the limits ofdefinition are obvious. Moral and aesthetic definitions are seldom understood as descriptions (as is a definition of a word), but more often than not as prescriptions (moral maxims or proverbs). This is confusing. Moral and aesthetic definitions are interpretations of our practices within particular communities (whether we think that this implies a relativism or not one should
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? still be able to recognize that morality and art arejudgments of actions or of particular cases). The meaning ofthese interpretations orjudgments cannot be encapsulated in a definition ofthe objects ofjudgment, but onlyinthe process ofmaking thejudgment. We cannot say what is good, but only how it is good. Would the criteria for particular
judgments constitute a definition? Sometimes colored squares form lines o f demarcation between them, and sometimes they do not. There are always questions about application. Unlike in the Tractates, in Philosophical Investigations this incommensurability is
not a dividing line between language and silence. In some cases our confusion is a functionofmisappliedcriteria. Wittgensteinaskshimself(oranyone)tocompare knowing and saying in the following cases:
how many feet high Mont Blanc is-- how the word "game" is used-- how a clarinet sounds.
One's initial comparison might conclude that one cannot say what a clarinet sounds like, but one can both know and say how high Mont Blanc is. Wittgenstein, however, says that "if you are surprised that one can know something and not be able to say it, you are perhaps thinking of a case like the first. Certainly not of one like the third"(78). Of course we cannot say how a clarinet sounds. Our failure is surprising if we imagine that knowing this sound is like knowing the height o f a mountain.
Incommensurability of one kind arises ifwe fail to recognize the limits of our mediaofdescriptionandrepresentation. Theselimitationsaretiedtotheformsofour
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? sensoryexperience. Languageseemstoofferthepossibilityofsynesthasia,andsuch synesthasia seems to describe who we are as the nexus ofour sensory inputs.
Describe the aroma of coffee. --Why can't it be done? Do we lack the words? And for what are words lacking? --But whence comes the idea that such a description must after all be possible? Have you ever felt the lack o f such a description?
