Wittgenstein and Performance (Performance Philosophy) 1538175096, 9781538175095

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Wittgenstein and Performance

Performance Philosophy Series Editors:

Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, DAS Graduate School, Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam University of the Arts. Will Daddario, Independent Researcher, Asheville, NC, USA. Alice Lagaay, Professor of Performative Studies and Media Theory, Design Department, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany. The Performance Philosophy book series comprises monographs and essay collections addressing the relationship between performance and philosophy within a broad range of philosophical traditions and performance practices operating across multiple art forms and everyday life. The series addresses the philosophy of performance as well as performanceas-philosophy and philosophy-as-performance. The series supports diversely situated authors and considers ideas and practices coming from various geographical and cultural contexts, particularly in solidarity with wider projects to address the Eurocentrism of philosophy and the decolonization of knowledgepractices more generally.

Titles in the Series Rancière and Performance, edited by Colette Conroy and Nic Fryer Experiments in Listening, by Rajni Shah Art Disarming Philosophy: Non-philosophy and Aesthetics, edited by Steven Shakespeare, Niamh Malone and Gary Anderson Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought, by Paul Magee Ethics of Alterity: Aisthetics of Existence, by Jörg Sternagel, translated by John R. J. Eyck Wittgenstein and Performance, edited by Mischa Twitchin

Wittgenstein and Performance Edited by Mischa Twitchin

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 9781538175095 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 9781538175101 (ebook) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Wittgenstein and Performance: Introduction Mischa Twitchin 1 Familiarity in Gesture: An Encounter between Dance and Wittgenstein’s Thought Né Barros 2 Pataquerulous Wittgenstein (and the Animaladies of Language) Charles Bernstein

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3 ‘The Possibility of Fact’: Sketching an Origin for the Performative 27 Simon Bowes

VERBAL FOG 45 Miles Champion

4 The More One Looks . . . Will Daddario and Alice Lagaay

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5 The Stage of Thoughts: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Josef Nadj Veronika Darida

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6 Encountering Wittgenstein Françoise Davoine

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7 ‘I’ll Teach You Differences’: Wittgenstein against Philosophical Pseudo-Performance Peter S. Dillard 8 Conversation between Signe Gjessing, Sam Kinchin-Smith, Ray Monk, and Max Richter v

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Contents

9 Always One Sentence on Every Page Allowed My Mind to Flower 117 Kenneth Goldsmith 10 The Fibres, the Fly Bottle, and the Rough Ground: Wittgenstein’s Figuration of Politics Derek Gottlieb

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11 Ethics Is Aesthetics Anthony Howell

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12 Let the Use of the Words Teach You Their Meaning Sue MacLaine and Jonthan Burrows in dialogue

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13 Reading Jean Bazin with Wittgenstein: Playing Chess or Making Custard? Bernard Müller 14 The Odd Couple: Duchamp and Wittgenstein Marjorie Perloff

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IN MEMORIAM L. WITTGENSTEIN 189 Tom Raworth

15 On Performing Wittgenstein Bo Tarenskeen 16 Wittgenstein’s Use of the Tableau Vivant: Proposition and Group Performance The Aesthetics Group: Jeanette Doyle, Cathy O’Carroll, Mick O’Hara, and Connell Vaughan 17 Philosophical Problems and Stochastic Parrots: Between Aphorism and Algorithm Mischa Twitchin 18 Wittgenstein Incorporated Peter Verburgt in conversation with Lukas M. Verburgt

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Index 257 About the Contributors

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Wittgenstein and Performance Introduction Mischa Twitchin

The Performance Philosophy series that associates the work of a major philosopher and the field of ‘performance’ is by now well established, with a growing library of illustrious pairings. While this ostensibly brings together research oriented around a specific set of references and a generic topic of interest, the devil remains, of course, in the easily overlooked detail of the ‘and’ in the different titles of this series. What kinds of connection are supposed or, perhaps, invented in each instance? How and why might either the particular philosopher’s work or the proposed theories and practices of performance inform each other? Do the chapters address a body of work that is already developed or do they provide new associations in the research potential of that ‘and’? Such questions are highlighted most explicitly, perhaps, in the chapters here that address the ‘languages’ of choreographic and theatre practices by both artists and academics – Sue MacLaine and Jonathan Burrows, Veronika Darida, Né Barros, Peter and Lukas Verburgt, and Bo Tarenskeen (who reflects on his ongoing, eleven-part ‘Wittgenstein’ performance project that will include a play for children and ‘a performance about language without words’). Rather than philosophical commentaries on Wittgenstein, these chapters offer engagements with what the philosophical might mean in a variety of practices (poetry, dance, therapeutics, etc.), attesting to the implications of Wittgenstein’s writings in each case. Within this Performance Philosophy series, the present book also offers the suggestion of a new line of enquiry, in that previous volumes – perhaps inevitably – have featured philosophers identified with the so-called Continental traditions of phenomenology, the legacies of Marx, philosophical aesthetics, Critical Theory, and so on. Conspicuous by their absence are representatives of the so-called Analytic tradition in the history of philosophy. (A more provocative pairing, perhaps, would be with W. v. O. Quine, or Rudolph Carnap, 1

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and performance.) This disciplinary distinction is itself ripe for investigation, after all, not least as it is reproduced in the activities of Performance Philosophy, where it is nonetheless specifically put into question. The divide already includes, as it were, ‘anomalies’ – a whole domain of analytical Nietzsche studies, for instance; but in general it continues to provide professional identity within institutional politics, not only in polemics but in job descriptions and publication profiles. Wittgenstein, however, is among the few philosophers whose work crosses this institutional divide – albeit perhaps less visibly than J. L. Austin, highlighted here in the chapter by Simon Bowes. While Austin’s concept of ‘performatives’ in the analysis of language has become a key point of reference that has changed research questions across the humanities (not only in philosophy but even in forms of activism), the ‘influence’ of Wittgenstein’s work appears more muted. While his writings have made enormous contributions within, for example, feminism and anthropology (indeed, there are now traditions of Wittgenstein scholarship in both fields), the broader impact of these writings in and for questions of performance is arguably less familiar – with the exception of literary studies or poetics. This is despite the fact that the figure of Wittgenstein himself has become ever more auratic in the arts, as a subject of film (by Derek Jarman), opera (by Balduin Sulzer), literature, theatre, and visual and conceptual art. With respect to the last of these it is a particular pleasure to present here the contributions by Marjorie Perloff, reflecting on Wittgenstein ‘and’ Duchamp, and pages from Kenneth Goldsmith’s ‘annotated Tractatus’ project. Perhaps one way to reconsider the Wittgenstein-performance relation is to address the generic concept of performance in terms of the philosopher’s approach to the analysis of ‘forms of life’ distinct from an articulation of concepts – exploring how the term performance is used in different contexts (including in varieties of performance studies) rather than aspiring to render applicable a concept that it is supposed to name. Indeed, such an approach is addressed specifically in the chapter by Bernard Müller here. Fundamental to this mode of enquiry is the question of translation – not only as concerns the hegemonic Anglophone culture of different fields of cultural studies, touched on in the chapter here by Charles Bernstein, but also between different fields of research, as in Françoise Davoine’s reflections on thinking with Wittgenstein about the social relations informing ideas of the psychotherapeutic. There are many examples of Wittgenstein wrestling with the idea of a ‘book’ and any ‘introduction’ to it – as when he cautions that: ‘The danger in a long foreword is that the spirit of a book has to be evident in the book itself and cannot be described’ (1984, 7e). Manifestly, it is not the intention of this brief introduction to offer summaries of the chapters that follow, as if to assimilate into some sort of synopsis the ways in which they might ‘teach

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you differences’. This citation from King Lear, which Wittgenstein once proposed as a motto for the Philosophical Investigations (Drury 2019, 135), specifically orients the chapter by Peter S. Dillard, for instance. Suffice it to say that the range of practices addressed by the Wittgenstein in each of these ­chapters – as, further, with questions of ethics-as-aesthetics by Anthony Howell, political thought by Derek Gottlieb, art-based research by the Aesthetics Group in Dublin, experimental theatre pedagogy by Will Daddario and Alice Lagaay, and ChatGPT by Mischa Twitchin – evidence the creative potential of the ‘and’ in the series title; while the inter-relations between poetry, music, and biography are also explored in the conversation – hosted at the London Review of Books by Sam Kinchin-Smith – between Signe Gjessing, Max Richter, and Ray Monk. In addition, this volume includes two poems – one each by Miles Champion and the late Tom Raworth. In the opening of part II of the Brown Book, Wittgenstein asks: ‘Do we have a feeling of familiarity whenever we look at familiar objects? Or do we have it usually? When actually do we have it? It helps to ask: What do we contrast the feeling of familiarity with? One thing we contrast it with is surprise’ (Wittgenstein 1980 [1958], 127). This is, hopefully, a quality that readers will encounter in the contrasting chapters gathered here, and it is echoed in an anecdote that provides the motto of this volume itself – ‘You’d be surprised.’ The published motto to the Philosophical Investigations is from Nestroy’s play, The Protégé, but according to a recollection from Maurice Drury: ‘Wittgenstein once said to me, laughingly, that he thought of taking for the motto of his second book the sentence “You’d be surprised” – a frequent remark of his’ (Drury 2019, 204). Curiously, while Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker (1980, 16–18) refer, in their commentary on the Investigations’ motto, to alternatives proposed by Wittgenstein (from Herz and Goethe, among others), and even include Drury’s memory of the Lear suggestion, they omit this ‘low brow’ possibility – which could be a reference to either a 1940 detective novel (by Peter Cheyney) or an Irving Berlin song. Originally written in 1919, the song has been much recorded since, including in the 1946 Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire film Blue Skies. (It was also memorably recorded by Marilyn Monroe in 1954.) But perhaps this motto reference is itself surprising – as ‘surprise’ is not a term that features in any concordance or analytical commentary to the Investigations that I have (yet) come across. The relation between Wittgenstein and crime fiction, musicals and popular film – according to Norman Malcolm ‘he was fond of the film stars Carmen Miranda and Betty Hutton’ (Malcolm 1984, 27) – is not addressed specifically in any of the following chapters; but this motto informs the volume as a whole, with each chapter offering a potentially surprising refraction of the titular ‘and’. Between Wittgenstein’s proposals that ‘the world is all that is the case’, opening the Tractatus (1981

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[1922], 5), and that ‘words are also deeds’, as a motif in the Investigations (PI, 546), perhaps the most intriguing (if not so surprising) aspect of the collection is the reappearance of common traces – indeed, of literal citational threads – that attest to the Wittgensteinian presence in the cultural unconscious, which the title’s ‘and’ symptomatizes. Another way of reading these two proposals would be in terms of logic and ethics, thought and aesthetics, as these set the scene for the evocative aphorism that ‘in art it is hard to say anything as good as: saying nothing’ (1984, 23e). Finally, I am profoundly grateful to all the contributors for making this collection possible, as well as to the Performance Philosophy series editors for accepting it as a project in the first place. The interest of any such publication will be found in the ways in which it is used by readers, exploring what otherwise remains potential in it – hopefully, in ways that would be surprising to the contributors themselves. REFERENCES Baker, Gordon and Hacker, Peter. 1980. Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Drury, Maurice O’Connor. 2019. The Selected Writings. Edited by John Haynes. London: Bloomsbury. Malcolm, Norman. 1984. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1981 [1922]. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. David Pears and Brian McGuiness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1980 [1958]. The Blue and Brown Books. Edited by Rush Rhees. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1984. Culture and Value. Trans. Peter Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009 [1953]. Philosophical Investigations and Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment, 4th edn. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Chapter 1

Familiarity in Gesture An Encounter between Dance and Wittgenstein’s Thought Né Barros

Throughout its history as an art form, dance has evolved to redirect us to an ever more plural and complex notion of the body in the sense that, instead of isolating and instrumentalizing it, it has created spaces of freedom for a body that is always ready to be reborn – to be reinvented. The evolutionary line of dance leads us to the singularities of a given practice, multiplying poietic approaches. More than ever, instead of a question of schools of movement, techniques, universal languages, we need to question the significance of the work of art. Today, we need to question the circumstances and rules of particular practices and the role of knowledge transmission within them. It is not anymore a matter of simply acquiring a set of rules and definitions of general practice, but of understanding the work of art in its particular social and political context. It is through this perspective that I am interested in discussing some notions of Wittgenstein’s thought, since it emphasizes the importance of social interaction and participation in shaping our understanding and use of language and other social practices. My interest is in the idea of ‘family resemblances’ particularly, and in how this notion engages the modus operandi of choreographic work. Not so much as passive recognition of a set of characteristics that allow us to locate a work artistically, but as an active instrument of contemporary choreographic creation. According to Wittgenstein, language is learned through immersion and participation rather than through explicit instruction or transmission of ­knowledge. This idea of language as a social practice that is learned through use and interpretation applies more broadly to other domains beyond language. In his later philosophy, Wittgenstein emphasized the role of social practices and customs in shaping our concepts and ways of life. These practices are not static or fixed, 5

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but rather are constantly evolving and changing as they are used and interpreted by individuals and communities. In this view, transmission of knowledge is not a one-way process, but rather a dynamic and interactive process of participation and interpretation within a community of practitioners. In fact, since the last century, relevant proposals concerning dance practice are grounded on the active participation of interaction with the public, changing the idea of the predefined work into that of an event, of something in process. Hence it is important to demystify the work of art which is not closed in a kind of ‘private language’, but, on the contrary, should be understood in its condition of publicly observable phenomena as a manifestation. The important contribution of the externalist conception of signification in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is, then, a counterargument to any possibility of a ‘private language’. According to Wittgenstein, language is not a matter of inner sensation or private mental states, but rather a social practice that is grounded in our shared experiences of the world. It is not my intention here to discuss the controversy surrounding the concept of private language as such, as I am mainly interested in aspects that allow us to operate choreographic concepts and materials which need, from the outset, to be freed from inaccessible places such as individual experience. Then, by concentrating on public practices, on the following of rules, on language as a game, through family resemblances, the notion of a private language is dismantled, leaving manifestation; or, in our case, the performance or the figural discourse as the intelligible that we can access. Contemporary dance guides us to the singularity of the individual moving body, even as access to the body cannot be mystified in terms of an unattainable interiority. Through this external access, what circulates through the ‘surface’ should be understood as a result of a certain corporeal practice. By performing, the body manifests itself gesturally and thereby historically. Family resemblances are, then, projected as images derived from movements (motivated or not) and through them we can remap sensations, intentions, or messages. These Wittgensteinian notions inform my own choreographic practice. In a game of both distance and of what brings us closer through physical and observational contact, transmission also becomes a game of language, showing an impact on the level of political or ideological forms, types of cultural practices, and the ethical limits of embodied identity. Transmission finds its significance through practices, surfaces, physiognomies, which is why it might be the most appropriate term for what concerns art since, to some extent, it overcomes communication. But Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance, in particular, informs this way of conceiving movement’s transmissibility. While breaking with essentialist categories, the polysemic/ poly-physiognomic openness conveyed by the notion of family resemblance

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shifts its epistemological value less into testimony than into processes of transmission. In other words, testimony is meant to launch the game, hence the persistence of a certain value; yet, when dealing with the transmission of a quasi-language (as with choreography), testimony is not the main source of knowledge. I argue here that all knowledge in dance, when considered through transmission, must be largely rethought in terms of transmission in the original process of making. The testimony is not, then, a standardized object but a process of making gestures in itself. In Wittgenstein’s words, we cannot accept a testimony from another person because it is not a testimony. ‘(I cannot accept the other person’s testimony, because it is not testimony. It only tells me what he is inclined to say.)’ (PI, 594). What is accessed is the process of recognition by family resemblances, which could also deal with a less concise notion of what a game is. A vague idea, a vague concept, a vague image could be sufficient or appropriate for the understanding of dance in general and particularly. Wittgenstein says: ‘One can say that the concept of a game is a concept with blurred edges. – “But is a blurred concept a concept at all?” – Is a photograph that is not sharp a picture of a person at all? Is it even always an advantage to replace a picture that is not sharp by one that is? Isn’t one that isn’t sharp often just what we need?’ (PI, 71). Language is not capable of providing precision, nor is the dancing body that finds its existence through ephemeral gesture, on both its ballast and memory. Within the ephemeral condition of dance, transmissibility is a subject of constant debate and scrutiny. Though image technologies have failed to provide a proper answer to it, several approaches – re-imagining, reenactment, and recreation – have been problematized so as to situate the intersection of processes of transmission, translation, and transformation. While all of these have generated critical contributions to the evolution of dance, contemporary thinking is pervaded by a notion of dematerialization, by plural forms, or by an understanding of the non-necessity of a documentary archive, which – regardless of the strategies employed in the transmission processes – leads us to question the very purpose of transmission. Should not dance experience ephemerality within a radical condition of its existence? Are memory and archive the main arcs of temporal connection that add contextual knowledge and potentially activate renewed feelings through transmission? Transmitting what? For Wittgenstein, the idea of a clear and definite essence that characterizes all instances of a particular category is misguided. Instead, we should think in terms of family resemblances when it comes to categories that lack a clear and definite essence. Just like the category of ‘language’ or ‘games’, dance does not have a clear and defining characteristic that encompasses all instances of it. Different forms share a family of related characteristics that

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overlap and intersect in different ways, creating a network of similarities and differences. The multiplicity of approaches in contemporary artistic creation is coupled with a resistance to any sort of categorization, and thus devaluing the transmission of value. Today, the ethical dimension is linked to performance practice. If there is a patrimonial value to be considered, that should be regarded as both plural and dynamic, it ought to be observed from a distance and each time approached in a renewed way. The observational must be added to an open concept of testimony, no longer tied to the understanding of one’s inner life, but more like a form of documentary cinema, which follows the subject more than stages or produces it. It is within this territory that a reformulated transmission based on family resemblances will prove to be operative and suggestive. Wittgenstein’s notions of game and family resemblances, developed in the Philosophical Investigations, inform us as to the use, or the practice, of the observational and how it can rehabilitate language as a potential source of knowledge, while, at the same time, freeing language from a more logical dimension. ‘There are countless kinds [of sentences]; countless different kinds of use of all the things we call “signs”, “words”, “sentences”. And this diversity is not something fixed, given once and for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (. . .) The word language-game is used here to emphasize the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity or of a form of life’ (PI, 23). As a consequence of this, the concept of language could be extended to other fields – such as drama, singing, and dance – intended as a gestural discourse (with repetition, regularity, form, ideology). When broadened to art, the literal and metaphorical dimensions of Wittgenstein’s family resemblance are prone to blurring. In biology, a family is a taxonomic category used to group related, similar individuals together – not as distant as other individuals that belong to the same realm, not as close as those belonging to the same species. The elements that make up a family are determined after analysis of the genomic or morphological features that make living beings similar. In addition to mapping out relationships of proximity between individuals and with a common ancestor, this particular factor helps us understand the distances between individuals of the same family. There is no clear consensus, however, as to the best method for analysing relationships between different species or for distributing the latter among different families; and, since there are no hard rules for describing families, the common and critical sense of taxonomists is pivotal, though always in keeping with international taxonomy rules. An important aspect is that the family taxa is more commonly used than other ranks in evolutionary or paleontological studies, insofar as it is far more

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stable than taxonomic levels such as genera or species – there are no major changes on the level of taxa, and its features are more general. The ability to bring together both ambiguous and determinative, particular and general factors endows the term family with a special efficacy for thinking about the real and optimizes the relationship between the world and words. These characteristics of the family category allow it conceptual ­elasticity to other territories such as those of art. Art is less about discussing family resemblances on the boundary between the literal and metaphor – how the former may be understood, or how this expression may initiate a discussion about an ontology of art – than about seizing their potential for operationalizing meaning and effects on a communicational level. (Likewise, in this case, it is a game, a concept that arises out of the game of meanings.) As we have seen, the flexibility of the term ‘family’ is somewhat implicit in Wittgenstein’s re-evaluation of the power/function of language throughout his philosophical theory: from a language held hostage to analogies with images about the world, to an understanding of language as a tool, as an instrument of communication, and, we could say, as a game of determination. Departing from a theory of meaning grounded on logical factors and on vulnerabilities within the representation of the world through language, we move on to a theory of meaning based on relational questions contingent on use and action, without seeking to mask the traps and ambiguities of language. This opening is key to expanding the notion of language and understanding it within the inseparability of manifestation and knowledge. Not every word gives rise to a concrete image, nor does every possible image resulting from a word univocally correspond to that word, and nor is comprehension separate from praxis. What does it mean to comprehend? As Sofia Miguéns states, ‘According to the Investigations, expression, that is, behavioral manifestation, and comprehension are conceptually inseparable’ (Miguéns 2019, 200). It makes no sense to talk about a pure language if it is not associated with a praxis or a specific application, from which derives the argument against the possibility of a private language. Language is about following rules; language-games or family resemblances are what characterize language. In dance, it is possible to recognize a set of rules to configure; that is, to identify parameters of a programme that leads to a certain form or gestural performance, which may not be immediately obvious, but is inherent to that gesture. What will interest us, above all, is the openness to a distinction between two modes, phenomenological and logical, that operate in different areas, but which become complementary in understanding the game and its respective complexity. There might be a tension in the same word, the same gesture, depending on its use and the role it represents in the understanding of the game. As Wittgenstein points out, the game is not limited to a set of rules: ‘So I am inclined to distinguish between essential and inessential rules in a game

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too. The game, one would like to say, has not only rules but also a point’ (PI, 564). On the other hand, rules do not lie outside the world (thus rejecting a Platonist bent) and are the result of a public practice. This externalist conception of signification and of the mind is what allows us to move away from a signification confined within an inner world, a shadow, or some idealism, something detached from language, towards an understanding of signification as a pure activity: ‘an activity of life producing signs’ (Wittgenstein quoted in Miguéns 2019: 195), or a theory of signification as use. Thought is not a shadow, but rather an activity. So is the gesture. The gesture is an activity that summons a phenomenological and physical double understanding; and at the same time that the gesture removes an ideal technical predetermination, it opens up the possibility of mapping sensation and meaning. The phrase family resemblance seems to optimize the space of representation. This is the space that we intend to think about and discuss here, especially because family resemblances dismantle universality and suggest strong links among different elements simultaneously and, above all, allow a cartography of gesture. The analogy between the terms of genetics and language, family or family resemblances, proves a rather useful tool to analyse not only the historical dimension of dance but also choreographic practice in itself. The body is its own movement, its own action; looking at the choreographic body, a central term in our discussion, through the lens of family resemblance allows us to enquire into what distinguishes it as art. When the body acts in its strict functionality, its generative quality evades us. On the other hand, when we focus on its similarities (and consequently differences), we move into the poietic and aesthetic dimension of a certain action. There, the performance is what grips us and speaks to us. The process of choreographic construction is derived from multiple approaches and methods, but even those founded on principles of randomness can be recognized through a regime of patterns, which justifies familiarity-based meaning. The terms ‘family resemblances’ or ‘familiarities’ are simultaneously operative and accessible to one’s comprehension, physical and metaphysical, acquired and constructed – that is, these terms identify forms of transmission (body to body, dance performance to audience) that are capable of playing among imponderables, silent acts, or strategic and extensive acts. POIESIS AND FAMILY RESEMBLANCE Dance is halfway down a path. It has already found a skilful body and seems to materialize through a game that proceeds from the ability of its body to respond

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to a challenge, to a movement. This game is one of communication and of gesture performativity. Some things are meant only to be read halfway, for they do not need an absolute reading to signify themselves, as with the notion of gesture. In one of his aphorisms, Wittgenstein states: ‘Architecture is a gesture. Not every purposive movement of the human body is a gesture. Just as little as every functional building is architecture’ (Wittgenstein 2019: 87). Though seemingly anachronic, such a distinction between what architecture might or might not be, between what a gesture might or might not be, should be taken as an alert to a modality of how things may signify themselves, persistence, and to the poietic dimension that brings us to the limit of the gesture’s survival, that is, to the memory of the gesture. As such, the gesture appears to belong not to a lost dimension but rather to the place of know-how and of incorporated knowledge. By separating the purely functional gesture from the extraordinary one, Wittgenstein leads us into a dialogue between aesthetics and epistemology, between manifestation and comprehension. More than the notion of value implied, the game between what is distributed and what is accumulated in the different parts of an artwork – or, if we so wish, a form of knowledge transmitted less by a valuative action than by a distributive one, focusing on the practice of such transmission – is what is mainly at stake. That is the case with the understanding of language as a game; in other words, finding meaning within the tension between interior and exterior, not separating manifestation from comprehension conceptually, will lead us to a theory of signification as use, as praxis. When Wittgenstein begins his Philosophical Investigations by quoting Saint Augustine, he means to show that Augustine’s system does not contain all that is considered language (PI, 3). Wittgenstein considers Saint Augustine’s conception of language to be but a simplified version of writing, arrived at through a denotative process and simple correspondences. It becomes necessary to introduce complexity into the comprehension of language, and the phrase ‘language-game’ contributes to extending the relationship between things and words. The language-game entails multiplicity, whether of tones or facial expressions, and the recognition of such multiplicity allows us to move from the question on to the description, from the explanation on to the description. But how are we to tell the games from one another? ‘Instead of pointing out something common to all that we call language, I’m saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common in virtue of which we use the same word for all – but there are many different kinds of affinity between them. And on account of this affinity, or these affinities, we call them all “languages.” I’ll try to explain this’ (PI, 65). In comparing the different types of games, Wittgenstein notices a complicated network of criss-crossing, overlapping similarities, both in the large and in the small. And he goes on to state: ‘I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”;

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for the various resemblances between members of a family – build, features, color of eyes, gait, temperament, and so on and so forth – overlap and crisscross in the same way. – And I shall say: “games” form a family’ (PI, 67). As such, one is supposed to regard this notion of game as unlimited – one where not every rule is written, where not everything is regulated. The philosopher continues his reasoning by mentioning Frege and his distinct stance on the idea of concept, comparing it to a region with clear boundaries. Wittgenstein’s openness regarding the notions of language and concept proves fundamental to situate new problems without getting lost in explicative questions or superimposing linguistic questions on worldly images. It is indeed possible to communicate and achieve objectives through the ‘blurring’ of the image or of the concept. From another angle, by resizing the impact of language as communicability, Wittgenstein submits it to its potential for discommunication. Family resemblance resolves part of this question insofar as it provides an outline amidst the chaos and helps establish a strong connection between the whole and its parts. How are we to identify family resemblances? Accumulation, distribution, and, particularly, the notion of persistence, or a regime through which performativity becomes evident by insistence or pattern, is a figural process that should be associated with family resemblance. Persistence can be understood within the natural order of the world or as something contrived – our territory of enquiry. Such as language in general. When Wittgenstein states that language is an instrument, he is assuming a technicity, but also a need for the coexistence of what is natural and artificial. ‘Language is an instrument. Its concepts are instruments’ (PI, 569). And he goes on to stress that, contrary to popular belief, the concepts we use make all the difference: concepts, like calculus in physics, are what lead us to make investigations. Apropos of persistence as a sort of emerging order of things and artefacts, Filipe Martins says: ‘On the phenomenological level of performativity, and on the level of art reception in particular, persistence is not only the recognition of order in the midst of chaos, but constitutes the very tangibility of a poietic composition, the reflection of a plan or an authorial order’ (Martins 2019, 60). On this plane of the authorial and of contrivance, persistence proves a powerful means to fabricate forms: There are several figures or subspecies of persistence. It all starts with a simple repetition of elements that, in each new appearance, consolidate their active role in the artwork, contributing to an order or cohesion: for example, a musical measure, a rhythm, the repetition of a certain color in a combination of clothing, the recurrence of a diegetic element, etc. Persistence is a powerful poietic instrument: we find it in rhymes, choruses, narrative arcs, thematic elements, the choice of techniques, the consolidation of styles. (Ibid.: 61)

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If persistence can be associated with family resemblances, it is interesting to extend it to the aesthetic experience where the tension between natural and artificial seems to gain new contours. Still with Martins, according to the author, the triad of persistence, difference, and contingency configures the aesthetic game: In the aesthetic game, difference is directly opposed to immersion, stimulating the audience’s participative, co-authorial attitude. While persistence refers to the author (against arbitrariness) and contingency refers to the real (against artificiality), difference constitutes the engine of co-authorship (against immersiveness). The aesthetic experience, in its relationship with the work of art, can be described globally from the intersection of these three phenomenological vectors. (Martins 2023, 147)

Persistence, then, also allows us to read the work of art in its modus operandi as a purposive act and a motor of fabrication. In this double game, family resemblances are both a way to understand and a principle of construction; family resemblances may be produced or even induced. Crafted in Wittgenstein’s later theory, this notion has a pivotal role in understanding the meaning and functioning of words on the plane of signification and communication; despite their rules, use and game generate an openness to, and make room for, ambiguity. This is distinct from what Wittgenstein writes at the end of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: ‘The world is independent of my will’ (6.373). Within this positioning, wherein the world does not depend on me, sense results from my activity; it must not lie in the world, but rather outside of it. ‘The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists – and if it did exist, it would have no value’ (6.41). Notwithstanding the implicit, restricted, logical dimension wherein language seems to acquire a primary function as the technical translation of the world, it is important to cast light on the sense that is not constructed randomly but rather from a reflection of the world. However, value and sense are not direct imports of the world but rather, as is clear, the result of my experience in the world, which is processed mainly through language, through our multiple translations and interpretations of the world. Wittgenstein clarifies that language is more than a linear and ostensive communication system or a simplified conception of writing. Language is an interweaving, a whole set of activities. It is the language-game that goes beyond the denotative and training process. Each letter can perform different functions. It is the twist to a post-positivist paradigm that should guide us regarding language as practice and the meaning linked to its use. There is a sort of silent agreement according to which we can only feed off the world, without

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there being a need to comprehend it in its totality. This is the remit wherein the artistic gesture encounters its ontology, in a network of convergences between the world and ourselves. Family corresponds to a condition of proximity, functioning as a proximity strategy as well. In opposition to the fixed and to the certainty of a proposition, this proximity strategy is modulated and modelled after the rhythm and the form of the world. A world-language isomorphism at best is replaced by an aesthetic isomorphism respecting the performativity with which we read, feel, and think about the world. The familiarity of movement and the choreographic body offer a remapping of sensations and intentions. Throughout my career as a choreographer, I have developed various methods that attempt to open new possibilities for the dancing body – how to find it, how to challenge it, how to conceive it in a world where we can no longer feign innocence before our historical legacy. What does the dancing body of the world tell us, and how does it speak to us? With a necessary, inevitable feeling of unease, from my point of view. From such unease arose one of my working methods – in an intuitive way, I would say – which I designated familiarity of movement. Potentially alluding to Wittgenstein’s family resemblance, this phrase may be conveyed via a method that springs from a double ethical and aesthetic consciousness through which I have been problematizing the materiality of dance. As we will see, the Wittgensteinian notion of family resemblance instructs us to look at a particular nexus, which in this case is the choreographic nexus, created by a set of similarities between bodies in gesture. Doing away with an interest in maintaining more objective, normative techniques in order to understand dance in its more processual, collaborative aspects, choreographic creation claims the gesture that identifies the performer themselves and that grants them an identity in the performance. The familiarity in the gesture I am referring to leads the game of imperfect, incomplete meaning into the working space; it promotes the performance of the gesture that has been rescued from memory. In a way, the rehearsal functions as the final presentation, it constitutes a unique moment, and the attitude is highly focused on the performance in itself. The objective of this method – let us call it so – is the production of a choreographic body that is able to combine a more arbitrary aspect of the gesture and its ambiguities with a nexus that associates the singular gesture with the whole of the piece. With this in view, the movement that is improvised or composed by the choreographer is transmitted in such a way that the dancer is able to promptly recompose in real time whatever they recall of that movement, whatever they have managed to retain as the ballast of that movement. We already know that improvisation is a process that allows us to simultaneously break with pre-established techniques and reveal more

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unexpected approaches of the moving body; yet, beyond such evidence, improvisation cannot entirely resolve a certain legacy. Improvisation is the best possible compromise for cross-temporal dialogue, but it does not offer a complete answer, since it is restricted by the habits of each body, by the use of the body, by acquired experience. A body that performs an insistent type of practice produces a restricted gesture. Improvisation cannot be made absolute under the pretext of innovation, for it carries the trace of a past. As such, we must find new processual paths and layers to challenge the incorporation presupposed by improvisation itself. And that could be the encounter with the other, the incorporation of movement through an instant selection/use of gestures captured from another body. Processes of score construction based on tasks assigned to dancers – alternative writings such as dramaturgies – are in themselves incursions that attempt to challenge improvisation, granting it new destinies, shaping it as a return-less action, using it as an empathic element wherein we too are that body, not entirely dominated or impulsive. In our case, the method which we call familiarity of movement integrates improvisation as an overlay or as accumulation. In almost instantaneously reproducing the gesture of another and recomposing the memory of this experience right after, the body allows various layers and its various ‘bodies’ to coexist, though under the guidance of the gesture transmitted. This method functions as a sort of production that enables us to recognize in choreography a genesis of movement, a seeming form of movement among the varied interpretations necessarily executed by each dancer. While each dancer, each body, retains their independence and diversity, a choreographic nexus is constructed via the game of similarities generated by the bodies. All depart from the same movement matrix, though displaying different segments and variants of the initial gesture. That nexus is the meaning, simultaneously one and plural; it is the composition of the singularities of each moving body. This process associated with the notion of family resemblances allows us to map the gestures, to do a cartography of similarities that may locate sensations or intentions. Of course, this meaning is phenomenological; still, it is important to consider the kinaesthetic summoning and the respective connection between propositions and sensations, as stated by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations apropos of language-games, after writing about family resemblance: ‘If I understand the character of the game aright, I might say, then this isn’t an essential part of it. (Meaning – a physiognomy.)’ (PI, 568). The possibility of a sensorial impression providing information about form or colour corresponds to the possibility of the sensation being described with words or with images. ‘My kinaesthetic sensations apprise me of the movements and positions of my limbs’ (PPF, viii §1), as Wittgenstein points out in Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment (Part II of Philosophical Investigations).

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The possibility of identifying traces without reducing the object to an essential one, while grasping the difference between objects, proves rather important for understanding the nature of the dancing body in contemporaneity. To begin with, family resemblance integrates instability in its very definition, but this instability also proves to be a form of stability, because this notion presupposes variability. How can we understand a certain writing of the body, a certain choreo-graphy, if it does not presuppose the complexion and difference of the body in motion? We can only do so via the variability of the forms and the terms that designate them, such as family resemblances, a notion that incorporates traces allowing the distinction between games without reducing them to essential traces. The choreographic body emerges from this condition as a nexus of a dance, as a regime of similarities, and rethinks language for itself as a figural discourse. We can also use Wittgenstein’s notion of game to access this choreographic body: the intersection and overlap of data, the bias of the phrase family resemblance towards what it designates, its intuitive appeal, or to remap sensations and create discursive hypotheses about the world. Things of the world that connect and disconnect us, the world where the familiar, unfamiliar, or the strange, are not linear, but a matter of the complex game of names and sensations.

PERSISTENCE As we have stated, this chapter aims to reconceive transmissibility in dance, especially as concerns choreographic creation, through Wittgenstein’s framework of family resemblance. Yet, since this notion was originally discussed within the boundaries of language, transmission must be brought to terms with the obstacles inherent to dance: Can art be understood as a language? Or is this a metalinguistic impossibility? In any case, it is indeed possible to refer to the construction of a dance concert or another work of art in metalinguistic terms. Jérôme Bel’s The Show Must Go On can be seen as a metalinguistic approach, since some of the elements chosen, such as the music, create a double space and a strategic setting where we stand both inside and outside the music, where we move and observe ourselves moving. The way Bel links mundane and deconstructed gestures leads us to step back to the origins of dance concerts. He exposes the language and the tools to understand in certain ways that the tools are the language itself. This is the double space: we are in front of the language and we process the language. This focus on the operation and strategies of choreographic composition places us on a two-way road: the symbolic dimension of how to operate facing the world, and the symbolic dimension of how to translate the world. This process works as a discourse. The notion of discourse may be

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assumed in its principles and achievements regardless of the significance of its content. Instead of focusing on the material aspects of language, discourse examines the behavioural and figural (Greimas); because it is both an act of contact and an aggregative element, discourse replaces other ontological forms of understanding dance by being the performatic trace of similarities. Considering dance in these terms, family resemblance allows us to assess patterns, common spaces, and different uses of the same proposed gesture, the original gesture that was proposed to the dancers. As we have seen, the transmissibility of movement, reconceived through a regime of familiarities, seems capable of adapting to multiple bodies; in other words, it becomes naturalized in each body, and at the same time establishes a cartography of the senses, by mapping similarities of gestures. If, in Bel, transmission could be located in the game of set composition, here, we intended to focus on the nature of gesture and the limits of its transmissibility. Beyond the transmissibility of movement as an ideal transference (as testimony), we are looking for the process of movement fabrication of the choreographic body, which is linked to a presupposition of difference (my body is different from yours) and of communion (my gesture is echoed in yours through certain persisting qualities of movement). It is not about how to perform the gesture, but rather about preserving some aspects of movement. That’s what I have exposed through the process of familiarity of movement and, in another perspective, Bel works in the cited piece by creating a situation for playing with our imaginative body. In this piece, the bodies that are on stage are not the main concern in relation to those watching from the auditorium with respect to the role of the DJ. However, it is precisely because of that signalized bodily presence that we are pushed to the kinaesthetic sensation that is capable of projecting our double. Regarding the fabrication of movement (one transmits movement to another), an interesting discussion emerges about the artificial or the arbitrary – a non-pre-existent, non-essentialist movement which reveals itself through a certain body, naturalizing itself in it. This fabrication process presupposes a fractional moment: a suspension, an epoché of any judgement or critical approach wherein my body disappears and I am the movement of the other; in other words, a temporary rupture between body-movement and the movement of the body, which, among other aspects, allows us to hypothesize meanings for the different uses of a gesture, or to create different starting points for creating movement. As we have shown before through the personal method, the ‘grammar’ of movement is displayed through a regime of similarities by departing from the same matrix – similarities between the course of movements and the movements of different bodies in action, wherein one can find a common space and common traces. In the end, we see sameness, a

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connected universe of gestures, and differences; no one’s body is the same as another in its gesture. Indeed, polyphony might be an apt picture of the final performative work. The choreographic body through this regime works a grammar of difference. Wittgenstein, after questioning the criteria to determine the information that a sensation could give about form or colour, says: ‘What I am looking for now is the grammatical difference’ (PPF, viii §6). In his conception, this should be the way to make it possible to teach the use of language, through description. ‘But “knowing” just means: being able to describe it’ (PPF, viii §2). If we extend this to the choreographic body, we construct meaning through the way gestures are distributed or accumulated, creating an image or relating a word to those, describing the set of sensations (pointing out positions or intensities). Important aspects of family resemblance include its bias in categorization and how it can be combined in a common space. In a certain sense, it is not about understanding difference and pluralism in an infinite spiral, but rather about reorganizing them within a regime of affinities – which is not tantamount to fixing categories. This bears upon the recognition and disciplining of bodies as vehicles of culturally and socially coded movement and gestures, where family resemblance provides a distinct conception of pluralism. However, the relativistic criticism of the notion of family resemblance grows weaker when it becomes not only important but necessary to relativize terms – there being no other way to understand the world – as networks of access to knowledge multiply. Of course, the focus is less on essentialist requirements than on traits, less on the centre itself than on the track of multiple post-phenomenological forms. This procedure expands the field of analytical possibilities and generates new organizations and compositional games. There is an identification of the space of representation without there necessarily being a representation. From the outset, the social body – the most codified and optimized within the domain of representation – also expands and shifts, taking on new ‘physiognomies’ and thus new meanings by identifying prominent patterns and traces, as well as ‘snapshots’. Wittgenstein notes that there are two ways of understanding (PI, 532): we may comprehend one sentence by substituting from another equivalent; we cannot replace a sentence for another one, and that’s what happens in music or in a choreographic phrase, for instance. In this last situation, the philosopher asks: ‘But in the second case, how can one explain the expression, communicate what one understands? Ask yourself: How does one lead someone to understand a poem or a theme? The answer to this tells us how one explains the sense here’ (PI, 533). While the notions of game and concept are not restricted to a number of terms and rules, there are certain modulations to consider when thinking about the world and the way we describe it. Wittgenstein states: ‘The reinterpretation of a facial expression can be compared

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to the reinterpretation of a chord in music, when we hear it as a modulation first into this, then into that key’ (PI, 536). By attending to the differences between bodies playing the same game, Wittgenstein’s notions give access to a phenomenological understanding of the dancing body in contemporary work. Transmission, conceived through Wittgenstein’s notions, is a responsible process of describing the rules of the game. These rules can take multiple forms and means. The choreographic body is above all the nexus generated by resemblances, gestures that these rules generated. When understanding does not correspond to replacing one sentence with another, we can only speak of the traces of change – the language of transmission. ‘The human body is the best picture of the human soul’ (PPF, iv 25). REFERENCES Barros, Né, Da Materialidade da dança, Edições Centro Estudos Arnaldo Araújo, Esap, Porto, 2004. Greimas, Algirdas Julien, Dell’imperfezione, trad. Gianfranco Marrone, Sellerio Editore, Palermo, 1988. Main, Lesley, ed., Transmissions in Dance: Contemporary Staging Practices, Palgrave MacMillan, London, 2018. Martins, F., ed., Memory and Aesthetic Experience — Essays on Cinema, Media and Cognition, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, Col. Estética, Política e Artes, 2019. Martins, F., “Imersividade e Diferença no Cinema e nas Artes”, Aniki vol. 10, n. 1 (2023): 138–155 | ISSN 2183-1750 | doi: 10.14591/aniki.v10n1.950. Miguéns, Sofia, Uma leitura da filosofia contemporânea. Figuras e movimentos, col. O saber da Filosofia, Edições 70. 2019. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Culture and Value, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford, 1998. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, 2009. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and New York, 1995a. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tratado Lógico-Filosófico * Investigações Filosóficas, trad. M.S. Lourenço, 2ªedição revista, Edição Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, 1995b.

Chapter 2

Pataquerulous Wittgenstein (and the Animaladies of Language)1 Charles Bernstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein is the philosopher of conventional, ordinary, normal language, so it’s funny that he has been so fundamental to me, a poet of the pataquerulous kind. Wittgenstein is acutely conscious of those moments when ordinary language seems to fail as it falls out with the ordinary, for example when a term of art (that is to say, a term in use) becomes abstractly metaphysical, or when we lose our way with words, becoming alienated or sceptical. Wittgenstein tracks the way words and expressions go from unremarkable to odd: the familiar becoming strange. Me, I love the rhythm of falling in and out of sense, like a needle skipping on a record. ‘Now. / Not now. / And now. / Now’. How exquisitely awkward. Wittgenstein practices philosophy as something dialogic; philosophical questions arise in response to perceived issues in the course of everyday life. The terms of philosophy take on their meaning in specific situations. Wittgenstein is wary of centring philosophy on a set of mastered abstract or monovalent technical names. When philosophy presses on words to become terminologically precise, something queer happens. The words fall out of everyday use, sticking out like sore thumbs. This is the obverse of what happens in poetry when language is defamiliarized. In poetry, the obtrusiveness (aversion to absorption) is the secret of rime and rhythm, and indeed to the art (or is it a kind of aesthetic shock treatment or method of intoxication?) of stunning with bolts of melody. Poetry’s magic, to call it that, is to transform the queer instantiation of wordness from malady to melody. In Wittgenstein’s time, queer would have meant gay, though he surely did not intend for that to be a coded reference to his putative homosexuality.2 For the first English version of Philosophical Investigations, Elizabeth Anscombe 21

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translated both merkwürdig and seltsam as queer, but neither of those German words suggests homosexuality. That’s queer. In the revised fourth edition of Philosophical Investigations, the new editors eliminate queer from their translation.3 That’s queer because in the letters Wittgenstein wrote to his Cambridge associates, he uses queer about twenty times in a way that is consistent with Anscombe’s translation, though in his letters he also speaks of feeling queer: I have occasional queer states of nervous instability about which I’ll only say that they’re rotten while they last. . . . I’m feeling queer. One cause of this is that my nights aren’t good, but there are other causes. . . . This is a queer letter, but no queerer than its writer.4

In German you might say schwul for gay, and it wouldn’t be queer at all to just say queer nowadays. Perhaps in Wittgenstein’s day you might hear such pataque(e)ricals as widernatürlich or unnatürlich (against nature or unnatural), abnormal, krankhaft (sick), perhaps even, and closer to the point here, ungewöhnlich (uncommon/anomalous).5 Wittgenstein uses ungewöhnlich just once in Investigations, where he speaks of an ungewöhnlich lighting that makes something familiar unrecognizable (§41). The only time he uses unnatürlich is to characterize using words out of context (§595). (Widernatürlich does not appear in Investigations.) (I consult Investigations the way some people consult the I Ching: as an oracle.) Merkwürdig means something that calls itself to our notice, that’s worth looking at, something strange, curious, odd, weird, or unlikely. Seltsam, normally a synonym of merkwürdig, suggests something rare, indescribable, or ungraspable, so incongruous, bizarre, funny, altered, unexpected, surprising, funny, something that doesn’t immediately scan. 94. ‘A proposition is a queer thing!’ [Der Satz, ein merkwürdiges Ding!] Here we have in germ the subliming of our whole account of logic. The tendency to assume a pure intermediary between the propositional signs and the facts. Or even to try to purify, to sublime, the signs themselves. – For our forms of expression prevent us in all sorts of ways from seeing that nothing out of the ordinary is involved, by sending us in pursuit of chimeras. (§94, Anscombe trans.)

A phrase, a queer thing!6 When we look at language as ‘actual word stuff’,7 to use Williams’s phrase, it’s queered, averting the ordinary way in which phrases become transparent – that is, it is sublimed (absorbed) in perception. Such subliming or immediation occurs even though language is conditioning perception:

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we don’t notice the lens in our glasses unless the lens is scratched or because of ungewöhnlich (unordinary) lighting. In poetry, this desubliming (failure to connect) may be rhythmically entwined to moments of intensification and, ultimately, resubliming.8 In other words, the desire for absorption is a desire to overcome, or counter, animalady (alienation or estrangement, irremediation). Wittgenstein uses one of the two words translated by Anscombe as ‘queer’ in situations where there is a resistance to propositions/naming as fixed mapping of a word on a thing, at moments of tension between naming and that which is named. When we ‘sublime’ the nature of our language we idealize it: we think our nouns are the adequate symbols for the fluid world we live in. Naming, then, can be a kind of stigma if we sublime or idealize the fit between names and the world. When seen in their queeroid dimensions, Wittgenstein’s remarks take on an uncanny directness about the violence of naming and its connection to stigma.9 This person, the one standing before you, the one you are yourself, is never one thing. But some people, and from time to time all of us, become frame-locked, stuck on one aspect of a ‘this’ – causing what Wittgenstein calls aspect blindness (Aspektblinde). Once a single aspect is stigmatized, it becomes difficult to break free of the stigma. Wittgenstein wonders if this could be compared to colourblindness: something that is often on display as aesthetic blindness, where work is stigmatized because the reader or viewer or critic gets hung up.10 This argument is a simulation for demonstration only. Actual arguments may vary. Do not attempt to try this simulation in your own vehicle.

DEBUNKING DEBUNKING Pataquericals are aversive to what Wittgenstein calls ‘ostensive definitions’: manifest and fixed connections between names and things, meaning and objects, as when we point to a this.11 (Only this and nothing more.) It’s queer, he notes, that a figure will look one way in one context and another way in a different contexts. The duck/rabbit is the paradigmatic pataquerical figure because it is more than meets the eye: our ‘aspect blindness’ may cue us to see it one way rather than other. What it ‘is’ we never can see in a single moment in the eye. We may be able to perceive it all at once, but we see it serially (oscillating dialectically). Wittgenstein compares the inability to see things without contextual cues to not having ‘perfect pitch’.12 We don’t see the thing itself but see as, see with and through our metaphoric frames. It is our animalady to suffer from frame lock. Aspect blindness is a rigid adherence to one reading or

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interpretation of a figure (or poem), a repression of the necessity for context to establish meaning (and for different frames to establish potentially incommensurable meanings). This view is sometimes stigmatized as relativism, or in terms of poetry, as nihilism or aversion of meaning or affect. Wittgenstein suggests that the problem is not in the context dependence of meaning but in stigmatizing (getting stuck on) an ordinary feature of language. In our failure to understand the use of a word we take it as the expression of a queer [seltsamen] process. (As we think of time as a queer medium, of the mind as a queer kind of being.) (§196, trans. Anscombe)

What’s queer is that we sublime ‘the logic of our language’ (§38) from its everyday, context-dependent use into an axiomatic system of rigid correspondences, which has the effect of creating chimeras (two-dimensional stick figures) in place of living beings. The chimera that holds us captive is that perception does not require mediation: when we reach out to touch it, thinking it is the living proof, it dissolves in our hands, leaving a faint mist in its place. In Wittgenstein’s account, ostensive definitions map nouns onto the world, as if the fact of the existence of objects in the world pushes language towards deambiguation: a compulsive (dis-eased) state of trying to strip language to its essentials, as if it were a set of labels for a pre-existing world. But what, for example, is the word ‘this’ the name of in [a] language-game . . . or the word ‘that’ in the ostensive definition ‘that is called . . .’? – If you do not want to produce confusion you will do best not to call these words names at all. – Yet, [queer / merkwürdigerweise] to say, the word ‘this’ has been called the only genuine name; so that anything else we call a name was one only in an inexact, approximate sense. . . . Naming appears as a queer [seltsame] connection of a word with an object. – And you really get such a queer [seltsame] connexion when the philosopher tries to bring out the relation between name and thing by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name or even the word ‘this’ innumerable times. For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. And here we may indeed fancy naming to be some remarkable act of mind, as it were a baptism of an object. And we can also say the word ‘this’ to the object, as it were address the object as ‘this’ – a queer [seltsamer] use of this word, which doubtless only occurs in doing philosophy. (§38, trans. Anscombe)

Only this! Perception is evermore remediated: remediation precedes essence. Or as Preston Sturges puts it in Christmas in July: ‘If you can’t sleep at night it’s not the coffee, it’s the bunk.’ Debunking had itself to be debunked.

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NOTES 1. This text is an extract from Charles Bernstein, The Pitch of Poetry, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016: 317–321. 2. In Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), Ray Monk reports that a friend of Wittgenstein asked ‘whether he thought his work as a philosopher, even his being a philosopher, had anything to do with his homosexuality. What was implied was that Wittgenstein’s work as a philosopher may in some way have been a device to hide from his homosexuality. Wittgenstein dismissed the question with anger in his voice: “Certainly not!”’ (567). 3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, rev. 4th edition ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Walden: Blackwell, 2009). The new editors note: ‘[Elizabeth] Anscombe translated seltsam and merkwürdig by “queer.” We have translated seltsam by “odd,” “strange,” or “curious,” and merkwürdig by “remarkable,” “strange,” “curious” or “extraordinary”’ (xiii). See also the third edition of Anscombe’s translation (New York: Macmillan, 1958). 4. Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911–1951, ed. Brian McGuinness (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008): the first excerpt is from a letter to Norman Malcolm on 2 May 1948, letter no. 380, p. 422; the second is from a letter to Rush Rhees, 20 August 1948, letter no. 433, p. 392. 5. Information on German usage thanks to Norbert Lange, who responded to my questions in two emails on 15 February 2014. 6. Lange notes that with the removal of the comma, the comic element of the sentence is diminished. 7. The Correspondence of Williams Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 544 (1928). 8. This line of thinking is pursued in ‘Artifice of Absorption’ in A Poetics: sublimed is absorbed; queered is antiabsorptive; pataquerical is syncretic hyperabsorption (oscillating absorption and impenetrability). 9. See ‘Characterization’ in Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1985). 10. Wittgenstein discusses ‘aspect blindness’ in The Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment (formally called part 2 of Investigations) and included in the 4th ed.: §§257, 258, 260. 11. Philosophical Investigations, §§6, 9, 28–38. 12. §257, The Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment, in Philosophical Investigations, 4th ed.

Chapter 3

‘The Possibility of Fact’ Sketching an Origin for the Performative Simon Bowes

POINT ZERO The document is new, blank, its newness, blankness confirmed by the brightness of the screen. I gaze into it, until this newness, blankness, brightness feels one, whole, single, continuous. The world divides. There are two fields: one relatively large, white; within it another, relatively small, whiter.1 I focus upon the smaller, until, again, the world divides. Two thick bands of colour emerge, one green, one orange, crossing diagonally, and over it a circle, rimmed black, other circles proliferating within it.2 I turn my face to the window, close my eyes. In this field of interior vision, the image fades, part by part, until a single circle remains. The centre fades entirely to black, takes on depth, filled, until there appears a large, black basin against the bare wooden floor of a studio space.3 I picture this basin, and the ripples of water contained within it, as facts – or possible facts. POINT ZERO, ONE Perhaps this chapter will be understood only by those who have themselves already had the thoughts expressed in it – or at least, similar thoughts. So it is not an explanatory text. It is, rather, an experimental one. Its purpose would be achieved if it gave pleasure to one person who read it and understood it. The chapter deals with problems of the performative, and shows, I believe, that the reason why these problems are posed is that the logic of the performative is misunderstood. The performative is a concept. It became a dominant concept. Like all dominant concepts, its proliferation obscures other concepts. The whole sense of this chapter might be summed up in the following 27

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words: There is an origin for the performative in Wittgenstein; it takes a Deleuzian to find it. Reading between Wittgenstein and Deleuze, I extrapolate two definitions: (1) performance as an act of will, and (2) the performative as a sense event. The aim of this chapter is to draw a limit to the performative, or rather – to accept the limits of the concept of the performative as an expression of performance. It may only be in performance that these limits can be drawn, but in performance we fall a long way short of what is possible.

1.



1.1 1.11



1.12



1.13 1.2 1.21 2. 2.01 2.011



2.012



2.0121



2.02



2.021



2.022

The world is all that is the case; a performance, all that is the cause. A cause is a multiplicity of phenomena. A performance is determined by its causes, by their being all the causes. A multiplicity of causes determine what is the performance and also whatever is not the performance. Causes in physical space are, altogether, the performance. The world divides into bodies (causes) and events (effects). Each cause and each effect are independent. What is the cause – a fact – is the existence of states of affairs. A state of affairs is a combination of causes. It is essential to causes that they should be possible constituents of states of affairs. Everything is incidental: the incident of the cause and the incident of the effect do not coincide. There, in that phrase, states of affairs: an origin for the concepts: performance; the performative. Of course, the origin of the performative is well founded: it is Austin (1962). That phrase, ‘state of affairs’, recurs six times in Austin (1962), forty times in Wittgenstein (1922). As we read them together, we might come to regard performance and performatives as distinct, and to regard this distinction as logical: In Austin, the phrase ‘state of affairs’ refers to performatives. In Wittgenstein, I construe the same phrase as referring to performance. In his opening lecture on the performative, Austin remarks: ‘It was for too long the assumption of philosophers that the business of a “statement” can only be to “describe” some state of affairs or to “state some fact” which it must do truly or falsely’

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(Austin 1962: 1). Were this the case, a true statement, and the fact to which it refers, would be one and the same. 2.023 In his preliminary isolation of the performative, Austin gives several examples, now old familiars: the vows of the wedding ceremony, the naming of a ship, the bequeathal of a watch, the betting of sixpence on the chances of rain (ibid., 5). In such cases, ‘to utter the sentence is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it’ (ibid.). Here, speaking and acting are one and the same. 2.1 Against the question how, there is the question what. 2.11 ‘First there are bodies with their tensions, physical qualities, actions and passions, and the corresponding “states of affairs”’ (Deleuze 1990: 5). 2.12 ‘Second, all bodies are causes in relation to each other, and causes for each other – but causes of what?’ (ibid.). 2.13 Effects. 2.131 Causes and effects are situated on separate planes. Effects are ‘incorporeal’ entities (ibid.). These incorporeal entities are ‘logical or dialectical attributes’ – ‘not things or facts, but events’ (ibid., 5–6). 2.14 The distinction between bodies (causes) and effects (events) is logical. 2.141 The point of distinction between bodies (as causes) and effects (as events) is: causes are material, corporeal; effects are immaterial, incorporeal. This opens a further distinction between performance and the performative. 2.142 Performance belongs to the plane of causes. 2.1421 The performative belongs to the plane of events. 2.1422 What is done, in the uttering of a performative – what is accomplished in the naming of the concept of the performative – is a movement from the plane of causes to the plane of effects. 2.143 The performative is an event. A performance is not. 2.144 Performance, as an art, belongs to the plane of perception, sensation, affect. The performative, as an event, belongs to the plane of sense. 2.2 In naming the performative, Austin describes the powers of language in terms of immaterial effects; of course, immaterial

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effects may produce further, material, consequences (causes – or, quasi-causes). 3 There is what there is. 3.1 In the Notebooks 1914–1916, Wittgenstein supposes: ‘Aesthetically, the miracle is that the world exists. That there is what there is’ (Wittgenstein 1998: 86). And again, in the Tractatus: ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists’ (Proposition 6.44, Wittgenstein 2001: 88). 3.11 The question of how was always the wrong question. 3.112 Between the Notebooks and the Tractatus, the fact of existence opens to mysticism. 3.1121 Performance is mystical. The performative is not. 3.1122 In performance, we are open to surprise. 3.2 The performative is an epochal concept. 3.21 It has emerged, proliferated and is, presently, in decline. 3.211 There was no concept of the performative before Austin (1962). 3.22 There has been no substantive refinement of the concept of the performative since Barad (2002). 3.221 Here, epoch names a fifty-year period. 3.222 There has been no substantive development in performance studies since McKenzie (2001). 3.223 The concept of performance founds an epoch, the epoch founds a regime – the performative. 3.224 McKenzie describes a movement from discipline to paradigm: performance extends from the cultural to the organizational to the technological (2001: 5–12). The regime extends indefinitely. 3.23 In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein searches for the limits of language. He only confirms the limits of logic: ‘May others come and do it better’ (Wittgenstein 2001: 4). 3.231 In the Philosophical Investigations (1953), in the Blue and Brown Books (1958), Wittgenstein attempts to better his understanding of language. He gives up trying to account for the logic of language in its entirety. The concept of the logical picture gives way to the concept of the language-game. 3.232 The language-game refers to ‘language and the actions into which it is woven’ (Wittgenstein 1958: 5). The language-game is situated, contextualized: ‘the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life’ (ibid., 127).

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3.233 Wittgenstein’s concept of the language-game makes possible McKenzie’s concept of the performative. McKenzie describes language-games as ‘categories of utterances defined by specific rules that guide their usage’ (McKenzie 2001: 162). The early Wittgenstein is concerned with facts. The later Wittgenstein is concerned with rules. In rules defining the language-game, McKenzie observed an origin for the performative. McKenzie then turns to Lyotard to describe these metalanguage games in terms of social agonistics, in which ‘performativity replaces the traditional goals of knowledge, truth and/or liberation’ (ibid., 163). 3.234 The consequence of the performative is: ‘be operational (that is, commensurable) or disappear’ (Lyotard in McKenzie, ibid.) – or, ‘In other words: perform – or else’ (ibid.). The emergence of the performative defines the condition of postmodernity – or, neoliberalism. Performativity, neoliberalism, one and the same. In our present epoch, it is ‘profits over people, over the environment, over the entire planet’ (ibid., 254). ‘Such are the workings’, McKenzie concludes, ‘of neoliberalism’s invisible hand job’ (ibid.). 3.235 As McKenzie observes, the performativity condition might yet produce ‘Liminality, disintegration, diversification, fragmentation’, and while these aspects of the condition may yet ‘harbor forces of resistance and mutation’, they also, and quite crucially, ‘carry forces of reaction and normalization’ (ibid., 254). 3.236 The emergence of the performative is the plot which determines the world. The performativity condition situates us on the plane of effects. The performative is a sense event, a discursive plane whereupon every force can be neutralized. Performativity not only conditions postmodernity, neoliberalism – it is postmodernity, it is neoliberalism. We must regard this is a fact – a most damnably regrettable fact. 3.3 Performance has lost its efficacy. 3.31 The performative is losing its efficacy, too. 3.4 The concept which would seem to explain everything in fact explains nothing. 3.41 ‘The problem is that language has been granted too much power’ (Barad 2002: 801). 3.411 Barad explains that the consequence is the ‘extent to which matters of “fact” (so to speak) have been replaced with matters of signification (no scare quotes here)’ (ibid.).

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3.412 And so: ‘Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter’ (ibid.). 3.42 Against the metalanguage games of postmodernity, Barad describes a posthumanist performativity which aims to ‘give matter its due as an active participant in the world’s becoming’ (ibid., 803). 3.43 Barad explains the performative by introducing the novel terms ‘intra-action’ and ‘entanglement’, renewing a conception of realism. In her agential realist account: ‘Reality is not composed of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena but “things”-in-phenomena’ (ibid., 817). 3.44 Barad’s close observations of physical phenomena reveal a world – a universe – in which ‘“Things” don’t preexist; they are agentially enacted and become determinately bounded and propertied within phenomena’ (Barad 2007: 150). In recognizing matter as an active participant in the world’s becoming, we recognize, and reframe our own participation, our own becomings. 3.45 Barad’s novel invention is to describe the universe in terms of an entangled ontology of the material – discursive (ibid., 89). She separates the material and discursive in order to unite them, to cut them together, apart (ibid., 3; 179). Against this, I propose: we will never understand performance in ontological or other terms until we disentangle it from the performative. 3.46 The enthusiasm with which Barad’s novel terminology has been greeted across the arts and humanities is considerable. Where McKenzie, in the context of performance studies, describes the performativity condition as a will to politics, Barad, in the context of physics, describes performativity as, finally, a will to science. 3.47 It is almost as if, through careful calibration of her apparatuses, Barad has lately, finally, constructed a logically perfect language to describe the world as it really is – as it always was – as it always will be. 3.48 This changes nothing – or, nothing unless we will it. But even when everything seems perfectly well explained, certain facts remain curiously untouched by their explanation: what there is still is, and that is the really marvellous, the really wondrous – the really surprising – thing. 4 Performance is an act of will.

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4.1

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I picture a circle. The circle is in Vienna. It is the Vienna Circle. This is what its members called it. The members of the circle have convened to hear an extrapolation of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. After he is announced to applause, he turns his back to them, and recites poetry (Sarkar 2021: 86). 4.2 We could say that in the recital Wittgenstein is reflexively aware of his situation and context. 4.21 We could say that in turning his back, in turning from philosophy to poetry, he is underlining, emphasizing his behaviour, or, showing doing (Schechner 2013: 28). 4.22 We could say, Wittgenstein is not only refusing, but performing refusal. In the picture above, Wittgenstein is clearly aware he is doing something, something with words. And yet, here, speech is a form of silence. 4.3 This picture of the recital complicates the final logical proposition of the Tractatus. What he is doing, and how he is doing it, speaks to all of the things he insists we cannot about speak about: aesthetics, ethics, or, the mystical (Wittgenstein 2001: 86–89, Propositions 6.41–6.522). 4.31 It is possible to describe the recital in simple etymological terms. As Natasha Lushetich notes: to perform – from the Old French ‘parfournir’ – ‘to complete’, ‘to carry out thoroughly’, or ‘to execute’ (Lushetich 201: 2). 4.4 It is also possible – and more desirable – to describe the recital in Wittgenstein’s own terms: the extrapolation of philosophy is one state of affairs (the expected), the recital is another state of affairs (the unexpected). We might imagine the members of the circle, briefly, surprised. 4.5 Here, the recital figures as an act of will. 4.51 In the Notebooks 1914–1916, we find Wittgenstein thinking of will, indeed, thinking of will in terms of performance. His notes on will follow thoughts relating to art, aesthetics, and happiness: 4.52 ‘Aesthetically, the miracle is that the world exists. That there is what there is’ (Wittgenstein 1998: 86). 4.6 ‘Is it the essence of the artistic way of looking at things, that it looks at the world with a happy eye?’ (ibid.). 4.61 ‘Life is grave, art is gay’ (ibid.). 4.611 ‘Is the will an attitude towards the world?’ (ibid.) 4.612 ‘The will seems always to relate to an idea’ (ibid.).

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4.613 ‘We cannot imagine e.g. having carried out an act of will without having detected that we have carried it out’ (ibid.). 4.614 ‘Otherwise there might arise such a question as whether it had yet been completely carried out’ (ibid., 87). 4.7 Lushetich’s definition quickly proceeds from this conception of performance: performance is a way of thinking by doing (Lushetich 2016: 5), ‘a communication method and a way of making direct propositions’ (ibid., 6), which ‘re-structures, re-codes – or re-formats – the existing reality’ (ibid.). 4.8 In the Notebooks, Wittgenstein is thinking of a willing subject: 4.81 ‘Have the feelings by which I ascertain that an act of the will takes place any particular characteristics which distinguish them from other ideas?’ (Wittgenstein 1998: 87.) 4.811 ‘It seems not!’ (ibid.). 4.812 ‘In that case, however, I might conceivably get the idea that e.g. this chair was directly obeying my will’ (ibid.). 4.813 ‘Is that possible?’ (ibid.). 4.9 There are answers to these last questions in Ahmed (2014). Ahmed gets them from Sharp (2007). Sharp gets them from Spinoza. 4.91 In training his thoughts on the willing subject, Wittgenstein is posing a humanist question, a question concerning the capacities and affections of the human body. And yet, his thoughts concerning the willing subject express their own limits, pointing to other possibilities, possibilities which may be described, in contemporary terms, as posthumanist. In considering the will of the chair, he is reopening a Spinozan question, the question of what a body can do, and moreover, the question of what a body is. 4.911 ‘It is impossible to will without already performing the act of the will’ (Wittgenstein 1998: 87). This already-performing seems to define performance. The will does not relate to ideas, but rather, to virtuality. The act of will is a passage from virtual to actual. 4.912 ‘The act of the will is not the cause of the action but the action itself’; ‘One cannot will without acting’ (ibid.): the performer materializes the action. 4.92 These assertions place an emphasis on the body, on movement, on the feeling of ‘responsibility for the movement’ (ibid., 88). The implication of the act of will is ethical, ethical because material.

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4.921 ‘Wishing is not acting. But willing is acting’ (ibid.). 4.922 ‘When I move something, I move’ (ibid.). 4.923 ‘When I perform an action, I am in action’ (ibid., emphasis mine). 4.924 In these assertions Wittgenstein situates performance on the plane of bodies, causes. 4.925 In naming the performative, Austin is thinking through the same set of problems, but he sets them up differently. Austin’s performative describes a passage from the material plane of bodies and causes to the immaterial plane of effects – or, from will to event. 5 Against logic, a logic of sensation. 5.1 In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein proposes: ‘We picture facts to ourselves’; ‘A picture presents a situation in logical space, the existence and non-existence of states of affairs’; ‘A picture is a model of reality’; ‘In a picture objects have the elements of the picture corresponding to them’; ‘In a picture the elements of the picture are the representatives of objects’; ‘What constitutes a picture is that its elements are related to one another in a determinate way’; ‘A picture is a fact’ (Propositions 2.1–2.141, Wittgenstein 2001: 9). 5.2 In Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation, Deleuze marks a distinction in visual art between the figurative (the representational) and the figural (an extraction or isolation of the figure) (Deleuze 2003: 2). 5.21 The abstract and the figural open two possibilities against the regime of the figurative. Deleuze described the arts as a ‘community’ addressed to a ‘common problem’ which is ‘not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces’ (ibid., 56). ‘For this reason’ he observes, ‘no art is figurative’ (ibid.). The task of the artist is: ‘Not to render the visible, but to render visible’ (Klee in Deleuze 2003: 56). 5.3 Performance is an art among arts. 5.31 The task of performance is to render perceptible. This rendering is, in performance as in any other art, a matter of framing, intensity. In the frame, what is perceptible opens to sensation and sensation to affect. In this respect, performance is no different to any other art. 5.32 ‘Composition, composition is the sole definition of art’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 156).

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5.4

Performance is only a way of rendering perceptible.



5.41

In rendering perceptible, performance renders temporal, spatial.



5.42

Performance – in rendering temporal, spatial – is diagrammatic.



5.5

Deleuze refers to Bacon’s figural compositions as diagrams.



5.51

The diagram refers to ‘the operative set of asignifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones, line-strokes and color-patches’ (Deleuze 2003: 101); ‘the operation of the diagram, its function, says Bacon, is to be “suggestive”’ (ibid.).

5.52 This extraction – or, isolation – of the figure is a process, becoming figural. In a Bacon painting, image becomes figure.

5.521 In the event of performance, the body, too, becomes a figure – or, becomes figural.



5.522 And here, right here, another origin for the performative.



5.6

The performer is moving through adjacent rooms; in the rooms are situated a large black basin filled with water, two large brass bells with automated strikers, several meshed cushions, quartz crystals, a pendulum, a recording of the performer’s voice announcing the time, on the minute, throughout. And all of these elements are causes, each suggestive.



5.7

But suggestive of what?



5.71

Deleuze continues: ‘more rigorously, to use language similar to Wittgenstein’s, it is to introduce “possibilities of fact”’ (ibid.).



5.72

The diagram does not present a situation in logical space, either the existence or non-existence of states of affairs.



5.73

Deleuze’s diagram, unlike Wittgenstein’s logical pictures, is not a model of reality. The elements of a diagram do not necessarily correspond to exterior objects, and if they did, they would not be related in any determinate way.



5.8

The diagram introduces a new fact – or, possible fact.

5.81 A possible fact – or, possible cause.

5.82

The fact that water, when disturbed, will ripple belongs to the logical picture.



5.821 The fact of this water rippling in this basin because of this movement here about it belongs to the diagram, to the ‘operative set of asignifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones’ (Deleuze 2003: 101).



5.83

This equivocation denies the body nothing, no, nothing at all.

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5.84

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The diagram refers to the time and space of composition, figure becoming fact, where every fact emerges from the possible. 5.841 In art there are no logical pictures, only diagrams. 5.9 The diagram is the possibility of fact – of new facts. 5.91 New facts introduce the possibility of surprise. 6 Against logic, a logic of sense. 6.1 In Notebooks 1914–1916, Wittgenstein distinguishes between wishing and willing: 6.11 ‘Wishing is not acting. But willing is acting’ (Wittgenstein 1998: 88). 6.2 In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze marks a Stoic distinction between bodies and their tensions, their physical qualities, their actions, passions, and their corresponding states of affairs (Deleuze 1990: 5). All bodies are ‘causes in relation to each other, and causes for each other – but causes of what?’ (ibid.). 6.21 Effects. 6.211 These effects are ‘incorporeal’ entities (ibid.), ‘logical or dialectical attributes, not things or facts, but events’ (ibid., 5–6). 6.3 It is thus that the world divides. 6.31 And thus we separate performance from the performative. 6.312 Deleuze describes the event, in Stoic terms, as a propositional form – or, lekta. The Stoics named four incorporeals: void – space – time – lekton. Lekta refers to propositions. A proposition is always between two dimensions, ‘between denotation and expression or between the denotation of things and the expression of sense’ (ibid., 25). 6.313 Two sides of a mirror: ‘whatever is on the other side has no relation to what is in front of it’ (ibid.). Here, on the other side, ‘language no longer has a relation to that which it denotes, but only to that which it expresses, that is, to sense’ (ibid.). There is no question of a distinction between the event and its sense. 6.4 I picture a mirror. He is standing before it, in his logical phase. In the picture he is now wishing, now willing his reflection, a logical picture. He knows perfectly well that all events are sense events – the event and its sense are one and the same, but he does not put it this way. Beyond reflection, beyond any picture we have of him, he is thinking of aesthetics, ethics, the mystical, and recalling lines from a poem, a poem about birds, maybe.

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6.5

Wittgenstein proposes one conception of logic, Deleuze proposes others. 6.6 Barad questions whether all performances are performative (Barad 2002: 807–8). 6.61 It may be that no performances are performative, none. 6.62 It is possible. 6.621 It is possible that performance and the performative are situated on entirely different planes. 6.622 Against the plane of bodies (causes), the plane of effects (events). 6.623 The one plane right up against the other, and yet hardly coextensive. 6.7 McKenzie describes the shock of the future researcher, a shock which might be phrased as a proposition: ‘all performance is electronic’ (McKenzie 2001: 267). 6.71 Another possibility: all performatives are discursive. 6.711 The performative obscures the artlike nature of performance. 7 ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ (Proposition 7, Wittgenstein 2001: 89). In Deleuze as in Wittgenstein, there is a preoccupation with language, with language as propositional form. For Deleuze: ‘It is characteristic of events to be expressed or expressible, uttered or utterable, in propositions which are at least possible’ (Deleuze 1990: 12), and yet, sense ‘does not exist outside the proposition which expresses it’ (ibid., 181). We are rarely still, in silence. What is this passing over? Wittgenstein opened a conception of performance by describing acts of will, belonging to the plane of causes. And yet, we cannot, through performance, will the event. Performance, belonging to the plane of causes, is endlessly differential. Certain propositions from Wittgenstein and Deleuze might well describe performance: ‘I’ll show you differences’ (Wittgenstein in Drury 1996: 157) – or, ‘Difference must be shown differing’ (Deleuze 1994: 56). Each is a philosopher of difference. We might also describe each as a philosopher of the impersonal. The logic of the Tractatus is quite perfectly impersonal. And the logic of sense is equally so. An appeal to an impersonal logic might well describe the performative. The passing from performance to the performative, from cause to effect, is the passing from sensation to sense. The sense event is becoming-performative, through the making of sense. And yet, this making of sense refers, finally, to the silence it breaks irrevocably.

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In addressing the limits of language, Wittgenstein only confirms the limits of logic. But there is logic and there is logic. Where logics of sensation give us an origin for performance, logics of sense give us an origin for the performative. But even as the performative is redescribed, we approach another, further, limit. It is only after he has addressed the limit of logic that Wittgenstein can propose another, deeper form of experience. At the limits of logic, there is aesthetics, ethics – or, mysticism. The performer moves about several rooms. There is a large black basin filled with water. There are two large brass bells, with automated strikers. There are several meshed cushions. There are quartz crystals. There is a pendulum. There is a recording of the performer’s voice announcing the time, on the minute, throughout. And all of these facts seem miraculous. Of course, each are causes, and each suggestive. But suggestive of what? The performance is entitled We can no longer deny ourselves, presented in the River Rooms in the New Wing of Somerset House, London, 23 September–30 October 2022. On the day that I encounter it, the performer is Jamila Johnson-Small. On other days, other performers. Once, the performer collaborated with Alexandrina Helmsley as Project O. Later, the performer went under the title Last Yearz Interesting Negro. They now perform as Serafine1369. This work feels like a departure. The artist’s work has always been situated between dance and live art, but it has been inseparable from the narrow economy of theatre, from the sense of scale that the theatre implies, but also from the time frame which theatre typically requires. The performer moves through the space for 3 hours. We pass from time to duration, and from sensation to sense, and back. And we pass from aesthetics to ethics so freely that they are, we see now, one and the same. And in this moment of oneness, wholeness, continuousness, singularity, we open to some other plane of experience which is – we cannot deny – mysticism. What is suggested, in this performance between multiple bodies – bodies of flesh, brass, steel, fabric, rock – is a process of becoming figural: body becoming figure, figure becoming fact. It is a process of abstraction, which makes empathy possible. Becoming figural – becoming diagram – the body is at once virtual and actual. The diagram is not an object of discourse. It is, rather, an intensive force, uniting the spatial (in extensity) and the temporal (in duration, not a matter of time’s length, but time’s density). As the body becomes figural, the performance becomes diagrammatic. Becoming diagrammatic, the body is freed: from the logical picture, from the languagegame, and from the performative, which was only and ever a form of social agonistics. Deleuze proposes two forms of will: against organic will (which belongs to the plane of bodies, causes) there is spiritual will (which belong to the plane of events, effects) (Deleuze 1990: 149). In the latter of these cases, what is

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willed is not what occurs; it is, rather, ‘something yet to come which would be consistent with what occurs’ (ibid., 152). The passage from bodies, causes to effects, events, implies another, doubled movement: from organic will to spiritual will, another will is attained: ‘It is a question of attaining this will that the event creates in us’ (ibid.). The will is ‘what must be understood, willed and represented in that which occurs’ (ibid., 149). Wittgenstein wonders, marvels: ‘Aesthetically, the miracle is that the world exists. That there is what there is’ (Wittgenstein 1998: 86; cf. the Tractatus: ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists’ [Proposition 6.44, Wittgenstein 2001: 88]). Wittgenstein calls it mysticism. Mysticism, like aesthetics, like ethics, exposes the limits of logic. Of the performance, Serafine1369 writes: ‘Still, we are seeking that hum which is the peace that comes when able to hear all of the frequencies all at once, together, and each distinct, and hear so deeply that it feels they become us, and we become them. Sound the same as feeling’ (Serafine1369 2022: n.p.). Between things and facts and phenomena entangled, no difference, none. It is only a matter of what can be rendered visible, sonorous, perceptible. It is all in the rendering. We cannot enter into the world, aesthetically, ethically, except by sensation. In certain sensations, we will hear deeply, we will feel that sounds become us, that we become them. We will know then that sound is feeling. There will then be the question of who feels? ‘[F]orms of subjective feeling are replaced by an impersonal “one feels”’ (Perniola 2004: 131). ‘But how does one feel?’ (ibid.). ‘[T]ogether with extreme evidence and suspension, as in a kind of coloured and intense epochē’ (ibid.). The epoch of performance is yet-to-come. Perniola describes a feeling where a phenomenon, a sound for example, becomes a thing – or, becomes this thing (ibid., 130). He coheres these sentiments with reference to Wittgenstein. He describes a neutral and impersonal sexuality which is ‘strictly connected with [a] sense of extraneity and unnaturalness that Wittgenstein attributes to the perception of something as something and not nothing, of this thing as an entity that surprises, flashes and glows’ (Perniola, ibid.). Wittgenstein describes this as Vorschweben. Anscombe translates Wittgenstein’s description of Vorschweben like so: ‘it is a matter of something’s coming into one’s head’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 34). Massimo Verdicchio translates this from Mario Perniola’s Italian: ‘a matter of something standing or stirring in front of one’s eyes’ (Wittgenstein in Perniola, ibid.). We shall prefer this second definition. In Abstraction and Empathy, Wilhelm Worringer describes the feeling of aesthetic enjoyment: ‘To enjoy aesthetically means to enjoy myself in a sensuous object diverse from my self, to empathize myself into it.’ ‘What I empathise into is quite generally life.’ (Worringer 1991: 5). He describes life as ‘energy, inner working, striving and accomplishing, or, in a word, “activity”’ (ibid.). ‘But activity is that in which I experience an expenditure of energy’(ibid.).

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‘By its nature, this activity is activity of the will. It is endeavour or volition in motion’ (ibid.). This endeavour, volition, or motion is not the event, only the force which makes the event possible. What Deleuze calls spiritual will, I will call, after Wittgenstein, mysticism. ‘The human body is the best picture of the human soul’ (Wittgenstein 1958: 178, Proposition II, iv). In the performance, I see the body in motion, and in the animacy of the body I see the soul. The body before me, volition in motion, becomes figure, becomes fact. A new fact. It is possible. It is possible to understand performance as an activity of the will, an expenditure of energy, as volition in motion. This volition is not ephemeral. It inheres in all bodies. It is not wholly corporeal, nor entirely incorporeal; not wholly concrete, nor entirely abstract; not wholly actual, nor entirely virtual. This is why Phelan was wrong about ephemeral ontology: she thought that performance was an event. Performance is rather the material grounding, the corporeal sensation that makes the sense event of the performative possible. The possibility emerges in Wittgenstein’s earliest conception of performance, wherein will is an attitude towards the world (Wittgenstein 1998: 88), wherein will is also the world in us. He considers: ‘I might conceivably get the idea that e.g. this chair was directly obeying my will’ (ibid., 87) – Or, he its. This is why Ahmed, after Sharp (2007), after Spinoza, was right about will: ‘will becomes something everything has’ (Ahmed 2014: 188). What was called abstraction was only a precursor to performance and the performative. The enjoyment consists in experiencing, at once the sheer materiality of form and the sheer immateriality of the void. The sentiment Serafine1369 describes, of hearing so deeply that it feels sounds become us, and we become them, is a late expression of what Worringer described, in 1908, as empathy, an empathy made possible by abstraction. And briefly we view the world sub specie aeterni, as a limited whole. There, right there – in performance – we sense and know we are eternal. What Worringer describes, however, is not only aesthetic enjoyment, but ethics. And there, right there, in a performance by Serafine1369, we can no longer deny, aesthetics and ethics are one and the same. Beyond equivalency, towards indistinction, subjects and objects dissolve, selves multiply. If ‘one feels’, it is because all is feeling. Ethics is all feeling – as any Spinozist knows: joy, joy, rendered utterly impersonal.

NOTES 1. This image formed in this reverie resembles Malevich’s Suprematist Composition, White on White (1918).

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2. Here, the image resembles Kandinsky’s Circles in a Circle (1923). 3. This image remains obscure, until Section 5 of the text, where the author describes a performance by Serafine1369, We can no longer deny ourselves, presented durationally at Somerset House, 3 hours daily, 23 September–30 October 2022.

REFERENCES Ahmed, S. (2014) Willful Subjects. London and Durham: Duke University Press. Auslander, P. (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge. Austin, J.L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Barad, K. (2003) ‘Posthuman Performativity: Towards and Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 28, No. 3, 2003, pp. 801–831 . ——— (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. London and Durham: Duke University Press. Deleuze, G. (1990) The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. London: The Athlone Press. ——— (1994) Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. ——— (2003) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G., and Félix Guattari (1994) What Is Philosophy. New York: Zone Books. Drury, M. (1996) The Danger of Words & Writings on Wittgenstein. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. Lushetich, N. (2016) Interdisciplinary Performance: Reformatting Reality. London: Bloomsbury. McKenzie, J. (2001) Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London: Routledge. Perniola, M. (2004) Sex Appeal of the Inorganic. Trans. Massimo Verdicchio. New York and London: Continuum. Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked; the Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Sarkar, P. ‘“Ethics and Aesthetics are One” (T6.421): Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore’, Global Conversations: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture, Vol. IV, No. 1, 2021, pp. 85–100. Serafine1369 (2022) We Can No Longer Deny Ourselves. Somerset House, Exhibition Handout, 23 September–30 October 2022, https://www​ .somersethouse​ .org​.uk​/sites​/default​/files​/SERAFINE1369​%20​%20We​%20can​%20no​%20longer​ %20deny​%20ourselves​.pdf. Sharp, H. (2007) ‘The Force of Ideas in Spinoza’, Political Theory, Vol. 35, No. 6, December 2007, pp. 732–755. Wittgenstein, L. (2001 [1922]) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. London: Routledge Classics. ——— (1958) Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. London: Basil Blackwell.

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——— (1980) Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume I. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. ——— (1998) The Collected Works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. Worringer, W. (1997) Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style. Trans. Michael Bullock. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks.

VERBAL FOG Miles Champion

Verbal Fog The patch has a colour Analogous to the problems Toothache causes Altering face Thus it can be said That the root of our dissatisfaction Reaches up to reality like Phenomena in visual space If I had given it some drug Whose solution would at long last Give us the right to do arithmetic We might begin

This poem is re-printed, with permission, from Miles Champion, A Full Cone (Manchester: Carcanet, 2018). 45

Chapter 4

The More One Looks . . . Will Daddario and Alice Lagaay

For some time now, we have been ensconcing ourselves in a fantasy. It takes the form of an imagined work of devised theatre that asks college students to develop a version of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros that only includes the scenes from the play related to dead cats. It turns out there are a significant number of references to dead cats in the play. Go ahead and look. We (again, imaginatively) supplement this primary theatrical challenge with a few other materials that would, ideally, find their way into the performance. These included the following: • Tales of a historical event: Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the problem of the Rhinoceros. During a visit to Russell’s office when Wittgenstein was a student, the latter refused to accept Russell’s statement that ‘there is no rhinoceros in the room’.1 • The Romanian folk tale, ‘The Enchanted Pig’ (chosen to present a connection to Ionesco’s ancestral home and to offer another story that features a non-human animal). • Anecdotes from the days when Wittgenstein taught mathematics to primary school children: o Primary interest is this quotation, cited in an easy-to-read article on OpenCulture​ .or​ g: Wittgenstein’s students ‘designed steam engines and buildings together, and built models of them; dissected animals; examined things with a microscope Wittgenstein brought from Vienna; read literature; learned constellations lying under the night sky; and took trips to Vienna, where they stayed at a school run by his sister Hermine’.2 47

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o Equally important: Ludwig’s resignation from the school after knocking a child unconscious.3 This might be apocryphal. This imagined devised theatre project comes into view as one (among many, many) versions of what performance philosophy might look like, that is, how it might transpire within boundaries formed by the pair Theatre and Philosophy. We have even taken the step of introducing our fantasy to other philosophers, which challenged us to demonstrate the subtle prominence of dead cats in Ionesco’s play. We, for example, featured some of Ionesco’s dialogue between Old Man and Logician. The response from some philosophers was that the logic rehearsed in that dialogue was invalid, which, of course, it was. Our point in including this dialogue in our imagined theatrical production, in addition to featuring the dead cat(s), was to showcase the limits of the performance of logical thinking. We did not, in other words, intend to contest the veracity of the logic itself. And yet, upon receiving the feedback from our philosopher colleagues, we began to see the entire situation anew. Logic is faulty. But what logic are we now looking at? After sharing our fantasy with others, Ionesco’s text is no longer of primary importance. Rather, the metacommentary around the formation of the performance philosophy that inspires the fictional devising practice now called for inclusion into the fictional devising practice itself. It was as if, in other words, a fictional scenario had provoked an intellectual quiver in real life that, in turn, entirely validated the fabric of this fictional universe. Does it not seem that now we ought to continue with the fictional devising experiment and include the two real life philosophers as aesthetic figures within the performance? (Hint to reader/performer: rhetorical question). DON’T THINK, BUT LOOK! Along comes Mischa Twitchin and the premise for the volume you’re currently reading. An opportunity presents itself. Drop the spat with the philosophers and the meta-thinking and re-engage with the core of the fantasy. How can we forge a deeper engagement with Wittgenstein through this fantasy? Might we learn something more about the pairing of Wittgenstein and Performance by practicing what we learn through that engagement in the form of building upon the imaginary Rhinoceros (read, Dead Cats) devised performance? Beginning with the first question, which surely has many parts, we find ourselves drawn to Proposition 66 from Philosophical Investigations, specifically Wittgenstein’s repeated instruction, ‘Don’t think, but look!’ That

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command arises in a discussion of ‘activities we call “games”’ en route to the discussion, beginning in Prop. 67, about ‘family resemblances’. In this chapter about Dead Cats, this choice of entry feels right for a few reasons. First, our devised performance is a game, albeit one in which nobody wins or loses, no points are scored, and no prizes result from playing. The game might be called, ‘What’s possible?’ It is a game that utilizes tactics familiar to devisers of theatrical and performance works to expand what we mean by ‘thinking’. In other words, this is a Performance Philosophy game insofar as a primary mission of that group is to rethink what thinking might be by, for example, dwelling in the thick present of performance’s becoming. Second, theatre, here presented as a member of the family ‘performance’, concerns itself with sight. Θέατρον: the seeing place. While, as we will discuss, seeing is not the same as looking (at least, not as far as Wittgenstein is concerned), the two activities are frequently intimate partners. If looking is a route to understanding, then theatre-goers and theatre-makers may want to participate in this production of understanding. Third, ‘thinking’, supposedly the wheelhouse of Philosophy, is here demoted and even condemned as precisely the wrong way to understand what one sees. Knowing what Wittgenstein has in mind with his command then becomes crucial to engaging more thoroughly with both Performance Philosophy and the related project named ‘Wittgenstein and Performance’. The more one looks at Rhinoceros – through the text itself, the dead cats, Wittgenstein, philosophy, performance philosophy – the more something begins to show itself. This ‘something’ has value for the Performance Philosophy community and for philosophy, generally. At least, that’s the argument that we are putting forth.

FROM BEYER TO PRAGMATISM TO DEVISING (PHILOSOPHIZING THEATRE THROUGH MAKING PHILOSOPHICAL THEATRE) Lawrence Beyer helps us navigate ‘Don’t think, but look!’ by drawing our attention to the Pragmatist affinity displayed by Wittgenstein’s method in Philosophical Investigations. His initial short-hand explanation of Wittgenstein’s point concerns ‘commitments made to preconceptions, which obscure vision of the phenomena in which one is interested and whose renunciation is not considered even when they lead into confusion or perplexity’.4 Plumbing deeper, Beyer highlights Wittgenstein’s concern – certainly visible in the issue of ‘games’ – with ‘how actual conceptual-semantic variations cloaked by an unchanging outward linguistic form go unnoticed’.5 Among the many problems that could arise through this ‘cloaking’ is the obfuscation of the

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production of truths in favour of a passive ushering-in of presupposed preexisting Truth that is somehow embedded in specific words. Beyer brings William James into the picture in order to highlight James’s Wittgenstein-like objection to Russell’s logical philosophy and to suggest that ‘thinking’ too often plays the part of the usher. More succinctly: ‘Thinking’ involves a systematic production of mistaken semantic interpretations of words: a word W is used in some theorizing activity as if it means X, and is taken to have the meaning X not only within this activity but generally and essentially, when in fact X is a specialized sense shaped by the demands of this or some other (culturally-esteemed) theoretical enterprise, and disconnected from the ordinary uses of W.6

For the Wittgenstein of Prop. 66, ‘Looking’ involves the process by which recast linguistic concepts are ‘fashioned and refashioned through use to enable thought and action’. To look, then, is to disavow a metaphysical universe of Truth and magnify the making of the world through, for example, language-games. Do you see how Absurdist theatre begins to feel appropriate? Wittgenstein’s ‘Look!’ seems especially apt for approaching a play in which the title word (Rhinoceros) fuelled a cottage industry of post-war theatre critique wherein that word came to mean something else (e.g. Fascism/fascists). What happens when we try to look again at Rhinoceros with the knowledge of that line of critique but without a (conscious? unconscious?) compulsion to apply it? Is there, in other words, a Rhinoceros there? Don’t think, but look! Engaged in this act of looking, we happened to see dead cats. And thus the seed of a devised theatre piece was planted. As it turns out, Beyer’s Pragmatist reading of Wittgenstein is helpful in the domain of devised theatre, too. In addition to being an undertaking for students of the theatre, the dead cat piece becomes a way to philosophize theatre through making philosophical theatre. It is performance philosophy, where the accent falls on the making.

WHILE WE’RE AT IT: TO LOOK ≠ TO SEE To be offered as a microlecture before a rehearsal early in the (imagined) devising process in order to prepare readers for the discussion of racial politics below: Marie McGinn, “Two senses of ‘see’”, in Wittgenstein and Perception, eds. Michael Campbell, Michael O’Sullivan, New York: Routledge, 2015. It is possible to look and not see. It’s actually possible to look and not see in two different ways.

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An audience member could watch the version of Rhinoceros with only scenes mentioning dead cats and, at some point during the performance, say quietly to themselves, ‘I see!’ but it still may not be the case that the audience member actually ‘sees’ either rhinoceroses or dead cats. That same person may also not ‘understand’ (see) the many arguments made through the performance. They may, in fact, see only what they believe they see, that is, they may project a scene/seen upon the performance that in a sense obfuscates understanding. And, it is also possible that the same audience member leaves the performance, attends as many versions of Rhinoceros as they can and ends up saying, ‘When I see Rhinoceros, all I see are dead cats.’ And here, ‘see’ refers to a kind of mental picture that performs along with the production. THINK OF DEAD CATS LOOK! DEAD CATS!! Let’s return now to the ongoing flight of fancy that is the devised theatre piece with dead cats. This year’s collaboration between the philosophy and theatre departments at the university takes the form of a game. The game is called, ‘How is performance philosophy?’ The philosophy students are first invited to choose a philosopher or a text or a fragment of text to begin the game, and they choose Ludwig Wittgenstein. Having never heard of Wittgenstein, the theatre students blithely respond with their choice: Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (which they insist is funny but, like, because, well, we don’t know exactly why). Upon researching the pairing of Wittgenstein and rhinoceroses, both sets of students are surprised to find a poignant overlap. Visiting his teacher, Bertrand Russell, during a tutorial, a young Wittgenstein refuses to concede that there is not a Rhinoceros present in the office with them. The issue, it seems, has something to do with judgements and propositions. Nobody is quite sure of the technical aspects of the argument, but it doesn’t matter. The serendipitous meet-up of Wittgenstein (previously unheard of) and an invisible rhinoceros is enough to unite all the students in a spirit of goodwill as they commence a multi-week devising project. There are two teachers who act as guides and facilitators of the devised theatre game: Will Daddario and Alice Lagaay. After the initial selection of Wittgenstein and Rhinoceros as the first ingredients in the production, the teachers present a list of topics that must be incorporated into the devised project in some way: • All the scenes in Rhinoceros that mention dead cats. • Elements of Proposition 66 from Philosophical Investigations in which Wittgenstein instructs his readers: ‘don’t think, look!’ • Other text, yet to be determined.

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Let’s imagine that the first meeting of the group includes a brief ‘lecture’ on Proposition 66 that closely resembles the discussion of Beyer above. All participants are then separated into self-selected groups and given the task of either researching one of the bullet points offered by the teachers or looking for some other relevant source material that would aid in the creation of this play. The only requirement for this ‘other relevant source’ is that the group who brings in this material must thoroughly convince the entire artistic team to accept it as vital source material. As a way of demonstrating what ‘vital’ and ‘relevant’ source material might look like, Alice and Will support their claims about the importance of dead cats in Rhinoceros by showing students the following excerpts: 1. Dudard, this ‘young employee with a future’, declares: ‘It’s all here; it’s all down here in the dead cats column!’ 2. Botard’s response to Dudard: ‘You call that precise? And what, pray, does it mean by a pachyderm? What does the editor of a dead cats column understand by a pachyderm? He doesn’t say. And what does he mean by a cat?’ 3. Logician and the Old Man Logician: [to the Old Gentleman] Another syllogism. All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat. Old Gentleman: And he’s got four paws. That’s true. I’ve got a cat named Socrates. Logician: There you are, you see . . . Old Gentleman: [to the Logician] So Socrates was a cat, was he? Logician: Logic has just revealed that fact to us. 4. The Old Gentleman’s reply to the Lady whose cat is trampled by Rhinoceroses: ‘What can you do, dear lady, cats are only mortal.’ Followed by the Logician, ‘What do you expect, Madame? All cats are mortal! One must accept that.’ The students leave the first meeting of the experiment convinced that there’s something to look at more closely. Something is afoot. LOOK! RACIAL POLITICS! A group of three black women, two from Philosophy and one from Theatre, ask for the attention of the cast during a rehearsal early in the devising process. Due to the foresight of the teachers, a graduate student with stenographic know-how was discovered in a class in the Criminal Justice department on court reporting and then offered a modest fee to join the artistic team

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as the official stenographer. As such, we have a transcript of the relevant conversation: Jackie:  We have a proposal. Who wants to talk? Do I have to do it? I always do the talking. China:  I’ll do it. So, look, this Rhinoceros, it’s pretty White, right? And Wittgenstein, like, also pretty White. Or totally White. All White. Do the rest of you see that? Brad:  I do now that you’re bringing it up. Chad:  (inaudible) Class Group:  (sounds of general agreement) China:  So but we didn’t have to pick him, I mean we could have chosen a black philosopher . . . Isis:  . . . Like Angela Davis or George Yancy or Frantz Fanon or bell hooks. Chad:  Who’s Angela Davis? Beth:  Who’s bell hooks? Isis:  Really?? Oh my god. China:  Our point is . . . oh . . . I don’t want to do this. Jackie:  Come on, come on. The point is . . . ok, like Wittgenstein says: Look! What do you see when you look at Rhinoceros? Do you see any people in it that look like us? Do you think Wittgenstein and Russell thought at all about us or about George Floyd or Beyoncé and Jay-Z buying Basquiat paintings or anything like that? China:  And so like I’m also in this reading group where we’re reading AphroIsm: essays in feminism, pop culture, and Black Veganism by two sisters. The sisters are Aph and Syl Ko . . . Brad:  . . . What’s black veganism? Class group:  (conglomeration of sounds that basically add up to ‘not now Brad’) China: No, no, that’s the point. Brad. That’s the point. Black Veganism. The sisters argue that racism is underpinned by the imaginary hierarchy between humans and animals but that when people say ‘human’ they almost always mean white people. And also that black people have been equated with animals. Or really everyone Other is some form of non-human animal. And, like, it’s a complicated argument but the point is . . . black veganism puts race into the practice of veganism, which is also almost always white . . . Isis:  . . . Maybe we’ll learn something about performance and philosophy through this project, but what will an audience see who looks at the stage? Jackie:  And tell them about the back cover thing. China:  Right, so I’m looking at the pictures of the sisters on the back cover and it says that Syl Ko is working on a book about Wittgenstein and animals! Chad: So? China:  Well, what are the chances? I mean it’s clearly a sign that we’re on to something, right? . . .

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Jimmy K.:  Ok. Ok. This is all really interesting but, like, what’s the proposal? Jackie:  We want to add some sources to the mix. China:  We want to add them and feature them because, what, what if, like, imagine you saw a production of Rhinoceros where all the black actors turned into rhinos but the white actors didn’t. Or like the dead cats. Imagine the discussion about the dead cat and the cat with three paws coming from two black people. Wouldn’t it change the meaning? Jackie:  We want to add Aphro-Ism, and also a book by George Yancy called Look! A White! and . . . what was the other one? Isis:  The Black Book: Wittgenstein and Race by Richard A. Jones.

The proposal was accepted. From those books, the students selected three specific ideas to incorporate into the devised theatre piece. The first took the form of a performance lecture that interrupted the first conversation between Ionesco’s Old Man and Logician. Isis, wearing a leopard print suit, spoke into a microphone: ‘Wittgenstein says, “Philosophy gives no picture of reality.” Why is this important for Black philosophers and their students?’ What followed was a summary of Richard A. Jones’s argument in chapter two, ‘Models, kites, and simulacra’. Call reality ‘A’. How do we understand A? If we look to pictures of reality developed by dominant models (like the kind we find in Philosophy classes), then we have a problem. Dominant models present themselves as the only picture that comes close to A. Black people, however, don’t fit that model. What would it look like to teach only models developed by black people? What would it look like to only teach Wittgenstein through Richard A. Jones? For starters, Wittgenstein’s ideas would certainly be recast within the world as experienced by people dominated by whiteness. Is it possible in establishing new models for African American philosophy that it need not be based upon the model that Western philosophy has provided? A model that always misses the mark? By using Wittgensteinian picture theory along with his ideas concerning models, African American philosophers gain degrees of freedom in creating new philosophical paradigms, both theoretically and practically (Jones 2013, 24).

A new model would be something like a Theatre of the Absurd that expressed the absurd reality black people were forced to live in during the late 1950s in the United States. A new model would be a version of Rhinoceros where Botard is that guy who refuses to admit that police kill black people because they like to. Botard, sceptical of what he reads in the newspaper of the so-called pachyderm sighting, which appears in the dead cats column, refuses to acknowledge what he doesn’t see. But he doesn’t see because he doesn’t look. He doesn’t look because he thinks. The models he thinks

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through actually foreclose any ability to see what’s right there in front of him. Because he thinks, he knows the world wrongly. Even when everyone else yells, ‘I saw it’, Botard doesn’t flinch because his logic denies all that falls into the (self-made) category of the improbable or the absurd. The second part was Wittgenstein’s ‘forms of life’ argument. (By sheer coincidence, the stenographer’s cat died and so she was unable to transcribe this portion of the students’ presentation. Aware of the profundity of the coincidence, the students wrote short obituaries for this cat they never knew and submitted them for publication in Cat Fancy. [The publication doesn’t publish obituaries.])

LOOK! A WHITE! Isis reminds the group that there are a handful of species of rhinos, two of which are the black and the white rhino. She’s well aware that Wikipedia isn’t a favoured source of teachers, and yet look at what Wikipedia tells us about these black and white animals. The black rhinoceros was originally named Diceros bicornis by Carl Linnaeus in 1758. The name harbours some mystery, however, because it is likely that this ‘two-horned’ rhino was actually identified from the skull of (a dead) Rhinoceros unicornis to which a collector had manually affixed a second horn. This species of (not really) bi-horned rhino, though ranging in colours from grey to brown, became seen as just plain old black, which Isis supposes refers to a certain kind of unspecified darkness. Hence: black rhino (?). Isis adds that Linnaeus also identified four varieties of Man, one of which was the Africanus niger, whose medical temperament was phlegmatic and lazy; physical characteristics included swollen lips and profusely lactating breasts (among the females); behaviour was noted as sly, sluggish, and neglectful; and is governed by individual caprice. Then Isis discusses the equally misnamed white rhino. (Of note: she was wearing a ‘save the White rhino’ T-shirt during this presentation, which, Chad figured, must have been custom printed because the singular capitalization of White felt too uncanny to be a serendipitous occurrence.) In 1868, John Edward Gray anointed one of the rhino species Ceratotherium simum, literally a ‘flat-nosed, horned beast’. There are stories about how a mishearing of the Dutch word wijd (as in ‘wide-mouthed’) led to the name White Rhino, but, as with the Black Rhino, the active adjective seems to refer to a general lightness in appearance that differentiates this particular species from others. And then Isis seamlessly transitions into a microlecture on George Yancy’s 2012 book, Look! A White! The title functions to ‘flip the script’ produced

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through the exclamation, Look! A Negro!, which interpellated a young Frantz Fanon into the racial power hierarchies of his day. As in Fanon’s case, where the exclamation smuggled in the fear and anxieties of a young white child, Yancy’s book title is intended to stir up the fears and anxieties of white people that come along with being marked as racial beings. Additionally, however, the title (and the book) is offered as a gift to white people, an opportunity to come to grips with the invisible scripts and related performances that produce whiteness as a kind of ferociously violent and thoroughly manufactured system of containment that poses as a natural order. The group is then instructed to break into pairs in order to analyse the following excerpt of Yancy’s introduction: ‘Look, a white!’ also points to the historical white regulatory, anti-miscegenation norms that produced white bodies. ‘Look, a white!’ points to ‘the [white racist] discursive rules and regulations that dictated the biological chain that produced these hands, these eyes, and skin tone’ that have become privileged as beautiful, normative, white. ‘Look, a white!’ assiduously nominates white bodies within the context of a stream of history dominated by white racism. ‘Look, a white!’ unveils the ways in which white bodies are linked to white discursive practices and racist power relations that define those white bodies. ‘Look, a white!’ signifies ‘compulsory repetitions [that] construct illusory origins of [whiteness] that function as regulatory regimes to keep [whites] within a particular grid of intelligibility by governing and punishing nonnormative behavior, interpellating [whites] back into the normative discourse [and back into normative spaces]’. ‘Look, a white!’ dares to mark those whites who deem themselves ‘ethically superior’ because they have a ‘better’ grasp of the operations of white racism than those other complacent whites. ‘Look, a white!’ makes those whites who see themselves as radically ‘progressive’ now that they are able to confess their racism publicly or because they publicly demonstrate intellectual savvy in how they engage whiteness with sophistication. As intimated previously, ‘Look, a white!’ militates against its reduction to identifying singular, individual, international acts of racism only. Instead ‘Look, a white!’ also identifies ‘what one is in a social framework or system of social categorizations.’ In this way, ‘Look, a white!’ does not open the door to facile claims about symmetrically hurtful racial stereotypes, ‘reverse discrimination,’ and the rhetoric of a so-called color-blind, perpetrator perspective. ‘Look, a white!’ marks such moves as sites of obfuscation, revealing them as forms of ‘mystificatory digression from the clearly asymmetrical and enduring system of white power itself’. (Yancy, 11–12)7

A quietness descends upon the class. It’s partly the concentration needed to take in a host of challenging words and concepts strung together in complex discursive prose (not only the participants for whom English is not their first language look a little bewildered). One student – wearing a beetle/Beatles hoodie – appears to be scrolling on their phone, perhaps to find an audio file of

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the book to listen to later? (The teachers find this somewhat irksome; they feel resistance to the idea that hearing a text is equivalent to reading it – how do you hover over a word or go over a sentence? Isn’t the pace of an audiobook too fast for the mind to keep up with? . . . ‘But what choice is there? We must keep up with the times!’, says the head of department.) But it’s also clearly the thought itself expressed in Yancy’s book that brings a shift in the atmosphere. The seminar room is now hot and stuffy, a fly can be heard bashing against the window. Someone gets up to open it, but the handle seems to be broken. There’s no leverage. A student from the back of the room shouts, ‘It’s not broken, it just ain’t supposed to work!’ Another person mumbles ‘damned A/C’. Before the session closes students are given homework for next week: they are to select a sentence or two from Yancy’s book, a Wittgenstein quote, and/ or a scene from Rhinoceros – each is to be written on a flashcard so that next week the class can play Combinations to generate material for the devised play. Chad (mumbles):  Sounds a bit random to me. Nico (quick to counter):  Random is not necessarily bad .  .  . think Tarot cards, think ChatGPT. . . . It’s not how you get the things but how you connect them that makes meaning, right? Franzi:  Yeah, I hear it’s how some professors even write whole essays: they draw three random books from the bookshelf, open three random pages . . . connect the dots, job done! Maria:  Really? I would have thought there was more to it than that! Franzi:  ‘Na, I heard about it, someone did research on it . . . there’s a book on the secrets of how academics read and write . . .’8 Maria (musing):  I see . . . who would have thought . . .?

During next session the flashcards are collected and shuffled. The first draw reads, as can be seen in Table 4.1. ​ The second draw reads, as can be seen in Table 4.2. ​ The card game works to get a good discussion going. Perhaps it’s the playfulness of it that allows certain inhibitions to be dropped. The next session will be when threads are drawn together and dramaturgical decisions addressed. But ‘next week’ has yet to happen as it keeps on being postponed. The university faculty is now on strike in response to the news that the Theatre and Philosophy departments (along with programs in Literature, American Studies, and Gender Studies) are to be closed indefinitely due to restructuring at the university. ‘If a lion [cat] could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it’ (Wittgenstein, PI 327).

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Table 4.1   ‘Look, a white!’ dares to mark those whites who deem themselves ‘ethically superior’ because they have a ‘better’ grasp of the operations of white racism than those other complacent whites. George Yancy, Look! A White!

Jean: ‘Bérenger, you’re A picture held us clinging to a dying captive. And we could breed. The rhinoceroses not get outside it, for are the future. Join us, it lay in our language and you’ll be part of and language seemed something greater.’ to repeat it to us Bérenger: ‘I’d rather be inexorably. part of a dying breed Ludwig Wittgenstein, than lose my humanity. Philosophical I won’t abandon my Investigations principles for the sake of conformity.’ Eugène Ionesco, Rhinoceros

Table 4.2   There are some, perhaps many, Jean: ‘Bérenger, who will say, ‘Look, a white!’ is don’t you see? The too general; it lacks specificity; rhinoceroses represent it essentializes all whites. For a new order, a new them the construction ‘Look, a way of life. It’s time white!’ is too homogenous and to shed our human problematically reifies whiteness limitations and as a ‘thing’, obscuring its embrace our true historicity and plurality. potential.’ Bérenger: ‘I can’t believe George Lancy, Look! A White! you’re saying this! They’re destroying everything we hold dear, our values, our humanity!’ Jean: ‘Humanity is flawed, Bérenger. The rhinoceroses are a sign of progress, a chance for us to break free from our limitations and achieve a higher state of being.’ Eugène Ionesco, Rhinoceros

‘Don’t for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

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NOTES 1. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York: Vintage, pp. 39–40. 2. https://www​.openculture​.com​/2015​/05​/ludwig​-wittgensteins​-short​-strange​ -brutal​-stint​-as​-an​-elementary​-school​-teacher​.html (last retrieved 31 December 2022) 3. This might be apocryphal. See Norbert Rosner’s memoir in F.A. Flowers and Ian Ground (eds.): Portraits of Wittgenstein, 2018: 152–53. 4. Lawrence Beyer, ‘“Don’t think, but look!”: Wittgenstein (& James) on Method’ in Paul Weingartner, Gerhard Schurz, & Georg Dorn, eds., The Role of Pragmatics in Contemporary Philosophy, vol. 1 (Kirchberg am Wechsel: The Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, 1997), pp. 53–59, p. 54. 5. Op cit. p. 57. 6. Op cit. p. 58. 7. Isis included this footnote after the Yancy citation: ‘I don’t know how to use MLA and, truthfully, I don’t care. BUT: I want you to know the names of the other folx mentioned here, so check out these things: John T. Warren, “Performing Whiteness Differently: Rethinking the Abolitionist Project,” Educational Theory 51, no. 4 (2001); Alecia Youngblood Jackson, “Performativity Identified,” Qualitative Inquiry 10, no. 5 (2004); Steve Martinot, The Machinery of Whiteness: Studies in the Structure of Racialization (2010).’ Alice and Will both noted that she had in fact come pretty close to the ‘correct’ citation format but didn’t want to spoil anything – it wasn’t the right moment to be pedantic – and so didn’t say anything. 8. The mentioned research is potentially to be included in an imagined sequel to a recently published book on what it feels like to read and think. Cf. Veronika Reichl: Das Gefühl zu Denken. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2023.

REFERENCES Beyer, Lawrence: “Don’t Think, But Look!”: Wittgenstein (& James) on Method. In: Paul Weingartner, Gerhard Schurz, & Georg Dorn (eds.): The Role of Pragmatics in Contemporary Philosophy, vol. 1, Kirchberg am Wechsel: The Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, 1997. Fanon, Frantz: Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Flowers, I. A. & Ian Ground (eds.), Portraits of Wittgenstein. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Jones, Richard A.: The Black Book: Wittgenstein and Race. Lanham: University Press of America, 2013. Ko, Aph & Syl Ko: Aphro-Ism: Essays in Feminism, Pop Culture, and Black Veganism. New York: Lantern Books, 2017. Monk, Ray: Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York: Vintage, 1991. Reichl, Veronika: Das Gefühl zu Denken. Berlin: Matthes und Seitz, 2023.

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & Joachim Schulte, Revised fourth edition by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. Yancy, George: Look! A White! Philosophical Essays on Whiteness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012.

Chapter 5

The Stage of Thoughts Ludwig Wittgenstein and Josef Nadj Veronika Darida

The main subject of this chapter is an encounter, or more precisely the encounter, between the thoughts of a philosopher and a choreographer. In the first part of the chapter, I will briefly outline Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of theatre, recalling the philosopher’s relationship with arts, his interest in Shakespeare, followed by a brief overview concerning his Cambridge University lectures, which themselves could be interpreted as a kind of performance, and finally, the stage of his writings. In the second part, I discuss an interpretation of Wittgenstein by Josef Nadj, a widely acclaimed choreographer in the contemporary dance world,1 presented in a theatre masterclass in Lisbon (Almada), and later published in book form under the title Theatre and the Invisible;2 and his subsequent workshop with the Studio K Theatre in Budapest, which also draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The audiences for the two events were different: while in Lisbon (with a few exceptions) the sessions were attended by enthusiastic amateurs interested in theatre, the theatrical workshop in Budapest lasted several weeks and was attended by professional actors, all members of the small company. But the artist’s aim was the same: to show his essential connection with this ‘style of thinking’, and to treat the philosophical texts as stage sketches. Or, more precisely, as if they were ‘sketches of landscape’.3 Similar to this ambition, I will seek to show that theatricality is not far from philosophical thinking, and that philosophical theorizing can be an inspiration for theatre practice. THE THEATRE OF LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN Many major philosophers of the twentieth century dealt with the theatre of their time; however, Wittgenstein was not one of them. One finds only 61

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occasional examples of theatre in his writings, since he was probably more interested in all the other forms of art.4 Is it even possible to talk about Wittgenstein’s theatre? If we are not referring to existing theatrical practice, but to an imaginary stage, which, as a kind of philosophical performance, is realized in the scene of academic lectures and writing, then yes. To do this, however, we must first briefly consider the aesthetic and ethical background of a possible Wittgensteinian conception of theatre. When we talk about Wittgenstein’s aesthetics, we are also talking about his ethics, if we take seriously the only aesthetic thesis of his first major work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), which states that ‘ethics and aesthetics are one and the same’ (6.421). This does not mean that they have the same subject matter, but that both are beyond the limits of language. (‘It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental’ [6.421].) In other words, both ethics and aesthetics belong to the realm of the inexpressible. As Culture and Value (Wittgenstein’s surviving notes in his manuscript legacy, which include many reflections on art) puts it: ‘In art it is hard to say anything that is as good as: saying nothing.’5 Nevertheless, during his years at Cambridge, Wittgenstein gives lectures on ethics (c. 1929–1930) and aesthetics (1938), but does not discuss them as a science, but rather addresses the use of their basic concepts (the good and the beautiful), which can be applied to multiple subjects and therefore lead to misunderstandings. According to Wittgenstein, the ethical experience consists mainly in the astonishment of ‘how extraordinary that the world should exist’,6 whereas the linguistic expression of this is meaningless, since it violates the limits of language. Just as words cannot describe the impression that a poem or a musical act evokes in us, it is our facial expressions or gestures that attest to this experience. Thus, our responses to a work of art are gestures in the same way that artworks are gestures. (‘This musical phrase is a gesture for me. It creeps into my life. I make it my own.’7) Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Aesthetics do not touch on the traditional basic problems of aesthetics (e.g. the question of aesthetic judgement or the question of taste). Instead, they reveal some aesthetic reactions, such as the feelings of distress, confusion, or even satisfaction that we feel upon seeing a work of art (e.g. the feeling of ‘Oh, yes!’ or ‘Quite so!’ during the performance of a piece of music at the right tempo). Wittgenstein’s objective with this unusual approach is changing the style of thinking.8 However, we must add that although, in the philosopher’s view, there is no such thing as a science of ethics or aesthetics, this does not mean that they do not define our everyday practices or represent a particular lifestyle.9 Many analyses emphasize the ethical content of Wittgenstein’s entire oeuvre, where ethics is manifested in listening and in action (e.g. in Wittgenstein’s volunteering to fight at the front, or to act as a nurse or as a public educator).

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And although the literature on aesthetics claims that it was not at the centre of Wittgenstein’s philosophical interests, all interpreters acknowledge that art played an important role in his life. Music in particular, since during his childhood several composers (Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss) paid visits to the home of a wealthy art-loving family, while his brother was Paul Wittgenstein, the famous pianist. Ludwig himself also played the clarinet, so it is not a surprise that he mostly uses musical examples in his writings. He is strongly interested in the parallels of musical, mathematical, and architectural thinking, since each of them is characterized by constructions. A piece of music can be understood by following it through, that is, by playing it in one’s own mind (let us add that the Tractatus also presents a strict architectural structure, its movements being traversed like a ladder that can eventually be thrown away). In the field of art, Wittgenstein also demonstrates his talent as an architect (he builds a country house for himself in Norway and a modernist house for his sister in Vienna), while also showing an interest in photography and experimenting with sculpture. As a writer, his style is far from being mannered and is characterized by simplicity, precision, and a particular feeling of rhythmicity (he often emphasizes that his sentences should be read at the correct tempo, i.e. slowly). His literary taste tends to be conservative (he is an avid reader of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky), but he uses his inheritance to support contemporary poets (he offers scholarships to Rilke and Trakl). According to one of his most enigmatic notes, ‘really one should write philosophy only as one writes a poem’.10 On the subject of theatre, Wittgenstein’s taste for drama was shaped by the world of the Burgtheater (with performances of Grillparzer, Nestroy, Ferdinand Raimund), thus it is no wonder that he is more concerned with imaginary scenes than real, existing theatres. This is how Karl Kraus’s monumental literary drama The Last Days of Mankind catches his attention, and of which he writes: ‘I think today there could be a form of theatre played in masks. The characters would be just stylized human beings. In Kraus’s writings this can be clearly seen. His pieces could be, or should be, performed in masks.’11 The masked theatre described here is not intended to be an imitation of reality, but rather an expression of an intellectual character. In this imaginary theatre, movements and gestures would probably play a much greater role. In Wittgenstein’s sporadic reflections on the theatre, there is one playwright whose name recurs again and again: William Shakespeare. He begins to study the works of this English giant of poetry under the influence of his architect friend Paul Engelmann. According to a note from 1939, Shakespeare ‘displays the dance of human passions’.12 However, his attitude to his plays is highly ambivalent. This is evident upon reading a note from 1946: ‘If e.g. I hear expressions of admiration for Shakespeare made by the distinguished

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men of several centuries, I can never rid myself of a suspicion that praising him has been a matter of convention.’13 Or we could also quote one of his reflections from 1950: ‘It seems to me as though his pieces are, as it were, enormous sketches, not as though they were dashed off by someone who could permit himself anything, so to speak. And I understand how someone may admire this and call it supreme art, but I don’t like it.’14 George Steiner, in his study entitled Wittgenstein and Shakespeare,15 emphasizes this rejection and argues that Wittgenstein finds Shakespeare’s works lack ethical value. This is, however, a debatable position, given the philosopher’s ethical view that we have just discussed. The approaches that emphasize the parallels between Shakespeare and the late Wittgenstein are much more exciting. According to the recollections of his students, the motto of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was intended to be a quotation from King Lear (‘I will teach you differences’). In his notes written at this time, Wittgenstein often repeats that Shakespeare should be read as one looks at a beautiful landscape. Moreover, he compares the Philosophical Investigations to an album: ‘The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings.’16 Also relating to the analogy of landscape, he writes about his own teaching in his manuscript notes: ‘I am showing my pupils sections of an immense landscape, which they cannot possibly find their way around.’17 Wittgenstein’s fragments, written towards the end of his life, no longer portray Shakespeare as a poet, but as a linguist whose greatness is not to be found in his individual writings but in the whole of his works: ‘If Shakespeare is great, then he can be so only in the whole corpus of his plays, which create their own language and world.’18 This in turn recalls Wittgenstein’s vast and unfinished corpus. It is important to underline that the reading of Shakespeare from Wittgenstein’s point of view also opened up new perspectives in the interpretation of Shakespeare, especially in the writings of Stanley Cavell and his aftermath. (Géza Kállay’s great analyses of Shakespeare and Wittgenstein can be included here.)19 It was also Cavell who noticed that Philosophical Investigations was in fact a continuation of the philosophical tradition of confessional literature that began with St Augustine.20 The latter-day style of Wittgenstein displays several characteristics of confessions: the author confronts the errors haunting him, while at the same time he wants to abandon them, beginning a new life (‘A confession has to be part of one’s new life’21). The confessor’s objective is to achieve clarity and to be cruelly honest with himself. The confession is therefore a test involving many risks, since the author does not seek to conceal, but to openly reveal his inner confusion. It is disturbing to see how often the threat of madness appears in the philosopher’s notes (‘If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the

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health of our understanding by madness’22). Wittgenstein is well aware that the excessive desire for truth is analogous to madness (‘someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie’23), but still he consistently strives for it. However, in contrast to the Augustinian Confessions, these investigations no longer presuppose a divine spectator, but instead are conversations of the philosopher with himself (his various selves, masks, personas). Wittgenstein’s legendary university lectures, which were far from being academic, were also characterized by this dialogical form. This is not by accident, since Wittgenstein, who gave lectures at Cambridge (between 1930 and 1947), hated university life and the usual philosophical lifestyle, while insisting that no sane person would ever be a university lecturer. Through the recollections of his student and biographer Norman Malcolm,24 we can gain an insight into Wittgenstein’s courses, which mostly resembled philosophical performances, as they consisted of ideas put on stage (or on an irregular cathedra). The main attraction of the lectures was that the philosopher contemplated in front of the audience. Wittgenstein always gave his lectures without preparation or notes, as he considered written ideas to be rigid and dead. He used to sit on a simple wooden stool in the middle of the room. He usually spoke emphatically, with strong accentuation and a lively expression. However, there were times when he became embarrassed and even expressed it (‘I am a fool!’, ‘You have a dreadful teacher!’, ‘I’m just too stupid today’25). At the same time, the lessons were genuinely dialogical, even downright interrogative. Wittgenstein often asked questions of the audience and then responded to the answers. He took each contribution seriously, so he often remained silent for long periods, but these were not pauses, on the contrary, they were intense and tense silences. However, the full picture is that he was also a formidable teacher, impatient and irritable; although according to his students, this was driven by a passionate search for truth. He would not tolerate any expedience or compromise of any kind, seeking to clarify and resolve problems as fully as possible. It is therefore understandable that after his lectures twice a week he became physically exhausted, so he and his students went to the cinema immediately afterwards, where he would exclusively watch American films, from the front row (as Malcolm cites: ‘once he whispered to me, this is like a shower bath’26). If we consider these lectures as performative events, it is also worth reflecting on the role of the audience. It has already been mentioned that they actively assisted with their attention and questions during each session. Although Wittgenstein did not only hold his lectures for a narrow circle of students, regular attendance was a prerequisite, there was no such thing as a one-off visit. At the same time, he enjoyed to discuss philosophical questions ‘with friends’, so it was important for him that there were always some ‘friendly faces’ in the audience.27 This was probably a kind of consolation for

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him, as Malcolm says that Wittgenstein’s thoughts were mostly gloomy, and he was constantly depressed by the feeling that it was impossible to reach full understanding in philosophy. On the stage of writing, in the fragmented forms used by Wittgenstein, this unfinished, endless dialogue continues. It is particularly true of the Philosophical Investigations, where perspectives are constantly changing, multiple voices are heard, and we witness imaginary scenes. As the reader him- or herself also enters the realm of linguistic games, observing the reasoning of the characters, formulating their own arguments, and becoming a new actor (which is why Philosophical Investigations can serve as a repository of improvisational exercises for actors).28 Yet we must also acknowledge that nothing could be further from the previously envisioned ‘masked theatre’ than these very specific, ordinary scenes. However, one of the most beautiful scenes of the ‘theatre of life’ sketched by the late Wittgenstein can already be found in an earlier reflection: Let’s imagine a theatre, the curtain goes up and we see someone alone in his room walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, seating himself etc. so that suddenly we are observing a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves; as if we were watching a chapter from a biography with our own eyes, – surely this would be at once uncanny and wonderful. More wonderful than anything that a playwright could cause to be acted or spoken on the stage. We should be seeing life itself.29

We might add, of course, as Wittgenstein also does, that this is something we witness every day, without having any effect on us. Indeed, comes the reply, ‘but we do not see it from that point of view’.30 And therein lies the specificity of Wittgenstein’s theatre. A life or thought put on the stage of philosophy is not another life or thought; it is only the change of perspective that shows it to be so. It is through the new aspect that emerges thereby that we are able to marvel at the very fact of life, its most mundane things, its most ordinary gestures – be it the lives of others or our own personal existence. Perhaps such a scene flashed before the eyes of the dying Wittgenstein, as after a life he was fighting through with his own ideas, he told to his disciples (the faithful spectators of his theatre of solitude) on his deathbed: ‘I’ve had a wonderful life.’31 JOSEF NADJ’S INVISIBLE THEATRE In the second part of this chapter, I examine a specific theatrical research and rehearsal process, whose starting point is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The dancer-choreographer Josef Nadj, who was born in Vojvodina but works

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mainly in France, held a masterclass in Lisbon (at the invitation of the Municipal Theater Joaquim Benite, Almada) in the summer of 2021, the material of which was later published in book form. He gave five lectures to interested participants. One of the main subjects of the course was the difficulty of beginning, which defines every work of art, be it philosophical or theatrical. Arguably, no one knew the difficulty of beginning better than Wittgenstein.32 As Josef Nadj notes in his latest work in progress: I’ve been working on an idea for nine months. How long can we deal with or talk about an idea to come? This idea I’m developing takes as its point of departure the philosopher Wittgenstein. He says something I think is important to share: ‘I would like to write a philosophy book about the beginning.’ The beginning is really important. You have to insist that the first gesture is decisive for developing the idea.33

It is important to emphasize that this is not the first time that Josef Nadj has used philosophical texts as a starting point for his works. He is constantly inspired by the works of Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Georges Didi-Huberman, among others, but this is the first time he has chosen Wittgenstein as his point of reference. In this case, he is not only concerned with the oeuvre but also with the life story full of inner struggles. At the moment Wittgenstein is the focus of my research. I can’t sum up his philosophy, but I am going to try to tell you some details of his life that inspire me as much as his philosophical work. The drama of a genius, because he was born too intelligent. . . . The world has or has had very few geniuses like him, who managed to see the whole picture and get through it. His drama is so strong that he couldn’t find another option except to finish it, which is why he attempted suicide several times. Also for that reason, he tried several times to immerse himself in his philosophical reflections and production. Luckily, he neither committed suicide nor interrupted his philosophical work.34

During the course, the choreographer mostly recalls stories related to the first phase of Wittgenstein’s life, and the controversial relationship between him and his master Bertrand Russell, one of which is like a scene from a theatrical play: When the war ended, Bertrand Russell invited Wittgenstein to visit Cambridge. They met in Russell’s room, which immediately became a theatre set. They discussed logic and philosophy, and Russell stated the following: ‘It is as certain as there not being a rhinoceros in the room.’ But Wittgenstein asked: ‘How can you be sure there isn’t a rhinoceros in the room?’ Russell answered: ‘Of course there isn’t. Can you see a rhinoceros in the room?’ Wittgenstein stood up, made for the door, and before leaving, said, ‘You cannot be sure there isn’t

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a rhinoceros in the room.’ And he left. This was the first meeting of the two philosophers. A great piece of theatre.35

However, for Josef Nadj, there is something of greater interest than these theatrical episodes; namely, Wittgenstein’s doubt which prevents him from publishing another work after the publication of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, since he can never consider his forthcoming work as complete. Twenty years passed in research. An English publisher asked Wittgenstein for another edition of a book, but Wittgenstein asked: ‘How? How can I publish something that was right yesterday, but today is completely superseded?’ Later, his writings, gathered together in the book Philosophical Investigations, only appear after his death and were collected by his students. These texts gave rise to his second school. Imagine a director who takes twenty years to construct a show that he never presents because he doesn’t believe it’s ready to be shown and then, after his death, the show is staged and becomes a world theatre school!36

As the choreographer points out, this posthumous discovery is far more unimaginable in theatre. Theatre is the art of the present, so what is not born in this particular moment, in response to the challenges of the present, is unlikely to be born at any time in the future. Therefore, even if past concepts that have been left in a drawer are staged, they will almost certainly not respond to the actual issues of the present. Conversely, texts that were not intended for the stage at the time of their conception may later become stage texts or ideas that inspire performances. This is what happens with Wittgenstein’s writing entitled On Certainty, in Josef Nadj’s interpretation: Wittgenstein knew he was dying, he had cancer. In his final days he read a book by G. E. Moore, that poses the question: ‘Can I be sure this is my hand?’ And he answered him, writing On Certainty. This book begins with the reference to the hand. He wrote as fast as he could, then died. Note: this is pure theatre. Two of the most important philosophers arguing about the existence of the hand, it’s pure theatre, it’s the absurd. For many years I did not appreciate the absolute magnitude of all this, but now I realize the size of the question, when a philosopher who is on the verge of dying asks himself: ‘Is this my hand?’ It is an immensely poetic question.

Wittgenstein’s doubt, expressed here, also prompts the dancer-choreographer, who has worked with his body all his life, to look differently at his own hand and its gestures: ‘I began to look at my hands differently, the hands that have accompanied me all my life, the hands with which I write and draw,

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with which I live. What relationship do I have with my hands? How can I assert that a part of me belongs to me?’37 It is worth noting at this point that gesture is a central theme not only in Nadj’s dance theatre, but also in his other visual art activities (especially in his photographs and drawings). In his view, art never explains, it only shows. It reveals something that would otherwise remain invisible (hence the idea of the Invisible Theatre). Nevertheless, according to the artist, we can look at Wittgenstein’s doubt with different eyes. We can see in him not only uncertainty, but also the spirit of philosophy that questions all certainties, a radical openness to new insights. As Nadj confirms: ‘Wittgenstein reached the end of his life with no kind of certainty whatsoever. That was his drama, but it is also extraordinarily beautiful; he left behind his life, his work, absolutely open.’38 In addition to all this, there is another feature of Wittgenstein’s thinking that is also decisive for Josef Nadj: the turn towards poetry. He also has created numerous choreographies on the poems of Otto Tolnai (Ladders of Orpheus, Wilhelm’s Songs), Osip Mandelstam (Cherry-Brandy), Paul Celan (Atem), thus it is no coincidence that he highlights Wittgenstein’s interpretations of poetry in his lectures. There’s another detail I consider fascinating. During the period when he taught, often during the classes, when he couldn’t find a line of formulation that he judged correct, he would turn to poetry. In poetry he found an unspeakable solution to the problem he was wrestling with. From the accounts of some of his pupils, we know he quoted poems by Rabindranath Tagore and Georg Trakl. Trakl was even supported financially by Wittgenstein. There’s part of a poem by Trakl I read recently that I would like to share with you: ‘Beside the primordial water, a man bangs his head against the door.’ Only a poet can speak of this primordial water. For a philosopher it is much more complex, almost impossible. Wittgenstein was perhaps someone who would never reach the other side of the door, he would always be banging his head against it, but would never pass through.39

This longer passage presents Wittgenstein’s and Nadj’s common endeavour of seeking a new language (philosophical or theatrical). Just as all genuine poetry creates a new language, so does all original philosophy or theatre. Obviously, in case of poetry, philosophy, and theatre, these are incomplete/ unfinished endeavours. At least, this is what Josef Nadj demonstrates with his own example. If I had to say at what point I am in my life, I would say I am that head. I need to pass through that door in order to make a play that I know is impossible to make, and if I am faithful to Wittgenstein, it will never have an ending. I accept that work, I’m going to make a play I shall never première for the first time in

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my life. I shall work on the material, but without that formal obligation of making a closed show.40

Not surprisingly, the choreographer’s next work is also a radically open project. He started this with a company of an independent theatre in Budapest (Studio K) in the autumn of 2021, and rehearsals continued in the spring of 2021. Although now suspended for a while, they are far from over. In fact, rehearsal is not the right word for this process, which draws on the ideas formulated in the Lisbon masterclass. This current workshop also started with Wittgenstein’s philosophical texts (excerpts from On Certainty) and then turned to Francis Ponge’s poetry (poems from the volume On the Side of Things). This theatre research led to the rediscovery of the theatre of the absurd, partly according to the understanding of Ponge, who criticizes Albert Camus’s notion of the absurd for not addressing the problem of linguistic expression, namely that ‘our means of expression are unreliable, that it is impossible to express ourselves or anything else’.41 The real theatre of the absurd is therefore an awareness of the experience of failure. The experience of failure is akin to the thinking of Ponge and Wittgenstein, both of whom are confronted with failures of expression and description (although, as Ponge notes, ‘failure is never complete’). The experience of failure is also particular to the theatre, since a performance is never really complete; it is simply presented to the audience at a certain moment. Similarly to the poet and the philosopher, the theatre-maker is preoccupied with the problem of expression. How can theatre be a reflection of the world? How can it express reality or certainty? According to Nadj, if we want to remain faithful to the experience of failure, we must renounce the will to express or explain. Theatre does not explain anything, it only shows. It reveals the unusual, the unexpected, the unheard, and the invisible. It teaches us, as Wittgenstein said, ‘seeing from another point view’. It presents a different perspective, even if it seems absurd. In Lisbon, Josef Nadj concluded his masterclass by quoting freely an enigmatic Wittgensteinian thought,42 which simultaneously illustrates the thinking and operation of philosophy, poetry, and theatre. In the twentieth century, a philosophy school said: ‘It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’s raining.’ This is a valid discussion. Wittgenstein says something absolutely magical: ‘I sleep and I dream, I dream I’m saying it’s raining and I don’t believe it, but at the same time it is raining outside.’ What is the relationship between the affirmation and the world? When we are asleep, who speaks? It is pure Theatre of the Absurd.43

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Let us add that the most beautiful scene of the Theatre of the Absurd is also to be found in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again ‘I know that that’s a tree’, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: ‘This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.’44

As the quotation shows, the inquiry of the philosopher and the theatremaker is similar to that of a child or a naive mind (a madman) questioning the world. Both value open inquiry more than closed knowledge. Like his role model, the late creative period of Josef Nadj is characterized by an openendedness, a constant research and a dialogicity. A continuous and staged dialogue in which one of the most important current and future interlocutors is Ludwig Wittgenstein.

NOTES 1. About Josef Nadj, see Myriam Bloedé, Les Tombeaux de Josef Nadj (Paris: L’œil d’or, 2006), Veronika Darida, Eltérő színterek – Nagy József színháza (Budapest: Kijárat, 2017). 2. Josef Nadj, O teatro e o invísivel/Theatre of the Invisible (Almada: Companhia de Teatro de Almada, 2022). 3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell Ltd, 1968), VII. 4. As Malcolm Budd affirms, ‘Wittgenstein had a deep and enduring interest in at least two of the major art forms, literature and music.’ However, he does not mention theatre either. See Malcolm Budd, “Wittgenstein on Aesthetics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, ed. Oskari Kuusela, Marie McGinn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 775–795. 5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. Georg Henrik von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell Ltd, 1998), 26. 6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Lecture on Ethics,” accessed 1 September 2022, https://www​.wittgensteinproject​.org​/w​/index​.php​?title​=Lecture​_on​_Ethics 7. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 58. 8. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, ed. C. Barrett (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967) 9. See Bouveresse, Jacques. Wittgenstein: La Rime et la Raison (Science, Éthique et Esthétique). Paris: Minuit, 1973; and Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding. Edited by Garry L. Hagberg (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) 10. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 28. 11. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 14. 12. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 42.

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13. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 55. 14. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 98. 15. George Steiner, “Reading Against Shakespeare,” in No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1996 (London: Faber and Faber, 1997). 16. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, VII. 17. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 64. 18. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 89. 19. See Géza Kállay, “Nonsense and the Ineffable: Re-reading the Ethical Standpoint in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” Nordic Wittgenstein Review 1, no. 1 (August 2012): 103–130 and Kállay, “The New and Old Metaphysical Reading of Shakespeare,” in The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2018). 20. Cavell: The availability of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, Philosophical Review 71 (1962): 67–93. See also Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969) and The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 21. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 16. 22. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 50. 23. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 73. 24. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). 25. Malcolm, A Memoir, 25. 26. Malcolm, A Memoir, 26. 27. Malcolm, A Memoir, 27. 28. As suggests David G. Stern in his introduction to Philosophical Investigations (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 29. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 6. 30. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 6. 31. As Norman Malcolm confesses: ‘I am inclined to believe that his life was fiercely unhappy. Yet at the end himself exclaimed that it had been wonderful. To me it seems a mysterious and strangely moving utterance.’ Malcolm, A Memoir, 81. 32. As Wittgenstein writes: ‘It is difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not to try to go further back.’ See Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), 62e. 33. Nadj, Theatre and the Invisible, 134 34. Nadj, Theatre and the Invisible, 135. 35. Nadj, Theatre and the Invisible, 136. 36. Nadj, Theatre and the Invisible, 137. 37. Nadj, Theatre and the Invisible, 137. 38. Nadj, Theatre and the Invisible, 137. 39. Nadj, Theatre and the Invisible, 138. 40. Nadj, Theatre and the Invisible, 138. 41. Francis Ponge, Le Parti pris des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1942). 42. The exact quotation : ‘Someone who, dreaming, says “I am dreaming”, even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream “it is raining”, while it was in fact raining.’ See Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 90e.

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43. Nadj, Theatre and the Invisible, 150. 44. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 61e.

REFERENCES Ambroise, Alice, ed. Wittgenstein’s Lectures. Cambridge 1932–35. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979. Bloedé, Myriam. Les Tombeaux de Josef Nadj. Paris: L’Oeil d’Or, 2006. Budd, Malcolm. “Wittgenstein on Aesthetics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, edited by Oskari Kuusela and Marie McGinn, 275–295. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Cavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Say? New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969. ———. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Bouveresse, Jacques. Wittgenstein: La Rime et la Raison (Science, Éthique et Esthétique). Paris: Minuit, 1973. Darida, Veronika. Eltérő Színterek. Nagy József Színháza. Budapest: Kijárat, 2017. Malcolm, Norman. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. ———. Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? London: Routledge, 1993. Nadj, Josef. O Teatro e o Invisível/ Theatre and the Invisible. Almada: Companhia de Teatro de Almada, 2022. Steiner, George. No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1996. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Stern, David G. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Philosophy. Edited by Craig Bourne and Emily Caddick Bourne, London: Routledge, 2018. Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding. Edited by Garry L. Hagberg. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. A Selection from the Posthumous Remains. Rev. edn, edited by Georg Henrik von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, translated by Peter Winch. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. ———. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Edited by Cyril Barrett. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. ———. On Certainty. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. Wright, translated by Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969. ———. Philosophical Investigations. Rev. edn., translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1968. ———. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961.

Chapter 6

Encountering Wittgenstein Françoise Davoine

In a book that I wrote, entitled Wittgenstein’s Folly,1 Wittgenstein performs and speaks his own words, in the tone of voice he uses when he addresses the reader. The philosopher dialogues with a psychoanalyst – myself – confronted with patients reputed to be unreachable by psychoanalysis, and he interrupts the sessions by giving his point of view on what is going on. So, I thank Performance Philosophy for giving me the occasion to question the scenario that I imagined thirty years ago. I will describe how I met Wittgenstein – which is fictionalized in the book – and how putting the philosopher on the stage of such a ‘language game’ helped me in my work. THEATRE OF WAR I am not a philosopher. My training was in classical literature and sociology. Now retired, I belong to the EHESS (the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) in Paris. I first became a psychoanalyst practicing one day a week, for thirty years, in psychiatric hospitals and later turned to private practice. I also joined Lacan’s École Freudienne (the Freudian school). Then problems started. At that time not only did the two disciplines – sociology and psychoanalysis – not get along (opposing subjectivity and objectivity, the individual and the collective, etc.), but for psychoanalysis itself, even for Lacan, transference in cases of psychosis was problematic – except for child analysts like Winnicott and Françoise Dolto, who were able ‘to play’. These impasses have been overcome in practice when symptoms of traumatic revivals and psychosis were not considered a fixed structure, or a disease, but a way ‘to claim unclaimed experiences’, as Cathy Caruth describes it in the title of one of her books (2017). 75

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This claim may be expressed in a delusional way, as is the case for some patients in Wittgenstein’s Folly. I used to tell them: ‘Your delusion is a research on some catastrophe, and now it will become a co-research if we work together.’ How could I be so ‘sure’? Probably it had to do with a personal experience which, as Wittgenstein would say, is not a matter of ‘private life’. I was born during WWII in the Alps, in the midst of Resistance fighting, and somehow the madness of war was familiar from the beginning, as well as its therapy. I knew that to listen with benevolent neutrality was useless. Rather, you had to climb on the stage and act. Françoise Dolto learned her future job when she was six. Her beloved godfather was killed on the front in 1915. Looking around her, she saw women out of their wits from having lost their husbands and their sons. She climbed on that stage and declared that she was ‘a widow’ like them. As children are, she was a keen observer of what was going wrong around her, for those mothers and their kids. Later on, she used that knowledge and became a child therapist. During WWII she continued to practice, in contrast to Lacan who stopped his practice for the duration of the war. In The Unconscious Body Image (2022), she tells how she healed Léon, a Jewish boy unable to stand, as he spent his days attached to a chair in his parents’ clandestine workshop. Climbing on the stage of a theatre of death (which also recalls here the work of Tadeusz Kantor), she spoke to the chair and acknowledged its vital role against the threat of death all around. Soon after Léon walked by himself. The etymology of ‘therapist’ goes back to therapôn, an Homeric word which, in the Iliad, qualifies Patroclus for Achilles. It has two meanings: a second in combat and a ‘ritual double’, who gives burial to his comrade when he is killed. (This figure is discussed by Gregory Nagy, for instance, in The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours [2022], especially chapter 6.) At the time of WWII, I had not heard about Homer, but one of the first books I carried about with me was a colouring book featuring Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, his squire, who also performs the role of a second in combat, regularly falling with him to the ground where they begin a genuine talking cure. The therapôn is also the second in combat ‘against melancholia’, says Cervantes. Many years later, I read in Maurice Drury’s Conversations with Wittgenstein (Drury, 2019: 118) that the philosopher’s favourite book was Tristram Shandy, especially the character of Corporal Trim, the Sancho Panza of Captain Toby in Laurence Sterne’s novel, which is itself inspired by Don Quixote. Some authors of literature and philosophy are a great help, as they perform psychotherapy while wars and pandemics rage. After all, Descartes wrote the Discourse on Method as his ‘method’ to overcome the traumatic dreams which troubled him when he was a soldier during the terrible Thirty Years’ War. Socrates himself is presented by Alcibiades, at the end of the

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Symposium, as a front line soldier serving under his orders, who healed him when he was wounded and saved his companions from imminent death. I contend that the theatre of war I witnessed as a little child during WWII made me ‘see’ the healing performance of such philosophers and other authors as akin to my work with psychosis and traumas. But that happened after I encountered Wittgenstein.

ENCOUNTER WITH WITTGENSTEIN In the EHESS, it was mandatory to conduct a seminar on your research. So, during forty years, Jean-Max Gaudillière and I led a weekly seminar entitled ‘Madness and the Social Link’. Between our two disciplines, our aim was to show that psychosis was an exploration of ruptures in this link and that psychotherapy was a co-research to validate what patients found concerning these ruptures, in the forms of their social isolation. Of course, confidentiality made it impossible to speak of our clinical experience, so we chose to present each year in turn an author familiar with madness and historical catastrophes. In the 1980s, I was talking about Harry Stack Sullivan, a psychoanalyst of schizophrenia since the 1920s, having gone through such a lived experience himself during his adolescence. He was especially useful for us as he had always maintained contact with social scientists. One day, I was commenting on his statement that his young schizophrenic patients were keen observers of invisible, erased truths in social relationships. For him, addressing schizophrenia as a human process, ‘the interpersonal’ relationship of psychoanalysis manifested what had been silenced, on the condition that the analyst could act as a participant observer from his or her own experience. At that point, a member of the seminar intervened: ‘You should read Wittgenstein. He offers family resemblances with your Sullivan. Moreover, they are contemporaries.’ I answered that I had tried to read the Tractatus without much success. Undeterred, he advised me to read the Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’ and ‘Sense Data’ (Wittgenstein, 1968). On the first page, I was taken aback by a little theatrical scene in which the philosopher plays his part. He encounters someone with ‘a faraway look and a dreamy voice’, who cannot express their ‘inner feeling’. The philosopher enters the stage asking: ‘What is it that puzzles me in this matter?’ Then he starts a dialogue: ‘You say you have an intangible impression. I am not doubting what you say. But I question whether you have said anything by it. That is, what was the point of uttering these words, in what game?’ (Wittgenstein, 1968: 275). At once, I recognized the play. I saw the faraway look and heard the dreamy voice of a patient with whom I worked at the hospital. Later on she

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was eventually discharged and started a new life of her own, but at that time, she looked terrified, unable to express what she felt. In front of that silence, neutrality is of no avail. The philosopher discloses his own impressions in a situation ‘which plays hell with us’ (ibid.: 276). So, I went on reading. I was impressed by the dialogic performance of the Philosophical Investigations which impelled me to fill the spaces between the paragraphs with moments from my practice. If I missed that detour, I did not understand anything at all. I was in awe at discovering major bearings on the controversial topic of transference in psychosis and devoted two years of our seminars to that discovery, which I put on stage afterwards in Wittgenstein’s Folly. Still, I was worried that the Wittgenstein I had embodied in that book would be dismissed by real philosophers and that the psychoanalysis inspired by his teaching would seem unorthodox to real psychoanalysts, not to speak of the social scientists’ criticisms. Worse, in order to create his character, I had relied on just the few elements that I could gather about his life, since the biographies by Ray Monk and Brian McGuinness were only published after I had finished writing. By chance again, I met McGuinness when he came to Paris to present his book, Young Ludwig (1991–1921). After his talk, I went to introduce myself as a psychoanalyst and dared to confess what I had done with the philosopher, having him speak with very disturbed patients. To my utter surprise, he answered: ‘You know, he performed that role in reality.’ Then he explained, quoting an episode about which I did not know anything. When visiting his disciple Maurice O’Connor Drury in Dublin, who was a medical doctor, Wittgenstein had asked to be taken to Saint Patrick’s psychiatric hospital, in order to encounter patients who hardly ever received visits. McGuinness gave me the reference to the Conversations between Wittgenstein and Drury (Drury, 2019), which were not yet translated into French. I was so grateful that I rushed to find that information and was at once struck by the date when Wittgenstein decided to meet these confined patients who had no hope of meeting any one. They remained in total loneliness since otherness was destroyed by a ruthless agency which also struck the philosopher. His decision was taken in 1938, the year of the Anschluss and the destruction of the rights of Jews in his native country, a catastrophe akin to what these patients had gone through. Although, according to Drury, he seemed to adopt a non-committal attitude concerning the merging of millions of Austrians in a totalitarian system – an unprecedented event that Hannah Arendt calls ‘an experiment in total domination’ (1962: 392) – this attitude was tested when he was later in Berlin, negotiating to help his sisters, still living in Vienna, having established a new social tie for himself by becoming a British citizen in June 1939.

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During his stay in Dublin, he visited these patients several times a week and was so appreciated by them that he encouraged Drury to continue after he left. His recommendations to Drury were even given with a theatrical allusion, to Mozart’s Don Giovanni: ‘Don’t stand at the bottom of their bed as the statue of the Commendatore, but sit on a chair at their side and take the time to speak with them.’ He added that one of them, an elderly man, ‘was much more intelligent than his doctors’ (Drury, 2019: 123). During WWII, he continued to assume a therapeutic role by working as a dispensary porter for traumatized patients at Guy’s Hospital in London, even telling them not to take the mind-numbing drugs he was supposed to distribute (Monk, 1991: 432). I contend that by acting in such a manner he performed the philosophy he was writing, even if the Philosophical Investigations did not appear until 1953. The circumstances of this performance are not to be neglected. Indeed, some philosophers, psychoanalysts, writers, and artists rose to the occasion in circumstances which were truly unthinkable, in order to show and enact what was erased or denied in official discourses.

A NEW PERFORMANCE FOR THE HEALING OF TRAUMAS Another date, 1945, is that of the Preface of the Investigations. One of the last paragraphs reads: ‘I make them public with misgivings. It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another – but, of course, it is not likely’ (Wittgenstein, 2009: 4e). Freud too used almost the same terms in a Foreword dated 1938, just before his exile to London, when he was completing Moses and Monotheism under Nazi persecution (Freud, 1964: 54-56). Both compare an ‘older way of thinking’ (Wittgenstein, 2009: 4e) with their new way of thinking in the 1930s, in ‘the darkness of this time’ (ibid.). In 1933, Freud’s books had been burnt in an auto-da-fé at the Opera Square (Opernplatz) in Berlin. At the end of 1936, after the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Wittgenstein made a ‘confession’ to some friends about which little is known, except that he told them he was three-quarters Jewish. By breaking the secret of his grandfather’s conversion, he put himself at risk of falling under anti-Semitic attacks in Vienna, while creating a new social bond by claiming this ‘unclaimed experience’ in his family heritage. ‘Historical Truth’ is the title of one of the last chapters of Moses and Monotheism, in which Freud compares the threat of the destruction of psychoanalysis to the eradication of Pharaoh Akhenaton’s civilization. Its erasure, visible at Tell el-Amarna, is not a matter of repression but of suppression – a term already coined by William Rivers, a neurologist and anthropologist, who

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had become an analyst of traumatized officers when he was called up during WWI. Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy (1996), drawing on Rivers’s notebooks, puts him on stage performing his clinical work where he discovers that he needs tools other than mainstream psychoanalysis if the subject of historical truth, his patients’ cutting-out their experience of the trenches, was to emerge from annihilation. This dissociation, which allowed them to survive, is not that of the repressed unconscious. Freud himself had recognized this as early as 1907, commenting in Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ that in cases of delusion – and of traumatic revivals – the unconscious at work is not that of repressed desires, as articulated by signifiers according to Lacan, who defines that unconscious as, precisely, ‘the discourse of the Other’. When all otherness has been destroyed, when the given word is betrayed, the symbolic chain does not hold. The unconscious here is made of unspeakable sensorial images, recorded on the ‘seismograph’ of our soul, as the historian of Renaissance art, Aby Warburg, described it (Michaud, 2004: 305) – and who himself suffered a breakdown at the onset of WWI. In his delusion he showed what could not be said – the rise of mass anti-Semitism, that he had witnessed as a child in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 (Arendt, 1962: 40). At the beginning of the 1920s, while he was confined in the clinic of Ludwig Binswanger (a disciple of Freud’s), he shouted that his Jewish family would be deported and assassinated, and that he wanted to escape that hell (Warburg, 2003: 17). Binswanger promised to release him on the condition that he was able to give an hour’s lecture in front of the staff and the patients. Thanks to his disciple Fritz Saxl, who trusted his intelligence (whether scientific or delusional), Warburg succeeded in giving his lecture on The Serpent Ritual among the Hopis on 23 April 1923, which had a cathartic effect on him and he left the clinic the following year. The unconscious in that case looks for recognition of truths that nobody wants to see and needs the therapist to abandon benevolent neutrality in order to become a therapôn (‘a second in combat’) against a ruthless agency perpetrating ‘attacks on linking’. This expression was coined by Wilfred Bion, the British psychoanalyst and another veteran of WWI, in his analyses of forms of thinking in schizophrenia and psychosis, collected in Second Thoughts (Bion, 1967). In Warburg’s case, the role of therapôn was, indeed, played by his disciple Fritz Saxl, who visited him regularly after he was demobilized from WWI and helped him prepare for the famous Kreuzlingen lecture that attested to his return to the world of cultural research. This change of therapeutic technique had already been undertaken with traumatized soldiers during WWI by analysts who had been drafted into military hospitals, like Rivers in England, Sandor Ferenczi in Hungary, Thomas

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Salmon in the United States, and Frieda Fromm Reichmann in Germany. But Wittgenstein had not benefitted from any such specific psychotherapy during the war. Although he was a sympathetic reader of Freud, he considered psychoanalysis to be a powerful mythology towards which ‘one should not loose one’s critical sense’. This sentence ends his Conversations on Freud (1967: 41-52), where he contends that dreams of fear are often confused with dreams of desire. As Bion did, Wittgenstein focused on the question of trauma that Freud abandoned in September 1897, writing to Fliess: ‘I don’t believe any more in my Neurotica’; that is, his approach to trauma, published with Breuer, in the Studies on Hysteria. To quote again the first sentence of the Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’ and ‘Sense Data’ (1968: 275), it is clear that the experience of ‘fright’ was for Wittgenstein not a word to philosophize about but ‘a form of life’, which haunted his return to Vienna to such an extent that he abandoned philosophy for ten years before going back to Cambridge in 1929. Then began the sixteen years mentioned in the Preface to the Philosophical Investigations, when ‘new thoughts’ replaced ‘the old thinking’ – written on the front line – that had been expressed in the Tractatus. I contend that in his ‘new thoughts’ a performance takes place which is not metaphorical, but therapeutic, opening up a new understanding of transference in the work with psychosis and trauma. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus famously ends with the sentence: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ This was such that during the ten years of his stay in Austria, he was overwhelmed by unspoken post-traumatic revivals. Back in Cambridge, he started what is commonly called his ‘second philosophy’, asserting that ‘there is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies’ (Wittgenstein, 1958: 51e [§133]; 2009: 57e [§133d, with translation modified]) – again without metaphor. Here the last sentence of the Tractatus might be recast as: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must show what is not said.’ But to whom? That is the question. When the relations of speech are broken, as no reliable other is there, time is ‘out of joint’. The experience of war comes back in the present tense, triggered by surviving images, called nachleben by Warburg. These do not enter the game of metaphors and metonymies which presuppose the symbolic chain of signifiers. Traumatic dreams are clear cut, without associations, as are some words which have to be taken at face value – where, as Bion says, ‘objects are thoughts and thoughts are objects’ (1967 [1961]: 184). Wittgenstein’s new method insists on showing what cannot be said by ‘imponderable evidence [which] includes subtleties of glance, of gesture, of tone’ (Wittgenstein, 1958: 228e [IIxi]; 2009: 240e [PPF, §360]). This may make an impression on somebody else, such as the philosopher at the

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beginning of the Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’, who does not react professionally, but ‘speaks for himself’. This expression appears in a comment on his own Lecture on Ethics (1965 [1929–1930]). When ethics is at stake – and the stake here is to resist the annihilation or reification of experience – ‘speaking for oneself’ is ‘not a sociological description’, but a genuine performance. ‘At the end of my lecture on ethics, I spoke in the first person. I believe that is quite essential. Here nothing more can be established, I can only appear as a person speaking for myself. For me the theory has no value. A theory gives me nothing’ (Waismann, 1965 [1930]: 16). This recognition is also at the core of a specific transference with psychosis and trauma, too often drowned by the flow of theories. WHEN THE TOOL WITH THE NAME ‘N’ IS BROKEN Regarding mute people ‘who cannot tell us what happens inside them’, a little theatre is staged at the beginning of the Investigations: Now suppose that the tool with the name ‘N’ is broken. Not knowing this, A gives B the sign ‘N’. Has this sign meaning now, or not? – What is B going to do when he is given it?. . . . – Well, perhaps he will stand there at a loss, or show A the pieces. Here one might say: ‘N’ has become meaningless; and this expression would mean that the sign ‘N’ no longer had a use in our languagegame. . . . – But we could also imagine a convention whereby B has to shake his head in reply if A gives him the sign for a tool that is broken. – In this way, the command ‘N’ might be said to be admitted into the language-game even when the tool no longer exists, and the sign ‘N’ to have meaning even when its bearer ceases to exist. (2009: 24e, §41)

Suppose A is out of her wits and gives a sign ‘N’ without ostensibly meaning anything or even gives no sign at all. B is then at a loss. Instead of showing her the elements related to a diagnosis of fragmentation and mental illness, or theoretical recitations on the foreclosure of the name of the father dear to Lacan, B may perform immediately a nod of the head which takes the place of the broken tool of the word. Now this is not a mechanical recipe since this nod starts a language-game, related to a form of life which acquainted B with the loss of names for those who remain unburied – as happens, for instance, during wars and pandemics. Transference with madness and trauma starts with this nod of the head. I remember a mute patient in a psychiatric hospital whose story I often quote. Here I also remember Maurice Drury, who claimed, in The Danger of Words, that analyses of clinical examples should be allowed to mature like good whisky (Drury, 2019: 268). (For myself, I let them ripen like Beaufort cheese

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in my native mountains.) Week after week, I used to stand by her and tell her what came to my mind. She must have taken my steadfast presence as a nod of the head, since one day she said, out of the blue: ‘I heard a big YES and now I can speak.’ She then told the following story of fright during WWII, as if it had happened yesterday: She is eight and lives with her mother who is a sluice keeper on a canal in the north of France, while her father is at war. One day she follows her mother, who used to disappear sometimes, and sees her with a German soldier in the outskirts of the neighbouring small town. Back home, her mother lifts her skirt and says: ‘You want to know what I do, look!’ Soon after, the little girl jumped into the canal and was rescued by a sailor from a nearby barge which was called Quand j’y pense (‘When I think of it’). The tool of that name was broken ever since. Time had stopped with that unspeakable event and she stopped talking after giving birth to a son. When I think of it, I hear Wittgenstein say: ‘I turn to stone, and my pain goes on’ (2009: 105e, §288). When the symbolic chain is broken by a ruthless agency, it is impossible for the event to be inscribed in the past and it comes back as present outside of any chronology, which needs symbols to be sequentially articulated. It cannot be given any cause either, since causality needs the past of the cause and the future of its effect. If I had told her, ‘You are mute because of that trauma’, she could have answered as others do: ‘Yes, I know – so what?’ So, the pain goes on and may take shape, in the present tense, at any moment, triggered by some unspeakable impression. ‘The body keeps the score’, says Bessel van der Kolk (in the very title of his book), the score of silenced matters which it shows in unexpected ways. To whom? In what language-game? Wittgenstein would ask. Only the encounter with another able to speak for herself, in front of what is shown, creates a performance of scenes and events which have been cut off from the social link. It took me ages before I realized that this muteness was familiar to me, as it had been my mother’s utter silence about her imprisonment during the war, pregnant with me. Like the embryo of Tristram Shandy’s first word, in the eponymous novel, I could have shouted: ‘I wish . . . that my father and mother . . . had minded what they were about when they begot me’ (Sterne, 2009 [1759]: 5), but so many years later, I only wish that this paper on Wittgenstein’s performance philosophy tells something to the reader – in spite of my ramblings, since I am aware that I am always saying the same things. NOTE 1. A translation of this work has been published by Routledge (2023).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Arendt, Hannah. 1962 [1958]. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland: Meridian Books. Barker, Pat. 1996. Regeneration Trilogy. London: Viking. Bion, W.R. 1984 [1967]. ‘A Theory of Thinking.’ In Second Thoughts. London: Karnac: 110–119. Bion, W.R. 2018. A Memoir of the Future. London: Routledge. Caruth, Cathy. 2017 [1996]. Unclaimed Experience. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Dolto, Françoise. 2022. The Unconscious Body Image. Translated by Sharmini Bailly. London: Routledge. Drury, Maurice. 2019. The Selected Writings. Edited by John Hayes. London: Bloomsbury. Freud, Sigmund. 1964. ‘Moses and Monotheism.’ Translated by James Strachey. In The Standard Edition, Vol. 23. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, Sigmund. 2001. ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s “Gradiva”.’ Translated by James Strachey. In The Standard Edition, Vol. 9. London: Vintage Classics. Kolk, Bessel van der. 2015. The Body Keeps the Score. London: Penguin Books. McGuinness, Brian. 2005. Young Ludwig (1991–1921). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Michaud, Philippe-Alain. 2004. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. Translated by Sophie Hawkes. New York: Zone Books. Monk, Ray. 1991. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Vintage Books. Nagy, Gregory. The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 2022. Sterne, Lawrence. 2009 [1759]. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waismann, Friedrich. 1965. ‘Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein.’ In The Philosophical Review 74:1: 12–16. Warburg, Aby. 2003. Le Rituel du Serpent. Translated by Sibylle Muller. Paris: Macula. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations (2nd ed.). Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1965. ‘A Lecture on Ethics.’ In The Philosophical Review 74:1: 3–12. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1967. ‘Conversations on Freud.’ In Lectures and Conversations. Edited by Cyril Barrett. Berkeley: University of California Press: 41–52. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1968. ‘Notes for Lectures on “Private Experience” and “Sense Data”.’ In The Philosophical Review 77:3: 275–320. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009. Philosophical Investigations (revised 4th ed.). Including Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Chapter 7

‘I’ll Teach You Differences’ Wittgenstein against Philosophical Pseudo-Performance Peter S. Dillard

Goethe once quipped that ‘the ox becomes furious if a red cloth is shown to him; but the philosopher, who speaks of color only in a general way, begins to rave’.1 Writing more than a century later, Ludwig Wittgenstein describes Goethe’s own non-theoretical account of colour: Goethe’s theory of the constitution of the colors of the spectrum has not proved to be an unsatisfactory theory, rather it really isn’t a theory at all. Nothing can be predicted with it. . . . Someone who agrees with Goethe believes that Goethe correctly recognized the nature of color. And nature here is not what results from experiments, but it lies in the concept of color.2

According to Wittgenstein, ‘in every serious philosophical question’ about colour or anything else ‘uncertainty extends to the very roots of the problem’.3 His preferred approach is not to solve the problem by presenting an experimentally confirmed theory but to dissolve the problem by carefully attending to the nature of the concept in question – in this case, the concept of colour. As it stands, however, Wittgenstein’s counter-philosophy of colour is uninformatively abstruse. In the manner typical of his later writings, he offers us a loosely organized compilation of observations on various themes without providing any motivation or context. Other than a few scattered references to the eighteenth-century experimental scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the text does not target any definite theorist of colour as an opponent. Exactly what philosophical misconceptions about colour does Wittgenstein seek to debunk? To which features of our concept of colour does he attend in order to do so? Is he successful? 85

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A suitable foil for Wittgenstein’s critical remarks is not one of his predecessors or contemporaries but a philosopher who came after him. In the 1980s, Frank Jackson published a pair of papers presenting his famous “Mary’s room” thought-experiment and related material in support of the metaphysical theory that colours are not physical properties. The critical force of Wittgenstein’s reflections becomes apparent when they are brought to bear on Jackson’s thought-experiment. ‘I’ll teach you differences’, a line spoken by the Earl of Kent in Shakespeare’s King Lear (Act 1, Scene 4) that Wittgenstein considered as the epigraph for his Philosophical Investigations,4 hints at the gist of his critique: the use of key expressions in the story Jackson tells differs crucially from their use in the ordinary, everyday practices described by Wittgenstein that give these expressions the only sense they have. The upshot is that Jackson’s ‘thought-experiment’ is a pseudo-performance, a philosophical fairy tale that proves nothing at all about the nature of colours in the actual world. The script for Jackson’s thought-experiment consists of a prologue and two acts. To show that it is indeed a pseudo-performance, this chapter applies Wittgenstein’s techniques to each part of Jackson’s script.

PROLOGUE Jackson begins by asking us to imagine ourselves as spectators of a highly unusual performance.5 Fred is not only capable of discriminating every single colour we can discriminate but also colours we cannot. Specifically, whenever we bring him a batch of ripe tomatoes, he sorts them into two groups he calls ‘red1’ and ‘red2’. No matter how many times we test him under varying conditions, he always sorts the same batch of ripe tomatoes into the same groups of what he calls red1 and red2 tomatoes. While we can detect no noticeable difference in colour between the two groups, Fred insists that they look as different to him as yellow and blue look to us. He concludes that we are to him as a red-green colourblind person is to us; we are red1-red2 colourblind. Furthermore, when Fred is sorting red1 ripe tomatoes from red2 ripe tomatoes, we know everything about what is going on in Fred’s brain and optical system, his overt behaviour, his behavioural dispositions, his biochemistry, and any additional physical facts pertaining to him and his environment. Yet we still do not know what colours Fred is seeing when he sees the difference between red1 and red2 tomatoes. Therefore, the colours of red1 and red2 that he but not we can see are not physical properties at all. Even if Fred dies, donates his body to science, and we learn how to transplant his optical system into one of us who can then distinguish between red1 and red2, the conclusion doesn’t change because before the operation we knew all the relevant physical facts

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about Fred yet still couldn’t discriminate between red1 and red2. ‘Hence there is more to know than all that. Hence Physicalism is incomplete.’6 Wittgenstein would challenge Jackson’s assumption that Fred sees colours we don’t. In the following passage, ‘reddish-green’ and ‘yellowish-blue’ might be, respectively, replaced by ‘red1’ and ‘red2’: But even if there were also people for whom it was natural to use the expressions ‘reddish-green’ or ‘yellowish-blue’ in a consistent manner and who perhaps exhibit abilities which we lack, we would still not be forced to recognize that they see colors which we do not see. There is, after all, no commonly accepted criterion for what a color is unless it is one of our colors.7

To buttress Wittgenstein’s challenge, it will help to examine more closely our actual practices involving the concepts of unripe fruit, ripe fruit, and colour. Initially, another remark Wittgenstein makes in connection with such practices may strike us as wrong: ‘It makes sense, for example, to say “the sighted person distinguishes with his eyes between an unripe apple and a ripe one.” But not: “The sighted person distinguishes a green apple from a red one.” For what are “red” and “green”?’8 Upon closer inspection, Wittgenstein’s point becomes clear. A normal person who isn’t red-green colourblind can learn to tell unripe from ripe Winesap apples either by taste or with his eyes by sorting them into green or red ones. But he cannot learn to tell green from red apples by sorting them with his eyes into green or red ones – what non-redundant sense would ‘red’ and ‘green’ have here? – or in accordance with some other colour criterion playing the same role the colours red and green play in telling unripe and ripe Winesap apples apart. At most he can be said to see the colours green and red because he distinguishes with his eyes between unripe and ripe Winesap apples.9 Even if it makes sense to say that someone who is red-green colourblind does not distinguish with his eyes between green and red apples, Wittgenstein rejects the inference that someone who is not red-green colourblind does distinguish with his eyes between green and red apples. We will return to the reasons for his rejection presently. Wittgenstein’s remark reminds us of how our ordinary uses of the expressions ‘unripe’, ‘ripe’, ‘green’, and ‘red’ are interwoven. We do not recognize various shades between red and green analogous to the various shades between red and orange or between green and blue that we do recognize.10 Nevertheless, ordinarily we do distinguish unripe from ripe Winesap apples according to whether they are mostly green (i.e. with surfaces mostly covered by green areas) or mostly red instead. A similar practice occurs with other kinds of produce and our comparative uses of ‘green’ and ‘yellow’. Wittgenstein asks, ‘Does everything depend on my range of possible language-games with the form “. . . ish”?’11 We play no language-game in which we discriminate between things that are more or less bluish-yellow or yellowish-blue.

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Nonetheless, in everyday life we do play the language-game of judging the degree to which bananas are unripe or ripe according to the degree to which they are greenish or yellowish. Fred’s alleged ability to see the colours red1 or red2 has nothing do to with any of our language-games that have been described so far. The tomatoes in the batch Fred sorts are all equally ripe. There is no correlation whatsoever between whether a tomato is unripe or unripe and whether it is mostly red1 or mostly red2. Nor is there any correlation between the degree to which tomatoes in the batch are unripe or ripe and the degree to which they are reddish1 or reddish2. Hence Fred does not distinguish with his eyes between unripe and ripe tomatoes according to whether they are ‘red1’ or ‘red2’ or according to whether they are ‘reddish1’ or ‘reddish2’. Our ordinary practices in everyday life of using colour words preceded by ‘mostly’ or appended with ‘ish’ to tell the difference between unripe or ripe produce give us some grip on what it means to say that one of us, Fred, or anyone else ‘sees colors’ corresponding to the relevant colour words. Since Fred’s behaviour as Jackson describes it is entirely divorced from these ordinary practices in everyday life, we have no grip on what it means to say that Fred sees colours which we do not see. At the very least, as Wittgenstein notes, we are not forced to recognize that he does. Still, that is only the prologue of Jackson’s script. He has much more to say. ACT 1 Jackson now invites us to imagine the following scenario: Mary is confined to a black-and-white room, is educated through black-andwhite books and through lectures related on black-and-white television. In this way she learns everything there is to know about the nature of the physical world. She knows all the physical facts about us and our environment, in a wide sense of ‘physical’ which includes everything in completed physics, chemistry, and neurophysiology, and all there is to know about the causal and relational facts consequent upon all this, including of course functional roles [i.e., causal relations between organisms’ external stimuli, internal states, and overt behavior]. If physicalism is true, she knows all there is to know.12

Mary’s confinement to a black-and-white room with only black-and-white books is the first part of a thought-experiment intended to show that colours are not physical properties. The thought-experiment has even been dramatized in a video presentation in which Mary’s room is depicted as including, along with black and white, shades of grey.13 Since the text, pages, and

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television images through which she comes to know all the physical facts there are to now appear to her as black, white, or grey, it assumed that things can appear black, white, or grey to her without her knowing anything at all about red, green, blue, yellow, and other colours. Wittgenstein says, ‘We do not want to establish a theory of color (neither a physiological one nor a psychological one), but rather the logic of color concepts.’14 Colour concepts are said to have a logic since, unlike the empirically testable statements of natural science, they can be used to make statements possessing a kind of necessity comparable to that of logical principles. We accept the zoological statement that ‘Zebras have black and white stripes’ as true because all the Zebras observed so far have only had black and white stripes. By contrast, ‘There are no glasses of white water or clear milk’, ‘Nothing is bluish-orange’, and ‘Saturated yellow is brighter than saturated blue’15 are more like the logical principle ‘No X is both F and not F’ in that we accept them as simply true, not because so far we’ve never encountered a glass of white water or of clear milk, something bluish-orange, saturated yellow darker than saturated blue, or an X that is both F and not F. Wittgenstein is particularly interested in the logic of certain statements involving the concepts of white, black, and grey. An example of such a statement is ‘There is no transparent white’ – that is, no sheet of glass, windowpane, or pair of sunglasses that is tinted white. Wittgenstein explicates the necessity of this statement by reminding us of the ordinary practices or language-games in which we speak of glass as ‘tinted’. The following remarks are especially pertinent: Transparency and reflections exist only in the dimension of depth of a visual image. The impression of the transparent medium makes is that something lies behind the medium. If the visual image is thoroughly monochromatic it cannot be transparent. Something white behind a colored transparent medium appears in the color of the medium, something black appears black.16

The sense we ascribe to ‘tinted’ or ‘colored transparent medium’ derives from our familiar practice of placing a sample of white directly behind the medium in good light and then observing the sample. The tint of the coloured transparent medium is the colour the white sample appears to be. Behind a red-tinted glass, a white sample appears to be more-or-less red depending on the strength of the tint; behind a blue-tinted glass, the sample will appear more-or-less blue; and so forth.17 By the same rule, a white sample should appear to be white behind a whitetinted glass. But a white sample also appears white behind a non-tinted glass: ‘White seen through a colored glass appears with the color of the glass. That is the rule of the appearance of transparency. So white appears white through white glass, i.e., as through uncolored glass.’18 We come to understand what

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it means to speak of a ‘tinted’ or ‘colored transparent medium’ through our familiarity with the practice of checking how various colour samples appear behind a seemingly transparent glass. Since the practice marks no difference between white-tinted glass and non-tinted glass, we are unable to attribute any sense to the phrase ‘white-tinted glass’. Wittgenstein asks whether a pane of glass that takes colour away from things behind it and leaves them only white, grey, and black – somewhat in the way that the events of an old cinema film sometimes appear to lie behind the screen and faded – might count as a transparent white glass.19 He answers that a glass ‘tinted’ green or some other colour as we ordinarily understand the term darkens rather than lightens what lies behind it. Moreover, a pane that makes things behind it appear ‘faded’ does so for all coloured things, including white, grey, and black ones. Apart from the puzzle of how a white transparent medium could make anything white behind it look faded, a glass pane that made other coloured things behind it look faded would also make anything black things behind it look less black. Yet black remains black behind a coloured transparent medium. At best, a glass pane that makes colours behind it look faded is ‘translucent’, not ‘white transparent’ or ‘white-tinted’. The rule that something white behind a coloured transparent medium appears in the colour of the medium while something black behind it remains black also deprives ‘black-tinted glass’ of any sense. Behind a black-tinted glass, something black would appear the same way it appears behind a nontinted glass, leaving no discernible difference between seemingly transparent glass that is tinted black and truly transparent glass that isn’t. As Wittgenstein puts the point, ‘black and white themselves have a hand in the business, where we have transparency of color’.20 How there could be a transparent black is no more comprehensible to us than how there could be a transparent white. Another logical principle of colour is that although there is such a thing as a glowing or luminous red or white, there is no such thing as a glowing or luminous grey.21 Wittgenstein explains: Whatever looks luminous does not look gray. Everything gray looks as though it is being illuminated. If a ghost appeared to me during the night, it could glow with a weak and whitish light; but if it looked gray, then the light would have to appear as though it came from somewhere else.22

We understand what it means to say that the colour of something is ‘glowing’, ‘luminous’, or ‘incandescent’ by noticing how a grey sample that is next to or near it looks ‘illuminated’. Something white, red, or blue next to or near a grey sample can look luminous while the grey sample looks illuminated.

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Something grey next to or near a grey sample looks...well, neither luminous nor illuminated but merely grey. Where we have luminosity or incandescence of colour, grey itself has a hand in the business that strips ‘luminous or incandescent gray’ of any sense. The upshot of Wittgenstein’s investigation of the logic of statements involving the concepts of white, black, and grey is that our understanding of these concepts is interwoven with our understanding of red, blue, green, yellow, orange, and other colour concepts. Any narrative in which we are supposed to possess the concepts of white, black, and grey without possessing any understanding of the other colour concepts is therefore highly suspect as an accurate portrayal of our ordinary, everyday practices centred around colour. The first part of Jackson’s ‘Mary’s room’ thought-experiment is just such a narrative, since we are asked to imagine book pages, written text, and images on TV screens appearing white, black, or grey to Mary so that she understands the concepts of white, black, and grey – even though she has no inkling of how something might appear red, blue, green, yellow, or orange to her and so lacks any understanding of these other colour concepts. Consequently, the narrative is no more reliable as a basis for drawing conclusions about the nature of actual colours than a folk tale about a boy who can explain the notion of tomorrow but can’t fathom the notion of today is a reliable basis for drawing conclusions about the nature of time.

INTERMISSION Before proceeding to the second part of Jackson’s thought-experiment, let us pause to consider a possible defence of the first part against the foregoing Wittgensteinian critique. Things can’t appear red or green to people who are red-green colourblind, but things can appear to them in other colours. Perhaps Mary is red-bluegreen-yellow-orange-etc. colourblind: things can appear white, black, or grey to her, but things cannot appear to her in any other colour. If so, then contrary to the critique she understands the concepts of white, black, and grey but not the other colour concepts. Wittgenstein devotes several remarks to the phenomenon of colourblindness. One remark addresses the relevance of colourblindness to normal colour vision: ‘The description of the phenomena of colorblindness is part of psychology: and therefore the description of normal vision too? Psychology only describes the deviations of colorblindness from normal vision.’23 Typically, we are not warranted to draw any conclusions about an aptitude or ability based on how it is manifested under abnormal conditions. For example, our assessment of how well Kyle can read should not be based

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on his performance when he reads a poorly printed text illuminated only by weak moonlight. Similarly, conclusions about what colour concepts are and what colour concepts are not understood by a colourblind person do not automatically transfer to someone who is not colourblind. Even if a redblue-green-yellow-orange-etc. colourblind Mary understands the concepts of white, black, and grey without understanding any other colour concepts, her colour vision does not license any conclusions about ours. More precisely, it does not show that those of us with normal colour vision can understand the concepts of white, black, and grey without understanding any other colour concepts, and thus it cannot function as the first part of a thought-experiment intended to prove that no colours we see are physical properties. Instead of imagining Mary in the first part of Jackson’s thought-experiment as red-blue-green-yellow-orange-etc. colourblind, perhaps we are to imagine her as endowed with the same capacity of normal colour perception that we have. But unlike us, she has only perceived white, black, and grey without perceiving any other colour. This reply assumes that there is a capacity of normal colour perception, the exact nature of which is open to debate: does a person who has the capacity but who has only perceived white, black, and grey only understand those colour concepts (a Jackson supporter answers ‘Yes!’) or not (Jackson’s physicalist opponent answers ‘No!’). Another remark of Wittgenstein’s about (colour)blindness short-circuits the debate by casting doubt upon its underlying assumption that there is any such thing as ‘a capacity of normal color perception’: Can we say ‘colorblindness’ (or ‘blindness’) is a phenomenon and ‘seeing’ is not? That would mean something like: ‘I see’ is an expression,’ ‘I am blind’ is not. But after all that’s not true. People on the street often take me for blind. I could say to someone who does this ‘I see,’ i.e., I am not blind.24

Why think there is a capacity of normal colour perception? Well, it certainly makes sense for a colourblind person to announce, ‘I can’t see such-and-such colors.’ Hence it must also make sense for a non-colourblind person to announce, ‘I can see such-and-such colors.’ Certainly – yet what is the non-colourblind person announcing, other than the truism that she isn’t colourblind? Wittgenstein advises us to resist the temptation of going a step further by taking her statement to point out some psychological perceptual capacity she has, the nature of which stands in need of explanation. Imagine that midway through a dinner party Matisse stands up and announces to us, ‘I can see red and green.’ Unless he is correcting the mistaken conviction of one or more of the guests in attendance that he is red-green colourblind, we furrow our brows, scratch our heads, and stroke our chins trying to discern the point of what he said. Our brow-furrowing, head-scratching, and chinstroking are our way of doubting that what he said has any point, including

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the point of pointing out some capacity he, we, and any normal colour perceiver all have in common. Even if we indulge in the supposition that there is a capacity of normal colour perception, it is not at all clear that someone with such a capacity who so far has only perceived white, black, and grey things has no understanding of any other colour concepts. Wittgenstein poses a question he immediately answers: ? White must be the lightest color in a picture. In the Tricolor [flag], for example, the white cannot be darker than the blue and red. Here we have a sort of mathematics of color.25

Just as an understanding of odd integers without any understanding of even integers is impossible, an understanding of white, black, and without any understanding of other colours may be equally chimerical. Suppose (Heaven forbid!) somebody colourizes Truffaut’s film The 400 Blows. Though we might not approve, we would immediately recognize the previously black forest through which Antoine runs as now deep green, the previously offwhite sandy beach he reaches as now yellowish, the grey waves of the sea behind him as now sapphire blue, and his previously pale face as now reddish in the setting sun. We would not get lost in a whirl of visual confusion, even if previously we had never encountered any coordination between things appearing black, white, or grey and their technicolored counterparts. Something similar happened in the transition from black-and-white to colour television in the mid-twentieth century. Our ready recognition suggests that any exercise of our alleged ‘capacity of normal color perception’ so far to see only white, black, and grey things already includes some understanding of yellow, green, blue, and other colour concepts. Jackson says of Mary: When she is let out, she has new experiences, color experiences she has never had before. It is not, therefore, an objection to physicalism that she learns something on being let out. . . . The trouble for physicalism is that, after Mary sees her first ripe tomato, she will realize how impoverished her conception of the mental lives of others [and, presumably, also of herself] has been all along.26

But if, when she is let out of her room, Mary recognizes an apple that before appeared bright grey on her TV screen as now appearing shiny red, then all along she has already had the conception of things appearing red. It’s

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just that none have until now. She is then in a position comparable to a zoologist who has known all along all the chemical, biological, and other physical facts about Tasmanian devils without ever having seen one. When he finally does, the conclusion that Tasmanian devils are non-physical creatures hardly follows. ACT 2 Let us proceed to the second part of Jackson’s thought-experiment: It seems, however, that Mary does not know all there is to know. For when she is let out of the black-and-white room or given a color television, she will learn what it is like to see something red, say. This is rightly described as learning – she will not say ‘ho, hum.’ Hence, physicalism is false.27

The operative expression here is ‘learning’ as coming to know. Mary is said to learn, to come to know, that things which previously did not appear red to her now do. Wittgenstein would prompt us to ask what language-games we play in everyday life with the ‘learning’ or ‘coming to know’ and colour words like ‘red’. Whether or not an item has a given property depends on the item’s role in a particular language-game. When Wittgenstein gives the example of the standard meter rod in Paris as something that itself is neither 1 meter long or not 1 meter long, he is thinking of the language-game in which we measure the length of a thing by placing it right alongside the standard meter rod in Paris and then officially certifying either that the thing is or is not exactly 1 meter long depending on whether its ends match the ends of the standard meter rod. Since we obviously do not place the standard meter rod right alongside itself to see whether its own ends match themselves, it neither is nor is not exactly 1 meter long in the language-game we play of measuring things’ lengths by comparing things’ ends with the ends of the standard meter rod.28 Wittgenstein goes on in the same section to draw a parallel using the example of a colour sample: Suppose that samples of color were preserved in Paris like the standard meter. So we explain that ‘sepia’ means the color of the standard sepia which is kept there hermetically sealed. Then it will make no sense to state of this sample either that it is of this color or that it is not.

We might teach a child or a non-English speaker what ‘sepia’ means by pointing to the hermetically sealed sample and saying, ‘A sepia thing looks like this’, and we might train our pupil when to say that something either is or

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isn’t sepia by holding the thing up in front of the hermetically sealed sample and seeing whether the thing looks or doesn’t look just like the sample. We do not train our pupil to hold the hermetically sealed sample up in front of itself to see whether it looks or doesn’t look just like itself. Thus, in this languagegame, the sample itself is neither sepia nor not sepia. In discussing Wittgenstein’s influence on the Oxford ordinary language philosopher Gilbert Ryle, Julia Tanney underscores the importance of the attending to the specific language-game involving an item when asking whether it is red or not.29 Crimson-dyed hair may count as red in an optometry test but not in a beauty contest where the participants are evaluated based solely on their natural features. Wittgenstein describes two language-games: one in which I paint the view from my window, another in which I point out various shades of paint available at the paint store. Suppose that I am asked to name the colour of a particular spot on my canvas. In the first languagegame the answer is ‘ochre’, since that is the overall appearance of the canvas section where the spot occurs. In the second language-game the answer is ‘scarlet’, since that is the exact shade from the paint store into which I dipped my brush and then dabbed onto the spot.30 An even more striking example Wittgenstein gives is what in one context is my seeing lighter and darker shades of black-and-white photographic paper but in another context is my seeing a man with dark hair, a boy with blond hair, and behind them a machine with iron- and zinc-coloured surfaces.31 These examples remind us how our ascriptions of colours to things are not free floating but anchored in various concrete situations. ‘We must always be prepared to learn something totally new’, Wittgenstein counsels.32 It is in shifting from a language-game in which an item is not correctly described as having a certain colour to another language-game in which it is that our talk of ‘learning’ or ‘coming to know’ that something is red (or blue, or green, etc.) gains traction. If so far I have only played the language-game of holding things up in front of the hermetically sealed sepia sample to see whether they match it and then switch to the entirely new-tome language-game of finding objects having the same tint as a daguerreotype, then I can be legitimately be said to learn or come to know that something like the hermetically sealed sample that previously did not appear to me as sepia now does. I can learn that a spot that hitherto did not count as scarlet counts as scarlet when I switch from the language-game of describing the overall colour of a canvas section in a painting of the view from my window to the new language-game I am taught of matching a dab on the canvas with a shade from the paint store. When, having mastered the language-game of distinguishing lighter and darker tones of photographic paper, I now master the language-game of appraising photographic portraits, I come to know that what before did not look blond at all now looks like the blond head of a boy.

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Anything like the hermetically sealed sepia sample or the painting of the view from my window that is not just seen on a black-and-white television or not just read about in black-and-white books is excluded from Mary’s room. So is anything like a piece of photographic paper in lighter and darker tones seen through the clear glass top of a display case lined with red, blue, or green felt. Crucial language-games that we need to play in order to learn or come to know that something has a certain vivid colour are missing in principle from Mary’s room. But then the artificial transition Jackson’s Mary undergoes is not a case of learning or coming to know that something has a certain vivid colour in any ordinary sense of those words – the only sense they have – and therefore Jackson’s thought-experiment does not teach anything about our ordinary concepts – the only concepts we have – of colour. EPILOGUE Wittgenstein is not arguing that colour is reducible to language. He compares philosophers who are confused about colour to the ox gawking in front of the newly painted stall door.33 Like a dog who is afraid his master will beat him but not afraid his master will beat him tomorrow, the ox and many other animals without language can react to colour primitively but cannot grasp the logical principles governing our colour concepts.34 Conversely, mastery of a language does not suffice for a full understanding of our colour concepts any more than it does for a full understanding of chess or higher mathematics; otherwise, a colourblind person who learned the meanings of colour words could then see things in the corresponding colours, and a young child could learn to play chess or do calculus simply by learning the meanings of ‘chess’ or ‘calculus’.35 Participation in a practice at any sophisticated level requires mastery of a language.36 From Plato’s Ring of Gyges to Descartes’s Evil Genius to John Searle’s Chinese Room, David Lewis’s mad pain versus Martian pain, and David Chalmers’s zombies who are our behavioural clones but devoid of consciousness, thought-experiments have certainly played a prominent role in Western philosophy. Even so, their probative value remains highly controversial. Thinkers like Bernard Williams and Kathleen V. Wilkes caution that for thought-experiments to be philosophically effective, they should not indulge in far-out situations but employ examples that either are or might be encountered in real life.37 Wittgenstein goes even further in the same direction by insisting that all philosophical reflection, including any thought-experiments, must remain true to what we ordinarily say and do in everyday life. Otherwise, we run the risk of idly spinning our wheels, of merely fantasizing rather than truly philosophizing.

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To the protest ‘But in a fairytale a pot too can see and hear!’, Wittgenstein retorts that it can also talk, yet we still have no clear idea of actual circumstances in which we’d say of a pot that it talked.38 His riposte encapsulates the moral of his remarks about colour for Jackson’s thought-experiment. Just as a fairy tale of a seeing, hearing, and talking pot doesn’t prove that a real-life pot can see and hear and talk, a pseudo-performance in which a character named Mary comes to know that colours are not physical properties doesn’t prove anything about the nature of colours in the actual world. It is a tale told by a philosopher, full of fantasy and nonsense, signifying nothing.

NOTES 1. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, The Theory of Colors, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), xli. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, trans. Linda McAlister and Margarete Schättle (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 11e–12e. All references are the left-side pagination of the English translation. 3. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 4e. 4. See Ray Monk, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990), 536–37. 5. See Frank Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia.” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 32 (April, 1982), 127–36. For the case of Fred, see 128–30. 6. Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” 130. 7. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 4e. 8. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 39e–40e. 9. ‘Marginal note: “The sighted person distinguishes an apple that appears red to him from one which appears green”’ (Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 40e). An expansion of this note could occur in legitimate description of what the normalsighted apple-sorter is doing: distinguishing a Winesap apple that appears red to him as ‘ripe’ from one that appears green to him as ‘unripe’. He can be said to see the colours red and green in the sense that Winesap apples in the language-game of sorting ripe from unripe ones appear red or green to him. 10. For this point, see Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 3e–5e. 11. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 22e. 12. Frank Jackson, “What Mary Didn’t Know.” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 83 (May, 1986), 291. See also Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” 130. 13. See “Mary’s Room – Short Film,” available online at www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=I98IhFcnLL8. 14. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 5e. 15. See Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 5e (the first two examples) and 17e (the third example). He returns to these examples several times in the manuscript. 16. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 5e.

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17. See also Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 6e: ‘We would say, perhaps, of a green pane: it colors the things behind it green, above all the white behind it.’ 18. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 44e. 19. See Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 6e. 20. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 19e. 21. See Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 7e and 46e. There is also no such thing as a glowing or luminous brown. 22. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 47e. Even a grey sky appears to illuminate everything below only in a particular surrounding: for example, where the sun is weakly shining through it; see 46e. 23. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 4e. 24. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 54e. 25. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 17e. See also 93: ‘White as a color of substances (in the sense in which we say snow is white) is lighter than any other substance-color; black darker.’ Wittgenstein also speaks of a geometry of colour (e.g. 11e) and a theory of colour harmony (e.g. 12e). 26. Jackson, “What Mary Didn’t Know,” 292. 27. Jackson, “What Mary Didn’t Know,” 291. See also Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” 130: ‘What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it.’ When a philosopher italicizes a key term, it is often a red flag warning us to look more carefully at how we ordinarily use the italicized term and its cognates. 28. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Blackwell 2009), 29e. For an extended treatment of Wittgenstein’s example, see Cora Diamond, “How Long is the Standard Meter in Paris?”, in Wittgenstein in America, eds. Timothy McCarthy and Sean C. Stidd (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), 104–39. 29. Tanney’s remarks occur during the programme “In Our Time: Ordinary Language Philosophy” (November 7, 2013), available online at www​.youtube​.com​/watch​ ?v​=bSdg2w8f1b0, 20:22–22:22. 30. See Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 51e–52e. 31. See Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 10e. 32. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 4e. 33. See Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 16e. 34. Wittgenstein gives the dog example in. Philosophical Investigations, 174e. 35. See Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color, 31e. 36. For a critique of linguistic reductionism about colour, see Mark Mussari, “Umberto Eco Would Have Made a Bad Fauve.” M/C Journal, Vol. 5 (2003), https:// journal​.media​-culture​.org​.au​/mcjournal​/article​/view​/1966. 37. Williams discusses the philosophical significance of thought-experiments in “Man Without Qualities: Interview with Bernard Williams.” Cogito, Vol. 8 (1994), 3–19. The interview is also available online at https://manwithoutqualities​.com​/2015​ /03​/28​/interview​-with​-bernard​-williams​-2/. For Wilkes’s reservations about the role of thought-experiments in the philosophy of personhood, see Kathleen V. Wilkes,

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Real People: Personal Identity Without Thought Experiments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). I am grateful to Mischa Twitchin for encouraging me to place the philosophical use of thought-experiments into historical context. 38. See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 103e.

Chapter 8

Conversation between Signe Gjessing, Sam Kinchin-Smith, Ray Monk, and Max Richter

To celebrate both the centenary of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the recent publication of Danish poet Signe Gjessing’s Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus (translated by Denise Newman), the London Review of Books hosted a discussion between Gjessing (‘whose poetic reimagining of Wittgenstein is her first work to appear in English’), Ray Monk (‘Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton and author of acclaimed biographies of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell’), and Max Richter (‘one of our most celebrated and in-demand contemporary composers, whose pioneering literary collaborations have seen him work with texts by Murakami, Kafka, Woolf, and most recently the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’). The discussion (held on 17 August 2022) was organized by Sam Kinchin-Smith, head of Special Projects at the LRB, and has been transcribed and edited here by Mischa Twitchin. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  This is a conversation about a book that is a theory of everything, which sought to solve all the problems of philosophy in under hundred pages. So, an hour could easily pass by simply trying to introduce and elucidate its central argument: that language can only work by picturing the world; that it does so by configuring in propositions the names of simple objects into arrangements that correspond, when the arrangement is true, to the actual configuration of objects in the world; and when the arrangement is false, to an impossible arrangement of objects; that the world is therefore an array of simple objects and that if linguistic propositions don’t seem to be in this form, they can be analysed into them. Ray, how did I do? Ray Monk:  (Laughs) Very good! Sam Kinchin-Smith:  But instead of doing that, our plan is to have a very much more subjective conversation about the influence of the Tractatus through the lens of Signe, Max, and Ray’s own work and practice – the light the Tractatus 101

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shines on that – and, hopefully, to arrive at a more truthful account of Wittgenstein’s aspiration through this unique work’s significance in intellectual and literary history. Also, we’re going to structure the evening around readings of individual propositions that our panellists have selected as offering a way into thinking about Wittgenstein in their own work. And so to start us off, I thought you, Ray, could read us your chosen proposition? Ray Monk:  Sure. It’s proposition 6.52 – ‘We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.’ So, why have I chosen this? Well, because obviously as a biographer my first interest is in life – lives – and it seems to me that in the Tractatus, in the process of articulating what Wittgenstein considered to be the limits of thought, which he characterizes as the limits of language, he also drew up limits of science. Now, a few years after the Tractatus had been published, the Viennese philosophers, the Logical Positivists, attempted to do the same thing – but from a very different point of view. The Logical Positivists distinguished science from rubbish. Everything that wasn’t science was just to be thrown away into the waste basket. For Wittgenstein, however, the most important things are those that are not susceptible to scientific treatment. So, the famous last proposition of the Tractatus says, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ One of the Logical Positivists, Otto Neurath, subtly changed that and said, ‘We must, indeed, be silent, but not about anything.’ So, for Wittgenstein there was something to be silent about – and that is where everything important lies. Wittgenstein wrote to a prospective publisher of the book saying that ‘the book really consists of two parts. The part that I’ve written and the part that I haven’t’. And he said, ‘the part that I haven’t is far more important’, which was not a very winning strategy for getting his book published and the publisher turned it down. But you can see in this the spirit in which Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus, the spirit in which he philosophized, which was very different from what one might call the scientistic attitude of the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists. So, what lies in that area that science cannot reach? Well, logic. His book was first and foremost an attempt to articulate what logic is. Logic, he says, is transcendental. We cannot speak about it. So, logic lies in that area. So does philosophy. So does ethics, aesthetics, the meaning of life, religion. All the things that we really, deeply care about. Now it’s not that we’re not to address those things at all. Rather, our language is not able to say true and false propositions about those things. But, he says, what cannot be said can be shown. And so, in those areas we can’t say true things but we can show important truths. And that, for me, is where his work in the Tractatus crosses my work as a biographer. It seems to me that what you’re trying to do in biography is not to present a theory of somebody – of course not; nor is it to apply a theory – I have seen biographies that attempt to apply psychological theories to their biographies and it seems to me it’s never a success. Biography is not itself a theory or an application of a

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theory. It’s an attempt to show, an attempt to understand somebody by showing what was important to them. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  You listed there aesthetics, ethics, morality. Do you think artistic projects also occupy that space and do you think that Wittgenstein thought artistic projects also occupied that space? There seems to be a difference in opinion between some people who think that to some extent the project of the Tractatus leaves no room for those because its stakes are so high. And then there are other people who have argued that actually what Wittgenstein was doing was clearing the space for those things to carry the meaning that he believed in. Ray Monk:  Artistic projects are very much – he not only leaves room for them, he insists upon them. They are the means by which we show each other the things that really matter. Now, he was invited by the Vienna Circle and Logical Positivists to join in their discussions. And in order to demonstrate how his attitude differed from theirs, he turned up to the first meeting with a volume of poetry by Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet, and he just read Tagore’s poetry to the Logical Positivists. I suppose as if to say, look, my attitude could not possibly be more different than yours to the limits of science and what lies beyond those limits. So, yes, and the art form that he was most closely associated with was music. His family was extraordinarily musical. His brother was a concert pianist. His mother was a very able pianist, as was his sister. Brahms was a regular visitor to the home. The home was steeped in music and when you look at Wittgenstein’s manuscripts, he’ll be writing something on the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and then he’ll have four bars of Brahms or four bars of Beethoven. It was just there in his mind. He once said to his friend Maurice Drury, how can I expect to be understood when I can’t say a single word about how much music has meant to me? So, music means an awful lot, even though, as it were, it fails the Tractatus test. The Tractatus test is that if a proposition does not picture a possible state of affairs then it is meaningless. On that criterion music ought to be meaningless but, of course, for Wittgenstein it wasn’t meaningless. He took a view of music more like Schopenhauer’s – that music opens up to us the depth that lies beyond that which we can say. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  Fortunately, we have both a musical and literary artist with us, so we can explore the stakes of this in conversation with them. But I’m interested that you say that about music because, it seems to me, music is, in some ways, more resistant to the argument of the Tractatus than literary art because of the fact that Wittgenstein’s own material is language and it is in language that, essentially, the paradox of his project resides and where, arguably, his project fails. And I wonder whether, in some ways, it’s easier to make the case through something like music that at least doesn’t have to deal with this material that he gives no example of doing what he says it needs to do. In some ways music’s sort of immune.

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Ray Monk:  Yes, music is a difficult thing. He mentions it one or two times in the Tractatus – so, I’ll read out one of them. This is called proposition 4.011. He says, ‘At first sight a proposition – one set out on the printed page, for example – does not seem to be a picture of the reality with which it is concerned.’ This is his so-called picture theory of propositions – a proposition pictures a state of affairs in the world that it deems to be true or false. ‘But neither’ – he says – ‘do written notes appear at first sight to be a picture of a piece of music, nor our phonetic notation (the alphabet) to be a picture of our speech. And yet these sign-languages prove to be pictures, even in the ordinary sense, of what they represent’. And then a bit further, he says, ‘A gramophone record, the musical idea, the written notes, and the sound waves, all stand to one another in the same internal relation of depicting that holds between language and the world.’ So, with language and the world we have the objects that make up the world, arranged in certain ways. Language has a name for each of these objects and the arrangement of names is isomorphic with the arrangement of the objects and that’s how a proposition can say something about the world. And now he says something really curious about music – that music pictures in just the same way. Well, it can’t – can it?! Sam Kinchin-Smith:  Well, let’s pick that up. Can it – Max? Max Richter:  Well, I think one of the things that is so fascinating about music is exactly this question and actually it’s one of the things that made me want to become involved with music – right at the beginning. When I was a tiny child, less than three years old – so, I was still living in Germany – I had my first conscious memory of listening to music. It was what I later found out was the Bach double violin concerto. The sensation of this sound hitting me was very multidimensional. I experienced melody, nice colours, texture, movement, energy, all of that stuff. But I also experienced something else and it seemed to me that was the most important thing about it – and this was to do with there being a grammar sitting behind this sound, which made the individual sounds mean something, which is such a puzzle – and it remains a puzzle, actually, to this day. And I think all of us who work with music are partly drawn to it because of that sort of riddle. How does music, how do these sounds, vibrations in space, how do they do this thing to us? It’s very strange. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  I’m interested in you having that experience when you were a child and then obviously you became educated in musicological theory – and it seems to me that musicological theory has things in common with Wittgenstein’s project in terms of it being a kind of code through which things can be understood. But for the vast majority of people engaging with your work it’s not the code through which they understand it. It’s a code that, to some extent, you are a master of but you have to have meaning carry through it in a way that has to transcend the possibility of people understanding what you are doing there. And I’m wondering whether the way that you understand music now is essentially the same as you understood music then.

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Max Richter:  Well – yes. You learn harmony and counterpoint. You learn how it’s made and that’s obviously important. And to some extent then you can calibrate how events structured through time will have a particular effect on the listener. And it’s – I mean, music is a story-telling medium really, so you’re conveying events in a way which to you seem to add up to something. But this is all very, very conjectural. Even talking about that is very hazy and trying to understand exactly how that happens is very difficult. I mean, music analysis is fraught with this question. Pretty much all music analysis rests on subjective ideas of what is a significant event – how do you even begin to do that in an objective way? It’s very difficult. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  I suppose that’s part of what’s so extraordinary about Wittgenstein’s project – that he took on a similar level of difficulty and tried to do it, but without examples famously. I wonder whether the way that you think about these things – whether you can say something about the relationship between complexity and simplicity in your work? The fact that finding a place of simplicity is often an incredibly complex process, which seems to me something that Wittgenstein could also be said to be aspiring to. Does that help us get to a point of comparison between this code and your code and the work that results? Max Richter:  I think Wittgenstein follows Tolstoy, doesn’t he, in his idea of what great art works are. In other words, they are . . . that to some extent they have to be comprehensible in order to exist. I think that’s true, isn’t it? For me, intelligibility and a kind of directness are incredibly important. The historical contexts are quite important – we’ve got the modernist era where a piece of music was more like a technical manifesto or a sort of linguistics project. There are historical reasons for that, but the outcome was that art music was very much for specialists. You often found you were writing for other composers, you’d see the same eleven people at every concert, and that struck me as something I didn’t really want to be involved with. Ray Monk:  I just wanted to add here that Wittgenstein couldn’t abide any music later than Brahms . . . Max Richter:  Very few people are avant-garde outside their own field! Ray Monk:  He couldn’t listen to anything after Brahms – and even in Brahms, he said, ‘I can hear the gears turning’. He subscribed to a very Spenglerian view that we live in a society – much to its detriment – dominated by our mathematicians and our scientists. Whereas a fully functioning culture is dominated by its artists and its musicians. I’ll quickly read this story from Maurice Drury, who recorded his conversations with Wittgenstein. He says that Wittgenstein came to his rooms ‘looking so much distressed that I asked what was the matter. And Wittgenstein said, “I was walking about in Cambridge and passed a bookshop and in the window were portraits of Russell, Freud, and Einstein. A little further on in a music shop, I saw portraits of Beethoven, Schubert, and Chopin. Comparing these portraits, I felt intensely the terrible degeneration that has come over the human spirit in the course of only a hundred years”’.

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Sam Kinchin-Smith:  Max, do you want to read your choice of proposition? Max Richter:  Yes, I will. So, this is very short – 6.13. ‘Logic is not a body of doctrine but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.’ Sam Kinchin-Smith:  Do you want to talk about how that might lead into music? Max Richter:  Well, I’m not sure it does really. The reason I chose it is because, you know, having read Signe’s poem, I felt that it actually made the Tractatus feel more like a poem afterwards. I feel I could see other things in it and that was a particularly poetry-like line. I mean Wittgenstein said, didn’t he, that ideally one should write philosophy as one writes a poem, right? Dichtern – he uses that word. So, I wondered if you started with that idea? Signe Gjessing:  Yes – I could add that the extreme audacity of his poetic lines is the core of dealing with poetry, because it’s dealing with creation and he has both audacity and humility. And I think that’s why he’s so occupied with tautological thinking. That was a way of going extremely far without having gone anywhere and that was my great inspiration. I definitely thought of all of his writings in the Tractatus as radical poetry. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  And when you read the Tractatus for the first time, did you immediately see that quality in it? Or were you initially – potentially – intimidated by the implications of it for trying to articulate something in language? Signe Gjessing:  I definitely saw, as I say, the radical approach to language – the most inspirational fact that anything could give me as a poet. I couldn’t search in any poem for exactly that feature – I couldn’t find it. I also had a desperate need of having something far beyond me to reach for and Wittgenstein was the only one who could give me that. And also, his way of thinking of poetry as act – no, sorry, of philosophy and language as act – I really feel that poetry is action. It’s like playing with the world and reality – dealing with it in action. It can be an action like touching the ideal or moving it from its place and finding it in another place. And then putting it back again. This way of acting with thought is also extremely important. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  I think one of the most interesting things about your book is it that it clearly has this sort of ferocious engagement with what you’ve just described, but it also seems to me to not take itself too seriously. It’s quite funny in places and it’s almost, sort of insouciant in expressing gigantic things. Is that a texture that you detected in Wittgenstein or is that a reflection of your own way of reading? Signe Gjessing:  Well, I think humour is very close to courage, because you don’t care – you just do it. And I think humour is like that – it doesn’t care, it doesn’t really try to say something that needs to be understood, it just does it. But I’ve been on a path with my previous books where – in my very early poetry – I took some everyday objects and then some eternal objects and then I threw them together. But I had the feeling that the everydayness had to be represented by the way of speaking instead of by images. So, I feel that humour is a way of dealing in everyday life with the eternal.

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Sam Kinchin-Smith:  And the way that you break up the large universal images is with this, kind of, idiomatic speech – little, almost self-undermining, turns of phrase. Is it a book that you think is mostly to be read aloud rather than read on the page for that reason? Signe Gjessing:  Yes, it does come to life in a way. But I also – now you also talked about the graphicness of language and Wittgenstein’s thoughts about that, and I do think that the written word has opportunities of becoming – well, ideal, in a way. I have to say that. And I am intrigued by this realm that is sort of floating – and you talked about this in music as well – that which we cannot reach, which is not inside the structure, and then the sound of reading is structure, so it’s a paradox. It comes to life when you read; it has to be read but not necessarily out loud. Sam Kinchin-Smith: Ray, with this in mind, how seriously did Wittgenstein take himself? Ray Monk:  Well, going back to what you said about humour, Wittgenstein once said that a work of philosophy could be written that consisted entirely of jokes. There aren’t many gags in the Tractatus but his later work is full of jokes, funny stories, funny metaphors, and so on. So, you know, he honed his routines as a comedian! Sam Kinchin-Smith:  But isn’t the Tractatus a brilliant gag? In so far as it presents an understanding of language that it wilfully doesn’t manifest itself – but in not manifesting it itself, it also creates some of the immortal lines of twentieth-century literature. Ray Monk:  Sure. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  It’s a kind of very bizarre fulfilment of the opposite project to itself, which seems to me to be almost the definition of a joke. Ray Monk: Okay. So, there are two fundamentally different ways of understanding the Tractatus that exist among philosophers. The traditional way of understanding it is that it puts forward a theory of meaning according to which its own propositions are meaningless. And about thirty years ago a lot of philosophers said, look, attributing such a contradiction to a great philosopher is embarrassing. Can’t we understand the book in a different kind of way? And so they started to – this is James Conant and Cora Diamond – develop something similar to what you’ve just said. They develop this view that it doesn’t put forward a theory of language in terms of which its own propositions are meaningless; rather it’s a work of irony, a work of sustained irony that leads the reader into thinking that the book is going to deliver a theory of meaning. And right up until the very end the reader thinks I’ve got this theory of meaning now – and then it all collapses. And Conant and Diamond’s view is that that was the whole point all along. They were going to show you that this was a mirage; that the idea that philosophy can offer you a theory of meaning is mistaken and that was his chosen way of making a mistake – in a kind of performative way. I mean, you know, emphasizing the idea – he says in the Tractatus that philosophy is

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an activity not a discipline – and this is an active way of making that point. And it’s a rather attractive interpretation. However, it’s contradicted by almost everything he said. I mean, internally it makes complete sense and, as I say, it’s rather attractive. But when you look at the letters he wrote to Bertrand Russell, to Gottlob Frege, to Engelmann, you can see that he does indeed think he’s put forward a theory of meaning. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  That leads into asking an unfair question of a biographer – are we, then, into the territory of structuralism, where the fact of the text matters more than what he said about it in letters to his colleagues? What do you think Wittgenstein himself would have made of this reading of his own work? Ray Monk:  That’s a cunning question – because it purports to adopt structuralism only to abandon it, because you’re asking me that question as a biographer. So, yes, I think Wittgenstein would have rejected that interpretation and he would have said, no, that’s not what I meant; and he certainly wouldn’t have been happy with the view, ‘well that doesn’t matter! Who cares what you meant?’ He’s not going to adopt that. No, I think it’s perfectly clear that he thought he had put forward a theory of meaning and then he’s very upfront towards the end of the book where he says, ‘My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me, eventually recognizes them as nonsensical. When he has used them as steps to climb up beyond them, he must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up on it.’ So, that is how, I think, he regarded his propositions. They were meaningless, nevertheless – and this is a problem, of course – they could be used as a kind of gesture to get people to the point at which they can throw the ladder away. Then they can see that these propositions are meaningless and that there cannot be a theory of logic, because logic is transcendental. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  Max, I’m interested in the way that you approach text in your work and the fact that you clearly see it at the centre of quite a lot of your projects – that music has the ability to contribute something to text, that helps us to understand it, whether it’s a kind of ironic counterpoint or a multiplicity of perspective, or whether it’s a cumulative effect of whatever else. Is that almost the silence with which Wittgenstein’s work ends? That you fill that silence with something that reinjects meaning into the work? Max Richter:  Well – I think the interesting part in that question is what do you mean by ‘something’? The something. It goes back to the problem of what music really is and what it does. I’m a passionate reader, I love literature, I love stories, and I’m very interested in ideas. And using texts either as sound objects, just for their sonic qualities, or for their literary or narrative qualities – I mean, for me, this is something very natural. I mean, it’s been in music for ever, actually, this sort of idea – but, yes, the counterpoint between the kind of concrete story-telling aspect of the human voice, of a text, and the more diffuse, hard to pin down qualities that instrumental music has – I think these two things can work together in very interesting ways.

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Sam Kinchin-Smith:  I think it’s time for Signe’s proposition and then perhaps you could follow your proposition with a reading from your own book? Signe Gjessing:  Yes, definitely – 3.332: ‘No proposition can make a statement about itself because a propositional sign cannot be contained in it (that is the whole of the “theory of types”).’ And from my work – ‘3: The world is imported. 3.01: The world is a good alternative to certainty. 3.011: The world has been allowed to sit and watch from one side of the balance. The world is not supposed to shift the balance, it should just watch. 3.02: Is it completely intentional that the universe has not led roads to the stars? 3.03: The universe always shows up at the last minute, right before universality gives up. 3.031: And always with some kind of new scent. 3.1: The world is accentuated by the drops as an example. – Which ecstasies? – The world, for example.’ Sam Kinchin-Smith:  I’m interested in the way that your book has a sort of layer that is very much in keeping with the scale of Wittgenstein’s project and it also has a very much smaller layer that uses these specific images throughout – whether silk or shampoo or roses. Could you talk about what’s going on in the interrelation between those two layers? Signe Gjessing:  Well, it’s a book which tries to make a path between philosophy and poetry. And, therefore, it seemed natural to me to figure out a new language that was mathematical in its way of dealing with the system of language. And then making some small boxes, in which poetry could unfold itself. I feel that it’s a language that is equal to this way I speak now, where there are understatements and prime statements – I’m sorry for my English! – and these are just made mathematical, so that you can look under the sentence and see another one that has its own essence and is not dependent on anything. So, I thought that in order to keep the beauty alive you have to regulate it – and it had to be stressed as well. To me the system is that of the stresses – because you constantly number the images. I think it’s very good – so the images don’t fall asleep. They are constantly awake. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  The other thing that is quite interesting is the way that you – or rather an ‘I’ in the poem – gradually enter and it doesn’t take over. I love the line, ‘The world weighs less than my problems.’ I’m wondering if that ties in with a reading of Wittgenstein that I find interesting, which is that it has some parallels with psycho-analysis – that there’s an extent to which it’s thinking through things until something rises to the top and that rising to the top is therapeutic? Signe Gjessing:  Oh well, I only have an acquaintance with depth psychology in the way of dealing with symbols, so I haven’t thought about that. But it’s interesting. I feel that the ‘I’ is there because the world is thought through. It’s the thought world. It’s not the world – it’s an imaginary world. So, therefore, there’s an ‘I’. And that can be loosely connected with the Meditations of Descartes, where he thinks – over seven or eight steps – about being in the world. So to me, it’s important that there’s someone who’s involved in this world. I think to Wittgenstein the ‘I’ is beyond the world in a way.

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Ray Monk:  He does talk about the ‘I’, the philosophical ‘I’, and one of the things he says is that ‘if I wrote a book called The world as I found it, I would not be in it’. The ‘I’ is the limit of the world. He has this curiously childlike drawing where he has a little ‘I’ and the thing goes like this – ‘this is the world’ and the ‘I’ to whom it is the world is not in that world but rather is a limit of it. And he says, ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’. My world. He also says that solipsism thought through rigorously coincides with realism. Difficult to know what to make of that – but, in any case, he didn’t think that in putting forward this view, which is clearly a kind of solipsism, that he was contradicting realism. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  Max, where’s the ‘I’ in your work? Max Richter: Hah! That’s interesting. I mean, for me, the work that I make comes out of my experience of being human. Being a person is not always that easy – as I think everyone knows! – so, yes, the work reflects that. The work reflects the world as I find it and, again, it’s quite troublesome, as we all know. So, yes, I guess I’m in there somewhere – or my experience of being a person is in there somewhere. And I think there are meeting points then for listeners, for other people, to participate. We have common experiences, right? And then that’s the sort of bridge. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  Wittgenstein’s project is based upon the idea that if one person reads this and understands it then it has been worthwhile. Max Richter:  Yes, but doesn’t he also say that the ideal reader, or the person who really gets it, is someone who’s had the ideas already. So there’s a sort of – you get it if you get it kind of thing. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  I like that about him – the profound non-arrogance, the element of not really caring about authorship. You sort of feel that Wittgenstein, contrary to almost any other genius in the world, would have been delighted to discover that somebody had already authored his project, which is both a degree of self-confidence and humility that is unparalleled I think. Max Richter:  Well, he’s very hard about himself, about the Tractatus, in various places. Didn’t he say that, really, he is someone who can’t quite do what he wants to do? I think it’s a bit later, in the ’30s he says that. But yes, he seems – he’s a very harsh critic of the book. Even in the Introduction. Ray Monk:  I think the idea of Wittgenstein as humble needs some qualification! Sam Kinchin-Smith:  Okay! Ray Monk:  In his Introduction, he says that ‘the truth of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems’. That doesn’t sound all that humble! Sam Kinchin-Smith:  Point taken! Ray Monk:  In fact, he thought that he had solved all the problems of philosophy and consistent with that he gave up philosophy. He’d done it, he’d finished it! I mean, he did think that the Tractatus represented a solution to all the

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problems of philosophy until Frank Ramsey visited him and demonstrated that it wasn’t. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the more mystical dimensions to the work? Signe, in your introduction, which I think is extraordinary, you talk about ecstasy and that being something that Wittgenstein is open to but that doesn’t necessarily exist in the Tractatus. Could you say some more about that? Signe Gjessing:  Yes, well, I chose this very dry piece – ‘no proposition can make a statement about itself because it cannot be contained in itself’ – but I could also have chosen another piece, 6.45, which is equivalent, where he states that ‘the feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical’. So, the feeling of the existence of the limit is that which – well, he makes a loop, in my opinion. He stands at the immanence of the world and he doesn’t even point to the transcendence, but he just knows that having highlighted the world everything else is in question. He doesn’t go there, but he knows that embodying being everything mystical is at hand. I chose a more traditional way of mysticism – that is, to try to evoke, to walk in to it. But I have been inspired by his way of dealing with limits very much. And actually one of the phrases of Wittgenstein that I been most inspired by is not from the Tractatus but it’s from his notebooks, where he says ‘when I have done with the world’ – well, I don’t remember it in English, but I can say something like, ‘when I have done with the world the whole world lies there as an amorphous mass, an interesting box room’. So, I think this is connected with containment – this box room – that there’s a mysticism in the containment itself and I’m very interested to hear about that. I know that it’s connected with the paradox of Russell – to have a set of all sets that are not members of themselves, that don’t contain themselves. This paradox of stating that you have a universe – I think that set theory is quite immanent in the book and this way of putting the boundaries of everything is a way of making the mystical stand out and I’ve just chosen to walk into it. Sam Kinchin-Smith: I think that’s really interesting, specifically in terms of music, because I think that the mystical is often where helpful conversations about music go to die – maybe because of a loss of musicological grounding in everyday conversation. Obviously, it is something that music has available to it but it’s important that we don’t think it is only what music has available to it because at that point it just becomes a kind of, you know, transcendental sludge. How do you deploy the mystical in your work? Max Richter:  Well, it’s very hard to talk about music in a useful way – it really is. Academic music writing through the centuries has tried to find different ways to address it. You can go back to Tovey and it’s very novelistic; and then you get Schenker saying – who deals with it almost from a geometric standpoint – and then all kinds of other ways of analysing the work. But, ultimately, it’s a completely subjective situation and the kind of decisions that people

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make to describe a piece of music are instinctive. An event will happen which appears to be meaningful in some way in a piece of music – and how does that happen? Ray Monk:  Can I ask something? What do you think of Schopenhauer’s work on music? We know that Wittgenstein was very influenced by Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer was the first philosopher he read and you can see that influence – you can see the influence of The World as Will and Representation in the Tractatus – and Schopenhauer has a great deal to say about music in that book. What do you think? Have you read it? Max Richter:  I haven’t read it for about thirty-eight years, so you’ll have to refresh me! Ray Monk:  Shall I have a go? Very quickly! Well, Kant had analysed the world in terms of noumena and phenomena. The noumena are the things in themselves, but the phenomena are the things as they appear to us. We can only know the world as phenomena, we can’t know the noumena, according to Kant. Schopenhauer had his version of that, which is the world as will and representation. Ordinarily, we can only know the world as we represent it, but music gives us access to his version of the thing in itself, which is the will. And it’s precisely because it gives us direct access to that, unmediated by any form of representation, that it is so powerful, according to Schopenhauer. Max Richter:  Yes, I think that does make sense – but the opposite also makes sense. I mean, ‘unmediated by representation’ – yes, that’s one view of music. On the other hand, music is representative in many respects and many circumstances. Ray Monk:  So, it makes sense – but is it true? Max Richter:  Exactly! Sam Kinchin-Smith:  I’m interested in Signe’s idea of the transcendental being there and choosing to step into it or not. Do you feel moments when you do and moments when you don’t? Perhaps you work up to a point where you give yourself up to it, eventually? Max Richter:  I think probably everyone who does creative work has that experience. You try to do things, you try to make things, and if you’re lucky at a certain point something happens so that the things you’re making start to take on properties of their own – and that, I think, is something really special. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  I wonder if that applies to biography here, because presumably you’re interested both in Wittgenstein’s work and also Wittgenstein’s extraordinary life. It seems to me there’s an interesting crossover point where something becomes almost fictional-seeming about Wittgenstein’s life, perhaps because it almost has this kind of Old and New Testament quality to it. You have the kind of two works, the people who still believe in the first part, the people who believe in the second part; the idea of this almost kind of Holy Fool at the centre of it. Did you feel, when you were writing about him, that occasionally it did almost take off in that way?

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Ray Monk:  Well, what I felt was that there’s a strong connection between Wittgenstein the person and his philosophy. It became my aim in the book to show that connection. And also to show that if you misunderstand him, you will misunderstand the spirit in which he wrote his work. It seems to me that the spirit in which he wrote his work is the key thing to understand and it really helps to know what kind of person he was. So, I think, he was an extraordinary person. I’m not sure I’d use the phrase ‘holy fool’, but he was – he lived an extraordinarily pared-down life. You know, quite deliberately pared down. He never owned a house, he never married, he had as few possessions as possible. He inherited vast wealth, but he gave it all away. He gave it to his sisters, who he said were already so rich that it wouldn’t damage them! He always lived in very simple surroundings and he concentrated on just two things. The first was to think clearly and the second was to be a decent human being. And those two things were two sides of the same coin – what I call in the book ‘the duty of genius’. What prevents us from thinking clearly, according to Wittgenstein, is often not a lack of intelligence but vanity, a lack of will. We tell ourselves we understand something when we don’t; or we try to make ourselves look clever and make that the object of what we say rather than just trying to understand something. So, the two things go hand in hand. He himself made strenuous efforts to rid himself of vanity – partly for its own sake and partly because he thought that would clear the barriers to thinking clearly. They were intimately bound together. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  That leads us brilliantly into – oh, sorry, do you want to say something first? Max Richter:  It’s interesting – I mean, when I read the Tractatus, it strikes me as very biographical. You get such a strong sense of the person. And more than that, you get a sense of someone who is really struggling with something. Ray Monk:  That’s interesting – I have heard that said, yes. Max Richter: It made me think about, you know, his line about finding the redeeming word – das erlösender Wort – and I wondered actually whether your poem is a collection of redeeming words for the Tractatus itself. So, it’s almost like a kind of antimatter version – as you say, coming from ecstasy rather than limits. Ray Monk:  Can I just say something about that, about as it were the expressive quality of the Tractatus? One thing that drives philosophers nuts about it is that it contains so few arguments. Bertrand Russell tells this story of upbraiding Wittgenstein about this and saying, look why – you’ve got all these conclusions, why don’t you give us the arguments for them? Max Richter:  Show your workings! Ray Monk:  Show your workings! And Wittgenstein said this, ‘look I regard my propositions as like beautiful flowers and if I were to provide an argument for them it would be like surrounding the flower with barbed wire’. A rather beautiful image, I think – and it reminded me of one of your propositions, ‘The

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roses were just about to pack up and leave everything, when the universe fell in love with the law of causation.’ And we go back to the roses, ‘The world leaves everything to the roses, which leave everything to chance.’ That image of the rose, it seems to me, is very redolent of Wittgenstein’s image of his own propositions as beautiful, delicate things that could only be destroyed by argumentation. Signe Gjessing:  Which is what makes you, of course, a poet. I had an experience one day at college, when we were talking about this book – when afterwards I passed by some flowers and I just knew that they are poetry. Ray Monk:  I think that’s what he meant in the remark that you mentioned earlier – he said, ‘I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said philosophy ought to be written as if it were poetry.’ Sam Kinchin-Smith:  Signe, do you want to address Max’s question – the idea of it being a kind of antimatter Tractatus? Signe Gjessing:  Ah, yes. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  The reason I ask is because I think the ending of your poem is very extraordinary, but in a way that is almost exactly opposite of how the Tractatus ends. Signe Gjessing:  Yes. Well, I can read it aloud. It’s proposition 7.8: ‘The everything is one of the few bright spots in my life.’ Of course, you want to infuse the Tractatus with the feeling – with this being – you want it to be alive with being. And being is – well, you talked about the quality of sentences that are resting in themselves, they have themselves as ground, and that is being in poetry. You can never explain it. Perhaps when reading such agonizing literature as Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, you want to refuse it in a way, so not that it stands still but that it lightens up in a way. So that it becomes flower-like as it is, but just without searching. In my opinion, there is not much search in these lines that I wrote. I wanted to make them as destinations – on the semantic level the world is walking, constantly, but the poetry is resting.

ADDENDA FROM THE Q&A WITH THE AUDIENCE I. Ray Monk:  There’s a distinction by William James, who is a writer that Wittgenstein did read quite intensely – not many people know that William James is the most quoted writer in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations! – and James made a distinction between ‘verbalisers’ and ‘visualisers’, which Wittgenstein alludes to, describing himself as a visualiser. And you can see that in the Tractatus, quite clearly. The idea of pictures, the idea that we understand pictorially. Russell, by the way, was an extreme verbaliser, whereas you can see many times in Wittgenstein’s writing – and in his conversations – that he had to have a picture of things. He mentions this in some remarks that have been published in Culture and Value and he describes it, perhaps not very happily, as a feminine way of – he thinks of himself as having a feminine kind of

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understanding. But in any case, he thought of himself quite consciously as having the kind of understanding that had to picture things to himself. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  That was something I wanted to ask you – do you see your work as pictorial in character? Do you think you have that same sense of what language does? Signe Gjessing:  Yes, very much so. I have always loved visionary poetry and I’ve thought about what is vision, what is visionary in poetry. I think that visionary poetry is the sort of poetry that creates where nothing is – if you need something you can just make it. That to me is visionary poetry. And I see it, always, in pictures. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  The images that rise out of your book – did you see those when you read the Tractatus? Signe Gjessing:  Oh, no. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  I mean in terms of silk and . . . Signe Gjessing:  No, they are completely something new inducing. The silk also has a quality of being connected with the process of the silkworm becoming a butterfly. And that is also an image of transcendence. I would never go further than that – it should never be an image upon anything else. I agree, I allow the image to have some sort of meaning but only meaning that tells something about itself, because the transcendence only tells something about what the picture is doing in the poem. It doesn’t tell anything else about the world or us. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  Max, the composer Nico Muhly wrote a diary in the LRB about his compositional practice and it was clear from that he very much does see music as a picture. He talked about how he starts with an image and then he breaks the image apart and he sees the broken-apart image in a building. It’s an architectural kind of blueprint. Is there a visual element to how you conceive of projects, particularly big projects? Max Richter:  Yes. I mean, I think with a piece of music you’re making something that doesn’t yet exist. So, you start with a silent, sort of blackness and you put musical objects into it. It feels like you’re making a place, you’re making something which has properties, which has things in it, things that relate to one another in particular ways. And as you start to make that place, it changes the sort of actions that are possible within it and the kinds of thing that can happen within it. Yes, to me that’s a very natural way to go – from nothing to something. II. Ray Monk:  I don’t think Wittgenstein ever had any truck with ethical relativism. Now, should he have – having placed ethics outside the realm about which we can say things that are objectively true and false? Shouldn’t he – when you list all the propositions that are true, to each one of those corresponds a fact and those facts collectively make up the world and none of them will be about ethics. There are no ethical facts. Does ethical relativism follow from that? I don’t think it does, funnily enough. What does follow is that there can be no such

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thing as a science of ethics that tells you – you know, that instructs you in what you should and shouldn’t do. But I think the idea that we see things which we then can’t say – I don’t think there’s anything necessarily relativistic about that. In fact, I think if anything the opposite because you can only be shown something and you can only show something to other people that is actually there. So I think, actually, the tendency is anti-relativistic – and certainly that was his tendency. He had, as you know, very strong ethical opinions and he didn’t think that they were relative to his culture or to anything else. He refused to theorize – or even discuss – ethics as a branch of philosophy. He never did that. He delivered that lecture on ethics in Cambridge in 1929, but it’s not really about ethics. It’s not really about what philosophers call ethics. He’s not taking a view on the logical status of moral propositions. Neither is he, in a first order kind of way, saying whether certain things are good or bad, allowed or not allowed. The entire lecture is actually about running up against the limits of language. So, having run up against the limits of language, ethics lies beyond those limits and is something – it belongs to the mystical. And I think rather than it following that relativism is true, I think it would follow that relativism isn’t true. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  The phrase that is suggested by this – particularly through the lens of Bertrand Russell, who obviously became a public figure in a certain kind of way, at the point that his brain broke, when he was no longer able to live in an abstract way – is the Chomskian phrase, ‘the responsibility of intellectuals’ – and I wonder if, Max, as a high-profile artistic figure, you feel a certain ethical responsibility? Max Richter:  I do actually. I mean, it seems to me that if you’re choosing to make objects and put them into the world then you have a responsibility for what those objects are, their properties, and the effects they have – to some extent. I think music is a way to talk about the world as we live it – in it. There’s that Nina Simone quote, where she says you can’t help but talk about the stuff that’s going on. It’s just automatic, basically, in a way that everyone else does. Everyone else – non-artists, if you like – also talk about what’s going on in the world and, as an artist, I think it’s quite natural that we should do that. So, for me, the thing that lights the fuse very often is some kind of a question about what’s going on and those are the things that make me want to start a project. Yes. Sam Kinchin-Smith:  I think we might finish there.

Chapter 9

Always One Sentence on Every Page Allowed My Mind to Flower Kenneth Goldsmith

EDITOR’S NOTE BY MISCHA TWITCHIN The following pages are drawn from Kenneth Goldsmith, I Declare a Permanent State of Happiness, London: Eris Press, 2023 (used with permission). At the beginning of his Afterword to the 119 pages of this ‘annotated Tractatus’ project, Goldsmith writes that ‘my entire poetic production is founded upon Wittgenstein’s later writings’ and that although he had ‘always loved the idea of the [Tractatus] – after all, I am a conceptual writer’ – he found its mathematical dimension ‘intimidating as hell’. However, as he reflects in the closing sentences, while ‘you won’t really learn as much about Wittgenstein on these pages as you will about me’, nevertheless, ‘even in the driest of mathematical sections of the Tractatus, there was always one sentence on every page that allowed my mind to flower, permitting me to make often unconscious connections and permitting myself to go wherever they took me’. ​

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Chapter 10

The Fibres, the Fly Bottle, and the Rough Ground Wittgenstein’s Figuration of Politics Derek Gottlieb

INTRODUCTION It has certainly not been uncommon to find Wittgenstein in political theory,1 but Wittgenstein has been almost entirely absent from the intersection of performance theory and politics. He makes only one passing appearance in Isin’s contribution to Performing Citizenship.2 This state of affairs, or so I argue, is largely the result of overlapping disciplinary constraints. In political theory and political science, ‘the political’ is taken to refer to a certain subset of social activities, structures of governance, relations of power, and so on, and Wittgenstein has traditionally appeared in those fields to the extent that his thought can be productively addressed to those concerns. And in philosophy itself, of course, the reception of Wittgenstein’s work has been somewhat notoriously mediated by relatively narrow understandings of his ‘project’, whether through the Vienna Circle’s logical empiricism and its attention to clarity as the goal of first philosophy or through Baker and Hacker’s influential efforts to use the sense/nonsense distinction to police the boundaries of properly philosophical issues. Taken together, these disciplinary constraints have conspired to put out of play some of the most important questions raised by Wittgenstein’s thinking – particularly at the nexus of performance and politics. It becomes all too easy to think that politics is mainly about the specification of and subordination to certain kinds of rules, and that Wittgenstein’s discussions of rules and rule-following can therefore help. This is more or less what early Rawls thought.3 Or that the rule-following passages from Philosophical Investigations have some particular contributions to make to existing political debates, 129

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as between a natural law tradition and the legal positivism movement that was reinvigorated in the 1950s.4 From the philosophy side of things, as well, it has often seemed difficult to imagine Wittgenstein addressing anything political directly, a difficulty that we might trace to Wittgenstein’s own ‘Lecture on Ethics’.5 It is certainly a difficulty abetted by an exegetical tradition that concentrates on logical clarity as an imagined first step towards anything like social activity that could properly be called political.6 These constraints have made it all too easy to marginalize or simply to overlook the relationality lying at the root of Wittgenstein’s concerns with the matters that have made him famous – the meaning of words, the following of rules, and so on. And of course a variety of scholars have undertaken to highlight his attention to relationality over the years, albeit occasionally in a somewhat impoverished way.7 It is my purpose here to suggest that Wittgenstein’s attention to relationality is fundamental to his thought; that relationality as such is the essence of whatever we mean by the political; and that relationality as Wittgenstein conceives of it only ever appears in performance, in the doing. I think that we can see this by examining three of Wittgenstein’s most famous figures from the Investigations: The fibres (§67), the fly bottle (§309), and the rough ground (§107).8

LANGUAGE AND RELATIONALITY IN THE LATER WITTGENSTEIN Wittgenstein’s intellectual journey from the early notebooks and the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations and the thinking published posthumously in various forms is well-travelled – if hotly contested – territory.9 Putting aside as many elements of the contentious debate as possible, what remains are clear distinctions in the philosophical styles and the modes of address to be found in the Tractatus and the Investigations, respectively. If a ‘resolute’ reading of the Tractatus aimed to establish what we might call thematic continuity with the later work, it did so by reading against the grain of the early work.10 And this only emphasizes the difference between the grains, so to speak. What we find in the Investigations, at last, is not a series of numbered and hierarchical propositions, but a wide-ranging and peripatetic set of dialogically voiced aphoristic paragraphs. It is hardly revolutionary at this point to suggest that the earlier work, for all the radicalness of its proposals about what came to be known as the ‘picture theory of meaning’, or of the relationship between the limits of language and the limits of one’s world, serves as an instance of philosophizing in a European tradition recognizable through Descartes’s Meditations or Hume’s Essay Concerning Human

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Understanding. This is to note that Wittgenstein composed the Tractatus largely in isolation or in conversation with himself.11 In such a practice, as Hume himself testified, it is all too tempting to forget the organic connection between philosophical problems and the lifestream out of which they arise.12 The temptation trends in the direction of totalization and closure. In the Investigations, by contrast, we find a variety of voices raising questions and concerns for consideration from a variety of standpoints and with a variety of philosophical commitments in the background. Early receptions of the Investigations sought to distinguish between a ‘Wittgenstein’ whose claims or theses the Investigations endorsed and an ‘interlocutor’ whose views the work sought to reject or disprove.13 Stanley Cavell, however, would have us take a more agnostic view as to the owner of the various voices in the text, suggesting that they all may ultimately be Wittgenstein’s – he distinguishes, for his part, between a ‘voice of temptation’ and a ‘voice of correctness’.14 The project of deciding which propositions in Wittgenstein’s work (if any) count as theses, and which (if any) Wittgenstein himself endorsed is ongoing.15 But siding with Cavell, I think it is crucial to Wittgenstein’s view of relationality that it not be finally decidable who is voiced in any particular proposition or suggestion. That is, we should understand the dialogic voices in the Investigations, or even interlocutor characters, as manifestations of Wittgenstein’s inclinations or desires or temptations to say thus and so. Understanding the Investigations in this way would mean hearing each of these voices or inclinations as an intelligible version of ourselves, a stance we may at any moment feel compelled to occupy and defend. It is neither uncommon nor controversial to read the Investigations as an extended treatise on the theory of language implied in Augustine’s Confessions, with which Wittgenstein begins. It is somewhat less common to read the Investigations as an extended study of the interpersonal conditions involved in sharing a form of life, in maintaining and stabilizing a tendency to agree in judgements. There is a pattern in the philosophical literature around Wittgenstein of misconstruing the emphasis on naming objects in Augustine as the central aspect of the theory in Wittgenstein’s sights, but this misses the parental effort behind the naming, the effort to ‘initiate’ a child ‘into the relevant forms of life held in language and gathered around the objects and persons of our world’.16 When examined from this perspective – centring the simultaneous efforts to forge and test interpersonal bonds – the Investigations’ warnings about the dangers of barren theorizing on the substance and nature of language-learning take on a more overtly political valence, suggesting that philosophizing, when wrongly conducted, not only defeats the pursuit of truth, but also rejects and precludes the possibility of community. When properly conducted, philosophical attention to the substance and nature of our practices (language-learning,

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rule-following, aspect-seeing, pointing, demanding, explaining, etc.) not only keeps us in contact with the others with whom we share these practices, but also performatively instantiates and reinforces the first-person plurality in the midst of which we stand always to find ourselves.

THE ROUGH GROUND AND THE SCENE OF POLITICS When Wittgenstein invokes the ‘rough ground’ in the Investigations, it is as a figure of opposition to what philosophy has heretofore striven to construct: a world of ‘slippery ice’ in which there is no friction and so, ‘in a sense’, as he says, conditions are ideal. In response to this temptation – which one might read the Tractatus as giving expression to – he now emphasizes that ‘we want to walk’, and so ‘we need friction’. That is what prompts his exclamation: ‘Back to the rough ground!’ (§107). With this exhortation, coming at the end of a discussion of his own previous work, and of what he views, from the perspective of the Investigations, as his earlier misconceptions about logic and language, he calls upon the field to remember that it is for something other than the solving of logical puzzles – or perhaps, put better, that the solving of logical puzzles is good to the extent that the practice is useful. The approach to philosophy that Wittgenstein rejects at this point in the Investigations is the very approach he had taken earlier in the Tractatus. Indeed, we might hear him criticizing the goal of linguistic empiricism that grew up around the Vienna Circle in §90–92.17 He contrasts a process of ‘call[ing] to mind’ (sich besinnin) something that one always knows but has difficulty explaining to his Tractarian process, which he shared with Russell, of analysing propositions down to their atomic elements.18 Such an analytic process goes astray, Wittgenstein suggests in the Investigations, because of its tendency to impose some more or less concrete vision of finality on the process – an idea and picture of ‘a final analysis of our linguistic expressions, and so a single completely analyzed form of every expression’ (§91). He also calls this, in the same paragraph, ‘a state of complete exactness’ that we must already be able to imagine as a potentiality lying within each of our ordinary expressions. And he relates this temptation to a view of the situation in which something – some ‘essence’ – is hidden from view. The problem with such a temptation is that it compels us to cease asking whether this is the case, and therefore, what particular good it might do us to uncover or disclose this hidden essence. The metaphysical picture of essence becomes a requirement (Forderung), as he puts it (§107). In this way, by this process, and for these reasons, the philosopher supposedly invested in analysing the world interposes a particular kind of screen between herself and the world, compelling

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the world to present itself in a highly particular way, as the concealer of secret essences and final truths. A certain manner of rigorously approaching the world thus cuts one off from alternative ways of receiving the world.19 The overarching image of the philosopher, here, then, is of one removed and cut off from the world, walled out – but in such a way that they understand themselves as possessing the secret key to the ‘super-order’ (ÜberOrdnung) among ‘super-concepts’ (Über-Begriffen) (§97), the hidden inner essence of the world itself. Perhaps a better way of rendering this image is to say that the philosopher has built a double of the world according to their own specifications – this is certainly a productive way of understanding the nature of the metaphysical ‘requirement’ that Wittgenstein names. The creation, or the reification, of the world’s uncanny double simultaneously signals a retreat from the world that the philosopher ostensibly desires to know and also betrays a philosophical commitment to knowing – understood either as activity or possession – as a superior value, specifically over and above the object to be known.20 Despite describing this philosophical move as a retreat from the world, I should note the assertive – colonial – violence in the gesture, the philosopher’s arrogation of the sovereign power of decision over the world, the presumption to dictate terms of reason to the world itself.21 Perhaps this is what Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman have in mind when they accuse A. J. Ayer and his acolytes of practicing a ‘destructive empiricism’ via a method of ‘aggressive incomprehension’.22 The philosophical or epistemological impulse that Wittgenstein rejects in the run-up to §107 is therefore simultaneously political and antipolitical. It is antipolitical to the extent that the idealization of the world’s conditions, the slipperiness of the ice, renders politics superfluous: the world becomes solvable in a way that neither requires nor depends upon interpersonal relations.23 But it is also political – in a way that its methodical objectivity works to disavow – to the extent that its creations (private property regimes, human rights, international law) aprioristically exclude claims, voices, and interests that are not articulable in its own ‘reasonable’ terms.24 In this light, we need to acknowledge that the most radical part of §107 may not be the iconic finale – ‘Back to the rough ground!’ – but may rather be the simple assertion that ‘we want to walk’. It is radical because it postulates an aim for philosophizing in defiance of what is manifestly the case. That is, in making this assertion, Wittgenstein (re)interprets philosophy’s previous ‘requirement’ for logic’s ‘crystalline purity’ as something like a straightforward error, something that will interfere with an obviously shared aim. But one could just as easily take the wish for and construction of a world according to philosophy’s own ideal conditions as a straightforward expression of philosophers’ real desires. In other words, it may just as easily be the case that the ‘destructive empiricism’ characteristic of Wittgenstein’s own Tractarian

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work and the analytic tradition that followed it is an expression of not wanting to walk, a preference, indeed, for having puzzles to solve over lives to live.25 Making the assertion that he does, even if this is offered in the spirit of ‘mashalling recollections’ (§127), amounts to an ethical or political claim on philosophy to reorient its attention. ‘Back to the rough ground!’ performs a political project of urging philosophical attention away from a false world and towards a true one.

THE FLY BOTTLE AND THE OTHERS OF POLITICS If we understand Wittgenstein’s reorienting appeal to return to the rough ground as in the service of avoiding or reversing a rending of the world, we must also understand that appeal as made to an audience, which is to say, particular others. This impression is only reinforced by his sudden interjection into a discussion pertaining to the grammar of mental processes and of pain, at §309, of purpose once more: ‘What is your aim in philosophy? – To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.’ Wittgenstein suggests that we, plural, find ourselves hopelessly stymied in our aspirations (for knowledge or understanding, here) by our habitual modes of pursuing these. In this, we can see both the thematic similarity to the concerns discussed in the previous section and also a much clearer attention to the way that our habits necessarily involve others. The trap – the fly bottle – is an inheritance from others, or from public ways of doing things, as we might say. And so altering public ways of doing things may free us from the trap. A fly bottle is a device for trapping flies. Closed at one end and open at the other, like all bottles, it works by luring flies inside through a narrow neck; once inside, flies cannot navigate their way back out, partly because they are pointed in the direction of the bait and partly because of the narrowness of the bottle’s neck. Wittgenstein’s figure, here, is of a trap that works to enclose its prey despite remaining open (and here one might also think of Wittgenstein’s discussions in the Investigations of games not being fully determined by explicit rules [§68] and of the limited role played by doubtremoval in everyday action [§213]). The two-sidedness of his depiction of the interpersonal – what I would like to call the political – is especially important. Our structurally public practices are responsible for leading us, for leading philosophy, into the fly bottle. The structural publicness of our practices also provides us with the capacity for escape.26 This requires a turning-around, a reorientation, if we take the fly bottle figure seriously. And being turned requires a certain kind of receptivity to others. It requires taking another’s direction, acknowledging another’s standing with respect to one’s own predicament.

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It strikes me as significant that the interjection of the fly bottle figure appears in the transition from a discussion of how words are used to a specific consideration of the location and the expression of pain. In §304, Wittgenstein locates the fly bottle problem in the presupposition that ‘language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts – which may be about houses, pains, good and evil, or whatever’. This mistaken picture of how words relate to thoughts leads to insoluble paradoxes and unanswerable demands, such as those pertaining precisely to ascertaining the location and reality of another’s pain. What is out of play, or out of sight, in such a picture of language is its expressive, relational function. Cavell’s early essay ‘Knowing and Acknowledging’ makes this point eloquently and explicitly.27 In misconceiving the nature of uncertainty about another’s expression of pain, or in responding inappropriately to another’s expression of pain, we centre ourselves, as we might say in the contemporary parlance, precisely by annihilating the reality of the other.28 We refuse to hear the real demand – for sympathy, for help, for a doctor – and instead hear only a proposition whose reality stands in need of verification. Pursuing questions about the ‘meaning’ of pain in this sceptical way effectively denies the existence of the other, the one who is in pain. But importantly, especially for my claim that Wittgenstein’s fly bottle figure is related to a thoroughly relational ontology that must be presupposed in order to understand his thinking on language, it must be possible and in a sense even natural for pain-sceptics (as we might call them) to pursue an answer to their version of the question alone, quite apart from the putative sufferer. As Cavell puts it in ‘Knowing and Acknowledging’, the pain-sceptic can be understood as attempting to solve one half of a problem – the seeming opacity of another’s inner life, and the fact that the sceptic is ‘sealed out’ – while leaving a second region of the problem utterly untouched, namely, the way that pain-sceptics simultaneously figure themselves as ‘sealed in’.29 In line with the thinking developed in the previous section, we might think of this solipsistic entailment as one that the pain-sceptic actively desires. In such circumstances, it would not be knowledge of another’s pain that the sceptic doubts, but a certain and perhaps indefinite responsibility to the other that the sceptic refuses. The figure of the fly bottle invites us to see the philosopher as fundamentally disoriented, having related themselves perversely, as it were, to the world. In this, the fly bottle figure functions similarly to the rough ground that I treated in the previous section. There is something that we want, something that our thinking is supposed to deliver to us, but we frustrate our own best hopes by misconceiving the necessary approach. If the significance of the figure of the rough ground has to do with a philosophical temptation to banish

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the world as a whole in order to study it properly, the figure of the fly bottle, situated as it is in the midst of a discussion about the problem of knowing another’s mind, stresses the way that fidelity to a certain kind of philosophical method depopulates the world one wishes to know. This philosophical method for knowing other minds winds up functionally eliminating others. That is the sense of Cavell’s insight that scepticism walls the philosopher in by their own tools. Wittgenstein elsewhere more strongly suggests that framing the problem of others as a problem of knowledge is where philosophy goes astray: ‘My attitude to [the other] is an attitude toward a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul’ (PPF §22). There can be no finessing the distinction between embodying an attitude and holding an opinion.30 It is a commitment to the effort to solve a problem of alterity by epistemological means that entraps the philosopher in the fly bottle in the first place, and no epistemological argument will free the fly. And so it is important to attend to the solution to the fly bottle issue that Wittgenstein does propose. The point of the fly bottle is not only that this entrapment or stuckness is neither necessary nor inevitable, but also that at any moment another can appear to the philosopher and ‘show the fly the way out of the fly bottle’. The suggestion, as I understand it, is that we can at any moment, with the right kind of prompting – and perhaps of an unpredictable kind – find ourselves in the presence of another; and that other might turn us in the proper direction, revealing that we were never trapped at all, that the way out was only behind our backs. As in the figure of the rough ground, aprioristic commitments to certain formulations of the problem that we face render them insoluble and isolate us – from both the world and from the others with whom we share it. The locus and the publics of politics transform into airy nothings when we entrust their reality to a certain method of philosophical production, a method of clarification. It is only by returning to a starting point prior to ‘the decisive move in the conjuring trick’ (§308) that we stand to recover a habitable and inhabited political world. And this return is prompted by the obtruding appearance of another, an appearance that we have to receive. As in the figure of the rough ground, the philosophical temptation here is towards isolation, towards the substitution of a logically consistent world of crystalline purity for the unruly world of ungovernable others. This antipolitical temptation cannot be simply reasoned away. Rather, something like an attitudinal adjustment is necessary, a shift in focus, an alteration of attention.31 The others of politics, like the world of politics, cannot be recovered via traditional philosophical methods. One must be prompted to recall that they are rather the point of departure for philosophizing. One must not interfere with one’s own capacity to be recalled to herself.

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TWISTING FIBRE ON FIBRE The final figure I wish to treat in this chapter, and the most pregnant one from the perspective of performing political work, comes from a meditation on names and essences in §§46–81 of the Investigations. §67 is probably best known for introducing the concept of ‘family resemblances’ into the philosophical lexicon. But I would rather like to focus attention on the way that Wittgenstein imagines what we might call the reification – or the construction, or the maintenance – of ‘family resemblances’. ‘Why do we call something a “number”?’ he asks. ‘Well, perhaps because it has a – direct – affinity with several things that have hitherto been called “number”; and this can be said to give it an indirect affinity with other things that we also call “numbers”’ (§67b). Having probed the unsuitability of something like ‘universals’ or ‘essences’ for the work of defining concepts or drawing boundaries or determining membership in a set, Wittgenstein here floats the idea that nothing more than perceived ‘affinities’, whether direct or indirect, between two discrete things is sufficient to unite them under a single concept. These affinities do not rest, for Wittgenstein, on anything more fundamental than the affinities themselves – he proposes no causal or metaphysical mechanism that might be said to produce our perception of an affinity in any particular case. Instead, he puts the work in our own hands. ‘And we extend our concept of number, as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread resides not in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres’ (§67b). The stuff of our concepts is simple affinities; it is our tendency to perceive these affinities, and to weave them together, that makes up our concepts. This is an alternative description of our ability to inhabit and to navigate a shared world – alternative, that is, to the more familiar one based on metaphysical ‘simples’ or ‘essences’. Without, it seems to me, sacrificing anything about the objective quality of what we call ‘red’ or ‘number’ or ‘game’, Wittgenstein turns our relation to these things, and indeed to ourselves, entirely around in a way that is particularly relevant for politics.32 In the previous two sections, I have highlighted the way that the Wittgenstein of the Investigations militates against a philosophical tendency to abdicate the tasks of encountering the world (the space of politics) and encountering others (the populace of politics, one might say) to particular theories or methods. Here we find a similar admonition, but this time offered against a tendency to offload the work of politics onto theories of metaphysical production.33 In the Western philosophical tradition, not unbroken or without objection but still continuous, it has been typical to think of the world as just existing as it would anyway, and the human task as perceiving it

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correctly, in part by categorizing its furniture according to essential characteristics. Our responsibility, on this view, is not for the world that we share, but for knowing the world so as to share it properly. One upshot of this shift in responsibility is the abandonment of a kind of technocratic dream, a vision of political life in which the space, the populace, and the conduct of politics are given to us, circumscribed by certain rules and procedures and predicated upon clear and immutable definitions. In its place, Wittgenstein gives us a vision of a world – inclusive of a political life – that consists in, as we might call it, fibres to be spun with and within a ‘great surprising variety’ of others whom we might encounter and contexts that we might inhabit.34 That Wittgenstein’s ‘affinities’ can be objectively there, serving the same sort of function usually attributed to universals or essences, and yet not be simply given, is perhaps the most radical aspect of this picture. As Hubert Dreyfus noted once, in a similar context, affinities resist reduction to bare features because ‘everything is similar to everything else in an indefinitely large number of ways’.35 In such a situation, the constitution and navigation of our shared and public world relies upon our capacity to orient and reorient one another, to teach and to learn from one another. It makes our shared world resolutely dependent upon practices of sharing. And these are necessarily the practices of politics.

CONCLUSION In the three figures I have traced here, we receive a clear depiction of how traditional philosophical methods undermine our ability to occupy and to share a habitable world with others, a space suitable for the performance of politics. By imposing a presupposition of a static world stabilized by a logic of crystalline purity and occupied by atomized individuals, the traditional philosophical questions that Wittgenstein punctures in the Investigations would compel us to engage in wild feats of intellectual gymnastics, which would, for all our efforts, still leave us stranded on the far shore.36 But these three figures also body forth an alternative description of a world that we can – and indeed do – inhabit. This description includes our own irreducible involvement in the things and concerns of the world, the unpredictable omnipresence of differently situated others, and a ‘responsible task’ that confronts us collectively – a challenge to care for, maintain, and improve the world together.37 The Wittgensteinian upshot is manifold. Politics cannot be aprioristically bounded according to metaphysical or topological precepts. What counts as an object of political discussion is always also a subject of political

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discussion.38 Nor can the others with whom one ‘does’ politics, or indeed shares the world, be strictly delimited in any aprioristic way. Without denying the seeming naturalness, or at least the anthropological universality, of ‘usthem’ distinctions, the lines of demarcation are constantly to be worked out or worked through – and this cannot be thought as prepolitical, but is instead the sine qua non of politics.39 But perhaps most importantly, Wittgenstein hints to us that the function of politics has less to do with the strict adjudication of our rules than it does with a project of ‘extending’ our possibilities for belonging together as we do our concepts themselves. Linda Zerilli appropriately terms this activity the ‘pluralization and expansion of the common world’.40 This Wittgensteinian way of thinking about politics is necessarily performative, precisely because it is through our involved activities in a world with others, a common world, that anything we might call ‘political’ emerges in the first place. We can cut ourselves off from the source of our potential happiness and belonging – and indeed, the history of political philosophy can be read as a series of failed attempts to restore ourselves to the world – but we can also, at an indefinite number of points, simply find the world again, as well, or discover an as-yet-unseen plenitude in the world that we already inhabit.41 In such discoveries, we experience a reorientation of our attention, an experience most often prompted by friends or strangers whose public way of doing things in the world we take to be intelligibly representative of at least one way that things are done. The world, in other words, returns to us in the bodily performances of others. The world and its commonality return together. This can never be an absolute solution to the temptations to rigidly define an arena of politics or to draw boundaries between insiders and outsiders, but it is simply, phenomenologically, the only one that works.

NOTES 1. See, for example, John Gunnell, Conventional Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020); Linda Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso, 2000); and Hanna Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 2. Paula Hildebrandt, Kerstin Evert, Sibylle Peters, Mirjam Schaub, Kathrin Wildner, and Gesa Ziemer, Performing Citizenship: Bodies, Agencies, Limitations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 3. John Rawls, “Two Concepts of Rules,” The Philosophical Review, vol. 64, no. 1 (1955); Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxon: Oxford University Press, 1979): 3-32; Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Danielle Allen, Education and Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

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4. See, for example, Lon L. Fuller, “Human Purpose and Natural Law,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 53, no. 22 (1956): 68-76 and H. L. A. Hart, “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals,” Harvard Law Review, vol. 71, no. 4 (1958): 593-629. 5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” The Philosophical Review, vol. 74, no. 1 (1965): 3-12. 6. See, for example, Jerry Fodor, The Language of Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); Kevin Cahill, The Fate of Wonder (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Jonathan Strassfeld, Inventing Philosophy’s Other (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). 7. Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990); Avner Baz, “Stanley Cavell’s Argument of the Ordinary,” Nordic Wittgenstein Review, vol. 7, no. 2 (2018): 9–48. 8. All direct citations to the Investigations refer to Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G.E.M. Anscome, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2009). 9. David Stern, “The ‘Middle Wittgenstein’: From Logical Atomism to Practical Holism,” in Wittgenstein in Florida, pp. 203–226. Springer, Dordrecht, 1991; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Private Notebooks 1914–1916, ed. by Marjorie Perloff (New York: Liveright Press, 2022); John Gunnell, Conventional Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020); Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit (Boston: MIT Press, 1995); Alice Crary and Rupert Reed, eds., The New Wittgenstein (London: Routledge Press, 2002); Hans Sluga, Wittgenstein (New York: Wiley, 2011); Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990); Wolfram Eilenburger, Time of the Magicians, trans. by Shaun Whiteside (New York: Penguin Press, 2020). 10. James Conant, “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use,” Philosophical Investigations, vol. 21 (1998): 222-250. 11. I do not mean to discount the influence of Russell or Frege, for only two examples, on his work. I only mean to indicate that the final product was intended as his effort to extend the projects that had inspired his direction. 12. Hume: ‘Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find it in my heart to enter into them any further.’ A Treatise of Human Nature (Floating Press, 2009), 367.

13. Newton Garver, “Wittgenstein on Private Language,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 20, no. 3 (1960): 389–396. 14. Stanley Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” The Philosophical Review, vol. 71, no. 1 (1962): 67–93.

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15. David G. Stern, “Wittgenstein’s Texts and Style,” in Hans-Johann Glock and John Hyman, eds. A Companion to Wittgenstein (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016): 41-55. 16. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 178. 17. David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). 18. Stern, “From Logical Atomism.” 19. Heidegger’s thinking about philosophy starting ‘too late’ shares something of this sensibility. See also Cavell on Emerson in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome and David Rudrum on Cavell in Stanley Cavell and the Claim of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). For the history of these concerns with respect to the analytic-continental divide, see Jonathan Strassfeld, Inventing Philosophy’s Other (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). 20. For the dual sense of ‘betrayal’ here, see Roy Ben-Shai, Critique of Critique (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023). 21. This formulation is derived from Agamben’s discussion of Schmitt on ‘sovereignty as the decision on the state of exception’, which I here associate with the philosophical desire for a ‘world’ made perfectly compatible with the requirements of a certain kind of ‘reason’, in which unruly excess or messiness is banned. See Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 34–35. 22. Claire Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals (New York: Doubleday, 2022), 57. 23. To the extent that this philosophical dream was realized – if partially and problematically – it appears in the dominance of technocratic thinking in governance in the twentieth century and especially after the end of the Cold War. See Beth Popp Berman, Thinking Like an Economist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022); Penny von Eschen, Paradoxes of Nostalgia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022); Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (Oxon: Oxford University Press, 2022); and Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022). 24. It is hardly worth belabouring the sense in which political philosophy’s distinction between some prepolitical state and the time and space of politics, as in the social contract theories of Hobbes and Locke, serves as a paradigm case of this philosophical move, but it is worth pointing to incredible recent scholarship on the political power of disavowal involved in banishing whole segments of humanity and geography from the scene of politics. I am thinking of Chérie Rivers Ndaliko, To Be Nsala’s Daughter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023); Elisabeth Anker, Ugly Freedoms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022); Jill Casid, Scenes of Projection (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Naoki Sakai, The End of Pax Americana (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021); Yarimar Bonilla, et al., eds., Trouillot Remixed (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022); Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). 25. This particular possibility has been taken up explicitly by Hannah Arendt and James Baldwin, among others. 26. I take the emphasis on ‘structural publicness’ from Simon Glendinning, On Being with Others (London: Routledge Press, 1998).

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27. In Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 238–266. 28. I take this use of ‘annihilate’ from Cavell’s commentary on Veena Das’s ‘Language and Body’, as collected in Nancy Bauer et al., eds., Here and There (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022), 185. 29. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 261. 30. Saul Kripke’s proposal of a ‘skeptical solution’ to Wittgenstein’s sceptical problem is the closest that anyone has come to succeeding in finessing this point. See Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). Cavell demolishes this view in ‘The Argument of the Ordinary’ in Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990). Avner Baz lays out the full entailments of this dispute in “Stanley Cavell’s Argument of the Ordinary,” Nordic Wittgenstein Review, vol. 7, no. 2 (2018): 9–48. 31. There is a real sense in which the philosophical muddles Wittgenstein confronts in the Investigations are a form of what Iris Murdoch excoriates as ‘fantasy’, and it is in her sense that I use the term ‘attention’. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge Press, 1971). 32. Linda Zerilli leans heavily on something like this point in bringing Arendt and her use of ‘perspectives’ into contact with Wittgenstein. See Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 33. It is a different context, but Steven Klein’s The Work of Politics (Oxon: Oxford University Press, 2020) is the source of this phrase. 34. Murdoch: ‘The direction of attention is, contrary to nature, outward, away from self which reduces all to a false unity, towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability so to direct attention is love.’ Sovereignty of Good, 85. 35. Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t Do (Boston: MIT Press, 1992), xxv. 36. Dreyfus and Charles Taylor call this imposition of philosophical presuppositions ‘the ontologization of method’. See Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor, Retrieving Realism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). 37. The notion of the responsible task comes from Espen Dahl, Stanley Cavell, Religion, and Continental Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). I take the notion of care in this context from Nel Noddings, Caring (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), but also as significantly rearticulated in Christina Sharpe, In the Wake (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018) and Rinaldo Walcott, On Property (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021). 38. Gunnell, Conventional Realism, 15–17. 39. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Lies That Bind (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2018). 40. Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Judgment, 38. 41. I am thinking here of Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

Chapter 11

Ethics Is Aesthetics Anthony Howell

All too often, people step back from the harsh black and white of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into the comforting penumbra of the later Philosophical Investigations. What is gives way to what might be. Well, not for me. I read the Tractatus in 1968, a gift from my girlfriend Liz. I was twentythree. I accepted, and I still accept, that ‘the world is all that is the case’. The discourse of metaphysics was obsolete. For me, this cleared the decks of a great deal of religious clutter. Words were pictures of facts, and poetry was what I could make of them. One section of the Tractatus has been of abiding interest to me: 6.4 All propositions are of equal value. 6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists – and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world. 6.42 And so it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing that is higher. 6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)

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It is the statement in parentheses that mattered to me. I have no training in philosophy. I learnt that philosophy was to become ancilla scientiarum, the handmaid of science, a largely mathematical tool for empirical discovery. But Wittgenstein had given me my mantra: ethics is aesthetics. One and the same. One and the same. I struggled to grasp this. And I remember my mother (a veterinary scientist) saying to me, as we discussed some topical dictator, back in the late 1960s, that for her power was not represented by this dictator, power was epitomized by the brain surgeon. He literally held your life in his hands. If ethics is aesthetics, the meaning of both words shifts towards a unifying centrality. But from here on, I must abandon all pretence at philosophizing and simply speak of how I interpret this notion. Allow me to suggest that as a poet I try to do the job of making the poem as well as I possibly can. I imagine that the brain surgeon tries to do his job as well as he possibly can (and I’m aware that I am allowing the male pronoun to stand for both sexes here). Doing the job as well as you can is an ethical concern. Creatively speaking, doing that job as well you can do it, and therefore, you hope, as well as it can be done, is how the aesthetics of your practice get applied – to a poem, to a work of visual art, to a musical work, or to a performance. This truth extends beyond the arts. There is an aesthetics to firing a mortar, and obviously there is an aesthetics to brain surgery. To make a moral judgement about whether a certain poem should have been written, or a certain mortar fired, is to step outside the world, unless the comment is referring to the aesthetics, that is, to the way it may have been executed. Intentionality may need to be discussed. The poem was overloaded – more words in it than were needed to coalesce as a whole, the mortar was aimed badly and therefore missed its target. In my own practice, in all genres, I begin in a state of play – a creative habit that goes back to my childhood. I play with my pictures of facts. I jot down words, snippets of conversation, phrases, just as, when I create a performance, I play with a table to see what I can do with it, turn it upside down, balance it on one leg – can I spin it on one leg? So it goes. A cloud emerges – a cloud of words or a cloud of actions. Let’s focus for now on the cloud of words. My play is a process: I may experiment with organizing this jumble of words into some sequence with a regular line-length, then I may half the line-length and see what that looks like, or double the line-length. I may add, change or subtract words – and gradually a form emerges. Sometimes this process may be reversed, I have a notion of a form, and bring the words into that form. It’s a fluid method, progressing from one niggle to another, but there is an aesthetic concern governing each alteration. I may decide I have too many adjectives or too few. I may decide that the pronouns need to change, that the metre is too lumpy here, that somewhere else there are too

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many sibilants and the words are at risk of sliding into each other. For the artist, the aesthetic issue is the moral issue. The aim of the mortar is to hit the target. What is the poem’s aim? The poem is a magnet. It should attract thought. Thus, it becomes the target, in this case, a target for thought. It is through playing with our materials that our creative powers come together to create such targets. This is why play is such an important occupation in childhood. For as the child makes decisions about their play, the play becomes work, and so it constitutes a fine training for work at a later stage. However open-ended an aesthetic aim may be, there seems to me a movement from the accidental towards the chosen, and aesthetics is what governs that process of making a choice. I don’t see that this process necessarily excludes John Cage or Merce Cunningham or John Ashbery. The aesthetic aim may be some celebration of the random, the chance encounter or the phrase which seems to mean while eluding specific meaning. Nevertheless, Ashbery chose to write in his elusive way, Cage was happy to reveal chance in his music. Aesthetic decisions were still being made. As Fiona Templeton once said, ‘We make art to discover the reason for it.’ Perhaps one of the most intriguing examples of the fusion of ethics and aesthetics can be found in the work of the artist Mark Lombardi. As Marieke Wegener comments: Lombardi’s finely-etched drawings, filled with annotated lines, circles and squiggles, traced the flow of capital and political power between various government, private and underworld actors. His subjects were American foreign policy, crime, corruption and conspiracy, and his artwork consisted of not only his drawings but the investigative work required to create them.

Lombardi worked with interlocks – basically a form of flowchart tracing relationships, often overly cosy ones between boards of directors. In a ‘Who What Why’ Podcast, Patricia Goldstone stated: He used interlocks to draw what amounted to a continual visual history of the interconnections between intelligence and organized crime and corporations and governments in the shadow banking industry that we’ve heard so much about since 2007. He was particularly fascinated in tracing things like money laundering and tax evasion. He was actually way ahead of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in releasing a very wide swathe of extremely uncomfortable information to the public. What he created was a form of visual wiki-leaks. He died a very mysterious death. (His death by hanging was ruled a suicide in 2000.) (‘The Mysterious Death of an Artist Whose Drawings Were Too Revealing’ with Jeff Schechtman, 4 December 2015)

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These interlock diagrams are pure art. They have a graphic elegance which lifts them into irony. The lines are subtle arcs, as if they existed in some curved space delineated by astronomy (as in this ‘George W. Bush, Harken Energy, Jackson Stephens’ piece)1. Through his works, we experience the globes of power, the galaxies and black holes of the financial solar system, and these diagrams seem to me the epitome of ethics as aesthetics. They also show that the state of art, the condition of it being art, can arrive through whichever way the artist approaches this nexus. In my own work, the initial impulse comes at times when I regard the work as aesthetics, at times when I regard it as ethics. When the impulse is ethical, I find myself drawn towards satire, when aesthetic, I am drawn towards abstract systems, but when I begin the work, I find myself in the same place, located very much in the process. The abstract system may render a satirical result, the moral fervour may generate an abstract poem. And it’s the case that both the moral fervour and the issue of beauty itself lie, as Wittgenstein puts it, outside that process of turning work into play or play into work. The later ‘investigations’ acknowledge though that there is therefore a lot of stuff which is not the case. I was obliged to accept this myself when I visited the World of Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum.2 I am a confirmed atheist and I see religious belief very much as something about which ‘we must pass over in silence’ – as Wittgenstein puts it. However, Stonehenge brought home to me the creative power of belief. The monument served as an ancient solar calendar based on a solar year of 365.25 days, and its construction goes back to 2500 BC and it must have taken many years and a colossal mutual effort to create it as well as the earlier, wider configuration of the stones on Salisbury Plain. The goal of creating this physical calendar brought many people together, from many countries apparently, and they must have worked without feeling the need to defend themselves from each other – since self-defence is an essential, even existential, factor, and usually takes up all your time and most of your budget, if some threat reinforces your need to do it, and then there is no time for lugging great stones from one part of the country to another. Compared to self-defence, building a stone calendar can hardly be seen as essential, yet, some five thousand years ago, making it happen created peace and stability, at least for the duration of the henge’s making – otherwise it could not have been done. I guess it could be argued that the calendar, with its shaft of light striking just where it should on the solstice, may be construed as a chronometrical act, involving astronomical calculation rather than metaphysics. But what cannot be denied is that masses of people believed that the task needed to be done, so if a belief acts as a magnet to bring people together, so that they can work as a single force to achieve their great project without fear of being destroyed by some predatory element, then there is something to be said for it.

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But again, when one considers the sheer feat of it, and the engineering involved, one senses a preoccupation with doing a job, and doing it as well as it can possibly be done. No gloss is needed, no interpretation extrinsic to the sheer fact of the presence of the henge itself, which brings us back to the notion that ethics and aesthetics are one and the same. I came home from the exhibition with a cluster of thoughts in my head, images, memories, words the show has stimulated. Here is the result: PEACE Only the creation of the unnecessary ensures suspension of conflict. The Sun and the trowel bring these great blue stones to their henge. A tall, brimless, gold top-hat. Weapons must be left outside the Ting. The Solstice shaft. This homage to astronomy. It feels to me As if they worked together without fear, defence being a necessity That takes up all one’s time. The optional is exiled then – a luxury. Only out of the optional will goodness flow. The grape-cluster Dangling above the crescent moon, daughters of Atlas and Pleione, Elsewhere known as the hen with her brood, brings from the West Above Taurus, the seasonal rains, the breezes. What is the point in war Of seeking predictions? A podcaster’s metaphysics Best passed over in silence. The Pleiades have one invisible star. Worship now the Sun – when the future is the night of time. Forward, Only He can lead, urge the dawn forward. So we strain, Mutual in effort, here. Here on Salisbury Plain, also favoured for Maneuvers by artillery and other essential drills in the name of defence. How many centuries did it take to erect Milan Cathedral In the name of Mumbo-Jumbo? With a trowel, not a sword. (Anthony Howell, 2022)

NOTES 1. An image of Lombardi’s piece can be seen on the website of the Nome Gallery: https://nomegallery​.com​/artwork​/george​-w​-bush​-harken​-energy​-and​-jackson​ -stephens​-c​-1979​-91​-4th​-version​-1998/ (last accessed 24 July 2023). 2. An image of the celebrated Nebra Sky Disc, which was also shown at the exhibition, is available on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org​/wiki​/Nebra​_sky​ _disc (last accessed 24 July 2023).

Chapter 12

Let the Use of the Words Teach You Their Meaning Sue MacLaine and Jonathan Burrows in dialogue

This chapter is written by Sue MacLaine and Jonathan Burrows, who are discussing the play Can I Start Again Please written by Sue with Jonathan as outside eye. Can I Start Again Please is performed by Sue MacLaine and Nadia Nadarajah and was premiered as part of the Sick Festival at the Basement in Brighton in 2015. The performance went on to win a Total Theatre Award that year at the Edinburgh Festival, for ‘Innovation, Experimentation and Playing with Form’, and then toured extensively throughout 2015 and 2016. Sue is a theatre-maker, writer, and performer based in Brighton, England. Jonathan is a choreographer, teacher, and writer who is currently an Associate Professor at the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University. Although theatre and dance practices are sometimes rooted in quite different philosophies and methodologies, the two artists share a common interest in theatre and performance as a space of shared reflection. Sue:  ‘Why Wittgenstein?’ was a question often asked in post-show discussions. I always squirmed slightly because I am not, nor wish to be, a Wittgenstein scholar. In simplest terms he spoke to me and he spoke to the ideas I was trying to manifest. I knew I was writing about language and the incapacities of language, so I think I googled something like ‘incapacity of language’, or ‘when language fails’, and Wittgenstein’s ‘Whereof one cannot speak’ came up. This was 2015 and I had never heard of him or that quote, which I understand now as being quite well known. I was interested that somebody had articulated something about the subject. When writing about childhood trauma, any trauma, but particularly childhood trauma, finding people, other writers, respected writers, who seem to be an ally is a really wonderful thing because one lives in a world of disbelief. There is a demand for articulacy and the demand to know ‘what happened’: a testimonial version of trauma-telling. I like that Wittgenstein 149

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offered a space to think with him. That he held himself in stillness and, by all accounts, did not force people to express themselves when teaching. He was happy in silence and understood that silence has meaning. He comes across as a free radical allowing others to attach themselves to him and his ideas. As the writer John Heaton observed, ‘He understood that “It can be a relief to have nothing to say, because only then there may be a chance to be thoughtful”.’1 Being thought-full is a priority for me in life and in making work, and this is where Jonathan and I intersect. Jonathan:  I think perhaps one thing we share strongly is a particular view of the relationship between performers and audience in the theatre, that it’s not about showing off or even being witnessed, but more like thinking together under the same roof. The effort is towards how you might invite that thoughtful attention, which is quite different from the idea of a passive audience under the spell of the performer or the language of the performance. And of course it doesn’t always work. Sue:  Language always fails miserably and so, very often, does performance. When there is failure there is no choice but to keep going back to language and asking it to do better. This is true of any language. I was given the proposition by Wittgenstein that how something is said defines what is being said. ‘Let the use of the words teach you their meaning.’2 Jonathan:  For me with your performance Can I Start Again Please the interesting thing for the audience is that the whole set-up of two parallel monologues, one in British Sign Language and the other in spoken English, destabilizes from the outset our confidence in the idea that language will work easily to tell us a story. We have to suspend the usual ways we might take in what’s going on and trust whatever clues emerge through the combination of language and physicality, until a sense of meaning begins to accumulate. And that slow accumulation, full of unexpected humour throughout, distracts us from blocking ourselves to the difficult thing that’s being spoken about, so that we momentarily meet it in a way we may not have experienced before. Sue:  I’m very interested in the potential that opens up between performer and audience. So much of who I am as a person and so much of who I am as a writer and creative practitioner is influenced by having been in therapy for twenty-one years with the same person, and through that process discovering, conceptualizing, and inhabiting a ‘third space’. By that I mean the space between myself and the therapist where the juicy stuff exists. This space is dynamic and what happens between us, the shifts happening in the room, is the space between. There is the attempt to articulate in ways other than language and the permission for articulation to happen without language. Jonathan:  My experience has always been that the meaning or what matters in a performance seems to arrive in the gap between one thing and the next. It’s rarely about this or that particular word, sentence, gesture, or image, but more how one thing rubs up against what follows or precedes it. This sense which emerges in the gap between one thing and the next often has the quality of a

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question or questions that stay in your mind long after the performance has finished. Sue:  That image resonates with something I wanted to try and achieve with Can I Start Again Please, and which I want from all performance work that I make and watch; that thinking happens in this shared gap between performance, performers, and audience. An indication of meaning. A nod towards meaning with an openness towards different and differing interpretations of meaning. And with contemplation being sufficient: an end in itself. I know Wittgenstein was not a therapist, but his understanding of psychoanalysis as a space of shared thought resonated for me and gave me the encouragement I needed. Jonathan:  You sometimes hear people make a link between theatre and religious spaces, because it’s perceived that both invite a particular kind of shared experience, but I think the contemplation you’re describing doesn’t ask for agreement in quite the same way as a religious gathering. Your sharing and invitation to be silent aren’t reverent, and the lack of a demand for reverent sharing or silence is what makes Can I Start Again Please unusual as a piece of art that deals with trauma. Sue:  What gave us permission to not be reverent in the performance, despite the trauma we’re dealing with, is something to do with that idea from Wittgenstein of not focusing on what is being said but rather the method of the attempt. In the play we hold up bits of his writing and one of them is the quote from Philosophical Remarks, ‘Tell me how you are searching and I’ll tell you what you are searching for.’3 This reverse thinking, this other way around, is like the unarticulated-through-language-silence that you find in therapy. Wittgenstein’s ideas of silence are connected to his concept of what cannot be said, and together they fed the dramaturgical ideas for Can I Start Again Please. Jonathan:  The play uses two different languages to tell the same fragments of story simultaneously and I’ve heard you describe the Wittgenstein quotations as somehow speaking to the space between these two languages. Sue:  My co-performer Nadia Nadarajah uses British Sign Language whereas I speak in English and the two languages have very different modalities – the mouth and the hands – so they can work simultaneously without interrupting each other. I’m fluent in British Sign Language through being an interpreter, and through my work as an interpreter I’ve had the everyday experience of witnessing that what somebody is saying very rarely has anything to do with what they mean. As an interpreter there’s a discursive process where you’re trying to alight upon what is being said, but often miss what the person is really meaning. Do I make interpretation choices based on the intent of the source or based on the requirements of the target? This passage from Can I Start Again Please tries to articulate that paradox: There is a story, I am uncertain if it is apocryphal. President Reagan was visiting Russia for the first time after signing a treaty that eliminated a whole class of nuclear weapons from Europe. At the end of a summit meeting, Reagan gave a speech of thanks ending with a joke about farmers and cowboys.

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The Russian interpreter knew the joke to be untranslatable and so made the decision to tell a Russian joke instead. He ignored completely what Reagan said and went ahead with his own joke about Vodka and long winter nights. The joke was well received. Reagan got the big laugh he wanted and the Russian politicians were appreciative of his sense of humour. All was well.4

Jonathan:  When this moment comes in the play it’s funny, but at the same time important dramaturgically because it gives the watcher permission to accept that they won’t ever fully understand what you’re describing: your trauma, but also what anybody might say. And the quotes you hold up from Wittgenstein reinforce the idea that it’s ok not to know, that in fact the subject of the play is that you can’t know. This is very different from a more conventional confessional trauma narrative and arrives somewhere more profound, because it gives the audience a uniquely different perspective. The Wittgenstein quotes are incongruous in the middle of a play like that and they have the effect of switching round what you’re supposed to think. In a very unlikely way he becomes like a compere in a stand-up comedy show or the commentator in a wrestling match. Sue:  The idea is that there are two players in the performance, a signing body and a speaking body, and the kind of third space we spoke about before opens up between them. Wittgenstein is the host for this ‘third space’. We hold up quotes from him and they’re in written language so you’re required to read them. They’re never spoken and Nadia never signs them, but your reading rather allows you to occupy a third and separate territory between the signing and the speaking. The quotes host what you’re watching as an audience and the thing is to keep an eye on this third space. Don’t just watch Nadia and don’t just listen to me, because if you do that then the piece has failed and you’re not going to get what I want you to get from it. Jonathan:  What other forms of silence are there in the play? Sue:  The most important thing is that there is a chosen silence from me as a writer to not say. To never give a testimonial account of the incident. There is a silence in that. You could take Wittgenstein’s most well-known quote, ‘Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent’ as meaning there is no point in trying to speak about something that’s traumatic or oppressive, but for me it doesn’t really say that. I’ve interpreted Wittgenstein as meaning that the ways in which, for instance, trauma is spoken about can become what the poet Louise Glück describes as a ‘cult of exhaustive detail’ which is ‘a reprimand to imagination’.5 The language of the cult of detail says nothing, and I understand Wittgenstein as saying keep silent if this is the only language you wish to use. If as a performance writer I keep silent about the direct narrative then it liberates me or forces me creatively to find another route. You can take it that Wittgenstein’s writings about silence and language are a way of saying ‘don’t bother’, but that isn’t how I understand it. I understand from him that there are ways of saying things that are not worth saying, which means that you need to find better ways. I’ve felt encouraged by his writing that it is worth the effort.

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Jonathan:  There’s one quote from Wittgenstein which you describe as being central to the play, which is a quote from Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology where he’s talking about changes of aspect: ‘What is incomprehensible is that nothing, and yet everything has changed.’ It comes after a section of chanted Wittgenstein ducks and rabbits that takes the audience from laughter into a sudden shift of understanding, where the real narrative of the play begins to appear: It is a duck It is a rabbit It is a duck but it could also be a rabbit It is a rabbit but could also be a duck It is a rabbit and not a duck It is a duck and not a rabbit It is both a rabbit and a duck It is a happy duck It is an unhappy rabbit It is not a duck It is not a rabbit It is not a lamp Can you tell what it is yet? Can you tell what it is? Can you tell? Can we tell what it is yet? Can we tell what it is? Can we tell? Can I tell what it is yet? Can I tell what it is? Can I tell? A duck or a rabbit. It is one or the other The mind cannot allow for nothing. It has to be something A duck or a rabbit. It is one or the other The mind cannot allow for nothing. It has to be something And so to make things easier: (shouts) I am the duck and I am the rabbit And now all of this can stop Everyone knows where they are Knows their place. Wittgenstein said WHAT IS INCOMPREHENSIBLE IS THAT NOTHING, AND YET EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED. THAT IS THE ONLY WAY TO PUT IT.

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I looked at the lamp on the bedside table and I said lamp I said lamp because I could not say dad That’s dad D.a.d.6

Sue:  For me that quote is central to the idea of trauma and how one experiences the aftermath. Trauma holds one in the space of absolute change and absolute sameness. And in between there is incomprehensibility, because trauma – childhood trauma – is invisible. The labour of holding both of these spaces of change and sameness is invisible. I wanted the play to communicate something of that burden and offload some of it too. So there is labour for the audience in having to manage sign language, English, Wittgenstein, bells, paper. There is a sense of the audience joining in the labour, and Wittgenstein is a life raft for audiences and for performers. Sometimes it’s both of us holding the paper with Wittgenstein quotes or sometimes it’s just one of us, but together we host Wittgenstein into the piece and equally he hosts us. Both Nadia and I feel great love and gratitude towards Wittgenstein for saying these things that really summarize or help give specificity to the felt experience we’re dealing with. The play is struggling towards the idea of the ‘thisness’ of trauma. Not the experience of it, because that implies you were cogent during it, but rather the absolute and sudden change of landscape which happens and how that alters your DNA and everything about who you are in the world. What I observe is that the ‘thisness’ demands less of a linear narrative and more an assemblage of the experience. Jonathan:  How do you work towards that kind of assemblage? What methodologies or approaches are useful? Sue:  I’m making a new performance at the moment called I May Be Some Time and the interesting thing is that all my collaborators are dancers. This physical base to the collaborations was true also to a certain extent for Can I Start Again Please. The work is perhaps located in choreography rather than in writing, or perhaps you might describe it as ‘choreographic writing’. Jonathan:  Is your choice to work with choreographic writing something to do with the absence of spoken or written language, or is it something else about choreography? Sue:  I think the methodologies of choreography are able to help devolve or diffuse the autobiographical ‘I’. With Can I Start Again Please the performance was diffused by being shared equally in a choreographic way between Nadia Nadarajah and myself, and between our two languages. Jonathan:  This choreographic sharing of the monologue has the effect of making you wonder who is leading and who is translating: Is it the spoken word leading or is it the sign language? There’s the feeling all the time of an uncertainty as to how the two elements touch each other and a sense of the ‘gap’ that we spoke about before. What’s the role for you of this kind of translation in the play? Sue:  There were different stages of arriving at this use of mutual translation of the text. Initially, I doubted the presentation of the text in British Sign Language, because the ideas were complicated and could bring real challenges. I

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knew we were going to have to create signs for the piece that deaf audiences would never have seen before, because the language used would need to be poetical in a particular way. Sign language is a visual language and part of that is to do with its iconicity, where for instance you’re representing a cup with a gesture towards the mouth. However, the same handshape and movement is used for ‘cup’ and for ‘drink’ and it’s only the context that tells you which one is meant – a duck or a rabbit, a dad or a lamp. I think there’s a view that sign language is easy to comprehend because the vocabulary is often iconic like this, but of course that isn’t true because understanding the contextual meaning of each sign is a complex process. Some signs have a back story to explain how they came into being, for example the sign for biscuit is the right hand tapping the left elbow, which came from the way biscuits on ships in the olden days used to be tapped to allow weevils to fall out before being eaten. So like with any language you can find the etymology of some of it in this way, but there’s a whole swathe of sign language that doesn’t have a traceable etymology and doesn’t easily translate without context. We use the word ‘if’ a lot in Can I Start Again Please and in the context of a manual language reliant on space, hands, and face, the concept of ‘if’ is complicated. How do you represent something that is not concrete? So we worked with Nadia to find forms of poetic signing that might articulate what we were dealing with. There’s something important about having sign language so centred like this in a piece about the failure of language. I think some people think that sign language doesn’t permit full expression and articulation and this is not correct. Sign language is not responsible for failures of expression and articulation. If it can be articulated it can be articulated in sign language. It is a silent language in the sense of not being reliant on sound, but it’s not a ‘silencing’ language. Wittgenstein proposed that no language is ever inherently concrete or clear, and the silence and space inherent in the translation between any two languages is not reductive but rather full of meaning. In the case of Can I Start Again Please audiences have to find that meaning rather than be spoon-fed. Jonathan:  You said that the performance isn’t concerned with closure, but rather offers an ongoing and resonant conversation. How does that connect to your ideas about what theatre can or should offer? Sue:  In terms of the staging of this play we are onstage when the audience come in and we are in exactly the same position when they leave. We don’t move until the audience is gone. On a very simple physical level I enjoy how this image provokes in the audience an empathy that we’re going to have to do the show again, and also in terms of psychic resolution there’s the sense that although a small increment may have been made during the piece, it ends with us still there. The idea is that whatever psychic expansion has happened it will probably contract again fairly quickly once the show has finished. In other words it’s not about a recovery narrative or those clichéd ideas of autobiography which I think are somehow loosely based on the idea that ‘Christ has risen’ – this image that Jesus had a hard time, was punished, died, but came back to

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life and has done quite well. His life is often the model when people are writing autobiographically. There are things to do with memoir that I’ve discovered since Can I Start Again Please and I see autobiography now as a root that plants itself downwards and expands, rather than a horizontal line that pushes ahead of the body and leaves a trail behind. If you are expanding downwards like a root there is no end, whereas the idea of a horizontal plane of life is about always pushing the front plane behind you and then you’re done with it. I don’t believe in that and it doesn’t float my boat creatively. Like Wittgenstein I agree that there is possibility in coming back to the same ground. You just keep coming back and it will always be joyous and full.

NOTES 1. Heaton, John M., Wittgenstein and Psychoanalysis, London: Icon Books, 2000: 10. 2. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Revised, 4th Edition, eds. P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009: 231), ‘Philosophy of Psychology – a Fragment’ (PPF), 303. 3. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees, tr. Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998: 12. 4. MacLaine, Sue, Can I Start Again Please, London: Oberon Books, 2016: 25. 5. Glück, Louise, ‘Disruption, Hesitation, Silence’, The American Poetry Review 22, no. 5 (n.d.): 30. 6. MacLaine, Sue, Can I Start Again Please, London: Oberon Books, 2016: 45–47.

Chapter 13

Reading Jean Bazin with Wittgenstein Playing Chess or Making Custard? Bernard Müller

This chapter is an appetizer. Its aim is to introduce a non-French-speaking audience to the work of a French anthropologist, Jean Bazin (1941–2001), whose writings have not yet been translated into English, but whose unfinished work nevertheless asserts a radical epistemological and methodological shift, a turn that is both pragmatic and descriptive of the social sciences. The pagination of the passages mentioned is those of the book by Jean Bazin, Des clous dans la Joconde. L’anthropologie autrement (Toulouse, Anacharsis, 2008), a compilation of articles published throughout his career. While waiting for the translation of some of his publications (interest in which I hope to awaken here), I will zigzag through his work, from one quotation to another, showing their impact on my own research, in anthropology and theatre, with their echoes of Bazin’s reading of Wittgenstein – as here between these two instances: ‘That morning, in Toulouse, by posing, without further precautions and in a hurry, the question of what anthropological knowledge can be, I had started badly’ (Bazin, 2008, 347), and ‘Again and again I must submerge myself in the water of doubt.’1 Jean Bazin’s critical thinking was nourished by references borrowed from multiple disciplines, including currents of thought that were long marginalized in France (whereas they were central in Great Britain). Because of the epistemological dimensions of the approach, it was Ludwig Wittgenstein and the work of philosophers close to the analytic current (Willard Van Orman Quine, Donald Davidson) that Bazin drew on for most of his thinking. One major source of inspiration is social and political anthropology, echoing the work of Georges Balandier, whose student he was. Another influence in Bazin’s work was certainly that of the so-called Manchester School (Geoffrey Wilson, Max Gluckman, Arnold Leonard Epstein, Victor Turner, and James Clyde Mitchell), more original in the French context than in the 157

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British, leading to the restoration of the role of context, of practices, and of the balance of power against an ‘overarching’ (surplombant) anthropology, both disconnected from experience and ahistorical (structuralism is mainly targeted here). The importance of sociology and Pierre Bourdieu’s reflection on the social conditions of action and the ‘scholastic prejudices’ specific to intellectual work as they are exercised within university structures should also be emphasised: ‘if there is a discipline, it is indeed that knowledge is administered to disciples’ (Bazin, 2008, 359). The remainder of these references on which Jean Bazin’s work is based allows us to underline his hostility towards two influential traditions in the social sciences: hermeneutics and structuralism.

DISCUSSIONS AROUND THEATRE I was one of his students and he directed my thesis (published in 2006).2 He gave immediate and lasting direction to the theoretical path I had just embarked upon, at the dawn of my career as an anthropologist. It was with Jean Bazin, an anthropologist with a degree in philosophy (we shall see that this precision is important), that I also discovered the anthropological significance of Wittgenstein. We met regularly between 1995 and 2000, in his office at the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociale (EHESS), on boulevard Raspail, in the heart of the ‘Rive gauche’, to discuss the progress of my thesis, between field notes and drafts of articles. My research at the time was on ‘Yoruba Theatre’,3 a genre of folk opera produced in the major cities – Lagos, Ife, Ibadan, Abeokuta, Ogbomosho – of the southwestern part of the Nigerian federation. This genre draws its themes from a mythological corpus inspired by an oral tradition collected and put into text in the nineteenth century by Sierra Leonean Protestant missionaries, descendants of Yoruba recaptives, that is, liberated Africans who had been illegally enslaved on-board slave ships and rescued by anti-slavery patrols from the West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy. What seemed to captivate Jean Bazin in my account of the construction of my research object was the way in which I observed Yoruba theatre, trying to explain how this genre, in each performance in a different way, displaced ritual sequences in a theatrical device, thus interweaving two systems of conventions, each of them threatening to break at any moment: the ritual threatening to erase the theatrical distancing, or the theatre threatening to stifle the effect of the ritual. This social tension is also one of the aesthetic springs of this game which consists of juggling with the conventions present, and whose coexistence seems problematic since it is the object of a suspense. It seems to me that it was my proposal to study Yoruba theatre as

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a social game, or ‘cultural work’, that aroused Bazin’s curiosity about my work. Bazin first taught at the École Normale Supérieure in Bamako, Mali, from 1967 to 1969, during which time he undertook his first fieldwork in the Segou region, circumstances that made him an ‘anthropologist’. From 1985 to 1995, as secretary to the office of the President, he administered the EHESS with Marc Augé. He shares with this other renowned anthropologist a certain idea of academic research and teaching: We wanted it to be exemplary, diverse and brilliant; we wanted original recruitments; when intellectual polemics arose, we were delighted to see some of our colleagues occupy contrary positions. The School to which Georges Balandier, Louis Dumont and Claude Lévi-Strauss belonged, among others, should in our view remain not a school of thought, but a school of thoughts, and the fact that it was the site of heated debates between structuralists and anti-structuralists, Marxists and anti-Marxists, seemed to us to be an exemplary prerequisite.4

FROM STRUCTURE TO THE ‘LOGIC OF SITUATION’ (LOGIQUE DE SITUATION) By using the metaphor of the game, I was immediately embarking on a pragmatist path in which I refuted, without really realizing it, the causal value of the rule, in search of the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’, and I thus inevitably distanced myself from the structural-functionalist approach that I thought – initially – was necessarily that of ethnology. That the structural explanation is no less ‘magical’ than that attributed to the ‘primitives’ belongs to what Wittgenstein would have designated as the ‘bewitchment of intelligence’ (PI, 119)5 against which philosophy should fight. Indeed, it is simply a question of pragmatic logic. Bazin writes: If the rule followed in the action becomes the cause of the action, it’s because the notion of rule has been surreptitiously replaced by that of adjustment (today, we would say program). It is assumed that a kind of unconscious spiritual mechanics is at work in man’s ‘underlying reality’, the same kind of mechanics that the magician assumes is at work in the thing. (Bazin, 2008, 559–60)

This is ‘a well-known scholarly illusion’6 and for Bazin this causality of rules constitutes one of the fundamental errors of structuralism: ‘Transmuting rules into law is precisely the secret of structuralist alchemy’ (559). To Claude Lévi-Strauss’s maxim: ‘The anthropologist is the astronomer of the human sciences: he is responsible for discovering the meaning of configurations that are very different, in terms of their order of magnitude and their remoteness,

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from those immediately surrounding the observer’,7 Bazin replies: ‘to observe a situation (unlike observing a planet) is to find oneself in it’ (409). In this regard, the anthropologist, océaniste, and close associate of Bazin’s, Alban Bensa, the main architect of the compilation Des Clous dans la Joconde, writes in the foreword: By dispelling the fog of cultures, Bazin strips ethnology of its illusions and claims a general anthropology that is no longer a science of cultures, but a science of habits (science des moeurs). [. . .] With his characteristic jubilant irony, he even saws off the branch on which ethnology is sitting. (16–17)8

The exchanges with Bazin pushed me resolutely towards a descriptive method and thus to replace the ‘ethnological hypothesis’ by the ‘anthropological hypothesis’ which consists in describing actions in situation, by the familiarization of the investigator with the social world he studies, by trying to bring to light a set of contingent rules through experience. I deduced that instead of treating the performances I attended as cultural phenomena whose specific components I would have to identify (those that would make this genre Yoruba, making the ethnologist a sort of authenticity controller), I had rather to approach each of the theatrical performances I attended as a unique situation, understandable from the issues that organized it, from what was ‘happening’ and which I witnessed, without trying to identify traces, indices, or symptoms of an ‘invisible’ system of representation. Echoing Wittgenstein, Bazin writes: ‘There is no “structure” behind the events whose underlying permanence I would have to establish, nor a hidden meaning that I would have to decipher, as if the actors were following a secret text, an unreadable score’ (362). In this sense, behaviour is not underpinned by a pre-existing, stable belief system, but rather, more than we think, it is the ritual that creates the belief, and not the other way round. This reversal is fundamental because it definitively shifts the focus from description to action, moving away from the ethnologist’s task of reporting on supposedly pre-existing representations. This point echoes Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough when he takes exception to Frazer’s description of magical and religious conceptions in other societies as errors, such as belief in certain propitiatory rituals. For Wittgenstein, as for Bazin, the recitation of incantatory formulas designed to make rain, for example, is not an error caused by the naivety or ‘primitiveness’ of those who pronounce them, but an action that can be explained in the context of its enunciation – the very context that needs to be elucidated. It’s not a question of identifying beliefs, then, but of describing the context – the situation – in which human actions appear. For both, access to this level of discourse can only be achieved through a reduction of ‘Otherness’ (Altérité):

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‘Religious practices, or the religious life of the priest-king, are no different in nature from any authentically religious practice today, such as the confession of sins.’9

THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL HYPOTHESIS (REDUCING DIFFERENCE) Jean Bazin’s critical work can only be understood with reference to what he has always considered to be the vocation of his discipline: to work towards the production of knowledge about humanity in general, capable of showing how those whom one spontaneously perceives as different ‘are not so different’, and not to lock oneself up in an intellectually sterile and often mystical praise of ‘Otherness’ (Altérité) by insisting on the capital letter. Recalling the modern origin of the construction of ‘Otherness’, from contemporary raciologies to colonial ideology, Bazin cites Montaigne: ‘In the classical age, from Montaigne to La Rochefoucauld, it would have been accepted that any man gives a glimpse of the human condition’ (38). This is the anthropological hypothesis that Bazin defends in his lecture at the ‘Université de tous les savoirs’.10 We can understand what other humans do, that is, describe it satisfactorily, by transforming ‘Otherness’ (Altérité) into difference through a work that Bazin designates by a neologism eloquently absent from the text11 of the lecture as it appeared in 2001: ‘This understanding [of the action of others] is obtained by a work of generalisation, that is to say, of reduction of Otherness (Altérité), a work that we could call praxeography rather than ethnography if the term were not so pedantic sounding.’ Bazin specifies: Anthropological work – critical work that is more than ever on the agenda – is not to promote otherness, but to reduce it. However strange, even absurd, human actions may first appear to us, there must be a point of view from which, once they are better known, they are revealed to be only different from ours: this is how their description is anthropological. (48)

And then: ‘No human action, however strange it may appear to me, can be radically foreign; in other words, if it is human, I must be able to learn to act like them’ (476). To be able to act like them, to describe the rules of others (and not to interpret the hidden meaning that would organize their behaviour, in spite of them), it is necessary to make a decisive epistemological shift, a paradigm shift that modifies practice.

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Bazin transposes Wittgenstein’s famous linguistic formula, ‘The meaning of a word is its use in the language’ (PI, 43) to a social situation: if to understand a word is to be able to use it, to understand a (social) world is to be able to learn to behave in it. In other words, the work of elucidation that ethnology carries out in the course of a ‘practice that is both chaotic and reasoned’ consists in learning ‘a certain number of rules, i.e., of appropriate uses in a given context’. The rules that the ethnologist undertakes to learn in the field, and which stem from the description of actions, ‘are neither the cause nor the reason for their actions, but the way I describe them. Describing the rules of the game is not the same as explaining why this particular move was made’ (422). Humans do not act because there are rules: ‘either I cross the street in the right way or I don’t. But it’s not because there are rules. It is not because there are studs that I cross, but because I need or want to cross’ (559). In the same way, we do not play the moves of a game to comply with the rules, but to win the game, whose rules are only the conditions that allow it to run smoothly. By proposing to understand what people do, as close as possible to reality, from the actions they undertake, and in which I assist, or even participate, I must give an account of actions that follow one another in sequences. This whole composes a situation whose meaning is contained in this same situation, without going through the highlighting of a structure that would order the event, and which would exist outside the event. What exists before the event is simply the possibility of its realization; it is not a structure that explains what people do, but the way they do something according to certain rules, whether it is Yoruba theatre or making custard. For Bazin: ‘It is difficult to draw a strict distinction between knowing how to explain how to play chess and knowing how to play it, because in this case knowing how to play is not necessarily knowing how to play well, whereas knowing how to make custard is knowing how to make a good one’ (353). And he again makes an explicit nod to Wittgenstein here: ‘In the culinary art, when you don’t follow the right rules, you cook badly; but in chess, when you follow other rules than those of chess, you are playing another game’, echoing Wittgenstein’s remark, ‘You cook badly if you are guided in your cooking by rules other than the right ones; but if you follow other rules than those of chess you are playing another game.’12 As Bazin elaborates on this understanding: The analogy of the game has, of course, its limits: one would have to imagine one that is such that its rule would be modified each time a new move was accepted by the partners. . . . We must imagine a game – another limit of the analogy – where the explanations given to the spectators would eventually be moves in the game (380).

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In order to access the rules that make up this game, that make it possible to describe it, and of which each performance is a part, I had to construct my research object by placing myself in a place that allowed me to observe what people do when they perform Yoruba theatre as if I were also a Yoruba dramatist or spectator. So, for example, by following a Lagos-based troupe, the Phoenix theatre, between 1995 and 1998, I noticed that some of the ritual elements that were staged in the creation of a play came from folklore literature written in the nineteenth century by Protestant missionaries of Yoruba origin, who were trained in exile in Sierra Leone, an inspiration that translated into the presence of books (photocopies, to be precise) that the director used in the development of his dramaturgy. In constructing my research object through a detailed description of the operations carried out by the producers of the Yoruba theatre and its audience, it is the ‘outlines of the action’ (cadre de l’action) that occupy the centre of the heuristic approach. ‘A world is actual’, writes Bazin, ‘it is a particular, momentary, more or less durable configuration . . . of the space of the feasible for a given action’ (361). Similarly, with regard to the ethnographic relationship, Bazin quotes Bensa: ‘The field researcher participates in the lives of his hosts less as the cunning master of the situation than as the very uninformed pawn in a game whose ins and outs encompass and often exceed him.’ To describe, attention is focused more on the dynamics of change, considering social reality as a collective construction, and as the result of a combined action of actors. In short, the anthropologist must aim for a state in which ‘I know that what [such individuals] do is within the bounds of a readily imaginable set of plausible, ordinary actions’ (448). ‘This is why’, Bazin writes, ‘I find myself in the position of having to learn how they act, as an apprentice strives to reproduce with effort and awkwardness what the master does with surprising ease’ (489). The right description is one that, in a way, provides ‘the instructions’, allows us to act in the manner of those we observe. The good description of a sacrifice transcribes a ‘knowledge of how, immanent to a practice, into a series of instructions, models’ that allow me ‘to learn how here and now one sacrifices differently’ (45). My description is anthropological when I consider such an action ‘as a variant of another, more familiar to me, or of several others that I already know’ (43). In other words, the type of research undertaken by the anthropologist witnessing a situation in order to make it intelligible is very similar to the work carried out by an actor, director, or playwright when he or she constructs a character according to a social context (the set of relations and interactions that give him or her a place), both proceeding to situation analyses, considering what the other does as an action whose understanding allows its repetition. ‘This understanding [of the action of the other] is obtained by a work of generalisation, that is to say of reduction of otherness’ (247).

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FROM FRAME TO DRAMA, FROM STAGE TO FIELDWORK Over the years, I have gradually appropriated Jean Bazin’s theoretical proposals in an attempt to find a practical application as a method of enquiry. Among these often short but snappy propositions, the one that intrigued me the most was certainly the following: ‘That human actions conform to rules only means that they have a certain capacity to repeat themselves, to be “the same” (to know how one does it is to be able to repeat the act)’ (380). I have always taken this sentence as an invitation to experiment, that is, to implement the principles of theatre in ethnographic research, to the point of superimposing dramaturgical indications and anthropological description. I am not at all sure that Bazin would have followed me in this direction, but I am convinced that he would have been amused. By placing oneself on the side of theatrical practice, that is to say by observing a situation in the manner of a playwright who would like to reproduce it in his theatre, one inevitably wonders what one should retain from the observation of a given action, not only to be able to repeat it, but also to be able to provide others who have not witnessed the initial situation with the information that will enable them in turn to be able to reproduce it. Disregarding certain disciplinary precautions, I considered that if describing a social situation amounts to extracting the ‘logic of situation’ (logique de situation) by putting into practice distanced and enunciable indications which allow the repetition of the observed situation, then the nature of what is to be described in such a situation is a kind of dramaturgy of the real. The process of ‘establishing, for a given case, the “syntax” or “logic” of plausible actions’ (430) is tantamount to writing the dramaturgy, in the Brechtian sense, of explaining the social stakes of a theatrical situation. This is also what I propose to do by promoting an approach in anthropology in which the construction of the research object proceeds from a process of theatrical creation. In this case, why not open a field of experimentation in which ‘theatre’ becomes a method of research in anthropology, the objective of which would be to reproduce the observed actions from their anthropological, praxeographic description, in order to engage in what Johannes Fabian, following in the footsteps of Victor Turner,13 might have called ethnodramaturgy. By laying down the conditions for a true ‘anthropology of action’ (anthropologie de l’action), it is clear that Bazin has set the social sciences on the path to a complete revolution in which the situation, the act of language, and the point of view of the actors – in other words, the enunciation situation and the action sequences that produce it – take precedence over unconscious structures and over totalizing notions of culture or time. While structuralism in a way marked the ‘end of history’ for the discipline, Jean Bazin undeniably

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managed to open up new critical horizons in the field of anthropology (his ‘epistemology of description’). One thing leads to another, and it could be that the project of an anthropology of action, or praxeography, here joins that of performance studies via the contribution of Erving Goffman, a sociologist from the Chicago school. Describing an action in Jean Bazin’s terms, according to his ‘logic of situation’ (logique de situation), is thus singularly close to what Goffman calls the frames of experience, whose reference is more cinematographic than theatrical. The notion of ‘frame’ is borrowed from the anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1904–1980), who uses it to evoke communication situations that play on the distinction between seriousness and jest, such as bluffing or irony. Goffman points out that the notion of frame ‘also advances the idea that any individual can intentionally provoke framing confusion in his partners’.14 Thus, any ‘experience’, any ‘activity’, any social ‘situation’ can lend itself to several ‘versions’, several ‘framings’. This also follows from an observation of the ambiguity of any social situation, which embeds several games that can be played in different ways, including according to rules that change during the course of the game. Anthropological knowledge is nothing other than learning to play (a game that is undoubtedly very complicated, with implicit or explicit rules, and moves that change the rules) and as Michel Naepels, another of Bazin’s students puts it: ‘However singular, “their” game is always a variant of “ours” – or the other way around. Such is the limited and decisive place that is open to anthropological comparatism, far from any nomothetic aim.’15 This was successfully taken up by the ethnomethodology conceived by Harold Garfinkel,16 some of whose principles continue to find their way into interesting methodological innovations that are still relevant today, such as ‘provocation anthropology’17 by Mette Bovin, or the ethnodramaturgy mentioned above and sketched out by Johannes Fabian, another of Jean Bazin’s great accomplices, who wrote: ‘Much of what we can know or learn about a culture/society does not come in the form of answers to our questions, but as performances in which the ethnographer acts, as Victor Turner once put it, as an “ethnodramaturg” or as a kind of producer or provider of occasions where significant communicative events happen.’18 Is this not also in line with Balandier’s call for a research method based on ‘the staging of a game in order to show the games of society that make and unmake it; a sociology that is not a matter of enunciation, but of demonstration through drama?’19 Shakespeare’s plays are ‘a dramatic commentary on the forms in which collective practices are revealed, on the ins and outs of social powers and actions’. Ultimately, these various methods have a family resemblance with performance studies, the latter possibly providing the anthropologist with a range of methodological tools.

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PUTTING ON STAGE AND INTO NARRATION Today, almost thirty years after our very first meeting in 1995, and following on from my first Nigerian fieldwork, I continue to open up the methodological breach made by Bazin’s theoretical choices, inspired by Wittgenstein among others. My investigation of the current dynamics of the agouda community in southern Togo, made up of descendants of slaves who originated in this region and returned to freedom between 1790 and 1860, extends this initial theoretical impulse in its own way, albeit without dogmatism: starting with an ethnographic survey, and proceeding with a theatrical creation, in order to bring to light, in a participatory approach, these ‘outlines of the action’ (cadre de l’action), allowing the highlighting of narratives that those who are principally concerned consider to be the most apt to tell their story, in all its complexity, beyond the cultural-structural-functionalist abstractions to which researchers in the human and social sciences still too often devote themselves.20 The praxeographic proposal echoes that of performance theory. Indeed, Richard Schechner defends ‘the idea that everything (can) be evaluated and analysed’ as a ‘performance’,21 an approach of ‘pan-performativism’ that Erving Goffman already tempered when he specified that ‘the whole world is not, of course, a stage, but it is not easy to specify in what way it is not’.22 The performance studies project is that of a general anthropology: rather than being reduced to theatrical studies or an anthropology of spectacular practices, this approach is based on the principle that what characterizes a social action above all is its ‘performativity’, that is, precisely that it results from a device, a contingent arrangement, which makes it possible to express and then reiterate it, on the same principle as the dramaturgy of a performance, which allows both the identical reproduction of a spectacle and its completely new, unpredictable character at each performance. Faced with the temptation of ‘radical scenarism’,23 Johannes Fabian nevertheless invites us to a certain methodological caution. While he reminds us24 that theatrical metaphor is as effective as the effective recognition of the spectacular dimension (performance) of the social, neither of them exhaust the reality they seek to account for. For Fabian, the description of a given situation through its drama only sheds light on a fundamental but partial aspect of it, leaving in the shadows, for example, the workings of the dynamics of the transformation of societies (and the consideration of their historicity). Jean Bazin liked to quote this anecdote told by Wittgenstein: When Schubert died, his brother cut up Schubert’s scores into small pieces and gave these fragments of a few bars to his favorite pupils. This act of piety is just

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as understandable to us as the other, which would consist in keeping the scores intact, safe from everyone. And if Schubert’s brother had burned the scores, that too would be understandable as a mark of piety. (380)25

As for me, by shredding a complex work into quotations, I have a feeling of doing the work of an indisciple. NOTES 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein (2018), The Mythology in Our Language: Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Trans. Stephan Palmié. Edited by Giovanni da Col and Stephan Palmié. Chicago: Hau Books, 32. 2. Bernard Müller (2006), La Tradition mise en jeu, une anthropologie du théâtre Yoruba. Montreuil: Aux lieux d’être. 3. Bernard Müller (2004), «The Irruption of Trance in Contemporary Yoruba Theatre Identities», Identities–Global Studies in Culture and Power, Southern Illinois University – Carbondale, USA, Vol. 12, pp. 175-194. 4. Marc Augé (2002), «Jean Bazin (1941–2001)», L’Homme, 162 | avril-juin. 5. Ludwig Wittgenstein (2009), Philosophical Investigations and Philosophy of Psychology – a Fragment (4th edition). Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. 6. Thierry Bonnot (2009), «Prendre simplement les choses au sérieux de ce qu’elles sont . . .», L’Homme, Vol. 191, p. 242. 7. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958, 2012), Anthropologie structurale, Paris, Plon, p. 415. 8. See also Alban Bensa, «Jean Bazin in memoriam», Genèses, vol. 46, no. 1, 2002, pp. 2–3. 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Mythology in Our Language: Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Trans. Stephan Palmié. Edited by Giovanni da Col and Stephan Palmié. Chicago: Hau Books, 2018: 36. 10. Jean Bazin (2000, 5 avril), L’anthropologie en question: altérité ou différence?, Université de tous les savoirs, UTLS. [Vidéo]. Canal-U. https://www​.canal​ -u​.tv​/34269. 11. Note by Thierry Bonnot, op. cit., p.242. 12. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1967), Zettel. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 320. 13. Victor and Edith Turner, «Performing Ethnography», The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 26, No. 2, Intercultural Performance (Summer, 1982), pp. 33–50. 14. Erving Goffman (1959), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Chicago: Anchor Books/Basic Books. 15. Michel Naepels (2010), «Jean Bazin, de Machiavel à Wittgenstein. Une anthropologie d’un point de vue pragmatique», Critique, Vol. 754, No. 3, pp. 255– 265 (p. 262). 16. Harold Garfinkel (1974), “The Origins of the Term Ethnomethodology”, in R. Turner (ed.) Ethnomethodology, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 15–18.

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17. Mette Bovin (1988), «Provocation Anthropology: Bartering Performance in Africa», The Drama Review, Vol. 32, No. 1 pp. 21-41. 18. Johannes Fabian (1999), «Theater and Anthropology, Theatricality and Culture», Research in African Literatures, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 24–31. 19. Georges Balandier (2006), Le pouvoir sur scène, Paris: Fayard, p. 20. 20. Bernard Müller (2016), «Du Terrain Ethnographique à la Dramaturgie: une enquête sur les afro-brésiliens du Togo, aujourd’hui», Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença, Porto Alegre, Brazil, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 94–109, Jan./April. 21. Richard Schechner (2008), Performance: Expérimentation et théorie du théâtre aux USA, Montreuil-sous-Bois, Éditions Théâtrales (trad. Marie Pecorari). 22. Erving Goffman (1959), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Chicago: Anchor Books/Basic Books. 23. Simon Shepherd (2016), The Cambridge Introduction to Performance Theory, Cambridge University Press, (Introduction). 24. Johannes Fabian (2017), «La performance : promesse ou prouesse», in Le Terrain comme mise en scène, P.U. de Lyon, pp. 167–178. 25. Ludwig Wittgenstein (2018), The Mythology in Our Language: Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Trans. Stephan Palmié. Edited by Giovanni da Col and Stephan Palmié. Chicago: Hau Books, p. 40.

Chapter 14

The Odd Couple Duchamp and Wittgenstein Marjorie Perloff

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) were exact contemporaries, but their names have never, to my knowledge, been linked. On the contrary, the Viennese philosopher and French avant-garde artist would seem to be opposites: Ludwig, the member of one of the richest families in Austria, versus Marcel, the young man from the provinces, whose father was a notary in Rouen? The Viennese of Jewish extraction who loved the Gospels versus the Catholic atheist? The lover and connoisseur of Mozart and Beethoven who despised such ‘inventions’ as Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system versus the creator of the ‘readymades’ – works that pose the crucial question, ‘Can one make works that are not works of “art”’?1 Wittgenstein, the monk-like Cambridge don who lived abstemiously in one sparsely furnished room versus the well-connected, charismatic Duchamp, who was the centre of Walter Arensberg’s Manhattan salon? The queer author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, who hated the sexual gossip of the Cambridge and London Bloomsburies versus the sexually adventurous lover of many women, who declared eros to be the central principle of his art? Had Wittgenstein and Duchamp met at a dinner party (but then Wittgenstein didn’t go to dinner parties), they would not have had anything to say to one another, although they might just have played a game of chess: both were avid chess players.2 Wittgenstein had never heard of the Bicycle Wheel or the notorious urinal called Fountain; Duchamp seems never to have read – or even heard of – the Tractatus or Philosophical Investigations. And yet, by midcentury, John Cage was regularly citing Duchamp, whom he knew and adored, as well as Wittgenstein, whom he was reading carefully. And for Jasper Johns, the work of both Duchamp and Wittgenstein was seminal. Indeed, when one examines, say, Johns’s famed 0-9 Series, we begin to see how Duchamp’s predilection – slightly tongue-in-cheek – for ‘mathematical, 169

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scientific perspective’, and Wittgenstein’s insistence that ‘language is a calculus’ come together.3 Both men, for that matter, refer frequently to ‘the fourth dimension’, although it is by no means clear what each one means by that term. I propose here to explore the surprising links between the poetics of Wittgenstein and Duchamp – links that sheds much light on the core principles of the twentieth-century avant-garde. A CONCERN FOR DIFFERENCE In 1913, Marcel Duchamp cut a length of white thread exactly 1 meter long, stretched it at a distance of 1 meter above a rectangular canvas painted Prussian blue, and let it fall. He did the same thing with two more threads, each one to fall onto a separate canvas and then gluing it down with varnish in whatever shape it had assumed. Calling the piece Three Standard Stoppages (Trois Stoppages Étalon), Duchamp was amused to note that the supposedly ‘fixed’ meter assumed three slightly different shapes when it fell to the ground. Duchamp called it ‘canned meter’ or ‘canned chance’: ‘pure chance’, he tells Pierre Cabanne, ‘interested me as a way of going against logical reality’ (46–47). Or, to give this thread the twist we find in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: There is one thing of which one can state neither that it is 1 meter long, nor that it is not 1 meter long, and that is the standard meter in Paris. – But this is, of course, not to ascribe any remarkable property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the game of measuring with a meter-rule.4

In later life, Duchamp remarked that Three Standard Stoppages was his most important work: That was really when I tapped the mainspring of my future. In itself it was not an important work of art, but for me it opened the way – the way to escape from those traditional methods of expression long associated with art. . . . For me the Three Stoppages was a first gesture liberating me from the past.5 ​

The three glued threads were permanently affixed to glass plate strips, which served as imprints for the preparation of three wood templates. The entire assembly was then enclosed in a wooden croquet box (figure 14.1), and it is in the context of this box that most viewers know the work. What Duchamp liked is that his curved threads questioned the authority of meter as a standard unit of measure. The work reminds us, as Francis Naumann notes, that meter is itself ‘a unit of length generated through approximation: the straightening

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Figure 14.1  Duchamp: Three Standard Stoppages (1936) (Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS)).

out, as it were, of a curved meridian’.6 Duchamp thus parodies our faith in scientific authority, our trust in causality. At around the same time that Duchamp was playing with ‘canned chance’, Wittgenstein, who was serving in the Austrian army on the Eastern Front during WWI, wrote in his notebook: In essence, the whole modern conception of the world is based on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are explanations of natural phenomena. So they stop short at the ‘laws of nature’ treating them as something untouchable, just as their ancestors did with God and Fate. And in fact both are right and both are wrong. The Ancients were actually clearer, in that they acknowledged a clear-cut limit, while with the new system, it is supposed to look as if everything can be explained. (6.5.1916)7

In slightly different form, these lines reappear in the 1922 Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (6.371 and 6.372)8 expressing Wittgenstein’s repeated caution that the ‘so-called laws of nature’ are not to be trusted as explanations of natural phenomena. In the lectures delivered at Cambridge between 1930 and 1932, we find an uncanny echo of the experiment behind The Three Standard Stoppages: What does it mean to hold that there are a priori concepts? If we pull a piece of cotton very tight, then to say that it is straight is to refer to what is manifest

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to our senses. . . . But we know perfectly well that if we look through a magnifying glass we shall see that what was apparently straight actually is not so. (Wittgenstein 1989, 78)

But it is not just a question of perception. The ‘laws of nature’ simply cannot ‘explain’ most phenomena: For example, You can say ‘The fire causes the kettle to boil,’ and yet when you come to try it, the kettle might fail to boil. ‘Thunder comes after lightning’ is a proposition, being a statement about sense-data: ‘Lightning causes thunder’ is an hypothesis and needs verification and may be true or false. Causal necessity. The laws of nature are not outside phenomena. They are a part of language and of our way of describing things; you cannot discuss them apart from their physical manifestation. (Wittgenstein 1989, 79)

Both Wittgenstein and Duchamp had scientific training: they were by no means Romantics or High Modernists, opposed to a ‘cold’ and ‘heartless’ science that was the antithesis of poetic vision. Wittgenstein had been trained as an engineer at Charlottenburg in Berlin and was studying the motion of kites at the University of Manchester, when he first came across the Principia Mathematica and decamped to Cambridge to meet its great author Bertrand Russell. Mathematics remained centrally important to him throughout his life. It was the explanatory force of ‘science’ that he questioned, the faith in causality. ‘That the sun will rise tomorrow, is an hypothesis’, we read in the Tractatus, ‘and that means that we do not know whether it will rise’ (T6.36311). That sounds like nonsense, given our general conviction that of course the sun will rise tomorrow. But do we know it as a fact? From Duchamp’s perspective, physics could easily turn into pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions: All painting, beginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even [Georges] Seurat. I was interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science, which hadn’t often been done. . . . It wasn’t for love of science that I did this; on the contrary, it was rather in order to discredit it, mildly, lightly, unimportantly. But irony was present. (Cabanne, 39)

One can only discredit something one knows. Duchamp had studied Renaissance perspective and anatomy during his year in Munich (1912) and he used his time, the following year, as librarian at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève to pore over ancient and medieval mathematical treatises, trying to find his way out of the Cubism of Picasso which then dominated Paris.9 Beginning with The Chocolate Grinder (1913), his readymades, which depended on numbers like 3 (Three Standard Stoppages) or its square, 9 (Nine Malic Molds), were at

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once precise and suggestive: they draw on the new technology, from the X-ray to chronophotography, to mechanical drawing and the production of industrial objects. He was less interested in the simple reproduction of these objects than in the playful spin of their properties: physics easily morphed into what Alfred Jarry had called pataphysics, the ‘science of imaginary solutions’. For Duchamp, pataphysical experiment, far from relying on the metaphor and symbol dear to the Romantics and Modernists, was a question of difference. In a set of notes published posthumously, he gave examples – he insisted definition wasn’t possible – of what he called the inframince (infrathin). For instance, in this playful set: The warmth of a seat (which has just been left) is infrathin. Sliding doors of the Metro – the people who pass through at the very last moment/infrathin. Velvet trousers – their whistling sound (in walking) by brushing of the 2 legs is an infrathin separation signaled by sound. When the tobacco smoke smells also of the mouth which exhales it, the 2 orders marry by infrathin. The infrathin separation between the detonation noise of a gun (very close) and the apparition of the bullet hole in the target.

But others raise larger issues about time, space, and especially language: In time, the same object is not the same after a one-second interval. The difference between the contact water and molten lead make with the walls of a given container is infra-thin. Two men are not an example of identity and on the contrary diverge with an infrathin difference that can be evaluated. It would be better to go into the infrathin interval which separates two ‘identicals’ than to conveniently accept the verbal generalization which makes 2 twins look like 2 drops of water. The difference (dimensional) between two objects in a series (made from the same mold) is an infrathin one when the maximum (?) of precision is attained.10

The infrathin is the most minute observable difference possible between two items, whether temporal or spatial. The ‘detonation sound of a gun by one’s side and the apparition of the bullet hole in a given target’ take a moment to register. Even identical twins are not entirely alike. The singular is not the plural, and even two or more objects made from the same mould are not, in fact, identical. Thus, the meter, as we saw in the case of The Three Standard Stoppages, is not always identical to itself.

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Duchamp called this recognition of infrathin difference ‘a kind of pictorial nominalism’: Nominalism [literal] = No more generic specific numeric distinction between words (tables is not the plural of table, ate has nothing in common with eat). No more physical adaptation of concrete words; no more conceptual value of abstract words. The word also loses its musical value. It is only readable (due to being made up of consonants and vowels), it is readable by eye and little by little takes on a form of plastic significance; it is a sensorial reality a plastic truth with the same title as a line, as a group of lines.11

Tables is not the plural of table, the past tense is not the same as the present: Duchamp’s ‘nominalism’ here recalls the urgent question (215) in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: ‘But isn’t at least the same the same?’ The answer, for Wittgenstein as for Duchamp, must always be no. Whereas most Modernist writers and artists emphasize comparison, whose verbal figure is metaphor, avant-gardists like Wittgenstein and Duchamp think it more important to register difference. Hence the importance of puns and paragrams, which isolate the word and play on its many possible meanings. Then, too, the most simple of sentences can cause problems if we don’t know the occasion for its use. ‘If, from one day to the next, someone promises: “Tomorrow I’ll come to see you: – is he saying the same thing every day, or every day something different?”’ (PI, 226) Difference always depends on context. Consider Wittgenstein’s discussion of the way we use the colour word blue: ‘Is this blue the same as the blue over there? Do you see any difference?’ – You are mixing paints and you say, ‘It’s hard to get the blue of this sky.’ ‘It’s turning fine, you can already see blue sky again.’ ‘Note how different these two blues look.’ ‘Do you see the blue book over there? Bring it here.’ ‘This blue light means . . .’ ‘What’s this blue called?— Is it “indigo”?’ (PI, 33)

And note that these shades of meaning are merely variations at the denotative level; if we added the connotations of blue, as in ‘Am I blue?’ or ‘He’s a blueblood’, the list would be much longer. What Wittgenstein is trying to show us is that a single word may have so many possible meanings that we must contextualize and delimit our words as fully as possible. ‘The meaning of a word is its use in the language’ (PI, 43). Pictorial nominalism, as Duchamp used the term, and as Wittgenstein transfers it to the verbal realm, suggests that the poet is one who understands

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that ‘ate has nothing in common with eat’, that the same is never the same, and that hence every word, every morpheme and phoneme, and every rhythmic form chosen by the poet make a difference. To be a poet or artist, in other words, is to draw on the verbal or visual pool we all share but to choose one’s words and phrases with an eye to unexpected relationships – verbal, visual, sonic – that create a new construct and context – relationships that create infrathin possibilities. When Wittgenstein famously says Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten (‘Indeed, philosophy should only be written as poetry’),12 what he means, I think, is that it is poetry that makes us aware of what language can do and what a difference a single word of phoneme can make. Accordingly, the attentive reader must be attuned to difference. ‘Hegel’, Wittgenstein once remarked, ‘seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is on showing that things which look the same are really different’.13 For Duchamp, difference became the basis of the readymade, with its astonishing visual puns. Thus, the ‘assisted readymade’ Fresh Widow is a miniature French Window, its frame painted an ugly blue-green like that of beach furniture, and its windows’ eight glass panes covered with sheets of black leather.14 By erasing a single letter, n, from each word in ‘french window’, the object becomes a Fresh Widow – perhaps a recent widow or war widow, but also ‘fresh’ in the sense of bold, not easy to repress or squelch. What is this widow thinking? We don’t know because the leather panes are impenetrable: we can’t see what’s behind them. Then, too, the window is closed, and yet those little knobs on the wood ‘open’ the door, suggesting that perhaps one could see inside!15 Not comparison or generalization but difference: this, as both Duchamp and Wittgenstein foresaw, from their very different perspectives, would be what is required in the age of social media, where ‘our craving for generality’,16 our tendency to look for something in common to all the entities which we commonly subsume under a general term, dominates the scene. The emphasis on the infrathin helps us to look more exactingly at what is before us; it allows us to recontextualize the ordinary, the everyday. And here again Wittgenstein and Duchamp see eye to eye.

‘ORDINARY LANGUAGE IS ALL RIGHT’ In a 1930 note, Wittgenstein contemplated the strangeness of the ordinary: Nothing could be more remarkable than seeing someone who thinks himself unobserved engaged in some quite simple everyday activity. Let’s imagine a theatre, the curtain goes up & we see someone alone in his room walking up and

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down, lighting a cigarette, seating himself etc. so that suddenly we are observing a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves; as if we were watching a chapter from a biography with our own eyes, – surely this would be at once uncanny and wonderful. More wonderful than anything that a playwright could cause to be acted or spoken on the stage. We should be seeing life itself. – But then we do see this every day & it makes not the slightest impression on us! True enough, but we do not see it from that point of view . . . only the artist can represent the individual thing so that it appears to us as a work of art. . . . The work of art compels us – as one might say – to see it in the right perspective, but without art the object is a piece of nature like any other. (CV, 6–7)

This could be a description of the process whereby Duchamp made his readymades, for example the famous snow shovel called ‘In Advance of the Broken Arm’. Duchamp, newly arrived in the United States, picked it out in a hardware store on Columbus Avenue – an ordinary snow shovel, with a wooden handle and flat, galvanized iron blade. He had never seen one before: they did not yet have them in Paris. Having painted the title on the bottom of the blade, Duchamp signed the rod ‘[from] Marcel Duchamp 1915’ (‘from’ to make clear it was not literally ‘by’ him), tied a wire to the handle, and hung the shovel from the ceiling. The title, as Duchamp told Cabanne, referred to the possibility of breaking one’s arm while shovelling snow (54), but I think the artist was also poking fun at those popular late nineteenth-century American paintings like Edwin Markham’s The Man with a Hoe that celebrated the importance of the common man as worker. Seen from what Wittgenstein called ‘the right perspective’, the shovel, now hanging from the ceiling in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan (and there are many replicas), has become a well-known artwork. Both Wittgenstein and Duchamp relish such defamiliarization of the ordinary. Wittgenstein would never have admitted, to himself or anyone else, that a readymade like In Advance of a Broken Arm or The Bicycle Wheel or Bottle Rack (L’Egouttoir) could be a work of art, but the fact is that his own account of the man entering a room, lighting a cigarette, seating himself, and going out the other door is not very different. In both cases, it is context and framing – ‘see[ing] it from that point of view’ – that make the ordinary interesting. Then, too, in both cases, it is a matter of understanding ‘something that is already in plain view’ (PI, 89). For, as Wittgenstein puts it in the Investigations: §126: Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. – Since everything lies open to view, there is nothing to explain. For whatever may be hidden is of no interest to us. §129. The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something – because it

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is always before one’s own eyes.) The real foundations of their inquiry do not strike people at all. . . . And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

This emphasis on simplicity and familiarity – again, the strangeness of the ordinary – is precisely what Duchamp plays upon in such readymades as the Coat Rack (1917), a perfectly ordinary wooden board holding four metal coat hooks, that sits on the floor instead of hanging on the wall. Duchamp called it Trébuchet (Trap), from the verb trébucher, meaning ‘to trip’, and indeed it is hard not to trip over this object as one enters a given room. Trébucher is also a chess term for giving up a pawn in order to trap (trip up) your opponent. The object itself could hardly be more ordinary and yet the simple displacement from wall to floor, along with the suggestive title, makes all the difference. Then, too, Duchamp’s readymades are perfect examples of what Wittgenstein, still commenting on the ordinary, called family resemblances. In the Philosophical Investigations, where he discusses the ‘language game’, of which more in a moment, Wittgenstein argues that the phenomena we call languages ‘have no one thing in common in virtue of which we use the same word for all – but there are many different kinds of affinity between them’ (65): Consider, for example, the activities that we call ‘games.’ I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, athletic games, and so on. What is common to them all? – Don’t say: ‘They must have something in common, or they would not be called “games”’ – but look and see whether there is anything common to all. . . . Look, for example, at board-games. . . . Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. – Are they all ‘entertaining’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience.  .  .  . Think now of singing and dancing games; here we have the element of entertainment, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared? (PI, 66)

The similarities between such divergent ‘games’ as chess and singing games are best understood, Wittgenstein suggests, as family resemblances. No members of a given family have every attribute in common. ‘Some have the same nose, others the same eyebrows and others again the same way of walking; and these likenesses overlap’ (BB, 17). We notice such family resemblances instinctively. Duchamp’s readymades are often mistakenly said to be merely random objects, and it is suggested that any old object could be called a readymade.

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I once team-taught a course on Modernism with an art historian, and, for the unit on Duchamp, she assigned the students to bring in a readymade the next day. When a student would hold up, say, a pencil or a toothbrush or a single sock, the whole class immediately dismissed the item with the scathing comment, ‘That’s not a readymade!’ They understood intuitively that there was nothing interesting about the isolated pencil or sock. And indeed, Duchamp’s readymades, which later reappear in miniature in The Green Box and the boîtes en valise, or, like the chocolate grinder, in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), have decided family resemblances. Almost all, like the snow shovel, the urinal (Fountain), The Bicycle Wheel, the Dog Comb, and the Coat Rack (Trébuchet) are industrial objects of one sort or another; again, almost all of Duchamp’s readymades, not to mention the Large Glass, have an erotic component. Indeed, it is the combination of eros and machinery that makes his works so unique. Take the Nine Malic Molds (figure 14.2) designed for the Large Glass as early as 1914. The figures look like little men or bowling pins – but not quite: they are not male but malic, Duchamp’s coinage for male-ish. These amorous bachelors, who are designed to woo the ‘bride’ in the Milky Way in the upper half of the Large Glass, are dark moulds. In the preparatory drawings, they were given names: delivery boy, priest, cuirassier, gendarme, policeman, undertaker, flunky, busboy, and stationmaster. But which looks like a policeman? Which is the priest? It is impossible to know because the figures are non-representational, the moulds looking more like urns or repositories than

Figure 14.2  Duchamp: Nine Malic Molds (1914–1915).

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like human beings, though the first mould on the left is wearing what look like overalls. The forms are purposely abstract and suggestive; they decidedly look more male than female but no two are the same. It is their grouping, their set of interrelationships that is striking: the nine are always together, always in the same configuration. When the malic moulds turn up again in The Green Box, we greet them as if they were old friends. Infrathin, Duchamp insisted, could not be defined, only exemplified. Wittgenstein had exactly the same notion about ‘games’. One cannot, he insisted, define the word game; one could only show how a particular game works. And the family resemblances quickly make themselves apparent as they do in the case of the Nine Malic Molds. So, when Wittgenstein talks, as he does in all his later works, of language games, we understand exactly what he means. Just as ‘ordinary language is all right’, so the ‘games’ we play in ordinary conversation in our daily lives define our existence. LANGUAGE GAMES Wittgenstein first used the phrase ‘language games’ in The Blue Book, a set of notes he dictated to his Cambridge students in 1933: I shall in the future again and again draw your attention to what I shall call language games. These are ways of using signs simpler than those in which we use the signs of our highly complicated everyday language. Language games are the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language games is the study of primitive forms of language. . . . If we want to study the problems of truth and falsehood, of the agreement and disagreement of propositions with reality, of the nature of assertion, assumption, and question, we shall with great advantage look at primitive forms of language in which these forms of thinking appear without the confusing background of highly complicated processes of thought. When we look at such simple forms of language the mental mist which seems to enshroud our ordinary use of language disappears. (BB, 17)

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein elaborates on this early sketch. ‘The word “language-game”’, we read in PI 23, ‘is used here to emphasize the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life’. And Wittgenstein gives the following examples: Giving orders, and acting on them – Describing an object by its appearance, or by its measurements – Constructing an object from a description (a drawing) –

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Reporting an event – Speculating about the event – Forming and testing a hypothesis – Present the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams – Making up a story; and reading one – Acting in a play – Singing rounds – Guessing riddles – Cracking a joke; telling one – Solving a problem in applied arithmetic – Translating from one language into another – Requesting, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying. (PI, 23)

This last example is perhaps the best. The ‘primitive’ language-game called requesting has a very particular form, as in: John:  Would you pass me the sugar, please? Mary:  Here it is. John:  And is there cream? Mary:  Sorry, we don’t have cream. But here’s some milk. All of us have played this basic game. Or again, here is a game of greeting. The scene is in a college dorm: Corinne:  Hi there. Are you the girl moving into 321? Antoinette:  Hello! Yes, I am. I’m Antoinette Goodman. Corinne:  And my name is Corinne Riley. I’m in 320. Nice to meet you! Antoinette:  You too. Come on in. As you can see, I haven’t even unpacked yet. Corinne:  Yes, I see. Well, I’ll leave you to it and come back before dinner. And we can go down together. Antoinette:  Cool. Around 6:45? Corinne:  OK. See you later! Antoinette: Bye!

Wittgenstein calls such simple dialogues ‘language-games’ because in fact they follow particular rules. I greet you, you greet me back, and the conversation ends with mutual goodbyes. I ask you for sugar and you pass it to me and then the milk as well. Speakers of the same language have no difficulty playing these basic games. But now suppose that, instead of ‘Pass me the sugar’, John says, ‘Milk me sugar’. What game can prompt that request? Wittgenstein raises precisely this issue later in the Investigations:

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498. When I say that the orders ‘Bring me sugar!’ and ‘Bring me milk!’ have a sense, but not the combination ‘Milk me sugar,’ this does not mean that the utterance of this combination of words has no effect. And if its effect is that the other person stares at me and gapes, I don’t on that account call it an order to stare at me and gape, even if that was precisely the effect that I wanted to produce. 499. To say ‘This combination of words makes no sense’ excludes it from the sphere of language, and thereby bounds the domain of language. But when one draws a boundary, it may be for various kinds of reason. If I surround an area with a fence or a line or otherwise, the purpose may be to prevent someone from getting in or out; but it may also be part of a game and the players are supposed, say, to jump over the boundary; or it may show where the property of one person ends and that of another begins; and so on. So if I draw a boundary line that is not yet to say what I am drawing it for.

What Wittgenstein is suggesting here is that before we draw boundaries and exclude words from circulation, we should consider that there may just be a game where the combination ‘Milk me sugar’ makes good sense. And indeed, Gertrude Stein, in her love poems to Alice B. Toklas, makes statements of this sort all the time. If we add a comma after ‘me’, the sentence may be read as a request to the speaker’s ‘sugar’. If, in other words, the game in question here were the love-making game – love between two women – then the sentence makes sense enough. Duchamp challenges his viewer to play just the same sort of game – in his case with both visual material and language. Take his infamous Fountain, the urinal submitted to the first exhibition of the American Society of Independent Artists (modelled on the French Société des Artistes Indépendants), held in New York in 1917. The rule for submission was simple: any self-designated artist could exhibit up to two works for a fee of $5 plus a $1 initiation fee. Two days before the opening, an object titled Fountain was delivered, together with an envelope bearing the membership and entry fee of one Richard Mutt from Philadelphia. Duchamp had purchased this object a few days earlier from the showroom of J. L. Mott Iron Works, a manufacturer of bathroom fixtures, at 118 Fifth Avenue. It was a ‘flat-back Bedfordshire’ model porcelain urinal. ‘Duchamp’, Calvin Tomkins tells us, ‘had taken it back to his studio, turned it upside down and painted on the rim at the lower left, in large black letters, the name R. MUTT and the date, 1917’ (181). The reaction to this entry was electric: the ten-member board of directors (Duchamp was a charter member of the board and had done much to organize the meeting!) met and voted to turn down Richard Mutt’s submission. Duchamp immediately resigned from the board in protest; Fountain disappeared

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from the premises and no one seemed to know what had happened to it. But a week later it turned up in Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery and soon, at Duchamp’s request, the great photographer made the urinal immortal by photographing it in front of a painting by Marsden Hartley entitled The Warriors, setting its smooth curve against the similar ogival shape in the painting so that it resembled a sculpture in a niche: it was soon dubbed, by Duchamp’s acquaintance, the Madonna or Buddha of the Bathroom. In the avant-garde magazine The Blind Man, an unsigned editorial appeared with the title ‘THE RICHARD MUTT CASE’, side by side with the reproduction of Fountain as photographed by Stieglitz – an article almost surely written by Duchamp himself: The Richard Mutt Case They say any artist paying six dollars may exhibit. Mr. Richard Mutt sent in a fountain. Without discussion the article disappeared and never was exhibited. What were the grounds for refusing Mr. Mutt’s fountain: –

1. Some contended it was immoral, vulgar. 2. Others, it was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing. Now Mr. Mutt’s fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is moral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers’ show windows. Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object. As for plumbing, that is absurd. The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.17

‘He CHOSE it’: chose, moreover, an absolutely ‘ordinary’ object. Here Duchamp underscores the idea he shares with Wittgenstein that transforming the ordinary into art is a question of choice, context, and framing. Silhouetted against the Marsden Hartley painting in the Stieglitz photograph, the urinal looks like a sculpture in a niche: it becomes an art object. The Stieglitz effect is one of the games Duchamp is playing here. But there are others. First, the transformation game, whereby the purchased porcelain urinal, turned upside down, is given a female shape: it has a hole, moreover, at front-centre. Thus, the urinal designed for the use of men in the men’s room becomes a female repository for a male fountain. Second, the punning game: the inscription ‘R. Mutt’ can be read as a pun on the German word Armut (poverty), or as a reference to a stupid dog, or again, as a reference

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to the popular cartoon Mutt and Jeff. Third, the urinal can participate in the title game: Fountain asks us to compare this ‘chosen’ unattractive object to the beautiful fountains that dot Paris and Rome, especially the spectacular fountains of Bernini. In poetry as in painting, a fountain is a common symbol for masculine energy, for the powerful jet that renews life. Duchamp’s fountain, however, is quite dry. And fourth, we can play the ‘What is art?’ game, comparing Duchamp’s Fountain to the comparable sculptures submitted and accepted by the jury of the Independents: for example, Helen Farnsworth Mears’s Fountain of Joy, which displays a Cupid with a horn and arm raised, summoning leaping bunnies that are depicted running around the shallow circular bowl of the fountain, placed on a stone slab. Another accepted entry was Elizabeth Pendleton’s Drinking Fountain for Birds – an elegant column with acanthus leaves topped by twin pelicans, with a stork below waiting its turn to drink from the fountain. And Frederick K. Detweiler’s Miraculous Fountain of Brittany is a neo-impressionist painting of an actual fountain in front of a country church. Today, the sculptures of Pendleton and Mears have been completely forgotten, even as Duchamp’s Fountain has become world famous. Why? In Wittgensteinian terms, we might say that Duchamp knew how to play the art game while they did not – knew that the age demanded something consonant with its technological and non-representational turn rather than pelicans, storks, or acanthus leaves. His was a found object, not one made by the human hand, and it incorporated, in the Stieglitz version, both the new photography and the new painting rather than nature images and an actual water jet. Like Wittgenstein, Duchamp knew that language-games are rule based, even if the rules are not readily apparent. Fountain depends upon consistent inversion: the rule here is to make an object that is not fountain, not masculine, not natural, not made by an individual artist, not beautiful, not original, not elegantly worded. The larger ‘game’, then, is best understood as the negation game where x is not x.

ART, NOT THE ARTIST Finally, a word about aesthetics. Throughout his career, Duchamp rejected all talk of ‘creation’, ‘imagination’, and the ‘artist’. ‘I shy away from the word “creation”’, he tells Cabanne: I don’t believe in the creative function of the artist. He’s a man like any other. It’s his job to do certain things, but the businessman does certain things also, you understand. On the other hand, the word ‘art’ interests me very much. If it

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comes from Sanskrit, as I’ve heard, it signifies ‘making.’ Now everyone makes something, and those who make things on a canvas, with a frame, they’re called artists. Formerly, they were called craftsmen, a term I prefer. (Cabanne, 16)

I think this is a very important statement at a time when self-styled ‘artists’ are regularly spoken of reverentially as if they were special citizens, beyond normal rules of behaviour. Is anyone an artist who says s/he is? Can anyone be an artist? And what does it mean to admire the art, as does Duchamp, but not necessarily the artist? Wittgenstein did not share Duchamp’s dismissal of the unique creative genius, the artist. On the contrary, in this respect Wittgenstein was quite traditional, revering the ‘great’ composers Mozart and Beethoven, and the ‘great’ poets Goethe and Heine, while being suspicious of their heirs from Schubert to Mahler. On the other hand, in 1913, when Wittgenstein came into his inheritance, he gave a large sum of money to Ludwig von Ficker, the editor of the periodical Der Brenner, to distribute to the poets and painters von Ficker took to be most needy and deserving. Among the recipients were Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl, the latter being the poet Wittgenstein longed fervently to meet when they were both on the Eastern Front in WWI, but who died (by suicide) before Wittgenstein could reach him. Wittgenstein later said he didn’t understand Trakl’s work, but he somehow loved it. Whatever their differing views of the artist, when it came to definitions of art, the two were wholly at one. In the abstract, ‘art’ was an indefinable term. In his Lectures on Aesthetics, delivered at Cambridge in 1938, Wittgenstein declared, ‘You might think Aesthetics is a science telling us what’s beautiful – almost too ridiculous for words. I suppose it ought to also include what sort of coffee tastes good.’18 There is, in other words, no universal that defines the work of art; rather – and here Wittgenstein is perfectly in agreement with Duchamp – art should be understood, not as some mysterious essence but as a practice, again a language-game: What belongs to a language game is a whole culture. In describing musical taste you have to describe whether children give concerts, whether women do or whether men only give them, etc., etc. In aristocratic circles in Vienna people had [such and such] a taste, then it came into bourgeois circles. (Lectures on Aesthetics, 8)

Duchamp would not have disagreed with this formulation, but of course he approaches the question from the point of view of the artist. His rejection of painting had everything to do with what he considered the overemphasis of the retinal on the part of the Impressionists and their followers: Since Courbet, it’s been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone’s error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could

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be religious, philosophical, moral .  .  . our whole century is completely retinal, except for the Surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat. And still, they didn’t go very far! . . . It has to change; it hasn’t always been like this. (Cabanne, 43)

Even the Abstractionists, Duchamp adds, ‘are up to their necks in the retina’, whereas his own aim is to revive the role of the mind in art, to make an art that is intellectual and conceptual rather than optical. Duchamp is thus defining his own practice rather than art practice in general. And for him, the challenge is ‘to make works that are not works of “art”’. One of his favourites, among his own works, was Dust Breeding (Elevage de Poussière) of 1920. Man Ray had come to Duchamp’s small apartment one day and, using his big-view camera and the light from only a single hanging bulb, took a time exposure of the Large Glass’s lower panel, which had been lying flat on sawhorses collecting dust. As Calvin Tomkins explains (228–29): The resulting image was like a lunar landscape, with hills, valleys, and mysterious markings in low relief. . . . Soon after this photograph was taken, Duchamp ‘fixed’ the dust with varnish on the sieves, cleaned the rest of it away, and took the glass panel to a mirror manufacturing plant on Long Island, where he had it coated with silver in the Oculist Witnesses section at the lower right [of the Large Glass].

Dust Breeding is one of my favourite Duchamp works. A found object, it is somehow unusually suggestive, with its raised area at bottom left, its circles and parallel lines on the right (covered with lunar dust?), and its grid in the background. All sorts of narrative possibilities come to mind. ‘Do not forget’, we read in one of Wittgenstein’s notecards, collected in Zettel, ‘that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language game of giving information’.19 This says it all. The artwork is not inherently different from an ordinary object. But it differs from it by means of its use. A poem or sculpture does not function in the language game of giving information (e.g. the newspaper), but in that of art making. And so we judge such texts quite differently. This is the crux of the ‘odd couple’s’ place in the narrative of Modernist Art practice. As different as the two pioneers were, both in their own way rejected the obvious Modernist path. Duchamp trained himself to avoid the dominant movements of his day – Cubism and Abstraction. Wittgenstein gradually distanced himself from the Principia Mathematica of Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. Both understood instinctively that, to be genuinely new, art and philosophy had to rethink all ‘normal’ ways of operating; hence both were at first ridiculed and considered absurd. Both persevered. ‘Philosophy’, for Wittgenstein, was no longer a set of theories about the metaphysical, the ethical, or the aesthetic; it had to be understood as a practice, a way of thinking that transformed one’s everyday life. Duchamp had the same

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idea: take a large dog comb and give it two captions. First, ‘3 or 4 drops of height have nothing to do with savagery’, and second, ‘Classify a comb by how many teeth it has.’ Immediately the comb seems slightly sinister, as if the inanimate object had morphed into a savage animal. But, then, what do we understand about animals? As Wittgenstein mysteriously put it, ‘If a lion could speak, we would not understand him’ (PPF, 327). NOTES 1. Marcel Duchamp Note from 1913, in “A l’Infinitif”, The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet & Elmer Peterson (1967; London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 74. 2. For a brilliant study of the chess moves and habits of the two, see Steven B. Gerrard, “Wittgenstein Plays Chess with Duchamp or How Not to Do Philosophy: Wittgenstein on Mistakes of Surface and Depth”, toutfait​.co​m. The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, 2019/05/22, https://www​.toutfait​.com​/wittgenstein​-plays​ -chess​-with​-duchamp​-or​-how​-not​-to​-do​-phi​loso​phyw​ittg​enstein​-on​-mistakes​-of​-surface​-and​-depth. 3. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Viking, 1968), 38–39; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures, Cambridge, 1930–32: From the Notes of John King and Desmond Lee. Ed. Desmond Lee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 117. 4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte; revised 4th edition, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), §50. Note that all references to the propositions are to their number, not to page numbers. Subsequently abbreviated PI. 5. Katherine Kuh, “Marcel Duchamp,” in The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 81. 6. Francis M. Naumann, “Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation of Opposites,” in “Marcel Proust: A Reconciliation of Opposites,” ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 30. 7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Private Notebooks 1914–1916, ed. and trans. Marjorie Perloff (New York: Liveright, 2022), 171. 8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). §371. All further references to the Tractatus are to this edition. It is customary to have numbers refer to Wittgenstein’s own numerical sections, not to page numbers. 9. On the Munich year, see Calvin Tomkins, “Munich, 1912,” Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 85–102; Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: O Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan (1984; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 96–118; Linda Henderson. 10. See Marcel Duchamp, Notes, ed. Paul Matisse (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), 21–47. Trans. are my own. The best discussion of the inframince is that of Thierry

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De Duve in Pictorial Nominalism, 159–63. See also my Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), Introduction, passim. 11. Note for the White Box (A l’Infinitif) (1914), in The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du Sel/SaltSeller), ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), 78. Subsequently cited as Salt Seller. 12. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, Ed. Georg Henrik von Wright in Collaboration with Heikki Nyman; revised ed. Alois Pichler, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 1933–34, p. 28. Subsequently cited in the text as CV. 13. See M. O’C Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees (Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield, 1981), 112–90; see p. 171. 14. To view this and the other figures cited in this chapter do a Google search for ‘Marcel Duchamp, the Readymades’. There are plenty of other sites on line – for example, those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Arensberg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, or the Tate Gallery, London, but this is one of the most complete websites. 15. There is the further joke that no two Fresh Widows are quite the same: the leather varies. In the version found at the Chicago Art Institute, there are the outlines of breasts on some of the black leather panes. 16. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The Blue Book,” The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations”, trans. Rush Rhees (New York: Harper, 1960), 17. Subsequently cited as BB. 17. The Blind Man, 2 (May 1917), 4–5. The text is reproduced in Tomkins, 185. On the question of authorship of this editorial, signed P. B. T. for Pierre (Roché), B for Beatrice Wood and T for Totor, Duchamp’s pet name, see de Duve, 106–7. The reference to plumbing in the last line slyly invokes Duchamp’s first pronouncement when he arrived in the United States, frequently cited by the press at the time. 18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 11. 19. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright; trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 160.

IN MEMORIAM L. WITTGENSTEIN Tom Raworth

In Memoriam L. Wittgenstein cold lives forever inactivity is cold therefore movement must cease

This poem is re-printed, with permission, from Tom Raworth, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003). 189

Chapter 15

On Performing Wittgenstein Bo Tarenskeen

An empty stage. No scenery, not even a chair or a carpet, no music. Anything could happen right now. A man enters and says: ‘My name is Ludwig Wittgenstein.’ Theatre is, among other things, the creation of a new world through language. You could almost say, the creation of something – out of nothing. For me it’s the concrete illustration of the fact that language is the most important power we have. At the same time, I have always felt a strong discrepancy between the rigidity of words and my perception of reality as something throughout fluid, as a process, as pure movement. Language is the fabric of our existence. We use words to describe ourselves to ourselves and others, to understand ourselves, each other, and the world we live in. Without words we wouldn’t be able to differentiate between complex feelings like melancholy, grief, and despair. Words not only represent, they create. At the same time, language has boundaries. Everyone, especially adolescents, has experienced the maddening frustration of not being capable of uttering his or her emotions through words, or translating the inner chaos in intelligible statements. Language can often be experienced as too limited, too poor, too ill equipped to do what it should do. Language can be felt as a prison, words that are available to describe and understand oneself can fail us, can suffocate us. It can be used as a weapon, as a way of denigrating, humiliating, dehumanizing each other. There is the propaganda that speaks of people as ‘rats’ or ‘vermin’ or ‘reptiles’. And when we’re able to dehumanize someone, reduce him to a label, a word, a symbol, then language is getting dangerous. For it is way more easy to destroy a symbol than to destroy a human being. It is through language that we’re able to tell each other stories and with those stories organize ourselves, resulting in becoming the most powerful animal on the planet. We cannot do without words. We 191

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need language to think, so when we try to think about language, we have to use language as well. We can never fully go beyond or without it. How we are ‘locked’ in language has been a theme in philosophy as well as in the theatre since Wittgenstein. It is as if the ‘Linguistic Turn’ in philosophy prompted a similar turn in theatre, with playwrights like Ionesco, Beckett and Handke as its most well-known and influential advocates, whose work focused on the above-mentioned themes and problems. Especially La leçon, Not I and Kaspar were my first encounters with the theatre, when I was seventeen, which also canalized a philosophical wonderment. Before I went to the theatre school, I wanted to study Philosophy for a year. This study was meant to serve my theatrical practice, and it was never my intention to become an academic philosopher, but I couldn’t stop after one year. Or two. Or four. It was my love for the works of Wittgenstein that kept me at the university way longer than anticipated. He seemed the only one to whom philosophy was not a profession but a matter of life and death, who practiced logic out of existential necessity and a deep feeling of obligation. Reading the Tractatus was like reading poetry, reading his later work was like being the witness of an artist thinking aloud. The more I fell in love with his work, the more I realized I had to stop doing academic philosophy. Completely in line with what he himself tried to urge his students, I decided to graduate quickly so I could do ‘something real’. After six years of studying philosophy, I finally applied for the theatre school. During these first years of acting classes, voice trainings, yoga, writing sessions and some embarrassing first attempts at directing my fellow students, I started to miss my old love and decided to make a performance about Wittgenstein, initially purely as an excuse to read him again. But when I started to inventorize what themes are worth working into a performance, I came up with more than ten. There was so much to tell just from his unbelievable biography. The Tractatus is a work of art in itself. I imagined plays as language games, performances about what it means to follow a rule, absurdist acts about the meaning of meaning, a children’s play that could be made out of his work, with a lot of examples from Alice in Wonderland, I envisioned a performance about language without words, and so on. So I decided to make eleven shows. One of the pitfalls when writing a play about the persona Wittgenstein, or performing him, is admiration. His strictness, inexorability, his uncompromising demanding of authenticity and radical honesty are all traits that I secretly admire and sometimes envy. But nobody is waiting for a cringy hagiography. Neither do I want to use the theatre as an alibi for a lecture or as a philosophy lesson in disguise. There should always be something at stake, just as there always was something at stake for Ludwig Wittgenstein, which is felt on every page he wrote or dictated.

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For me, theatre is a place where I invite people to think. Thinking should be a goal in itself, not what is thought. When I watch a play I’m not interested in a political, moral, or artistic statement or message, for I’m convinced that art is completely useless and should be useless, for therein lies its beauty, especially these days where absolutely everything has to serve either a political programme or the laws of the free market. My favourite plays, and the plays I enjoy writing the most, are no psychological realistic dramas but rather juxtapositions of paraphrased thoughts around a central question or idea. For example, how to define trust, or the meaning of evil, and where every scene points at the question, works around it, tries different ways of approaching it, without ever answering it. The beauty of trying to paraphrase something in the most radical way possible is that you’ll never know beforehand where you’ll end up, and thus might come up with new thoughts or images or metaphors you could never have anticipated as a writer. The result might be that an audience feels itself being the witness of someone, or a group of performers, thinking aloud, associating, reasoning, dissociating. That should be the influence of Wittgenstein. And what is at stake there, for the performers as well as for the audience, is whether the train of thought will find its grip, will arrive somewhere, and, if not, whether it will leave everyone satisfied or not. And what should be the criterion for this satisfaction? More or less the same when viewing modern dance. There doesn’t have to be a final statement, lesson, plot, or moral, but things do have to add up in a way. It doesn’t have to make sense or be intelligible from the beginning to the end, but it has to work. People should be willing to take the performance with them when leaving the theatre, willing to finish the thinking on stage with their own thoughts, in their own lives. The risk here is that it’s easy to hide oneself behind arbitrariness and unfinished metaphors, hoping that the lack of intelligibility will be interpreted as ‘deep’ and ‘intelligent’ theatre. The most important and effective way of avoiding this – and this is also something you could learn from Wittgenstein’s writings – is being radically personal, radically honest. For in the personal lies the irrational, and in the irrational lies the theatrical. This is the main problem of philosophy That it desires no wisdom But intelligence And this intelligence Is usually used as something Behind which one hides oneself Most philosophers Most thinkers Don’t think themselves in They don’t write themselves in

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No They write themselves off For that is what our intelligence ultimately wants Decapitating oneself Because our intelligence is so very quickly and easily satisfied With itself But you should never be satisfied with yourself Being satisfied with oneself That’s deciding to take a nap outside during a snowstorm You think you’re taking a rest You think you’re falling asleep But actually you’re freezing Actually you’re dying You can’t explain life’s meaning That is inexplicable Ineffable Not to be proven Not to be found Not to be legitimized If you think you managed to do this You are satisfied too easily And that is deadly.

Part I, which premiered 2021 in Frascati Amsterdam, is a monologue showing the young Wittgenstein, the night before he has to defend his Tractatus before the PhD committee in Cambridge. He has picked up a young boy from the streets and taken him to his room. But instead of undressing each other, Wittgenstein starts talking. He keeps pacing in front of the boy, telling the boy about his youth, his first encounter with philosophy, his volunteering for the war, how he wrote the Tractatus during his years of service, while, between all this, thinking aloud about language and philosophy. Half naked (for the boy had managed to slowly take off Wittgenstein’s shirt, which he half unknowingly allowed) he explains to him the main outlines of his work, and how he has single-handedly solved, no, dissolved every philosophical problem, forever. The only thing that remains is doing something real and useful: teaching at an elementary school in Austria. He keeps repeating this intention, as if he is still trying to convince himself. Tomorrow I will stop doing philosophy I’ll be gone by then I think I’m going to be very happy In Otterthal In Mistelbach Yes

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Every time I think about it It makes me feel extremely happy.

Of course, he speaks my words. He says the things I assume he would have said in such a situation. And I shamelessly mix my assumptions about him with my own thoughts about him, his philosophy, the theatre, myself, and thinking in general. It’s about the impossible About that which holds itself in the corner of your eyes And you have to describe it while running So it keeps escaping you while you try to catch it Just like we are continually trying to form an opinion about the catastrophe While that very catastrophe is unfolding As a result of which that opinion loses its meaning as soon as you express it As a result of which the language itself turns out to be the catastrophe You don’t speak about things You speak against them You always speak against the things You don’t think about the world You think against the world You don’t think about life You think against it You always and only think Against life.

Wittgenstein was lonely. He was an abandoned child. This was something I already knew from his biography and letters, but I never ‘really’ understood it, neither did I connect it to his philosophical work. But while performing him in front of a silent and judging audience, this insight gained new meaning. I – and with me, the character I was embodying – realized that I was completely alone and at any moment, everything, everybody, could fall away: the people around me, and the ground beneath my feet. I physically experienced the thinness of the floor. Subsequently, my way of moving around the stage followed this insight. My feet seemed to have a life of their own; they were constantly conscious of their movements: searching, feeling, testing the solidity of the stage. For the first time I could link this feeling of abandonment, or the constant fear of abandonment, to his work. Not only to the Tractatus, in which he tried to create his own safe and perfect universe, but also his later work appeared in another perspective. Some of the major philosophical consequences of his later work can be seen in the radical rethinking of the classical inner/outer, private/public, and mind/body dichotomies. You could read it as a critical discussion with

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Descartes, whose philosophy is perhaps most of all responsible for man’s loneliness, by transforming him into an isolated subject. An island, a floating head that has its own thinking as its only certainty. It is as if Wittgenstein’s later work – in which he allowed for fantasy and playfulness, and where he regarded language as something that is essentially intertwined with life itself – was an attempt to free himself from his abandonment. For me, this monologue was a starting point. An exercise in paraphrasing his thoughts, an attempt in allowing myself to think his work through, draw its consequences, translating it in my own words in such a radical way that it leads to something new. As mentioned above, I have some rough ideas about the Wittgensteinian themes I want to address, or depart from, in the future parts. But the most important thing is that each performance dictates the next, that each performance forms a snapshot in a bigger train of thought. Each performance should come from an unfinished thought with which the last performance ended. Part 1 ended with Wittgenstein abandoning philosophy, and, in a way, life itself (spoiler alert: he and the boy don’t have sex at the end). He thought he chose an honest, practical life when moving to this shit hole, Otterthal, but of course it was to be more of a recluse. So part 2 has to deal with his return to the world. Not only with his first attempts to return to doing philosophy but also with how his work was appreciated in the world, and changed it. Part 2, which I’m currently working on, is about his attempted return to the living. It tries to investigate the possible political and social dimension of the Tractatus. It deals with the influence he had on the men and women of the Wiener Kreis or Vienna Circle. Together with three other performers, I want to show the rise, struggles, and fall of a group of Viennese intellectuals who, inspired by Wittgenstein’s work, try to purify language of metaphysics and theology and, by extension, populism, demagoguery, (Nazi) propaganda, and fake news – until their chairman is murdered and everybody flees abroad. Parallels between past and present are evident. The rise of Nazism coincided with a development in philosophy of which the Vienna Circle was the manifestation. The circle was an influential group of philosophers who tried to strip philosophy of all ‘metaphysics’, in order to arrive at the core of what philosophy should essentially be: science. They believed that something can only be meaningful if it can be scientifically verified. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for whom clarity of thoughts was the only legitimate aim of philosophy, was their greatest hero. Inspired by his Tractatus they sought to make language as precise and rigorous as a mathematical proof. Although, during the early 1920s, Wittgenstein was in regular contact with some members of the Vienna Circle, such as Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Friedrich Waismann, and Rose Rand, and although the mission of the Circle was in some ways similar to Wittgenstein’s mission, he rather looked down

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on most of its members. Sometimes he sat with his back to them during debates. When they asked him a question about logic, it happened that instead of answering, he began to recite poems by the mystical Indian poet Tagore. He quickly understood they had completely misunderstood his work: he was trying to protect the very thing that makes life worth living, namely the unspeakable, the mystical, against the destructive power of science. He tried to protect life with the help of cold logic – against the cold logic. His admirers seemed simply not to understand, let alone appreciate that. While the Circle was engaged in their great project of purging language of all that was irrational, Nazism rose around them. The Nazis, of course, harboured great suspicion of the Vienna Circle, which was not only mostly made up of Jews, atheists, and communists, but was also sceptical of tradition and a proponent of modernity and individualism. The language of the Nazis was of course full of the fuzzy abstractions and grand, seductive ideas that the Circle tried to unmask as nonsense. Yet, and here lies for me the dramaturgical value, it cannot be overlooked that both movements were engaged in a mission with a shared value: to ‘purify’ the world, to rid it of everything that is not in line with their ideas of purity. Both movements were in their own way looking for ‘clarity’, even though they had a completely different view of it. The Circle thought it had found an ally in Wittgenstein, but they didn’t share his respect for religious faith, mysticism, the secrets of life, the search for a deeper meaning. So he could not go along with their project and they lost contact. The relationship between the circle and Wittgenstein reflects in a tantalizing way that between the logicians and the Nazis: it shows the tension between the utopian idea that language precedes the world and can be purified, on the one hand, and the sense of the metaphysical on the other: the mystical, emotional, and religious, which cannot be ignored. What interests me here is: If language has to be clear, are we still able to grasp the unsteady, chaotic aspects of reality? How far can logic go without violating everything that cannot be grasped in language? To what extent is language itself violent, even dangerous? Perhaps as humanity we are always on the border between the desire for clarity on the one hand and the fear of clarity on the other. Between our longing for rigidity and our fear for it. Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and Nazism together form a triangle: three positions that contradict each other, mirror each other, and in turn hold up a mirror to us. (Of courses, the Circle is me. I’m terribly afraid of the cynical forces that are hostile towards rationality, reason, good manners, facts, science, and art because I don’t have the tools to defend myself. And I know Wittgenstein is not going to save me.)

Chapter 16

Wittgenstein’s Use of the Tableau Vivant: Proposition and Group Performance

The Aesthetics Group: Jeanette Doyle, Cathy O’Carroll, Mick O’Hara, and Connell Vaughan

INTRODUCTION: THE PROPOSITION OF THE TABLEAU In the Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein provocatively and somewhat surprisingly suggests that a collective proposition of objects comes to life for a brief period through performance in the manner of a tableau vivant. As he writes: ‘One name stands for one thing, another for another thing, and they are combined with one another. In this way the whole group – like a tableau vivant – presents a state of affairs’ (Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 4.0311 [2002, 26]). Wittgenstein’s proposition of the tableau vivant is an analogy that represents a state of affairs or ‘a situation’. In using ‘state of affairs’, Wittgenstein deploys a technical philosophical term that refers to a situation that necessarily obtains or does not. A situation is conceived as a picture, but Wittgenstein seems to suggest that this is closer to the performance inherent to a tableau vivant than the stillness and static-ness of a photograph. The tableau vivant is one of the few examples Wittgenstein provides in the Tractatus. Accordingly, this chapter interrogates the aesthetic and performative implications of Wittgenstein’s exceptional call on the example of the tableau. This is articulated through a contextualization of the performance of a ‘whole group’ utilizing Wittgenstein’s analogy of the whole group presenting a ‘state of affairs’ or a tableau vivant. This is developed by our

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experience, as a group, of using performance as part of our research practice. Specifically, we reflect on our work, I See Birds Flying Over the White House, presented in 2017 at the Research Pavilion in the context of the 57th Venice Biennale. In this chapter we consider the history of the form of the tableau and Wittgenstein’s use of it in light of our artistic research. We reflect on how our performance in Venice in part mirrored the modelling action of the tableau as described by Wittgenstein. Where Wittgenstein envisioned the tableau as an abstraction, a frozen moment that explicated a picturing relation, our performance differed from the tableau by incorporating recurring movement and spoken word, while addressing a digital model. However, this was part of an ongoing process of artistic research, including the curatorial selection of an artwork and conversations with the artist, Michael Bell-Smith; the development of the script/research poem; stage directions; scenography; and so on and the performance itself in Venice and even this iteration as collaborative written reflection. We argue that the example of the tableau and our performance is propositional. It is an aesthetic and critical moment that entails an abstract evocation of a presentable scene or, in the words of Wittgenstein, ‘state of affairs’. Each part of the group of objects must hold their own, however briefly, for the situation to pertain. What is striking in Wittgenstein’s use of the tableau is the possibility of objects being performers. We recognize in his description of a state of affairs an incompleteness and connectivity. Unlike Wittgenstein’s use of the tableau, performers are more than mere objects; together the group stands in for or represents a situation. In a similar vein, our research practice, as the Aesthetics Group, performs and proposes a state of affairs. This involves not only interlocution and co-authorship, but also intervention of performance that creates a temporal moment of delivery and interpretation. This chapter reveals that Wittgenstein’s use of the tableau vivant implies a set of aesthetic and philosophical categories, such as performance, reception, reflection, inspection, the gaze and display. Through this set of criteria, we analyse Wittgenstein’s use of the tableau vivant, claiming that this model of momentarily picturing reality does more than just represent, it also re-imagines and re-performs. Crucially the group production of a repeatedly arrested scene in the presence of an audience reveals the nature of performance inherent in Wittgenstein’s use of the tableau. Our performance repeatedly and momentarily corresponded to a historical reading of the tableau vivant as it deployed elements of a tableau such as the live presentation of bodies and freezing of action on stage towards the production of a performance that addressed a ‘state of affairs’. However, our performance also functioned as a critical proposition that reflected on contemporary socio-political events.

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DESCRIBING THE SCENE: I SEE BIRDS FLYING OVER THE WHITE HOUSE (2017) The Aesthetics Group is a research group affiliated with the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media at the School of Art and Design, TU Dublin. We are a group of researchers and practitioners from a variety of backgrounds, including philosophy, visual art, digital media, theatre, and performance. Since 2012, we have collaboratively engaged with aesthetic theory, practice, and policy to develop new critical positions in aesthetics and related fields. An important outcome of our research involves performative pedagogy: collaboratively writing texts from which performances are enacted. This method of ‘pedagogical performance’ explores the potential of performance as a vehicle for mobilizing philosophic and artistic languages as forms of research. In October 2017, the group performed a ‘research poem’, I See Birds Flying Over the White House (figure 16.1), at the Research Pavilion in the context of the 57th Venice Biennale in response to an artwork by Michael Bell-Smith which he repurposed for the occasion.1 Bell-Smith’s Birds Over the White House (figure 16.2) is a digital algorithm of nodes representing birds flying over a schematic plan of the White House. ​

Figure 16.1  Performing I See Birds Flying Over the White House, Research Pavilion, Venice, 2017.

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Figure 16.2  Michael Bell-Smith, Birds Over the White House, Video Still, 2006, Foxy Production, New York. Source: (c) Michael Bell-Smith, courtesy Foxy Production, New York.

Where the original was presented as a vintage tabletop console at Foxy Production, New York 2006, the 2017 version at Venice was a large-scale high-definition image projected onto a paper substrate on the floor of the pavilion, which playfully mused upon the invasion of air space over the White House by birds. We performed in response to the artwork in stillness and in movement while intermittently reciting a bricolage that parsed and selectively quoted the canon of contemporary philosophical discourse.2 Within this bricolage one name/performer collectively performed as a whole group to present a state of affairs. The Aesthetics Group’s process involved the creation of a collaboratively written script, delivered by the four voices of the group (culminating in ‘one thing standing for another’). To address the texture of the canon and the aesthetics of the contemporary political moment the ‘research poem’ was a form of call-and-response. It built up to the choral repetition of the refrain ‘I See Birds Flying Over the White House’. This insertion of the proposition ‘I See’ explicitly introduced the notion of the performance of the gaze as a defining feature of the research poem when performed live as in the tableau vivant, which extended beyond our gaze to the gaze of the live audience. ​ In the performance, the group, individually illuminated by lights attached to clipboards, incrementally edged to the four corners of the projected artwork like pieces in a game of chess, stopping in stillness before again

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reciting each individual’s part of the poem. The audience moved around the bodies of the often-static performers and the artwork’s architectural model, collaborating in the production of a propositional space. The mediation, manipulation, and interruption of access to the image of the White House schematic were achieved physically as well as discursively. The performers’ bodies monitored the work, thereby providing a fugitive boundary. This gesture was reflective of how access is performed, encompassing practices of inclusion and exclusion within the regime of the forty-fifth president in the White House. The recitation of this research poem, through interlocution and movement, allowed for the opening of a critical space to consider performance within a specific political and territorial space. The darkened theatre, the orientation of the performers, the movement of the audience, and the throw and intensity of the image contributed to the atmosphere of the performance. The mise en scène imaged the frame of discourse and the relationship between parts, providing a display of objects and relationships. An obvious effect of this was to re-present certain debates within an unusual context, light-heartedly questioning artistic and academic frames of presentation such as the tableau vivant and the lecture in the context of a research pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Our response to Bell-Smith’s Birds Over the White House constituted an implicit critique of our ‘authority’ to performatively respond to the work through the arrangement of bodies in a playful, poetic, and discursive manner. The performance operated on multiple recursive registers or gestures: the artwork, performance, the body politic, interlocutors, canon, audience, camera, and so on. The performance of research attempts to capture the research process for a moment and render it suitable for display, reception, interpretation. Crucially this method proposes a picturing representation of the research process as it unfolds. In this it echoes the form of the tableau vivant, a scriptless and static representation of the positions, status, and relationships pertaining to a given state of affairs. Yet the performance of the research poem I See Birds Flying Over the White House recognizes the tensions of representation or how one thing may stand for another. For Wittgenstein the tableau vivant displays its objects in a way that models a particular state of affairs pertaining to the objects presented. Yet we see Wittgenstein’s shift from the example of the model to the example of the performance event of the tableau as illustrative of this relationship between language, logic, and states of affairs. In using this example, he recognizes its potential to represent a state of affairs but he decontextualizes the form of the tableau from the history of theatre and performance. After all, any staged scripted performance necessarily aims to keep its actors and audience in a fixed place. The scripted form is an apparatus like a medical cast, or even a

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social caste system,3 to rigidly maintain roles and hierarchies. Significantly, and unexplored by Wittgenstein, the form of the tableau vivant is notable for challenging conventional norms of representation. THE HYBRID AESTHETIC FORM OF TABLEAU VIVANTS In grasping for an image to illustrate his account of ‘states of affairs’, Wittgenstein is drawn to a peculiar aesthetic practice. The tableau vivant has been considered a somewhat controversial nineteenth-century precursor to the living pictures of cinema. The practice was a popular parlour game of the European gentry and, in time, the popular variety theatre of the American middle class. Yet, even when tableau vivants became a widespread attraction of popular culture over the course of the 19th century – appearing on fairgrounds, in circuses, and in light theatre – they never fully shed their connotations of the artistic, contemplative, and sophisticated. One reason for this was their subject matter: even in these popular contexts, the tableau re-enacted paintings and sculptures from the sphere of classical, neoclassicist, and contemporary academic art.4

The practice, extolled by Wittgenstein, entailed a skilled cast of characters holding a position, usually of a famous painting, motif, or historical scene, for about roughly 30 seconds. The proto-cinematic three-dimensional composition freezes the action, enabling the performers to capture a scene. In contrast to the experience of gallery viewing, in this motley art form, characters could play (à la ‘musical chairs’) with different identities, stand for different things, and generate different narratives (states of affairs) by assuming different object positions in front of a live audience. It can also be subject to documentation and, in time, recreation. As a form of live diorama staged in tangible architectural space and framed by time, and in contrast to the peculiar theatricality of paintings, this is truly a portraiture ‘of subjects who give themselves to be seen and watch themselves being watched’.5 Wittgenstein’s unique use of the tableau vivant to describe the relationship between thought and language relies on an understanding of the viewing relationship between stage and spectator established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where theatre architectures held the proscenium (picture frame) stage. The historical tableau depended on this particular configuration of space that supports the theatrical illusion in order to function and operated with a viewing space that concentrates the gaze as though through a lens.6 The space of the tableau was a framed space clearly separated from the space of the observer who inhabits the everyday world of the auditorium. Wittgenstein addresses this separation in the notion of the logic or language of the

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picture – that cannot be spoken and that he cannot imagine.7 This understanding relies on a particular conception of performance space that has been challenged throughout the twentieth century where space itself is thought of as a potent element of performance.8 The tableau is designed for the pregnant stage space. Its meaning and import cannot be separated from the space and spatial relationships for which it was composed and in which it is experienced.9 In fact, an understanding of space and the relationships it fosters highlight the differences between Wittgenstein’s examples of the model and the tableau. While the model may exist in the world in which it is viewed, it is fundamentally an abstraction that may exist in perpetuity. While the tableau may likewise present a state of affairs, the tradition of the form is to represent and re-present a scene, whether fictional or historical, that often comments on its social context at a specific place and time. For example, in the performance I See Birds Flying Over the White House, and the context of the Research Pavilion, the positioning and framing function of performance itself produces a fundamental and situated and temporal relationship between stage and spectator.10 As a staged form of theatrical entertainment, the controversies surrounding the tableau vivant were unsurprisingly those of taste and representation. As a practice, it flirted between revealing and provocative ‘sensation’ (usually of the female body) and valuable ‘artistry’.11 Where the tableau vivant incorporated nudity, this was an erotic theatre known as poses plastiques (flexible poses).12 Its deployment in patriotic and public pageantry has been seen as a testament to its democratizing and progressive reforming capacity.13 By enabling the embodied performance of alternate, provisional, and experimental identities, the practice of tableau vivant was a vehicle for the exploration of identity, and eventually, protest. Wittgenstein was not focused on the messy politics of identity per se, for him that was not the remit of rigorous philosophy. Despite this, and in addition to his project of language and logic, we argue that the experimental and explorative nature of performance is inherent in his use of the tableau. Furthermore, our reflection on this exploration through an ongoing process of artistic research (including an analysis of a performance made in response to a specific contemporary artwork) reveals the limitations of Wittgenstein’s use of the tableau. The potency of the example of the tableau vivant that Wittgenstein calls on, in part, lies in its potential to permit the enunciation and illocution of reworked identities. Just as the two-dimensional illusion ‘Kaninchen und Ente’ (‘Rabbit and Duck’) illustrated for Wittgenstein the difference between ‘seeing that’14 versus ‘seeing as’ (perception vs interpretation), the proposition of the tableau is a simultaneous beholding of different aspects. In the nineteenth-century American context, for instance, ‘The parlor entertainments of the antebellum period [.  .  .] offered middle-class women more than the momentary thrill of stirring a collectively chaste admiration; they

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encouraged women to try on a variety of personae.’15 We, as the Aesthetics Group, also reworked the identities and writing of contemporary philosophers within I See Birds Flying Over the White House to adhere to our agenda of performatively addressing a current ‘state of affairs’. In the German context, the hybridity of the tableau as an aesthetic form and practice equally invites consideration of reworked identities and shifting forms. Goethe, for example, famously included performances of tableaux vivants in his novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Affinities] (1809) that repositions roles in the bourgeois nuclear family.16 His approach to the movement inherent in statuary is notable here. Like a film still and the digital nodes representing birds over the White House: The statue as Goethe represents it is always fresh and self-renewing despite its static condition. Its stasis tricks the eye’s ability to discern movement by seeming to move in those instants when the eye is closed. Deferring the statue’s movement out of the realm of the visible and into a moment of sightlessness, Goethe portrays a compelling statue that performs without moving.17

The tableau, in contrast, brings both stasis and movement to the beholder. As an experiment in the mixture of theatrical performance and visual art, the tableau presents a paradoxical drama condensed into the creation of an image or series of images,18 juxtaposed with the performance of deliberate motion. As such, the painterly performance of the tableau necessarily recognizes that it cannot achieve mimetic perfection but rather operates as a proposal of ideal representation. In this proposal is the dual beholding of its ‘two seemingly incompatible representational modes – allegory and mimesis’.19 Wittgenstein is clearly drawn to the aesthetic tensions inherent in the tableau vivant in his attempt to represent ‘states of affairs’. After all, the tableau vivant is a deeply uncanny art form. It represents an encounter between the imagined and the real, and its ontological status is always one of the copy, the double. The actors (usually amateur) attempt painstakingly to recreate the scene and affect of a painting familiar to all. Indeed, a big part of the pleasure on the part of the performers, set designers, and the audience is the experience of recognition, of knowing the reference. Yet this ‘aha’ moment is quickly followed by the anxiety the double produces.20

Given the formal instructive dimensions of the tableau vivant it is useful to recognize Danka Radjenović’s Wittgensteinian-inspired distinction between ‘instructing in’ and ‘instructing to’ when reflecting on the medium.21 Radjenović differentiates the latter paradigm as exemplified by a computer program and the performance of tasks as a result of automation, and the

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former as exemplified in the process of teaching and learning a language and incompleteness. The teacher, or handbook as we shall see, equally instructs and the performer engages in repetition and drilling, yet there is a necessary freedom and creativity in language use and performance beyond the simple application of coded instruction. This is coincident with the presentation of tableau vivants historically where handbooks for staging tableau vivants offered instructions for reproduction. For example: A perfect picture will be recognized and appreciated whenever displayed, or by whomsoever produced. In fine, nature is still nature, and the germ of poetical feeling is similar in its manifestation wherever it may chance to be shown. The delineation of the natural and poetical, its realization upon canvas, or upon paper, or in the living picture, tends to improve the mind, assimilates the real with the ideal, conforms taste to the noblest standard, overflows the heart with pure and holy thoughts, and adorns the exterior form with graces surpassing those of the Muses.22

With the example of such guidelines, in recognizing the necessary role of experiment in performance, rehearsal, and the effort of the performer in the evocation of a scene, we can juxtapose the tableau vivant with the automatic assimilation of algorithmic instruction. In addition to the popular historical content, this sort of etiquette guidance reveals the practice of the tableau vivant to entail not simply the production of a beautiful image to be admired but also the inculcation of a (momentarily) ideal comportment in the embodied performer and beholder. Here the approach to picturing is revealing of attempts to strictly regulate the tableau in the service of moral, aesthetic, and social improvement and is less concerned with achieving mimetic perfection or repeatable exactness. Implied from a reading of Wittgenstein’s reference to the tableau vivant using Radjenović’s account of ‘instructing to’ is a recognition of the centrality of performance beyond the automatic task in any ‘state of affairs’. In this context, Wittgenstein’s deployment of the example of the tableau vivant, an exemplary medium of visual and theatrical performance, necessarily implies these associations of deliberation, rehearsal, and repetition. Furthermore, it points to the potentiality and incompleteness of performance. It is the latter that Wittgenstein overlooks in his use of the analogy in the Tractatus.

THE CONDITIONS OF THE TABLEAU IN WITTGENSTEIN One of Wittgenstein’s key ideas is best understood through his notion of a picture theory where he argued that there is a logical consistency, even a

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necessity, between a model or picture and what it is modelling, or picturing. As he states, ‘What a picture must have in common with reality in order to be able to depict it correctly or incorrectly in the way it does, is pictorial form.’23 In this sense, for the picture to be true it must take into account the logical contingencies of what it is rendering. Wittgenstein contends that there is a logical consistency present in the structure of language which it shares with the world. In essence, language models or pictures the world. It is language itself that therefore sets limits to what we can meaningfully describe: ‘The totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world.’24 Wittgenstein’s evocation is consistent with his constant use of aesthetic illustration, metaphor, or simile in place of concrete argumentation.25 Given his recourse to the example of the tableau vivant, it is necessary to focus on the notion of the model that Wittgenstein proposes. Famously, Wittgenstein read a report of a court case regarding a car accident in Paris in which a model was utilized to describe the incident. Wittgenstein was taken with this use of the model in the proceedings, and it reaffirmed for him how the model ‘stands in’ or represents things in the world.26 In his earlier Notebooks 1914–1916, Wittgenstein states: ‘In the proposition a world is as it were put together experimentally. (As when in the law-court in Paris a motor-car accident is represented by means of dolls, etc.).’27 It is this notion of ‘experimentally’ that denotes the provisional nature of the model. In the Paris example, the model, cars, and people stand in for their real-life counterparts. They occupy space and are solid, arranged, or composed in a fashion that renders an approximation of the scene of the crash. The model in this instance experimentally constructs the scene. Each part of the model stands for or represents an element in the real world. But this scene is contingent; it could have been different, arranged in a different manner. This difference does not negate the model’s ability to convey truth. The experiment of the model is necessarily contingent on the objects selected to represent the scene. The parts can be moved, rearranged, and even omitted and still reaffirm a possible situation in the world.28 Likewise, the tableau establishes a scene, models a reality, and implies a truth value. If, as Wittgenstein states, the model through its experimental set-up ‘touches reality’29 how does his example of tableau operate? Perhaps the key can be found in 2.1513, where Wittgenstein declares: ‘So a picture, conceived in this way, also includes the pictorial relationship, which makes it into a picture.’30 The ‘depicting relation’ obtains regarding the picture or model. The tableau is provisional yet presents a state of affairs. The elements of the tableau: complex objects such as tables and chairs, bodies, and costumes correlate to what they represent, perhaps a scene from the past, fictional, or otherwise. These complex objects in space standing in relation to each other combine to articulate a world.31 Key here are the different elements

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that articulate a scene. The poses of characters and their arrangement in the scene are ‘picturing’, they are ‘modelling’ through their correlations. But for Wittgenstein, the model or picture is not in itself an object for it is always conditionally made up of elements that stand in relation to one another. This claim follows Michael Morris’s argument regarding the slippage of translation of ‘fact’ from German to English. Morris prefers to denote a fact as a ‘that’, a concatenation of elements that are arranged in a certain way. He further denies that a picture or model should be understood as a complex object.32 By denying that a picture or a model is a complex object, Wittgenstein in a sense denies any contextual situation that the picture or model is bonded to. To be consistent with his broader claims of a pure language, Wittgenstein’s model (and his example of the tableau) must be a pure abstraction. Complex objects must in a sense become almost invisible, hollowed out, emptied of their content. In the case of the tableau, the scene is stripped of artistic, social, and historical potency. For Wittgenstein, incompleteness and connectivity are necessary conditions for the elements of the group, and this is the nature of things. In describing the ‘state of affairs’ in this way, we can see that each part of the group of actors and objects must hold their own, however briefly, for the ‘state of affairs’ to pertain.33 For the tableau to succeed as an example on Wittgenstein’s terms, the individual actors must become imperceptible as subjects and transform into almost motionless objects in the ambiguous theatre of the tableau vivant. We claim that the momentary idealization presented and performed in this momentary stasis is an abstraction that cannot be held. Ostension, modelling, and picturing are not the essential elements of language that Wittgenstein’s artistic metaphor of the tableau articulates. A proposition is no longer a picture, but a tool activated through its use in human activity. In Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, propositions are in fact abstractions that are beholden to an explanatory understanding of language that represents and models but does not describe the experience of language use. Radjenović’s account of ‘instructing to’ is informative as it suggests a set of techniques that are mastered through practice and repetition.34 However, in his later writings on aesthetics, Wittgenstein’s account of ‘aesthetic words’ is worth considering.35 Gestures are for him the key to understanding the communicative operation and expressivity of art. For Wittgenstein, the concept and practice of art are built on the notion of gesture. Noteworthy here is that gesture is essential to aesthetic reception as well as delivery. It is not limited to the performer, but it includes the recognition of the beholder(s). The artistic gesture (of say, the tableau vivant) is held as distinct from and revealing of the state of affairs. The gesture has the more elementary and ‘exact’ capacity to instruct, inform, and incite where language cannot.36

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Despite the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus arguing for the impossibility of addressing the philosophical domains of art and aesthetics, the example of the tableau he offers strays into the artistic and theatrical. Crucially, we claim that the example of the tableau that he cites entails a performance that is both in space and contingent.37 The space of performance is a transitional space, a stage where a state of affairs can obtain.38 Through their comportment and arrangement, these elements of performative picture-making are both static and in movement, and together perform a state of affairs in the tableau. The frame space of animated digital nodes, the actors’ bodies in stillness and momentary motion, interlocution, and the stage space of the scene, all coalesce as a sense-making proposition. Like the tableau, the changing of these elements throughout the duration of the performance denoted the provisional sense-making marked out in time.39 Critically, the performance highlights the contingency of its arrangement. The provisional and experimental nature of the performance of the tableau is a necessary condition of its potential to convey a state of affairs. As stated, actors and props must establish a ‘depicting relation’ for any sense-making to cohere. In I See Birds Flying Over the White House, the depicting relation was a necessary condition of the performance. The performance goes beyond the operations of model and tableau insofar as it opens a space of interlocution. Wittgenstein’s call on the static nature of the tableau, in keeping with a more general correspondence theory of meaning, has a limited relationship to the world. Suddenly, in Wittgenstein, the example of the tableau in evoking artistic performance links modelling to the world. Unlike the Paris model, the actors in the tableau are not mere objects, they are characters, historical or fictional, they are ultimately tied to the world. Additionally, the value of considering Wittgenstein’s analogy of the tableau vivant, in our analysis, is to highlight the live and performative elements of this type of ‘picture’ in contrast to the correspondence, passivity, and stillness that the term picture might suggest, given the dominance of photography. The dominance of photography has been superseded by developments in digital technology. BellSmith’s Birds Over the White House incorporates a static two-dimensional digital model of the White House transgressed by a recursive algorithm of digital objects representing birds in movement. This movement is curtailed by the algorithm and is propositionally representing things that may not obtain beyond the frame of the model. As such, our performance in part worked ‘like a tableau vivant’ in response to an algorithmic model of nodes representing birds in movement over a static architectural model.40 I See Birds Flying Over the White House works with a conception of a performance event as a critically reflective tool and mode of experimentation. The fact that a performance like I See Birds Flying Over the White House may hold a mirror to the world is not unimportant, but through the

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contingency of elements, bodies, costumes, dialogue, and movement it also conveys a possibility that coalesces and is instantiated. What Wittgenstein fails to appreciate is that the essential fact of the tableau vivant is that it is a staged tension. While the tableau experimentally ‘performs’ and pictures, as the model ‘pictures’ and instructs, it does so much more. For example, there is the tension of the actor’s performance and the gaze of the beholder(s) temporarily retaining the picture. This is an attempt at, or a proposition of, static, conventional, and accessible representation that holds momentarily.41 This can be abstract, moralistic, political, or all at the same time. His privileging of the abstract nature of the tableau intentionally overlooks the moralistic and political elements. In contrast, we addressed contemporary political concerns in the performance of I See Birds Flying Over the White House which allowed for a propositional ‘state of affairs’ that held momentarily in the stage space of performance. Our performance of artistic research recognized not only that there is a history to the form of the tableau but that any performance of the tableau necessarily entails a politics of delivery and beholding. Wittgenstein’s recourse to the analogy of the tableau places, for example, certain expectations on the spectator that echo the reception of the courtroom jury to the demonstrator’s reference to the courtroom model. That is, he relies on a particular viewing attitude that does not include absorption into the illusion of the scene and the emotional, empathetic responses that this might trigger; there is no space for bourgeois romantic illusion here or the moral, political, historical, and contextual elements of a scene. The articulation of the tableau vivant represents a temporary emulation of a specific ‘state of affairs’. This is the actualization of a situation out of the potential combination of objects. This performance of an arrested beauty in front of the real presence of beholders, as Wittgenstein would surely recognize, entails the gaze, inspection, regard, and surveillance of an audience.42 In his later work, the Philosophical Investigations (1963, 1999), a text littered with analogies and metaphors, Wittgenstein’s philosophy undergoes a radical transformation. In the Tractatus, language modelled or gave us a picture of the world; in the later work it is the use of language in everyday life that determines its value. Although not wholly rejecting the earlier work and its insistence on the logical structure inherent to language, the meaning of a word is no longer denotative but constituted by its use. Wittgenstein conceives language as an exercise that is fragmented, multifarious, nonsystematic, and intrinsically stitched into the world. Nonetheless, the task of philosophy remains the same – clarity. Clarity is enunciated through an understanding of the role of conventions and techniques that are performed in language-games. Likening such language-games to a game of chess Wittgenstein states:

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To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions). To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.43

The rules that determine any language-game, including the tableau and the scripted language-games of the Aesthetics Group’s performance, are formed through a set of habitual practices or ‘form of life’. The forms of life are the linguistic and non-linguistic predicates that confer meaning in any languagegame for a group of language users and are the foundation or ‘given’ basis of any language community. For Wittgenstein, language is no longer delimited by logical foundations but is conceived fundamentally as a public activity. Language is woven into the particular form of life, in the case of the tableau, that manifests the set of agreements and instructions that participants perform as they hold that momentary pose. The ambiguous theatre of the tableau may represent a provisional ‘state of affairs’, but it is also shot through with a suite of social agreements, linguistic practices, and gestures between the performers. It is a momentary scene that frames the contingency, texture, and colour of the world. The frozen, silent space of the tableau vivant offers time for critical reflection and interpretation, always provisional and incomplete.

CONCLUSION: PRESENTING I SEE BIRDS FLYING OVER THE WHITE HOUSE ‘LIKE A TABLEAU VIVANT’ This chapter reflected on the Aesthetics Group’s artistic research represented by an instance of performance, through the lens of Wittgenstein’s use of the tableau vivant and the history of the form of the tableau. In keeping with one tradition of the form, the performance in Venice sought to address the social and political contingencies of the time. Yet, it differed from traditional versions of the tableau, as the audience could move freely through the space of the Research Pavilion viewing Bell-Smith’s modelled artwork on the floor and navigating the often still bodies of the performers punctuated with a spoken script. Where the historical arrangement disciplined the gaze towards a single point, presenting or dissimulating itself as a space that remained outside of the everyday world, I See Birds Flying Over the White House engaged with the space and contingency of performance explicitly. A further difference of the performance is how this occasion is an element (or object) of a larger tableau of the overall artistic research process. The performance of I See Birds Flying Over the White House emulated elements of the tableau vivant insofar as it presented a staged live performance that incorporated the stillness of performers’ bodies to depict momentarily static scenes. Crucially, it exceeded the limitations of the form of the tableau

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through discursive and bodily acts of interjection, interlocution, and interpretation. In contrast to Wittgenstein’s abstract deployment of the tableau, the performance was developed through a collaboratively written script that engaged philosophy and politics, and it ultimately proposed a philosophical and artistic response to its contemporary social and political context. Wittgenstein’s use of the tableau as an artistic metaphor reveals the limitations of his early work in relation to language. Yet, as the history of the form and our reflection on artistic performance show, it is also a seed of his later recognition that the meaning of language is woven into its use. In our reading and performance of research, Wittgenstein’s example of the tableau evolves from mere analogy to something more profound. The analogy entails a particular experimental proposition of the ontology of both theatre and performance. An event that, through its partial stillness, invites and necessitates thought, critique, and re-creation as part of the work and resists audience immersion and the suspension of disbelief. The performance of I See Birds Flying Over the White House in the space of the pavilion intervened to momentarily still the dynamic of the artistic research process and render it suitable for display, reception, and interpretation. It presented the technicity of thought and research as visible and available for critique. The performance frame allows for the momentary freezing of a ‘state of affairs’ and allows the tableau to include non-traditional aspects, beyond Wittgenstein’s frame but intrinsic to the process of research and collaboration: indecision, unanswered questions, body positioning, textural tone, and gaps. The performance, model, or tableau is not treated as an object itself but a collection of objects, imbued with content yet still forming a proposition.

NOTES 1. The Research Pavilion’s theme was ‘The Digital Aesthetic in Utopia of Access’. 2. Formally, the script was developed through a process of text-based sampling of the canon of contemporary aesthetic and ethical discourse in response to Bell-Smith’s artwork. Elements of the Western philosophical canon were appropriated and mobilized to produce a text for performance. In practice, this multiplicity of perspective(s) was realized through the scripted dialogical call-and-response of the performers. This strategy of production and presentation required the critical occupation of a liminal space that contested the norms of the politics of the aesthetic gaze and the production of the other in a post-digital context, in addition to the accepted use of the philosophical canon. By pirating the canon of Western philosophy this textual bricolage afforded the work a critical language that would speak to both the current political situation and the terms of aesthetic engagement. Critical reflection of this work was later performed by the group as an academic paper entitled “A Post-Digital Aesthetics

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of the Inhuman Gaze: Reflections on I See Birds Flying Over the White House” at The Inhuman Gaze Conference, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, June 2018. This chapter marks the third iteration of an ongoing reflection on the nature of this group performance. 3. See, for example, Wilkerson, Isabel, (2021) Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Random House: New York, 39–40, 282 where the metaphor of social caste and the cast of a play is developed. 4. Daniel Wiegand, (2018) “Tableaux vivants, early cinema, and beauty as attraction,” Film and Media Studies, 15(1) 2018, 16 5. Berger, Harry (1994) “Fictions of the Pose: Facing the Gaze of Early Modern Portraiture.” Representations, no. 46: 116. 6. See McKinney, J., S. Palmer, and S.A. Di Benedetto. (2017) Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design. Performance and Design. Bloomsbury Academic, 6. 7. Wittgenstein, 2002, 2.013, 7. 8. See Aronson, A. (1981) The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography, Theater and Dramatic Studies. UMI research Press. Strategies that sought to question the relationship between stage space and spectator were adopted by theatre practitioners of the historical Avant Garde; for instance, Prampolini, Piscator, Artaud, and later Brecht, Grotowski, Kantor, who were influenced by art world experiments (McKinney et al., 2017, 6). These attempted to create a more active relationship between actors and the audience in experimental works that consciously called into question the processes of seeing and perceiving, rather than viewing the performance as a proposition to be translated and understood by the spectator (Aronson, 2005, 39). 9. See Aronson, A. (2005) Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1. 10. The projection of a proposition onto or into an ‘empty’ space is an act of placemaking that overlays the already existing space and can therefore map over it, rendering the already existing space invisible. Peter Brook’s notion of ‘empty space’ is a fallacy because there is no empty space that becomes a stage because an actor walks across it (as he proposed in 1968). ‘Every space is marked; every space is charged – the space performs even before the actor walks across it. The character of a space is the way that it positions us and spaces our actions’ (McKinney et al., 2017, 4). 11. See McCullough, Jack (1981) Living Pictures on the New York Stage, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. 12. A solo performance of a living picture is more commonly called an ‘attitude’. 13. See Glassberg, David (1990) American Historical Pageantry Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 106–56. 14. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell) 1958 part 2, section xi. 15. Elbert, Monika, “Striking a Historical Pose: Antebellum Tableaux Vivants, ‘Godey’s’ illustrations, and Margaret Fuller’s heroines,” The New England Quarterly 75 (2002): 236. 16. Goethe’s apparent inorganic mixing of artistic forms, the novel and tableau vivant, notably displeased Hegel. See G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics Lectures on Fine Art

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Volume 1. Translated by T. M. Knox Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 156, 297. Hegel’s criticisms match the contemporary perspectives of the tableau as a low form of art associated with the working class and women. 17. Volker Schachenmayr “Emma Lyon, the Attitude, and Goethean Performance Theory” New Theatre Quarterly, Volume 13, Issue 49, February 1997, pp. 3–17, 9. 18. A contemporary example might include the work of Cindy Sherman. 19. Heidi Schlipphacke (2018) Kinship and Aesthetic Depth: The Tableau Vivant in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 87:3, 147–165, 149. 20. ibid, 159 21. Danka Radjenović (2022), “Instructing to and Instructing in: Two Paradigms of Instruction” Technology and Language, Vol 3,2 pp. 6–13. 22. James Head Home Pastimes, Or Tableau Vivants 1859, pp. 7–8. 23. Wittgenstein, L. (2002). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London and New York: Routledge, 2.17,10. 24. Wittgenstein, (2002), 3.1, 13. 25. See, for example, James C. Klagge’s recent book Wittgenstein’s Artillery: Philosophy as Poetry 2021 where he considers the use of military metaphors in Wittgenstein’s writing. 26. See Michael Morris (2008) for more on this and the distinction between bild and ‘picture’. Morris, M. (2008) Wittgenstein and the Tractatus. London and New York: Routledge. 27. Wittgenstein, L. (1979). Notebooks 1914–1916. Edited by G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford, Blackwell, 7. 28. It is this arrangement of parts or elements in the model or picture that stands for a situation or state of affairs. As Wittgenstein states in 2.1514, ‘The pictorial relationship consists of the correlations of the picture’s elements with things.’ And in 2.1515, ‘These correlations are, as it were, the feelers of the picture’s elements, with which the picture touches reality’ (Wittgenstein 2002, 2.1514, 2.1515, 10). 29. Wittgenstein notes the correlation between a picture’s elements and things in the world: ‘These correlations are, as it were, the feelers of the picture’s elements, with which the picture touches reality’ (Wittgenstein, 2002, 2.1515 10). 30. (Wittgenstein, 2002, 2.1513 10) 31. Objects and facts are discrete and independent of each other. Objects are for Wittgenstein the most basic unit; they are not complex things such as tables, chairs people, and so on. ‘Objects form the substance of the world. Therefore, they cannot be compound’ (Wittgenstein, 2002, pp. 2.021). 32. As he states: ‘We naturally think of a picture or a model as a complex object: an object with component parts – movable parts in the case of the Paris courtroom model. Wittgenstein here denies this (sic 2.14): a picture or a model is not an object at all, and what we usually think of as its component parts are not related to the picture or model as parts to a whole. Rather, a picture or model is a that, and what we think of as parts are really just ‘elements’. Instead of being an object with parts, a picture or model is a that certain elements are arranged in a certain way’. (Morris, 2008, p. 127)

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33. It is fitting then that the other explanatory analogy he offers is that: ‘In a state of affairs objects fit into one another like the links of a chain’ (2.03). Yet catenaccio gives way to total fluidity. Each object is not fixed in the chain, instead each object is a player in the totality of the scene/tableau. 34. Central to theatrical performance is repeated action with an eye to an audience. For example, Richard Schechner’s definition of performance distinguishes it from other behaviour in terms of repetition: ‘Performances – of art, rituals, or ordinary life – are “restored behaviours”, “twice-behaved behaviour”, performed actions that people train for and rehearse.’ Richard Schechner, 2002 Performance Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge. p. 29. 35. ‘In order to get clear about aesthetic words you have to describe ways of living. We think we have to talk about aesthetic judgments like “This is beautiful”, but we find that if we have to talk about aesthetic judgments we don’t find these words at all, but a word used something like a gesture, accompanying a complicated activity.’ Wittgenstein, L. (1966), Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). 36. Ibid., 4. 37. See Morris (2008, pp. 31–32) for more on the tension between facts and state of affairs and how they are translated/read differently by Ogden and Pears and McGuiness, respectively. The version cited throughout this text is the later translation by Pears and McGuiness. 38. As Wittgenstein states: ‘Each thing is, as it were, in a space of possible states of affairs. This space I can imagine empty, but I cannot imagine the thing without the space’ (Wittgenstein, 2002, 2.013, 7). 39. It also marked out an instantiation of research that potentially opens a space for critical reflection. 40. Unlike the traditional tableau vivant, the audience’s primary view of the artwork was horizontal as a projection on the floor of the pavilion. 41. Concerned with a similar epistemological problem of representation, Walter Benjamin famously proposed that ‘ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars’ by which he meant that ideas do not exist in the world, or for that matter the heavens, but are meaningful tools to perceive the relations between things. Beyond Benjamin’s analogy of ideas to constellations, the constellation of the tableau vivant suggests a tense self-reflexive and silent-visual performance. See Benjamin, W. (1998) The Origin of German Tragic Drama, New York: Verso, 34. 42. Like Bertolt Brecht’s description of epic theatre via the notion of the ‘street scene’ where an event is re-played such that it informs critique, debate, and reevaluation, the tableau vivant in pausing the action of the performer places a burden of activity on the audience. For Brecht, a truth in life is demonstrated within the model and frame. What Brecht neglects to consider, however, is the emplotment of the performer and the manipulation of truth that takes place in the mise en scène of performance. See Brecht, Bertolt (1964) ‘The Street Scene’: A basic Model for Epic Theatre’ in John Willett ed. and trans Brecht On Theatre, Methuen, 121–129. 43. Ludwig Wittgenstein (2009) Philosophical Investigations, Rev. 4th ed (Chichester, West Sussex, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 199. Jean-François Lyotard,

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in The Differend explicitly built on this metaphor. He claimed that a proper name is not descriptive, merely an index and that while the qualities of a person can be validated, his or her name ‘adds no property to him or her’ (Lyotard, 1983, 35). Lyotard had previously, in The Postmodern Condition (1979), contested the role of languagegames in the construction of society. ‘The social subject itself seems to dissolve in this dissemination of language games’ (Lyotard, 1979, 40). For Lyotard, language can be an ‘adversary’ but is co-constitutive of the human subject and human relations. Each party in these relationships may obey or transgress an order. This obeisance or transgression can modify the rules of the language-game.

REFERENCES Alexenberg, M. (2011). The Future of Art in the Postdigital Age. Bristol: Intellect Books. Aronson, A. (2005) Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Aronson, A. (1981) The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography, Theater and Dramatic Studies. UMI Research Press. Benjamin, W. (1928) The Origin of German Tragic Drama Ursprung des Deutscher Trauerspiels. New York: Verso. Berger, H. (1994) “Fictions of the Pose: Facing the Gaze of Early Modern Portraiture.” Representations (46): 87-120. Brecht, B. (1964) “The Street Scene: A Basic Model for an Epic Theatre.” In Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Ed. and trans. John Willett. London: Methuen, 121–129. Brook, P. (2008) The Empty Space. Methuen Drama Modern Classics. Penguin Elbert, M. (2002) “Striking a Historical Pose: Antebellum Tableaux Vivants, ‘Godey’s’ Illustrations, and Margaret Fuller’s Heroines.” The New England Quarterly 75: 235-75. Glassberg, D. (1990) American Historical Pageantry. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Head, J. (1859) Home Pastimes, Or Tableau Vivants. https://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​ /19724​/19724​-h​/19724​-h​.htm. Jones, A. (2021) “Queer Performance Marks the Apotheosis of a Radical Critique of Liberal Bourgeois Values. Performativity Queers Art(Making). Queer Performativity Deconstructs Gender . . .” In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance. Routledge (Italics in original). Klagge, J. C. (2021) Wittgenstein’s Artillery: Philosophy as Poetry. Cambridge: MIT Press. Lyotard, J. F. (1979) The Postmodern Condition, A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lyotard, J. F. (1983) The Differend. University of Minnesota Press Originally published as Le Différend 1983 Les Editions le Minuite.

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Lyotard, J. F. (1992). The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Stanford: Stanford University Press. McCullough, J. (1981) Living Pictures on the New York Stage. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. McKinney, J., S. Palmer, and S. A. Di Benedetto. (2017) Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design. Performance and Design. Bloomsbury Academic. Monika, E. (2002) “Striking a Historical Pose: Antebellum Tableaux Vivants, ‘Godey’s’ Illustrations, and Margaret Fuller’s Heroines.” The New England Quarterly 75: 236. Morris, M. (2008) Wittgenstein and the Tractatus. London & New York: Routledge. Radjenović, D. (2022) “Instructing to and Instructing in: Two Paradigms of Instruction.” Technology and Language 2(3): 6-13. Schechner, R. (2002) Performance Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Wiegand, D. (2018) “Tableaux Vivants, Early Cinema, and Beauty as Attraction.” Film and Media Studies 15(1): 16. Wilkerson, I. (2021) Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. New York: Random House. Wittgenstein, L. (1966) Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1979). Notebooks 1914–1916. Edited by G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (2002). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London and New York: Routledge. Wittgenstein, L. et al. (2009) Philosophische Untersuchungen =: Philosophical investigations, Rev. 4th ed. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

Chapter 17

Philosophical Problems and Stochastic Parrots: Between Aphorism and Algorithm Mischa Twitchin

As a question of reading (with) Wittgenstein, to begin with the citation of a single proposition from the Philosophical Investigations may well seem arbitrary. However, in writing this reading, it turns out that the particular citation has its own motivation, exploring the sense in which questions of readingwriting, with students at universities, have been overtaken during the past year by ChatGPT. The very possibility of being overtaken (not least, in its perplexing logic) is famously explored by Lewis Carroll’s playful dialogue, What the Tortoise Said to Achilles (Carroll 1895) – the punning conclusion of which I will return to. But here, to start with, is the citation from Wittgenstein: The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something – because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of their inquiry do not strike one at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck them. – And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful. (PI, 129 [emphasis in the original])

This invocation of the potential of inquiry, concerning what is ‘most striking and most powerful’ in the apparently ordinary and familiar, evokes a dulling of awareness in both the intellect and the senses. Thinking, Wittgenstein suggests, is a dimension of aesthetics concerning intuition or imagination in the everyday – as much as in the ‘learning and teaching’ that is practised at universities. As a medium of and for inquiry, thought here has an aesthetic sense that might be addressed, for instance, through the want of surprise. Nonetheless, defamiliarization as an index of and for the art(s) of meaning

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is itself familiar enough from varieties of aesthetic formalism. To cite the source that would be most expected here, Viktor Shklovsky proposed: Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things. . . . The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. (Shklovsky 1965, 12)

Reading with Wittgenstein, then, we might speak of thought as a ‘sensation of life’ (rather than in distinction from it); that is, as a sensation of language, where the technique of its art is recognizable, for instance, in aphorisms (not to mention puns). Indeed, to give another example from Wittgenstein: ‘How come? The idea is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off’ (PI, 103). Keeping our reading glasses on for the present, with respect to aphorisms Georg von Wright makes an association with Lichtenberg, ‘an author .  .  . who reminds one, often astonishingly, of Wittgenstein’ and who Wittgenstein ‘esteemed highly’ (Wright 2018 [1954], 17). In Wright’s account: An aspect of Wittgenstein’s work .  .  . certain to attract growing attention is its language. . . . The form is sometimes that of dialogue, with questions and replies; sometimes, as in the Tractatus, it condenses to aphorisms. There is a striking absence of all literary ornamentation, and of technical jargon or terminology. (Ibid.)

Citing Wittgenstein’s own reflection that ‘Lichtenberg’s wit is the flame that can burn on a pure candle only’, Elisabeth Van Dam also makes this comparison in terms of a common ‘concern with the dynamic of language, and, in particular, with the interplay and intervals language invokes between the particular and universal, between the idiosyncratic and the communal, between a self-thinking subject and its participation in the culture and public sphere of reason’ (2013, 103 and 104). * In the present context, I wish to consider how easily the sense of surprise – where the ‘philosophical’ concerns an aesthetics of thought – is reversed in the hype surrounding Generative AI when it comes to student essays. Turning from the dynamic of aphorisms to that of algorithms, it is notable that claims for the latter (as regards reading-writing) constantly suggest that they offer something ‘striking and powerful’ – itself, I suggest, an example of the dulled scope of what ‘one is unable to notice’. Instead of making the familiar unfamiliar, this

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hype attempts to make the unfamiliar familiar through narrative clichés. In the world of AI, of course, rather than removing them, our glasses are supposed to be adapted soon to effect a so-called augmented reality, as if remediating the sensation of life might attenuate – if not eliminate – the augmentation already offered by metaphor. The rush to see the ‘new’ all too often overlooks what is already there to be seen – as, precisely, a question of seeing, of ‘perception’ (Shklovsky) or of the reflexive capacity to be struck by thought. Regarding the efficacy of algorithms, however, it is usually only when they fail to work that we are struck by their power – that is, by their power over our expectations, when we are ‘left to our own devices’. This experience of failure offers an abstraction from the tempting analogy with everyday communication, when we are struck by the question of meaning as it becomes clear that someone has not understood us; when, indeed, we find ourselves wondering not simply whether we have been misunderstood by someone else, but whether we have misunderstood ourselves. Here we might find ourselves not only ‘perplexed’ but also aggrieved. Wittgenstein often reflects painfully on this in his letters, as here to Piero Sraffa (23.8.1949), when he observes how ‘often [it is] that one man thinks that the other could understand if only he wanted to, hence he gets rude or nasty (according to the temperament) and thinks he is only kicking back. . . . The older I grow the more I realise how terribly difficult it is for people to understand each other’ (in McGuinness, ed. 2008, 450). In the terms of my title, the question of reading (with) Wittgenstein offers a counter-example to the much vaunted machine learning – as, perhaps, another variation of the Turing test that concerns the lure of the artificial within intelligence (as if thought was not always already a question of technology). Indeed, Turing had been a participant in Wittgenstein’s seminar on mathematics in 1939, as Wittgenstein recalled in reply to Norman Malcolm when the latter sent him a copy of Turing’s ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ paper that appeared in Mind in October 1950 (Malcolm 1984, 127– 28). While the impact of AI in politics is continually expanding the means of ‘disinformation’ (as with deep fakes), the corollary in higher education also touches on relations between ethics and claims to knowledge. In universities, faced with the capacity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT to produce plausible text (satirized in recent episodes of South Park as ‘deep learning’), the question is hardly ‘striking’ (at least, at first sight): Why would anyone be interested in devoting time to producing the prompts required for an AI-generated essay instead of exploring for themselves a reading of the ‘large language model’ (LLM) represented by, for example, the Philosophical Investigations? Such (a) reading – not simply of, but also with, the Investigations (as a practice of learning) – engages with the work’s own questions of, precisely, reading. Might this distinguish an inquiry – an investigation or (a) reading – as ‘philosophical’, not least when exploring the potential for its expression in aphorisms rather than by algorithms?

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Unsurprisingly, the answer as to why one might be interested in outsourcing to ChatGPT the question of reading concerns the ‘value’ of time, expressed (supposedly) as a ratio between effort and effect. The economistic worldview in which time is understood in terms of productivity means that the very condition of and for reflective experience is a cost to be reduced, if not eliminated – and certainly not to be ‘prolonged’ (Shklovsky). There is no subject in this calculation, where performance is not expressive but standardized. The tradeoff between automation and creativity is efficiency – although with rarely any evidence of the positive use of the time saved by work done through an algorithm. As if to prove the point, while working on this chapter, I received an email from Academia​.e​du advising me that ‘based on your entire viewing history, you could have saved 17,434 minutes by using Summaries’. It seems to me doubtful that my writing would have been any better had I not actually read the pdfs accessed, but merely skimmed their ‘summaries’ instead. In a university context, then, what understanding of the work of learning is manifested by the AI plumage of the emperor’s new parrot? * Where tasks can be reduced to those requiring no human judgement – those that can be performed robotically (including, potentially, more accurately, and ‘dextrously’) – there is no doubt a benefit which is not simply monetary in turning to AI (although, of course, this depends entirely on who owns the capital to which such benefits accrue). But the sense that an activity takes time – that a person doing it might ‘take their time’ – is anathema in capitalism, even when it is recognized that some tasks ought not to be rushed for fear of compromising not only quality but safety. Learning is not, however, efficient in the sense of assimilating the already defined, already quantified, already accounted for. If reading concerns only learning about a subject – information – without regard to why one might be concerned with what (as if there were no question of meaning in learning; that is, no implied subject), then universities may indeed be understood as little more than what Gerald Raunig has called ‘factories of knowledge’ (2013). Even if this phrase offers only a ‘fashionable metaphor for the self-proletarianisation of intellectuals, misinterpretation of ephemeral Marx marginalia, [a] terminological makeshift solution for the situation of precarious knowledge work’ (2013, 17), it attests to the relentless commodification of not only knowledge but experience in the contemporary ‘edu-factory’ (ibid.: 31 and 47–48). This aim of policy makers pursuing the marketization of education finds a symptomatic manifestation in the AI-generated essay. No one would imagine that reading a book, taking the time to learn from it, means to process (or download) its content without regard to its form. No one would claim that skimming through St Augustine’s Confessions is to read it – as if to have summary knowledge of what it is ‘about’ is to have reflected on its concerns. And

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yet the econometric view (precisely, that of no one) tends to such delusions, as if ends were separable from concern with means. To wonder whether the text field of the Philosophical Investigations is large enough to be reduced to an automated citation matrix would surely also seem absurd. After all, the philosophical sense of learning shows that anyone’s investigations (however stereotyped they may be) are uniquely large in a way that generative AI can never be. While the latter is producing ‘new’ text, in the sense of predictive text, it is only stochastically extrapolating from its data set (following ‘n-grams’), unhindered by any question of meaning. With AI, there is no ‘practice of calling-into-question’, as Raunig characterizes the Socratic ethos (evoked by Foucault) that ‘leads to self-care . . . to self-inquiry’ (ibid.: 59) – until, perhaps, as with the Turing test or Joseph Weizenbaum’s Eliza lessons, there is interaction with a human respondent for whom, indeed, there is a question of possible doubt, of interpretation, of not knowing; that is, of understanding on the side of Alice rather than an algorithm – not to mention the Red Queen or Humpty Dumpty. * Rather than any creative sense of invention or ‘performance’, the algorithms that automate the stochastic parrot are empty of the once celebrated concern of literary semiotics with intertextuality (not to mention the gnomic idiom of the Delphic Oracle addressed to and by Socrates [Raunig 2013, 59–60]). This is why there is no question of ‘plagiarism’ in the ChatGPT essay, as distinct from questions of copyright regarding the LLMs on which the AI was trained (‘scraping’ the internet for content) and which are now being pursued in court actions against OpenAI and Meta (for ‘stealing’ content from the internet) (Milmo 2023, 19). For in these generated essays nothing has in fact been read, such that its apparent citations or paraphrases could ever be (un)acknowledged. By contrast, in Max Jacob’s understanding of poetry, for example, as ‘seizing data from the unconscious in every possible manner [saisir en moi, de toutes manières, les données de l’inconscient (1967 [1917], 16–17)]: words in freedom, chance associations of ideas, night dreams and daydreams, hallucinations, etc.’ (2022, 6–7), there remains the reflexive implication of chance and the significance of dreams. The algorithm, after all, never sleeps and the creative potential of the anonymous – the transformation of ‘data’ (les données) in the digital age – is now reduced to a stochastic production that is, however, sold as a simulacrum of the authorial. In the ostensible genealogy of ‘automatic writing’, the question was already posed by Italo Calvino in 1967: Having laid down these procedures and entrusted a computer with the task of carrying out these operations, will we have a machine capable of replacing the poet and the author? Just as we already have machines that can read, machines

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that make translations and summaries, will we also have machines capable of conceiving and composing poems and novels? (1997 [1967], 12)

Despite the constant suggestion that generative AI ‘hallucinates’ text (including references), there is no ‘ghost’ in the algorithm save, of course, for the accumulated biases and prejudices contained in its data sets. As Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru et al. observe, introducing their term ‘stochastic parrot’ (2021, 617), ‘no actual language understanding is taking place in LM-driven approaches’ (ibid., 615): ‘Text generated by an LM is not grounded in communicative intent, any model of the world, or any model of the reader’s state of mind’ (ibid., 616). Although a Chatbot produces seemingly coherent text, it does so by ‘stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning’ (ibid., 617); and, crucially, this allows for ‘taking advantage of the ability of large LMs to produce large quantities of seemingly coherent texts of specific topics on demand in cases where those deploying the LM have no investment in the truth of the generated text’ (ibid., 617). By contrast, as Emily Bender and Alexander Koller observe: The process of acquiring a linguistic system, like human communication generally, relies on joint attention and intersubjectivity: the ability to be aware of what another human is attending to and guess what they are intending to communicate. Human children do not learn meaning from form alone and we should not expect machines to do so either. (2020, 5190)

This key of ‘joint attention and intersubjectivity’ is echoed in the opening of Calvino’s lecture, where he distinguishes the use of words by the storyteller from the ostensible pragmatics of language use (where, in the econometric view, instruction substitutes for learning): The story teller began to put forth words, not because he thought others might reply with other, predictable words, but to test the extent to which words could fit with one another, could give birth to one another, in order to extract an explanation of the world from the thread of every possible spoken narrative, and from the arabesque that nouns and verbs, subjects and predicates performed as they unfolded from one another. (1997 [1967], 4)

It is, precisely, the unpredictable ‘fit’ of words with each other that generates meaning – as a question of what may be perplexing – which is to offer an implicit rereading here of the opening of the Philosophical Investigations and its account of what Wittgenstein identifies as a common – but ‘primitive’ [PI, 2] – conception of language in the example of St Augustine (oriented by the idea of ostensive definition). *

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In the brave new world (supposedly) of AI, then, the sense of Wittgenstein’s famous reflection, ‘let the use teach you the meaning’ (PI, 43 and PPF, 303), takes on a surprising new possibility, where the echo of the terms ‘use’ and ‘teach’ appears to have shifted the sense of ‘you’ and of ‘meaning’. If, as already suggested, this begins to sound a little like Lewis Carroll perhaps that is the point. After all, Wittgenstein himself makes reference to Carroll in the implied question of distinguishing between words that ‘mean something’ and words that don’t, when he observes: If we say, ‘Every word in the language signifies something’, we have so far said nothing whatever; unless we explain exactly what distinction we wish to make. (It might be, of course, that we wanted to distinguish words of language . . . from words ‘without meaning’ such as occur in Lewis Carroll’s poems, or words like ‘Tra-la-la’ in a song.) (PI, 13 [emphasis in the original])

For ChatGPT, indeed, ‘every word in language signifies something’ – that is, nothing at all – owing simply to the stochastic substitutability of words in the syntactic alignment of its ‘natural language processing’ training. ChatGPT can make no distinction between ‘words of language’ and ‘words “without meaning”’ because their use – their algorithmic extrapolation – makes no sense beyond simply the application of syntactic rules. The ‘interplay and intervals’ (Van Dam) between sounds and (non-)sense, just as ‘joint attention and intersubjectivity’ (Bender and Koller), are obviated since for ChatGPT all words are, in this sense, meaningless. The essays it produces, therefore, say ‘nothing whatever’ precisely because they are indistinguishable from nonsense – until, that is, they are read by somebody who is able to make a distinction between narrative and instruction, poetry and proposition, aphorism and algorithm; as, indeed, a question of words with and without meaning in their use. * No doubt, there is nothing new in wondering how it could be culturally possible for some university students to regard the point of essay writing in terms that are so transactionally empty that they might imagine submitting an AIgenerated text and passing it off as their own work. For those who advocate for the marketization of education this might be seen as the demonstration of a new kind of entrepreneurialism on the part of students, an epitome of outsourcing in which even the erstwhile knowledge worker at the essay mill is made redundant. (How this meets the ‘value for money’ agenda when the essay is failed, however, is another question.) Such an essay is symptomatic of the university ‘experience’ today, which is so commodified that institutions now have non-academic departments devoted to instrumentalizing it in terms of ‘positive outcomes’. English universities have, for instance, established offices of ‘student success’ in parallel to the traditional departments concerned with

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learning (Custer 2023). By contrast, teaching and learning activities remain, however residually, engaged with the possibility of failure (without which, one might have thought, ‘success’ means nothing much). Distinct from the merely performative sense of care offered by the new institutional apparatus, usually oriented by government auditing of institutions’ ‘success’ (from recruitment and retention to results, and in particular employability), the one obvious concomitant of the mandated student ‘success’ is that appeals for extenuating circumstances when essays are due have gone through the roof. The one clear measure of this required ‘success’ is an epidemic of anxiety, for which neither university managements nor politicians take any responsibility. This anxiety might be expected once ‘success’ is detached from the possibility of ‘failure’, so that anything called ‘success’ becomes incipient failure as the contrast is no longer admissible. One need not be Freud to sense how punitive this instantiation of the superego (à la Humpty Dumpty) might be. Such ‘success’ has fostered a culture of performance in which students could imagine that their interlocutors – the tutors with whom they study (and who are also learning through that study themselves) – are no more reflexively aware than a Chatbot. Indeed, AI-based feedback (at least, in some courses) is now being trialled, as well as, apparently, in the Australian Research Council’s evaluation of research grant applications (THE, 6.7.23: 3). Aspiring to a degree, whether in philosophy or in any other discipline, without being concerned with one’s own learning is not as potentially life threatening as imagining oneself competent to drive a car in virtue of simply having paid for a licence. But not ever having practised driving doesn’t make one’s experience of being a passenger any more ‘successful’, even if one is now ‘qualified’ as a potential driver. Indeed, one might hear echoes of the proverbial ‘car crash’ where this simple fact is largely ignored in the neoliberal marketization of higher education and its idea of students as paying customers. For politicians advocating the monetization of learning, so-called market discipline will eliminate the supposedly uneconomic alternatives to capitalism’s dehumanization in universities. Students’ desire to study humanities for creative reasons will be constrained by an obligation to repay their loans; and employment outcomes will substitute for learning outcomes, understood simply as a ratio of graduate earnings to student debt. In the econometric model of the student’s relation to the university, the burden of ‘success’ (albeit in a rhetoric of concern with equality of access and outcome) is devolved to the individual in the advocacy of ‘measurable benefits’. Where concern about essays – the practice of reading-writing – is emptied of intrinsic meaning and oriented towards extrinsic motives, where reflexive dialogue with tutors is pre-empted by the demands of managers, then, of course, the opportunity for learning is turned into one of metrics rather than engagement. These metrics (‘key performance indicators’) are demanded by the UK government’s Office for Students (OfS), enforcing

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a ‘value for money’ agenda in the name of ‘student experience’, whereby universities must define both students and their experience in terms of those same metrics – as a condition of accreditation – irrespective of their implications for learning. A recent Vice-chancellor of Oxford University, Louise Richardson, trenchantly observed, for example: I cannot point to a single area in which they [the OfS] have actually improved the quality of what we do. They are constantly evaluating us but nobody’s evaluating the impact of all this regulation. And I think the impact is primarily to waste funds that I’d much rather be spending giving scholarships to students or hiring more teachers than people to fill out the next mind-numbing set of consultations. (Richardson 2022)

This government-demanded substitution of ‘success’ for ‘learning’ is not the enfranchisement of the student against the authority of tutors, but the disenfranchisement of both in relation to the power of institutions (as inverse proxies for ‘markets’). The ChatGPT essay is another symptom of this, as also the embrace of precarity in the conditions of academic employment by university managements. * One need not seek to mystify, by contrast, the unique transferential phenomenon of Wittgenstein’s seminars, with their very particular example of ‘thinking aloud’, but neither need one deny (as if it were simply elitism) the testimony of those who attended these seminars regarding what was striking or unfamiliar about them. As Norman Malcolm writes, for instance: In all of these meetings – lectures, at-homes, private discussions, and [the weekly Moral Science] Club meetings – Wittgenstein gave his thoughts without stint. There was never any attempt by him to preserve his researches in secrecy. Furthermore, in every one of these discussions he was trying to create. (Malcolm 1984, 47 [emphasis in the original])

There also remains, of course, the example of the impossible ‘books’, or collections of remarks (notes and, indeed, aphorisms), that emerged from these seminars and which, while continuing to inspire readers today, would probably not meet the requirements of the ‘excellence framework’ that now audits research at English universities. In Malcolm’s memoir of his friendship with Wittgenstein, we read a recollection of the latter suggesting that doubt, belief, certainty – like feelings, emotions, pain, etc. – have characteristic facial expressions. Knowledge does not have a characteristic facial expression.

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There is a tone of doubt, and a tone of conviction, but no tone of knowledge. (Malcolm 1984, 75 [emphasis in the original])

While the context of this remark concerns Wittgenstein’s engagement with G. E. Moore (explored in the notes On Certainty [1979]), it offers an opening to reflection on its own characterization of questions of ‘knowledge’ through embodied expression. (I dare say that readers of this essay can easily imagine the facial expressions that might have accompanied the writing of it!) By contrast, what the ChatGPT essay offers is, precisely, a faceless ‘tone of knowledge’, complete with invented quotations and fake references. While there are many conditions of and for learning in which the sense of ‘reading-writing’ appears reductive, in circumstances where this remains a vital part of the sense of ‘literacy’ the ChatGPT essay means turning the student’s work into a kind of academic phishing, where the ‘tone’ of communication is devoid of any specific characteristic other than its generic one. In contrast to this lure of ‘knowledge’, Wittgenstein offers aphoristic appeals to reflection – as, for instance, the one that has informed this essay throughout: ‘A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about”’ (PI, 123). Such aphorisms offer a thoughtful interruption of ‘explanation’, something unforeseen in and by an ‘argument’; a surprise, something that is not generated ‘predictively’. This specific aphorism is itself expressive of the perplexity to which it gives expression, where the completeness of the form evokes the incompleteness of the content. As Wittgenstein later notes in a reflexive parenthesis of his own: (In giving all these examples, I am not aiming at some kind of completeness. Not a classification of psychological concepts. They are only meant to enable the reader to cope with conceptual unclarities.) (PPF, 202)

Here the example of a question of ‘examples’ – not instancing the already known, as if cited in confirmation of a point, but as ‘only meant’ to point out ‘conceptual unclarities’ – exposes the common appeal of and to an impossible (but all-too-familiar) ‘tone of knowledge’ at which, indeed, ChatGPT excels. * What, after all, is the ‘form’ of a ‘philosophical problem’ in the Investigations? Or for (a) reading of the Investigations? Is the aphoristic form of this example – ‘“I don’t know my way about”’ – philosophical? Or does the thought of the latter take the form of the quotation marks, indicating an ‘internal dialogue’, as a literary mark of the point that ‘the close relationship between “inner speech” and “speech” comes out in that what was said inwardly can be communicated audibly’ (PPF, 302)? Between the experimental and the

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descriptive, how does this form of reflexive proposition – as an admission of perplexity, of not knowing – evoke the ‘philosophical’? Is a ‘philosophical problem’ a form of acknowledged disorientation? The citation of thought in this way – as reflexive dialogue – gives it a literary aspect, the absence of which is precisely what programmes developed to identify AI-generated content look for when appraising text by ‘employing perplexity-based detection methods’ (Zou et al. 2023, 2). Although the aim of Zou et al.’s research was to evidence how such GPT detection methods encode discrimination against likely ‘non-native English speakers’, it is indicative that the key indicator is the inverse question of ‘perplexity’ evidenced in the stochastic AI model. A ‘low perplexity’ index – in contrast to literary uses of language – is one in which the predictive word scheme offers little surprise. The literary and the perplexing become the very measure of its inverse – where, after all, even aphorisms are assimilable by algorithms. This leads to a bizarre regression, as Zou et al. observe: [O]ur results demonstrate that prompt design can easily bypass current GPT detectors, rendering them less effective in identifying AI-generated content. Consequently future detection methods should move beyond solely relying on perplexity measures and consider more advanced techniques, such as secondorder perplexity methods and watermarking techniques. (2023, 5)

Besides the real world effects of discrimination, then, we seem to have stepped once more through the Looking Glass, where generative AI is used to identify potential ‘cheating’ in students’ essays (as produced by that same AI) – and commonly mistakes its own failures as successes. * A philosophical problem is not the same as a biographical (or a psychological) problem – even as it takes the form of something ‘I’ might say – still less a ‘second-order perplexity method’. Acknowledging a state of perplexity is distinct from supposing that affirming ‘I think that’ or ‘I know that’ adds anything to that very possibility of, or claim to, knowledge. While the attribution to an ‘I’ does not necessarily contribute to the understanding of what is thought or known, perplexity is different from being wrong, mistaken, deceiving, or deceived. A corollary of understanding that I do not know is, at least, knowing that I do not understand, which is impossible for an algorithmically derived ‘argument’ to acknowledge, as there is no implied subject in its text. Perplexity, rather than systematic doubt (a relation of thought and being that effects a logical consequence for the Cartesian ‘I’), is only one indicator of ‘a philosophical problem’ in Wittgenstein’s examples, where aphorisms offer a literary condensation of the translation between seminar speaking and the written remark or note. Here the ‘I’ within quotation

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marks is an explicit echo of the implied ‘I’ of reading-writing. In an entry in his Notebook (11.8.16), Wittgenstein writes: ‘I can objectively confront every object. But not the “I”. So there really is an art and method by which philosophy can and must come to terms with the “I” in a non-psychological sense’ (2022, 189). This is taken up in the Tractatus with the profound reflection (or implication) that: ‘What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that “the world is my world”’ – that is, ‘the limit of the world’ (1981 [1922], 5.641). Calvino’s diagnosis of the literary ‘I’ may be instructive here, not least because it ends with the appearance – albeit in another mirror image – of the stochastic parrot: [I]n these operations the person ‘I’, whether explicit or implicit, splits into a number of different figures: into an ‘I’ who is writing and an ‘I’ who is written, into an empirical ‘I’ who looks over the shoulder of the ‘I’ who is writing and into a mythical ‘I’ who serves as a model for the ‘I’ who is written. The ‘I’ of the author is dissolved in the writing. The so-called personality of the writer exists within the very act of writing: it is the product and the instrument of the writing process. (1997 [1967], 15)

The writer as a ‘writing machine’ is, paradoxically, manifest in the stylistic signatures that allow for the deduction of particular authorship in hitherto unattributed texts – a scholarly work of reading that is now freely available for the production of text with such stylistic markers. As, again, Calvino observed (in 1967): ‘A writing machine that has been fed an instruction appropriate to the case could also devise an exact and unmistakable “personality” of an author, or else it could be adjusted in such a way as to evolve or change “personality” with each work it composes’ (ibid.). In the ChatGPT version, it is implied that not only the writer but also the reader could become redundant – with the whole process of production and reception, writing and reading, automated. The university tutorial reading of the student essay is – or should be – precisely a ‘philosophical’ resistance to this digital conferencing of parrots, in which even if the ‘language model’ were infinite it could not replicate the singularity of either students’ or tutors’ perplexities which are not reducible to the number of neuronal connections activated (Rudolph, et al., 2023, 344). * Distinct from a problem in philosophy – as a historical (indeed, an institutional) discipline – a problem of philosophy has its corollary in the implied obverse of Wittgenstein’s formulation: that perplexity is an index of what makes philosophy problematical – not least, as a question of and for learning in universities. Wittgenstein’s examples are engaged with the matter of philosophical investigations – plural – rather than with an ‘applicable’

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method of investigation. (‘There is not a single philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, different therapies, as it were’ [PI, 133].) An experience of reflecting on the limits of any claims to knowledge – including those concerning philosophy – must engage with precisely the experience of such limits, which bears upon the reflexive implication of a perplexed, rather than a knowing (or even hallucinating), subject. Indeed, as any Fool knows, knowing need not entail thinking, just as to think is not (necessarily) to know something. This is not a question of ignorance (or even stupidity), both of which are bound up with the forms (indeed, tones) of judgement beloved of the knowing subject. Ignorance (at least, in a philosophical rather than a technical context) is always one’s own; that is, it attests to reflexive experience. The delusions of collapsing the distinction between subjective and objective conditions – at least, in and for a world in which this distinction has meaning (where the cultural politics of solipsism are now ‘viral’) – need not be confused with distinctions between the intentional and the determinate; still less, the accidental and the necessary. Bizarre claims about ‘my truth’, and even about ‘alternative facts’, in contemporary politics attest to an impatience with the sense that there is no cure (philosophical or otherwise) for perplexity. And yet, to listen to the modern Humpty Dumpties, spouting management-speak in university meetings, for instance, is itself perplexing. Their assertions of ‘knowledge’ are dressed up in a tone of entitlement, as if it was their use of language that gave them authority rather than the implicit violence of these words being spoken to colleagues as if for them – with no question about (or, indeed, any time for) how they are being heard. The philosophical question of doubt – whether of systematic scepticism or simply of reflexive caution – is also distinct from the institutional effect of ‘self-doubt’; that is, from the lack of self-confidence that is an all-toocommon effect of ‘education’. As Beryl Gilroy proposed in her inspiring reflections on her experience of teaching in primary schools during the 1960s and 1970s, aiming to counteract not only the ‘tone of knowledge’ but equally the destructive impact of racism: We would speak to the children, I thought, in a living way, not in the age-old ‘special’ teacher’s voice, or in the jargon of status. We would work with the children as an artist works – patiently, yet potently. Children would question us, unafraid, and by helping them to understand our purposes we would understand them better ourselves. The ultimate aim would be to bring the children to the point where they would face up to themselves and their true feelings. (Gilroy 2021, 259)

The obverse of this – the effect of overconfidence – weighs arrogance with ignorance, descrying the creativity of the perplexed (whether that of rural school children in Austria or of philosophy students at Cambridge). Starting with a

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question of reading (with) Wittgenstein, then, one might end up having got no further than that very beginning – as in a version of Zeno written by Lewis Carroll, in which a perplexing logic is overtaken by a pun (a relation of ‘sound and sense’) concerning what such an inquiry may have ‘taught us’. Exhausted by the logic of getting no further on, the tortoise asks of Achilles: ‘[W]ould you mind adopting a pun that my cousin the Mock-Turtle will then make, and allowing yourself to be renamed Taught-Us?’ (Carroll 1895, 693 [emphasis in the original]) No doubt, the scope of generative AI will already seem to have overtaken the present reflections by the time this chapter is published. But what we may learn about AI is obviously not the same as what we might learn from it – as concerns, precisely, a question of and for learning in the potential of perplexity. REFERENCES Bender, Emily and Koller, Alexander. 2020. ‘Climbing Towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data’. Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: 5185–5198. Bender, Emily and Gebru, Timnit et al. 2021. ‘On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?’ Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’21), March 3–10, 2021. https://doi​.org​/10​.1145​/3442188​ .3445922. Calvino, Italo. 1997 (1967). ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’. In The Literature Machine, trans. Patrick Creagh. London: Vintage Books: 3–27. Carroll, Lewis. 1895. ‘What the Tortoise Said to Achilles’. Mind 104: 691–693. Custer, Sara. 2023. ‘Is Student Success Academia’s Failure?’ THE 22.6.23: 34–39. Dam, Elisabeth Van. 2013. ‘Wittgenstein Lights Lichtenberg’s Candle: Flashlights of Enlightenment in Wittgenstein’s Thought’. In Wittgenstein Reading, eds. Sascha Bru, Wolfgang Huemer, Daniel Steuer, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013: 103–114. Gilroy, Beryl. 2021 (1976). Black Teacher. London: Faber & Faber. Jacob, Max. 2022 (1917). The Dice Cup. Trans. Ian Seed. Cambridge: Wakefield Press. Jacob, Max. 1967 (1917). Le Cornet à Dès. Paris: Gallimard. Malcolm, Norman. 1984. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Milmo, Dan. 2023. ‘Sarah Silverman Sues OpenAI and Meta Claiming AI Training Infringed Copyright’. The Guardian, 10.7.23: https://www​.theguardian​.com​/ technology​/2023​/jul​/10​/sarah​-silverman​-sues​-openai​-meta​-copyright​-infringement (last accessed 28 July 2023). Raunig, Gerald. 2013. Factories of Knowledge. Trans. Aileen Derieg. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Richardson, Louise. 2022. In Richard Adams: ‘State-educated Students Driving Up Competition and Diversity at Oxford, says Outgoing VC.’ The Guardian, 22.11.22: https://www​.theguardian​.com​/education​/2022​/nov​/26​/louise​-richardson​-oxford​-university​-state​-educted​-students​-competition​-diversity (last accessed 28 July 2023).

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Rudolph, Jürgen, Tan, Samson, and Tan, Shannon. 2023. ‘ChatGPT: Bullsit Spewer or the End of Traditional Assessments in Higher Education?’ Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching 6.1: 342–263. Shklovsky, Viktor. 1965 (1917). ‘Art as Technique’. In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee Lemon and Marion Reis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press: 3–24. Weizenbaum, Joseph with Wendt, Gunna. 2015. Islands in the Cyberstream. Trans. Benjamin Fasching-Gray. Sacramento: Litwin Books. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1979 (1969). On Certainty. Translated by Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1981 (1922). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by David Pears and Brian McGuinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009 (1953). Philosophical Investigations and Philosophy of Psychology – a Fragment (4th edition). Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2022. Private Notebooks, 1914–1916. Edited and translated by Marjorie Perloff. New York: Liveright. Wittgenstein in Cambridge. Edited by Brian McGuiness. 2008. Oxford: Blackwell. Wright, Georg von. 1982 (1954). ‘A Biographical Sketch’. In Portraits of Wittgenstein, eds. Flowers and Ground. London: Bloomsbury, 2018: 3–17. Zou, James et al. 2023. ‘GPT Detectors are Biased Against Non-Native English Writers’. Patterns 4.7. https://doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.patter​.2023​.100779.

Chapter 18

Wittgenstein Incorporated Peter Verburgt in conversation with Lukas M. Verburgt

Wittgenstein Incorporated premiered at Brussel’s Kaaitheater on 7 February 1989. The play, widely acclaimed for its ‘sublime minimalism’, was written by Peter Verburgt, directed by Jan Ritsema and performed by Johan Leysen. It reconstructs or, as Verburgt calls it, ‘recreates’ lectures Wittgenstein gave on the topic of faith and religion at Cambridge in 1938– 1939 to a small group of invited attendees. These conversational lectures, where Wittgenstein can be seen trying to understand the specific nature of religious as opposed to nonreligious beliefs, were not originally meant to be published. In Wittgenstein Incorporated – performed throughout the Netherlands, Belgium, and France in the years 1989–1990 and later also in Germany and Austria – fragments from these and other notes are freely expanded and interwoven with descriptions of the scenery at Cambridge, from the position of the sun to sounds coming from the adjacent room and the physical gestures of those present. Rather than impersonating Wittgenstein, in the two-and-a-half-hour monologue, written and performed in the third person, Leysen re-enacted Wittgenstein’s thinking – performing what it took to arrive at the thoughts Wittgenstein was developing and experimenting with. During our conversation, which took place on 5 June 2023, Peter Verburgt and I talked about different aspects of Wittgenstein Incorporated, from the origins and writing of the text to the performance and reception of the play. What unfolded was as an attempt to capture what it means to recreate Wittgenstein’s thought exercise, both on a textual and dramatic level. The answer, in brief: for the writer and actor to shift the focus from the content of his thinking to the existential conditions of its possibility.

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Peter Verburgt (PV):  From a young age, there’ll be certain names reverberating around you. For me, one of these was Wittgenstein’s. But, of course, there are many other names which immediately evoke images, feelings, associations, etcetera, that you instantly recognize but that don’t originate or already belong to you. Che Guevara, for instance, or Gandhi or Virginia Woolf. These names represent something of which you are perhaps yet unknowing at the time you first hear them. But even then, they have a strong appeal. Gandhi is about simplicity and peace. Woolf about the vulnerability of genius. Che is about courage and fiery combativeness. Looking at Wittgenstein, what immediately suggests itself, however intuitively, is Vienna; the beginning of the twentieth century; philosophy; radicalness; honesty; he owned a wooden cabin somewhere in Norway; at one point, he hit a young child; he designed a modernist house; he was rather intelligent and came from a wealthy family; and there was this rumour that Adolf Hitler had been one of his classmates. There is also the image of a man with a sharply drawn face and an expression which showed that he didn’t really like to be photographed, that he perhaps wasn’t all that interested in representations or, for that matter, in other people. What seemed to matter most to him was serious thinking, which was not at all like the kind of thinking professional academics were engaged in. This put him in a peculiar position, one he could afford to assume because of his family’s wealth – although he apparently gave away most of his money to some poet, whose work, as he later found out, he didn’t like at all. For me, Wittgenstein was a phenomenon at large, out there somewhere. When I started studying and reading things about him he became somewhat more familiar, of course. But the core of what he personified – the existential basis on which his characteristics were familiar to me – did not significantly alter as a result of this; it more or less remained intact. Lukas M. Verburgt (LV):  What you say is that to become intimately familiar with someone like Wittgenstein is not really based on knowledge that you obtain individually – it’s more about opening up to collective associations, which are mostly intuitive. PV:  Yes, suggestions and associations that you come across, that just exist, seemingly without having been brought about by any individual and without ever ceasing to exist because of some individual’s will. LV:  But this means that there is really no way to know whether these associations say something about yourself or about that particular person. PV:  Yes, that’s right. You situate them within yourself. As if they consist of features or characteristics that were once personified and lived by, at a different place and at a different time than where you find yourself. They represent a way of being that is both strange and familiar, both out there, elsewhere, and here, nearby. You understand the peacefulness of Gandhi within yourself. You recognize the stubbornness of Wittgenstein within yourself. Or Che’s combativeness. And it’s nice to know that these characteristics have been personified in this world, because they suggest and open up a possible way of doing, of living. Wittgenstein did not strike me as strange, or unfamiliar, at all, in fact.

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He was like a relatable prototype. It wasn’t necessary for me to come to know a lot about him, in this sense, for him to have a direct effect on me. He is one of those persons who are just there, representing one kind of existence realized on this planet. And then, one day, around the end of the 1980s, I read some notes scribbled down by two or three people (or more, I don’t remember exactly) about a series of meetings at Cambridge. And while browsing through them, they struck me as rather interesting and special. I didn’t know why exactly. It had to do with the kind of atmosphere evoked. The topic was religious belief. A couple of people got together at some point, in Cambridge. It was a small circle, apparently, and the names of those present were mentioned in the notes. Only after a while I realized the authors of these notes (and of others as well) had been present at those meetings, organized by Wittgenstein on Friday afternoons in his rooms at Cambridge. It was a pleasant surprise, to meet Wittgenstein again. From the start I began to imagine, while reading the notes, what it must have been like. Or, perhaps more precisely: how those meetings would have taken place. I started to visualize them. I heard the tone of voice in which people spoke. Perhaps it was because the notes were formulated so well. But mostly it was because Wittgenstein, always appealing so strongly to the imagination, came closer and closer. And that aspect of appealing to the imagination, of being evocative of imaginations, in a quite literal sense of the word, proved important and crucial for what would become Wittgenstein Incorporated. LV:  Do you recall what happened exactly while you were the reading those notes? You weren’t interested primarily in what Wittgenstein said about religious belief. It was much more about how and where his words about the theme were spoken: that they were heard by someone who was there . . .? PV:  What it evoked was a sense of something important taking place in a physically and mentally carefully delineated space. The meetings were not secret, but they were secretive. It was clear that something was going on that was not for everyone. This resonated with my impression of Wittgenstein before having read the notes. That it was the atmosphere, the kind of personal vibrations, which most strongly appealed to the imagination. I also read some others notes about those same meetings. These differed somewhat from each other. But all shared the sense that something was happening at Cambridge at that particular time and place that was unique and unrepeatable. LV:  There was Wittgenstein’s name which, when you first heard it, immediately evoked an entire realm of associations. And there were those notes which, upon first reading, had a similar effect – stimulating imageries and visions. How were these two things related? The first were about Vienna, the war, etcetera. The second about a small room in Cambridge. PV:  The first was a wide-ranging image, with loose ends and still malleable. The situation in Cambridge was very different, more grounded and in your face. It was a situation located in space and time. A happening that had actually taken place.

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LV:  What did the effort of bringing these two together involve? Was it a zooming in? An attempt to compress a collection of imageries into one specific location? PV:  Yes, it was a meeting, so to speak. The notes allowed you to experience, to be present at a get-together from which you were absent. For me this meant that the wide-ranging image of Wittgenstein was placed in time and space, and acquired a focal point. From this moment on, I started to combine the two. I read something specific in the notes – a remark, a comment, for instance. And as a result Wittgenstein, the person, disappeared into the background. I felt that it would be possible to work with and write about these notes, that is, about what is described in and evoked by them. The important realization was that while describing something that had really taken place, the notes were actually about something else that they did not describe: someone’s behaviour. The behaviour, and the attitude behind it, was all important. Here was someone making an effort, in a very literal sense of the term. And I wondered, somewhat strangely perhaps, how I would behave, what I would do, how I would act, if I were able to arrive at such thoughts – if I were aiming to arrive at this or that thought about religious belief. This just came over me, without any conscious choice or deliberation. I just felt the urge to write about it, imagining it would turn into a script for a film or a play. But, so I thought, it might make sense to talk to some people knowledgeable of Wittgenstein. I wanted to see whether what I was starting to envision was doable, or possible, and what was at stake. And that is what I did. LV:  The motto of the printed version of what would become Wittgenstein Incorporated says: ‘This text was written as an exercise in another’s thinking.’ For you, this didn’t mean: an attempt to become knowledgeable of the content of Wittgenstein’s thinking. It meant to become familiar with the effort behind it? PV:  Yes, what or how do you need to be in order to arrive at such thoughts and ideas? What does that require? What are its conditions? This is not an intellectual question. It is a matter of behaviour, of attitude. It became clear to me that Wittgenstein’s thinking did not contain anything ordinary. Perhaps his thinking does not even consist of knowledge content. It consists of existential content and is in that sense also ethical. It deals with what it means to be as a knower, or how one should be in order to be able to know something or be knowledgeable of something; for instance, what it says about a person to believe this or that to be true, to take this or that position towards a certain subject. Wittgenstein is all about the existential preconditions of philosophical thought. In the context of those Friday afternoon meetings, this holds both for the speaker and for the listener, the writer and the reader. All this brought me to address the following question: What kind of effort, what kind of exercise, is involved in thinking the kind of things that Wittgenstein was thinking? LV:  So, for you as the author of Wittgenstein Incorporated, it was never about the content of Wittgenstein’s ideas about religious belief? It was about the behaviour, the attitude, the existential doings behind it?

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PV:  Yes, or more pointedly: it was about the existential possibility of these ideas. The total will or readiness to arrive at them, to try them out and to pursue them. They don’t emerge automatically, without any toll. You’ll have to be willing to put yourself at risk, so to say, or at least to let go of any protection provided by the things you take for granted. It wasn’t about the content of Wittgenstein’s thinking. Neither was it about the exercise of thought, the act of thinking, itself – or at least not only that. It was about thinking as an existential effort. And a quite exhausting one at that. LV:  If these are the origins of Wittgenstein Incorporated, why did you feel the need to speak to others, to check with experts whether what you had in mind was doable? Was it about checking what could be said about it, or perhaps especially what could not be said about it? PV:  I just wasn’t familiar with it, with the content I mean. The origins of the play were subjective and intuitive. And it just made sense for me at the time to talk to experts who really knew Wittgenstein inside out. I went to a nearby university where they had a Wittgenstein working group. I contacted them because I wanted to have a chat with them about my ideas to write a script about Wittgenstein. Perhaps they knew of better or different notes. Perhaps they had some good suggestions. I just wanted to find out a little bit more. So, there I was, on the seventeenth floor of some academic industrial complex, sitting in front of a group of ten or twelve people (about the same number as during Wittgenstein’s Cambridge meetings). They really knew a lot about Wittgenstein and were very serious about it. After I had listened to them for a while, I told them about my plans to write a script loosely inspired by those Cambridge meetings about religious belief. What followed was a long silence. They didn’t approve of it. They seemed to be nervous about the idea that ‘something would go wrong’, in one way or another; it would always be an interpretation (and probably a bad one at that), it would mean that some actor would impersonate Wittgenstein, or that everything would be dramatized. As Wittgenstein puritans, they simply didn’t and couldn’t allow it. It didn’t bother me. They just weren’t the kind of people willing to think about the idea of bringing Wittgenstein to the stage. They told me, or tried to tell me, that it could not be done – period. And that it would be better not to give it a try. Even more strongly, someone like myself shouldn’t be dealing with Wittgenstein. And these were nice people . . .! They would have allowed me to join their Wittgenstein circle if I’d been interested. But writing a play, no . . . After the meeting, standing in the elevator, I realized that devout believers would probably have had the same response if someone had come up with the idea of writing a play about Jesus. LV:  We started by talking about the popular cult around Wittgenstein. Would you say that these experts had a Wittgenstein cult of their own? PV:  Well, they thought or dealt with him as a quasi-saint, as someone who was very special and almost untouchable. And he is, of course, to a certain extent. But what struck me was that they also thought of themselves as very special and almost untouchable. They simply didn’t allow for someone not as

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knowledgeable of Wittgenstein as themselves to say something about or do something with Wittgenstein. LV:  In a way, they tried to make sure that something about Wittgenstein would remain unknowable – presenting themselves as keepers of the content of his ideas. And they suggested that knowing Wittgenstein via a different route, for instance by staging him or performing his ideas, was not or should not be possible? PV:  They didn’t believe it was possible. This mostly because of the artistic freedom needed towards Wittgenstein’s thinking and persona. And to a certain extent they were right; because staging Wittgenstein often means to ‘psychologize’ him, to reduce him to one or more of his alleged character traits. This holds even for a terrific play like Thomas Bernhard’s Ritter, Dene, Voss (1984), where Wittgenstein is portrayed as a hot-tempered and boisterous figure. Or, and here I’m thinking of Karl Johnson’s Wittgenstein in Derek Jarman’s 1993 movie, he is too well behaved and lacking in intensity. After talking to the Wittgenstein experts at the university, I met someone else in the Netherlands who was expert on his work. In his dissertation, he had approached him in a more radical way, in a sense, without the kind of scruples shared among those I’d spoken to earlier. But he too was convinced that what I wanted to do wasn’t possible. He even warned me, urging me not to pursue my plan. For many years, Wittgenstein had affected his life too much. It had confused him and he predicted I would have the same experience. He really told me it had cost him several years of his life, even after his dissertation. And even if I would try, I wouldn’t succeed. After we said goodbye and I walked the other way, I knew that I would pursue my plan. And I knew one thing for sure. Having knowledge of Wittgenstein, especially having a lot of this type of knowledge, would not lead to a play. I also knew that the same applied to me. If I would try to satisfy the Wittgenstein experts, it would mean I would give up my freedom as a writer. For that was the gist of my experiences with the academics, with those who approached Wittgenstein in terms of acquiring certain academic knowledge about him: it meant to limit oneself, to introduce constraints on what could be known and how to arrive at this kind of knowledge. So I decided to not get knowledgeable, not to pile up facts and information about Wittgenstein – which, in practice, meant: not reading what was said and written about Wittgenstein. I decided to continue along my previous path, the one before I had spoken to the experts, namely: to see what it means for someone, for instance myself, to engage in that kind of thinking, to produce those kinds of ideas. And somewhere I felt rather strongly that asking about those existential preconditions might be more interesting and valuable than being able to reproduce certain insights or truths – to see how this or that idea of Wittgenstein fits with the other, etcetera. I returned to my original intention, so to speak, to the origins of my plan which had come to me upon reading those notes. I started to imagine – for theatre is, after all, an imagining – a mental and physical staging. I now knew that writing a play would not be possible if I would work from biographical facts or philosophical consensus. It

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would have to be much more direct, almost visceral. There were my intuitions about Wittgenstein. And there were these notes about the Cambridge meetings. My task became that of imagining what it would take to arrive at the ideas that Wittgenstein developed there and then. I didn’t go looking for Wittgenstein. I didn’t move towards him. There was no need for me to have or take possession of him, so to speak – to comprehend or capture him. It might sound strange. And I don’t mean to be idle or unappreciative of Wittgenstein scholarship. It was just what happened. It wasn’t really a deliberated alternative or anything like that. When I started writing, I invited Wittgenstein into my own mind, my own being – and the rest more or less happened automatically, without any active intervention on my behalf. LV:  So for you (and Johan Leysen, the actor) to ‘invite’ Wittgenstein didn’t mean to invite him as a guest in your own home, as it were, but for him to become you or for you to become him – or both perhaps, as a mutual becoming . . . PV:  I invited him into my lived reality, into my life as I live and experience it – but in a non-personal way. My experience while writing was that this is possible. It is possible to experience someone, to get to know someone, within and through yourself. This can be done precisely because you let go of knowledge or interpretation, and of the objective standards involved, in this regard. It was from this position, from this basis, that I returned to those notes on religious belief. I used what they invoked in me. And I wondered if this is what was said at those Cambridge meetings, what else could have been said? And what I did was to write down my answers to this question. That is what the play consists of. At the same time, I started writing about what we talked about earlier: What is at stake in these ideas? What are its existential conditions? What kind of attitude, behaviour, willingness, and courage do they require – or necessitate even? And what does this say about the relation between the speaker and those in attendance, the listeners? And what could be the meaning of inviting a small number of people to your rooms on a Friday afternoon between 5 and 7 to witness your unprepared act of thinking in public and to function as a sounding board to it? For me, this was about sincere open-mindedness, a kind of serious innocence. About the courage to go as far as needed. And about the emotional side of doing so. All of these aspects passed through me as I let those notes sink in. So, as said, I took the notes and started writing about what else could have been said during those meetings. That was a rather speculative endeavour, of course. And at that moment I realized that Wittgenstein experts would object to it. But I nonetheless gave myself permission. Simultaneously, I was writing about what happened during those meetings. I wasn’t so much interested in the facts. I wrote about it because how it happened or took place . . . it had to happen in a certain way in order to arrive at a certain content. That became very clear to me. How it happened evoked the content of Wittgenstein’s thinking. If this were the case, then it would also result in certain behaviour, in a certain attitude. For me it was all about this mutual connection, this two-way interaction. As I was writing, there emerged two separate texts. One was in direct

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speech, dealing with what was and could have been said. The other described and captured how it took place, what happened there. This would later prove important, when it was staged: the how and the what were interwoven in the text and would later also be performed this way. Also important was that I wrote it in the third person. This made that neither the text nor the eventual play was about imitating Wittgenstein. It was about how those Cambridge meetings had happened, what could have happened, and not what had actually happened. Like a narration. There was no claim to the truth or to accuracy. You knew it had happened, as a matter of fact. But on the basis of those notes I started re-imagining it. The play is not a reconstruction. It is a re-imagination. It was never about imitation. For me this was the fundamental core: given the words uttered by Wittgenstein, what else could have been said, and how were these words related to and conditioned by how those meetings took place. LV:  That’s interesting, because in a way Wittgenstein himself was never interested in reconstructing his own ideas, either in articles or lectures. In a sense, he himself was already performing, engaged in philosophizing as a staged act. PV:  It was well-prepared improvisation, perhaps. It was not about repeating or rehearsing his thoughts, for this would mean to imitate himself, as it were. It was about letting thinking happen at that particular moment, at that particular place. LV:  It is an exercise in the quite literal sense of putting yourself in a specific situation, under the right conditions. There seems to be a parallel here between Wittgenstein’s attempt and your attempt to capture it. PV:  I remember the writing process very vividly. It took me six weeks in total to write the text. I wrote it in one go, writing three pages every day, in response to the available notes. Against all dramatic rules, I didn’t give any thought to suspense or development. Each day I read some of the notes. I elaborated on them, and at the same time wrote about what happened, how it happened. I wrote about movements, the way the light entered the room, someone’s glance, small actions and gestures. I was working in a very disciplined way, writing every day and not more than three pages for six weeks straight. I just wrote down what came up on the basis of Wittgenstein’s thinking, the interactions during those Friday afternoon sessions, both within Wittgenstein and between Wittgenstein and those present. This was all very intuitive and associative. Which attitude, behaviour, or movement does a certain thought content require in order to be thought? And once thought, to which next movement or attitude does it give rise? In a sense Wittgenstein Incorporated is mainly a study of movement. The basic situation is a room with about ten people with Wittgenstein standing, walking around, or sitting. I got to know that room pretty well. I knew where the window was. The way the wooden folding chairs were placed. Where Wittgenstein’s chair stood. I knew the annex or side room. Where his bed was. I summoned it, so to speak, and it slowly became reality. I got to know that there was a mirror hanging above the sink. I knew what kind of tap he opened to let the cold water flow over his wrists. And the pin-up board with a couple of photographs and notes.

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LV:  So, in a sense, Wittgenstein himself is not even the main protagonist. The play is a study of movement, but also of presence – of Wittgenstein’s presence, of the presence of the ten others, and how their presences created each other. PV:  Yes, there were the others as well – who spoke incidentally, because they wanted to or because they had to. LV:  Those present were witnesses. And then there was you, the writer, witnessing what happened through the eyes of those witnesses. Your position was similar to theirs but also very different? PV:  Yes, very different. I wasn’t there, of course. I wrote that presence into existence. I wasn’t there, but I saw what was real, I made it real by realizing it in and through the text. LV:  It is likely that most of those present at the Cambridge meetings didn’t understand much of what Wittgenstein was saying. Perhaps they were also primarily busying themselves with their own presence, with being present, more than with the actual content. PV:  For them, of course, it must have been rather special to be there. Wittgenstein, after all, had personally chosen them to be present. He didn’t enter into a dialogue with just anyone. LV:  But I’m trying to get a better grasp of your presence as a writer. You say you got to know the room at some point – neither the actual room nor an imagined room, but the actual room as realized by you . . . PV:  I learned to create the space, to inhabit it. To say that I knew it, in one way or another, is too passive. LV:  But you didn’t just make it up. The room you realized wasn’t just any room. It was that particular room. There must have been some internal criterion, in this sense, on the basis of which you could say which objects were there and which weren’t, etcetera. On the basis of which that reality you created was delineated. PV:  This wasn’t my experience, actually. It really didn’t matter what the actual room had looked like. It’s like a dream and while dreaming you are aware that it is a dream. In dreams reality is not tied to any criteria. In that particular space the hallway was there, the door over there . . . that is where the chairs stood, placed in a semicircle. An armchair that wasn’t actually there. But then again, it was. The window over there. This is what the view was like. That is where his bed was. And a table and a sink. It probably wasn’t like this at all. But if I would see the room today, I would think that it wasn’t the actual room at all. And outside there was the grass, with a bird flying over every now and then, which Wittgenstein would trace with his eye, standing over there. I realized an imagined space. And I made use of movements, of ways of doing, that were familiar to me, that were often my own actually. There is a lot in the final text concerning things I’m familiar with, and of which I presumed they had been familiar to Wittgenstein as well. Of course, that holds only for certain things, and not others. When he was looking out the window, he wiped together dry leaves from a plant in the palms of his hands, squeezing them a bit to make them crackle, and

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then threw them in a metal dustbin. This was a gesture, a way of doing, familiar to me. And I let Wittgenstein experience it as well. Much later, after the premiere in Brussels, there was an old professor who had been present at similar Cambridge meetings with Wittgenstein. And this professor wondered how on earth I could have known about those dry leaves and that metal dustbin. These kinds of things happen when you work in this particular way. LV:  In a sense, you shifted the ground on which you got to know Wittgenstein: you didn’t start from biographical facts, for instance, and took it from there, but you started from somewhere else, from non-knowing so to speak, and then started a kind of imaginative act of approximation – getting closer and closer, not to how it actually was, but to how it could have been. PV:  I guess so, yes. This is not something you do or arrive at by reading biographies. For the simple fact that, if I had done so, I wouldn’t have dared to write what I wrote. And also in the sense that you will then write what is already known. For me it was different. Something was called to mind. Some things appeared, other things evolved. Because they come from the unknown, because you dwell in the unknown with a sense of freedom – a freedom that tells you that this and that is permitted or allowed. That is what I experienced while writing the text. Because there was this imaginative space where I was present and from where things happened and images appeared. LV:  You wrote the text in six weeks. And after that it lay on the shelf for about a year . . . PV:  While writing it I already knew who would perform it (not Johan but someone else) and who would direct it. But then suddenly there was this big argument between the actor and director which made that things didn’t go according to plan and the production was off. About a year later, the great actor Johan Leysen, who recently passed away, came to visit Jan Ritsema, the director. Johan told Jan there was something on his mind that greatly bothered him. He had grown tired of doing dramatic plays, of acting based on feelings, emotions. By then, Johan was already a big name. He starred in French movies alongside Catherine Deneuve and others. He was ready for a change. He wanted to do something about serious thinking, not with feelings or emotions. Jan asked him what he meant by that. And Johan told him that the evening before he had seen a television show about this Austrian figure, some thinker or philosopher. He had enjoyed it and found it very interesting. Jan got up from his chair, opened a drawer, pulled out the script, and dropped it on the table. That was a fantastic coincidence. It was as if Johan had summoned the play, in his own particular way – and this would echo through everything that was to follow. Almost the next day Johan started rehearsing the text. It was about 130 pages long. He really went at it, with so much energy and ambition. Soon after, plans were made for the play to be staged in Brussels. Johan said about his own acting that it was never primarily about the content. For him, it was about the rhythm of the text. ‘If I can’t feel or get a sense of the rhythm, I simply can’t do it.’ Johan learned the entire text by heart. He did so very,

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very quickly. Also because his mother was ill and lying in the hospital. He had promised himself to perform it in the presence of his mother, or at least to be able to say the lines in the hospital. I think it took him about a month. Already at that point, he really knew it by heart. And he did, in the end, perform it for his mother in the hospital. I said learned by heart, but it was pure photographic knowledge. When you read Johan a line from the text, he could point out the line number and whether it was on the right- or left-side page. He would add, jokingly, that he unfortunately couldn’t give you the exact page number. Johan came from an intellectual home, where he was the ‘non-intellectual’ actor. It was a wonderful thing in his life to have performed such a text as an actor. He told me this once, smilingly. And the fact that he performed it for his mother had really meant a lot to him. LV:  Perhaps the text is ‘intellectual’, but Johan’s way of approaching it wasn’t intellectual . . . PV:  No, absolutely not. LV:  He wanted to do a text that was serious and cerebral, yet his approach was surprisingly different, the opposite almost? PV:  As soon as he started rehearsing it, it became important to determine how the text should be played, how he should act – what was needed to play it in the right way. This was about the right attitude, the right kind of conscience. This was all we talked about . Much more, at any rate, than about the content of the text, the meaning of this or that sentence. LV:  Johan’s challenge from the beginning was not to understand what the text said, but to connect with it on a different level, not starting from the content at all? PV:  The play is called Wittgenstein Incorporated. For me, it meant to incorporate, to embody, but definitely not to imitate or impersonate someone. Johan did not play his part as if he fully understood what the text said. He made use of his photographic memory. And that is how he entered the stage, remaining in this state for two-and-a-half hours. As someone who was really trying his utmost to tell, as precisely and accurately as possible, ‘what was imagined in the text’. (In Dutch, ‘voorstelling’ means ‘a theatre play’ as well as ‘an imagination’.) Johan was constantly searching for the right word to capture what may have happened, making it felt that it was absolutely crucial that what was said was being said carefully and with perfect clarity. LV:  He wasn’t in any way trying to be or become, to impersonate, Wittgenstein? PV:  No. And that’s also partly because the text is written in the third person. LV:  He imagined it, on stage, just like you had imagined it behind your writing table. The text opens with the words ‘Imagine . . .’ (See the extract following this interview below.) PV:  Johan’s great task was to find out what the position was from which he was speaking. He wasn’t playing Wittgenstein. Neither was he playing a person present at those meetings or, for that matter, the one who wrote the text. He really put or found himself in a unique position – one very difficult to define. What mattered to him was to describe as precisely and detailed as possible

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how those meetings had taken place. This was in line with the way in which I’d written the text. LV:  And what made that he managed to do this so well, in your view? PV:  For Johan, as an actor, it was really a tour de force to perform 130 pages of monologue. That may sound redundant. But it really was. And it mattered. Because for the audience Johan’s efforts in memorizing the text closely resembled what they thought Wittgenstein’s efforts at deep, serious thinking must have looked like. Johan allowed for, or dared to allow for, long pauses. At times Johan really had to think hard to remember what came next. And that was very exciting, like an intense suspense. Johan’s greatness consisted in his ability to act as if to memorize was to think. His all too real attempt to memorize a line was at the same time a performed act of thinking. The most breathtaking moments during a performance were when Johan really didn’t know how to continue, what came next. Something similar must have happened at Cambridge. That Wittgenstein paused to think, because he didn’t know how to continue, to move on to the next thought. That he was at a loss, turned around, or even walked away, only to reappear, perhaps several minutes later, to continue an argument or line of thinking. In this sense, nothing could go wrong on stage – failure wasn’t really a possibility. This way, Johan came very close to how people in the audience would have imagined Wittgenstein to have acted during those meetings. Much more so than when he had tried to imitate, or impersonate, Wittgenstein. Every effort, every failed attempt .  .  . every time Johan really had to go to lengths to be able to go on, to continue, were fantastic. It wasn’t about trying very hard or making an effort in the sense of slogging. It was all very concentrated and lucid. One way in which Wittgenstein Incorporated did something new was that it brought Wittgenstein’s philosophy, his thinking about religious belief, to the stage. Yet, this wasn’t what the reviews of, and publications on, the play would speak of. There, people described it as establishing a new kind of theatre altogether. A kind of theatre revolving around unwinding, about personal readiness. Of course, philosophy had been staged before – for instance, in the form of plays with a philosophical message. But not in this particular fashion. To show that thinking can be theatrically dramatic, so to say – that hadn’t been done before. This is what made it ‘avantgarde’, I’d say. The play was analysed by theatre scholars, psychologists, and top-ranked scientists. Never ever did they focus on the content of what was said – and that’s true almost to this very day. It received critical acclaim from the reviewers and many people who had seen it were wildly enthusiastic about it. For them it was all about the acting, the cultivation of a particular attitude, about perseverance, and the dramatization of thinking. LV:  As for Wittgenstein, the right conditions had to be in place for Johan’s performance to succeed. Looking at the dozens of times he performed it in the years 1989–1990, how did his acting develop? PV:  It is telling that the same theme keeps reappearing! If I had read a lot of biographies or listened to the Wittgenstein experts, I wouldn’t have written the play

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– or at least I’d have written it differently. Johan was a very brave actor. He was able to stand on the stage, in front of a very attentive audience, and overcome his fears. To perform a 130-page text the way he did was really a huge achievement. But of course, at a certain point he wanted to know more about the content, the meaning behind the words he was speaking every evening. He started reading about Wittgenstein. And there arose discussions between the three of us about what Wittgenstein meant by this or that. Jan Ritsema, the director, quickly realized where this was heading, and he forbade Johan to speak to me about the text. Looking back, that was actually rather amusing. Johan used to say: ‘I don’t really understand what it’s about. I don’t believe Jan understands what it’s about. So I really hope Peter does.’ But if Johan started acting as if he understood it, or even indirectly suggested that he did, for instance, under the influence of some book he’d read, the play really suffered from it. Johan became a teacher lecturing about something he knew too well. The apparent similarity between Wittgenstein’s thinking during those meetings and Johan’s efforts in memorizing and focusing disappeared. At those instances, Johan had to be convinced that he really didn’t understand a single word of it. When we succeeded, the performance got better again. It was a beautiful example of what happens when someone grounds his actions, his behaviour, on the knowledge he has acquired. The effort, the attention and energy that had to be invested, disappeared. It was as if the stakes changed. It was no longer about attempting knowledge but about consolidating it. LV:  So Johan was able, and brave enough, to return to his original, creative position of ignorance, or not-knowing? PV:  Yes, he did. As I said, Johan was a very brave actor. He was willing to act, to perform what he didn’t understand. And he could do this because for him it was all about the rhythm of a text, the cadence of the focus and attention. LV:  Let’s return for a moment to the play’s reception. You said that what held for Johan and yourself also applied to the critics: rather than about the content of what was said, the play is about how the words are delivered and how the content is arrived at? PV:  Yes, definitely. Reviews of the play appeared in England and Sweden, written by critics who hadn’t understood a single word of it. They had just been looking at Johan for two-and-a-half-hours. And they were very positive about it. An eminent Swedish theatre critic wrote that it was the most dramatic and at the same time most esoteric play she had ever seen. Also from her review it was clear that the play is about the ‘non-content’: the effort, the attention, the level of detail, and the absolute commitment conjured by the actor. Johan incorporated Wittgenstein’s presence; his perseverance, his unrelenting willingness to try, to take thinking seriously. And, especially, the emotional side of this intellectual endeavour. The process of constantly starting over. Failing better. Of being dissatisfied with himself. And then experiencing a breakthrough leading to a new insight. Or perhaps not. For this, it’s not necessary to be able to understand the text – whether it’s Johan not understanding what it says, or the critic

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not understanding Johan’s Dutch. There is a real sense in which Wittgenstein Incorporated, while being a two-and-a-half-hour monologue where the actor constantly speaks, is actually a mime performance. LV:  And what about France, where the play was performed in 1990, after it had toured the Netherlands and Belgium the year before? PV:  This episode was very important for the play’s development. Johan’s Dutch was slightly better than his French. And this meant that performing it in French again confronted him with a new challenge. The text was translated by an excellent translator. And Johan started rehearsing it as he had done with the Dutch text. The necessary effort, the grappling was back. On another level, performing it in France also turned out to be totally different. In France, the focus was much more on the content, probably because philosophy plays such a different public role there. The reviews in Le Monde and other newspapers seriously discussed the play on a textual level. And there were philosophers who, after seeing the performance, started debating it among themselves. In France, people weren’t so easily impressed by the play’s supposedly intellectual character. This already became apparent at the premiere, which took place in a big theatre in Paris. It was filled with prominent members of the French cultural elite, who knew that the play had already made a name for itself in the north. They were sitting there, watching this man talk on and on about Wittgenstein’s Friday afternoon sessions at Cambridge in the late 1930s. They knew Johan there as he had already played in a few acclaimed French movies. It was a celebration for Johan. He toured through France, performing in many of the larger cities there, including the theatre festival in Avignon. LV:  Fast forward to 2010, when the play saw a reprise in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. PV:  Yes, so far, we’ve been talking about the early 1990s. For many years after that, the play was considered as an exemplar of a new way of performing, of theatrical presence. Some young theatre makers who had heard much about it had never seen it. So, at some point it was decided there would be a reprise. This reprise, some twenty years later, was very interesting. Johan had become a much better actor. His presence on the stage had improved. It was beautiful to witness. At the same time, he had of course also become older. In the early 1990s, Johan was a young man who did his utmost to imagine what those Cambridge meetings must have been like. He imagined it, he created it while telling about it. Twenty years later, Johan stood there as a great, fifty-year-old actor with many major films to his name and with an even more beautiful voice and presence than before. What happened, or emerged, was remarkable to witness. The play turned into a reconstruction. And this on two levels. Rather than recreating them, Johan was now reconstructing the Cambridge meetings, as if he could have been there. But Johan was also, to a certain extent, reconstructing the play as he had performed it twenty years before. It was a play imitating, or impersonating itself. The very same text had given rise to two completely different performances. What Johan was saying on stage had already happened,

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in a twofold sense. Wittgenstein’s meetings had already happened. And now the same was the case for the play itself. This was new for me. For the audience, I think, it wasn’t much of an issue. In a sense, it made the play more comforting, less intense. What they now experienced was Johan telling them about something that had already happened, at some point in the past. His acting was brilliant, but it was totally unlike the original performance. Something else that had changed over the course of twenty years or so was the audience’s and reviewers’ approach to the play. In the 1990s, many viewers had been silently impressed, as this was almost what the play itself commanded. When it reprised, this was no longer the case. People were much more focused on the content, and also felt that they could or should be critical of what was being said. This was reflected in the reviews. Almost all of them started by calling it a legendary play, only to continue with some critical remarks about Wittgenstein’s views. In so doing, they – perhaps unknowingly – changed the nature of the play, approaching it almost as if it was a lecture rather than a performance. LV:  Johan was not the only actor who performed Wittgenstein Incorporated, right? It was also staged in Germany? PV:  Yes, in 2003 the German actor Ulrich Mühe, who starred in The Life of Others [Das Leben der Anderen], for instance, wanted to perform it. In the meantime, a German translation had been prepared. In Germany and Austria, the context was again very different. Like Johan, Mühe was a great actor. Their approaches, however, were nothing alike. In Germany and Austria, the play was much more tense, weightier, in a sense. It was a strange experience for me also to see Mühe perform it rather than Johan. As I said, the text contained both direct speech and descriptions of the surroundings. On the stage, these were originally treated on par. The how and what were one and the same. Mühe put more emphasis on the what and used the descriptions as if they merely contained additional information. This made the play very different, heavier, more hermetical, more complicated. It became clear that the German performance culture was different from that in France and in the Netherlands and Belgium. In France, people felt challenged to enter into debate and dialogue. In the Netherlands, people were focused on the experience, on just letting it happen. In Germany, and especially in Austria, the play was taken much more seriously, more scholarly almost. A small joke about Catholics that was largely lost on the Dutch audience and had caused some laughter in France, in Vienna’s Burgtheater made half the audience leave. The next day, a press conference had to be organized to explain what the meaning of the joke was. The fact was that Wittgenstein belonged to them and was not be taken too lightly or staged too freely. It reminded me of the Wittgenstein scholars I had spoken to in the late 1980s, who also made it clear that there was a limit to what could be ‘done’ with Wittgenstein. So, in Germany and Austria the performance was less about the effort of thinking, and more about voicing Wittgenstein’s ideas. As a result, the knowledge expressed in it took centre stage. In a purely theatrical sense, this was a limitation.

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LV:  Wittgenstein Incorporated never was, or will be, one play: depending on actor, time, and place, it will always be different, differing from itself? PV:  Yes, and this on many levels. In Johan’s case, the reprise became a play about a play. In Germany and Austria, when Ulrich Mühe performed it, it became a serious reconstruction of Wittgenstein’s lectures. By the way, attempts have been made to have the play performed in England. After its success in France, it was decided that an English translation had to be prepared. This was done by Arnold Pomerans. Pomerans, a prominent translator who in his youth had been friends with Nelson Mandela, had already translated many Dutch texts into English. I worked with him for about two weeks at his home in Polstead Heath. I slept in a little summer cabin in his garden that had once been used by Alfred Ayer, the philosopher. Every coincidence that could happen happened in the case of this play. Arnold Pomerans was a great translator and a very friendly man. He worked very carefully and wanted to know exactly how I’d written the text. When I told him about its origins, he shook his head, laughed, and looked at me, only to continue his search for the exact right words, which he then discussed with me. At the end of our two weeks together, Pomerans told me he knew Peter O’Toole. He suggested he could bring me into contact with him, because O’Toole might be interested in performing the play. Pomerans’s translation of Wittgenstein Incorporated did reach O’Toole, and someone once told me he read about half of it. At one point, I had a conversation with him over the phone, about the text and the possibility of him performing it. O’Toole was standing in some London club of which he was a member. I heard voices and the sound of chairs and glasses in the background. He told me he was convinced it could not be done, and that he wouldn’t do it, because it was all ‘too complicated’. During our conversation, he explicitly wondered whether it was really true that there had already been actors who had performed it. So, O’Toole wouldn’t do it, and this is why Wittgenstein Incorporated has hitherto never been performed in England. LV:  Do you know what it was exactly that O’Toole found ‘too complicated’ about it? Was it the content of the text? Or was it too complicated to perform it, in terms of the kind of effort it took? PV:  He simply couldn’t imagine that the text could be performed at all. Or, this at least is what he seemed to suggest. During those few minutes that I spoke to him, he did make clear that Wittgenstein interested him, and Cambridge as well. But performing a play written in the third person, with a duration of twoand-a-half hours about Wittgenstein-related contents and all kinds of detailed descriptions. . . . No, he couldn’t imagine it could work. He said this in a very friendly tone. At the end, he told me that he knew of someone who might be able to perform it, and that he would give me his name. But this never happened. LV:  Now that we’ve discussed the history of the play, let’s return to some of its major themes. I want to talk a bit more about the sense in which the play stages Wittgenstein, but isn’t really about Wittgenstein at all. You didn’t write it and Johan didn’t perform it as an attempt to search for or arrive at Wittgenstein.

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And the audience shouldn’t see it if they’re interested in seeing Wittgenstein impersonated. PV:  For me the essence is that, in all its possible aspects, Wittgenstein Incorporated is not about knowledge. Knowledge is neither its topic nor its ambition. It does not attempt to convey Wittgenstein’s knowledge about the topic of religious belief. And it does not attempt to showcase any knowledge about Wittgenstein himself. Knowledge is always only half of the story, at best. To know something is to compartmentalize it and, as such, to reduce it to something it is not. The act of knowledge is the act of making something knowable. But as soon as something is knowable, it is no longer the thing you’d hoped to know. In this sense, knowledge is an instrument and to know it to instrumentalize – as if the thing you are knowledgeable of exists for you to know it, use it, and exploit it. This has some value, of course. But it inevitably runs into its own limitations. A basic premise of the play is that Wittgenstein is fundamentally unknowable. Wittgenstein isn’t fit for knowledge, so to speak. Those who try, usually get lost, or confused. The point, I think, is that that you must be willing to change yourself if you’re looking to understand the other, in this case Wittgenstein: you must be willing to make the existential conditions of his thinking your own. Otherwise you’re reducing Wittgenstein to manageable, knowable proportions. But Wittgenstein cannot be compartmentalized. Yes, he was a philosopher, a serious thinker. He took philosophizing and thinking seriously. But the activity itself emerged from his being, his way of being, his entire attitude towards life. Its essence, if any, consisted in the act of caring, of being careful. Wittgenstein cared about the philosophical subjects that were at stake in and through his thinking. He knew of the perils of war. Of the poisonous mix of knowing and believing. He cherished the deep hope – no, he demanded of himself that he would put an end to the confusion and messiness which, in the hands of the wrong people, could be used to achieve bad things. Wittgenstein never cared about being intelligent, about being smart. It was about dedicating himself to things that mattered to him, about which he cared; and in so doing, he was able to think truly in earnest, without the vanity or pretensions that characterize so much of philosophy. He really had no time for that. Think, for instance, of the way in which he treats his audience at those Cambridge meetings; he permits himself to be rude. This was legitimate for him insofar as it was demanded by the act of truly and deeply caring about the attempt at serious thinking. There were scientists who went to see Wittgenstein Incorporated, and the play reminded them of their attempts in the laboratory: of the process of trial and error, of experiencing and even staging failure, of making errors and learning from good mistakes. Perhaps Wittgenstein’s method of philosophizing, his methodological way of thinking, resembles what happens in a laboratory. But Wittgenstein, of course, didn’t work in a laboratory. The conditions under which he was thinking weren’t that of an artificial space. They were that of human existence as such. This is what the play was all about. For

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Wittgenstein, there is science and knowledge, on the one hand, and religion and belief, on the other. If you’re a believer, knowledge is not the ground of your faith. He was almost emotionally invested in drawing this distinction. To many, Wittgenstein probably resembles a scientific philosopher, a logician dedicated to exactness. But while writing the play, it became clear to me that this is all method: he’s more like a mystic demanding exactitude, total clarity. He wants to liberate a certain conscious awareness that is not reducible to knowledge, which indeed assigns knowledge its relative place within its specific domain. This, I think, is the main problem for those who want to know Wittgenstein from the standpoint of knowledge. For it means to approach Wittgenstein according to a criterion that he himself problematized. It means that your efforts are undermined by Wittgenstein’s own doing. What he does to knowledge – to put it in its right place – he also does to you, the knower or spectator. In so doing, he shows that what you busied yourself with was not Wittgenstein himself, but what you made of him. Wittgenstein, just like any other object (or subject) of knowledge, will always partially escape you. For me, Wittgenstein is not about what happens inside numbered paragraphs, but about the outside that this systematization creates – he’s not about reducing, but about liberating. LV:  We’re perhaps facing a difficulty of translation here. In Dutch, there’s a difference between ‘kennen’ (‘knowing’) and ‘weten’, which sits somewhere between intuitive knowing and conscious awareness but is not the same as ‘geloven’ (‘believing’). Wittgenstein wanted to free belief from knowing, and in a sense he did so from a position of ‘weten’, of understanding perhaps. I see something similar happening in your writing of Wittgenstein Incorporated. You didn’t approach Wittgenstein from a position of knowledge and it was precisely because of this that you managed to get to know him. Or, put more broadly, there is something about the staging of Wittgenstein’s thinking that makes possible a kind of understanding of him that differs from, and is perhaps not fully achievable by, reading him. PV:  What you’re trying to say, I think, is that in order to fully understand a thinker like Wittgenstein it is not enough to know what he means by this or that sentence or argument. It is also required that you understand how you must be in order to arrive at this or that sentence or argument. Thinking, after all, is a human, embodied activity. I think you see this very clearly in Wittgenstein’s case. For him, thinking and being overlapped, up to the point of being actually indistinguishable. And I believe this is what Wittgenstein Incorporated showed. It made it possible to witness, to experience what his radicalness consisted in. LV:  I’m going to ask it again: How did it make this possible? PV:  On a textual level, by allowing a type of existence which put everything at stake. Wittgenstein was willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of thinking, to risk his life, so to speak, for his next thought. This was he actually did, to a significant extent: to really and deeply care about thinking means to force yourself

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into certain conditions and accept all the consequences. In this sense, the duty of genius comes with the demand of madness – in the sense of accepting the risk of giving up the assumptions and habits that normally make life livable. This demand must have driven Wittgenstein crazy, at least from time to time. The text captured this existential conditioning of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. On a dramatic level, it had everything to do with Johan’s willingness to sacrifice or eliminate himself through or in acting, so as to place himself in the narrative position demanded by the play he was performing. LV:  So, for you, Wittgenstein Incorporated is about the question: How must one be in order to think? How must one change oneself in order to change one’s thinking? PV:  It’s about thinking as an existential orientation. This is not something you can really describe. Wittgenstein would probably say that it shows itself. And perhaps this holds for Wittgenstein Incorporated as well. Rather than describing, it was showing that certain thought contents have certain consequences for how to be and how to live: they demand a readiness, a willingness, to live your life in such a way that these contents become possible. When described, this attitude can come across as abstract. When staged, it becomes a lived reality.

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Wittgenstein Incorporated Written by Peter Verburgt Translated by Arnold Pomerans

This text was written as an exercise in another’s thinking…

Imagine: a room. High, large and imposing, but very simply furnished. No ornamental objects or other non-essentials. Bare, austere and orderly. Rain against the window, continuously. A rickety camp bed with some carefully folded blankets. An open suitcase packed with shirts, toilet articles, journals. A pair of wet, down-at-heel shoes. Water drips onto the wooden floor from a sopping wet raincoat that has just been hung up on the wall. Beside the coat, a small black-framed mirror and, above it, a number of pinned up photographs: Wittgenstein outside his cabin in Norway, in Vienna and – possibly – a portrait of the philosopher G. E. Moore, his obsession. Under the window, a small desk, on which someone has just eaten. A steaming cup of tea and a pile of notes headed ‘Religious Belief’. In the centre of the room, a chair with books scattered all round it: American detective stories. A man comes in and sits down in the chair. He has a towel over his head and dries himself. As he does so, the movements change and make way for concentration. Pressing his hands to his head he utters a few words, muffled because of the towel. He rises to his feet, suddenly, without any apparent cause. He does a few quick knee bends, moves his head about to relax his neck muscles, and then walks towards a half-open door. After putting down the towel and buttoning his leather jacket up a bit higher, he goes into an adjoining room and, once there, he says something about a badly wounded Austrian general. ‘And . . . he promised to think about us, also after his death.’ The man seems to be doing an exercise. There he stands, hand rammed into his pockets, straining his memory. Then he adopts a more introspective attitude and lowers his voice. ‘Perhaps . . . And I don’t know at this moment. But wasn’t that a grotesque thing to say?’ A lean, lined face. Older than his movements and bearing suggest. He continues to stare hard at the floor, as his upper body moves gently to and

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fro. His curly hair is still wet. Drops of water run down his face, despite the towel. He brushes them off, an action that will be repeated many times. The drops of water are going to look more and more like sweat. He is thinking himself dry.

Index

Arendt, Hannah, 78, 80, 141, 142 Austin, J. L., 2, 28, 29, 35 Balandier, Georges, 157, 159, 165 Barad, Karen, 30–32, 38 Barker, Pat–Regeneration Trilogy, 80 Bazin, Jean (Des clous dans la Joconde. L’anthropologie autrement), 157–68 Beckett, Samuel, 192 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 103, 105, 169, 184 Bel, Jérôme (The Show Must Go On), 16–17 Bell-Smith, Michael (Birds Over the White House), 200–203, 212, 214 Bender, Emily, 224, 225 Bensa, Alban, 160, 163 Bernhard, Thomas (Ritter, Dene, Voss), 240 Beyer, Lawrence, 49, 50, 52 Binswanger, Ludwig, 80 Bion, Wilfred, 80, 81 Brahms, Johannes, 63, 103, 105 British Sign Language, 150–55 Cabanne, Pierre, 170, 172, 176, 183–85 Cage, John, 145, 169 Calvino, Italo, 223–24, 230

Carroll, Lewis (What the Tortoise Said to Achilles), 219, 225, 232; Alice in Wonderland, 192 Caruth, Cathy, 75 Cavell, Stanley, 64, 131, 135–36 ChatGPT, 219–33 Chimera, 22, 24, 140 “Choreographic writing,” 154 Conant, James, 107 Cumhaill Mac, Claire, 133 Dam, Elisabeth Van, 220 Davoine, Franҫoise (Wittgenstein’s Folly), 75, 76, 78 Deleuze, Gilles, 28, 29, 35–41 Descartes, Rene (Meditations), 109, 130, 196; Discourse on Method, 76 Detweiler, Frederick K. (Miraculous Fountain of Brittany), 183 Diamond, Cora, 107 Dolto, Franҫoise, 75, 76 Dreyfus, Hubert, 138 Drury, Maurice, 3, 76, 78–79, 82, 103, 105 Duchamp, Marcel–Inframince (infrathin), 173–75, 179; In Advance of a Broken Arm, 176; Bicycle Wheel, 169, 176, 178; The Bride Stripped Bare by Her 257

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Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 178; The Chocolate Grinder, 172; Coat Rack, 177, 178; Fountain, 169, 178, 181–83; Fresh Widow, 175; Nine Malic Molds, 172, 178, 179; Pictorial nominalism, 174; The retinal shudder!, 184; Three Standard Stoppages (Trois Stoppages Étalon), 170–73; Trébuchet (Trap), 177

Ionesco, Eugene (Rhinoceros), 47–58, 192 Jacob, Max, 223 James, William, 50, 114 Jarman, Derek, 2, 240 Jarry, Alfred, 173 Johns, Jasper, 169 Johnson, Karl, 240 Jones, Richard A. (The Black Book: Wittgenstein and Race), 54

Ecstasy, 111–13 Engelmann, Paul, 63, 108 Ethics (and aesthetics), 39–41, 62, 82, 102–3, 115–16, 143–48, 221 “ethnodramaturgy,” 164, 165

Kállay, Géza, 64 Kolk, Bessel van der, 83 Koller, Alexander, 224 Kraus, Karl (The Last Days of Mankind), 63

Fabian, Johannes, 164–66 Fanon, Frantz, 53, 56 Ficker, Ludwig von (Der Brenner), 184 Frege, Gottlob, 12, 108 Freud, Sigmund (Moses and Monotheism), 79; Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’, 80

Lacan, Jacques, 75, 76, 80, 82 Leysen, Johan, 235, 241, 244–50 Lichtenberg, Georg, 80, 220 Linnaeus, Carl, 55 Lombardi, Mark, 145 Lushetich, Natasha, 33–34

Gaudillière, Jean-Max, 77 Gebru, Timnit, 224 Gesture(s), 6–19, 62–63, 66–69, 81, 108, 133, 150, 155, 203, 209, 212, 235, 242, 244 Gilroy, Beryl, 231 Gjessing, Signe–Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus (tr. Denise Newman), 101 Glück, Louise, 152 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 206 Goffman, Erving, 165–66 Goldstone, Patricia, 145 Gray, John Edward, 55 Handke, Peter, 192 Hartley, Marsden (The Warriors), 182 Heaton, John, 150 Hume, David (Essay Concerning Human Understanding), 130–31, 140

MacLaine, Sue (Can I Start Again Please), 149–56; I may be some time, 154 Mahler, Gustav, 63, 184 Malcolm, Norman, 3, 65, 221, 227 Markham, Edwin (The Man with a Hoe), 176 Martins, Filipe, 12–13 McGinn, Marie, 50 McGuinness, Brian, 78 McKenzie, Jon, 30–32, 38 Mears, Helen Farnsworth (Fountain of Joy), 183 Miguéns, Sofia, 9 Monk, Ray (The Duty of Genius), 25, 113 Mühe, Ulrich, 249–50 Muhly, Nico, 115 Mysticism, 30, 39–41, 111, 197 Nadarajah, Nadia, 149, 151, 154

Index

Nadj, Josef, 61, 66–71; The Theatre and the Invisible, 61, 67–70 Naepels, Michel, 165 Nagy, Gregory, 76 Naumann, Francis, 170 Neurath, Otto, 102 O’Toole, Peter, 250 Pataquerulous, 21–25 Pendleton, Elizabeth (Drinking Fountain for Birds), 183 Perniola, Mario, 40 Phelan, Peggy, 41 Pomerans, Arnold, 250, 254 Ponge, Francis, 70 Praxeography, 161, 165 Queer, 21–25 Radjenović, Danka, 206–7, 209 Ramsey, Frank, 111 Raunig, Gerald, 222–23 Relationality, 130–32 Rhinoceros, 47, 50–52, 55, 58, 67–68 Richardson, Louise, 227 Ritsema, Jan, 225, 244, 247 Rivers, William, 79–80 Russell, Bertrand, 47, 50, 51, 67, 105, 108, 111, 113, 114, 116, 132, 172, 185 Saxl, Fritz, 80 Schechner, Richard, 33, 166, 216 Schenker, Heinrich, 111 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 103, 112 Schubert, Franz, 105, 166–67, 184 Schumann, Clara, 63 Serafine1369, 39–41 Shakespeare, William, 61, 63–64, 86, 165 Shklovsky, Viktor, 220–22 Simone, Nina, 116 Solipsism, 110, 231 Spinoza, Baruch, 34, 41

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Sraffa, Piero, 221 Stein, Gertrude, 181 Steiner, George (Wittgenstein and Shakespeare), 64 Sterne, Lawrence (Tristram Shandy), 76, 83 Stoics, 38 Stonehenge, 146–47 Strauss, Richard, 63 Studio K Theatre, Budapest, 61, 70 Sturges, Preston, 24 Sullivan, Harry Stack, 77 Sulzer, Balduin, 2 Tagore, Rabindranath, 69, 103, 197 Templeton, Fiona, 145 Therapon, 76, 80 Tolstoy, Leo, 63, 105 Tomkins, Calvin, 181, 185 Tovey, Donald, 111 Trauma, 75–83, 149–54 Turing, Alan, 221, 223 Vanity, 113, 251 Verburgt, Peter (Wittgenstein Incorporated) (extract), 254–55 Vienna Circle, 33, 102–3, 129, 130, 196–97 Warburg, Aby, 80, 81 Wegener, Marieke, 145 Weizenbaum, Joseph, 223 Wiseman, Rachel, 133 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: ‘In art it is hard to say anything that is as good as: saying nothing.’ (Culture and Value, 23e), 4, 62; ‘aspect blindness’, 23; ‘Back to the rough ground!’ (PI, 107), 132–34; ‘bewitchment of intelligence’ (PI, 119), 159; The Blue and Brown Books, 3, 30, 179; On Certainty, 68, 70, 71, 228; Conversations on Freud, 81; Culture and Value, 58, 62, 114; ‘At first sight a proposition–one set out

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on the printed page, for example– does not seem to be a picture of the reality with which it is concerned’ (T L-P, 4.011), 104; ‘So I am inclined to distinguish between essential and inessential rules in a game too. The game, one would like to say, has not only rules but also a point’ (PI, 564), 9; ‘I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family–build, features, color of eyes, gait, temperament, and so on and so forth–overlap and crisscross in the same way.–And I shall say: “games” form a family’ (PI, 67), 11; ‘Language is an instrument. Its concepts are instruments’ (PI, 569), 12; Lectures on Aesthetics, 62, 184; Lecture on Ethics, 82, 116, 130; ‘Let the use teach you the meaning’ (PI, 43 and PPF, 303), 225; ‘If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it’ (PI, 327), 57, 186; ‘Logic is not a body of doctrine but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.’ (T L-P, 6.13), 106; ‘The meaning of a word is its use in the language’ (PI, 43), 162, 174; ‘No proposition can make a statement about itself because a propositional sign cannot be contained in it (that is the whole of the “theory of types”).’ (T L-P, 3.332), 109; Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’ and ‘Sense Data’, 77, 81, 82; Philosophical Investigations, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 15, 21–22, 30, 48–49, 51, 58, 64, 66, 68, 78, 79, 81, 82, 86, 114, 129–32, 137, 138, 143, 169, 170, 174, 176, 177, 179, 180, 211, 219, 221, 223,

224, 228, 230–31; ‘A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about”’ (PI, 123), 228; Philosophical Remarks, 151; Private Notebooks 1914–1916, 30, 33, 34, 37, 208; Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, 160; Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, 153; ‘There is not a single philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, different therapies, as it were’ (PI, 133), 231; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 13, 62, 68, 81, 101–14, 130–32, 143, 169, 171, 192, 194, 196, 210, 230 ; ‘What a picture must have in common with reality in order to be able to depict it correctly or incorrectly in the way it does, is pictorial form.’ (T L-P, 2.17), 208; ‘What is your aim in philosophy?– To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.’ (PI, 309), 134–36; ‘And we extend our concept of number, as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread resides not in the fact that someone fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres’ (PI, 67b), 137; ‘We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.’ (T L-P, 6.5), 102; Zettel, 185 Wittgenstein, Paul, 63 Worringer, Wilhelm (Abstraction and Empathy), 40–41 Wright, Georg von, 220 Yancy, George (Look! A White!), 53–58 Yoruba theatre, 158–63 Zou, James, 229

About the Contributors

Né Barros is a choreographer and researcher at the Institute of Philosophy in the research group Aesthetics, Politics and Knowledge, University of Porto, and a professor at the Escola Superior Artística do Porto. As a choreographer, she has collaborated with visual artists, photographers, filmmakers, directors, and musicians. Besides numerous articles, she is the author of Performances and Post-Phenomenology and Da Materialidade na Dança. She co-founded, and is artistic director of, Balleteatro and the Family Film Project – International Film Festival on Archive, Memory, Ethnography (Porto). Charles Bernstein is the winner of the 2019 Bollingen Prize for Near/Miss and for lifetime achievement in American Poetry. He is the author of TopsyTurvy and Pitch of Poetry, along with dozens of other books. He is Regan Professor, Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His college thesis, on Stein and Wittgenstein, can be downloaded at: jacke​​t2​.or​​g​/com​​menta​​ry​/th​​ree​-c​​ompos​​ition​​s​-phi​​losop​​ hy​-an​​d​-​lit​​eratu​​re​-19​​72. Simon Bowes is a writer, scholar, researcher informed by philosophies of immanence. His current interests are shaped by a reconsideration of posthumanism in terms of ethology and of performativity in terms of ethics. Recent publications include an article, ‘An Art Like Nature: Theatre Environment as Territory’, in Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (vol. 10.1, 2022); and a chapter, ‘If One Looks Closely at an Edge: Four Dances Remember’d’, in Diffracting New Materialisms. He is currently a lecturer in Drama at the University of Greenwich.

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About the Contributors

Jonathan Burrows is a choreographer whose main focus is an ongoing body of pieces with the composer Matteo Fargion, with whom he continues to perform around the world. He is the author of A Choreographer’s Handbook and Writing Dance and is currently associate professor at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University. Miles Champion’s books include A Full Cone and Sauna Turns. He edited As When: A Selection by Tom Raworth. He lives in Brooklyn. Will Daddario is a mental health counsellor, grief worker, teacher, and scholar whose recent works include Pitch and Revelation: Reconfigurations of Reading, Poetry, and Philosophy through the Work of Jay Wright, written with Matthew Goulish and Rethinking Roland Barthes through Performance: A Desire for Neutral Dramaturgy, edited with Harry Robert Wilson. Veronika Darida is a philosopher, aesthetician, and dramaturg. She is an associate professor and head of the department of aesthetics at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary). Her main research interests include theatre aesthetics, phenomenology, and contemporary theories of art. To date, she has published ten independent volumes and more than two hundred studies in Hungarian, French, and English. Her book on Josef Nadj’s theatre was published under the title Different Scenes. Other recent publications include The Puppet Theatre of Philosophers, Enigmas. Giorgio Agamben’s Aesthetics, and Aesthetics of Theatre. Françoise Davoine has a PhD in sociology and degrees in classical literature. She has been a psychoanalyst in public psychiatric hospitals and now works in private practice. A faculty member at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, she led a weekly seminar on ‘Madness and the Social Link’ with Jean-Max Gaudillière. Her books include History Beyond Trauma (with Jean-Max Gaudillière); Wittgenstein’s Folly; Mother Folly; Fighting Melancholia: Don Quixote’s Teaching; Pandemics, Wars, Traumas and Literature; and Shandean Psychoanalysis: Tristram Shandy, Madness and Traumas. Peter S. Dillard received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. He has written extensively on the ongoing relevance of seminal texts from the medieval, Continental, and analytic traditions for contemporary thought. His works include Fate and Faith after Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy; Divine Audacity: Unity and Identity in Hugh of Balma, Eckhart, Ruusbroec, and Marguerite Porete; and articles on Wittgenstein’s earlier and later philosophy. His book Making the Past Present:

About the Contributors

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Oxford Ordinary Language Philosophy, Wittgenstein, and the Mind is forthcoming from Brill. Signe Gjessing is a Danish poet. She graduated from the Danish Academy of Creative Writing in 2014. She has published several collections of poetry and a novella and is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the prestigious Bodil and Jørgen Munch Christensen Prize for emerging writers. The English translation of her Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus, by Denise Newman, appeared in 2022. Kenneth Goldsmith is a conceptual artist and the first poet laureate of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Among other work, he is the author of Seven American Deaths and Disasters, Wasting Time on the Internet, Duchamp Is My Lawyer, and a collection of essays, Uncreative Writing. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and is the founder of UbuWeb. Derek Gottlieb is an associate professor of educational foundations and curriculum studies at the University of Northern Colorado. He is currently completing a book on democracy and education reform. Anthony Howell was founder of the Theatre of Mistakes and is author of Analysis of Performance Art. His versions of the poems of Iraqi poet Fawzi Karim, Plague Lands, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for 2011. He is the editor of Grey Suit Editions. He is a Hawthornden fellow and has recorded poems for the Poetry Archive. His latest book of poems is From Inside, published by the High Window. Sam Kinchin-Smith is head of Special Projects at the London Review of Books. His books include a monograph about Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes and an illustrated history of the LRB. Alice Lagaay is a professor of media theory and performative studies in the Design Department at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. She is active in multiple collaborative projects which seek to experiment with new ways to generate and communicate philosophical content. She is a founding member and core convener of the Performance Philosophy international research network to which she currently contributes (alongside others) in the role of ‘Strange Attractor’. She is a co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy and of the Performance Philosophy book series at Rowman & Littlefield International.

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About the Contributors

Sue MacLaine is a writer, performance-maker and British Sign Language/ English interpreter. She is currently completing a practice-as-research PhD at the University of Essex. Ray Monk is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Southampton and the author of biographies of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and (in two-volumes) of Bertrand Russell. The Wittgenstein biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, won the 1990 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the 1991 Duff Cooper Prize. In 2015, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Bernard Müller trained as an anthropologist and his research blends anthropology, narrative studies, literary studies, and performance studies, addressing the production of different types of narrative and their staging. Since 2003, he has run regular seminars at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), where he is an associate member of the Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur les Enjeux Sociaux. An editorial board member of Communications and the blog Decolonizing Collections – Networking Towards Relationality, he is professor of anthropology at the École Supérieure d’Arts d’Avignon and a lecturer at the Institut für Ethnologie in Cologne. Marjorie Perloff is Sadie Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities at Stanford University. She is the author of many books on poetry and poetics, including Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century, and Infrathin, an Experiment in Micropoetics. Her translation of Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks 1914–1916 was published by Liveright in 2022, and she has written the Preface to Damion Searls’s new translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Tom Raworth (1938–2017), Anglo-Irish poet and printer, is the author of over fifty books, including A Serial Biography, ACE, Common Sense, Writing, Tottering State, Clean & Well Lit, Windmills in Flames, and Incomprehensible Things. His unpublished 1971 book Cancer will be issued by Carcanet Press in 2024. Max Richter is one of the leading figures of the contemporary music scene, with groundbreaking work as a composer, pianist, producer, and collaborator. From synthesizers and computers to a full symphony orchestra, his innovative work encompasses solo albums, ballets, concert hall performances, film and television series, video art installations, and theatre works. His 2002 debut was with Memoryhouse and in 2012 his Recomposed version of Vivaldi’s

About the Contributors

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Four Seasons won the prestigious ECHO Classic Award. His collaborations with Wayne McGregor for the Royal Ballet have been widely acclaimed. Bo Tarenskeen is a leading Dutch playwright, actor, director, and the cofounder of Theater Na de Dam. He studied philosophy of language in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Potsdam and theatre directing in Brussels. He has written and performed plays about historical figures like Eichmann, Kissinger, and Heidegger and is currently working on a series of eleven plays about Ludwig Wittgenstein. Part I premiered in 2021, part II in 2023. He lives and works in Amsterdam. www​.botarenskeen​.nl The Aesthetics Group (Jeanette Doyle, Cathy O’Carroll, Mick O’Hara, and Connell Vaughan) is a research group affiliated with the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM) at the Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin). The group include researchers and practitioners from a variety of different backgrounds including philosophy, visual art, digital media, theatre, and performance. Since 2012, the group has collaboratively engaged with aesthetic theory and performance to develop new critical positions in aesthetics, philosophy, and related fields. Mischa Twitchin is a senior lecturer in the Theatre and Performance Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. He was a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow (2014–2017) and has contributed chapters to several collected volumes, as well as articles in journals such as Memory Studies and Performance Research (an issue of which, ‘On Animism’, 24.6, he also co-edited). His book, The Theatre of Death – The Uncanny in Mimesis: Tadeusz Kantor, Aby Warburg and an Iconology of the Actor, is published by Palgrave Macmillan and his performance and essay-films can be seen on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user13124826 Lukas M. Verburgt is currently Marie Curie Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, and is affiliated to the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study. Over the past few years, he held visiting research positions at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. He has published widely on the history of science and philosophy in the long nineteenth century, oriented around themes of abstraction, disciplinarity, canon formation, and the unknowable. Peter Verburgt studied political sciences and philosophy in Amsterdam and Warsaw. In the 1980s he worked in Eastern Europe, publishing in Le Monde, Taz Berlin, and other newspapers. He has written several plays, which have been staged in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, and Austria.

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About the Contributors

Verburgt has also developed concepts for several radically sustainable architectural projects. At the moment, he keeps a large garden in the middle of the Netherlands, where he works on philosophical notes concerning the notion of ‘the whole’ while sowing, harvesting, mowing, and pruning.