File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1999/lyotard.9907, message 113


Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 09:28:02 -0700
From: Lois Shawver <rathbone-AT-california.com>
Subject: Re: Das Capital



Hi Eric,

My apology for my confusion as to who you were.  I'll try to keep it
straight.  It does seem that you are pulling togther Lyotard in ways
that interst me right now, looking for ways of translating and creating
new idioms, and thank you for tying it to Wittgestein.  
In the Wittgenstein passage that you quoted Wittgenstein said that
Augustine's simple and misleading picture of how a child learned
language was nevertheless more or less correct in describing how an
adult learned a foreign language.  Augustine simply imagines the child
learns language the way that the adult does.  The child's language is
not built on translation.  It grows from the activities, the language
games, it learns, that together make up the cultural form of life.  If I
understood you, you were pointing out that when the adult learns a
foreign language it does not grow in this rooted way.  As an adult, I
may learn the translation for an English word, but it does not contain
the family of meanings, the sometimes irrational cluster of meanings,
that provide the universe of ways a phrase might be sensibly used within
the language.

And I think you were drawning an analogy with the working through of the
differend.  Somehow, coming from different backgrounds and different
present projects, we are foreigners to each other when we become
philosophical.  I can make sense of this.  I think I give Lyotard a
Wittgensteinian reading.  I know of those who give him a more Kantian
reading, and even a Marxist reading.  In our efforts to make sense of
his system, which seems to hang together but not entirely, we bring our
own backgrounds to the task -- and we end up with different Lyotards.

And so it might be in many situations in which we try to talk.  We are
bringing different backgrounds and different projects to the task and so
communication is not fluent.  We are each having to go back and forth to
our translation tables, remembering each other's context, even to
understand.  And completely fluent understanding may not always be
possible, at least not for a while.  Still, we can realize that the
differend exists, that this differend is making it impossible for one or
both of us to be adequately understood, and together we can begin to
create ways of either working towards a mutually satisfactory tranlation
of our texts (which doesn't mean that we agree about the beliefs
expressed in that new framework!), that is, we can begin to create new
idioms together that will allow the emergence of a social bond that
makes it possible for us to begin to talk, and perhaps even possible to
begin to litigate in ways that seem fair enough to all, at least for a
time.

Is this what you had in mind?

..Lois Shawver
> I personally agree with you, Lois that the differend between
> Wittgenstein and Lyotard is a fruitful one and I would am happy to
> continue to explore it.  I also feel that the question of politics we
> are discussing here is not a programatic one, but rather a kind of
> ur-politics.  

What do you mean by "ur-politics"?

> The question is what the conditions must be that give rise
> to politics and the demands for justice.

Do you mean: Although a person who is mute (because the law that
litigates the differend gives her no phrases for making a complaint) is
often silenced, it is still sometimes possible to correct this situation
with a demand for justice and politics.  What is it that promotes this
demand, this rising above being victimized by the differend?

> Earlier, Lois, you quoted Wittgenstein quoting Augustine and the
> latter's definitely pre-structuralist views on language.  Here is
> another quote from PI, section 32:

> "Someone coming into a strange country will sometimes learn the language
> of the inhabitants from ostensive definitions that they give him; and he
> will often have to guess the meanings of these definitions; and will
> guess sometimes right, sometimes wrong.
> 
> And now, I think, we can say: Augustine describes the learning of human
> language as if the child came into a strange countrty and did not
> understand the language of the coutry: that is, as if it already had a
> language, only not this one."

Yes, this is a familiar passage to me.

 
> Without falling into the trap of making a private language argument, I
> think that quote explains well the basic conditions which make for
> politics. For each language game is, in effect, a foreign country and
> parology may be defined, at least in part, as the attempt of someone
> with a language to understand the language of another.  It is a slow and
> tenuous process where misunderstanding is a commonplace. The foreign
> lands may be exotic, but they will never be our home.
> 
> Politics then becomes a matter of translation, while we recognise that
> there is something which always resists translation, that can never
> enter the mother tongue.  Reality always has something of the uncanny
> about it.
 
> As I write these words, I notice a beetle has landed on its back and is
> making futile attempts to right itself.  It reminds me of Gregor Samsa.
> I sense its pain and suffering, yet I really don't know what it is
> feeling.  There is something here that will always remain alien to me.
> With a piece of paper, I gently lift it upright so it can crawl away to
> find some other death.
> 
> Those of us who live in the borderlands between foreign countries find
> that agonistics, war, violence and conflict is commonplace.  However, it
> is not a necessity.  A good part of the paralogical consists of making
> peace while preserving differences, creating a community which is not a
> tribal herd - what Wittgenstein calls discovering the family
> resemblances among the elements which have nothing completely in common.
> Language, not as a city, but as a grand archipelago.
> 
> PS - I'm not familiar with the book on Wittgenstein and Justice you
> mention, but I will look for it.

   

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