File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1999/lyotard.9907, message 94


Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1999 12:32:13 -0700
From: Lois Shawver <rathbone-AT-california.com>
Subject: Re: Das Capital


Mary,

I asked you earlier today to flesh out your notion of the importance of
seeing the political side of language games -- and then as I look
further Isee you have already written a bit about this.  I would like to
engage you in a conversation about it.  The question in my mind is
whether we have a different opinion here or if we merely use words
differently to state an agreement -- for I believe it is sometimes
possible to invent an idiom that will allow us to separate out these two
possibilties, although sometimes not.  Still, I would like to try.

If you define the word "politics" very, very loosely so that it includes
our universal vested interest in maintaining the language games in tact
that seem to serve us well, and our vested interest in deconstructing
the language games that "appear" counter to our interests, then it seem
on the surface you are certainly correct.  
---------
 Are you are familiar with Wittgenstein, and know of the first language
game in #2, for example?  If you or others here want to refresh your
memory, you might look at this aphorism by going to:

<http://www.dnai.com/~rathbone/lwtocc.htm>
----------

Reading through Wittgenstein's text, what we see is that he is
deconstructing his own language games and that of his (our)culture.  As
I explain on the introductory page ofthe website above, Wittgenstein
does this by using two voices.  One voice is represented at times by
Augustine or Plato, sometimes by Frege or Russell, and often by
Wittgenstein's earlier positivist writings.  Wittgenstein says, in many
ways, "see how compelling this way of thinking is?  How much it draws us
in and how easily we overlook the counterexample?  How do we get sucked
into this way of thinking?"

And as he works through key language games in our culture in a careful
and soul searching way, his readers, very often it seems begin to see a
new world emerging, new theories, new ideas abouthow the mind works, how
society works.  It is as though Wittgenstein unties the knots that hold
us into traditions.

But Wittgenstein never pulled it together into an image of how things
work, at least not in a way that is even slightly systematic.  In one
way of using the word "political" this leaves Wittgenstein's text
non-political.  It is non-political in that it does not point us in a
particular direction. We know that Wittgenstein was a Jewish athiest, or
perhaps I should say, a disbeliever, but many of his proponents were
religious. (Capable commentator O.K. Bowsma, I understand, was a
fundamentalist Baptist!)  I believe one could be a Wittgensteinian and a
Marxist, although a Marxist who is self-conscious of one's language.  If
one uses "political" in the sense I am using the term for the moment, I
can think of few texts less political than Wittgenstein.  (Of course, if
you define "political" much more broadly, then Wittgenstein is
political, too, -- although then when everything is political it becomes
less interesting, doesn't it? to call a particular text "political.")

Which reminds me, have you read Hanna Pitkin's work, "Wittgenstein and
Justice: On the Significance of Ludwit Wittgensetin for Social and
Political Thought", 1972.  It has been a while since I read her, but I
just pulled her text from my shelf and let me type in some of the
passages that I marked (I read this text only once and that was 25 years
or so ago) but perhaps you'll consider it a contribution to our
conversation for me to type in a few passages I have marked towards the
end of this book.  

"Despite our craving for order and transcendent meaning, the fact is
that words have no absolute, God-given meaning; and he order in our
langauge is fragmentary.  Meanings are simply the product of our various
uses of words; and since they nevertheless determine our world in
important ways, our world itself is dependent upon human practice and
convention.  There is no Master Umpire to judge the meaning or the ruth
of what we say; there is only a collection of fallible human beings,
interacting.

"In a way, Wittgenstein does say these things and is one of these
teachers.  But there is also a significant evolution in his thought,
from the Tractatus to the later writings. Confronted with the modern
predicament, with a universe in flux, lacking centr or meaning or
stability, the Tractatus is essentially a failure of nerve, a retreat to
what seems the only remaining solid ground, the one fortress that still
seems defensible, ruthlessly abandoning whatever is outside the walls. 
If langauge defines our world, then for that world to retain any kind of
stability language MUST bea system of fixed, exhaustive,
systematicrules. if we stay within those rules we will be safe, will
save meaning and sense and reality.  Of course, much will have to be
given up....That, I think is the spirit of the Tractatus.  

Wittgenstein himself clearly experienced the insights of his later
philosophy as a liberation from that earlier spirit, a release from the
rigid and frantic commitment to unambiguous order.  Instead of
retreating to a last island of certainty, Wittgenstein's philosophy
examines the craving for certainty itself, and concludes that we are,
after all, able to live on the sea...." (336-7)

So, is Wittgenstein political or descriptive?  Wittgenstein does teach
that philoosphy should be descriptive.  Does that mean we should not be
activists?  hardly.  Here is Pitkin's last paragraph:

"Thus, when Wittgenstein says that our forms of life must be accepted,
that is not the same as saying that ourlives as welead them must be
accepted, that our ways of theorizing about them must be accepted. 
Rather, it suggests, as Cavell says, 'that criticism of our lives is not
to be prosecuted in philosophical theory, but continued in the
confrontation of our lives with their own necessities."  It is not that
we cannot change our concepts ...If they are to change, we must change
them in our actions, in our lives; and ultimately that means that we
cannot change them in isolation. [And, in his Remarks on the Foundations
of Mathematics, p.57, Wittgenstein says:] ""the sickness of a time" is
cured only "by an alternation in the mode of life of human beings,"
through alternative modes of "though and life, not through medicine
invented by an individual."

So, to sort of sum up, it seems to Pitkin, and to me, too, that it is
worthwhile distinguishing a political treatise from one that is
descriptive even though in some uses of the word the term is so broad
that it captures my call to my dog to come.  The great advantage of
seeing the descriptive element is that it allows us to step into the
thinking of the thinker that does not present a final system, that
simply prevents us with self-critical self-reflection for us to make of
what we will.

In places, at least, I think Lyotard does this, too.  It seems to me
that "language games" are not "discourses" (in the Foucaultian sense of
discourse.)  And what we uncover in our deconstruction of langauge games
is less the political forces that would insist we stay in the favored
games but the marvel of seeing through a fallacy of our own thinking,
tricks we have played on ourselves without noticing.  There are no
oppressors in this way of thought, only innocent people deluded by those
who were deluded, by cultures that swept us along the streams of its
mythology in our short lives that give us so little time to think things
through.

..Lois Shawver





hugh bone wrote:
> 
> Mary Murphy&Salstrand wrote:
> >
> > the twist that Lyotard gives to language games
> > and speech acts is to politicize them and place them under the rubric of
> > capitalism.
> > >
> > > -AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT-
> > >
> > > I don't understand the last sentence.
> > >
> > > Could some of our participants explain their own, personal,
> > > understanding of "agonistics" and "paralogy" (without reference to other
> > > persons).
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > > Hugh
> > >
> > > -AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT-
> > >
> > Maybe it is just me, but I sometimes get the impression that British
> > philosophers sit in their English drawing room smoking their pipes,
> > sipping their sherry and talking about the christening of the Queen Mary
> > as though the solution to all political problems was seen in the
> > vanishing of the question.
> >
> > What I meant by that sentence it simply that language games and speech
> > act cannot be seen in abstractions as purely universal idioms without
> > reference to class, race, nation or historical periods (such as
> > capitalism). They must be situated in a manner that shows their
> > contextual relationship with the social bond, the inscribing socius with
> > its codes and rules that tend often to act in a manner that constrains
> > us, establishes what speech act are to be permitted, what language games
> > are to have meaning in a given culture in a certain place and time.
> >
> > As such, these gestures are political.  I believe Lyotard uses them in a
> > manner that brings this out.
> >
> > I hope this helps and does not confuse the issue too much.
> 
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> Mary,
> 
> Thanks very much.
> 
> Speaking of the English, did you ever hear this:
> 
> GBS invited Churchill to see his newest play,
> saying: "Come to first night opening and bring a friend,\
> if you have a friend"
> 
> The reply was:  "Sorry, can't make it first night, but
> will be there second night if there is a second night."
> 
> I agree with your reply 100% on first reading, but promise a second
> reading.
> 
> Hugh

   

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