Constructing A Replacement For The Soul - Bourbon

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Constructing a Replacement for the SoulThe Grammars o f Self-Reflection and
Temporality as the Limits o f Language in Finnegans Wake, Philosophical
Investigations, and Cognitive ScienceA thesis presented byBrett Ryan BourbontoThe
Department o f English and American Literature and Languagein partial fulfillment o
f the requirements for the degree ofDoctor o f Philosophyin the subject ofEnglish
and American Literature and LanguageHarvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts
July, 1996Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
UMI Number: 9710397Copyright 1996 by Bourbon, Brett RyanAll rights reserved.UMI
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(C) 1996 BY BRETT RYAN BOURBON All rights reserved.Reproduced with permission of
the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Abstract: Constructing a Replacement for the Soul: The Grammars of Self- Reflection
and Temporality as the Limits of Language in Finnegans Wake, Philosophical
Investigations, and Cognitive ScienceIn my dissertation I explore how literary art
can function as a kind o f cognitive philosophy. I begin with the proposition that
Artificial Intelligence programs, and the game worlds they spawn, attempt to
articulate an aesthetic with ontological force, poems to blow our heads off. This
possibility or promise frames my examination of Joyce's Finnegans Wake,
Wittgenstein'sPhilosophicalInvestigations, and my own description of a hypothetical
machine I have designed that generates a fictional future within which it figures
itself. I analyze Finnegans Wake as a philosophical text, and Wittgenstein's
Philosophical Investigations as describing an aesthetic. Both texts do not
articulate a theory of meaning, but model meaning within what Wittgenstein called
our "forms of life," our attunement within our language, culture, history,
psychology, biology, and so on. How is it possible for human beings to inhabit this
'our' at all? How can I use an 'our' as mine? In writing towards and at the limits
of language, I am trying to speak an 'our' as our species-being, and it this
speaking enact the particularity of meaning instantiated through my particular
involvement in language. Both Investigations and the Wake explore the limits o f
what it means to be human by examining how linguistic meaning works
throughtheinteractionsbetweensenseandnonsense. Ianalyzehowtheshiftingbetween
language games, between sense and nonsense described and enacted within Finnegans
WakeandPhilosophicalInvestigationsarticulatesamultivalenttemporalsense. I
investigate the ways in which the limits between sense and nonsense construct a
grammar of temporality that is simultaneously a literary aesthetic and a theory of
mind. Time becomes a grammatical effect. The theoretical machine I have designed
pressures theReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
reproduction prohibited without permission.
interpretative limit between the animate and the inanimate and between sense and
nonsense toward the ontological limits described by causal languages. My
dissertation is an attempt to describe the ways in which such grammars determine
what counts as human.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
TABLE OF CONTENTSAbbreviations, iEtymologies, iiA Note on the Interpretation o f
Finnegans Wake, iii1. I.INTRODUCTION: Constructing a Replacement for the Soul, 1
FRAGMENTS: FROM SOUL-MAKING TO PERSON-MAKING 2. From Soul-making to Person-making,
212.1 Personalidentityandimpersonalsalvation, 292.2
"timeliquescingintostate,pitilessagegrowsangelhood", 382.3
Spiralingfrominterpretationtocause, 553.RomanticFragmentsandModernistMachines, 62
4. Keats' Version of Finnegans Wake, 1035. The Distance between the Soul and the
Mind, 113 6.TheWakeanGrammarof'Between', 167H. THE SEMANTICS OF IDENTITY AND THINGS
(Eliot's The Waste Land and Heidegger's 'Das Ding')m .7. Semantics of Identity and
Mind, 213 8. (How) Can things mean?, 2498.1 Matter, 2588.2 What is a thing?:
Functionalism, 2698.3 A Thing is a Temporal Condensate o f a Semantic Chain, 2758.4
The Ontological-Semantics of 'weilen', 2808.5
TeXevTTjteatevreXexeia(etverbumtemporalenomini), 2968.6 Animamundiseuorbis, 3199.
'Weileri* in The WasteLand, 328 9.1. Thunder-talk, 3289.2 On the road to
objecthood, 3489.3 The visibility of the subjunctive, 383THE SEXUAL ONTOLOGY OF THE
PSYCHE(Finnegans Wake)10. The Sexual Ontology of the Psyche, 39910.1 Conversation
with God and Self, 39910.2 "aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues", 41310.3
"RenovetheBible":thelogicofcreationinGenesis, 424 10.4 AnnaLiviaPlurabelle, 43610.5
Masculinetautology, 44810.6 Thelimitsofwhy, 453Reproduced with permission of the
IV. WITTGENSTEINIANTIME(Philosophical Investigations)11. The Ontology of Time, 460
11.1Knowingtime, 46511.2 Inhabiting time, 47712. The 'I* in the Nature
ofPhilosophicalInvestigations, 49313. GrammaticalTime, 53213.1 Physiognomyofasoul,
53213.2 Understanding, or not, how not to go on, 54013.3 The theology o f
sentences, 556V. MACHINE TIME: THE SCIENCE OF BUILDING A FUTURE14. Machine Time,
57114.1. Constructing a Time Machine (the Self-Inductor) Limit between Cause and
Grammar, 571at the14.2 Time-machinelinguist, 57714.3 Generating the present from
language, 58014.4 A wink in time means two, 58814.5 "Be! Verb umprincipiant through
the trancitive spaces!", 58914.6 The logic o f short-term prediction, 59214.7 The
continuous future: hearing of and speaking in the newworldorder, 59414.8 Another
blueprint o f time, 59614.9 Mental imperialism: to make the world as mind, 59614.10
Time and the other, 59714.11 Looking for Mr. Goodmachine, 60014.12 Meta-temporal
identities: the modeling o f others as syntax,60114.13 Negative entropy, 60514.14
Re-building ourselves in the other, 60614.15 The pursuit o f death, 60814.16
Learning from the future, 60914.17 Inside a Chinese box, 61014.18 The I as the not-
I: Using the future to build other machines,61115. EPILOGUE: But what have I denied
the existence of?, 614 Bibliography, 616Reproduced with permission of the copyright
owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
AbbreviationsAll references to Finnegans Wake (abbreviated FW) in the following
dissertation are identifiedparentheticallybypageandlinenumber.
AllreferencestoPhilosophical Investigation (abbreviated PI) are identified
parenthetically by section number or where appropriatebypagenumber.
Otherworksfrequentlycitedareidentifiedparenthetically by the following
abbreviations:CPE BTDDNSBBEliot, T.S. The Complete Poems and Plays. NY: Harcourt,
Brace and Co., 1952.Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson. (NY: Harper and Row, 1962); Sein und Zeit.(Tubingen: Max Niemeyer,
1993) Where relevant references are identified by the page number in the English
translation, followed by the page number in the original German.. "The Thing". In
Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. NY: Harper, 1971; Vortrage
undAufsatze.Stuggart: Gunther Neske, 1954.1will refer to the German throughout, and
in specific cases will identify the German text as "Das Ding".Vico, Giambattista.
The New Science o f Giambattista Vico. Trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold
Fisch. Rev. ed. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984. References will be to paragraph number
and not page number.Wittgenstein,Ludwig. TheBlueandBrownBooks.Oxford:Basil
Blackwell, 1952.CV_________ _________________ . Culture and Value. Ed. G.H. Von
Wright with Heikki Nyman. Trans. Peter Winch. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.PGTLP
_________________ . Philosophical Grammar. Ed. R. Rhees. Trans. Anthony Kenny.
Berkeley: U o f California P, 1974._. "Philosophy" (Big Transcript) In
Philosophical Occasions, 1912-1951. Ed. J. Klagge and A. Nordmann. Indianapolis:
Hackett, Pub, 1993.. TractatusLogico-Philosophicus. Trans.C.K. Ogden. NY: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1922. References will be tosection number.Reproduced with
permission.
EtymologiesThe etymologies I use to interpret Finnegans Wake and to describe
aspects of our philosophical grammar were developed through consulting the
following works:Benveniste, Emile. Indo-European Language and Society. Trans.
Elizabeth Palmer. Coral Gables, Fla.: U ofMiami P, 1973.Buck, Carl Darling. A
Dictionary o fSelected Synonyms in the Principle Indo- European Languages. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1949.Gransaignes dHauterive, R. Dictionnaire des racines des
longues europeennes. Paris: Larousse, 1949.Liddell, H. G. and R. Scott. Greek-
English Lexicon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1871. Onians, R.B. The Origin o fEuropean
Thought about the Body, the Mind, theSoul, the World, Time, andFate. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1951. Onions, C.T. et al. The OxfordDictionary o fEnglish Etymology.
Oxford: OxfordUP, 1966.Oxford English Dictionary. Compact Ed. Oxford: Oxford UP,
1971.Partridge, Eric. Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary o f the English
Language. NY: Macmillan, 1959.Pokomy, Julius. Indogermanisches Etymologisches
Worterbuch. Bern, 1959. Williams, Raymond. Keywords. NY: Oxford UP, 1983.Reproduced
with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.
A Note on the Interpretation ofFinnegans WakeIn my interpretations ofFinnegans Wake
I have drawn on number of standard resources. These resources will not always be
cited specifically within the text when the information is o f a general nature:
James S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake: A Study o fLiterary Allusions in James
Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1974.AdalineGlasheen.
ThirdCensuso/"FinnegansWake:AnIndexoftheCharacters and Their Roles. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1977.Helmut Bonheim. A Lexicon o f the German in Finnegans Wake.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1967.Clive Hart. "Index of Motifs," in Structure cmdM
otifin Finnegans Wake. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1962, p. 211-47.Roland McHugh.
Annotations to Finnegans Wake. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1980.Louis O. Mink.
A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979. Brendan 0 Hehir. A
Gaelic Lexiconfor Finnegans Wake. Berkeley: U ofCaliforniaP, 1967.Brendan O Hehir
and John M. Dillon. A Classical Lexiconfo r Finnegans Wake. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1977.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
1Introduction: ConstructingaReplacementfortheSoulIn the following dissertation I
explore how literary art can function as a kind of cognitive philosophy. I begin
with the proposition that Artificial Intelligence programs, and the game worlds
they spawn, attempt to articulate an aesthetic with ontological force, poems to
blow our heads off. This possibility or promise frames my examination of Joyce's
Finnegans Wake, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, and my own description
o f a hypothetical machine I have designed that generates a fictional future within
which it figures itself. I analyze Finnegans Wake as a philosophical text, and
Wittgenstein'sPhilosophicalInvestigationsasdescribinganaesthetic. Bothtextsdonot
articulate a theory of meaning, but model meaning within what Wittgenstein calls
our"forms o f life," our attunement, as Stanley Cavell phrases it, within our
language, culture, history, psychology, biology, and so on. How is it possible for
human beings to inhabit this 'our' at all? How can I use an 'our' as mine? In
writing towards and at the limits of language, I am trying to speak an 'our' as our
species-being, and in this speaking enact the particularity o f meaning
instantiatied through my particular involvement in language. BothInvestigations and
the Wake explore the limits ofwhat it means to be human by examining how linguistic
meaning works through the interactions between sense and nonsense. Artificial
Intelligence programs embody one way of conceptualizing the limit of our humanity,
and as such embody an aesthetic, a failed aesthetic whose failure pressures the
relation between our inhabitation of time and meaning into a kind of clarity
nascent within both Finnegans Wake and Philosophical Investigations. The
theoretical machine I designReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
Further reproduction prohibited without permission.1
at the end o f my dissertation is meant to pressure the interpretive limit between
the animate and the inanimate and between sense and nonsense toward the ontological
limits described by causal languages. My dissertation is an attempt to describe the
ways in which such grammars determine what counts as human.In describing these
grammars I analyze how the shifting between language games, between sense and
nonsense, described and enacted within Finnegans Wake and
PhilosophicalInvestigationsarticulatesamultivalenttemporalsense. Thelimitsbetween
sense and nonsense construct a grammar oftemporality that is simultaneously a
literary aestheticandatheoryofmind.Timebecomesagrammaticaleffect. Thisconclusionnot
only challenges Heidegger's conception ofthe temporality ofDasein, it also suggests
the depth of our misunderstanding about how we function within various holisms
(from sentences to language games to our forms of life). In answer to this
misunderstanding I attempt to describe how the logic of human temporality and the
possibility o f language simultaneously enact each other as systems of
symbolization organizing the world and one's relationship to it. In chapters
devoted to various ways in which we confuse minds for worlds (theologically,
mechanically/ logically, and socially), I describe the ways in which the
ontological, or rather the criteria determining what counts as real, collapses into
modes of self-reflection. These modes ofself-reflection, the theological, the
mechanical, and the social, determine the limits of mind enacted in my three
'texts'. I describe thegrammar o f these modes in order to demonstrate how we
construct ourselves through the dynamic interaction o f our everyday and every
night uses o f language, and in their generation of our sense of time, of the
possibility of a future as an aesthetic.Reproduced with permission of the copyright
Such an aesthetic cannot entail the abandonment o f the claim truth exerts on our
self-descriptionsandsubjectiveexpressions. Wecannottakecareofourselveswithout
"truth".The man who seeks truth becomes a scholar; the man who wishes to act out
his subjectivity can become a writer; but what must be done by the man who seeks
that which lies between the two? (Robert Musil)I'm tempted to think Musil is being
funny, or at least ironic, when he asserts that a scholar seeks truth. But if we
take him seriously, and maybe replace "scholar" with "scientist," the anxiety in
which he finds himselfbecomes clear. Roughly, the truth Musil thinks the scholar
(or scientist, in my case) seeks is that which can be verified, that which can be
found and tested as an objective fact or principle, or if we want to extend
Popper's emendationtothispositivistnotionoftruth,thatwhichcanbefalsified. Thistruth
remains independent, at least in its ontological claims, o f meaning, the acting
upon or ordering o f the world within a subjective frame, construct, system, etc.
Certainly scientific "truth" serves and is used within a whole series of language
and ideological games, but its claims about the world, which are never meant to be
absolutely true, cannot speak to the significance o f these claims in relation to
our desire to justify our lives: in other words,you can use science to give meaning
to life but you cannot be scientific when you do this. The modem individual, the
man without qualities, is hamstrung between that which is true but meaningless and
that which is meaningful but false. The perception o f this seeming separation is
the foundational virus sparking literary modernism. Modernism could not domesticate
this anxiety. It remains unresolved, simply because literature and maybe all
without permission.3
the arts do not have the means to resolve it. One can easily reformulate this
anxiety back into any originary moment o f the modem (defined by different
disciplines or conceptualizations o f culture) that one thinks important. One o f
these, Descartes' Cogito ergo sum betrays the need, opened up by science and
materialism, to collapse the world
intoourownconsciousnesssuchthatthetruecanremainmeaningful. Thecostofthis attempt is
the seductiveness ofmodem skepticism, the generation of a self an identity, a
consciousness grounded in our knowing.A solution to the fear that what is
meaningful is not true is to somehow reconceive ourselves as objects within the
purview of science or scholarship, of "truth," and thus to make our attempts at
subjective ordering indirectly "true." Even in this solution, however, meaning
apparently has no ontological significance, only survival value. To give meaning or
art, as a subset of how we assert our subjective meanings, ontological force, one
must construct something that is subjectively meaningful and simultaneously true.
One must build a mind, which is to say that building a mind is a theological
exercise. One can indeed conceive of art, as Thomas Mann says in Dr. Faustus, "as
mind," both in its attempt to embody truth but also as a result of its own
necessary functioning within the possibility o f meaning defined by human
subjectivity. Musil, therefore, wants to be a kind of cognitive scientist, or he
wants, unbeknownst to himself to think within the domain of inquiry one might call
neuro-aesthetics, as much to indicate what it is not as what it existsbetween.Musil
finds himselfbetween Dilthey's Geisteswissenschaften andNaturwissenschaften,
resisting the drive to reduce the one to the other. Musil's desire toReproduced
permission.
think within a Naturgeisteswissenschaften, secure in its ontological claims without
appealing to substance (things) or socio-historical reality, has a history in
English. One could make a list and call it a genre, bearing some affinity to G.
Steiner's Pythagorean Genre and to Menippean Satire or Frye's Anatomy, and to
various attempts to construct a language game, or collection of such games,
somewhere between mind and world. These texts, however, articulate the interstices
between language games, including their own, and thus unwind themselves into the
limit of what counts as human; Thus they examine our
formoflifebygeneratingnewforms: TheAnatomyofMelancholy,Browne'sHydriotaphia, Urn
Burial, Cavendish's Blazing World, Wilkins' Mercury: Swift Messenger, Godwin's Man
in the Moone, Vico's New Science, Swift's A Tale o fa Tub,Sterne's Tristram Shandy,
Blake's The Four Zoas, Coleridge's Biographia Litteraria, Carlyle's Sartor
Resartus, Pater's Marius the Epicurean, Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Poe's tales,
Thoreau's Walden, Melville's "Bartleby," the essays ofEmerson and H. James,
Finnegans Wake, Meta-fiction, some modem Science Fiction, and Artificial
Intelligence programs. The members o f this literary genealogy translate,
transform, and negotiate with a comparable (but more central) set o f philosophical
texts in order to enter language throughtheseductionof(orresistanceto)metaphysics:
BrowneparleyswithDescartes; Cavendish trumps Descartes and Newton; Wilkins
translates Leibniz; Vico, Janus-faced, sits beside Spinoza, Sterne sexualizes
Locke; Coleridge and Carlyle lie through Kant, Schelling, ei al., Carroll points at
and teases Frege and Freud, and so on. These two strands enter into, and offer
themselves as displacements o f the attempt to mediate between the claims of
substance (things), of meaning (understanding, justification,Reproduced with
permission.
knowing, significance, going on, oflife, etc.), ofthe psyche (the inner/mental,
instinct, subjectivity), and o f temporality (objective, scientific, existential,
social, developmental, historical). I intervene in these claims through the
temptation toward nonsense, or maybe a certain kind o f mind-sickness, resisted,
exploited, lanced, and encouraged by Wittgenstein and Joyce (and, for me here,
Eliot, Heidegger, Thoreau, Dennett, Cavell, andB. Johnson).These literary and
philosophical texts can form a complicated 'genre' if they areunderstood to ask the
question 'Can one construct a philosophy of mind from literary aesthetics?' This
question can seem obvious, a kind oftraditional truism that seems to
neednoexplanationasitseemsnottoforAbramswhenhewritesin TheMirrorandthe Lamp that
"In any period, the theory of mind and the theory of art tend to be integrally
relatedandtoturnuponsimilaranalogues,explicitorsubmerged"(69). Orthisquestion can
seem surprising, as if the demands of a theory of mind to attach logic to biology
overwhelm the problems of fiction or even the possibilities of meaning. Both the
surprise and the ordinariness ofthis question should surprise us. Finnegans Wake
andPhilosophicalInvestigationsenactthissurprise. Theyeachfunctionascomplementary
limit cases o f each other in the investigation and enactment o f the limits o f
aesthetics as the limits ofmind, and ofthe limits ofmind as the limits
ofaesthetics. The relation between mind and art, configured as Abrams shows in
similar analogies and metaphors (wax tablet, mirror, lamp, etc.), exposes how we
inhabit our biology and our language. Exploring this inhabitation means describing
the limit between sense and nonsense as a
formofourbeing(notasonlyananalogyormetaphor). TheanalogiesbetweenmindandReproduced
permission.6
art, therefore, should be seen as symptoms and riddles about the problem o f
meaning as it constitutes our ontological commitments. The following chapters
attempt to listen to and respond to these symptoms and riddles, with the
recognition that the ontological status of
bothaesthetics(literature)andphilosophiesofmindmustbejustifiedinanewway. The
descriptive power o f science and the translations o f these descriptions into
technologychallenges the status of the analogies between mind and aesthetics in a
way that displaces the implied symmetry o f Abrams' description. The ontological
status o f interpretative analogies is not equivalent to the causal relations
described in cognitive science.Geometry infects the mind as well as metaphor. The
ciphers organizing the mind run not to circles, but for the moment can stand as two
overlapping (?), congruent(?), tangent(?) ellipses, in some metaphoric non-
Euclidean geometry, one wrapped around a region whose primary focus is Sense and
the other whose primary focus is Nonsense. The region o f nonsense is bounded by
Finnegans Wake and the region o f sense by Philosophical Investigations. In each
case the ellipse includes at its farthest extreme the locus o f the other ellipse.
Sense and nonsense, themselves, should only serve as deictic markers of structures,
interpretations, possibilities, actions, and functionings whose form and meaning
prove intractable.The Wake and Investigations operate and articulate a self-
reflexive language that resists collapsing the mental into analogies of substance,
and yet they both retain an ontological claim on our attention. This is only
possible to the degree that these works offer themselves as limits within which the
transformation o f nonsense into sense (or the reverse) describes the temporal
pressure which pushes understanding a sentence intoReproduced with permission of
the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
understanding a life (our own). The limits of language explored in the Wake and
Investigations, therefore, mediate the relation between how to go on in life, the
justification we ordinarily call the meaning o f life, but maybe the sense o f life
that prevents us from pressuring our answers too seriously, and how to go on with
words, how to go on reading, talking, listening, understanding. The description o f
how words mean within particular language games determines the kinds of claims we
can make when we use these words. Weleamhowtoapplythesewordstoourcommitments.
Finnegans Wake dissolves sense into the temporality of being. Sense, as a (or the)
form o f consciousness, remains, but under the ontological dominance o f temporal
change and our, as Joyce calls it, "infrarational senses." Wittgenstein, in
Investigations, dissolves temporality into sense. The aesthetics and logics ofthe
repressed or disguised terms, sense in the Wake and temporality in Investigations,
build different forms of unconsciousness within these texts, complementary but
polarized forms o f mind and worlds. Wittgenstein pulls his investigation toward
the pole of sense, articulating the logic o f language games as a way o f
restricting nonsense, but not as a way o f denying nonsense
anddoubt,butratherasawayofmoderatingtheseundertheaspectofsense. Conversely,
Finnegans Wake delimits sense by stretching its language into nonsense. The Wake
approaches what Barbara Johnson calls poetry, "the repository o f knowledge about
the resistance o f language to intentional dissolution. And 'absolute randomness'
is the outer limit of that resistance" (7). Wittgenstein assumes that philosophy
investigates the grammar o f 'is' and Joyce assumes that literature investigates
the grammar o f 'mean[ing]\ The limit of resistance that Johnson describes,
however, not only configures thatReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
randomness as meaningful (as resistance), but undoes meaning or identity or the
world as mine or yours or ours. The loss ofintentionality, the aboutness of our
language, our involvement in a world as our world, means the dissolution o f the
interpretative functions of consciousness. The randomness of "intentional
dissolution" is not necessarily the randomness o f a chaotic world, the failure o f
cause and effect. It may mean this or it may not. We may simply be asleep or have
suffered brain damage or have returned to some earlier stage o f primate evolution
or have died. Interpretation might make causal explanations visible and possible,
but it does not constitute the world into a proximate causal order.If this outer
limit is the inhuman, the transcendent point toward which skepticism drives, then
our machines seem to offer transport beyond the phenomenal limits of our knowing.
De Man, Cavell, and Lacan all say as much. Technology would serve as a symptom
through which we discover that the brain is the seat of intelligence and not the
heart. Machines, and the formalisms animating them, reform our analogies within an
increasingly more grounded ontological faith: our analogies gain power not through
ourbelief, but through their greater intimacy with the substance (means) through
which we act. Artificial Intelligence programs, in this sense, and more in their
potential than actuality, read us, and not we them, as the limit o f the inhuman, a
limit through which we re-interpret ourselves, constructing fundamental othemess as
particular philosophical- aesthetics. This is the way to proceed toward a link
between meaning and mind through doubting and belief: "His hearing is indoubting
just as my seeing is onbelieving" (FW 468.15-16).
Therationalityof'intelligentprograms'andthenonsenseoftheWakeReproduced with
permission.9
function as, what Wittgenstein called "objectfs] ofcomparison": 'Tor we can avoid
ineptness or emptiness in our assertions only by presenting the model as what it
is, as an object o f comparison --as, so to speak, a measuring rod; not a
preconceived idea to which reality must correspond" (PI?131). Not all measuring
rods, however, are measuring rods.Hearing, and not seeing, that is, doubting,
means, with a Heraclitian like aplomb, recognizing time; And thus we are again in
the Wake:hearing in this new reading o f the part whereby, because o f Dyas in his
machina, the new garrickson's grimacing grimaldism hypostasised by substintuation
the axiomatic orerotundity. . . could simply imagine themselves in their bosom's
inmost core, aspro tem locums, timesported acorss the yawning (abyss) (FW55.34-
56.05).Thus we find Artificial Intelligence close to (if not in) Finnegans Wake,
even in the difficulty we might have in going on as we read. Joyce writes not only
as the kind of cognitive scientist Musil wants to be, he puts together a text which
unwinds us into the "between" truth and meaning. In a letter to Ms. Weaver, his
publisher, he writes"I am really one of the greatest engineers, if not the
greatest, in the world besides being a musicmaker, philosophist and heaps of other
things. All the engines I know are wrong. Simplicity. I am making an engine with
only one wheel. No spokes o f course, The wheel is a perfect square."This
engineering means "[w]e seek the Blessed One, the Harbourer-cum-Enheritance"
(FW264.08-09; an entrance into and inheritance of [L ens] being our own human
inheritance, the condition for our own blessedness. This condition he calls "Ever
a-going,Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
prohibited without permission.10
ever a-coming. Between a stare and sough" (FW264.10-11; sough: moaning sigh,swamp).
"There's a split in the infinitive from to have to have been to will be" (FW271.21-
2). Thisplace,this'there,'between'to',agrammaticalmarkerofintentional force,
expressing the form o f desire or will or action, and the verbal complex o f
possession ('have') and being ('been,' 'be') and possibility ('will': as if
possibility opposes possession) is the "Harbourer-cum-Enheritance": the human being
as a non-substantialnexus formed in place, becoming, beside, preserving itself as
its own history.Modem literature, I think, should be understood as a continuing
response to adeveloping mechanical materialism and its implications. Finnegans Wake
is a point, as Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus, where "solipsism strictly
carried out coincides with pure realism" (5.64). Literary history also
demonstrates, as does the move from empiricism to skepticism and idealism, the
inverse. The temptation toward stylistic solipsism (where form is content, and thus
a kind of linguistic collapse into subjectivity) betrayed by modernist literature
arises not simply as a development o f symbolism and as a reaction against science
(toward pleasure, as in Poe, or meaning, as in Eliot), but through strictly
carrying out literary realism, as seen in Joyce's move from Dubliners to and within
Ulysses and into the Wake. Finnegans Wake collapses reality into an "extensionless
point", or "non-psychological I", or, as Joyce calls it, "world, mind." This point
of embodiment represents the end o f literature. It is in this sense that Finnegans
Wake also points toward the more fully embodied aesthetic o f what Artificial
Intelligence promises.We should at least ask what kind ofliterature can withstand
the leverage exerted by a materialism so thoroughgoing as to dissolve the soul, or
what might be left of our belief inReproduced with permission of the copyright
immaterial essence, and then remain aesthetic, protecting what we understand as the
"immateriality" of meaning, of our minds, and ofour attachments?We might not
recognize Finnegans Wake as art; we might not know what it is or does. In many ways
it is not a work o f art, but rather a text which requires one to create
orgenerateanaestheticthroughwhichandinwhichitwillberecognizedandfunction. It re-
enacts not our everyday experience, nor the ordinariness o f our being awake, but
the everynight experience and the ordinariness of our being asleep. It is literally
a mind in a vat in which the controls organizing the coherency of its input have
failed and exposed the mind's mediated relation to the world, to that which
controls this input (a demon, a god, ourselves?).The unit o f coherence in the Wake
should be defined not as a sentence as such, but as a statement which
simultaneously functions as a locally relevant sentence and an
illustrative(?)orinterpretative(?)recapitulationoftheWakeitself. Inotherwords,the
nonsense ofthe words gains meaning not as language about anything other than
themselves as a continual form of self-justification. The Wake rewrites knowledge
claims as value claims in order to construct being or a selfor a text as an
axiological matrix that can function with ontological force.An artificial
intelligence program is, even if it fails, a form o f art in the way that
FinnegansWakeisaformofart. Ifeachattemptstorepresentandembody(tobecome)a
formofmind,thentheyeachalsofunctionasakindofmetaphysicsortheology. Artificial
Intelligence, as embodied theology, attempts to construct whatever used to be
called spirit within the mechanical logic of scientific materialism and
mathematics. This is at least oneReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
way o f explicating Vico's definition o f art as that which "does its utmost to
give a body to spirit" (Scienza nuovapr. bk. iii, chp 26). AI, therefore, attempts
to transform a language into an ontological aesthetic, to give a language
ontological force. I f we accept Wittgenstein's caution not to organize our
descriptions ofthe mind as ifit were an immaterial body, then the Cartesian
mind/body problem is replaced by the problematic relation between soul and being,
soul and God, that is more like the theological puzzles concerning the soul that
Aquinas considered.Finnegans Wake attempts to construct a grammar determined by
ontological commitmentsthatarenotafunctionofrepresentingthingsandsubstances.
TheWake's non-substantive ontological commitments are (an) aesthetic. Thus,
articulating the logic, or the demands ofthis aesthetic, constitutes a grammar, or
a set of shifting grammars, of an inner mental life-world, invoking our everyday
life not only through our night-time experience but as an experiment on and within
the sleep-generated fall into skepticism and intermittent idealism.I do not mean to
suggest that we should think in opposition to science in the way that Heidegger
attempts in his later work; the demand, instead, is to think through and as a
function of the materialism that defines the limit of any ontological claim. We can
make differing,butnotopposing,ontologicalclaims.
Ifartoffers,asBeckettassertsinMolloy, the "laws ofthe mind", what can we discover
about the logic oftheir formation, the significance of their form, their etiology,
meaning, continuity, hopefulness, effect if we acceptorconsiderthisoffer?
TheselawsarenotmonumentsofamentalHammurabi.Our brain works without a homunculus
operating the levers. The unity of mind thatReproduced with permission of the
copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.13
allows for a directed and effective response to stimuli, even in animals with
rudimentary brains,isafiction,avirtualunity,abiologicalaesthetic.
This,ofcourse,pointstoboth some idea o f a priori categories and to the
physiological pre-conditions for vision, language, taste, etc. But it also allows
one to ask in what way does how we use words depend on how our brain uses words, on
how our brains use us using words? From within our biology and our form of life,
the functional unity of mind and language, as an aesthetic, exists as a response to
the pressures our thinking, consciousness, planning, doubting, making exerts on
instinct, desire, physiological needs and so on. We cannot enter into our biology
through the portal o f this unity o f mind; but we can respond to it.
Werespondbytyingourselvestoandseparatingourselvesfromthisbiology. Our making ofthe
world, ofour perception, out ofwhatever given or set ofcategories one imagines,
seems unable to capture our own making (I mean also our own biological making) even
if others like ourselves inhabit our made worlds. Self-reflection, however, builds
all sorts o f meanings derived and dependent on not only who we are but what we
are. One might sideline this "what we are", or one might answer it, if one could
self- reflect outside of knowing. Wittgenstein sets up aesthetic barriers to
protect his separation of grammar from phenomena, moibus-strip twisting us back
into our practices and our being (how should one understand the interaction and
difference between beingand identity in the Investigations?). In order to pressure
grammatical analysis into the aesthetics of our temporality, I will constructs the
limits and interaction between sense and nonsense along one of the axes
Wittgenstein uses to map our form of life, whose ends are marked by the sentences
"Understanding a sentence is more akin to understanding a themeReproduced with
permission.
in music than one may think" and "The human body is the best picture o f the human
soul". Why does Wittgenstein invoke the musical and visual, appeal to metaphors o f
the metaphoric at these limits, as expressions reflecting back toward language? Our
misuse of words pushes us not only into confusion, but into art. How are these
aesthetic appeals like his assertion in the Blue Book that "[a]s part of the system
of language, one may say, the sentence has life" (5)? What justifies Wittgenstein's
attempt to limit our inquiry into the logic determining a form of life by these two
curious appeals to art, justifying these limits aesthetically?Poetry, in all its
complexity, even in its modernist distortion, is not opposed to or
leftoutofordinarylanguage. Literaryartarticulatesthedifferentconstituentlevels,the
barely conscious aspects present in varying degrees and kinds in our ordinary
language. Wittgenstein points to this, although in an unfortunate two-level image,
as surface grammar and depth grammar. It is between surface and depth that we
create our different kinds o f sense and nonsense. One should speak not o f depth
grammar, but o f a complex set o f depth grammars. It is the logic and the
aesthetics generated out o f these depth grammars, as they invoke and distort our
surface grammar and as they turn about each other, that describes the limits ofwhat
counts as a mind. These limits of mind function as symptoms o f an aesthetic
prejudice. The shifting between language games, the waxing and waning of our form
of life in describing a limit of mind enacts through these changes amultiplicity o
f times. This enactment is the form o f our being within the world. What is the
relation of this Wittgensteinian aesthetic (the limits of the human) with the
aesthetic animating Finnegans Wake, with the interaction between time and language
brought out inReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
reproduction prohibited without permission.15
the failure o f Artificial Intelligence, in general, and the weakness o f
Heidegger's construction o f being toward the future and toward a thing?My
dissertation is structured as a kind of dialogue between Finnegans Wake and
PhilosophicalInvestigations. In any such exchange the question ofwhat counts as
such a dialogue is continually reformulated. I find myselftrying to write in an
idiom that allows Finnegans Wake and Investigations to make a kind of mutual sense,
with the attending dangeroflosingsensealtogether.
Thisdialogueisdirectedatthelogicalformalisms underlying Artificial Intelligence and
more specifically at the causal mechanisms I describe inmytheoreticalmachine.
Oneofmyconclusionsisthatsuchadialogue,sodirected, describes a theology, that is,
the articulation of the semantic limits of our language and mind as ontologically
significant. That is to say that in all three o f these texts aesthetics functions
with theological import. I read Modernism, and its investigation of our language,
as an attempt to construct a self-consuming calculus or machine that will write the
world as poetry.An engagement with these texts cannot take the form o f an
argument. Interpretations have no ground: "every interpretation together with what
is being interpreted, hangs in the air: the former cannot give the latter any
support" (PI ?198). Interpretations,consequently,requirecontinualjustification.
Wecanevaluateboththesejustifications and the ontological efficacy o f the
interpretations themselves (experiment in science is one way o f doing this). One
must work not only to avoid confusing allegories (and other interpretive apparatus)
for causal descriptions, but also to avoid confusing interpretations for meanings.
If literature and its study and philosophy are involved in theReproduced with
permission.16
problem o f meaning they should, at least, operate in the confusion between meaning
and interpretation.I imagine the ideal commentary on Finnegans Wake would be to
interpret a set of texts as interpretations ofthe Wake, without mentioning or
including the Wake. This would be a way o f writing toward Finnegans Wake as a
limit, itself. I am not writing such a commentary, but I am attempting to think and
write towards and at the limits of language described by Finnegans Wake,
Philosophical Investigations, Heidegger's "Das Ding", Eliot's The Waste Land and a
number of secondary texts. All of these texts generate ontologies o f fragments,
condensations o f time, localized and shifting temporal- series: jug-time in
Hiedegger, um-time in Keats, subjunctive-time in Eliot, language-game and
philosophical time in Wittgenstein, between-time in Joyce. These fragments o f time
describe in various ways models of animation as expressions of the limits between
sense and nonsense, mind and world, the animate and the inanimate, and so on.I will
use myselfand a plethora oftexts to speak for other texts, for other people, for
myself, and for machines. I am neither speaking in my voice nor letting these texts
speakintheirs,norevenventriloquizingwiththesetexts. Icontinuallyaskwhetherany
language is mine or whether any text means anything that is more than fantasy. It
might seem that I am trying to speak and write as an 'our', as some ill-defined
expression o f the humanspecies.
Anyofusmightspeakthisway,appealtoourhumanityinthewayan ordinary language
philosopher might appeal to his or her language. But such a use of 'our' is as
problematic as an 'I' or 'you' or 'he', 'she', and 'it'. I can speak from neither a
subjective (except temporally) nor an objective position, but towards and in
relation toReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
both,adjudicatingtheirclaimsonmeorusoranyone. IfIwritebetweenmyselfandthese texts,
then I am trying to figure this 'between' as an inhabitation fit for an 'our'
figured in relation to the limits o f sense and being that emerge under the
pressure o f thinking.This thinking has set up a complex pattern o f ocean currents
and winds. Theological currents course through interlaving Aristotelian and Pre-
Socratic currents. Music and opera move both above and below throughout troubling
especially the waters of my discussions of Wittgenstein and The Waste Land.
Cognitive science currents swirl around everything as do literary winds and the
tides o f analytic philosophy and so on. Reading becomes a way o f sailing.While
operating in this confusion literature and philosophy must acknowledge that while
we must write toward (and in relation to) the metaphysics o f science, the
ontological limits it describes, they are not sciences. We cannot pretend that
their are any binding rulesonthekindofinterpretation(s)artdemands.
Interpretationrequirescontinualself- reflection because, in large degree, its
claims are unbounded and thus meaningless. We must understand how this nonsense
works both in relation to meaning, let's say the use of words within language games
and our form(s) of life, and determines what kind of claim it can legitimately make
on us.Meaning embodies ontological claims, at least through the semantics o f 'to
be'. J.L. Austin argued in "A Plea for Excuses" that "[wjhen we examine what we
should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are looking again
not merely at words (or 'meanings' whatever they may be) but also at the realities
we use words to talk about: we are using sharpened awareness ofwords to sharpen our
perception of, thoughReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
not as final arbiter of, phenomena"(130). Interpretation requires both
justification for its claims(thelogicofitsallegory)anditsapplication(itsscope).
Thusonecanproducea literary philosophy by investigating the semantics o f 'to be'
within the procedures and structures o f self-reflection or self-forgetting that
enact the justification o f the limits o f meaning and interpretation.My initial
question, 'Can I construct a mind out o f aesthetics?,' should be modified,
therefore, into something like three questions: How are literary aesthetics
implicated as a form ofmind through a description ofthe grammar ofhow temporality
(our negotiation between sense and nonsense) is embodied as the logic animating
self- reflexive language games?; how are our ontological commitments enacted,
described, and undermined in this grammar?; and what is the role ofjustification in
enacting and determining the limits, interrelation, and confusions between meaning
and interpretation?The construction of a mind within the specific language games
leading to Artificial Intelligence programs is an attempt to give art enough
ontological force to justify itself withinthelogicofscientificmaterialism.
Anontologicaljustificationofartisamind,a principle of animation determining what
can function as a form of life. How do we function between meaning and
interpretation? Confronting this question requires putting the legitimacy of
literature, philosophy, and cognitive science at risk: "Working in philosophy --
like work in architecture in many respects - is really more a working on oneself.
On one's own interpretation. On one's own way of seeing things. (And what one
expects ofthem)" (CV16e).11Augustine, in De Trinitate, pursues a language of
thought directed, through the Bible, towards God: Search is a striving for
discovery, which is the same things as finding; and things found are as it were
"brought forth" -w e remember the connection between the Latin words partus and
without permission.
repartus--andsocomparablewithanoffspring. Thebringingforthcanonlybeintheknowledge
itself,wheretheyare(aswemaysay)shapedandformed... Accordinglywemaysaythatthe mind's
"bringing forth" is preceded by a kind of striving, by which, in the seeking and
finding of what we desire to know, knowledge is bom as an offspring. (IX)If such a
search could not be directed toward God but only toward facts, others, language,
and interpretations, what kind o f knowledge would be produced?:Suppose you came as
an explorer into an unknown country with a language quite strange to you. rebelled
against.them, and so on?The common behavior o f mankind is the system o f reference
by means o f which we interpret an unknown language. (PI? 206)Anyone can find
anyplace, any person, or any text foreign, and on another day, in another mood find
this sameplace,person,ortextsoordinaryastodissolveintoobviousness.
PhilosophicalInvestigations, Finnegans Wake, and Artificial Intelligence programs
all describe ways o f negotiating, mediating, facilitating, and resisting this
oscillation between confusion and clarity, between the visibility and transparency
o f what Joyce calls the "world, mind".Reproduced with permission of the copyright
owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.20
IFRAGMENTS: FROM SOUL-MAKING TO PERSON-MAKINGReproduced with permission of the
2From Soul-making to Person-Making'Is it possible for a machine to think?' (whether
the action o f this machine can be described and predicted by the laws of physics
or possibly, only by laws of a different kind applying to the behavior o f
organisms). And the trouble which is expressed in this question is not really that
we don't know a machine whichcould do the job. The question is not analogous to
that which someone might have asked a hundred years ago: 'Can a machine liquefy
gas?' the trouble is rather that the sentence, 'A machine thinks (perceives,
wishes)' seems somehow nonsensical. It is as though we had asked 'Has the number 3
a color?'. (BB47)Wittgenstein pictures being human under the aspect of what he
calls a form of life, or rather the complex o f language games, activities,
history, biology, culture, and so on that constitutes humans as humans:
"Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part o f our natural
history as walking, eating, drinking, playing" (PI?25). In this he imagines our
humanness as a semantic function (what it is to be human is what it means to be
human) under the ontological aspect ofthe self-limiting totality ofthis humanness
as determiningallpossibleactions. Thisisnotaconfusionorhypostatizationofsemantic
categories into ontological concepts ofthe kind that Wittgenstein demythologizes
(understanding, time, meaning, and so on). It is a theological claim like "We
cannot imaginethe'reality'ofGod."
'Thinking','perceiving',and'wishing'functiononlywithinNotes for this chapter begin
on page 60.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
our form o f life through our participation in, inhabitation within and use o f
language (games).Our problem is not how to identify an intelligent machine. Such an
epistemological question might be answered by the behavioristic Turing test, where
the ability o f a machine to fool a human into thinking it also is a human would
determine the successorfailureoftheprogram.
Aconsciousmachine,however,wouldbeamachine which would mistake us as a form of
itselfj within its own, and not our, form of life. The question we can ask that can
lead us to artificial intelligence, therefore, is "Could a machine o f'kind X'
mistake us for a machine o f'kind X'?", where what it means to be recognized or
'mistaken for' can be established by observation (of machine Xs) as an
interpretation o f their behavior. Calling this machine species 'kind X', labeling
it a member of a species is already to picture these machines within our systems of
understanding and representation. Attempting to describe such 'kind X' machines
generates a kind o f nonsense equivalent to that generated by let's say Aquinas'
attempts to prove (and hence describe) God's existence. This kind o f nonsense
might seem to be a- something-else-besides-sense:nonsenseastranscendence.
Such'descriptions',however, are rational meditations on the relation between our
thinking and being and the limit of this thinking and being understood as dependent
on that limit.A meditation on God, on the possibility that interpretation, the
demands of intentionality, teleology, and allegory, constitutes the world, can look
identical to a meditation on the inanimate, on the possibility that there exists no
possibility or that causes (evenifonlyexplanations)constitutethemindasaneffect.
Thesetwopossibilities,Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
interpretation after the fact in relation to putative final causes and the
description o f proximate causes, together describe a machine, the inanimate
defined through function (teleology) and functioning (causes: mechanisms), and
together describe art, the inanimate definedthroughfunctionandfunctioning.
Thispictureofmachinesandartarepicturesof us: our form(s) of mind, our identity, our
mind, our being Darwinian machines and human beings, beholden to measures and
qualities.The failure to justify the limits o f interpretation (God) and o f
causation (mechanics) can be survived by making and interpreting ourselves toward
those limits. But nothing may count as such a making and interpreting. Cognitive
philosophy under one aspect, Theology under another, Literature under a third
promise this making and interpreting, but such promises must be justified. We have
no intelligible language with which to speak about art which does not risk
constructing itself as a form o f mind, and, therefore, as a pseudo-mechanism, as
nonsense.If I ask seriously 'Can a machine mistake us . . . ? ' how would I begin
to answer that question? If I transmute 'Can I a machine mistake us . . . ? ' into
'How can we make a machine o f "kind X' mistake us for a machine o f "kind X '?', I
would already be pursuing a methodology: we can know what we can make, therefore,
we must make what we want to know. Kurt Godel, in explaining his philosophical
work, described philosophy as the analysis o f concepts, and science as the use o f
these same concepts. Engineering philosophy into a machine, a philosophy machine,
while at least a terrifying proposal (and useful as such), allows us to reconceive
and merge Godel's distinction between philosophyReproduced with permission of the
and science within a model o f thinking where the analysis o f concepts,
categories, and logics follows from their construction and use in an evolving
machine (see chapter 14).In his essay on "The Influence ofDarwin on Philosophy,"
Dewey pictures the possibilities o f thought circumscribed by the limits o f being
described by evolution:Once admit that the sole verifiable or fruitful object o f
knowledge is the particular set of changes that generate an object of study
together with the consequences that then flow from it, and no intelligible question
can be asked about what, but assumption, lies outside. (311)Joyce also describes
this Darwinian limit:The thing is he must be put strait on the spot, no mere
waterstichystuff in a selfinade world that you can't believe a word he's written
in, not for pie, but one's only owned by natural rejection. Charley, your my
darwing! So sing they sequent theassentofman.
Tilltheygoroundiftheygoroundagainbeforebreakpartsand all dismissed. (FW252.24-28)
Thisisapictureofscientificconstraint("putstraitonthespot"). Evolutiondescribesthe
relation between the inanimate and the animate through the rules o f scientific
epistemology and constructs as part o f this epistemology the rules and
possibilities for how any living being is made. These rules of transformation are
directed at the facts describing theworld.
Ahistoryabouthowanyonecametobe(atwhateverlevelofcomplexity),despite whatever
ideological or axiological assumptions and patterns underlying it, exhibits forms
of being whose status must be determined. Thus, it is easier to write a history of
a person (whose ontological status is relatively stable), than it is a history o f
literature when this isReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
not understood as the history o f book, but the history o f meaning figured as both
a particular text and functioning and created within or by the general forms of a
number of totalities: language, society, ideology, biology and so on. How does one
determine the relation between any particular and any whole when the ontological
status o f the particular is always at stake? The self-reflection on the
ontological status o f the units within any history or grammar is not a species of
historiography or science, but a semantics of remaking what counts into what
matters, in Joycean terms an 'evoluation', a story of
becomingthatisfundamentallyastoryofevaluation. Butanystory,asastory,willbe
meaningless outside of our application of it to an aspect of our world (as a story
of recognition). How do we find ourselves in a story? Such an application, however,
requires a theory justifying the correlation of a theory (or allegory) with our
experience. Darwin's power is partly a function of our necessary involvement within
the picture of becoming (both o f what is real and what something is). The
controversy surrounding it is alsoafunctionofthisnecessaryinvolvement.
Thereisadifferenceinfindingoneselfina story and finding oneselfas a story. How do
we find ourselves as a story?Wittgenstein, by and large, rejected the relevance o f
scientific discovery (specifically Darwin's) to the conceptual work of philosophy,
the analysis of how we use language and configure ourselves within this usage (the
grammar). Wittgenstein's understanding o f philosophical grammar was primarily
normative, and thus contingent on particular normative standards, but without a
clear picture of how grammars change. Similarly while he recognized, and he
himselfwas engaged in, the construction of new language games and new grammars, he
did not analyze or describe this process ofReproduced with permission of the
creation. This was partly because the philosophical problems arose when one either
operated outside of a coherent grammar (or language game) or when the application
of a grammar (a usage or interpretation) was not seen to be nonsense.
Wittgenstein's relatively static picture of grammar made it difficult for him to
appreciate the philosophical significanceofDarwin.
AlthoughIwillnotexaminethissignificanceinanydetailinthis dissertation, the
interaction between ontological and identity claims in Darwin opens up the problem
of self-reflection in its theological dimension (a dimension which also collapses
ontology and identity into grammar).In Finnegans Wake evolution underlies the
process ofbecoming and dissolution, in both its moral and epistemological
dimension, that organizes our pictures ofthe night, in the same way that Vico's New
Science, the Egyptian Book o f the Dead, Freud's Interpretation o fDreams do. HCE,
one of the central 'figures' in Finnegans Wake, is himself"a theory none to
rectiline ofthe evoluation ofhuman society and a testament of
therocksfromalldeaduntosometheliving"(FW73.31-33). Evolutionincludesan evaluation,
at least an ontological commentary on the dead from which anybody and everybody
came: matter has been educated through what we call evolution. Such a commentary is
'ontological' because such a process produces whatever is-real, and the success o f
such a production acts as an ontological comment, even judgment. This ontological
language, o f course, can only 'say' existence and 'betray' absence or extinction.
It is not a 'language' that anyone must understand, but is an education that we all
enact and embody.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
Science expresses a negative metaphysical fact: a description o f ontological
limits without foundations. Hilary Putnam describes the loss o f foundations
attending science:Science is wonderful at destroying metaphysical answers, but
incapable of providing substitute ones. Science takes away foundations without
providing a replacement. Whetherwewanttobethereornot,sciencehasputusinaposition o f
having to live without foundations. It was shocking when Nietzsche said this, but
today it is commonplace; our historical position--and no end to it is in sight --
is that o f having to philosophize without 'foundations'. (24)If science destroys
metaphysical answers and cannot provide substitutes, in what sense is the atomic
bomb a 'metaphysical fact'? Science, or rather the enactment of scientific knowing
in technology, enacts ontological limits, not within its descriptions of the world,
but in the way these descriptions correlate the world in relation to itself. Putnam
unconsciously recognizes this metaphysical force when he writes 'whether you want
to be there or not," an acknowledgment of ontological limits determining our
possibilities, even if not in an absolute sense (an allegory of self-annihilation).
We replace foundations with limits in relation to which we correlate ourselves. We
function and exist within systems from which we cannot exit, and these systems
determine what counts as animate, conscious and human. The threat that these
systems will determine our animation, consciousness and humanity as inanimate, as
deterministic fictions, and as inhumane is the great theme ofFinnegans Wake and,
after it, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow:Reproduced with permission of the
The war does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even o f the sort the
Germans have engineered, ein V olk ein Fuhrer--it wants a machine o f many separate
parts, not oneness, but a complexity.. . . Yet who can presume to say what the War
wants, so vast and aloof is i t . . . so absentee. Perhaps the War isn't even an
awareness--not a life at all, really. (Gravity's Rainbow, 152)Technology enacts
proximate causes through the process of its function and functioning. Such
functioning describes a localized teleology, what Joyce called an "odium
teleologicum" (L. odium theologicum) a hatred o f theological teleology (FW264.04-
05). The War might also only look like God. "[0]ur silent passing into the
machineries of indifference" (482) means our translation into a fragment within a
system defined by its functionandfunctioning.
Gravity'sRainbowunderstandsthisseductiontobeadiscovery about how we enter and exit
the world: "Whether you believe or not, Empty or Green, cunt-crazy or politically
celibate, power-playing or neutral, you had a feeling --a suspicion, a latent wish,
some hidden tithe out ofyour soul, something--for the Rocket" (784). Resistance is
hardly the point, although it can seem like all that is left to being human, but
even this might be describing a technique (and thus the effort Heidegger puts in
re-defining techne). Resisting the "beckoning" of the rocket, Pokier "hunted, as a
servowith a noisy input will, across Zero, between the two desires, personal
identity and impersonalsalvation"(473). Thisisnotaproofofanything,butamodemproverb.
2.1 Personal identity and impersonal salvationIn an essay saving Hume from the
claim that he had separated 'is' from 'ought', Alasdair MacIntyre links "what is
good and right" with "what we need and desire", countering the Kantian translation
of morality into formalism:We could give a long list ofthe concepts which can form
such bridge notions between "is" and "ought": wanting, needing, desiring, pleasure,
happiness, health-- and these are only a few. I think there is a strong case for
saying that moral notions are unintelligible apart from concepts such as these
(Against the Self-Images o f the Age, 120)Part ofthe special status ofthe words
'wanting', 'needing', 'desiring', 'pleasure', 'happiness', 'health' is the way they
mean, as interpretations of our stances toward the world, others, and ourselves.
These interpretations are, then, posited as internal states or somehow constitutive
o f who we are.In "God and the Theologians", MacIntyre describes "a whole group of
theologies which have retained a theistic vocabulary but acquired an atheistic
substance" (,Against, 23) He argues that "we have no language to express common
needs, hopes, and fears that go beyond the immediacies o f technique and social
structure. What we do have is a
religiouslanguage,whichsurviveseventhoughwedonotknowwhattosayinit. Sinceit is the
only language we have for certain purposes it is not surprising that it cannot be
finally discarded. But since we have no answers to give to the questions we ask in
i t , it remains continually in need o f reinterpretation, reinterpretation that is
always bound toReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
fail.. .within theological discourse, as Feurbach and Marx saw, we are bound to
remain blind to the human significance of theological discourse" (23). The confused
use of theological language to express an atheistic content, as a mask for the
failure o f both atheism and religion, has been transplanted into literature both
in ideological criticism (in which moral prejudices are disguised) and in versions
o f the symbolist faith in 'art for art's
sake,'anidentificationofthedeepestinhumanlifewithart. Thisisamasquethat Geoffrey
Hill recognizes: "The major caveat which I would enter against a theological view o
f literature is that, too often, its is not theology at all, but merely a
restatement o f the neo-Symbolist mystique celebrating verbal mastery" ("Poetry as
'Menace' and 'Atonement', 17). What would constitute an adequate theology? Such a
question has nothing to do with doing science, but it can only be answered in
relation to the ontological limits enacted in science. Artificial Intelligence
attempts to work out of the mental, phenomenological, qualitative, and intentional
in relation to the requirements o f scientific determinism, the demands of the
rationality or logical coherence of the world. Cognitive science investigates the
relation between quality and quantity, when quantity describes a common limit
between our knowing and the world. I will say nothing about the possible success of
such an endeavor. Its form, as I describe it here, however, retains the same
structure as the theological picture of the mind as the soul. One can at least say
that cognitive science is directed toward the same limit that theology has figured
as between humansandGod. Cognitivescienceunderstoodasatheologyofmindisadescendentof
what Coleridge called, in Biographia Literaria, a "Genuine Philosophic Poem" (156),
a poem that enacts our moral stances as ontological commitments.Reproduced with
permission.30
In Finnegans Wake, pursuing a Don Juan scene o f seduction, Juan (a version o f
Shem the artist brother) "asking coy one after sloy o n e . . . (and all o f course
just to fill up a form out of pure human kindness and in sprite of fun) for Juan,
by the way, was by theway ofbecoming (I think, I hope he was) the most purely human
being that ever was called man, loving all up and down the whole creation . . . "
(FW431.04;08-12). What kind of education is this? For Juan's fun this pursuit means
'dropping] a few stray remarks" (FW431.01-02). These fragments promise and seduce
and teach "the twentynine hedge daughters . . . learning their antemeridian lessons
o f life" (FW430.03- 04). Fragments seduce the will: Wittgenstein seduces with such
fragments; Austin seduces with such details. Any language or language game seduces
with fragments (metaphoric possibilities), keeping their application, legitimacy,
and ontological status inthe background. Commenting in one o f his manuscripts
(part o f which was collected in Culture and Value), Wittgenstein frames the
seduction of an object as the conflict between our what we want to see and how we
live (the truth enacted in our practices):Tolstoy: "The significance o f an object
lies in its universal intelligibility" . That is partly true, partly false. When an
object is significant and important what makes it difficult to understand is not
the lack of some special instruction in abstruse matters necessary for its
understanding, but the conflict between the right understanding o f the object and
what most men want to see. This can make the most obvious things the most difficult
to understand. What has to be overcome is not the difficulty of the understanding
but of the will (MS 213, 406-7: CF17)1Reproduced with permission of the copyright
The condition I am following finds that seductions premise new versions o f myself
and new limits to my world. If I hear Thoreau ask "Who bolsters you?" (Walden 26),
do I answer some seductress or some future or myself, my will, my fictions?I
concern myselfwith what 'making' means and what limits I make myself(or anyone
makes themselves) toward: "Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead
man makes indifferent all times and places" (Walden 90). This indifference I think
is a mistake, and marks such an awakening as another dream. Our awakening involves
at a fundamental level not only our recognition of our humanity, but the
recognition of humanity(asaparticularkindoflimit).
Thoreauimaginesthatthisplaceisalwaysthe same, a sameness guaranteed by our common
species-being, and if we imagine this as our form o f life we confuse the content o
f our life with the meaning o f its form. This meaning may not be determined solely
by who we are or even what we are, but may emerge as meaning only as how we are
anything at all.Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being.
Next to us the grandest laws are continually be executed, Next to us is not the
workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman
whose work we axe.(Walden 90)Both the world and we are constituted in this
nextness, what in Finnegans Wake is continually formulated as being between. The
double possibility o f meaning through who we are and how we are offers us a
fulcrum on which we can lever ourselves into willfulness, that in copying the
process of our own evolutionary making we become more fullyawakeinrelationtoit.
ThoreaupicturesthisdoublepossibilityasthegivenofourReproduced with permission of
the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.32
nature ("We are not wholly involved in Nature" [Walden 91]). He pictures our stance
toward it as determined by perspective ("With thinking we may be beside ourselves
in a sanesense"[Walden91]). Doestheworldseduceusinthesamewayasthisnextnessto
ourselves and others seduces us simply through our involvement (interestedness)
with it?When thinking about what came to be Ulysses, Joyce rejected Christ as the
greatest western hero in favor o f Odysseus, because Christ had never lived, in
love, with a woman, and thus had avoided the primary realm in which Joyce
understood (male) heroics to survive in the modem world. Can we understand the need
or pursuit or possibility of love to be subsumed under Thoreau's categories o f
neighborliness, or resoluteness, or nextness, or interestedness? What does it mean
for all intimacies to be collapsed into a single realm of sociability opposed to
the solitude into which Thoreau writes himself? If Thoreau resists one kind of
skepticism, denying his reduction into simply one who knows and thus exposes
Nature's nextness and his own nextness to himselfj why does this
nextnessnotexplicitlynameloveaspartofitspurview? WaldenseemstohideThoreau's
fanaticism in the face of Love (a Leontes in disguise as a natural scientist), as
if Love is notevenapossibilitytobeexplicated.
Howcanapoliticaleconomyfunctionifitisnot also a psychology o f intimacy? I expect
Thoreau at times to speak like St. Paul and allow for marriage, although he himself
does not understand the desire and would wish people to live in chastity as he
does.One then wonders about the need to translate the Vulgate's Carilas as Love. Is
it the "piety of thinking" that translates love into our desire for (or our
relationship to) God and our soul, as if those are the only realms in which doubt
about the thing in itself canReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
find satisfaction? Isn't that another fantasy, almost a fantasy o f science?
("Because 'women' are too hard to understand or trust?", some man might say). Or
should we follow Heidegger in quoting Eckhart quoting Dionysius the Areopagite that
"love is of such a nature that it changes man into the things he loves"?2 In this
case knowing and loving both become forms o f pantheism, as if believing in
someone's love is like believing in things (by this I mean that the survival o f
skepticism requires a kind o f pantheism, o f a
sortthatconfusesimaginedmindsforimaginedworlds). Ifthistooisakindof romanticism,
then can we explain part ofwhat is different about how Thoreau tries to awaken us
(and reanimate our language) and how Heidegger tries to reconfigure and recover our
relationship to Being by caricaturizing Thoreau's allegory as one ruled by irony
and Heidegger's allegory as one ruled by metonymy? (Romanticism here defines the
need for a kind of allegory, as a way of protecting the distance between things and
people, andbetweenourconfusionandtruth). Ironywillcreateaconfusionbetweenfragments
andauthor. Thetruthorontologicalstatusormeaningorapplicationofanysentence(or
fragment), because o f this confusion, must be continually redetermined
(justified). The rule o f metonymy produces justification as an effect, displacing
the need for justification in the description of our stances toward and within
these totalities (this is how Hiedegger avoids skepticism in Being and Time).These
stances are in some fundamental sense moral stances. In a "Lecture on Ethics" he
gave not long after he returned to Cambridge in 1929, when he was still in the grip
o f his Tractarian system, Wittgenstein describes the limit between facts that
describe the world (and can be true) and statements of "absolute value" that
describe ethics,Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
aesthetics (as a form of ethics), and religion. He calls ethics "an enquiry into
what is valuable, or, into what is really important, or I could have said Ethics is
the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into
the right way of living" (PhilosophicalOccasions,38).
IntheTractariandescriptionofthelogicoflanguage, propositions are all on the same
level. No statement can have a logical priority. Ethics, however, requires just
such a priority. Judgments of relative value can be translated into statements o f
fact, as in "better or worse." Ethical judgment, however, must act as a frame in
which all statements o f fact have meaning, and thus such judgments cannot
themselvesbe statements o f fact:If I contemplate what Ethics really would have to
be if there were such a science, this result seems to be quite obvious, it seems to
me obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing. That we
cannot write a scientific book, the subject matter o f which could be intrinsically
sublime and above all other subject matters. I can only describe my feeling by the
metaphor, that, if a man could write such a book on Ethics which really was a book
on Ethics, this would, with an explosion, destroy all other books in the world. Our
words used as we use them in science, are all vessels capable only of containing
and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is
anything, is supernatural and ourwords will only express facts. (40)Ethics
describes and enacts a transcendent limit to the world. A true book of ethics,
however, describes not only this limit but is enacted through and as the
perspective of a particular 'I', which in the Tractarian picture is also a
transcendent limit of the world.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
Consequently, such a book ofEthics becomes this 'I', constituting the meaning ofthe
worldinthepracticesofaperson(thisT). Allotherbooksofethicsceasetofunctionas books o
f ethics within the world so constituted. They, in effect, spontaneously combust
(ceasetobeseenorunderstoodasbooksonethics). Atruebookofethics,therefore, both
animates an T and delimits a world. These ontological consequences mean such a book
describes a kind o f ontological ethics. This kind o f link between ontological
consequences (figurations of the world and o f'I') are possible only within the
kind of coherent theological language MacIntyre describes (I say nothing about the
content of such a language). It is the consequence of our economies, technologies
and sciences that such a language must operate in relation to the limits o f the
world also construed as physical and quantifiable (this does not mean that such
languages would be scientific or mathematical,farfromit).
Itisunclearthatanylanguagecouldregainthiskindofforceand coherence (this is why so
much is at stake in the way in which we conceptualize the relation between the
qualitative and the quantitative).Wittgenstein'spictureofontologicalethicsisakinto
hislatterunderstandingofa true philosophy. Written in 1930, after Wittgenstein had
shifted from his Tractarian picture of a transcendent limit between 'I' and
language to a fluid (and in some way phenomenological) conception of our
involvement in language, the following remark was included in Philosophical
Investigations: "If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be
possible to question them, because everyone would agree to them" (?128). This
agreement would follow from the obviousness o f any real thesis (clearly philosophy
does put forward theses, but because they do not evince immediate andReproduced
permission.36
universal agreement, they are not theses in Wittgenstein's sense). In 1931
(December 9), Wittgenstein responding to Waismann's attempt, in a book to be
entitled Theses, to render the Tractates into a number of dogmatic theses,
articulates his shift away from describing the limits o f sense (and o f
philosophy) through describing the logical structure o f facts (and thus as a set o
f propositions):As regards your Theses, I once wrote if there were theses in
philosophy, they wouldhavetobesuchthattheydonotgiverisetodisputes. Fortheywouldhave
to be put in such a way that everyone would say, Oh yes, that is of course
obvious... controversy always arises through leaving out or failing to state
clearly certain steps, so that the impression is given that a claim has been made
that could be disputed. I once wrote, The only correct method o f doing philosophy
consists in not saying anything and leaving it to another to another person to make
a claim. That is the method I now adhere to, What the other person is not able to
do is to arrange the rules step by step and in the right order so that all
questions are solved automatically. (183-84)The transcendent limit describing
ethics in the Tractates is now constituted as the relative ground o f our ordinary
language (and experience). This ordinariness describes our involvement within the
world as both our ontological commitments, our transparent language use, and our
values: "The aspect of things that are most important for us are hidden because o f
their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something--
becauseitisalwaysbeforeone'seyes)"(PI?130). Consequently,philosophyshould "simply
puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. Since
everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for
example, is of no interest to us" (PI?126). The determination of our interests is a
moral (or ethical concern).Wittgenstein's engagement with this moral concern as a
form o f therapy may, as it does for Freud, excavate any moral content from his
versions of ourselves and the world. Or at least it displaces this content from his
remarks to his personality. In such a displacement moral concern remains
transcendent, something that can be shown in one's practice but not said within
one's language. This is a model of confession that honors truthfulness without
concerning itselfwith truth. There are, therefore, two aspects of Wittgenstein's
picture o f philosophy. Philosophy is a kind o f therapy used to release us from
the temptation to philosophize and it is an attempt to get "a clear view o f the
world" (Kenny, 2): "[t]he philosophers treatment of a question is like the
treatment of an illness" (PI ?255) and "[t]he concept of a perspicuous
representation (ubersichtliche Darstellung) isoffundamentalsignificanceforus.
Itearmarkstheformofaccountwegive,thewaywe look at things" (PI ?122).2.2
"timeIiquescingintostate,pitilessagegrowsangelhood"(FW251.09-10)Thoreau describes
the promise of art as a kind of delusion mapped into our seeing both as a limit to
our being (the temptation to solipsism) and the promise o f knowing:The stars are
the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the
various mansions ofthe universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment!
Nature and human life are as various as our severalReproduced with permission of
constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater
miracletakeplacethanforustolookthrougheachother'seyesforaninstant? We should live
in all the ages ofthe world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds ofthe ages. History,
Poetry, Mythology!--I know of no reading of another's experience so startling and
informing as this would be. (Walden, 6)An artwork o f sufficient complexity to
generate and justify its own particular aesthetic drives toward an ideal of
neurological identity with others: an adequate aesthetic (of course "adequate"
reopens all the questions I am trying to close, so it can only mean at this point
something like "convincing", "self-justifying", etc.) represents an attempt to
become an instantiated metaphor, to become someone else without losing oneself and
thus existing as a transpersonal identity that sees with the eyes of our species as
a whole. The temptation in seeing through another's eyes is not like what motivates
someone to say "While I was speaking to him I did not know what was going on in his
head"(PI ?427). In saying this, as Wittgenstein remarks, "one is not thinking o f
brain-processes, but o f thought processes." This desire is, as Wittgenstein
describes, that "we should like to know what he is thinking." The picture o f
seeing into someone's head has a use, "apparently contradicting the picture, which
expresses the psychical."(PI?427). In saying this is not the temptation that
Thoreau describes I am trying to suggest that it is not part of a interpretive
game. There is certainly something uncanny about Thoreau's picture.Our ordinary
understanding of our involvement in the world is limited to the domain defined by
our quiet desperation. Thoreau is not picturing seeing something new about someone.
InWittgenstein'spictureandresolutionwewantsomeinformation,andourReproduced with
permission.39
picture o f this desire figures this desire in relation to the limit o f our
knowledge (the other person).Thoreauisnotafterwhatsomeoneseesbuthowwesee.
Seeingnotevenasifbut through another's eyes as they see through ours is to be a
more complex form of life that has at least four eyes, a network ofbrains, nerves
and limbs. The limit to this seeing is not an interpretive limit, where we use
physiological (or ontological language) as a metaphor, but an ontological limit;
not a limit between people or within a language game, but a limit constituting
language: "Incredible the first animal that dreamed o f another animal"(Fuentes,
9). This is what I will later call the limit between the mind and the soul. This is
the possibility to confuse the world for a mind and a mind for a world from the
inside o f each. In this sense literature becomes a philosophy o f mind, an attempt
to construct and embody the mind such that human particularity and separation is
reconstructed within a system of identities operating as the ideal or fundamental
mind of our form o f life, approaching or enacting our species-being.From seeing
through another's eyes we are transformed into God, collapsing all time, all worlds
(whose worlds?) into our being. This might be a justification or a mad description
of art. This fantasy is almost like taking language too seriously, or at least
offering up the strangeness of language as so powerful as to undo itself into
absurdity, as evidence o f both our extreme alienation and as the means to survive
it: to find Descartes' certainty not in himselfbut in others, to allow perception
or, within the context of Thoreau's allegory, language to dissolve our ontological
limitations into what sound's like divine power. But why does Thoreau jump from
seeing through another's eyes to seeingReproduced with permission of the copyright
through God's eyes ("all ages o f the world in an hour, ay, in all the world o f
the ages")? Is this the ontological justification for loving thy neighbor? Do we
believe this fantasy? If we did then Wittgenstein could tease us back into sense by
correcting our language. And yet this would be a "miracle". The ambiguity o f
language, the need for philosophical therapy, protects the distance between us.
Thoreau's piece of science fiction here is a version of the quest for certainty, to
confirm the existence of other minds by entering into
one,orevenasinartificialintelligence,bymakingone. Thoreauassumesananswerto
skepticism, like Wittgenstein's notion of a true book of ethics, would re-construct
the fundamental ontology of all that defines our lives and our world(s). If we
admit that such a reconstruction is impossible, that such certainty is illusory,
then what would the construction o f another mind amount t o ? 3Wittgenstein
answers: "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him" (223). But again, what
would the construction of another mind amount to? What does 'mind' mean here? If I
convert a lion into a human being I have remade my form of life: my biology,
species-being, history, culture, society, conceptual, existential, and
phenomenological world(s), language, desires, values, commitments. Are there
necessary and sufficient conditions for being human? At what point would a lion
cease to be a lion and become human?Any attempt to answer this question, or to
build a human being or a mind, or a machine X even if limited to a conceptual
description (of a lion and a human; what would or should I include in such
descriptions?) or scientific models (in biology, neuroscience, cognitive science,
or computer science) are stuck inside our human limitations (ontology,Reproduced
permission.
phenomenology, language, psychology, biology, etc.). This means any such question
or attempt can always be translated into the question 'what does it mean to be
human?' And what do things mean? A question that can be answered, at least, by
science or theology.
Itisasurprisethatthesetwoquestionsarerelatedorevenattimesmightseem the same.How
would we answer this question?: What does it mean to be human? Maybe
withMiddlemarch, the works ofAristotle, or Bach'sMass in B minorl Ifthis question
can only be answered, however poorly, with representative representations, it is
not a question but a riddle. A riddle we might answer with our own life. This
riddle, however, is not like the duck-rabbit 'riddle', nor like the riddle o f the
Sphinx. To know the solution to the Sphinx riddle you have to know how it is the
solution, If you are simply told that man is the solution to the riddle, but do not
understand why this is the answer you do not understandtheriddle.
Knowingtheansweristoknowhowtoapplytheriddleasa description or a picture of human
life. One must know what is relevant, what aspect of human life is being pictured
by four, then two, then three legs.4The riddle 'what does it mean to be human' is
not like this. One could call it instead a riddle of the enveloping facts. Every
'answer' to the riddle is a restatement of anotherrelatedriddle.
Toanswer'whatdoesitmeantobehuman?'withBach'sMassin
BMinormeanstheriddleofhumanityistheriddleofBach'sMass. Howthisisthe answer cannot
be explained except as another riddle. We can never decide what is relevant
aswecanwiththesphinx. Wittgensteinarguesthatonemightseesomearbitrarycipherin any
number o f ways, "in various aspects according to the fiction I surround it with.
AndReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
here there is a close kinship with 'experiencing the meaning of a word"' (PI p.
210). The fiction surrounding 'the meaning of being human' cannot reduce the riddle
to anything like a word; we can never decide what is relevant as we can with the
sphinx. Joyce represents the riddle of the meaning of being human as (or in) the
riddle ofFinnegans Wake:Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense of even the
psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts
themselves circumstancing it isjust as hurtful to sound sense (and let it be added
to the truest taste as were some fellow in the act of perhaps getting an intro from
another fellow turning out to be a friend in need of his, say, to a lady of the
latter's aquantaince .. . straightaway to run off and vision her plump and plain in
her natural altogether, preferring to close his blinkhard's eyes to the
ethiquethical fact that she was, after all, wearing for the space o f the time
being som definite articles o f evolutionary clothing... (FW109.10-21)This
difficulty of answering this riddle forces us inside the question. We can translate
it into philology with the help ofsingle quotation marks: What does it 'mean' to be
a 'human being'? We can answer this by showing our uses o f'mean' and 'human being'
within whatever conceptual logics they can function. Understood in this way
philology becomes the analysis of the functioning of these categories, and in this
an analysis of meaning. 'Function', however, is slippery. Does a crystal have a
function of growing, or does it simply grow? Function implies a kind of
intentionality, a directedness and a teleology. Function in this sense means to
unite proximate causation (the causes describing how something works) with final
causation (telos). Final causes are eitherReproduced with permission of the
epiphenomena (a virus makes you sick not because it is malevolent, but as an effect
o f its living) or ascribed interpretations (descriptions o f motives, reasons, and
justifications).The riddle in this philological form, like our use o f 'function',
constantly confuses interpretations for cause, as does Freud when he understands
the unconscious, an interpretative category, to function as part o f psychic
mechanism. Freud offers interpretations and he has no way of establishing that the
structures he describes or 'discovers'causeanything.
Causescanbetested:ifxhappens,thenyfollows(inclearly defined conditions): Freud
cannot establish this kind o f connection. He describes instead motives and
justifications and reasons that are interpretations of our actions and expressions.
They cannot be tested, only applied.But Freud's confusion of interpretations for
psychic causes is a temptation hard to resist, especially when it can generate
important questions. Inquires into the meaning of the phrase 'human being' can
generate, for example, the following questions:What rights do human beings have?
What counts as being human?How do human beings represent themselves?In these
questions 'meaning' seems to describe the criteria for what counts as being
'human'. The criteria for being human might take the form of descriptions of kinds
of humans, a set of traits or properties, or in literature the articulation of a
way of being human, as a man or woman, an artist or engineer, or as a member of
some ethnic or cultural group defined in whatever way. The meaning o f such
descriptions is determinedReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
by their inclusion or articulation within some allegory, through an interpretation;
in this case meaning is often equated with interpretation.We do not know, nor
within this methodology do we have any way of determining
thestatusofthesecategoriesorallegories: aretheytrueordotheyevenexist. Wemight be
very clever in interpreting some event or the actions or identity of someone in
relation to the devil or some demonology but we do not know how to ask within
philology, if the devil exists or if this allegory is an adequate explanation of
someone, or if we are using this interpretation to further our own ends, the power
o f the church against women for example. This may be a result of cultural
blindness, but it is blindness nevertheless.This limitation drives us further into
the riddle.Attempting to distinguish the domains of interpretation and causation
force us to investigate the relation between what is real [ontological claims] and
what is meaningful [semantic functions]. We retranslate the question into a kind of
philosophy: W hat does it 'mean' 'to be' 'human'?5 What does 'to be' mean? Such a
question asks about the semantics of self-reflection. We can now ask what is the
ontological, epistemological, and axiological (value) status ofthe criteria,
interpretations, categories, and 'entities' generated in the previous versions o f
the question. What it means to be human must be understood in relation to the
criteria or the processes determining what is real. This 'reality' is unstable, but
this instability requires that the descriptions, interpretations, and
representationsofhumanbeingsfunctioninrelationandrespondtothisinstability. This
entails an attempt to distinguish between interpretations and causes. Cognitive
science does this by assuming that only what can be made can count as real
(although humans mayReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
not be the 'maker'): being human must be understood as an effect. The distinctions
between animate or inanimate, human and non-human (animal or thing) dissolve in the
demand that any such distinctions be produced as a process outside ofthe
interpretive structurewhichdefinesthem. Thisdoesnotmeanthatonecanstepoutsideofthe
hermeneutic circle, but that the question about whether something is animate and
inanimate must also rest on whether such a distinction exists as a product o f
causes. Can knowing or recognizing the difference between what is animate or
inanimate or between human and non-human mean anything separate from not only how
these distinctions are used but also how these distinctions are possible?
Wittgenstein states: 'A metaphysical question is always in appearance a factual
one, although the problem is a conceptual one" (Remarks on the Philosophy o f
Psychology I, ?949). Wittgenstein analyzes how we use our concepts and shows how
our instantiation or reification ofthese concepts is often unwarranted. Is that the
only conceptual problem? If we agree that our claims about the world (or picture of
our mind as inside and the world as outside: o f our understanding as a state, or o
f consciousness as states or entities) should only be understood as meaningful
within our language and that these claims illegitimately instantiate some truth or
reality of our being or the world, then how do we commit ourselves to these
concepts as if they were real? If we determine thegrammatical use o f
'understanding' and the rules determining its use as nonsense, we have
notunderstoodourinvestmentofourselvesintheconceptofunderstanding. Wittgenstein is
looking at the points where we mistake our grammar for ontology. As Hacker argues
the claim that 'Nothing can be red and green all over' is not a truth about the
world. ThisReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
does not mean that it is false. We cannot say what it would be like for it to be
true or false. It is nonsensical because the grammatical rules determining the
sense o f something being only red and being only green do not allow for something
to be only red and only green simultaneously(//mg/rt 197).6 Sense describes the
possibilities of our language; nonsense describes what has been excluded from our
language (PI?500).The instantiation o f distinctions that function within language
games means that we have a specific problem in determining the status o f these
distinctions when they are used to describe ourselves or to instantiate the meaning
or cause or functioning of behavior, language, attitudes, beliefs, and so on. All
psychological, intentional, ideological language has an unknown and problematic
existential status. How do we invest ourselves in our self-descriptive language
games? This is not to ask 'Are we conscious?' or 'Do we have belief states?', etc.
If the logic of language is such that the distinctions formalized as words, or
sentences, or concepts function and have meaning only within (a) system(s) of
discourse, that is, in relation to other words, sentences, concepts o f a
particular language game, then even our interpretative distinctions and models are
only a shuffling of tokensor the working out ofthe logic organizing a particular
language game. A working out which has no truth values separate from the rules o f
application and criteria o f sense thatconstitute the language game as a coherent
system o f allegory that people use bound by some conventions. So much o f literary
criticism and philosophical analysis devolves into the shuffling oftokens within
these systems ofthe extension ofthe number oftargets for allegorical assimilation
within a discourse o f a community o f speakers.Reproduced with permission of the
The problem of how we enter into our interpretations or how we are involved in our
seeing determines much of Wittgenstein's analysis in the latter part of part I and
all of part II of the Investigations. Wittgenstein's description of our involvement
in and between language games (in our negotiation between sense and nonsense)
describes a form of temporality as one o f the limits o f our mind. Wittgenstein
understands this limit to be described by the shifting relationship between what he
calls our language games and our form o f life: "Here the term 'language game' is
meant to bring into prominence the fact
thatthespeakingoflanguageispartofanactivity,orofaformoflife"(PI?23). Meaning can
emerge through our involvement within a language game constituted by the limits of
our form of life. In Finnegans Wake this same relationship is described within a
different kind of obscurity. This is a description ofFinnegans Wake, "this daybook,
what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed!":Can you rede (since We and
Thou had it out already) its world? Its the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations
on miscegenations. Tieckle. They lived und laughed ant loved end left . . . In the
ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that
whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that
adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance
of existentiality. (FW18.18-28)To be before the world ofthe book is to have had the
book before "The soul of everyelsesbody rolled into its olesoleself' (FW329.18-19)
in continuous reinterpretation (into categories o f miscegenation's) which alter
the shape (or color) o f the world.Reproduced with permission of the copyright
How do we draw a line between the animate and the inanimate? The decisions about
where and how to draw this line would seem to determine who we count as like us,
whoever we are, and thus it might describe our moral categories, who is good or
bad; Or where and how we draw this line might explain or describe how we interpret
the world and ourselves, determining our social orders or psychological identity.
This means that when I ask myself what counts as human I begin circling around a
(the) confusion between citizenship and personhood. This confusion is acknowledged
in our use of the concept of rights. If I recognize someone's rights (as a human
being), do I recognize someone as human? Didn't I recognize her human form, or did
I imagine she was a machine? My
acknowledgmentmeansthatIincludeherwithinmycommunity. Thisinclusioniswhat
wecallcitizenship. Myacknowledgmentofsomeoneelseashumanonlyservestoincludethat
person as an example of my kind of humanness determined by his or her inclusion
within the community I recognize myselfas functioning in. Thus, the American Bill
of Rights acknowledges that rights must be given, and, therefore, that they are not
human rights,butrightsofcitizenship. Andtheapplicationoftheserightsisafunctionof
interpretation.The confusion between citizenship and personhood might be necessary
for any democracy. Thisconfusion,however,canonlybeansweredbyinterpretations,
interpretations about origins, identity, values, marks, etc.; but the fact that
these categories are slippery makes any interpretation (positive or negative)
unstable, and thus induces further anxiety about what constitutes humanness.
As human beings, our questions or motives in determining the meaning of a thing
arise because o f the claim things have on us, a claim that describes the material
world as somekindoflimit. Thisclaimisnothingnew. FrankensteinhaslittletodowithAIor
science, except as an expression of anxiety about our interpretations of the
instability of the distinction between inanimate and animate, between human and
otherness. It is True that science explicitly questions this distinction, claiming
that it is not given but is made, a product of a set of causes and effects that we
now call evolution. But the book is not questioning these limits in relation to how
they are constituted within nature (or out). Rather it examines the moral
implications o f drawing the difference between human and others superficially,
examining how we interpret our obligations to others. The problem o f alienation
Frankenstein explores is possible because we can identify with the monster and the
monster with us: and in this it is a novel asking about the relationship between
personhood and citizenship. It may suggest that our recognition as human (our
inclusion in a community) must arise from a recognition of certain origins, but we
are not made like the monster and yet he may describe our condition. The novel does
not ask but leaves us with the question 'what does it mean to be made'? That
question was partially answered and given a special claim on us by Darwin. But how
would Darwin fit into a discussion about what counts as human?. His thinking
explains, and is now used to explain, how things become living, how living
creatures become intelligent, even become human. Do we imagine Darwin would
pressure our texts away from the questions o f interpretation exemplified in the
confusion between citizenship and personhood? I have to leave this question
hanging, but the difficulty of fitting Darwinian thought (as opposed to rhetoric)
isReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
exactly the difficulty o f making the relation and difference between cause (what
science describes) and interpretation (what literature demands) clear. This is the
difficulty of constructing an intelligence in a machine.For example how would our
claims about the limits or status of subjectivity or our ideological judgments
survive philosopher Daniel Dennett's description o f the necessity for selfishness
within evolution?:"As soon as something gets into the business of self-
preservation, boundaries become important, for ifyou are setting out to preserve
yourself you don't want to squander effort trying to preserve the whole world: you
draw the line" {Consciousness Explained, 174)The interpretations that function
within, as and between the confusion between citizenship and personhood in
Frankenstein mean we ask for the distinction between the animate and the inanimate,
as it were, from inside the security o f acting as animate creatures.AI turns this
interpretive investigation o f the inanimate around. It investigates the difference
between the inanimate and animate (or conscious and mechanical) as it were from the
outside, not from the assumption that this distinction is meaningful but that it is
caused: human beings or animals or plants are effects. Cognitive Science asks 'how
can onegeneratequalitativeexperiencefromwhatcanonlybedescribedquantitatively? Itis,
for example, much easier to teach a computer how to do calculus, than it is to
teach it what a chair is. How can we get from our interpretations of ourselves to
the causal mechanisms of our minds? This is, however, as much a question about and
of poetry as about AI.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
Keats' ends the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" with the equation: "'Beauty is truth,
truthbeauty.'" Evenifonethinkthisisafailedline,theinterrogationofthemeaningofa
thing, o f the urn in Keats' ode, suggests that any other answer would fail to give
the thing meaning. Even this answer gives the proper form without the necessary
force that would make it true (although it might seem beautiful or it might not).
But that this question, 'what is the meaning o f a thing?', should be important to
us organizes one o f the currents in the following pages, and at the very least
describes a problem romantic poetry found itselffacedwith.
Theequationbeauty=truthdescribes,Ithink,arequirementfororan ideal (of whatever
status) of poetry in general, although how to construe truth and beauty here is
always at issue. Poetry always seems confined by an asymmetry: it can enact meaning
or beauty but it's claims on truth are tenuous, becoming more tenuous within modem
scientific culture. Things or objects can function as the grounds for truth, and
one can argue that this is always the case, but it is certainly the case when what
is real is primarily described as material. Within the Keats' ode, the status of
the um is complex and shifting (within the poets interrogation), but it functions
at least as the vanishing point ofthereal.
Thus,theasymmetryofpoetryispartlycounteredbythefactthatitistheum that speaks the
equation between beauty and truth: in a rough allegory the thing, the um, with its
status as true (or real) asserts an equation between beauty and truth that can only
function aesthetically, as an expression of beauty. The um as thing (the real)
articulates the truth as an aesthetic. The attempt to enact the qualitative
(meaning, beauty, intention, and so on, what AI calls qualia, what it feels like to
be conscious or to be human) through an embodiment in language describes what
Coleridge called a philosophic poem: to enactReproduced with permission of the
the beautiful (or meaningful or intentional) as real and true: poetry with
ontological force, the force ofthe real which we describe as true. This is close to
what is attempted in AI: to enact the equation between beauty (or the meaningful)
and truth, and in this translate our interpretative relations with causal
processes.Traditional AI makes two founding assumptions about this project: what is
called the symbolic system hypothesis and the algorithmic assumption. The first
claims that the processes underlying intelligence are not just described
symbolically but that they are symbolic: we ourselves as well as our thinking are
constituted as nothing more than the self-reflexive (to varying degrees) processing
of different kinds of symbols within a vast system of symbolic relations. The
second claims that our mental states are algorithms, procedures that convert inputs
into outputs according to a defined set of rules: a recipe or a function converting
or computing inputs into outputs.What kind of claim do these algorithms and the
symbolic processes they enact have on us? AI assumes they are both true and are the
only way anything can be made meaningful. In this picture, only symbolic processes,
which are not interpretations, allegories or non-symbolic computations, can have
sense, and thus our brains must enact these symbolic processes as our mind (There
are ways even of construing all of reality as such symbolic processes within
physics).Heidegger wants to displace the claim of this picture of the world on us.
Although I do not think Heidegger understood it in this way, the best sense I can
make of his claim, in "Das Ding", that "the atom bomb and its explosion are the
mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened" ("The
Thing", 166) is that theReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
possibilities determined by thinking, knowledge, technology, and economics that
produced a working bomb alters the kind of metaphysical possibilities in and
through which we function. We can literally enact our death through our knowledge
and its potential to destroy the world: I call this a metaphysical fact because our
knowledge and knowing, when instituted within social power, has ontological force
so great as to destroy us. The
worldcanbecontainedbyourknowledgebecauseitcanbedestroyedbyit. Theatomic bomb as a
metaphysical fact is a new conceptual limit determining the scope o f our
commitments toward what we count as real. We can only believe in ghosts to our
greater peril.
Thisfact,describingthelimitoftheworldbyourknowledge,enactedthroughthe possibility
of nuclear destruction, is that what counts as matter, and what matters and counts
for us will have to include a commitment to a physics that can manipulate the
substance o f the universe through a complex set o f mathematical models. This is
called the possibility o f losing my life by losing the world. That this loss o f
the world can be enactedthrough human knowing, as if from a single source, gives
knowing ontological force not unlike turning the world into a fantasy. What Joyce
described as "lethelulled between explosion and reexplosion . . . from grosskopp to
megapod, embalmed, o f grand age, rich indeathanticipated"(FW78.04-
06)hasgainedanewallegoricaltarget: wecanliterally enact our death through our
knowledge o f the world as a whole and its potential to destroy the world. The
problem ofthe machine is not only about our knowledge of how to be mistaken for a
thing or how to be mistaken for being human. Our understanding of ourselves and the
world must be a kind of reverse evolution, undoing our feelings and interpretations
into quantities within some created conceptual language, a language notReproduced
permission.54
restricted by the limits o f cause or interpretation. The failure to find such a
language has been the failure o f AI.2.3 Spiraling from interpretation to causeThe
fundamental assumption for Cognitive Science is that the brain is a computer. All
forms o f meaning and understanding must be derived from the computations o f
neurons.7 This Computational model grounds all mental functioning in rationality.
But this rationality should not be mistaken for what we often oppose by the word
'irrationality' (these words are used primarily as interpretations). Cognitive
Philosopher John Pollock defines rationality as the ordered, non-random transition
between mental states: "try to imagine a creature possessing mental states but
entirely unconstrained by considerationsofrationality"(HowtoBuildaPerson,70)
Suchrandomtransitionswould
resultinasystemscrashonanycognitivelevelonwhichtheyoccurred. Thisuseof rationality
is really a way of arguing that all mental processes (metal states and their
transitions), including language instantiate an ordered system.Pollock is
attempting to construct this kind of system. He tells a story about howto move from
things and causes into interpretations and qualities; this describes an
aesthetic,butnotanaestheticlikethatinanovel. ThisisthestoryofOscar.(Iwillgive only
the schematics o f this story without concerning myself here with the justification
o f the type/token mentalism for which he argues, although such a theory can also
be understood to form an aesthetic)Reproduced with permission of the copyright
Oscar I is a system that consists o f sensory input, some information processing
mechanism; which produces a picture ofthe world. This picture is generated from
generalizations (computational processes) about this sensory input. These cognitive
abilities are embedded in a conative (from Latin conatus, endeavor, attempt)
function determining a set o f goals. Such a mental model, although Pollock ignores
this, already figures symbolically a kind o f self but in this case one determined
only by its pain sensors and its response. If pain then flight, if flight fails,
then fight. This describes the mental functioning o f an amoebae, and therefore has
its limits.Oscar HTheprimaryfailureofOscarIisitsvictimizationbyitsenvironment.
Survivalpotential increases with the ability to make predictions about the world
(or really about itself about its responses to its sensory inputs). Such
predictions mean that Oscar II, in replacing Oscar I, must be able to make
generalizations about the environment in relation to his goals (in this case only
avoid pain). This is the beginning o f mental fiction.These predictions are
generated through self-reflection: an internal sensor senses
whenandwhy:pointythingsmeanpain. Isay'meanpain'becauseitoperatesasajudgment based
on a correlation between a rudimentary self (that defined by pain sensors) and the
representation of pointy things. This correlation is possible by virtue of the goal
(avoid pain) and the possibility for Oscar o f modeling his own sensory outputs.
What these sensors do is construct generalizations about certain aspects of the
environment in relationtoOscarsownresponses(pain).
Suchgeneralizations,reallypossibilities,areReproduced with permission of the
logical fictions. There is no question whether they are true or false: everything
that looks pointycausespain. porOscarIItheworldisfullofpaincausingthingstowhichhe
always reacts as if the possibilities, the generalizations about how the world
effects Oscars pain sensors, are always true (but in fact Oscar has no notion o f
truth because there exists
nopossibility,forhim,ofthesepredictionsbeingfalse,eveniftheyarefalse). Possibility
means always true fiction. This is the mental world o f a worm.Oscar IUThe problem
with being a worm is that the environment can be deceptive and one's own sensors
can fail or produce false information. Not all pointy things are alike, a pointy
leaf is not like a pointy stick, and a machine-eating tiger is not the same as the
mirror image of such a tiger.Oscar HI experiences a mirror stage. Initially Oscar I
and H were like amoebae to worm; Oscar n and m , however, are like bird to cat (I
guess the bird has eaten the worm). The cat is able to distinguish a mirror image
from another animal (it's not clear whether the cat thinks it's its own image). The
bird responds to a mirror image as if it is another bird (it attacks the image)
Oscar HI must be able to evaluate the ontological status of its perceptions, are
they real or not, it must be able to recognize mirrors as mirrors, and mirror-
images as mirror- images. Oscar n sees the world phenomenological, as if its eyes
were video or film cameras. If you hold a camera and film while walking around the
picture jumps, and bounces and shakes. The viewer gets a headache trying to
stabilize the picture into sense.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
Why don't we see like that? We walk around and yet our picture of the world doesn't
really jump around like this; why?To answer this we must ask how can we make Oscar
m generate a world separate from his senses, such that he can evaluate his sensory
inputs in relation to this stable world? Pollock ask: how can Oscar distinguish
between machine-eating tigers and mirror-image tigers? Asking this question means
asking the difference between appearance and reality, and its answer requires an
interpretation.This level o f interpretation requires another layer o f internal
sensors, this time evaluating the first level o f internal sensors. Pollock thinks
that our picture o f the world is generated by two different kinds
ofgeneralizations: "On the one hand Oscar HI has generalizations about the
relations between his perceptual inputs and the states o f his environment, and on
the other he had has generalizations about regularities within the environment that
persist independently of perception of the environment"(4). This independent world
is generated as a set of generalizations not about the world but about Oscars
correlation o f himself (defined by avoidance o f pain) to representations
(processed sensoryinput). Thiscorrelationisevaluatedinordertodeterminehigh-
levelregularities that constitute a stable world, that in essence allows us to see
without all the bouncing.Now these kinds of evaluations take place at many
different computational levels within the brain, and most o f these evaluations
take place through hard-wired computational processes about which we have no
awareness.Pollock argues that there is a distinction between sensation and the feel
of sensation. Thefeelofsensationistheoutputofsecondlevelinternalsensors,sensorsthat
sense the first level internal sensors that process our perceptual information:
being-aware means and is the sensing o f perceptual input (this is the link AI
wants to make between 'mean'and'is').
Thequalitativefeelofourconsciousnessorsensingmeansandisthe processing or sensing of
lower level internal sensors by higher level sensors. Consciousness and the
qualitative feel o f our experience, what understanding feels like, or meaning, or
love, or whatever are only what we call this second level sensory processing of our
own internal processing.I think this implies for example that all o f our emotions,
love, hate, desire, fear, etc. are only interpretations of physical states. We try
to make meaningful (sometimes by connecting it to some putative cause) physical
states that we sense but do not understand. Even our emotions are interpretive
fictions, convenient descriptions that may mask a mechanism whose primary purpose
may be to simplify decision processes (emotions force us into decisions).*What
exactly does it mean to process the information from our first level internal
sensor? Pollockshiftstheproblemofconsciousnessorqualitativefeelingintosome magical
processing. How do these interpretations produce new effects? Or how do we invest
ourselves in all o f the complicated ways we do in our correlation between internal
sensors and our picture ofthe world? I don't think we should find Pollock's picture
satisfactory.Whatever the merits ofthis model ofthe mind (and there are many), it
leaves us with a puzzle. So far I have described only two kinds of meta-languages,
which seem to describe the limits o f the other, but whose relation remains
unclear: a language o f causeReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
described vaguely here by different versions of Oscar, call this Darwinian
engineering, and a language o f interpretation, commonly used in literary analysis,
asking about meaning, anddeterminingthedistinctionsbetweenanimateandinanimate,etc.
Butthisinterpretive language undermines its own status by showing how its
distinctions and categories are so unstable as to be senseless without ontological
limits o f exactly the sort described by science. But these scientific limits are
not foundations precisely because we cannot get outside o f our interpretations.
Thus these languages o f science and literature speak in two
directionsatthesamething. Ithinkthisisourinheritanceandtheforgingofanother language
that includes both of these languages is the underlying although unrealized promise
o f AI, and I think our problem.1Translated and found in Kenny, "Wittgenstein on
the Nature of Philosophy", 14.2 In Being and Time.3 Is Thoreau's jump from anyone's
embodied, particular eyes to God's eyes justified by the same trick that Heidegger
uses to move from Dasein-as-mine to its identity as Being-with in Chapter IV of
Being and Time! The kind of holistic, non-formalizable link between particular and
universal that Heidegger constructs both elucidates a critical dependence between
meaning and existence, while at the same time
offeringthegreatestresistancetothepossibilityofembodyingaconstructedmind.
Daseinbecomesa soul. Ibelieve,however,thatHeidegger's"soul''isfalse.
(Howisitpossibletotalkaboutfalsesouls?) But I am nevertheless left with
investigating the intransigent existence and meaning of our use of, belief
in,andneedforwhatHeideggerpointsto. Ifconceptsarenotthings,thenwhatarethey: howisit
possible for us to function at a level o f abstraction beyond materiality?4 Cora
Diamond describes what it means to understand the answer to a Sphiax-like riddle:
[T]o know the solution to a riddle is not merely to know o f something that thought
o f in some way or other it is the solution: you have to know how it is the
solution, If you are simply told that man is the solution to the Sphinx's riddle,
but do not understand why--ifi that is, you do not understnad why man is supposed
to have four legs in the morning and so on--you are in the positoion of someone who
'knows' that every equation has a solution without any idea o fhow that may be
arrived at (270)5This is, of course, not the end of the opportunities for analysis.
6 P.M.S. Hacker. Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy o f Wittgenstein.
1Neuronscanbeintwostates:excitatoryorinhibatory;onoroff:thustheyaredigitalcircuits,
by stimulation a neuron reaches an activation potential and fires. The energy of
this firing is not variable-- so no information can be encoded in the strength of
the output--only by the fact of the firing and in, what
doeschange,therateoffiring.Greaterstimulationofaneuronincreasestherateoffiring.
Thereissome
confusionwhetherthebraindescribedinthiswayislikeadigitalorananologcomputer,
digitalswitches (or in computer science these are called logic gates) are like
digital clocks, they are in one state orReproduced with permission of the copyright
another- analog switches are like a clock with two hands--the changes in rate
describe an analog relation. Itdoesn'tmatterforus--
buttheassumptionbymostAItheoristsandcognitivescientistsisthat it is digital..8 This
might be a way o f explaining how replicants in the movie Blade Runner can generate
emotions even though they are designed not to have any.Reproduced with permission
of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.61
3Romantic Fragments and Modernist Machines
InalettertohissisterandbrotherKeatsimaginessoulsasmadenotgiven. This making
proceeds through what is given: the world as circumstance and the mind as
intelligenceandmemoryandemotion. Whywouldapictureofthemindexpressa theology or a
moral stance? "The point at which Man may arrive is as far as the parallel state in
inanimate nature and not further" (326).1The inanimate is the limit o f human
happiness. Thislimitengenderstheworldasa"valeofSoul-making",rewritingthe Biblical
"a vale o f tears." In support for this inanimate limit, Keats animates a rose with
sensation, in order to tell a tale of crucifixion:For instance suppose a rose to
have sensation, it blooms on a beautifulmorning, it enjoys itself, but then comes a
cold wind, a hot sun--it cannot escape it, it cannot destroy its annoyances--they
are as native to the world as itself--no more can man be happy in spite, the
worldly elements will prey upon hisnature. (326)The unity between the divine and
human, between fundamental ontological difference, is twisted toward biology, into
a unity between rose and human. In order for Keats to tell the story of our
inhabitation and involvement in the world as a limitation on our happiness he
endows a rose with a conscious o f that which threatens not its consciousness
specifically, butitslife.
Sucharoseisnotnativetoanyrealworld,butevenitsfantasticsentienceNotes for this
chapter are on page 102Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
does not free it from its containment and belonging to a world described by power,
not determined by the roses intentions.The rose slips from the perception
ofsensation to an interpretation ofthe meaning ofthese sensations as 'annoyances'.
Even to evaluate negative stimuli as annoyances implies a complex o f responses
that involves the possibilities o f happiness and hope, a language ofintention in
which the consciousness or the desires or beliefs or values ofthe
rosestructureitsrelationtotheworld. Therosefunctionsasarosewithinasystemof
opposedintentions. Intention,inthiscaseannoyanceorhappiness,isafunctionofthe
systematic relation between the rose and the world, and is therefore in neither.
The world is animated and the intentionality o f our involvement in the world is
determined and guaranteedbythisanimation. Coleridgepicturesthisin"TheEolianHarp":
And what if all of animated natureBe but organic Harps diversely framed,That
tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual
breeze,At once the Soul of each, and God of all?Thought is generated as a
consequence of our involvement with dominant non-human
forces;intentionfunctionswithinthesystemofworldandbeings. Ourintentioncanbe
generated by reducing ourselves to things--and then displacing intention into the
environmentthroughwhichthisintentionbecomesvisible. Weenterintothedominionof
arbitrary forces to the degree that we can let the rose stand for ourselves,
allegorize ourselvesasusedbytheworld.
Inthissensewearealwaysinvisibleinthisallegory. WeReproduced with permission of the
exist as nothing more than our own interpretations o f ourselves through our
language or actions. Allegories describe and constitute a limit to our knowing
ourselves.Consequently, it is a mistake to imagine that these allegories can
describe our becominganything. Theycanonlydescribehowourinterpretationschange.
Whenthey describe change they describe it teleologically, as if the allegory were a
machine. Even if wearemachineswefunctiononlypartiallythroughourinterpretations.
'Causation'hasa particular grammar that overlaps but is not continuous with
'interpretation'. Wittgenstein at one point investigates how the word 'reading'
describes how we read words into speech, how words 'cause' our reading, not our
understanding o f what we read.But why do you say that we felt a causal connection?
Causation is surely something established by experiments, by observing a regular
concomitance of eventsforexample.
SohowcouldIsaythatIfeltsomethingwhichisestablished by experiment? (it is indeed
true that observation o f regular concomitances is not the only way we establish
causation.) One might rather say, I feel that the letters are the reason why I read
such-and-such. For if someone asks me "Why do you read such-and-such?"--I justify
my reading by the letters which are there. (PI?169)Whatever a causal connection is,
it is not a 'feeling'. "We imagine that a feeling enables us to perceive as it were
a connecting mechanism between the look of the word and the soundthatweutter"(PI?
170). Ourfeelingisaninterpretationafterthefactofour reading.
Itisthecasethatwereadwords,andthusthatthereisacausallinkbetweenReproduced with
permission.64
these words and our reading. But we do not 'know' this through introspection, nor
through feeling ourselves reading.Is Keats confusing the language o f causation for
that o f interpretation when he claims that "[t]hen you will find out the use ofthe
world ... [is] I say 'Soul-making"'? What kind of making is this "soul-making"? To
what degree should we read poetic soul- making, a "Soul or Intelligence destined to
possess the sense o f Identity," as theology, psychology, hyperbole, anachronistic,
animistic, metaphoric? Keats configures the world as meaningful through our use o f
it. Soul-making is how we use the world. Do we know or experience the world
separate from this, or any use? The world acts against us as a limit, and in this
uses us. This use does not imply the intention o f the world so much as an
interpretationofaneffect. Keatsreinterpretsthislimitingforceasthecontextinand
through which we make a 'soul'. Thus the interaction between the domain of what is,
nature, and the functioning o f our intentionality produces a surrogate in the
'soul' for both ourintentionality(oridentityorselfor...)andtheworldaslimit.
Descartesseparates consciousness from living: ".. I, perceiving that the principle
by which we are nourished is wholly distinct from that by means of which we think,
have declared that the name soul when used for both is equivocal... I consider the
mind not as part o f the soul, but as the whole o f that soul which thinks"
{Philosophical Works, 2. 210). Keats in effect stitchestogether this separation
with the soul. Self-reflection and self-generation as descriptions of both
consciousness and of animation constitutes a theology. But this does not answer the
question about the ontological status ofthe soul or ofthis theology. What this does
show is that we respond to this problem by translating ontological questions into
semantic questions. Thisisagrammaticalpebble-game.Keats' souls begin as
intelligences, "sparks of divinity ... atoms of perception-- they know and they see
and they are pure, in short they are God." A soul arises only when an intelligence
becomes itself, that is, acquires an identity. Keats asks "How then are Souls to be
made?"This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a
series o f years. These three materials are the Intelligence--the human heart (as
distinguished from intelligence or Mind) and the World or Elemental space suited
for the proper action ofMind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the
Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. (326-27)Keats
describes the soul and its making as if it were a theory or a recipe, which
structurally looks as much like Hegel as like Freud. What can this theory do? What
can the recipe create? The problem, for Keats, is that the world uses us, and we
must somehowusetheworld. Technologywouldofferonewayofdiminishingthepowerof nature
to annoy us; but other human beings are as native to the world as storms and
neitherseemsultimatelycontrollable. Onekindofhappinesscanbeincreasedif fundamental
needs are met and disease is eradicated. Intelligence, phenomenalconsciousness or
awareness, what we see, and judgment, how we know, alters the Heart, the 'Mind's
Bible", a hornbook, the Mind's experience'; in turn, the Heart, "the text from
which the Mind or Intelligence sucks its identity, alters the Mind. Intelligence
must be transformed into a soul through a suffering and experience within the
world:Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little
children to read -- I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that school
anditshornbook. DoyounotseehownecessaryaWorldofPainsandtroubles is to school an
Intelligence and make it a soul? (327)This is a picture through which to generate
humanness beyond the ontological limits of the inanimate and o f circumstances.
What kind o f theoretical weight can such a picture sustain?
WeshouldnotlookfortheIntelligencenortheHeartinourmindorbody. This picture, while it
describes interactions, only mimics a mechanism. The movement from mind to soul is
internal, a process of moral instruction and selfconversion. If this is a reduction
o f a theological commitment to the ontological status o f the soul, can we say
that in reducing it to a moral ideal it works only as a metaphor? What is growing
here? if not a real soul then the imagination, the mental, our being as what? The
world or poetry becomes a moral laboratory, a realization or transformation of our
potential selves into greater degrees o f actuality.Mind through its confrontation
and interaction with the inanimate limits o f the world and the limits of self,
exposed in suffering, failing, desire, and self-reflection,
determinesitselfasanethicalstance:asoul. Ifthisisnotaphilosophyofmindthenwhat is
the function o f the symbolic language that invokes this philosophy? Its function,
I believe, is to offer a particular kind of foundation for a morality that need not
appeal to Godnortotherelativisticvaluesofaparticularcommunity. Thisfoundationis
simultaneously aesthetic and ontological: a theory about how we inhabit language as
if both language, our inhabitation, and 'we' or 'I' are real. The interpretative
and theReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
constitutiveareconfusedasanIdentity. Thelinkbetweentheoriesofmindandaesthetics
follows from this function. This is why theories o f aesthetic justification
attempt to justify art by attempting to establish the truth-status of figurative
language or fantasy. This defenseoftenarguesforamoraleffectgeneratedbyfiction.
HarryBergerJr.thinksthat "the great problem confronting classical thought was that
it did not quite know how to keep the order it assumed as objective reality from
looking like a projection" (10). This is why Aristotle's poetics, in which truth is
recovered, reworks his theory o f perception inDe Anima as simultaneously a work of
making and knowing. The problem for the Romantics, I think, is that they did not
know how the unity o f experience determining the world as a world could be
distinguished from their interpretations o f the world.In Keats theory the Soul is
an analogue for art: "so let me be thy choir" ('"Ode to Psyche"). The question
'what justifies this analogue?' seems to demand answering the question 'what is the
ontological status of this "theory" of mind?' I take this question to
beawayofaskinghowweinhabitlanguage. Keats'theoryofthebecomingofthe intelligence
(through its interaction with the Heart and circumstance [the world]) into a Soul
stabilized as a self-possessed identity is a theory ofjustification directed at the
question 'how we can live?'.Geoffrey Hill re-constructs this soul-making as a means
o f redemption in his claim that Coleridge's "To William Wordsworth" functions as
"the private utterance of highly organized art can for a while stabilize the self-
dissipating brilliance o f the listener's mind, that is, Coleridge's mind, the mind
that is concentrating upon that very diffusion" (12). How does 'mind' 'stabilize'
in "the private utterance of highly organized art'? "PrivateReproduced with
permission.
utterance" does not mean 'private meaning', susceptible to the force o f
Wittgenstein's private language 'argument', the absurdity o f a language
functioning as a language without public criteria determining the meaning o f words
from one moment to the next. The force o f 'private utterance' attaches to what it
means for someone to be 'stabilized' in language. The specialness of aesthetic
language lies not in its form, but in its utterance or its use as language standing
for, or acting as the expression of, a 'mind' ('mind' here remainsablackbox).
Anexpressionofmindisnotatheoryofmind. Rather,itisa temporary identity that allows a
fiction or a figure to seduce us into a moral stance towards ourselves as if toward
the world, or towards the worlds as if towards ourselves: "a poet can transfigure
his own dissipation by a metaphor that perfectly comprehends it" (13). This moral
stance is an interpretive stance ('this means x'), where we allow the
interpretation to constitute ourselves or a text.This metaphoric comprehension
entangles the poet in the very language in which
hefailstoactorconfiguretheworldorhimselfasmeaningful. Wecanuselanguageto describe
the world within systems of values (the logic of a language game); the application
of the distinctions determining any language game, however, is continually subject
to normativerestrictions,criteriaoflegitimacy,andontologicaljustification.
Thecriteria determining legitimate use, while grounded in social and linguistic
conventions, continuously require ontological support justifying the actuality of
the distinctions and entities indicated or expressed within a language. In other
words we can use language as a self-contained descriptive system of values or
distinctions, but we can only enter language, that is, constitute ourselves and the
world through the justifications o f both theReproduced with permission of the
application and the existence o f these distinctions and values. (This is not to
say we do not make mistakes, but that there are limits. I can, for example imagine
that rocks rolling downmountainsaregods.
IfIaminthepathofsucharock,Icanstandthereand
embracethisgodinamomentofexquisitehappiness. Mylifemightbemoremeaningful than
someone who thinks rocks are rocks, and they are better avoided when they reach a
certainvelocity. IfIclaimtherock-as-godpictureisequivalenttotherocks-are-hard
picture I have made a grammatical mistake. The rocks-are-hard school is superior if
ones goal is to stay alive. The rock-god school might be superior if my goal is to
die meaningfully in a mountain accident. Relativistic arguments often make confused
comparisons. Inthiscasephysicsactsasalimitonhowsuccessfulabeliefsystemisasa
survival system. The question remains: is it better to live a life o f fictional
fantasy that may be meaningful, or a life o f scientific realism that may not be?.
These may not be opposites in any real sense, but their application is fraught with
confusions). Ontologicaljustification can describe the limits o f our involvement,
and the meaning o f this involvement, in our language.Poetry works through
configuring ontological justification as a problem o f interpretation. This
formulation can justify Ransom's vague description o f poetry as "ontological or
metaphysical maneuver" (The World's Body, 347). In poetic use the demand for
ontological justification appears as a demand for recognition, to use the creation
ofmeaning as an expression ofself. The constitution or the making ofourselves marks
our expressions o f value as expressions o f power; these expressions cannot
supersede the systematic normative organization and functioning o f language, where
theReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
accuracy o f statements becomes an acting through, agreement with, and description
o f language. Our failure or success within these normative rules cannot be
mediated through our self-constructions, but only by the determining structures o f
society, language, biology. These normative rules urge or measure us; our
ontological creation ofourselves and our world within language measures orjudges
language. We can forgive our ontological failures but never our failures in
clarity. Hill, quoting Chesterton's study ofDickens says, "'a saint after
repentance will forgive himselffor a sin; a man about town
willneverforgivehimselfforafauxpas"'(7). Artisaconstructionwithinthe'density'o f
language, the normative resistance o f words and the incommensurability between
different concepts, ideas, meanings, and language games. This poetic making
delivers both the poet and our poetic responses "up to judgment"(14). Hill divides
this judgment up between a (1) judgment o f our "empirical guilt" accompanying our
possible failures and faux pas within the normative criteria of our language and
social life and a (2) judgment of the "Sin" that Karl Barth understands as the
'specific gravity of human nature as such' (15).6 This 'empirical guilt', or the
normative force of language, has its own weight. "[I]t is at the heart o f this
'heaviness' that poetry must do its atoning work, this heaviness which is
simultaneously the 'density' o f language and the 'specific gravity o f human
nature'" (15).The failure of clarity, the difficulty requiring interpretation in
Finnegans Wake (and in a different way in Philosophical Investigations) forces the
reader to mediate the normative rules through ontological justification (the
radical need to determine the ontological status of its language as the exercise of
its art), and to mediate the constitutiveReproduced with permission of the
force of ontological justification by the normative rules of our language (its
humor, what Wittgenstein calls grammatical jokes). The normative rules o f language
can function like the laws o f nature (the descriptions o f form as quantity) and
our ontological justifications are judgments about how we function within these
laws. Together these rules andjudgments constitute us within language and describes
our intentionality, seemingly our qualitative mental relations. Finnegans Wake,
therefore, can describe our constitution as
humanbeingsasafunctionofacommentaryaboutitsownlanguage. Ournormative language while
constituting the possibilities of meaning available to us can not function
ontologically, that is, we can exist within and through these possibilities, but we
can only exist at all, through the ontological or creative pressure attending the
kinds o f ontologicaljudgments we make about the normative status of our language
games, for example, 'Do I love you?' 'Can I love?' 'Is love possible?' This
explains why ordinary criteria can fail; why we are continually tempted by
skepticism.2 If I rewrite Hill's formulation of our deliverance up to judgment, I
can suggest a vague canopy to include this play between ontology and epistemology
as a moral crisis: "in the constraint of shame the [Wakean\ poet and [grammatical
philosopher] [are] free to discover both the 'menace' and the atoning power o f his
own art" (17).Our survival in language requires an act of will. We must, however,
take responsibility for the governance of our will, and not cede or abrogate our
moral involvement within language to the confusion ofuse which distorts and hides
this moral dimension within the confusions and entanglements between language games
o f powerReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
(ideology)disguisedasmoraljudgments. Somethinglikethissensemotivates Wittgenstein
to remark his distrust oflanguage:Human beings are profoundly enmeshed in
philosophical--i.e. grammatical-- confusions. They cannot be freed without first
being extricated from the extraordinary variety o f associations which hold them
prisoner. Y ou have as it were to reconstitute their entire language.--But this
language grew up as it did becausehumanbeingshad--andhave--
thetendencytothinkinthisway. So you can only succeed in extricating people who live
in an instinctive rebellion against language; you cannot help those whose entire
instinct is to live in the herdwhich has created this language as its own proper
mode o f expression. (MS 213,?423; quoted in Kenny, "Wittgenstein on the Nature of
Philosophy", 16).Poetry and philosophy both constitute kinds of rebellion against
language. This distrust of language constitutes a religious stance, a configuration
of oneself as anything or anyone in relation to a negative limit which can
determine our meaning and our world. What is it like to be trapped within a system
of meaning within which you cannot escape but which you distrust? Finnegans Wake is
a comic version o f Kafka's The Castle.Coleridge, commenting on the mental schema
articulated in Wordsworth's Prelude, redescribes the reciprocal relation between
the senses and the world that constructs the mind. Following what he believes was
"partly suggested by me ... He[Wordsworth] was to treat man as man--a subject o f
eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the
senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out ofthe senses"(188). This could
seem a conquest ofa world, or the constructionReproduced with permission of the
o f a Khananite pleasure palace after such a conquest. Eliot, in 'Gerontion,' finds
such aworld "a decayed house", where "In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut,
flowering judas,/ To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk/ Among the whispers";
where these whispers, these "vacant shuttles weave the wind" into a riddle about
the consequences ofknowledge ["After such knowledge, what forgiveness?"]. Our
ordinary needs eat, divide and drink the world into metaphors (cliches: whispers,
weave the wind) that signal the loss, consumption and disappearance ofthe world.
The organic world symbolizes its own loss.
Eliotdescribesamoralterror,akindofknowledgethatcanappearasaskepticism generated
from failing senses, but I think it is more likely a realization that a soul can
fragment through a kind of self-reflection in which the indifference ofthe world
and our own indifference generates a specific terror. Poetry can enact this terror
as what we are. Thisstance-indifferentterror--
isneitherexistentialnorstrictlyspeakingmoral. Eliot's poetry describes this terror
as a realization that the soul (and our demand for redemption) and subjectivity (at
least our speaking T ) describes the subjunctive: we live counterfactually. Eliot
does not discover this. The possibilities of either idealism or modem skepticism,
when understood as moral responses to scientific knowing, outlinesthe soul,
subject, self as subjunctive. (This does not mean the soul, subject, self are
constructed; they may be given as perpetual possibility; making a soul or a mind
follows as apossibilityofthispossibility).
Eliot'sdiscoveryisoftheterrorgraspingandattending modemself-reflection.
Heexposespartlywhatthis'subjunctive'means,teachingusthe consequence ofthis
knowledge (ifit is 'knowledge'). Words describe ideal forms that our descriptions
belie into algorithms of loss:Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.I have lost my passion: why should
I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated?I have lost my site,
smell, hearing, taste, and touch: How should I use them for your closer contact?Age
and terror and revulsion and the failure of our knowing and knowledge, the
realization that not only can the mind and the world be confused for each other but
that a failure o f courage, sense, or meaning can tempt us to deny our mind.
Instinct, the algorithm describing the non-human, and our dying, the algorithm o f
loss, sketch the limits ofour knowledge ofboth ofthese as despair: "What will the
spider do,/ Suspend its operations, will the weevil Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca,
Mrs. Cammel, whirled/ Beyond the circuit o f the shuddering Bear/ In fractured
atoms." The constellation Ursus Major can mean a " shuddering Bear", a promised
stability o f meaning that cannot preserve the atoms ofanyone'sbody.
MeaningdescribesthelimitbeyondwhichNothingbeckons.For the Ancient Mariner the
periodicity of the stars measures our human needs as our involvement in the world
as a promise of a home. Hill offers Coleridge's prose gloss of the Ancient
Mariner's loneliness as "an outstandingly beautiful image of the attainability of
atonement":In his loneliness and fixedness he yeameth towards the journeying Moon,
and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue
sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and
theirReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly
expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.This description has the
coherence o f a poem, a fragment: not a fragment o f the world it describes, nor of
the longing it evokes but of a kind of self-reflection that the glosses
accompanying the poem form on the poem, and in this case a coherence o f self-
sufficiency that ironically refers to the complex worlds that include the poem,
Coleridge, the heavens, us, the future ad infinitum. This is the promise o f the
Romantic fragment. These fragments are a profound attempt, even in the anti-
Newtonianism ofBlake, to configurepoetry as Schlegel describes Romanticism as kind
o f aesthetic-moral formula describing itself and all worlds in which it would or
will make sense:"The whole history of modem poetry is a running commentary on the
following brief philosophical text: all art should become science, and all science
art; poetry and philosophy should be made one" (Critical Fragment 1 1 5).The
different ways of finding a text speaking to us, for us, at us, allegorizing us
allows us to displace forms o f skepticism into fantasies o f intelligibility which
animate the text into various forms o f animism. As a form o f animism, and,
therefore, as a kind o f romanticism attempting to link science and art, the
animation o f the text parallels the mechanical, like the animation of dolls,
bodies, and clay heads, as if science gave us the truth of what we see, a common
sense weeding out visions and spirits. Is this the kind o f animism we findin Henry
Adams' dynamo or in Yeats' Byzantine birds?In "Byzantium" we are presented with
three categories o f being: "Miracle, bird orgolden handiwork". These are what in
"Sailing to Byzantium" Yeats called "bodily form".Reproduced with permission of the
"Once out of nature" the poet's voice rejects the form of natural things, the
category "bird" in the later poem in order to enter the " artifice of eternity" as
an aesthetic form "as Grecian goldsmiths make". This collapse of natural form into
artifact is what Wittgenstein, in Investigations, called the sublimation o f the
machine into a symbol: where the normative structures o f language, rules,
conventions, etc. are confused as the causal structures o f our psychology
determining what we actually say. A symbol built out o f this confusion can seem to
stabilize our linguistic practices. The structure o f a symbol so
constitutedoutofthisstabilityisdeterminedasaformofidentity. Thus,Wittgenstein
writes in the Tractatus:Only the proposition has sense; only in the context o f a
proposition has a name meaning. (3.3)Every part of a proposition which
characterizes its sense I call an expression(a symbol).(The proposition itself is
an expression.)Expressions are everything--essential for the sense o f the
proposition-- that propositions can have in common with one another.An expression
characterizes a form and a content. (3.31)Identity functions as a metaconcept, or
rather as the logical possibility that allows propositions to be decomposed and
recharacterized as expressions. In this sense propositions function as expressions
when they have a sense, in Frege's picture when they can stand in for each other.
This commonality or conceptual identity functions as a repeatability that lies
behind and extends the Cartesian idea of animalReproduced with permission of the
animation as mechanical, a rule-bound persistence, to that of the mind: a picture
of the soul as a perpetual motion, or rather expression, machine. This is like the
picture o f the soul in Swift's Tale o fa Tub as clothes or the kind of person
described by Adams in his preface as "a manikin... clothes ... the same value as
any other geometrical figure o f three
ormoredimensions,whichisusedforthestudyofrelation"(xxx). ForAdamsthe collapse into
the mechanical attends a despair over the virgin's failure, the failure of spirit,
to limit, let alone convert, human violence. This renunciation requires that he
convert himself into a vision o f mechanical time and identity, into at least a
metaphor o f the algorithmic: "Every man with self-respect enough to become
effective, if only as a machine, has had to account for himself somehow, and to
invent a formula of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed"
(471-72).This vision of self-transformation is quite different from what we find in
Keats: "Even a Proverb is no proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it." A
proverb in its generality and structure is formulaic. This formula, however, is not
applied to the world, but you interpret yourself as expressing it, that is, it
becomes a proverb to you only when you can use it to describe your life. "Life" and
a "Proverb" articulate incommensurable and irreducible domains, as do picture and
text, and thus the aptness o f the word 'illustrate,' as a means o f mapping one
domain onto another, as a picture illustrates a text. But what allows ones' life to
be such an illustration? This is a question not only of application but of
intentionality (the formulaic aspect calls for application: apply this formula
across this domain; an application that leads to illustration opens up a problem of
intentionality: what exactly is being illustrated? Matisse was commissioned to
illustrateReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
Joyce'sUlysses. HeproducedaseriesofdrawingsillustratingHomer'sOdyssey,not having
bothered to read Joyce's book. What if he had read the book would he have then been
able to illustrate it?) What an illustration picks out in a text is like an
interpretation, but its application to the text remains unclear or even tenuous: Is
a movie an illustration of a book? Is it a translation ofat least a word, or
phrase, or character into another medium? A particular shot in a movie might be an
illustration; the musical score might be an illustration; but the movie itself is
an interpretation, an attempt to tell not illustrate.Asking "What does it mean?"
leads to interpretation; asking, "What is it like?" leads to illustration. The
first gives us a logic or a language we can understand; the other shows us the
answer to a riddle.A proverb is a fragment, as Schlegel called it, a kind o f self-
articulating totality pointing, however, beyond itselftoward the world or
experience which it describes or to which it can be applied. Schlegel's fragments
function organically; they are not analogized into machinery as in Modernism
(poetries appealing to Newton under the pressure of further scientific and
technological transformations), but, akin to Goethe's conceptualizations ofthe
Urphanomen, the ground phenomena, the principle ofform out of which and through
which all other forms metamorphosize. This principle of holographic gestalt,
organic self-articulation does not describe the mutual identification of
ontogenyandphylogeny,butratherthereductionofbeingintoorganicmorphology. For
Schlegel this form was the hedgehog:A Fragment should be like a little work of art,
complete in itself and totally separated from the surrounding world like a
hedgehog.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
Ein Fragment muss gleich einem kleinem Kunstwerke von der umgebenden Welt ganz
abgesondert und in sich selbst vollendet sein wie ein Ingel. (Athenaeum, 206)
Fragments define an holographic ecology: "Fragmentary totality, in keeping with
what should be called the logic ofthe hedgehog, cannot be situated in any single
point: it is simultaneouslyinthewholeandinthepart.
Eachfragmentstandsforitselfandforthat from which it is detached" (The Literary
Absolute, 44). Schlegel describes this symbolic function as constituting a mode
ofbeing, a function ofa particular kind ofart: "I have expressed a few ideas
pointing toward the heart o f things, and have greeted the dawn . . . from my own
point ofview... Let anyone who knows the road do likewise ... from his own point
ofview." (Ideas, 155). This is what Blanchot called "a totally new mode of
completion" (358), the "demand posited by poetry that it reflect itself and
accomplish itself through its reflection . . . poetry no longer wants to be natural
spontaneity but solely and absolutely conscious" (353). This requirement displaces
the site o f poetry away from the"poetic work" and towards "the poetic activity"
(357). The relationship between consciousness and the world takes place through
animation. For human beings this describes knowing as a poetic activity and for the
world describes its dynamism. Blanchot describes this as a "mode of completion"
that "mobilizes . . . the whole through its interruption and through interruptions
various modes" (358). Gasche explains this mode as the consequence o f "a cross-
fertilization between the Romantics' practice o f writing
andKantiandoctrine,which...dealswiththeuniversalconditionsofcompletion"(ix). I will
tilt my way to one side of such a characterization of the relation between the two
senses o f the aesthetic playing out in Kant: the aesthetic as "reflective
judgment" (in the Critique o fJudgment) and the aesthetic as the
constitutivejudgment determining the relation between concepts and experience (in
the Critique o fPure Reason).Schlegel analogizes the relation between science and
art as between the dissipating force ofthe individual mind and the organized
rigidity ofa system. The systemic supports the ground o f the real and is thus
necessary; the dissipating force o f the mind constitutes the subjectively true and
is also necessary. Thus "it's equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to
have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two" (Athenaeum 53). This
integration follows by constituting the individual as embryo system, and thus the
implication between individual and system follows from phylogenesis: "All
individuals are systems at least in embryo and tendency" (Athenaeum 242). Human
beings are embedded in the a priori, which functions as a determining system.The
categorical imperative universalizes the individual outside of the semantics of
'morality'. The force ofthis universalizing functions as an 'ought', a necessity
determining the moral autonomy of any particular human as the microcosmic version
of the universal law. The categorical imperative determines moral necessity
"without reference to any purpose", but rather through the "form ofthe action and
the principle from which it follows" ("Grounding for the Metaphysics ofMorals",
26). In Kant's picture, moral action measures the distance between someone who acts
and rational moral criteria. This distance is measured by the special character o f
'ought' which marks the criterion for action and serves as the motive for action.
Kant describes the criterion for moral action in a self-reflexive proverb which
appeals to and contains another proverb:Reproduced with permission of the copyright
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it
should become a universal law' ("Grounding", 30). The embedded proverb divides (1)
an action (moral action) into a personal act in a particular situation and (2) an
act ofwill universalizing this action. Kant's model for action, therefore, enacts
the way of seeing described in Blake's "Auguries o f Innocence" as a description o
f moral action:To see a World in a Grain of Sand,And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,Hold
Infinity in the palm o f your hand, And Eternity in an hour.Kant imagines human
moral failure to be a failure in the application o f moral precepts. Underlying
this assumption is a theological picture translated into a logical problem: how to
translate the universal, in which the moral 'ought' and the ontological 'is' are
related as a conditional (if x, then y), into the particular contingencies
determining human action. Kant's 'is' is not Hume's: Kant's criterion for existence
is not grounded in human practice but in the simultaneous demand for individual
human moral autonomy (to act andjudge through and as being 'I') and the necessity
of a universal moral law. The means by which he accomplishes the translation of the
'I' into the moral universal proceeds through our formal equivalence as human
beings within the formal limits o f our identity as agents. Within the categorical
imperative this takes the form of a textual self-reflection that in
itselfservesasamodelforhumanaction. Thustheproverb"Actonlyaccordingtothat maxim"
describes the application of "that maxim". This textual self-reflection functions
as a means of application that displaces the implicit 'act as if. . . " in the
embedded proverbReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
into the initial proverb concerning action. This initial "Act only. . . " assumes
that we act outside o f moral commitments (and thus these commitments must be
shaped and ordered). (I think this is a skewed picture but I cannot criticize it
here).Because ofthis assumption, however, this new proverb would require a proverb
of application ad infinitum. Kant's response is to characterize 'acting' itself as
a form of self-reflection:
"Actinsuchawaythatyoutreathumanity,whetherinyourownperson or in the person of
another, always at the same time as an end, and never as a means" (36). The
particular concerns o f any action are dissolved in his designation o f humanity as
the defactoobjectofanymoralact. Thisispossiblebecauseanyindividualisalsoanexample
of humanity ("whether in your own person or in another"). Characterizing someone as
an example (or even an exemplar) aestheticizes being human, and translates the
question 'when are you a good person?' into 'when are you human?' This follows from
Goodman's description of art in Ways o f WorldMaking (or mine ofFinnegans Wake in
the next section) as a function marked by the use or perception of something as an
exampleofart. Thisfollowsfromthefailureofthequestion'whatisart?' Artrequires the
question 'when is art?' Such a question replaces the quest for substance with a
kind of dual perception of ourselves (when are we seeing art?) and of an object or
text (is this an example o f art?). Kant has displaced the model o f a moral
example (or exemplar) with a model of an ontological example (or exemplar). (Such a
displacement is for Kant a requirement of morality, part of its universalizing
demand). If we say 'he acted like amonster' or 'he's no longer human' or 'he acted
like an animal', do we imagine he is really a monster or some other species? Do
animals murder in the way that humans do? KantReproduced with permission of the
provides a picture o f how content or qualities can be translated into form. T
becomes a universal law through which we act toward and as our species being, our
essential being, so that the universal law coalesces into the form of all moral
actions as if it generated an animateuniversalbeing.
AlthoughIcannotpursuethisfurtherhere,Iwanttosuggestthat Kant's attempt to integrate
moral autonomy with necessity organizes the form o f the moral 'ought' and the
universal law as the form o f our animation as human beings.The problem with
Goodman's picture is that he reduces the function o f art to the recognitionofart.
Kantinhismodelreducesbothbeinghumanandbeingmoraltothe recognition of the human and
the moral. The application of morals reduces to the recognition o f the form o f
morality which further reduces to the recognition o f being human; these
recognitions are applied to oneselfto such a degree that moral action becomes a
species o f self-recognition.The fragment can work as a fragment, that is, it can
preserve its unity and coherence (seemingly) without a clear discursive context
(what is its scope, its truth value, the discursive rules determining its use or
expressive force as literature or philosophy or theology or whatever?), by pointing
beyond itself by pointing to itself. The fragment exists through the logic ofKant's
categorical imperative read as a theory of meaning, as if the 'I' and the word
invoked their context and significance through the same ontological claims or
presuppositions about themselves. (Why the temptation to personify fragments and
word?). If the good is what can be universalized for all other individuals, then
the systemic is split into the abstraction of universalizing, a mode of equality
determined asfundamental human identity, and the a prioric ground ofjudgment and
subjectivity thatReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
determines the scene ofmorality as the individual will. The world is dissolved into
identity;theforceofthisdissolutionispartlythecrueltythatNieztschesmelled. Thissplit
follows from the confusion between personhood and citizenship brought out in Locke.
But this abstraction must be supported by the a priori conditions determining the
human relation with the world: supported by metaphysics.Stanley Cavell argues that
"maintaining fragmentariness is part o f Emerson's
realizationofromanticism"(TheNewYetUnapproachableAmerica,21). Ininterpreting
Emerson's essay "Experience" as "a theory of the fragment" (21), the discoveiy that
philosophy as a way ofgoing on is "a work ofmourning" (26), Cavell appeals to
Schlegel (or rather the reading of Schlegel in L 'absolu litteraire) for an
epigraph: "Many works of theancientshavebecomefragments.
Manyworksofthemodemsarefragmentsright from their beginning [generation,
Entstchung]." (Athenaeum, 24; Cavell, 22): "In 'Experience,' the condition o f
existing from birth, that is to say, existing from the condition of birth--call it
the congenital--is taken as the condition of fragmentariness" (22).
SuchfallenessrewritesPlato'sdivisionofouroriginaryandrogynousunityintomale and
female with our continual alienation from God described in Genesis. The fragment
functions here as the organic resistance to the mechanistic description o f the
mind developed from Descartes mechanistic description ofthe body and the
application ofNewtonian logic to the mind in the British empiricist tradition. The
organicist fantasy (as ifwe know what 'birth' means as a description oftime or what
the 'organic' means as a description of our thinking) and the mechanical fantasy
(thinking our way out of our consciousness or replacing ourselves with higher level
machines) each describe an extremeReproduced with permission of the copyright
(insane?) response to loss. Schreber enacts this insanity: "As long as he remains
male, Schreber is not subject to the travail of mortality. Only after he has
mothered a new breed o f humanity, a new Geschlect (spirit), will he die a natural
death and be assumed, bodies andsoul,intoheaven"(103). Self-
generationisanadmissionofmortality;itsdenialan assertion o f continual identity.
Schlegel, in Vorlesungen uber schone Literatur und Kunst, asserts that art must
mimic the generative process ofNature:That means it must--creating autonomously
like nature, itself organized and organizing--from living works which are not set
in motion through an alien mechanism, like a pendulum-clock, but through an
indwelling power... In this manner did Prometheus imitate nature, when he formed
man out of clay of the earth, and animate him with a spark stolen from the
sun . . . (281)Art functions like a fragment, "itself organized and organizing,'
animated not by mechanisms but by an "indwelling power", animated by animation. But
would Schlegel suggest that Nature as a whole functions like a fragment? Prometheus
embodies and enacts this "indwelling power" and thus is an extension, a fragment of
this same natural creation. As an animating principle ofNature he creates man, who
is, therefore, analogized to art. This animation as an extension or fragment o f
Prometheus semantically or mythically describes the autonomous metabolism
("organized and organizing") constitutinglife. Oneisanimatedbycontinuallyre-
animatingoneselfwithinthelimits defined by that which initially animated one.
Nature, Prometheus, Man, Art, as if collapsing metaphor and metonymy into an
holographic, ontplogical trope, are allReproduced with permission of the copyright
fragments, each a deus exfragmento or deus ex anima: "The more organic something
is, the more systematic it is.--The system is not so much a species o f form as the
essence o f the work itself' (Gasche citing Schlegel's Literary Notebooks, xii).
Gasche comments that Schlegel equates "fragment=system=work=individual. In the
closed-offindividualities of the fragment, unity is achieved in chaos, but at the
expense o f any systematic relation as the absoluteness, or isolation, o f the
fragment suggests" (xii). The absolute reduces to fragments within fragments: an
infinite set o f finite sets.The promethean generative power Coleridge calls the
primary Imagination functions in the same way that the soul does for Keats, as a
grammatical surrogate for the self and world: "the living Power and prime Agent o f
all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of
creation in the infinite I AM' (Biographia I. 13; 304). The creation o f these
grammatical surrogates describe models o f a mind. Artificial Intelligence uses the
mathematical syntax o f computer languages, or the potential syntax o f an
idealized language and machine, as this kind o f surrogate. This mathematical
syntax, as it does for Adams and Yeats, animates as a proximate cause a mind as a
fragment. In Artificial Intelligence, the Infinite I AM is divided into the
proximate cause within a mind, usually as consciousness (animation having been
reduced to this) and into the interpretive complexity of our experience, and thus
as an epiphenomenon resulting from a conscious machines interaction with its
environment.Wecannotspeakofcauseshere,butonlyofinterpretations. Theself-reflective
attachments between the self-standing fragment and its reflective containment and
expression o f systematic totality creates a symbolic distance that is meant to
picture theReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
relation between T and 'world'. Within this economy o f mirroring there exists no
conceptual outside (there is no, as Joyce calls it in Finnegans Wake, "surview over
all the factionables" (FW285.26). Interpretative meaning or significance must be
generated from insidethissystem. Thetropethatallowsforthisisirony. Blanchotwrites:
The'T ' of the poet, finally, is what alone will be important: no longer the poetic
work, but poetic activity, always superior to the real work, and only creative when
it knows itself able to evoke and at the same time to revoke the work in the
sovereign play of irony. (The Infinite Conversation, 357)Irony here, however, is an
act o f creation, an act o f creation that produces analogic knowledge at the site
of our manifestation as descriptions (in writing), that as Keats suggests, we
illustrate. This is not what Blanchot says, but it is an implication o f how he
illustrates the romantics, who "bound to the act of writing as to a new knowledge
they are learning to take up anew by becoming conscious ofit" (354). The dynamism
ofthe mind describes an education (as it will also for Emerson and Adams). Lacoue-
Labarthe andNancy translate this picture o f dynamic self-illustration into an
aesthetic that more clearly reflects Kants' transcendental aesthetic. They claim
that "[w]hat makes an individual, what makes an individual's holding-together, is
the 'systasis' that produces it. What makes its individuality is its capacity to
produce, and to produce itsel? first of all, by means of its internal 'formative
force'-///e bildende Kraft inherited from the organism of Kant..." (49). Adams
realizes that the ontological limits enacted within our scientific descriptions o f
the world make this "capacity to produce . . . itself' impossible, except as
biological and physical effects (as in the way our eyes 'reproduce' the world or
our genesReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
reproduceus). Ifhumanbeingsarereducedtoan'acting'thatrequirestheapplicationof a
moral maxim (as in Kant), then this reduction to biological effect means we cannot
apply moral ideals as a function o f self-reflection (more o f this latter).For
Adams, the fragment (what he calls Multiplicity) is a consequence of science
(pictured as broadly mechanical), whereas for Schlegel (and in the logic of Keats'
proverb) fragments resist this mechanization. This difference is partly a battle
between Newton and Goethe. Novalis writes in Grains ofPollen: "Fragments ofthis
kind are literary seeds: certainly, there may be sterile grains among them, but
this is unimportant if only a few of them take root"(2.463). The play between
particular and containing universal, figured here as a seed and its growth into its
determining form, is a conception o f the infinite that, as in Hegel, unites self-
reflection in infinite dynamism. Romantic poetry, both in particular poems and as a
totality, "should forever be becoming and never be perfected" (A22).Because these
fragments (as models ofthe moment or instant) contain or describe a totality they
are essentially infinite (describing a kind o f self-contained infinite
divisibility as between the numbers 0 and 1), and in this describe gods or our
godhood: "every infinite individual is god" and "there are as many gods as there
are ideas." (This set o f ideas will latter be limited and humanized by W. James
when he says that one has as many selves as friends: this turns the infinity o f
the individual into a void becoming through its interactions, this is one form o f
modernism, but one failing against grammar). As Charles Rosen explains, such a
fragment is a "closed structure, but its closure is a formality: it may be
separated from the rest ofthe universe, but it implies the existence ofwhat is
outside of itself not by reference but by its instability" (Romantic Generation,
51). This fragmentReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
defines what a fragment should be, but such a definition transfers the ambiguity of
"fragment" to what it means to be complete and separated" when this fragment-
definition itselfpoints at itselfbut also at all other fragments, the ganz Welt,
and the obscurity of being like a hedgehog. This instability is what Keats answers
with "illustration": the fragment in its separateness and completeness invokes a
logic or interpretative frame, but one that resists us, like a riddle.What is to be
illustrated is obvious--the proverb. Is the interpretation clear? Keats' claim
about proverbs is itselfa proverb illustrating another proverb--"Nothing ever
becomes real till it is experienced." Something becomes real in this sense when one
views one's life as such an illustration. In this case, Keats offers us an
ontological criterion in order to make sense, or rather to make the world in which
the first proverb functions: Proverbs become proverbs to us when our life
illustrates them, because nothing is real until we experience it. Experiencing is a
kind of illustration--that turns the type (the proverb) into the token (the
proverbfo r us: we can use it because we have become its token: this is an
illustration of meaning from given types into particular tokens: from language to
us). The proverb is meant to be true in all cases, let us say, within its world, or
within the language game in which we mean (self-reflection or instantiation within
the language game) as an illustration o f the proverb, where we can measure
ourselves as real (as defined by the proverb: the proverb measures us), and we can
measure the proverb as True: "'p' is p". Thus the proverb remains a mere type when
we do not recognize ourselves as one ofthose cases, within the totality defined by
that "all". Whatever is realis something we have experienced, in which case
everything we have experienced is real toReproduced with permission of the
us. But this statement about what is real only functions as a proverb, let us say
it is a true statement about what is real, i.e., what we experience, when we
recognize it as an accurate description o f what we count as real.Proverbs for
Keats, therefore, are curious examples of aspect seeing. Instead of seeing a duck
or a rabbit, however, we see ourselves, our life--as a narrative? a picture? what
do we see? But what is illustrated for whom? The proverb does not illustrate our
life, weillustrateit. Thusitisseeingourselvesasanillustrationandtheproverbasa
descriptiontobeillustrated. ThetransformationofProverbintoproverbandourlifeinto an
illustration becomes an actualization--not as a change ofbeing but as a
transformation of aspect. The proverb is not strictly speaking a description of our
life but it is a way of our seeing ourselves, a description ofmeaning as opposed to
experience; that is why we illustrate it.Adams is calling for a more radical
transformation, an objectification o f himself
mirroringhisnarrationofhislifeinthirdperson. TheironyofAdams'provocationto become a
formula in order to become effective in the world is that a loss o f humanity is
required in order to be. Human beings have become fragments under the gears o f the
totality o f the world. This inversion marks the end not only o f human beings but
o f human beings as Newtonian machines, as clay pot with gears inside. It is as if
the demands o f the world require that we become proverbs ourselves, not
illustrations, become types not tokens, or, more specifically formulaic,
descriptions ofthe world in order to enter into the
conditionsofbeingandactingdeterminingwhatisreal. Ineffectourabilitytomeasure the
proverb as True becomes impossible, collapses into our vanishing into a formulation
ofReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
the criteria determining the real. This is a way of saying that we are replaced by
ontologicalcriteria. Ourexistenceisimpotentbeforeorwithoutthesecriteria,these
determinations. Do we imagine someone in Adams' world asking "Is this formula true
for me?" as one might about a proverb? Adams can only become real if he refigures
himself as what counts as real in what he already knows and what he cannot resist
as Real. Skepticism in this world begins as a case ofseeing oneselfas unreal and
the world as real;oneself as a projection, a fantasy, a dream: the world exists,
but do I?The systematic totalization of the real, where we are presented neither
with objectsnor fantasies, but with the conditions of reality, where the criteria
determining what counts
asrealbecometheobjectswesee,removestheworldassomethingweexperience. Our science is
not a science o f empiricism, but an attempt to determine and articulate
ontological conditions or descriptions. By this I mean that empiricism has been
replaced by metaphysics. The picture underlying much o f biology is "Genes
determine what counts as a human being": it is not that we illustrate the genes--we
manifest them in a particular way; we are determined by them, and, therefore, they
are always ours in a way a proverb canneverbe.
Aproverbisanideal,aplatonicformunderwhichwegainrealityanditgains truth; a string o
f nucleic bases describes us for the world, into the real, where being human as
opposed to being a chimpanzee is the effect o f this description enacted through
biochemistry. Are we true copies? Maybe, but that either means we are positing
other determining factors, environment for example, or we lose our claim-usually
our life, to being human. Genes make us real. Biology is becoming, as Chemistry has
already become, o f course in varying degrees, engineering. One does- not have to
think o f scienceReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
in this way, it is, as Wittgenstein might say, the picture is forced upon Adams and
to a large degree upon us. But it is a picture that competes with another cultural
picture--half Cartesian, with our bodies as forms to be filled, and halfromantic,
with the filling allegorized onto language, the world, and our pictures of
ourselves.The disorder ofour language is a function ofthe disorder ofour culture
and its failure to organize human life in relation to the order ofthe world enacted
through science and technology. The effect ofthis is to require the kind
ofjustification ofone's being, identity, life, picture o f the world that Conrad
asks for when he requires that art justify itself in every line if it is to be
called art (The Nigger o f the Narcissus). This can be understood as a drive toward
totality, as either a resistance or response to, what Adams' calls, "that path of
newest science [where] one saw no unity ahead--nothing but a dissolving mind"
(434). I f "Mind and Unity flourished or perished together", then the dissolution o
f the unity guaranteed by God results (at the time Adams was writing) with
"Faraday's trick of seeing lines of force all about him, where he had once seen
lines of will. Adamsconcludes"thatthesequenceofmenledtonothingandthesequenceoftheir
society could lead no further, while the mere sequence oftime was artificial, and
the sequence o f thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence o f force"
(382). Adams further reduces the grounding o f moral being in the recognition o f a
common humanity to therecognitionofuniversalizingconstitutiveforces.
Theproblemofmoralapplication that concerned Kant, however, is dissolved into
individual powerlessness: Act is replaced with being acted upon. Human beings mean
as the nexus of forces within the world. InReproduced with permission of the
being the nexus o f forces the relation between being human and the being o f the
universe is constructed as a pure limit, as a contentless unit o f self-reflection:
The sum o f force attracts; the feeble atom or molecule called man is attracted; he
is the sum ofthe forces that attract him... The universe that had formed him took
shape in his mind as a reflection o f his own unity, containing all forces except
himself. (474-75)This unit o f self-reflection is contentless because unity is the
act o f self-reflection itself (notthecontentofthisreflection). Consequentlyself-
reflectioncanonlygeneratesymbols not the forces that constitute what is (476).For
Adams the sense of life requires some commonality, some meta-identity into which
the seemingly incommensurable logics, forces, sequences o f the dynamo and virgin
can be converted: this identity is his mind (383). Adams required that intellectual
energy reduce into a kind of physical energy, or that they both reduce to some more
primal form o f energy. This is one way o f conceiving Artificial Intelligence.
Such a picture, however, lacksanyscientificvalueorvalidity.
Adams'translatesourpictureofthemindintoan analogic language in which
incommensurable and irreducible realms could be re-valued. Mind in this sense
separates from materiality but so does science, in that they both are mapped into
the language of special objects, concepts, forces, energy, or mathematics, and in
this allow human values to be refigured with ontological force. Such force remains,
however, only analogic, and with Adams, therefore, depends on scientific ignorance,
not suspended belief, and on philosophical naivete.Reproduced with permission of
In Y eats the temptation o f Adams' reductive conversion o f mental into physical,
a version o f which he pursued in "Sailing to Byzantium," is itself converted into
a kind o f hierarchical equivocation:Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, More
miracle than bird or handiwork Planted on the star-lit golden bough, Can like the
cocks of Hades crow,Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud In glory o f changeless
metalCommon bird or petalAnd all complexities of mire or blood.What is it that is
described as possibly miracle, bird or artifact? "All that man is"? The bodily form
ofthe golden bird ofthe emperor's smithies? Whatever is also "image, man or shade"
of the previous stanza? These are all versions ofthe soul or rather versions of the
mind following our intentionality backwards from the things it picks out to the
limits oflanguage pointing inward. The realm ofspirit, itselfanalogic for that
which or who fears death and desires immortality (hades' crow), gains a greater
claim on us, a claim greater than bird or handiwork. But is this partial priority
only for us, as a function of our desire for its power? Do 'we' identify, commit,
and recognize ourselves to and within this realm? The miracle is that we find
ourselves planted and crowing within the mythic, star-lit golden bough, like the
cocks of Hades. The equivocation between "image, man or shade" and "miracle, bird,
or golden handiwork" is not resolved by the "more miracle than. . . ",Reproduced
permission.95
but shifts from asking 'what is it?', and expecting an answer to 'who is it?, to
asking 'which world do we inhabit, a world ofmiracle or handiwork?' Are these the
same world?Is our choice between being image or handiwork? Miracle and handiwork
are both possibledescriptionsofhumanbeings. Withinthepoemtherearenowaysorresources
for deciding between these two possibilities. Miracles cannot resist their
degradation into handiwork and then into mire and blood.We flip aspects from
miracle to handiwork in the rest ofthe stanza. The light is no longer traced back
to a tapestry of stars but to "the moon embittered." Crowing can be heard as "scorn
aloud". The mechanical form ofthe earlier bird returns as "changeless metal". The
sublimation into the "glory" ofthis metal or into the miracle at best remain
aspects of the "common bird or petal/ And all complexities o f mire or blood." The
demand forjustification that propels Adams into the figure ofthe machine remains
the condition of our being within these complexities of chaos, life and death. The
movement Adams finds himself attracted to gets formalized in the "dancing floor',
but again as a pun in which an object as the context for human activities, as a
version of the world, can be read as dancing itself (synecdochic identity
encapsulating human interaction: as in let's go to a dance, where what is to be
done becomes totalized as a place, activity, and social entity allanalogized
through the transformation o f verb into noun as a kind o f thing). This too is a
way o f animating the inanimate.These versions o f animism and mind-making resist
transcendence and moral development through a kind of instability (chaos for Adams;
the pull of mire and blood for Yeats) that inverts romantic soul-making. What is
being made, described, converted, etc.Reproduced with permission of the copyright
becomes mysterious, even it if one calls it "mind" the varying aspects with which
it conformsemptiesthistermofanysense. Itiswewhoareindangerofbecoming
senseless,nottheworld(asonemightimagineKeatsfearing). Adams'problemof introjecting
chaos into order can be seen both as organizing the forces o f the world according
to a religious sense and in projecting the scientific order describing the world
into the chaos ofthe mind.If Yeats desires transformation in "Sailing to
Byzantium", then it is not into the self-beggettor, the magi, but into a machine
that mimics the form o f art in its body in order to speak within what is itself a
formed world, and beyond this into the ear o f the powers determining the wealth,
the power, the freedom ofthis world: the emperor somewhere off stage.
WhatYeats'narratorinvestsinthe"formtheGreciangoldsmithsmake"isthe desire to be
made, to function as a symbol o f some whole. (Not to use the world like Keats, but
to be used by something besides the world). Both an "aged man... studying monuments
o f its own magnificence" or "Soul clap its hands and sing" act as an "it"; the
choice here between singing and studying does not offer to make us human. The
objectification o f both ourselves and what we study as things lies confused in our
desiring and knowing: ". . . sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal/ It
knows not what it is." If we imagine that desire operates in the face of objects
pinched off into otherness, itness, then our failure to know ourselves, except as
dying animals, and thus as nothing to desire or nothing stable, translates into a
fragmented form of life, "[a] tattered coat upon a
stick",ifnotforthedelusionsofyouth. Thisform,emptiedanddecaying,akintotheReproduced
permission.
Sibyl prefacing The Waste Land, cannot be filled, but only remade into a stability
that tries to work language to a standstill in paradox:O sages standing in God's
holy fireAs in the gold mosaic ofa wallThese icons can act upon us as a golden bird
made by the decree ofthe emperor in order tokeephimselfawake.
Hisgoldsmithsbecomethewayinwhichhe(allofuswithinour
heads)talkstohimself(toourselves). Orthepoeticvoicecanspeakasaproductofthe empire,
and thus talk to lords and ladies. In every case, however, these 'human beings' and
'things' speak ofwhat they already know: "Ofwhat is past, or passing, or to come."
If as tattered coats and decaying animals the soul or aged man knows not what it
is, then the measureofthisignoranceliesinthemeasureoftime.
Thismeasure,however,liesoutside ofthe caring about what is past, passing, or to
come. Being made into pure form and animated by sages mastering his soul determines
being human as, what Yeats will call in"Byzantium," "an image, man, or shade": "I
call it death-in-life and life-in-death."In "Sailing to Byzantium", he calls to
these sages to "be singing-masters of mysoul", as if this singing could animate him
through his being possesses (by a formula maybe) by another (a revocation ofLocke's
grounding our freedom in our own self- possession). This is an inheritance as a
form ofbeing possessed, (an inheritance that possesses one, something not unknown
to happen). This possession and the gathering up "into the artifice of eternity" is
a way ofturning Keats "illustration" into our becoming, what Wittgenstein calls, a
"machine-as-symbol", the seeming representation o f a future as
apredeterminedexpressionofamachinesstructure. Ifwestudyourmonuments,theseReproduced
permission.98
machines or golden birds or words, we measure them as things made, as diagrams of
our ownmaking,andthusasproductsofhowwemadethem. Thismightbethemeasuringof a space
for a wedding bed in Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro", or the confused
resistanceto andmarkingoftimeandofdesirebyElizabethBishop'snarrator"studying" the
"Monument", or a critic's, or an engineer's, or a philosopher's description o f a
text or a mind. But as Figaro measures out his bed he sings, and in this measures
himself as the music and in duet with his wife's singing.Would we say here then
that the music illustrates him measuring out this bed? And if we silence the music
do we have a scene like the following described by Wittgenstein?Put a ruler against
this body; it does not say that the body is of such-and-such a length. Rather is it
in itself--I should like to say--dead, and achieves nothing of what thought
achieves."--It is as if we had imagined that the essential thing about a living man
was the outward form. Then we made a lump of wood in that form, and were abashed to
see the stupid block, which hadn't even any similarity to a living being. (PI?430)A
bed and a wooden body--asleep maybe, a "humptyhillhead" as Joyce calls such a
sleeper seems to have lost something essential. No amount of measuring will be able
to describe the nighttime experience of any block of wood, human or not. Such a
picture of our humanity is a picture ofdeath: what ifthe block ofwood looks like
you? And then you might ask with Descartes in the First Meditation: "How could I
deny that these hands and this body is mine, were it not that I compare myself to
certain persons ... who imaginethat they have a earthenware head or are nothing but
pumpkins or made o f glass?" Such aReproduced with permission of the copyright
picture is o f a Romantic fragment, a hedgehog, "complete in itself and totally
separated from the surrounding world" : one picture o f a human being. (What's the
history o f this?). A modernist fragment like a modernist machine works
differently. The movementfrom microcosm to macrocosm, the universe in a grain o f
sand, is replaced by golden birds in a Byzantine court or by a disjunction between
the logic of the world (the real) and our willing or choosing; or as Conrad
describes it "the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the
likeness ofone ofthose misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral
illumination ofmoonshine" (Heart ofDarkness, 7). In this the machinery has not been
replaced by something else, we will still find wheels and gears and a dead pumpkin-
head frightening our neighbors if we look, but we find ourselves within another
'machine' designing these wheels and gears, and we do not know how to describe this
machine. We can see its effects in Darwin's discussion of intentionality and
evolution:Although an organ may not have been originally formed for some special
purpose, if it now serves for this end we are justified in saying that it is
specially contrivedforit. Onthesameprinciple,ifamanweretomakeamachinefor some
special purpose, but were to use old wheels, springs, and pulleys, only slightly
altered, the whole machine, with all its parts, might be said to be specially
contrived for that propose. Thus throughout nature almost every part of each living
being has probably served, in a slightly modified condition, for diverse purposes,
and has acted in the living machinery o f many ancient and distinct specific forms.
(197)Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
Dennett understands this as a kind ofinterpretative functionalism, where there are
neither "real functions ... [nor] real meanings": "Mother Nature doesn't commit
herself explicitly and objectively to any functional attributions; all such
attributions depend on the mind-set of the intentional stance, in which we assume
optimality in order to interpret what we find" (Intentional Stance, 320). How this
intentional stance arises is of course obscure. Intentionality in this case is only
normative within a particular interpretation or framework.Evolution describes a
temporal unfolding of seeming intentionality, in which possibilities exist only as
a function o f changes which have particular applications that can result,
according to particular complex etiologies, by an accident o f design, in a seeming
intentionaleffect. InConrad'ssensesurvivingislikelisteningorbeing"onthewatchfor the
sentence, for the word that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired
by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy
night-air o f the river" (Heart o fDarkness, 45). Function organizes what is the
case into possibilities for further functions, propelled by change. What is this
change? Evolutionary theory instantiates change as a particular kind o f time,
mapping or mimicking the physics o f time into our own being, our own bodies and
minds as extensions of all animal bodies and minds.We exist within a non-
teleological (not described by function), non-purposeful machine, that we totalize
into "Mother Nature" or "Logic" or "Physics". And yet there is a difference between
such intentional fictions (as ways o f animating the descriptive laws o f science)
and the great Christian AI, the Virgin Mary, that Adams calls a "goddess because o
f her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction-- the greatest and
mostReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
mysterious o f all energies" (384). The modem dynamo that Adams opposes to the
Virgin has force but no value; it reproduces by organizing human beings into
patterns o f force but it cannot be embodied: artists "felt a railway train as
power; yet they... constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train
could never be embodied in art" (388). This, if nothing else, will force art to
change.Our seeing ourselves blinks the context of our being ourselves into sight,
illuminating not the world as a clock, but the force o f succession turning us into
a clock to measure this succession. Ontologically this blinking o f our world and
ourselves into mutualvisibilitydeterminesthelimitofourbeingorofourunderstanding.
Thislimitand this blinking constitutes the symbolic condition of our temporality.
1The discussion of soul-making is in the letter to George and Georgiana Keats,
February 14,1819.2 We can say both kinds ofjustification but only show the
consequence of this saying, that is, our involvement within and commitment to our
language (games).Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
4Keats' Version ofFinnegans WakeKeats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" works its way
"[b]etween a stare and a sough" ('sough':moan,sigh;FW264.10-11).
Theumseemstopresentitselfassomethingto know. But this knowing is senseless unless
the um can mean something. Thus, the poem finds itself mediating between the
demands and the grammar o f 'being' and 'meaning'. The um wears its content, speaks
its pictures, a tattooed head. Does the poetic voice or
KeatsortheUmanswerthequestionsthispoeticvoiceputstotheum? Thisisthefirst set o f
questions:(I) "What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape o f deities or
mortals, or of both, in Tempe or the dales o f Arcady? What men or gods are these?
What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipe and
timbrels? What wild ecstasy?"If not an answer, the response is "unheard melodies":
the water in the pictured tea pot boils: the youth is beneath the trees as if
contained in this unheard song, unable to kiss his beloved,sheunabletofadeintoloss.
Isthisananswer?This is the second set o f questions:(II) "who are these coming to
the sacrifice? To what green altar, 0 mysterious priest, leads't thou that heifer
lowing at the skies, and all her silken flanks with garland drest? What little town
by the sea shore, or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, is emptied o f this
folk, this pious mom?"Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
A little town (either amidst mountains or beside the sea) will remain silent. Keats
animates the town by addressing it by 'thou' and claiming that it will not speak
(as if it could) or tell asoulwhyitisdesolate.
Suchsilentform,thesemarblemenandmaidensoverwroughtin passion and into stasis (as if
art in its purity translates the human into something alien) seduce us into this
beyond, renouncing the aboutness o f thought: "Thou, silent form, dosttease us out
of though as doth eternity". These forms tease Keats into questions, which seem
answered by default, by virtue o f a rhetorical latching onto the clarity o f form
and content offered by the aphorism in the last stanza: "'Beauty is truth and truth
beauty'" (henceforth abbreviated as "BTTB"). "BTTB" pretends to be a synthetic
statement givingus, what Cora Diamond critically calls, "an explanatory account
ofthe relation between thinking and the standards proper to it. So we may look for
metaphysical truths to which our thinking ought to properly correspond" (13).For
Helen Vendler "BTTB" is the wake of the "complex mind . . . which we came to know
in the opening stanza of the ode" (149). She posits the mind as that which
functionally unites, enacts and is described by the languages of truth and
sensation. Although I think Keats wants to introject philosophical standards for
truth into aesthetic experience (see Vendler, 147-52), the "BTTB" equation
functions not as a statement offactortheory;itisnotaknowledgeclaim.
Vendlerarguesthatthis"riddlingmotto" articulates this identity as an expression o f
the urn's language within a Platonic realm
whereBeautyandTruthhavea"simultaneousandidenticalexistence"(149). Thus,she believes
that this statement is a prepositional statement about this Platonic realm. Vendler
criticizesthisasafailureofdiction. Sheconfusestheanalysisofhowthisknowledge
without permission.
claim works (either as a proposition or within the poem) with the analysis ofthe
effect this claim has on the meaning of the poem, as if'"Beauty is truth, truth
beauty5" answers the motives o f Keats in writing the poem or, anthropomorphically,
o f the poem itself in 'speaking5.Can meaning be equated with motive? Motive is not
a cause of the words, nor doesitdeterminetheirunderstandability.
Theascriptionofmotiveconceptualizes intentionality as an external interpretative
frame to the poem. The effect ofthese last lines, Vendler argues, while incomplete
and "not structurally complex enough to be adequate .. . to what we know o f
aesthetic experience - o r indeed to human experience generally5 (152), determines
the relation between Truth and Beauty as "constitutive o f creative expression, and
the mind is permitted its allegorizing, interrogatory, and prepositional
functions5(151). Inheruseof'adequate,5Vendlerassumesthatadaequatio,the
correspondence ('equal to5in a number of senses) between statement and world (in
this case experience) describes the criterion oftruth for poetry or for language in
general orfor Keats. The fact that she claims that Truth and Beauty function as
representative concepts in two different kinds of languages articulating, at least
for Keats, different domains, suggests that Keats is pressuring the philosophical
use (or meaning) of 'know5. He is not claiming that we only "need to
know5"BTTB5because it is adequate to our experience; how would we determine its
adequacy? "'Truth is Beauty5is not a statement of predication but an identity
statement, and thus it articulates different aspects or appearances as a unity. In
this it is a name, like 'the duck-rabbit picture5. Faced with such a picture we can
recognize a duck or a rabbit or a duck-rabbit picture. If I say "Duck isReproduced
permission.105
Rabbit,RabbitDuck'thisisonlytrueofthispicture. Itisnotafactlike'thatisapicture ofa
duck.' One does not say 'that is a picture ofa duck-rabbit picture'. 'Duck is
Rabbit' is a metaphysical statement not an epistemological statement, and thus not
subject to any criteria of adequation. If I always only see either a duck or a
rabbit then how do I recognize the picture as a duck-rabbit picture? In fact it can
function as that kind of picture depending on how I use it. As Wittgenstein says,
"I can see it in various aspects according to the fiction I surround it with" (PI
p.210). If I have different pictures of ducks and rabbits I might then say 'these
are not all duck-rabbit pictures,' or 'Duck is not always Rabbit'.If we read other
poems with different claims would we then say 'Truth is not Beauty'? Would such a
claim counter Keats' claim? Because this is not a statement of predication we
cannot compare it to any experience. It remains a statement about the relation
between the words 'Truth' and 'Beauty' for the um, that is, a rule about how to use
these words within um language. If another um in another poem, or maybe if an
artificially intelligent computer described 'Beauty' and 'Truth' as non-identical
we would conclude this is a different language. This difference would again be a
metaphysical difference. We could not adjudicate between them and say this
statement is closer to my experience. Weneverexperienceanynon-
predicativeidentityrelationoftheform'Xis Y'. We use identity statements as the ends
ofthought. As it does in the ode, an identity statement describes the limits ofmind
or world, a description ofthe possibilities ofmeaning available for perception or
interpretation.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
The um is a thing which we ventriloquize into speaking a truism whose meaning
cannot be determined, whose epistemological value and application to our experience
remainsmysterious. Sowhyventriloquizethisclaim? Tobeteasedoutofthoughtisto face the
ontological limits o f our thinking through language. All we can know as mortals
onearthisthelimitofourknowing. AllofKeats'previousquestionswere epistemological
questions, questions of fact. None of these questions are answered. If our
conclusions about the unanswerability ofthese questions remain within an
epistemological register we would say visual representations or ocular sensations
are not commensurablewithlanguage. Theyareonlycommensurablewithineithertheworldor
within the unity o f experience o f a subject. Thus, V endler's appeal to a complex
mind means she interprets their unity as a function of some transcendental subject.
An interpretation that described the unity between language and the visual as a
given o f the world would have to describe human vision and language as natural
systems under the aspectofasingleworld.
Eithersolutionfailstorecognizethatthepoemreframesthese questions outside oftheir
epistemological force: not a duck or a rabbit but a duck-rabbit picture without any
other possible pictures.The commensurability o f the allegorical, interrogatory,
and prepositional functions of the mind with the "silent form" of the um is
determined, by Vendler, in a disguised allegory between the complex mind betrayed
in the poem with the interpretive possibilities thatallowustodiscoverthismind.
Sheunderstandsthatinan"artcorrespondingtothe sense of sight, Truth as well as
Beauty has become a constitutive expression" (151). Constitutive ofwhat? Ofthat
which is expressed? Then the identity oftruth and beautyReproduced with permission
constitute the possibilities of allegory, interrogation and assertion
simultaneously as a functionofthemindofthepoet-readerandoftheurn'slanguageormind.
Thiswould mean that art means what it is, and what it is can be described by
allegory, through interrogation, and as propositions. The allegories, questions and
propositions (including "BTTB"), however, do not function as allegories, questions
or propositions in the poem.The um is speaking about the poem not itself. The poem,
however, is not an expression by or of the um, except maybe in the last stanza. The
poem describes the um as the limit o f knowing. "BTTB" expresses the only thing the
um can be or say if it were animate: 'I am the limit o f your knowing'. Thus the
allegories and questions and propositions can not be about the um but about
language and its rules o f description. "BTTB" is more like a rule of description,
and therefore not a constitutive expression. The um is not expressing itself in our
language, but offering a rule under which we could describe it if we could
construct a language game with this identity as an ontological condition. "BTTB"
does not construct being or meaning or urns or minds; it describes a rule for
counting something as real within a language that can describe the same thing as
true or beautiful in all and every case. Does the urn's use of such a language game
(it may be that this statement is the only statement in such a game, and thus it is
all one can know about such a game) constitute it within that language game? No:
the urn's language isconfined to this statement alone, as such the statement does
not express anything about theumforus.
Wemightbetemptedtorecognizethisphraseasalinguisticequivalentof the um within our
language game: a symbol ofthe visual. But the um remains absent. The statement
gives us an ontological rule by which to recognize a language that includes
both the epistemological questions ofthe poetic voice (at least until the last
stanza) and theworldpicturedontheum.Wearenotgiventhatlanguage. Suchalanguagewould
constitute,inKeats'terms,amindorsoulthatisnothuman. Thus,theconfusionover who is
speaking in the last stanza: has the narrator died? and who makes the claim that
"BTTB" is all you need to know? The seeming self-sufficient clarity o f the
aphorism does not express a proposition, nor represent a denouement within some
unified perspective. Such a unified perspective is not possible and such a
proposition would be senseless withinthe logic o f the earlier questions."BTTB" is
a limit between the language game described by the initial
epistemologicalquestionsandtheworldonthevasedescribedinthesequestions. This
worldneverspeaks. Theum,thelimitwhich'noone'or'thing'inthatworldcanknow or see,
speaks to us. The um seems a topographically inverted Cartesian theater, and speaks
therefore as both a world (for its pictures) and a mind for us. This animation, I
think, seduces Vendler into using "constitutive expression" in describing "BTTB".
This could only be an expression if the identity between Truth and Beauty
constituted the urns animation, somehow defining the mechanics or the organics o f
um life and consciousness (these are identical here). I think Vendler understands
Truth and Beauty as the constitutive facts o f two necessary but not sufficient
languages determining a mind as a mind (as both conscious and alive):Haunting these
odes, up to this point, is the absence o f any real exploration o f the "lower"
senses o f taste and touch; and o f these odes is itself incomplete as a metaphor
for Keats' total experience of art as he knew it in poetry- itsReproduced with
permission.109
dependence on the senses, its inceptions in reverie, its fertile, constructive
activity in the mind, its powerful embodiment within a resistant medium, its
reception by the greeting spirit, its representational validity, its allegorizing
tendency, its luxurious beauty, its philosophical truth, its momentary glimpse o f
divinity, its sense o f active intellectual and critical power and mastery" (152).
This experience is translated into a set o f 'languages,' which prove
"aesthetically grotesque",butwhichexhibit"amind"unwillingtoabandontheselanguages.
Ifthe identity o f Truth and Being functions as an ontological claim at the limit
between different language games then this picture o f poetry as the 'constitutive
expression' o f a mind fails. Vendler's analysis highlights a disjunction between
this experience of poetry and these languages o f the mind, between existential
phenomenalism and a transcendental aesthetics, experience and construction. Poetry,
therefore, for Vendler, becomes the continual attempt to construct a language
(constitutive expressions) adequate to this experience.The requirment that these
languages overcome this disjunction (between the experience ofreading, or seeing,
and what is said, the content ofwhat is read or seen) hypostatizes this aesthetic
experience as separate from the languages that describe it (if only partially) and
enact it. This aesthetic experience, however, is always and only some set of such
languages. Someone might answer that the experience is not restricted to reading
the words. While this is true, to imagine poetry as the site o f some experience is
toenterintoandfunctionwithinitslanguage. Theinadequacyofpoetrywouldbethe
inadequacyoflanguage. TheinadequacyoflanguageinthesensewithwhichVendleris using
'inadequacy', however, is primarily a function o f the incommensurability o f
languageReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
with all o f our sensory information. It is unclear whether something can 'mean'
outside of language. (This does not mean that one should not or does not profoundly
distrust the meanings within language). Poetic experience, therefore, exists to the
degree with which we respond to its language as a language. There is no remainder
only different poetries definingdifferentlanguagegames.
Iftheidealizedadequacyisnotsomeidealizedworkof art then it is simply our experience
ofthese supposedly inadequate language games.Underlying the claim that this
language fails is the demand that poetry not only describe but reenact our
experience as its own, that it be animate and conscious.By such a standard art will
continually fail until it is translated into a linguistic being. Thus the
inadequacy o f the ending o f the Ode is because it is only the urn that is
animate. Such animation, however, cannot be described through a correspondence
theory o f truth (even a metaphoric one). How does one measure the adequacy o f a
language to describe or enact aesthetic experience and not include the aesthetic
experience of that poem itself? The demand for an animate poem becomes the
necessity o f a perspective that includes both the poem and our experience, and
therefore becomes a demand for God. The demand for adequacy is thus incoherent
because no poetic language could ever beadequate, nor in fact can adequacy even be
determined orjudged. What Vendler is describing as inadequate is her realization
that "BTTB" cannot serve as an epistemological claim about either poetry or the
vase and as a description of our experience of the urn through either poetry or
experience. "BTTB" is inadequate as a 'constitutive expression' of a mind. Vendler
assumes that such an expression can be measured against experience. There is no
language game or experience which one can measure with "BTTB" as a eitherReproduced
permission.Ill
a proposition or an expression. In other words one cannot get outside of one's
aesthetic experience nor outside of one's languages in order to judge them.In this
sense "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'" is arbitrary, an expression of an
ontological commitment that cannot bejudged. It might illustrate our life but not
interpret it. Thus "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" offers an interpretative frame.
Ontological criteria offer interpretive frames, and thus interpretation cannot
constitute them, but is limited by them.
ThisiswhatWittgensteinmeans,Ithink,whenheclaimsthatjustificationmustend or else it
would not be justification.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
5The Distance Between the Mind and the SoulThe semantic distance between the two
parts o f a single marginal phrase in Finnegans Wake describes the distance between
what is stake in the difference between a mind and a soul. I am not sure what kind
o f claim the concept o f the soul can have on us.I do not think it can be used
coherently within the systems of meaning within which the modem world and societies
are found. And yet I am driven to its use when trying to describe (let alone
understand) the mutual and equally powerful claims Finnegans Wake,Philosophical
Investigations, and cognitive philosophy have on me. I do not think this is just a
personal anomaly or perversion, but it is the consequence ofwhat is at stake in all
three.Thisisapictureofthemindasa"mindfactory"inFinnegans Wake: "ANTITHESIS OF
AMBIDUAL ANTICIPATION. THE MIND FACTORY, IT GIVES AND TAKES." (FW282.R4).This is a
picture o f the soul:"AUSPICIUM. AUGURIA. DIVINITY NOT DEITY THE UNCERTAINTY
JUSTIFIED BY OUR CERTITUDE. EXAMPLES." (FW282.R4)How these describe a mind and a
soul entails understanding what kind of claims any description of the mind or soul
can have on us. Negotiating the distance between what we might call a mind and what
we might imagine as a soul enacts (or describes) the kind of moral self-reflection
that Augustine described in his Confessions: "But while he was speaking, Lord, you
turned my attention back to myself. You took me up from behind,Notes for this
chapter begin on page 165Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
my own back where I had placed myself (Ps. 20.13) and you set me before my face
(Ps.49.2.1) so that I could see how vile I was, how twisted and filthy, covered
with sores and ulcers. (Confessions, Vm.vii: derived from Seneca De Ira 2.36.1).
How is this kind o f self-reflection enacted without a God? What kind o f moral
self-reflection can we construct or inhabit when our ontological limits are
constructed as a conflicting set of fragments of science, technology, social
prejudice, anachronistic religion, psychologicalfantasy, and so on? In Finnegans
Wake this moral self-reflection, or rather the confession that is involved in
attempting to read it, is directed at the limit(s) between sense and nonsense.In
order to provide a place to begin from which to measure the difference between mind
and soul I will provide very brief sketches o f the soul as Aquinas conceptualized
it (as the most complete and coherent presentation of the soul)1and of the mind as
it is broadly understood in cognitive science.The soul, or let's say the
distinction between divinity and deity, is an interpretative definition expressed
through a set of stances toward the future (Auguria), toward oneself in relation to
the totality of the world, and toward others as human. Aquinas describes these
distinctions as expressing the distinction between the animate and inanimate. He
describes the soul "as the first principle of life in those things in our world
which live; forwe call living things animate, and those things which have no life,
inanimate. Now life is
shownprincipallybytwoactivities,knowledgeandmovement"(SummaIa.75.I). Aquinas is
careful to establish that "not every principle of vital action is a soul, for then
the eye would be a soul." The soul is not related to the body as in a burning coal
heat is to theReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
coal--butasparttowhole,likethehumanhandistothebody. Butthisanalogyis misleading. As
Aquinas asserts in Disputed Questions on the Soul, the soul is not a diminished and
inessential part like a hand, but the soul "as the [substantial] form ofthe body
has the role of fulfilling or completing \perficiens\ the human species". This is
Aquinas version ofAristotles definition ofthe soul as "the first entelechia
(completion, actuality) of a natural body that potentially has life" (De Anima,
n.412a). There is a tension in Aquinas' use of Aristotelian hylomorphism. Aristotle
describes a kind of functional unity between form and matter that could be
understood to rule out the immortality o f the soul, yet such immortality is
required within Aquinas' Christian theology. This is a problem ofboth identity
(what survives? ifmy body is absent in what sense can my soul be identified with
me?) and subsistence (how can form exist separatefrom matter?). Aquinas solves this
problem by arguing that only something which is not mattercouldpercievematter.
Thustheremustexist,therefore,anincorporealsomething thatisnotboundtothebody'sdecay.
Thisisimportantherebecauseitdescribesa tension between our being human, which
requires the unity o f body and soul, and our
involvementwithinthetotalityoftheworld. Aquinas'descriptionofthesoulasself-
subsistent (because non-corporeal) leads to a description of being human within the
greater totality of the world described by the soul (and ultimately by God):
Therefore, since the human soul, insofar as it is united to the body as a form,
also has its existence raised above the gody and does not depend on it, it is clear
that the soul is established on the borderline between corporeal and separate
(purely spiritual)substances. (DisputedQuestionsontheSoulIc)2Reproduced with
permission.115
This means that the soul is an interprative limit (not causal) for both my world
and my being human.The mind enacts this relationship between the totality o f the
world and the particularity ofthe person from the inside as it were, as the
difference between the causal functioning ofthe brain and the causal history
ofevolution. What Joyce calls a "mind factory," as a picture ofthis doubleness, is
a factory ofsensation and thought and a factory making minds. The mind, as a mind
factory, describes the causal mechanisms through which mental functions are
constituted. One way o f construing the mind is as a list o f problems to be
solved, as, for example, the "essential twelve issues" o f cognitive science:
"beliefsystems, consciousness, development, emotion, interaction, language,
learning, memory, primary perception, performance, skill, and thought".3 The
relation between these problems is complicated and not understood. All ofthese
descriptions of mental abilities are interpretations o f what we are and how we
function. Cognitive philosophy attempts to test and analyze these interpretations
by determining their causal function.The point in any cognitive theory where the
relation between the causal functioning o f the mind produces the possibility o f
interpretation does not simply try to resolve or dissolve Cartesian dualism, but in
effect construes the mental (meaning, interpretation, signification, valuation,
involvement and so on) as ontological (as having the force o f the actual). Any
critique o f metaphysics must analyze this point o f interaction as the fundamental
site of ontological concern in cognitive science (other sciences are less concerned
with the relation between meaning and being except as a methodologicalReproduced
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concern; this relationship, however, is the substantive problem in cognitive
science). Herbert Simon describes the mind as "a system that produces thought,
viewed at a relatively high level of aggregation: say, at or above the level of
elementary processes that require 100 milliseconds or more for their
execution.. . . The primitives o f mind, at the level I wish to consider, are
symbols, complex structures o f symbols and processes that
operateonsymbols"(AndroidEpistemology,24). Inanessayentitled"TheComputer Model o f
the Mind," N. Block further describes such a symbol system:The way to discover
symbols in the brain is to first map out rational relations among states o f mind
and then identify aspects o f these states that can be thought
ofassymbolicinvirtueoftheirfunctions. Functioniswhatgivesasymbolits identity, even
the symbols in English orthography, though this can be hard to appreciate because
these functions have been made rigid by habit and convention. (830).4As a symbol
system the brain is described by it various functions. Functions, however, are a
special kind of cause in which the process proceeding through causal mechanisms
gain meaning within the broader context of the environment in which they have
meaning or significance(thereisagrammaticalrelationbetween'function'and'ought').
Tosay somethinghasafunctionisofferaninterpretation. Theenvironmentortheverybiology
ofa creature can offer such an interpretation ifthe function ofa biological
mechanism allows a creature to survive or to replicate itself or when the mechanism
itself survives or replicates itself. This is another description o f the causal
logic justifying the description ofPollock's Oscar as animate.Reproduced with
permission.117
The distance between the constitution o f being human as a soul or as a mind
reflects a continuum from interpretative definitions describing the limit of our
being human (soul)tothefunctional/causalmodelsincognitivescience(mind).
Thiscontinuum describes an historical development in the kinds of metaphors,
analogies and models used to describe the constitutive relation between an 'I' and
the world: wax, tablet, mirror, lamp, camera obscura, wind-harp, reed, plant
[organism], homunculus, container, theater, bicycle plus cyclist, society of
agents.5 Every model includes both interpretative elements, often setting out what
has to be explained (that is, being human, animate, intelligent,
conscious,havingintentionality). Thesignificanceofthemovefromtheearlierinterpretive
definitions and the later functional models is not their exclusion o f the other,
but rather in the way they highlight the difference within their own description
between the interpretive pole (the inanimate/ animate distinction, for example) and
the functional pole (howitworks).
Cognitivesciencewantstoturnafunctionalmindintoaninterpretive soul.Wittgenstein
addressees the problem I am here calling "measuring the distance between mind and
soul" with the following question:"The feeling o f an unbridgable gulf
between.consciousness and brain-process: how does it come about that this does not
come into the considerations o f our ordinary life?" (PI?412)This picture of a
dualism between consciousness and causal functioning ofthe brain, "accompanied by
slight giddiness," arises when I "turn my attention in a particular way on to my
own consciousness, and, astonished, say to myself: THIS is supposed to beReproduced
permission.
produced by a process in the brain!". In turning in this way I am trying to know my
phenomenologicalexperienceofconsciousnessassomethingcaused. Wittgenstein describes
a picture o f someone trying to do this:It was a particular act ofgazing that I
called doing this. I stared fixedly in front of me--but not at any particular point
or object. My eyes were wide open, the brows not contracted (as they mostly are
when I am interested in a particular object). No suchinterestprecededthisgazing,
Myglancewasvacant;oragainlikethatof someone admiring the illumination of the sky
and drinking in the light. (PI?412)The seeming paradox ofbrain states producing
consciousness arises because ofthe impossibility o f finding the object
"consciousness" within the logic described by cause. There is in fact no such
object. There is nothing for this "THIS" to pick out; to point to the boundary o f
consciousness from inside consciousness will result in a continual oscillation
between pointing to the world and then to myself, and in this case I am movingfrom
my thought allegorized as my brain to the world conceived, however, as that of
whichIamaware. Thismovementisanattempttodescribeaphenomenologicalwhatin relation to
what is understood as a physical cause. To say "This is produced by a brain-
process" makes sense to say in the context of an experiment, or one might add in a
psychiatric examination, or even in a philosophical therapy begun trying to cure a
"slight giddiness," but not in our ordinary language.We have reached a limit point
because of an incommensurability between phenomenological experience and physical
causation. This incommensurability, however, isnotnecessarilyaproblem.
TheparadoxisgeneratedwhenthepictureofagapbetweenReproduced with permission of the
consciousness and brain is not part o f a coherent language game (in which it would
be an ordinaryexpression).
Theordinarinessofitsuseisafunctionofbothbrainfunctions(or
causallanguage)andphenomenologicalexperiencebeingmeaningfultokens. Thisis achieved
in Wittgenstein's example by opening someone's skull and stimulating his or her
braininsuchawayastocausehimorhertoseelight. Inthisexample"brainfunction" and
phenomenological experience (light) are defined as related concepts. The effect of
brain stimulation (whatever it is) is meaningful within the experimental context
whose purpose it is to construct causal relations and investigate the status of
particular concepts. Thus we can say that questions about the relation between
consciousness and the brain (and puzzlement over this relation) make sense within
certain language games so constituted. But these language games are constructed in
order that they may investigate (and explain within a set o f language games
cognate to that defined and enacted in theexperiment) our brain and our phenomenal
experience as they both function everyday. One o f the difficulties in science, the
one that experiments are constructed to mediate, is how to apply or how to
generalize from experimental data to the objects, events or effects being studied.
Experiments, which are designed for a reason, are never separate from their
application (although they may be problematic). We can speak o f a difference
between making sense within a language game and making sense o f a language game,
but this does not mean that these two uses o f 'making sense' are disconnected. The
scientific context (or language game) Wittgenstein describes is coherent because
"THIS" can pick out something understood within the language game. The phrase "THIS
is produced by aReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
brainprocess"mightbeusedcausallyinsuchlanguagegames. Thesegamesthemselves are
developed within certain limits and with certain applications.The problem that
Wittgenstein pictures is the impossibility in ordinary language of conceptualizing
as objects or as meaningful terms either consciousness or brain functions. What I
am calling the application of cognitive science language games (in which both
objects and concepts can be suitably defined, where, for example, aspects of
consciousness are defined as kinds o f effects), however, requires a special claim
about bothconsciousness and these brain functions being ours, attaching to our
inhabitation o f this pronoun (let's say our use of it to define ourselves as human
beings). Such a definition, like Aquinas' picture o f the soul, is not only an
epistemological proposition, but it determines the scope or limit of the language
game in which such claims can be made.This scope or limit is part of the
application. How words make sense within languagegames (horizontal sense) depends
on the vertical sense operating through 'our'. What this 'our' means is always at
issue. By this I do not mean whether a person can count as an average person, or
whether they are a man or a woman, or whether this 'our' can be usedto define a
particular group (these might be at issue, but they are not always at issue). This
'our' marks a form o f life as a limit towards which my life or any human life
enacts itself as meaningful. Thus, the disjunction between "consciousness and
brain-process" is not simply a problem for experiment. It is, however, senseless as
an epistemological problem within ordinary language, but it is not senseless as a
semantic problem (or a semantic challenge or response or form or limit). This may
mean simply that poetry is ordinary language, but I think it suggests that
epistemological nonsense (or as CavellReproduced with permission of the copyright
would say, our temptations toward skepticism or fanaticism) make visible the limits
in relation to which we negotiate the ways in which we make sense to ourselves and
to others (and this is why these limits seem ontological).The meaning ofthis
scientific language game is determined not only in our ability to map the
experience "seeing light" and "brain stimulation" into our ordinary experience, but
in it being 'our' experience, 'our' brain', and 'our' questions. The experiment
makes sense because another person can stand in for all other people (within a
certain statistical model).
Thisstandinginmeansthattheexperimentismeaningfulwithinasymbolsystem (where people
can stand in for each other as examples of a person) outside of which the
experiment cannot get. This symbol system (which expresses the meaning o f any
particular person as a human person) is what Thoreau highlights by imagining a form
of life which can view people from both the inside and the outside. His
construction o f this limit-person, however, was not part of an epistemological
language game about what people think or are thinking or see or are seeing and so
on. His picture imagines the limit ofbeing human (in all its dimensions, including
our knowing) as being humanity or
humanityconscious(ifthese'people'arefromonotherplanets). Thisislikeaskingforthe
meaning ofbeing human as opposed to the meaning of'human being'.W e can see this if
we compare where the semantic weight lies in the phrase 'how are consciousness and
brain states related in our ordinary life?' (a slightly altered versionof
Wittgenstein's paradox) when used in ordinary life and in some relevant scientific
language game. In ordinary life Wittgenstein wants to say 'how are "consciousness"
and "brain states" related in our ordinary life?' 'Consciousness' and 'brain
states' make littleReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
sense in this usage. In cognitive science, when consciousness and brain state are
sufficiently defined experimentally (or conceptually), the semantic pressure should
be marked "how are consciousness and brain states related in 'our' ordinary life?"
One could include "ordinary life" as well, but it would simply be a further
elaboration ofthe use of"our". I highlight "our" here not because ofepistemological
reasons (as iftempted by solipsism), but rather because it is our species being,
our interchangability (statistically) within the experiment that marks both its
target (what is to be explained) and the limit the experiment is trying to define
(how do human brains function as human consciousness?).This is the same 'our'
Thoreau's thought experiment highlighted. In cognitive science, this 'our' defines
a limit within a complex set of language games organized around causality.
Thoreau'suseof'our'marksashiftinglimit(whatcountsasoursandwho counts in his use
[my, your, our use]) within a complex set of language games organized around
meaning and interpretation.Because Wittgenstein makes visible human beings (as
forms of life) within language games (or in relation to their failure) all limits
can be analogized as some version ofthelimitbetweensenseandnonsense.
Senseandnonsensecanfigureasanontological limit because we enact this limit as the
form o f our activities; that is we constitute this limit in our language games and
their failure through the way in which our activities (physical, linguistic,
interpersonal and so on) mean to and for us. This kind of limit is different from
interpretive limits like those between animate and inanimate (a classificatory
limit) or betweenconsciousnessandbrainstatesorbetweencauseandinterpretation.
Thesenseofthese limits is expressed by the ways in which they configure and express
sense orReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
nonsense, and thus they are judgments. Although, sense and nonsense can be used as
judgments as well, they have a further sense in that they describe (self-
reflexively) grammar. Wittgensteinasserts"Essenceisexpressedbygrammar"(371).
Thisrather cryptic claim, which one might first reads as 'whatever something is is
expressed by our use of language within the order that is our social and personal
practices, normative linguistic rules, criteria ofjudgment, knowledge, biology, and
so on that constitutes our formoflife.'
Thiskindofreadingfollowsfromareplacementofterms. Itremains unclear within what kind
o f language game it could function. The next remark seems to offer a target for it
to do its work:Consider: "The only correlate in language to an intrinsic necessity
is an arbitrary rule. It is the only thing which one can milk out o f this
intrinsic necessity into a proposition" (PI?372)"Essence" is translated into
"intrinsic necessity". "Grammar" is translated into "arbitrary rule". This is a way
of interpreting 371 in relation to the Tractarian picture of the relation between a
proposition and the world. Wittgenstein had argued that essence was expressed
through the logical form o f both objects and propositions (this logical form being
tautological). These tautologies order the world (actually order the limits of the
world) accordingtoanessentialnecessity:"Inlogicnothingisaccidental:
ifathingcanoccurin an atomic fact the possibility of that atomic fact must already
be prejudged in the thing" (2.012). A 'thing' is an object. These objects are
essential parts o f atomic facts (2.011). "The world is determined by the facts,
and by these being all the facts"(l.l 1). These objects (of which Wittgenstein
never gave an example) constitute facts according to theReproduced with permission
of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
possibilities that "must lie in the nature of the object" (2.0123). Thus, knowing
an object (and the facts which it can constitute) requires that one know the
"internal qualities" that
describe"thepossibilitiesofitsoccurrenceinatomicfacts"(2.0123). Thenecessityof
relationsdeterminingobjectsisnotfullymatchedbyanecessityinlogicalnotation. Any
symbol system has accidental elements (the shape o f notations), but the logic o f
the notation is such that once a system is established a logic o f relations is
established: "if we have determined anything arbitrarily, then something else must
be the case. (This results from the essence o f the notation)." (3.342).6 The
picture o f language use inInvestigations, however, rejects any necessity separate
from the conventions and practices orderingthegrammarofourlanguagegames. The
Tractatuspictureofnecessitycan only be retained if it is understood as an arbitrary
rule. But such a rule is neither an object nor an internal relation.Has
Wittgenstein displaced the immanence of possibility described by the internal
qualities of an object into the immanent possibilities described or expressed as
grammar? The next remark provides a kind o f answer, reasserting the link between
essence and grammar: "Grammar tells what kind of object anything is. (Theology as
grammar)" (?373). An object is not defined by its internal qualities, by any
immanent property. It emerges as an object within the logic of criteria and the
actuality of practice (see alsoPI?293). Wittgenstein is placing a kind of
hylomorphic pressure on language. That something is remains an absolute limit. This
limit is expressed through what something is. Grammar can seem a theology because
it expresses that something is (existence: an analogue for matter) through the form
(essence: what kind o f object anything is)Reproduced with permission of the
somethinghasforuswithinanygrammar. Inthissentence"[F]orus"means'forusas human
beings': An arrow drawn on a page points "only in the application that a living
beingmakesofit. Thispointingisnotahocus-pocuswhichcanbeperformedonlybythe soul"(PI?
454). Wittgensteinunderstandsustobejustifiedinouractions,our understanding, our
meaning, our knowing to follow (or come to a stop) in the forms of life that
constitute us as human beings: "What has to be accepted, the given, is --so one
could say--formsoflife"(PIp.226). Thisgivendescribesthelimitwithinwhichwefunction,a
kind o f fundamental limit in practice because "only o f a human being and what
resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it
sees; is blind; hears; isdeaf; is conscious or unconscious" (PI?281).The conceptual
difference between the inanimate and animate, however, describesan interpretive
limit. Imagining people as automata, "alone in my room", as if alone in my head, is
like making a fiction. If you stand in front of another person and imagine "this
seeming-person is a machine" you might either laugh and find these words
meaningless or "youwillproduceinyourselfsomekindofuncannyfeeling,
orsomethingofthesort... Seeing a living human being as an automaton is analogous to
seeing one figure as a limiting case or variant of another; the cross-pieces of a
window as a swastika, for example" (PI?421). There is nothing arbitrary about this
example; it might have been also seeing magical symbols in clouds or the course of
human life in the stars. An analogy cangenerate a poem, but if I imagine that this
course o f stars causes my character or determines the course of my life I am
speaking nonsense. How did I move from interpreting shapes or movements as like
myselfto a theory of causation without the limitsReproduced with permission of the
o f experiment that justify the use o f causal language? Someone who sees swastikas
in the cross-pieces of a window might be a Jew or a Nazi, or it might be 1939. But
if I see a human being as a machine how do I see myself? We are on the edge of a
moral abyss, an abyss Wittgenstein marks by his example. In fact he challenges the
reader to imagine a group of children as "mere automata; all their liveliness is
mere automatism." Such interpretations describe a limit between sense and nonsense;
the failure to understand that one has reached such a limit requires one to enter
into this nonsense as if it were a coherent language game, and thus a coherent
world and form o f life from which one views one's ordinary life as uncanny.If our
forms of life act as the ground ofjustification for our interpretations, it is not
a metaphysical ground about the world, but a defacto metaphysical ground for 'us'.
To say justification must stop or it would not be justification is to offer a
definition ofjustification: ajustification mustjustify, not be in need
ofjustification itself. It must be an unmovedmover.
ThisisthesamelogicthatAquinasusestoarguethatthesoulcan
perceivematterbecauseitisnotmadeofmatter. Thedifferencemakesperception possible.
Thus the soul is incorporeal and therefore self-subsistent, or immortal. Such a
model of perception is false if we take it for a theory about the mind (it violates
the laws ofconservationofmatterandenergy).
Itis,Ithink,however,notatheoryofthissort. The soul is not viewing the material
world as if on a screen. Rather the soul describes the
limitthatdeterminesperceptionasperception. Thesoulistheformofourlife,orrather
theformoflifethatisconstitutedpartlybyourmaterialperceptions. Thesoulisnotan entity
at all. In Wittgenstein, "forms of life" describes a limit concept that is the
ground ofReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
justification (for knowing, perceiving, understanding, acting and so on) because it
is itself the expression o f this knowing, perceiving, understanding, acting and so
on."So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?"
- I t is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the
language theyuse. Thatisnotagreementinopinionsbutinformoflife.(PI?241)This
agreement becomes visible as a ground in our interpretations o f each other as
human. Wittgenstein uses the concept o f form(s) o f life to describe the limit o f
grammar, o f sense and nonsense, that which describes the limit between language
games, our shifting involvement in language games. Our agreement in judgment, not
just in definition, is required in order that our application of criteria, as well
as the criteria themselves, in knowing, measuring, interpreting and so on, are
consistent enough to allow for meaning and communication (PI?242). The content of
our agreement is expressed in ourunderstanding and communication, but it is made
visible in our recognition o f each other ashuman.
Thus,formoflife,likeKant'scategoricalimperativeandGoodman'spictureof when art is
art (when it is an example of or is recognized as art), acts as a limit to these
conceptualizations of essence (what something is: good or art).Form o f life
functions as a ground only within our interpretations, that is, we can only use the
phrase 'form o f life' as justification when we have exhausted our answers to why
we do something. It cannot answer or explain how we do something without begging
the question. It does not function as a ground in our knowing, perceiving,
understanding and so on. Rather our form o f life is expressed in these actions.
Wittgenstein suggests that we are misled by our way ofjustifying our belief, for
example,Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
that something will happen in the future. We say, "This is a good ground, for it
makes the occurrence probable"'(PI?482). What this means, however, would be better
expressed as 'a good ground expresses probability'. This is a definition not an
explanation (or even ajustification).What kind ofground andjustification is enacted
inFinnegans Wake! It is not anepistemological ground, but rather it enacts the
fantasy Thoreau imagined o f seeing through another's eyes as if through God's. In
Finnegans Wake, the demand to "Renove the Bible" is answered, "by the grace of
Votre Dame", with "winding your hobbledehom" into a "dreambookpage" (579.10;
428.17-19). J.B. Steams in his discussion o f the use and representation o f dreams
in classical poetry, suggests that "the dream fills the role of messenger between
the divinities or the spirits of the dead and living mortals. Consequently, the
poet, who often regards himself as a priest o f the gods, sometimes receives
inspiration by means o f dreams, or, at least, assigns dream as his reason for
composing"(ix-x). Joyce creates a language that allows dreams o f this kind to be
spoken.Finnegans Wake becomes the intentional domain, a domain articulating the
possibility of aboutness, linking whatever might be this divinity, the soul, the
insubstantial, language itself, mind with the human, the physical, substantial,
language again, referring as opposed to being. This is at least one dimension ofthe
double speak behind Joyce's puns. Although one can extract dreams from the text,
versions ofPearl, The Divine Comedy, and ordinary dreams o f desire, fear, shame,
etc., it is the domain in which these dreams
functionthatformsthesubstanceofthetext. Ifthe Wakewereadreamthenitwouldbe about a
kind of psychology. The possibility for dreams to mean anything is a function of
their functioning as a kind o f language or thinking separate from psychology, in a
way analogous to Frege's separation of logic from psychology (dreams can mean not
as dreams but within our interpretations, within our waking life, as descriptions
within language). Freud insures this public domain through his construction o f a
particular language game into which dream experience as the manifestation of the
content of our mind could be allegorized and therefore analyzed: in this way
allegory is transformed into a meta-language.In Finnegans Wake every attempt at
allegorical mapping shifts into another within the text, so that no stable language
game or meta-language can organize our experience, even if we want to call it a
dream. The linguistic aesthetic distortions Joyce puts English through conflates
whatever grammar is left with the ontological possibilities picked out, exposed,
created by this grammar (its ability to talk about itself as something, although
thing is a misanalogy here). Language is mapped onto itself in such a way that the
constitutive temporality enabling language (I will have to show what this means)
becomes itself the formalized limit between the private and the public, that is,
this limit is the form oflanguage. Thisformorlimit,whereFinnegans
Wakebecomesitselfaformof temporality, functions as if the human and divine had
collapsed into language. Any interpretative mapping that names a sentence to be
about god(s) or human(s) falls into contradiction. Instead the text articulates the
point or the moment, but these are again misanalogies (when does it mean?) that
calls forth the demand for this allegorizing. The text is neither human nor divine
but the condition for both materiality and the soul to matter to us, in the way
dreams matter to us. This might be called a language ofReproduced with permission
conversion, where conversion becomes the determining change o f what we experience
as time, or a language of confessionFaced with "Som's wholed, all's parted"
(FW563.30) we ask ourselves or our book "what does it mean?". The sentence does not
seem to be about anything exactly, and any interpretation offered must
simultaneously construct an interpretive frame. In whatever particular story or
character elements one extracts from a sentence or a fragment of the Wake, it is
possible to trace two intentional strands: the language points 1) to an absent
sleeper, an intentional object that exists as a negative point, an impossible
beyond, and(2)simultaneouslytothe Wakeitself,aself-
reflectionorversionoftheentiretext: where each sentence functions as a justifying
aesthetic for the whole and as an example of this aesthetic: an exemplar, a
representative representation. In both cases the intentional dimension of language
has been lost, we cannot grasp either the sleeper or the Wake itself; the
intentional drive of any particular string of words points but not at anything
understandable. The effect ofthis is not to undermine the intentionality, the
aboutness of language, but rather serves to expose the mechanisms of intentionality
through which language functions, or rather we, as readers, become the mechanisms o
f intentionality, continually adjudicating between sense and nonsense as a way o f
figuring our relation toany particular set of words or phrases.Failed or vanishing
intentionality calls forward the demand and need forjustification, but not the
epistemological justification of a true belief, nor even of acting or action: the
demand is whether to count the World as Mind or to count myself within a world.7
Finnegans Wake highlights intentionality not as a logical or even a linguistic
problem, but as a problem of confession. Finnegans Wake is a confession in which
both who confesses, what is confessed, who the confession is being directed to, who
actually does hear the confession, and what the moral consequences o f and response
to the confessionareblank. Thisblankness(theabsenceofintentionaltargets)enactsthe
grammar of Wittgenstein's remark that '"You can't hear God speak to someone else,
you can hear him only if you are being addressed'. --That is a grammatical remark"
(?717). This follows not simply from a definition of God, but from the way in which
human language configures its own boundaries.Bretano, in his Psychology From an
Empirical Standpoint, describes the intentional as what constitutes our mental
experience (partly as a counter to Cartesian dualism):Every mental phenomenon is
characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or
mental) inexistence o f an object, and what we might call, though not wholly
unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to
be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental
phenomenon includes something as an object within itself, although they do not
always do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, injudgment
something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired
and so on.(88)TobeaboutXseemstorequirearelationbetweenthinkingorathoughtandX. Any
relation would, however, require another relation to relate it to X. And thus if
intentionality is understood as a relation one would require an infinite number of
relations.(R) The verbs 'refer', 'symbolize', 'suggest', 'point' are all black
boxes to capture this ineffable intentional relation. If, however, the object does
not actually exist (as in 'I hope to build the tallest building in the world'), the
problem has shifted to the status of this object. Brentano uses the model o f the
imaginary object as pattern for describing all o f our mental stances toward the
world. The aboutness o f our language is immanent within our attitudes and
statements. In many ways this is simply to replace the mystery of the aboutness o f
our language with the mystery o f the immanence o f the world in our statements.
Itcannotserveasanexplanation(acausalmodel)butonlyasadescriptionof our mental
experience (and this is, o f course, how phenomenologists normally understand it).
The status o f such language as description and not as explanatory (in a causal
sense) is what Wittgenstein means when he says "The criteria for the truth of the
confession that I thought such-and-such are not the criteria for a true description
of a process" (PI?222). The meaning of the confession lies in what can be
understood as a consequence ofthe truth that is "guaranteed the special criteria
oftruthfulness" (PI?222). If statements about my mental content are understood as
confessions they form a particular language game whose grammar (terms, claims,
possibilities, application, usage, scope) allows me to speak, as it were, in my
voice. Confessions in this sense are like dreams (as Wittgenstein suggests). We do
not know that we at night actually experienced the dreams we remember and report. I
am using 'actually' here as part o f a pseudo- scientific language game. What would
be a non-actual experience? An experience is an experience. Unlike my conscious
experience my experience o f a dream cannot be ?Reproduced with permission of the
divorced from my telling it. I may be deceived about my dreams but I have no way of
determining this. The question in telling my dreams, like expressing my intentions
and making confessions, is about my truthfulness but not about the truth of my
claims. You can only determine their truth by judging my truthfulness:The question
whether the dreamer's memory deceives him when he reports the dream after waking
cannot arise, unless indeed we introduce a completely new criterion for the
report's 'agreeing' with the dream, a criterion which gives us a concept o f
'truth' as distinct from 'truthfulness' here. (PI p.222-23)In Investigations, the
'immanent objectivity' described by Brentano has been displaced into the normative
structures ordering and determining our language use, marking the relation between
sense and nonsense. Intentionality, broadly speaking, should be understood in
Wittgenstein as grammar. The intentionality of our language is not attached to the
world, but rather intentional statements (I wish that x; I expect y; I have a
suspicion about z) are matched by statements that describe their fulfillment,
verification, denial, failure, etc. (see ?? 136, 429, 458):"An order is own
execution." So it knows its execution, then even before it is there?--But that was
a grammatical proposition and it means: If an order runs "Do such-and-such" then
executing the order is called "doing such-and-such". (PI?458)Such a picture while
it makes our mental content accessible to others reduces aboutness to agreement and
usage. Approaching one kind of poetic voice approaches nonsense, when the rules or
grammar organizing intentionality in our ordinary language are excluded in
poetic language such that nothing can satisfy as either a description o f
fulfillment (of intentionality) or as an adequate interpretation oftruth-value,
reference, intentionality, meaning. This changing o f the language into the non-
intentional (which is sometimes described as non-functional language) does not
dissolve language but redirects intentionality toward us such that we describe (in
our reading and in our person) the fulfillment oflanguage. The consequence ofthis
picture is that intentionality becomes a mode o f interpretation. People, texts,
artifacts, and machines have an intentionality if they agree with the normative
criteria for fulfilling an intention or for acting (or thinking orbelieving)
towards something.9The Wake pictures intentionality as a theological problem, or
rather as ourtheological dwelling in the world where all of our words, or rather
where "[e]very letter is a godsend" (FW269.17): "Plunger words what paddled verbed.
Mere man's mime: God has jest" (FW486.09-10). Humans attach themselves to the world
through representation (mime) while God attaches himselfthroughjest. What is the
nature of God'sjest? What is a God-joke (besides the created world and life
itself)? There could be no other joke for God. Finnegans Wake describes such a
world, a world that is a misrepresentation of God or ofa dreamer or ofa body or ofa
brain, mind, world or ofsome beyond: it is at every level o f organization, what
Wittgenstein calls, a grammatical joke:The problems arising through a
misrepresentation of our forms of language have the character o f depth. They are
deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms o f our language and
their significance is as great as the importance ofReproduced with permission of
our language, -- Let us ask ourselves: why do we fell a grammatical joke to bedeep!
(And that is what the depth of philosophy is.) (PI?111)What are examples o f
grammatical jokes? 'Time passes (like a log).' I might explain how time can pass in
this way by saying that 'time flows like a river'. There is a sense to this kind of
talk, but it is not sense about time (but rather about our involvement in
language). I will recover this sense in chapter 11. The nonsense o f this time-talk
is various. I first picture time passing as if it were a thing passing by on a
river; this is an picture o f the present.
Ithenexplainthispicturebysayingtimeflowsliketheriveronwhichthelog passes; this is
an image o f past, present and future. Instead o f seeing that time cannot be both
ofthese, we might imaginethat this is part ofa complex picture oftime flowing (we
could add boats and call them words; and mention refuse against the riverbank and
callthese memories). Anna Livia Plurabelle forms just such a picture o f time as a
river. I f she is understood as a theory, then we have hypostasized a complex
analogy (that again has sense as an enactment o f our involvement and confusion
within language and the world, and is not a picture of either us or the world).
Grammatical jokes describe limits. This is one o f the best grammatical jokes in
Investigations: "In what circumstances should I say that a tribe had a chief? And
the chief must surely have consciousness. Surely we can't have a chief without
consciousness?" (PI?419) I am tempted to to describe an anatomy o f limits and
boundaries, but such an anatomy would tend toward a theory of limits. And a theory
of limits is exactly what is not needed. The picture of limits I am sketching is
meant to describe our invovlment within language through the shifting limits that
determine sense and nonsense asReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
enactments o f models o f mind (animate/ inanimate, consciousness/ unconscious, and
so on)andkindsoftime. Thisinvolvmentisplastic. Themeaningofourinvolvment,
therefore, can describe both a moral education (a configuration of ourselves as
human) and an ontology (what is real). The distance between these two meanings is
one way o f describing what I am calling the distance between the soul and the
mind. This distance, or difference, does not describe, however, an epistemology or
the limits o f reason (as in Kant).Kant argues that our experience never determines
a boundary but moves "from the conditioned to some other equally conditioned thing"
(Prolegomena, 59). In Kant, the metaphysical limit of experience, which "must lie
quite without it," describe something akin to Wittgensteinian grammar, but here
understood as grounded in reason, "by which it is neither confined within the
sensible nor strays beyond the sensible, but only limits itself, as befits the
knowledge o f a boundary, to the relation between what lies beyond it and what is
contained in it" (Prolegomena, 59). The phrase "as befits the knowledge o f a
boundary" is a definition of boundary (a requirement not a description). While such
a boundary marks a limit to what we can know (for beyond it is "an empty space"),
we can knowthenatureofsuchaboundary. Thedistinctionbetweenknowableandunknowable,
however, presumes criteria that can apply to what is beyond the boundary o f the
knowableconstitutingitasunknowable. Suchaboundary,tobemetaphysical,wouldsetitselfas
the negation ofthe ground ofbeing: a kind ofnothing. This does not make such a
boundary absolute, but the formulation of such boundaries discovers the limits of
the humanrelationtothepossibilitiesofbeing.
If'thepossibilitiesofbeing"issenseless,orifReproduced with permission of the
any category cannot mark or determine its own boundaries, the effect is not to
dissolve the concept of limit or boundary, but to leave nothing but such limits and
boundaries, shifting under the pressures our involvement and application o f the
concepts (knowing, being, thinking, caring, and so on) puts on these markers. But
"to leave nothing but" is itself a description of a limit, and at first blush seems
to follow Kant's discussion of naturaltheology, which "being constrained to look
beyond this boundary [of human reason] to the idea of a Supreme Being. . . in order
to guide the use of reason within the world of sense according to principles o f
the greatest possible unity" (Prolegomena, 59). My claim here, however, is that the
instability o f boundaries and limits pressures our involvment in language (our
understanding, interpretations, even reasoning) into disunity that is not organized
into time as either a metaphysical ground of experience or by consciousness (a
transcendentalapperception)butasagrammar(timeisasymbolicgrammar). Thisisnot meant
as a theory oftime, but as a stance within our language that configures the world
as meaningfulinaparticularway. Iamtryingtobringoutthismeaning. Thus,when
Wittgenstein describes the grammar of our use of "game" as a way of describing how
we inhabit the limits of our human form(s) of life, he is not describing the
unified concept of 'human being':The rales of grammar may be called "arbitrary", if
that is to mean that the aim o f the grammar is nothing but that o f the language.
If someone says "If our language had not this grammar, it could not express these
facts" --it should be asked what "could" means here. (PI?497)Reproduced with
permission.
The limits o f being human describe jokes; these jokes punctuate our involvment in
language as different kinds o f time and as different versions o f redemption. In
this picture or description o f time and language there is no transcendent
anything: "As things are I can, for example, invent a game that is never played by
anyone.--But would the following be possible too: mankind has never played any
games: once, however, someone invented a game--which no one ever played?" (PI?204).
The different versions ofthe first riddle ofthe universe inFinnegans Wake are all
grammatical jokes. "The first riddle of the universe" is called forth in the
chapter VII portrait o f Shem the penman as part o f the continual battle between
the artist and prankster Shem and his moralizing brother Shaun. The opposition
between the two brothers,asbetween"allears"and"all..
",betweenShemtimeandShaunspace, collapses not only into two aspects o f the
universe, but into different kinds o f language. This is the first version o f the
riddle:"dictited to of all his little brothron and sweestureens the first riddle of
the u niverse: asking, when is a man not a man?: telling them to take their time,
yungfries, and wait till the tide stops (for from the first his day was a
fortnight) and offering the prize of a bittersweet crab, a little present from the
past, for their copper age was yet unminted, to the winner.(FW170.03-09; boldface
added)P. McCarthy argues that this riddle begins the dramatization that will
continue for the rest of the book of "the struggle of the guilty mind toward
renewal" (79). Whatever we think about the nature of human guilt, the Wake is
certainly concerned with our education; ourReproduced with permission of the
soul-making. This concern for our soul, however, is the same as a concern for our
pleasures and our commitments and our body that can be figured as a concern about
whatwe imagine an education entails: "Is the Co-Education o f Animus and Anima
Wholly Desirable?"(307.03-04).As McCarthy notes various forms ofthe first riddle
ofthe universe appear seven times, and in this at least offers a week o f
questions, all o f which are versions o f theWake:1) the first riddle o f the
universe: asking, when is a man not a man? . . . --all giveup?--; when he is a
--yours till the rending o f the rocks,--Sham. (170.3-24)2 ) . . . to where was a
hovel not a havel (the first rattle o f his juniverse) with a tintumtingling and a
next, next and next.. .while itch ish shome.(231.1-4)3) When is a Pun not a Pun?
(307.2-3)4 ) . . .the farst wriggle from the ubivence, whereom is man, that old
offender, nother man, wheile he is asmae. (356.2-14)5) . .when is a maid nought a
maid he would go to anyposs length for her! (495.6-7).6) Here is a homelet not a
hothel. (586.18)7) The first and last rittlerattle ofthe anniverse; when is a nam
nought a namwhenas it is a. Watch! (607.10-12)These riddles are pictures o f
fragments. Fragments are structured like riddles, and thus their integration o f
completion and incompletion, o f particular and totality (system), o f act and
continuity require the same double vision required to recognize when a pun is and
isReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
not a pun. Fragments, as I suggested earlier, are forms o f ironic self-reflection
o f exactly the sort described by "When is a Pun not a Pun?" (307.02-04). A pun is
only a pun when we laugh, or only when we recognize, hear or see, (at least) one
word in another. This doublness(orindeterminacy)ofmeaningmakespunsaspeciesofirony.
Readingthe Wake does not mean one understands the answer to these riddles (that
might be part o f a higher level interpretation). Instead, I think, reading should
consist in asking these question as if they were your own questions. This kind o f
interrogation constitutes the self-reflexivestructureofthe
Wakeasinterrogativefragments.Ithinkthesecanallbecalledriddlesofrecognition.
Theoperateinexactlythe kind of confusion that allows Kant to imagine that the
application of moral obligation proceeds through the formal recognition o f when a
human being is a human being; he asks when is a moral a moral? Such questions are
akin to asking when is a citizen a person? or imagining that it makes sense to
understand as a riddle the question 'when is a person a citizen?' (and thus
assuming that it is not a question that can be answered except maybe with always or
never; these might be ways of answering the riddle within one picture of
democracyorofmonarchy. Atleastforademocracyriddlesmaybethenecessaryformof our
political engagement: are all people created equal?).These riddles, as points of
structural clarity relative to the method of the text itself, set a riddle for the
reader; if every phrase is a riddle that requires interpretation, but no
interpretation can provide an adequate answer, then what does it mean to recognize
the text as riddled, as a riddle, as riddles? The depth ofFinnegans Wake is partly
a function of showing how any answer or interpretation to the riddle of the text is
anti-climatic in aReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
way that makes the answer seem trivial and thus requires us to find a further
riddle that involvesusmorefullyintheriddleofthetext. Thisprocessofgoingoncannotend.
Therefore, it is not the answer to the riddles that provides meaning, but it is how
we continue asking questions that constitutes reading.How do we "hear the riddles
between the robot and his dress circular and the gagster in the rogues' gallery"
(FW219.22-23)? The distance between the mind, as a mind factory, and thus as a
robot and the dress of intentionality and appearance that makes it seem human, and
the soul as 'the gagster in the rogues' gallery" articulates two kinds of humor or
nonsense: robot dress (the humor o f one thing leading to the next without reason,
call this Chaplinesque) and gagster ro-gallery (the humor o f transgression, call
this MarxBrothersOperatic). Theidentificationofgagsterwithsoulrequiressomedefense.
Ithink "gagster" puns on the word "ghoster" used a few sentences earlier on the
same page: "With nightly redistribution of parts and players by the puppetry
producer and daily dubbing o f ghosters, with the benediction o f the Holy Genesius
Archimimus . . . " (FW219.06-09). This "Archimimus", from G. archimimos, is the
chief actor, maybe the puppetry producer, the intentional beyond, the body as the
limit of God, or all of the players as the shift through their parts. The humor
ofthe gags inFinnegans Wake functions through the confusion of names and words or
of phrases and language games where a word and phrase can always mean something
else. And thus the soul as the form marking identity (the subsistent soul) and
existence (what marks humans as animate and not inanimate) is neither the meaning
of a name or word (even organized very broadly intothe categories o f HCE, ALP,
Shem, Shaun, and Issy) nor in the grammar o f any particularReproduced with
permission.142
moment of clarity (soul as totality), but is the continuity of shifting between
these forms directed toward a vanishing intentionality, in other words, "the
gagster in the rogues' gallery". To "hear the riddles between the robot and his
dress circular and the gagster in the rogues' gallery" (FW219.22-23) is to read the
Wake itself as either a riddle whose answer is unknowable or as an answer whose
riddle is unknowable (this is another way of describing vanishing intentionality).
So another picture of the Wake: "Jests, jokes, jigs and jorums for the Wake lent
from the properties ofthe late cemented Mr. T.M. Finnegan R.I.C" (FW221.26-7). Mr.
T.M. Finnegan is not cemented anywhere in the text; so in what sense could we say
he, and not some other he, is the sleeper? If he is dissolved, or has lent
willingly or unwillingly, his properties (his words, his characteristics, his
desires and fears and so on) to the further mutations of the "jests, jokes, jigs,
and jorums" of the Wake, or other figments, then in what sense are those properties
his? Human beings hold a lot of properties in common, and those that distinguish a
particular person as a particular person are apparent as a particular
configuration, as a unity of form and matter maybe, that once dissolved cannot mark
someone as anyone at all.This is one way o f configuring the problem o f
intentionality as aesthetic (moving outsideofalogicalpictureoflanguage).
Butthisisnotanaestheticofrecognition(asin Goodman) where our problem is to
recognize the intentional object, existent or not, about whichwespeak.
Thereisnothingtorecognizeandnorulesorpracticesorprejudicesthat can apply in a way
that makes sense. When something makes temporary sense, we have not recognized a
version of the world or an example of meaning or aesthetic expression.Reproduced
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Asking when the Wake makes sense picks out the means we use to make sense of it not
the sense o f the Wake.This allows Joyce to picture the relation between the body
and the soul as between the mind and the soul as between divinity and deity. By
this I mean the condition o f being between in Finnegans Wake does not hypostatize
a betweeness as somehow more actual, but describes our being towards a shifting set
of limits whose meaning is enacted in both
ourcommitmentstothoselimitsandtheshiftingbetweenthem. Thisshiftingbetween
constitutes the grammatical humor o f the Wake. The problem o f intentionality,
therefore, describes the distance between the soul and god, both allegorized as the
body: "Ah, did you speak, stuffstuff? More poestries form Chickspeer's with
gleechoreal music or ajaculation from the garden o f the soul. O f I be leib in the
immoralities?" (FW145.24-26). 'Whether' (Du of) to "be leib", 'to believe' and 'to
be flesh' (G. leib), or to be confused with love (G. lieb[e]), in the
"immoralities" (immortals as immoralities) or in immortality (to be flesh in
immortality) is the speech o f the body ("stuffstuff'); and yet the poetry (or
pastries) of Shakespeare articulate an ode to joy, angels singing, or an
ejaculation of (or being cast out from) the garden of the soul. This confusion of
soul and body turns language into jest, and thus this confusion is God: the Flesh
made Jest.This picture o f vanishing intentionality can be analogized as
unintentional intentionality. "Willed without witting, whorled without aimed.
Pappapassos, Mannamanet,warwhetswutandwhowitswhy."(FW272.04-06): willuncontrolledby
cognition is energy without telos or form, so that the doubleness o f being Father
and child (Pappa and pappoose) and Mother (ma; manna) and man as names and
descriptions areReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
equivalent to the following question(s): what is what? where what is what and who
is it? who is why? who thinks (wits) why? how it is why? Wow! it's why?! and so on.
These questions respond to and constitute 'Pappa passes', the dissolution o f
identity within the aesthetics ofthe Wake, and 'Mamma remains' (L. manet). Such
questioning is a terror: "Terror ofthe noonstruck by day, cryptogram ofeach nightly
bridable. But, to speak broken heaventalk, is he? Who is he? Why is he? Howmuch is
he? Which is he? When is he? Where is he? How is he?" (FW261.26-31).The question
"what does a 'sentence' mean?" fails to lead to any answer. If we persist in
reading we find ourselves waiting for something to crystallize out of the text into
clarity. And thus we begin to ask "when does it mean?"; "If it doesn't mean now,
then when?" We always remain in the grip of this question. The book becomes this
question. But this question has a curious structure. Strictly speaking it is not a
question at all. What would count as an answer? At half-past ten it meant
something? or when I read the word "X" or when I read the word "vivlical"
(FW183.13); what criteria or rules describe the text or its use o f words? Every
word puns into something else pushing against grammar and syntax, referring to
unstable identities within unclear contexts. No answer is adequatetothetext.
"Whendoesitmean?"isariddle.10The most comprehensive and forceful attempt to
investigate the ontological andtheintentionalstatusofthe
Wake'slanguageisJohnBishop'sJoyce'sBookoftheDark. He argues that one cannot force
the Wake's verbal linguistic word play into the rational
andcomfortablepatternsofconsciousness. ForBishop,Finnegans Wakebecomesavast
nocturnal riddle, describing the "'freeley masoned' dreamwork of the night." One
mustReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
abandon reading the Wake like a linear narrative; for Bishop, as well as for Joyce,
"nobody's 'night-life' makes sense as a continuous whole." Reading Finnegans Wake,
for Bishop, does not involve shaping the night-world ofthe Wake into conscious
rationality. We must, instead, transform our conscious perspective into one that
recognizes the logic andthesignificanceofthenight-world.
Critics,includingDongahueandAdamsintheir reviews ofBishop's book, would rather let
the world of consciousness and of unconsciousness struggle against each other in
the text, as if they were coequal, and betrayed nothing more than a play of
perspectives, a play between night and day.11 As Bishop realizes, however, Joyce
has not created an equality between two states of consciousness, rather he
describes the transformative chaos of a nocturnal reality in which we can find only
the dim memory of consciousness. He understands the Wake as a kindofcounter-
Freudian psychology.In making sense o f such a claim I think one must understand
the Wake as anattempt to configure our involvement within language, biology,
history, logic, desire, etc., our form of life, within a complex shifting set of
languages, interpretative frames, and states o f being, mind and grammar that do
not function allegorically. Even mapping 'sense' and 'nonsense' onto
'consciousness' and 'unconsciousness' misses how we use all o f these words and how
we inhabit any o f these worlds.In such ignorance and chaos, the ordinary is not
the world outside the window; the skeptical temptations prompting us to ask 'how
does this mean that?' or 'does this really mean that?' or 'how do we know that?'
becomes 'How can I still be, or still think, or still experience, since this
doesn't mean?'. In not knowing this I do not know myself.Reproduced with permission
Thisnightworldisfundamentallyasymmetricwithourwakingworld. Thenegationof our
knowledge, meaning, identity does not create a context, a world in which further
negation leads back to identity, knowledge, or meaning. If it did one should read
the Wake as a mistranslated story or description or life, instead of a religious
and a theological riddle. In other words, if it is mistranslated then the
mistranslation itselfmeans nothing once the meaning has been recovered. But then
why the mistranslation? In this sense Joyce is competing with Freud (and
paralleling Wittgenstein within temporality), asking if this mistranslation
functions within or as our biology, psychology, social world, history, or of
physics, and if so then what does the mistranslation in itself mean? What does our
distortions of sense mean as a part, a function, a temporary ground, a possibility,
and obligation of our form of life? Such distortions describe a limit to what we
can understand as meaningful and suggests a condition in which coherence and
referentiality mutate or are lost in the "infrarational" o f this transformational
grammar, whether it is a mistranslation
ofourconsciousorunconsciouslifeorsomethingelse. Thenocturnalworldismorethan our
dreams; it is our night-life as the limit of and limited by both our being
(conscious or anything) and the world.Inthisnot-lifewedonotrecognizeidentities.
Ifourwakingmemorymeans anything it might suggest how we construct identities,
including our own identity: our form of life is not determined by our common sight,
nor our falling into confusion because we lose this agreement. This lack of
agreement is the condition o f our being at this time. Our own being as something
is not continuous, nor is the stability o f our agreement about what exists, for
Aquinas, the dimension of being guaranteed by God, opposed to essenceReproduced
permission.
or identity, which for Aquinas is variable depending on our perspective within a
scale leading towards God. Extracting allegories, character and plot reads toward
'what something is'; reading back toward the ontological and intentional status of
Wakean language pursues 'that something is.'Finnegans Wake articulates and
investigates the structural aspects of our own being, our nocturnal life, that
finds its home, whose ordinary state is not doubting as such but the actual
existing o f our person (whatever that is) withinthe continual negation o f
possibility and identity and ground, on a scale directed toward the unknowable.The
logic of the Wake, while appearing to be a masque of characters, points always to a
single unconsciousness. Once we enter into the associative, non-narrative logic of
the dream we find that any paragraph ofFinnegans Wake provides us "with a set of
vectors that point to an absent content- 'the presence (of a curpse)' --into the
'eyewitless foggus' o f whose 'trapped head' the process o f reading the Evening
Worldleads"(315). The(un)consciousnessofour"humbptyhillhead,"our"onestable
somebody" "aslip" in the text, as Joyce calls him, becomes the underlying
organizational locus (a locus betrayed by absence, however, not presence) around
which the text can be understood, and around which it was written.I think that
Bishop's presentation is convincing. All that I require here, however, is the
acknowledgment of our inability to offer any interpretation about Finnegans Wake
that provides an intentional object (existent or not) and at the same time provides
the meaning o f the indeterminacy, nonsense, and mutations o f any particular word,
phrase or sentence as essential to that intentional target. Wakean language remains
radicallyReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
intentional. This intentionality, however, cannot articulate the content of its
aboutness. We are left with the structure of intentionality without its object(s).
In other words, the referential targets have been subtracted not only from the
'world' but from language, and leaves only an intentional structure. Freudian dream
interpretation replaces these lost targets with a primal allegory. One could
organize the intentionality of"nat language" by any number o f allegories.12I do
not want to provide another allegory, but to continually turn around within the
allegorical possibilities marked by 'the distance between mind and soul'. Such a
turning around, while it will leave a tale, will not provide a description of the
difference between the animate and inanimate (biology can do that), but will
subtract the content from this distinction as a way o f highlighting the
constituting o f this kind o f distinction as a particular kind o f limit. I do not
think that the distinction between mind and body, consciousness and life, mind and
soul, soul and God, human and animal, divinity and deity,
animateandinanimateareallthesamedistinction. Theyareexamples(andinthisthey
describeanaesthetic)ofatheologicalinhabitationoflanguage. Thistheology,inthiscase,
however, must emerge from the difficulty o f describing our investments in
language,meaning and interpretation within the nomological boundaries described in
science. Finnegans Wake and in a different way Philosophical Investigations
correlate the limit between the animate human and the inanimate thing as a limit
between sense and nonsense figured as the limits between interpretation, meaning,
seeing, knowing, and process (being caused). These limits are not clear, in fact
what counts as these limits is exactly what is at issue in building or modeling a
mind. To triangulate the grammar of linguistic andReproduced with permission of the
aesthetic meaning, the logic of the mind, and the theological description of being
human cannot begin outside o f the problems o f language, literary texts,
philosophies o f mind, or theologies.
Theconfusionofdemandsandlogicsofthesepursuitscannotbeavoided,and while the clarity
o f engineering is one o f the limits I am trying to approach, the work remains to
make such clarity as a limit to being human amidst the claims of language, art,
philosophy, science, and theology. There is no reason to think being within any
limit of clarity involves being clear, or rather it is not clear what will count as
clarity; My goal isto think within, at and towards the limits ofmind and being
articulated through the triangulation o f language, mind, and the enactment o f the
totalities o f sentences, persons, worlds, and divinities (or let's say ultimate
limits). Finnegans Wake involves exactly this kind oftriangulation. It would be a
failure to synthesize the Wakes nonsense into sense or clarity or plots or
characters and so on. But neither should we describe nonsense with nonsense.
Translation and representation are not the point only because that is not the
problem ofFinnegans Wake. The problem is instead the preservation and analysis (as
a peculiar kind of self-reflection through the transformation of our reading into a
thinking along the Wake) of the question 'why read?' 'Why read' enacts the
philosophical wonderthat anything exists as a choice embodied in our stance toward
ourselves toward the world. Thisistheproblemofaestheticjustification.InFinnegans
Wakethetheologicaldemandofthetextisnotjusttoconstructan aesthetics within which it
can be recognized as art nor to construct the context for any sentence to make
sense. Both context and aesthetic assume that a language game or a set o f criteria
or a stance can be constructed in which the text will make sense (or beReproduced
permission.150
sensible). I think, for example, that this is the case for The Waste Land.
Finnegans Wake, while it is not absolute nonsense, generates a theological stance
(a kind o f theology without God). The demand is more like one for prayer. Could a
prayer cause God to act? If a prayer reconstructs me and not God, opens me up to
the possibilities described by our versions o f divinity, then how would I be
constructed through a prayer towards the nonsense of the Wake and Investigations!
Artificial Intelligence becomes a way of investigating the ways we can remake
ourselves toward the ontological limits against which both texts operate (they both
expose logical and aesthetic limits as functioning with ontological force).Neither
text defends anything like the assumptions of AI, or ofa computational model o f
the mind (far from it in fact). The intentionality o f prayer, the theological
demands o f the texts articulate the relation between how we function and why we
function: the demand that the application of our ontological resources, as a way of
determining how we enter into allegories, interpretations, meanings, and
possibilities, the intentionality that they both continually destabilize. This
destabilization opens us up to the demands o f the limits within which we live (and
commit ourselves), and thus the destabilization (or play) cannot be an end in
itself.IfFinnegans Wake enacts the world ofan absent sleeper, then our failure to
read backwards into his or her life or consciousness, into a mind that we would
recognize as our own, forces us to place our mind, our life, as the intentional
target o f the text. But thiswouldmeanthatwedonotunderstandourselves.
Howcouldthisbeournight-life, our dreams, our absence? If we resist this move then
why read the text? Before you'Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
answer that you will not, consider that in tempting us to stop reading so
continually Joyce forces to the surface of every line Conrad's claim that for
anything to be art it must justify itself in every line. Intentionality delimits in
a negative beyond an absent dreamer, maybe a version of ourselves, through which we
recreate ourselves as the target of its language, or
thisintentionalitydevolvesintoastructurethatrequiresconstantjustification:
intentional structure becomes a self-reflexive aesthetic, and thus an investigation
ofmimesis itself, ofthe kind o f realism described by Ulysses.Thegrammarofthe
Wake,therefore,functionsasasyntaxatthatextensionlesspoint that Wittgenstein
articulated in the Tractatus as the "metaphysical I", the limit o f the world
marked by "the fact that 'the world is my world'". This does not mean that the
metaphysics ofthe Tractatus and ofthe Wake are the same. The shifting limits within
theWake are more like the relation between language games and forms oflife in
Philosophical Investigations. The structure o f intentionality in the Wake,
however, is akintothekindoflimitdescribedintheTractatus.
Themetaphysical'I'describesidentity as a kind of uniqueness or the point of
independence that necessarily cannot be described within the world which is its
vision. That is, it is shown by its configuration o f the world as its own, but it
cannot see itselfonly its effect in how it sees the world. The 'I' cannot be
pictured, as Wittgenstein suggests at 5.6331, not even as the following:Reproduced
permission.152
The ellipse describes the world. The eye ( T ) is included in that world. Such an
inclusion is impossible:Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be noted?
You say that this case is altogether like that of the eye and the field of sight.
But you do not really see the eye.And nothing in thefield o fsight can it be
concluded that it is seen from an eye.(5.633)The limit ofthe world cannot be seen
and remain a limit. How does the T enter into this world or involve itself across
this limit?There is therefore really a sense in which in philosophy we can talk o f
a non- psychological I.The I occurs in philosophy through the fact that the "world
is my world".The philosophical I is not the man, not the body or the human soul of
which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit--not part ofthe
world. (5.641)The T enters the world through the world being 'mine'; but such an
entrance is only to say the world is formed in relation to a limit. The
justification o f this model is tied to both the limits of logic and the contingent
arrangement of the world, of the underlying atomic propositions that define a state
o f affairs. The limits o f logic work out o f the Scholastic distinction between
existence, that something is, described ontologically as a tautology
andsemanticallyaswhatcanbepredicatedofit,andessenceoridentity. Wittgenstein says at
5.552:Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
The "experience" which we need to understand logic is not that such and such is the
case, but that something is] but that is no experience.Logic precedes every
experience--that something is so.It is before the How, not before the What.
Wecannotexperiencethelimitsofexistence: experiencepresupposesexistence. IfLogic
precedes experience, what something is, the particular configurations and
identifications of particular states o f affairs, it does not precede existence
itself.I take the Tractatus to show that any form of realism depends on a limit to
the world. This limit always determines the world as mine. Realism can then move in
two directions: toward the world through the application o f logic and toward this
limiting point, a constitutive 'my'. This point existing beyond the world cannot be
said or describedbutonlyshown.
Itisinthisseconddirectionthatrealismbecomessolipsism. Realism is not false at or
about this limiting 'I', it simply becomes indistinguishable from solipsism.
Realismisdeterminedbytheidentityofexperience(phenomenalism)withthe
world(therepresented). SolipsismisnotaboutanyT wecanknow,butaboutthislimit.Realism
can be turned around so that it is not only about the world, but so that the world
acts as a limit on what counts as me, but only in a negative way. If the relation
between language and facts follows from language picturing these facts, which are
structured through tautological relations, then time or change does not exist as a
logical possibilitywithintheworld. InWittgenstein'slogicallfollowsfromtheanalysisof
symbols, and thus there can be no surprises because all possibility is determined
by the logical possibilities defined by these symbols. Wittgenstein is here
extending Frege'sReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
exposition ofall logical relations through logical notation, where the rules
oflogical notationdetermineandexpressallpossiblelogicalrelations.
WhereFrege'snotation works in order to define thought, Wittgenstein's symbols
function as facts not o f thought, as such, but ofthe world. Wittgenstein's logical
facts make ontological claims, but only about what is, that is, within the world.
But they make these claims in a special way: "What signifies in the symbol is what
is common to all those symbols by which it can be
replacedaccordingtotherulesoflogicalsyntax"(TLP3.344). Thepossibilityof replacement
defines identity as it does for Frege. But what is being replaced? Wittgenstein
distinguishes between the accidental and the necessary in a proposition--the mode o
f producing the prepositional sign, that is, the psychology and sociology and
history that determines the shape and sound ofEnglish, or what phrase or idiolect
is used inaparticularsituationareaccidental. Theessentialiswhatis"commontoall
propositions." This is again a curious extension ofFrege. Frege's distinction
between sense and reference picks out the difference between the different senses
attending the "Evening Star" and the "morning star" and the identity of their
referent. For Wittgenstein
thecommonalityiswhatiscommonto"allpropositions(TLP3.341). Thiscommonality
definestheessentialasadomainofpossibility: "Aparticularmethodofsymbolizingmay be
unimportant, but it is always important that this is a possible method of
symbolizing" (TLP3.3421). Symbolizingitself,therefore,becomesameansoftranslation:
Definitions are rules for the translation of one language into another. Every
correct symbolism must be translatable into every other according to such rules. It
is this which all have in common. (TLP3.343).Reproduced with permission of the
Inthe Tractatus,Wittgensteinseesthisasanecessitytounderstandtheworldasmylimit. But
the collapse between the solipsistic 'I' and the world as represented is resisted
by the distinction between saying and showing; the limit between the tautological
domain described by what can be known, and therefore said, and the metaphysical
'I', which can only be shown, cannot be reconfigured within another meta-language
game. This absolute limit becomes a ground in exactly the way denied in
Investigations, where every transcendent claim is always already a language game.
The power ofWittgenstein's vision in the Tractatus, however, uncovers the structure
of this 'myness' that determines what is the world. It is being a limit that
defines 'myness'. Wittgenstein argues against that "no
partofourexperienceisalsoapriori. Everythingweseecouldalsobeotherwise.
Everythingwecandescribecouldalsobeotherwise"(TLP5.634). Injettisoningthe Kantian a
priori he retains the limiting T as an End, but not o f itself, rather o f the
world. Perceived from this point, from itself as an End the configuration o f what
is is also an End: the limiting 'I' assures possession as my world, gives me the
world as my experience, but it remains "independent o f my will" (TLP6.373). Thus
the world as mine is not a solipsistic claim, but a formal limit (not
transcendental because it is not understood asenabling our knowledge; such a claim
would presume to picture the T . The T as a formal limit means that the world shows
the T as the world, and thus the limit is not bound by anyone's will.).In
Investigations sense is not determined through tautologies, and thus Frege's
replacement principle that determines sense as identity cannot alone describe
meaning:Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
We speak o f understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by
another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced
by any other. (Any more than one musical theme can be replaced another.)In the one
case the thought in the sentence is something common to different sentences; in the
other, something that is expressed only by these words in these positions.
(Understanding a poem.) (PI?531)Uniqueness is built out o f exclusion (x is not a,
b, c , . . . n, constituting the totality o f the
world,oratleastsometotalitywithinwhichxfunctionsorexists). Thiskindofexclusion
requires the establishment of criteria by which the limit between x and those
elements in opposition to which it is constituted can be determined and maintained
(grammar as essence).The Wake pushes both o f these criterion for understanding or
meaning or identity (replacability and uniqueness) into each other: any word seems
random and thus immensely replaceable and any word seems to carry a unique
significance built from the puns which compose it (as if embodying or enacting a
secret meaning or reference). Uniqueness picks out the essence o f what something
is, the configuration o f tones or words that describes a musical theme or a poem
as a limit to the rest o f the possible tones humans can hear or the possible words
that constitute any particular language (or alllanguages).
Replacabilitydescribesthefundamentallevelsofbeingsomething,ofbeinga
wordatall,thatsomethingiswithinanorganizedsystemofcategoricalunities. IfIcall
this the level ofexistentia, I mean an existentia of forms that structure language
as a set of possibilities that make words visible as words.You can find
yourselfalong this tangent intersecting realism and idealism not only by waking up
from reading in Hume's A Treatise o fHuman Nature "that an object may exist, andyet
be no where" (I.IV.V), and in waking up wondering where you have been, as if you
were unsure whether our limits of knowing constitute a ground for thinking or a
despair. I initially read Wakean grammar and the later Wittgensteinian grammatical
investigations as linguistic redactions ofAquinas' linking of intentionality to
existence through descriptions ofthe limits ofknowing, ofself-observation, ofbeing
(explaining the use of sleep as the means and world through which we develop a
theology describing death) (in the section ofthe Summa Theologica called the "Names
ofGod"). Discovering the limit ofthe ontological claims ofourthinking (or being),
our intentional failures, entailed a theological expansion of our self-reflection
as, what we confusedly call, the ground for this thinking. These intentional limits
describe the possibility of self-reflectionin such a way as to re-enact a theology
not in conflict with materialism. This might be like finding God in (a)
sentence(s), and not in the word. Do we imagine nothing o f such import is at stake
in Frege's appeal to meaning as a function of a statement and not a word? Does a
theology built on such a semantic reorientation function in a domain not limited by
substance in a way a theology ofthe word cannot, susceptible as it is to the
claimofthingsonwordsasnamesandtruthasreferentiality? Wittgensteinastheinheritor
ofthisFregeansemanticsbuildssuchatheology. Thelogicofnonsenseconstituting Finnegans
Wake proceeds along similar semantic assumptions, and thus becomes another
version ofthis theology. Why 'theology'? Theology is the language ofthe meaning of
those limits which we recognize as unshakable, as ontological limits determining my
possibilities as my possibilities.WhatIamlookingforisnotatheoryoforaboutnonsense.
Iaminvestigatingthe ways in which the relation between sense and nonsense can make
us imagine that we are, as Ashbery says, "some point o f concentration around which
a person can collect itself' (Flow Chart, 11):And you know,he said, sure, that's
the way to hell and its conundrums if that's the wayyou want to go, and they all
said we know, we are going that waycautiously approved o f in the introduction,
only it seems so full o f asperities now. And he said that's the way it was, it was
a tangle and will never be anythingmore than a diagram pointing you in a senseless
direction toward yourself.(Flow Chart, 109)This way to hell and its conundrums,
regardless of ones' best intentions or of what one might read "in the introduction"
as the promises of "Love that lasts a minute like a filter/ on a faucet", as itself
a "diagram pointing to you in a senseless direction toward yourself, builds its
sense partly in a kind of self-reflection that offers truth through what under one
reading might be a democratic tautology of acting: we are all acting as and through
each other:asrepresentativesofthelimitsofnonsensetowardwhichwemove. One'sbestlaid
plans like those best intentions fail "and the listing tundra is revealed" (108) as
the limit ofthe inanimate to all forms of meaning which we inhabit. A kind of
nonsense attends theReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
loss ofjustice, but the history ofthis "senseless direction" organizes the world
not toward the source o f this nonsense, as it does for Job where all senselessness
leads toward God, but toward the consequence ofthis nonsense, that is, "toward
yourself." The second person force o f this "yourself, having already been
abstracted as a kind o f limit to the diagram o f nonsense, a limit to language
itself) gets taken up as an hypothetical, including boththepoetandthereader.
Ifonewritesthisnonsensethediagramandwhatitpointsto invert the intentionality of
language away from the world, the diagram ends up not being able to be read as a
diagram ofthe world, toward oneself. Self-reflexive intentionality is a particular
kind o f self-reflection: in that it writes the failure o f events to conform to a
moral logic into a kind o f verbal nonsense. I will call this embodied self-
reflection as opposed to self-reference. Thus it is not like the following:[1]
"This 'word' is a word."[2] "I am that I am."Does Wittgenstein mean the following
to describe forms of self-reflection?:Asking what the sense is. Compare:"This
sentence makes sense."--"What sense?""This set o f words is a sentence."--"What
sentence?" (502)Compare what? Compare each statement and its question, or compare
statement and question with statement and question? "This sentence" animates the
sentence; can sentences use demonstratives? "This sentence makes sense" interprets
itself. An interpretation ofwhat? "This set ofwords..." looks like a description--
but ifit is not a description o f a sentence, but rather an example, is it a
description o f itself? I f asked whatReproduced with permission of the copyright
is the sense o f a sentence, and I answer "this set o f words is a sentence" what
have I shown? Only questions which betray an ignorance o f language would generate
a question where this might be the answer. "How many words make a sentence?" "Well,
this set of words is a sentence."An intentionality that recovers an T , as opposed
to the world, refigures the disjunction between self and world worrying the skeptic
with a comma between an initial realm o f intention that leads to personal action (
'building up a graduated series o f studies') and a realm o f possibility implied
by this intentionality but which loses its referent ('I can do that'; but who said
this? or can say and do that?'):My first concern (in any case) was to build upa
graduated series of studies, leading to the alchemical perfection of one who says,
I can do that. The fabrication o f it lasted nearly a lifetime,leaving me, at the
end, unable to perform the most banal act such as tying myshoelacesin a double
knot, and vulnerable to the japes o f skepticswho would have preferred to die a
thousand deaths rather than undertake the course o f study I had so painstakingly
elaborated. (150-51)Why-questions ('why do I suffer?' for example) can become
confused with questions about not only "who" speaks or is referred to or exists ('I
suffer because o f who I am?' or 'I didn't do anything to deserve this!' who did
then? Who is responsible for my actions?), but how this "who" either crystallizes
out of the world, out of a context, or conversely how any 'I' can know or believe
speak beyond the limits of the who which he or she findReproduced with permission
themselves to be. Has Ashbery's (or Joyce's or Wittgenstein's) writing constructed
a golem of such animate perfection that it can, as Flaubert claimed ofMadame
Bovary, be the artist, in this case a converted, transformed selfthat speaks ofits
own creation as if Ashbery has yet to create it? But underlying the metaphysics of
this creation is a comic undercurrent that allows any nonsense to be read, and
marked as nonsense, by the exclamation of some discontented reader "That's not art,
or there's nothing to that; I can do that!"Nonsense emerges under the pressure some
missing 'I', like the missing intentional target in Finnegans Wake, exerts on the
categorical structures o f langauge. This produces what Ashbery calls "slippery
harmonies":slipperyharmoniesabound. Infact,Ican'tbesureI'mnotaddressingmyself to
one or within one right now, but that's no matter. I've got to tell thisin whatever
time remains to me. (126)For the moment the confusion in the poem lies not only in
the obscurity o f context, to be "in" or addressing a "slippery harmon[y]" or in
the obscurity of what this "this" is that he musttell.
The"fact"ofthisobscurityisitselfslippery,andifitis"nomatter"tohis telling, it is
slippery also because such a fact can be without matter. If facts, as expressions o
f truth, do not matter, what does? But what fact is captured by pointing to
"slippery harmonies abound' as a fact? Is this a fact like H(2)0 is the chemical
formula for water? Why would someone write within or to such slippery harmonies
through such a
slipperypoeticsifneitherthepossibilitynorimpossibilityofbeingunderstoodmatters. He
pushes himselftoward, into, and through the senseless under the pressure ofthe
shrinkingReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
time available to him. How is the certainty of the approaching limit of death like
or unlike the uncertainty bound in questions about Others or the world? We can say
at least that this isakindofpoeticshighlightingtheexpressiveaspectsoflanguage.
Suchexpressivenessis nonsense. This kind of nonsense replaces our skeptical
temptations to lose the world and others with its own "no matter" that offers a
strengthened 'I' that can say "I can do that". This kind of expressiveness borrows
on a performative force that allows it to act without reference to its context or
addressee, but it is not an action of doing, language as some pure actuality, but
rather a kind of possibility-actualizing promise or recognition marked by saying "I
can do that." In this it is an attempt to push language into an extreme (it is
meant to fail, so it is not a "pure") subjunctive:.. .1sat naked and disconsolate
at a comer o f a crevice, hat in hand, fishing,for who can tell what God intends
for us next? And if a little girl can call and run, her dog twirl, why not be able
to slide a leg over the board barrier that disconnects us from all that is really
happening, that hiveo f activity as you think o f it? (121)A catechism of
questions: the mythic problem of The Waste Land ("I sat... fishing, for who can
tell what God intends for us next?" answered with another possibility, an allegory
not unlike the riddles of Alice in Wonderland, where this sliding a leg into
another realm works through the ambiguity of our language; saying I can do that--
where 'know' reduces back to can, the beyond ofthe thing in itselfis for us ("as
you think ofit") a "hive ofactivity"andthusonlyaccessiblebycomparableactivity.
"[Njakedanddisconsolate"Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
this T fishes, ifwe believe the punctuation, because ("for") we are the victims
ofGod's intentions. God's absence leaves only our ignorance pushing against what
from any human end (telos), where chance can seem fate, our lives have suffered and
become under the pressureofexternalintention.
Howmightthisdescribelanguage,oratleastAshbery's and Joyce's language? What counts
as an end when reading 'nonsense' is moments of sense, where understanding
organizes at least in a local way a bit oftext. Thus, in commenting on his own kind
o f nonsense, Ashbery writes that he is a poet "whosepersonal-pronoun lapses may
indeed have contributed to augmenting the/ hardship/ silently resented among the
working classes?"13PronounconfusioninFinnegans
Wakesketchesthesymbolicstructureof'our' through which it invokes the limit o f
being human by being a form any human can claim andoverwhichwecanfight.
Thisispartofthestructureofrightsandjustification:14 "The soul o f everyelsesbody
rolled into its olesoleself' (FW329.18-19).15 This means that Finnegans
WakeenactsaplayofmasksakintothatwhichKierkegaardusedtoexpose their emptiness,
without, however, an underlying God to mark a limit to these masks: "One single
word o f mine uttered personally in my own name would be an instance o f
presumptuous self-forgetfulness, and dialectically viewed would ensure with one
word theft guiltofannihilatingthepseudonyms"(Po/<</ofView,40).InFinnegans Wakethis
annihilation is resisted by reading oneselfinto the interrogative fragments that
sketch the limits o f the forms o f life through which we inhabit language.Sense
organizes the previous words into an order that transforms what seemed
randomintodeterminedandthereforeintentionallanguage. Suchclaritymightaccompany
the emergence or imposition of an interpretative frame, an attachment of language
to a secure pronoun, the application ofan allegory. Such moments of sense are
temporary, and the pressure o f nonsense within language combines the demand for
clarity, the assumption o f intentionality with the pressure o f dissolution or
dissipation that tempts us atthosepointsofinterpretativeambiguity.
Thebreakdownofthemeaningofasentence,if it is not at the service o f communication
but is framed as an aesthetic object, as an object or a language demanding a
commitment to its significance, to its exemplary status, modulates into a demand to
justify what kind of sense we make in relation to this nonsense (to whatever
nonsense claims 'us'). This dissertation is an example of such an attempt.' This
would require some defense, but nothing critical hangs on this here. I think
Aristotle's analysis of the soul is as coherent as Aquinas' (as one would
expect),,but the pressure of Augustine's conception of the will, o f the
conceptualization o f identity and substance in the Trinity, and o f the fact o f a
linguisitc limit (in the Bible) transforms the conception of the soul in ways that
I think are essential. A lot does hang on this, but I am not cosntructing as soul
within the Christian tradition, but am instead trying to recapture a functional
theological stance within the boundaries marked by something like Aquinas' soul and
a causal picture of the mind as these boundaries (understood conceptually, and thus
not tied to their particular history nor their detailed form in Aquinas or in
particular scientific pictures) figure the picture of our invovlment in language in
Finnegans Wake and Philosophical Investigations. In this I am responding to the
claim these texts have on figuring the boundaries against which modem science
works. 2 Cited in Kretzmann.3This list is Gearld Edleman's (Neural Darwinism).4 In
Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, ed. Alvin I. Goldman.5 M.H. Abrams
famously organizes romantacism around the shift from mechanical and passive
metaphors for the mind (minor) to reciprocal, interactive and/ or generative
metaphors for the mind (lamp). TheMirrorandtheLamp:
RomanticTheoryandTheCriticalTradition. SeeespeciallychapterHI, "Romantic Analogues
o f Art and Mind."6 P.M.S. Hacker fails to distinguish between objects and notation
in his comparison o f section 372 with the picture of necessity in the Tractatus in
Wittgenstein: Meaning andMind (Vol. 3), 439.7The grinding of this machinery failing
to latch onto anything that would count as an about x, of y, at z attracts our gaze
from the moon to the finger pointing to it, or even further to a picture o f a
scene with someone pointing to a moon replaced by someone (else) pointing at
someone (else), or a tree talking to a rock:
butthenthisseriesofimagesspeedingbylikeinaflip-bookiswhatisrepresented.
Themachinery of intentionality works or at least is isomorphic with the structure
of our experience of time (our existential involvement with, our representation o f
our enactment o f change).
8Adescriptionofourrelationtotheworldcannotusetheconceptofrelation.
Thisdifficultyleadsto claims that out relation to the world is indescribable.
Brentano counters this by arguing that our reference to objects are immanent within
out intentional stances.9 The two best attempts to defend all forms of
intentionality as derived from our interpretations see Dennnett (especially his
essays in The Intentional Stance) and Milkan.Reproduced with permission of the
10 The necessity o f asking 'When does it mean?', and the impossibility o f
answering this question in the Wake unpicks the allegoty and, therefore, forces the
possibility away from any particular word,. Thesense of any particular word implies
and invokes a vague and shifting set of relations with other words, sentences,
characters, interpretations, allegories, understandings, etc.11 Robert M. Adams,
"While Mr. Whoever-He-Is Sleeps" New York Times Book Review (18 Jan. 1987) 14.
Denis Donaghue, "Reading in the Dark" Partisan Review 54,3 (1987) 480.12Finnegans
WakeandPhilosophicalInvestitationsdescribethelimitsofmind. Inmarkingtheselimits,
from the inside as it were, they do not provide a theory of the soul or the mind,
but enact a demand forjustification.
Inbothcasestheforceoflanguage,thedialogictensionbetweenthetextandthereader,
undermines the claim questions like 'what is a soul?' and 'what is a mind?' They
both do this partially by forcing us to ask 'why soul?', 'why mind?', generating a
kind o f self-reflection that does not pursue self- representation (of the kind
answerion 'what is X?'); both texts figure being-toward-onself [and itself]
betweenoratthelimitofmetaphorsoranalogies.
Thisbetweennessmarksthelimitsbetweenidentity and ? , for Joyce, and between
language games, for Wittgenstein as the form of fulfillment (entelechy) of being a
soul and mind.I3This is the same confusion that the King o f Hearts exploits in his
persecution and prosecution o f the Knave when he reads and interprets (a picture
of literary analysis) some found verse (The AnnotatedAlice, 158)141will discuss
this paradox working in rights andjustification at the end of this section.15
". . . and, sure, we ought really to rest thankful that at this deletful hour o f
dungflies dawning we have even a written on with dried ink scrap of paper at all to
show for ourselves, tare it or leaf it, (and we are
luftedtoourselvesasthesoulfisherwhenheledthecatoutofthebout)...
hopingagainsthopeallthe while that, by the light o f philosophy (and may she neer
folsage us!) things will begin to clear up a bit one
wayoranotherwithinthenextquarrelofanhour...,
astheyoughttocategorically,as,strictlybetween ourselves, there is a limit to all
things so this will never do."(FW118.31-119.09)But all is her inboume. Intend. From
gramma's grammar she has it that if there is a third person, mascarine, phelinine
or nuder, being spoken abad it moods prosodes from a person speking to her second
which is the direct object that has been spoken to, with and at. (268.16-22)
6The Wakean Grammar o f 'Between'I am tempted to call the soul inFinnegans Wake the
state ofbeing "between" or "amidst" in "the circumconversioning" (FW512.16), in a
revolution (L. circumconversio, a revolving) o f conversation, conversion and
confession, o f "all her myriads o f drifting minds in one" (FW159.07). But "[t]o
the vast go the game!" (FW512.15). The betweeness continually described and evoked
in the "chaosmos . . . moving and changing every part of the time" (FW118.21-23),
however, enacts the distance between the mind and the soul as itselfthe form
ofbeing anything (not just being a soul or a body or an idea), placed under the
pressure of both a surrounding nothingness and the surrounding claim of matter.The
catalog o f genres amalgamated and informing Finnegans Wake is partially a function
o f the books used and rewritten into it. Many o f these were already odd
amalgamationsofgenres,furthercomplicatedbyJoyce'suseofthem: theEgyptianBook o f the
Dead, as a dream book or a psychological theology; Vico's New Science, already a
sociopsycholinguistic historical philosophy, Swift's Tale o f a Tub, Carlyle's
SartorResartus, and so on. The Wake is built out of distorted versions or fragments
from these texts (as it is out of language itself). And further, the fragments
ofwords that Joyce condenses into puns palimpsest words with allegories radiating
in interpretations that reduce the text to a set of words (as if moments within the
order of the interpretation). Any word offers itself as a target for interpretation
and thus confession.Notes for this chapter are on page 212Reproduced with
permission.167
"The abnihilization ofthe etym" describes the annihilation ofetym (its history into
a new founding) as the annihilation o f the atom (the passage is full o f
references to physics) which proceeds by an invocation of Vico's picture ofthe
beginning of language in fear and imitation ofthunder ("the grisning ofthe grosning
[It. groza, thunder storm] of the grinder o f the grander [G. Grunder, Founder] o f
the first lord Hurtreford [Lord Rutherford split the atom in 1919].. .''[FW353.22-
23]). These beginning are ends. They describe the common grammatical boundaries
between humans ("eytm") and matter (atom) and God ("grander"), the "fragoroboasity
amidwhiches general uttermosts confussion"(FW353.25).
Amidtheutmostconfusion,whichisanynumberofuttermosts (extreme limits) marking this
confusion. Such limits, however, describe a "confiission" (with a fusion) that in
coming together and flying a part is an image (or an enactment) o f a confession.
Such a reading brings out the significance of "fragoroboassity", a complicated pun
that can be read as the voice of God: fragor (loud harsh noise) + It. rombazzo
(uproar) + oro (L. I speak) + bombasity +frage (G. question). But such noise while
it can demand a response like the questioning o f human beings by God, can itself
be turned into ourquestioningofanysuchdivinity"untuoning"theworld.
Inthiscasethefirstperson"I am" of"the grander" becomes the alternative oro (I
plead, beg and pray) of human beings.How is such a "confiission" (confession)
"perceivable [in] moleton (hidden atoms) skaping with mulicules (molecules)"
(FW353.26)? What would a confession directed not at God, but in memory of God and
directed at the limit between mind and matter consist of or sound like? Are we not
made up ofatoms and molecules? Do we not have thoughts, beliefs and desires?
Such a confession is directed at the between, the vanishing intentionality, "the
studious omission of year number and era name from the date" (FW121.28-29), shaped
as the negative nexus o f these forces. Joyce's confession, like Wittgenstein's in
PhilosophicalInvestigations, is made up of"[T]hings I say to myselftete-a-
tete"(CV77), but cast as "The soul of everyelsesbody rolled into its olesoleself'
(FW329.18-19). (In Wittgenstein's such a debate is best understood as a negotiation
with oneself at the limit between grammar, or the limits oflogic, and the claims
ofpsychology as these limits organizes our common language and our forms o f life.)
Joyce writes a confession that could be anyone's ("I will confess to his sins and
blush me further" [494.31]) and thus is a "Wee, cumfused" (156.31).In Finnegans
Wake, the conflicts between opposites, the bipolar transformations and resistances
between characters, styles, categories (Space vs. Time; moral vs. aesthetic; life
vs. death; conscious vs. unconscious, etc.) are transformed into letters,
dialogues, commentaries, narratives, as much as they fragment into one another,
function as continuing multi-level debates, as if between body and soul, between
the absent intentional source-pointandthemanifestationsofformwhichweread.
Onewaythesedebatescanbe organized is between the father HCE and the mother ALP and
between the two brothers Shem the penman and Shaun the spaceman. The daughter and
sister Issy functions as a shiftingtokenofresistanceanddesirewithinthesedebates.
Butthesedebatescanalsofunction at a grammatical level, and that is the level of
primary interaction between the reader and the text (that is the level at which
meaning emerges as a problem not solvable by our interpretations). One can call
this the resistance of the text. I am interested not inReproduced with permission
the content o f these debates (their psychology), but in the ways in which the form
o f conversation and debate can be refracted into the descriptions o f a shifting
set o f limits like those that describe the difference between self and soul,
animate and inanimate, and so on.Stephen Gilman, in his analysis of the fifteenth-
century proto-drama La Celestirta, suggests two kinds of doctrinal debates:
"vertical debates" as in Boethius' Consolation o f Philosophy between a privileged
authority and a naive character and "horizontal debates" between characters of
equal authority and privilege as in Seneca's De remedtisfortuitorum. The structures
that provide for the determination of these relations are missing in Finnegans
Wake] and thus "the constant of fluxion" (FW297.29) of character
providesforneitherstabilityofidentitynorofrelationship. Allconversationswithinthe
text require the explicit construction of a conversation between the reader and the
text. Such a construction, therefore, entails the de facto animation of the text
(within an horizontal debate) or the stabilization of the text into a context
determined by text or reader (within a vertical debate). More importantly, however,
either kind o f conversation destabilizes how we read, and if we continue reading
these conversations destabilize our functional identity as human beings within or
who use language. Reading the Wake tempts us to ask 'Is reading Finnegans Wake a
human activity?'. The melodramatic character of this question is a reaction to the
extremity required to generate a theological relation between the reader and the
text.Debates between self and soul and their Neo-Platonic reflection in the debate
between lovers can take as their site o f debate the demands and the dread o f
conversation, both o f vertical and horizontal conversations as modes o f self-
reflection and self-denial.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
This is one description: "Peena and Queena are duetting a giggle-for-giggle and the
brideen Alanah is lost in her diamindwaiting" (FW377.19-20). Wakean dialogues,
where "Now's your never!"(377.19), do not resolve into the clarity o f a
communication, but
ratherslipinto"communicantinginthedeificationofhismembers"(498.21); acommon
canting, both singing and nonsense, reforging a body into unity, god-like or
statue-like, or at least a remembering of "Dodderick Ogonosh Wrak", Rodderick
O'Conner, the last high king of Ireland (c. 1116-98), "on the table round"
(498.23), before Wrack "busted to the wurld at large" (498.23). The dialogue
between Peena and Queena (a giggle-for- giggle), like that between the Elm and
Stone, the two washerwoman over and about Anna Livae Plurabelle, crosses beside
(paratactically) the lost "brideen Alanah," the bride Eileen
Aruna,theIrishHelen,lostbetweentwo-mindswaiting. "[T]hebrideenAlahah"isa version of
"Nuvoletta, a lass", Issy, who earlier in the night (FW159.06-07) "reflected for
the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads o f drifting
minds in one." Into "one": a diamond-waiting, a purity of soul, impervious to all
the but the greatest forces,adiamondweddinglastingastwo-mindswaiting.
Whatdoesitmeantobemake one'smindsintoone? Thisisapictureofintention.How does
someone get lost?"AisforAnnalikeLisforliv. Ahahahah,AnteAnnyou'reapttoapeaunty
annalive! Dawn bives rise. Lo, lo, lives love! Eve takes fall. La, la, laugh leaves
alass! Aiaiaiai, Antiann, we're last to the lost,. . . "I bring down noth and carry
awe." (FW293.17-294.06)Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
Eve ("alass") laughs at Adam; and this laugh leaves a girl ("alass"), but this
stuttering "la, la, laugh", is itselfthe "antiann" crying (aiaiaiai; a vowel
expression) not with the awe that anything exists, but that nothing (no-thing) can
be brought into our minds at night (that anything can be negated) and thus this
nothing ("noth") can also carry awe.The distance between the details and a meta-
description o f a sentence (between reading and interpreting) is the distance
between the "commonpleas" (FW422.29) and "AUSPICIUM. AUGURIA. DIVINITY NOT DEITY
THE UNCERTAINTY JUSTIFIED BY OUR CERTITUDE. EXAMPLES" (FW282.R4; how can we read
anything as an example? examples as auguria?); or "Now day, slow day, from delicate
to divine, divases" (FW598.12). What is the distinction between divinity and deity,
and why should divinity be preferred? How is divinity related to a kind o f
uncertainty justified by our certitude? And what would be an example of this
uncertainty and this divinity? Vico's poetic metaphysics describes how the
uncertainty of early peoples caused them to project themselves into their
ignorance, such that "he makes the things out o f himself and becomes them by
transforming himself into them" [NS405], Uncertainty justified by certitude inverts
this poetic metaphysics such that certainty is evacuated into uncertainty:
pantheismisreplacedbyskepticism. Certitudecanthereforebeunderstoodtobewhat Cavell
calls generic objects, those things about which no questions about their identity
arise, and thus our doubt about them questions their very existence and because of
their generic quality all objects, and thus the world {Claim o f Reason, 49-86).
The doubt here, however, is not about wax or trees or tables. The generic object or
target is divinity itself, and not any particular deity.Reproduced with permission
Divinity or deity are both manifested, in our interpretations, in Auspicium (the
augury o f bird-watching) and augury (in general) (a token and a type; an example
and a category). WhatcertaintygeneratesGod? Wecouldanswerthatthecertaintyof
ourselves and our uncertainty about the future and the world motivate Vico's poetic
metaphysics; or we could answer the uncertainty o f generic objects generates
skepticism. But neither o f these can rightly be described as divinity. It is easy
to imagine what uncertainty would generate the category o f divinity. But do we
imagine that uncertainty and fear could generate the 'actual' world in which we
find ourselves uncertain?1Between the "piejaw of hilarious heaven and roaring the
other place" (between the admonition and moral advice [SI. piejaw] o f heaven and
the roaring o f Hell), "you have become o f twosome twinminds forenenst gods,
hidden and discovered, nay, condemned fool, anarch, egoarch, hiresiarch, you have
reared your disunited kingdom on the vacuum ofyour own most intensely doubtful
soul" (FW188.11-17). This is a description of"Shem avic" (I a mhic, my boy), Shem
the penman, the artist, the prankster, who in one kind of dialogue between the self
and the soul would be the soul in Yeats "A Dialogue of Self and Soul": "Such
fullness in that quarter overflows/ And falls into the basin of the mind",
asking,atleast,"Whocandistinguishdarknessfromthesoul?"(Yeats,230). InYeats' poem
the Self, attached to things and himself"emblematical of love and war" thinks "that
shape must be his shape" because he exists as an 'I' that acts in folly toward "a
proud woman", "endure[s] that toil ofgrowing up", and is blind to his own soul,
which he never responds to or hears. Yeats' "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" is not a
dialogue at all. Two aspects of a particular 'I' (unnamed and by default a persona
for Yeats) alternateReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
speaking, until in the last section ofthe poem "my Self' speaks continuously for
four stanzas in a kind o f resignation to blindness and foolishness. Does this non-
dialogue describe a psychology? Or what is the claim psychology has on aesthetics?
Shem is become "twosome twinminds forenenst god" ("forenenst gods": overagainst
god). The dialogue of"twosome twinminds" is addressed in challenge or is caused by
being against the gods. What does this confusion between (1) being that which
addresses the canopy o f human limits (gods) out o f an internal dialogue and (2)
becoming this dialogue (being "twosome") by being against this limit (or limits)?
The first case might be a judgment on myselfor on the gods; I might provide
descriptions or meanings or interpretations. The second offers a cause for my
being, and this cause functions as a principle o f identity. This identity or being
(it is not clear which it is) is hidden, discovered, and condemned: hidden by Shem
as a revolt against heaven or in the instability o f intention, desire and identity
he discovers in himself as himself. And what would the discovery of my own
instability mean, my discovery of myselfas these dialogues? Would it be like
discovering an engine in my heart? Or a machine in my head? A discovery operates at
the limit between what I know and what I do not know, and thusoffers a resistance
to my fantasies. It can act as a temporary ground. This discovery, however, moves
the hidden form of this dialogue out into something that can be known and therefore
judged. And thus Shem must speak his revolt, through his discovery o f his revolt
and o f his doubleness (or "twinsome twinminds" (double)(double)= quadruple), and
thus be condemned (by himself, his family, his society, his gods). His condemnation
names him in four ways: "fool, anarch, egoarch, hireseiarch". He is he who speaks
nonsense (fool) that maybe wisdom (fool), who revolts against the ground (arche) o
f faith and knowledge and community (anarch), who is his own ground and his own
kingdom (egoarch), who is the ground o f the sacred (hieratic) and o f heresy
(heresiarch) [all doubled].Shem has become what seems to be a "disunited kingdom";
but there is a confusion between whether his "twosome twinminds" are the effect or
a cause o f his being against the gods. Is the next clause a reaffirmation ofthe
previous clause, or does it mark a reaction to being hidden, discovered and
condemned?: "you have reared your disunited kingdom on the vacuum ofyour own most
intensely doubtful soul". Is he fool, anarch, egoarch, hiresiarch outside o f any
disunited kingdom (maybe in the daytime unity o f consciousness)? Or can we only
understand this plurality through the 'disunited kingdom' he raises on the
discovery of what is either a soul whose existence or identity is doubtful. Or if
it is already the limits within which this doubt operates, then is it his soul that
doubts? The confusion o f cause and effect allows these two clauses to describe the
groundorlimitofagency. Thisagencyismeasuredasthedistancebetweenthe "twinminds" and
the "doubtful soul." The mind is confused into a plurality, a plurality of sensory
inputs, desires and fears, memories or possibilities and so on, a plurality
determined and expressed in four identities or roles (again a crucial ambiguity)
that allows a further self-reflection that constitutes (as an effect or cause) the
creation of a domain of self (a kingdom or society of mind) determining or
expressing the soul as doubtful.This kind of doubt can be expressed "Between his
voyous and her consinnantesl"; between his vowels (voice and voyage and his acting
the voyeur) and her consonantsReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
(consummation and together-in-sin-bom) (FW485.10-11). What is between vowels and
consonants in a word or between words besides empty space? Wittgenstein has an
answer. Theinterlocutor(oneofthe"twosometwinminds"ofWittgenstein)asks"Ifa
proposition too is conceived as a picture o f a possible state o f affairs and is
said tQ shew the possibility of the state of affairs, still the most that the
proposition can do is what a painting or relief or film does: and so it can at any
rate not give an account o f what is not the case. So it depends wholly on our
grammar what will be called (logically) possible and what not,--i.e. what that
grammar permits?" Unlike many of the statements marked offin quotation marks in
Investigations, Wittgenstein is not attempting to dissolve the logic of
thisdescription(exceptmaybetoremovethe"wholly'). Anothervoicechallengesthe claim
that what is possible is determined by grammar by exclaiming "But surely that is
arbitrary!" (PI?520). And is answered, "Is it arbitrary?" Grammar determines one
set of possibilities, but it cannot determine the application o f the sentences
possible within any grammar o f usage (philosophical statements being an example o
f statements that are possible within not only our language but in a domain o f
usage, which itself is senseless) :It is not every sentence-like formation that we
know how to do something with, not every technique has an application in our life;
and when we are tempted in philosophy to count some quite useless thing as a
proposition, that is often because wehavenotconsidereditsapplicationsufficiently.
(PI?520)A meaningful application, however, is not an interpretive application. A
large number of allegories are possible as interpretations of an event, action,
statement or text, but not all such allegories are equally probable. Thus
Wittgenstein recognizes two limits: the limitsReproduced with permission of the
of grammar ("Essence is expressed by grammar... Grammar tells what kind of object
anything is" PI ??371, 373) and the limits of application within or as a form of
life.Application for Wittgenstein is primarily normative (and thus he talks o f the
originary home o f a word, and adjudicates disputes about this home by asking how
we have leant a word or a language game, and describes language games as forms of
life basedonagreementinjudgment). Anotherwayofunderstandingapplicationisasa
description of our intentional stances or inhabitation of our language.
Intentionality is visible through the interpretation of our actions as purposive or
directed or about something.
Suchaninterpretivepictureofintentionalityisalsonormative,determining aboutness
within the context in which something is used or in which someone exists. And yet
the criterion of application is used to mark the limit of interpretation, where the
meaning of something is functional from within a language game. The need for
interpretation arises from the failure ofthe transparency of meaning, as it were
from the outside o f a language game (the difference between seeing-as and
interpreting. All forms of life, grammar or criteria or normative rules and our
practices and our history and our biology, interests, desires, fears and so on are
all between "his voyous and her consinnantes". This space (a 'between') is the mark
of our animation (the everything thatis required for something to mean).How do we
(as a particular he or she or you or I, at least these) inhabit thisbetween?
"[Wjhere to go is knowing remain? Become quantity that discourse bothersomewhen
what do? Knowing remain?" (FW485.14-15). The distance between "his voyousReproduced
permission.177
and her consinnantes" is generated by the self-reflexive knowing (voyeur) that
moves (voyage) 'going' (an act) into the question "where to go?", that is, a going
by remaining. I hear the rhetoric o f 'where to go' as invoking 'go to hell', which
is to remain in the state of sleep or imagination where one can go anywhere and
remain where one is, but at the same time lose oneself into fragments. Two pages
earlier, the inquisitors in this section in their pursuit ofthe buried father
interrogate Yawn (a version ofthe 'saintly' Shaun) who denies his relation to his
brother "Seamus" in order to disguise his relation to his father:Nwo, nwo!. . .
I'll see you moved farther. . . What cans such wretch to say to I or how have Me to
doom with him?" (FW483.15-18).But it is in this vacuum that we find the twinminds,
the subjunctive necessities that we "tumupon" or towards which we write or exist.
"Life, it is true, will be a blank without you because avicuum's not there at all,
to nomore cares from nomad knows, ere Molochy wars bring the devil era, a slip of
the time between a date and a ghostmark. . . from the night we are and feeland fade
with to the yesterselves we tread to tumupon" (FW473.06-11).The Latin avis ( 'bird'
and recall "Shem avic") and the Latin vicus ('street' or 'village') and the Latin
vacuum ('empty space') collapse into "avicuum" (as if Keat's Nightingale is gone
and the village on the urn empty). Without a bird-sign from heaven life is
inauspicious; this augury o f a blank life indicates another movement, "from nomad
knows" "to nomore cares". "Nomad knows" is both 'no man knows' and 'a nomad knows'.
The opposition of nomad to man invokes an opposition between change (or at least
movement) and identity. This tension and movement constitutes the blankness o f
lifeReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
which is itself opposed to the possibility o f the future ("ere Molochy wars bring
the devil era") that is itself"between a date and a ghostmark". This space "between
a date and a ghostmark", "where to go is knowing remain?", between vowel and
consonant is only visible through the failure of the continuity of discourse or
language. It is visible in our being creatures who are sometimes awake and
sometimes asleep and in language bound by the limits or frames organizing it into
sense or the world, and thus in language seen as fragments:
"Terrorofthenoonstruckday,cryptogramofeachnightlybridable. But,to speak broken
heaventalk, is he?" (FW261.26-28 ). This "broken heaventalk" directed and figured
between God and humans constitutes ianguage not as propositions, assertions, and
claims, but as always questions: "But, to speak broken heaventalk, is he? Who is
he? Whose is he? Why is he? Howmuch is he? How is he?" (FW261.28-31). How can these
questions be answered? "Who in the name o f thunder'd ever belevin you were that
bolt?" (FW299.11-12; Arch, levin: lightening). The thunder following lightening
voices the name o f not only the thunderer but o f the 'belevin' (Arch,
lightening), the 'being lightening-bolt' or as the source of the sound 'being
thunder-bolt'. The god of thunder has 'the name ofthundered', of the past echoed,
which is who this bolt claims to be: that thunder or that lightening voicing that
thunder; and thus "who in your name would believe you were your name?"(The
instability o f name [here a model o f language's iterability] reflects an
ontological instability o f self fragmented in the night: "[F]rom the night we are
and feel and fade with to the yesterselves we tread to tumupon". 'To tread' seems
synonymousReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
with 'to love', or rather the self-love on top of which I pivot all night or all
life long. I am pursuing here this pivot as a 'between' words and people and
sense.)Another way of picturing the distance between mind and soul is as between
the flash o f lightening and the sound o f thunder, the time when silence
communicates not only ourdistancefromtheflash,butseemsapauseintheturningoftheearth:
"Whereflash become word and silents selfloud. To brace congeners, trebly bounden
and aservaged twainly"(FW267.16-18).
SelfloudpunstheGermanSelbstlaut(vowel),andtherefore identifies vowels as the
expression of the self. The flash of lightening becoming the word, as the flesh
became, "consinnantes": the consent ("consin) of God to be bom ('nantes') as
humanandtobewithsin('consin'). Thelimitbetweenthedivineandthehumanlies
thereforeintheflash(Godtoman)andinthesilence(mantoGod). Inhabitingthis between is
to "brace congeners", to make or hold some group (or some mind) into an identity
('congener', in the same genus or resemblance); or this is the word of God forming
the self into absence and silence except as the receiver (as Noah was) to gather
two o f a kind (brace) into a unity (congener).Stuttering ("broken heaventalk")
crystallizes an 'I' out of Wakean language (betraying a stumbling human gait, as
Keirkegaard calls it in the second volume of Either/Or [14]) by staying language
into further nonsense: "which we do not doubt ha has a habitat ofdoing, but without
those selfsownseedlings which are a species ofproofthat the largest individual can
occur at or in an olivetion such as East Conna Hillock" (FW160.09-13). This
individual is manifested as a place, Old Conna Hill, and as the inverted HCE. Is
finding ourselves not in the world, but as the world (at least at night) "a
speciesofproof'thatouroriginisours,thatwefoundtheworld? Self-ownershipand self-
generation provides for an entrance into the world, and entrance as the world: "But
the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its own wrunes for ever, man, on all
matters that fall under the ban of our infrarational senses. . ." (FW19.35-20.1).In
what is called the ALP chapter, this "world, mind" as it "is, was and will be
writing", a "lost histerve"(FW214.01), that counters the story of the Bible with
"In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to the farther? Allalivial,
allaIuvial!"(FW213.31-32). ThisnewstoryisofthemotherAnnaLiviaPlurabelle,the
riverof"lethullian","[a]beingagaininbecomingsagain"(FW491.23). ALPdescribesthe
limit between language and time, "[bjetween our two southsates and the granite they
're warming, or herface has been lifted.../"(FW209.08-09). I will analyze this
limit between identity and change as a sexual ontology of language in Chapter 10. I
want to suggest here that her "becomings again" are part o f a conversation, like
that collapsed in the"abnihilisationoftheetym.. .withan...
fragoroboassityamidwhiches... uttermosts confiission" (the roar ofthe voice ofgod
and matter mixed with the prayer and confession o f human beings; FW353.22-25),
between "Is that a faith? That's a fact." (FW199.33).The first question ('Is it a
faith?") is asked by the elm. The answer (that is no answer: "That's a fact") is by
the stone. The elm and stone are the material forms of two washerwoman on the banks
of the ALP, the Liffey, who at the end of the chapter return into the night as elm
and stone. The dialogue between elm and stone (animate and inanimate) constitutes
or envelopes or limits or is about (there is no way to determine which o f these
verbs to use here) Anna Livia Plurabelle, herself the principle o f becoming
animating the structures o f identity invoiced by Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker in
his dissolution and in his memory: "0 tell me all about Anna Livia!.. .Telmetale of
stem or stone. Besidetheriveringwatersof..."[FW196.01-03;216.03-04]).
Thisdialogueas what is ALP is also a tale about ALP, a collapse o f expression into
being.This confusion of expression and being or identity (these are also confused
here) turns the call between family members into a confession. Justius, the
moralizing Shaun's name in debates with his brother Shem disguised as Mercius
(Justice and Mercy from English Mystery Plays), challenges his father HCE, calling
out to him as "Nayman of Noland"(Nomanofnoland)to'standforth...
inyourtruecoloursereyoubebackfor ever till I give you your talkingto!" (FW187.32-
35). He then taunts his brother, Shem Macadamson: "Where have you been in the
uterim, enjoying yourself all the morning sincy you last wetbed confession?"
(187.36-188.01). How do we distinguish a sign from an effect? A confession from an
act? Can we imagine praying as 'to prize', to lever open (a prize), or as an
inquisition into mystery? "Let us pry" (188.08)-- "We thought, would and did.--Away
with covered words, new Solemonites for old Bathsheetbaths! That inharmonious
detail, did you name it? Cold caldor! Gee! Victory! (FW188.25-27) Aconfession is as
inharmonious detail as he who confesses.In the Wake a mysterious letter, purporting
to reveal the guilt ofHCE, is a versionand one of the prime constituents of the
Wake itself: the Wake a "NIGHTLETTER" (FW308.16) and the mysterious "The letter!
The Litter!.. .Borrowing a word and beggingthequestion"(FW93.22-24).
TheLetter(inandastheWake)ortheletters(of the alphabet, of the letter, of the Wake)
is picked out of a midden heap by a hen, latterReproduced with permission of the
transformed into the king of birds as Queen, "Jenny Wren: pick, peck" (Wren, the
queen ofbirds; FW278.12), letters fragmenting the world and then sent through or
carried by "Johnny Post: pack, puck", one among many, able to move becomes only a
fragment of the world. "All the world's in want and is writing a letters. A letters
from a person to a place about a thing. And all the world's on which to be carrying
a letters... When men want to write a letters. Ten men, ton men, pen men, pun men,
wont to rise a ladder. And den men, dun men, fen men, fun men, hen men, hun men
wend to raze a leader. Is then any lettersday from many peoples, Dagnasanvitch?
(FW278.16-25).This list, beginning with "Ten men" is continued a few pages later:
"Ten, twent, thirt, see, ex and three icky totchy ones. From solation to solution"
[FW284.16-18; from solitude (It. sola, alone)] to dispersion in a whole. This is
how a solution is described: "Imagine the twelve deaferended dumbbawls o f the
whowl above-beugled to be the contonuation through regeneration of urutteration of
the word in pergross" (FW284.18- 22).Earlier the solution to "[t]he all-riddle o f
it?" was "[t]hat that is allruddy with us, ahead o f schedule, which already is
plan accomplished from and syne" (FW274.02-05). A riddle o f the enveloping facts
is always already known in the way that Dasein is always
aheadofitselfthatis,itisdefinedasitslimit,asthoseenvelopingfacts. Thecontinual
conception of beginnings (arche and genesis) in the Wake is an attempt to make
visible what is already and always the case for us at the point when it became
this; such beginnings are temporal moments of simultaneous change and repetition
(thus the continual rebeginning). The solution to "solation" (being dispersed into
aloneness) isReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
another return to this beginning built (the interpretation constituting the
substance o f what this beginning is in the Wake) out of the twelve apostles
reacting (from Judaism to Christianity) to the Death and resurrection o f Christ.
These letters and litters from the Hen, a bird or bard, can tell the tale o f
idiots in sound and fury, a second best bed a patrimony of always borrowed language
pointing forward, too late or too early, but "Toborrow and toburrow and tobarraw!"
(FW455.12-13). Isthisadescriptionoranenactmentofourinheritanceofwords?I have met
with you, bird, too late, or if not, too worm and early: and with tag for ildiot
repeated in his secondmouth language as many of the bigtimer's verbaten
wordswhichhecouldbalbly calltomemorythatsamekveldeve,erethehourof the twattering
bards in the twitterlitter between Druidia and the Deepsleep Sea .. (FW37.13-18)Any
"secondmouth language" can offer, "saluting corpses, as a metter o f corse"
(FW37.09-10), measuring (meter) time (a matter o f course) as the loss o f
ourselves into dead bodies, "not a little token abock all the same that that was
owl the God's clock it was"(FW37.06-07), "could balbly" (Babal and badly) call to
memory that same beginning ofevening,sin,andwoman(Da.kveld,eveningandEve).
Whatthismomentwasis always formed into interpretations. God's bigtimer verbatim
words o f forbidding (G. verboten) are stammered (L balbus) in the twitterlitter,
not yet poetry, between the devil andthedeepsea.
Thenonsenseofthesewords"tag"thehumanstancetowardtheworld as idiotic awe, an
expression oflight and thanks (Da takfor ilden, thanks for the light). Such thanks
can be ironic. Such irony can allow us to speak second mouth words as ours.
This "ildiot" (maybe not yet an idiolect), that is our human stance toward god
within our
languageconstitutesusas"ildiots"(lesserbeingsspeakinganonsensicallanguage). Oris
humanity divided here between 'ildiots' and 'kveldeve'? This stammering ("balby")
orders the world and our language into permanence: "accompanied by his trusty
snoler and his permanent reflection, verbigacious" (FW37.12-13). "Verbigacious
combines verbigeration, the meaningless repetition o f a word or phrase, and L
verbi gratia, for instance. 'Verbigeration' creates the form of identity, a
universal, a separation of content from form, from within language. This creates
the illusion that meaning accompanies form as an extra component, an addition to
sound, as perfume can come to stand for 'me': "My perfume o f the pampas, says she
(meaning me)" (FW95.22). This formal post hoc universal as a limit o f "soundsense"
is also the particular o f an example, an example o f anyvoice and of being an
"ildiot.. in the twitterlitter". What every instance is accompanied by, however, is
the entire system of language, or rather the entire system of
senseandthepossibilitiesofnonsensemediatedbyvariousinterpretativestances. Oneofthe
possibilities o f being human is the continual possibility o f the need for
interpretation. Which is not to say that every sentence requires interpretation.But
then again,Well even should not the framing up of such figments in the evidential
order bring the true truth to light as fortuitously as a dim seer's setting of a
starchart might (heaven helping it) uncover the nakedness of an unknown body in the
fields of blues as forehearingly as the sibspeeches of all manking have foliated
(earth seizing them!) from root of some funner's stotter all the soundest sense to
be foundReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
immense our special mentalists now holds (securus iudicat orbis terrarum) . . .
(FW96.26-33)A stutter can frame speech as a form of possession, the grating of
Moses' recitative againstAron'ssinginginSchoenberg'sOpera,
orthegratingatanylimitofanyframe that marks the possibility that the world is a
figment by showing that we see it through and asfragments. Thisself-
reflection,abetrayalofourlimitationsandoftheworld's instability as a world, is like
a "dim seer's setting o f a starchart" that uncovers "the nakedness of an unknown
body making a starchart to find the world's order." Contained within parenthesis as
if within a world itself (securus iudicat orbis terrarum), the verdicto f the world
is secure. Secured by what? What is the verdict? (Can anything be secured from
within parenthesis? can the world be secured from within the world?)A survey and
overview of this world marks the world's purview, its enacting principle, it's
limit, scope and purpose as something ordered as "my world". The algebra (binomial)
and the geometry (axioms and postulates) o f these "factionables" is
incomprehensible and as inexpressible as by gone days and the ways o f god for a
"neuralgiabrown", a brain:
ForasurviewoverallthefactionablesseeIrisintheEvenine'sWorld. Binomeans
tobecomprendered. Inexcessibleasthybygodways. Theaximones. Andtheir prostalutes.
For his neuralgiabrown.Equal to = aosch.P.t.l.o.a.t.o.(FW285.26-286.03)Reproduced
permission.186
What does it mean to find Potato and not Plato in these letters? What letters are
equal to what word? "Equal to=aosch" is a kind of self-referential paradox. "Equal
to" is not equal to anything; if it is understood as '=' which defines a relation
not a value; it marks equality it is not itselfa term except in relation to other
symbols of relation. If 'equal to' is mentioned in quotation marks it can gain a
categorical meaning (with all terms of relation) or generic meaning (with all
symbols). The claim here, however, is that equal to is equivalent to an anagram
ofchaos (to the anagram itselfor to the 'meaning' as chaos?). And therefore Plato
is a potato. Although this interpretation can seem reasonable(l), especially to a
new world Aristotelian, what does it mean? How do we apply this identity?The
following is an identification of an identification of missing what had counted
to'one'onceinageneralfailuretocountoneselfasoneselfexceptinthismistake: "the
aphasia o f that heroic agony o f recalling a once loved number leading slip by
slipper to a general amnesia o f misnomering one's own" (FW122.04-05). This is
called "the vocative lapse from which it begins and the accusative hole in which it
ends itself'(FW122.03-04) This lapse, the failure to address anyone (beginning the
Wake in midsentence--"rivemm, past Eve and Adam's") is a loss of identity (in sleep
or nonsense or forgetfulness or sin or sense or order) marked by the loss of any
beloved (are we attached to the world through suchattachments?):
"theaphasiaofthatheroicagonyofrecallingaoncelovednumber leading slip by slipper to
a general amnesia of misnomering one's own" (FW122.04-06). The loss o f love
(Eliot's hyacinth girl) and the agony o f recall, not only o f the beloved butof
loving, is a forgetfulness of who anyone is. Language, just as dreams, is a
reminder of that agony, "the cruciform postscript" (FW122.20) The revision of this
script is both ourReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
forgetting ourselves and the kisses of others into "the life he is to die
into .. .lost himself or himselfsome somnione sciupiones" (FW293.04-07). The
possibility ofothers is the possibility of love. The failure to address oneselfas
oneselfor one's language to others is what I have called the failed intentionality
ofthe Wake. This kind oflanguage is marked on the other end by "the accusative hole
which it ends itself', that is the objects which are the things themselves, the
things that are never themselves words, and within the inverted cnat language' seem
absences instead o f presences.The analogies describing the relation between mind
and world, between text and mind, text and world (wax, mirror, lamp, harp,
container, etc.) have been reduced here into a special kind of the self-reflexive
nonsense language asking "It was life but was it fair? It was free but was it art?"
(FW94.09-10) and expecting continually failingjustifications for asking these
questions that cannot be answered. This might seem (in many ways correctly) that
the analogies o f mind and aesthetics have been replaced by an interpretive stance,
but it is not clear that interpretation is always called for. If interpretation
cannot claim any particular truth value and is not itself as Wittgenstein suggests,
adequate for meaning, it's failure will not count as an adequate stance between
mind and world and art.Do we experience language such that we can experience this
between "mind, world" and language as the between of night or nonsense? This
following is some evidence for this: "Everyletter is a godsend, ardent Ares .. .To
me or not to me. Satis thy quest on" (FW269.17-20). The Wake is sent to god or from
god or to me or not to me. The resistance to "mind, world" metaphors is what Joyce
calls "holding tight to thatReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
prestatuteinourcharter''(FW117.34-35). Thisholdingtighttothe'discamate',"your
disunited kingdom on the vacuum o f your own most intensely doubtful
soul"(FW188.16- 17) "may have our irremovable doubts as to the whole sense o f the
lot, the interpretationo f any phrase in the whole, the meaning o f every word o f
a phrase so far deciphered out o f it..."(FW117.35-118.02).
TheWakecontinuallydisplaysKierkegaard'sclaimthat"there is a difference between
writing on a blank sheet o f paper and bringing to light by the application o f a
caustic fluid a text which is hidden under another text", but with the difference
that there is not any Christian truth underlying any surface of the world or mind
{PointofView,40). Iholdoff,therefore,inofferinganytheoryofidentitythatwould explain
how "Equal to=aosch" because this does not describe an identity, but a limit
between a description ("equal to"), mathematical symbolism (=), a riddle ("aosch"),
a self- expression ("aosch"=chaos). This is a limit because "Equal to=aosch" not
only does not have a meaning, it cannot have any meaning outside o f an allegory
that some reader will construct. Itis,however,notsenselessasadescriptionofalimit.
Thuswecanreadthe Wake, to the degree that it is made up ofthis kind ofnonsense, as
the self-description and enactment o f shifting limits. But what kind o f limits?
limits o f what? As I suggested in the previous chapter one such limit is the
vanishing intentionality that marks a limit between our inexistence as something
meaningful within language and our ability to investourselves as ourselves through
and as language. But this is to say the words 'our', 'ourselves', 'though', 'as',
'within', and 'meaning' all function as limits, as meaningless except as
transparent markers of an interpretive position within language games or under
theological pressure: reading language as a descriptions of the limits that make
our beingReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
human being human. This is not another kind o f language, but a way reading
language as a non-language, or again as Joyce calls it "nat language".How do you
figure language within language iflanguage is all on the same logical level? As
nonsense (as dead signs or code), as animate; thus the questions what is language
or sense become questions about nonsense and about how, what and why
anything,leastofallourselves,isorcanbeanimate. Sentencesorphrasesorlinesbecome
"[t]hese ruled barriers along which the traced words, run, march, halt, walk,
stumble at doubtful points, stumble up again in comparative safety seem to have
been drawn first of allinaprettycheckerwithlamp-blackandblackthorn"(114.07-11).
TheWake,likeThe Book ofKells, seems written with a black ink that "is lamp black,
or possibly fish-bone black."2 Joyce describes the Wake by describing a monkish
monument o f Irish culture, and uses this description, with others, as the
substance ofthe Wake. The substance of this theological language, however, is their
movement emerging out o f domesticity, not read or written but "drawn," for any
sensitive person, "first of all in a pretty checker with lamp- black and
blackthorn."The movement o f words can be characterized in relation to the
"comparative safety" of ordinary usage:It is seriously believed by some that the
intention may have been geodetic, or, in theviewofthecannier,domesticeconomical.
Butbywritingthithawaysendto end and turning, turning and end to end hithaways
writing and with lines of litters slittering up and louds of latters slettering
down, the old semetomyplace andReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
jupetbackagain from tham Let Rise till Hum Lit. Sleep, where in the waste is the
wisdom? (114.13-20)The "intention," one way ofofferingjustification (but ofwhat?),
could be geodetic, that is determinedby
surveying(butofwhat?);oraneven"cannier"viewwouldbethat "intention may have
been. . . domestic economical," L. domesticus or G. oikonomikos, pertaining to the
household. These two possibilities (surveying and the domestic) describe the two
aspects o f Wittgenstein's philosophy: surveying ourselves, the world and our
language (what Kenny called providing "a clear view of the world" and Wittgenstein
in his preface called "sketches of the landscape") and a return to ordinary
language (the disappearanceoftheproblemsofphilosophyinordinarylanguage).
Intherealmofthe ordinary, the translation between Latin and Greek is possible. The
world o f sleep is also ordinary, but this thithaways and hithaways (losing control
o f the tongue, the "latters slettering down", no one going up and no ladder to
throw away since it has already dissolved) requires asking what would be an
adequate survey or sketch o f what ordinary world?, limited how? seen as what?,
threatened always by the interpretive distortions that allow for the blessing of
one among any three brothers (Shem, Japhet, and Ham). The confusion o f
interpretation for truth, the replacability o f people and words and commitments
under this confusion, is the problem o f Hamlet ("tham Let" and "Hum Lit.)written
into the Wake. This is a tragedy accompanying our inheritance o f language, or
maybeofpronounswhere"Semetomyplaceandjupetbackagain". Joyceisconstructing the place
of my signs (Gr. <rr||ia), or the sign of me, or the place marked or having a mark
set or affixed (Gr. crr|no08To<;) or a cemetery place. Wakean writing seems to
place meReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
("Semetomyplace") within the surveyable world and loop it back again into a history
of origins and disinheritance, placing me with and as Japhet, the 'non-Semitic' son
o f Noah, Jupiter from "tham Let", Hamlet, and Ham, the rejected son o f Noah.If we
read this again, the old Greek signs and the Latin imitations, from them that rise,
or from Let Rise (a name, a description and a marker, like "ildiot") until Human
Literature Sleeps, ask the question "where in the waste is wisdom?" This is a
description of how to read: the unity of Greek and Latin in the text (as an example
of the language of the Wake) does not communicate, but asks forjustification. And
this request is understood as ordinary, as ordinary as waste is and is our desire
for wisdom. If 'let rise' both can mean 'arise' and function as the name 'Let
Rise', then the confusion o f verb for name (as in "In the beginning was the Word.
And the Word was God") is the way in whichonecanenterorbenamedbylanguage.
Consequently,"whereinthewasteis wisdom?" describes a stance toward ourselves, the
world and our language that analogizes the relation between mind and world, by
placing our humanity at risk by placing our constructions and our world as a world
against us.This is the effect ofJoyce's lists, to place the world enumerated
against us and in this offer targets for sense and identification. But once an
identification is made, as a result of an interpretation ('"alphybetty verbage' is
a version of the Wake, or "am I a whirling dervish?" or "can the world be built
outside of logic or as a list of predicates without any subject[s]?'), the meaning
remains unclear. No interpretation is ever adequate because interpretation cannot
determine meaning. Is the meaning ofFinnegans Wake the following list?Reproduced
permission.192
My wud! The warped flooring ofthe lair and soundconducting walls thereof... were
persianly literatured with burst loveletters, telltale stories,. . . doubtful
eggshells,. . . alphybettyformed verbage, vivlical viasses, ompiter dictas, visus
umbique, ahems and ahahs, imeffible tries as speech unasyllabled, you owe mes,
eyoldhyms, fluefoul smul, fallen lucifers,. . . counterfeit franks, best
intentions,.. . gloss teeth for a tooth,. . . inversions of all this chambermade
music one stands, given a grain of goodwill, a fair chance of actually seeing the
whirling dervish, Tumult, son o f Thunder, self exiled in upon his ego, a nightlong
a shaking betwixtween white or reddr hawrors, noondayterrorised to skin and bone by
an I neluctable phantom . . . writing the mystery o f himself in furniture.
(FW183.08- 184.10)Furniture and language both constitute the world as limits to
myself. This limit is enacted by or as matter, what Berkeley called "the furniture
of earth". What is "the mystery of himself'? He writes while sitting in furniture
as a piece of furniture determined and defined by materiality. This "mystery o f
himself in furniture" becomes at the end o f the Wake, when the sleeper is
awakening, the "fumit o f heupanepi world" (FW611.18). c[F]umit' containsfait (L.
as it was) andfarm s (L. oven, fireplace), and can be read as 'bum it'. "[F]umit'
can be translated as 'as it as bums and is a furnace." This burning is stabilized
as a thing when "fumit" puns "the furniture of earth." Consequently, the being
andstabilityofthepastcondensedintofurniturecontainsHeracletianflux. "[H]eupanepi'
consistsoftheGreekeu(good),pan(all),andepi(upon). Thus"fumitofheupanepi world" can
be translated as 'the furniture o f the flux o f the good upon all the world bums
into a furnace.' (So that's what it means to confuse the mind and the world!) As
the sleeper awakens into consciousness at the end of the Wake, under the sun and in
rising color, "that part of it (fumit of heupanepi world) had shown itself...
unable to absorbere", that part ofthe matter ofcourse, the matter ofa person
organized as time, as change,
(thefurnitureofthefluxofthegooduponalltheworldbumsintoafurnace)had shown itself
unable to absorb light, because there was little light in the night, and because
the mind reflects the world, which with the new sun means this it (this "world,
mind") becomes another sun.3 This is a picture of a mind generating and reflecting
the light of the world. But this picture is neither a metaphor nor a model nor a
theory ofthe mind. It is, instead, a description o f being between things
(furniture) and loss (burning) as a limit to them both. Being between matter and
time requires a mode o f self-reflection that generates an T as a limit to meaning.
What I mean by this is that one cannot get anymore meaning out our own self-
reflection than we can out o f this passage in the Wake. And the meaning of this
passage is a description of the limit to the meaning of this passage.The night is a
reordering of oneself and the world into the condition betwixtween things, ideas,
concepts, clarity, sense, moments. "Yet is no body present here which was
nottherebefore.Onlyisorderothered,Noughtisnulled.FuitfiatX"(FW613.13-14). Asit was,
let it be! What is this reothering, where "nought is nulled", but everything is
knot and nat? This kind o f riddle, another riddle o f enveloping facts, can be
answered by another riddle: "Do you hold yourself then for some god in the manger,
Sheholhem, that you will neither serve nor let serve, pray nor let pray?"
(FW188.18-19)Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
Language itself can be used as the form o f resistance to the claims o f the world
or ofother people on us (the claims, ifone acknowledges any, ofthe Wake). ALP
writes,"I wrote me hopes and buried the page when I heard Thy voice" (the coming of
day or of sense or of a greeting and so on) I asked "So content me now" (FW624.04-
05). Such content appears to be "I pity your oldselfI was used to. Now a younger's
there." (FW627.06-07). Theoldselfiswhat'I'usedto... be,orbecomingwasa
"Tobecontinued's tale" (FW626.18). Being here is also a habit, "I was used to",
where the difference between how one describes oneself is not clearly different
from how one describes others.And yet it is exactly the difference between myself
and others that allows me to be visibletotheseothers.
InInvestigations,Wittgensteinidentifiestwodomainsofknowing: (1) a knowing marked by
second and third person claims, and (2) first person claims
associatedwithmentalstateslikebeingdepressed,excited,inpain,etc. Thuswecansay 'I
know he is in pain,' but not 'I know I am in pain'. Could I doubt this? Or not know
that I am in pain?If we say "'Since yesterday I have understood this word.'
'Continuously', though?--To be sure, one can speak of an interpretation of
understanding, but in what cases? Compare: "When did your pains get less?" and
"when did you stop understanding that word?" (PI p. 59)I can forget that
"wissen"means to know, and then all ofa sudden recall it, maybe by saying to myself
"/c/z weiss". It is through experiences like this that we imagine an unconscious
somewhere behind, beneath, around, even surrounding our consciousness.Reproduced
permission.195
But I might never recall the definition without looking it up or asking a German
friend. Thus we might think that our unconscious is a dictionary for our
consciousness. Forgetting a word seems like losing it, losing something that is
mine. In this my world or my language has waned, and the world has shrunk.One can
follow the mineness of knowing a word (which does not mean of course that it is
private) into the mineness of pain and enter Wittgenstein's discussion of pain. Can
I ask someone if I am still in pain? Since I can't my pain seems private. I can
also forgetmypain. Imightgethitagain,harder,sothatwhateverwasbrokenbeforegets
maskedbyagreaterpain. Thismightbeafunctionofthelimitationsofmynervous system, but
we find the same effect in our emotional distress. This is what drives us into
homeopathy. I might listen to Chopin's B flat minor Sonata (with its Funeral March)
after my wife has left me. This might seem at the time a tragedy, and at least call
for catharsis, as Milton says in the Preface to Samson Agonistes "to purge the mind
o f those and such like passions, . . . , by reading or seeing those passions well
imitated. Nor is Nature wanting in her own effects to make good his assertion: for
so Physic things of melancholic hue and quality are us'd against melancholy, sour
against sour, salt to remove salt humors." The passions transformed in tragedy are
reduced analogically to a physiologicalprinciple.
Weentertheworldthroughthisanalogy. Thesepainsmightbe mine. If I lose this pain have
I lost something of mine? Pain, excitement, depression all can be temporally
limited to a particular duration. They are contained within time. The mineness of
these sensations is my experience, my investment or identification of myself with
these mental states. Can I experience the meaning o f the word "wissen"? If not
thenReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
how is it mine? Should we not construe it, after the model in the Tractatus, as a
limit of my experience and thus of my world? We want love to be like understanding
a world as myworld,notlike'knowing'transitorypain. Inthissensewewantlovetobeamind.4
The "between" in Finnegans Wake is marking off in negative space these two uses o f
'knowing,' not as logical distinctions tied to theories about first or third person
discourse, but as grammatical distinctions organizing our investments in the forms
o f our languageasmeaningful.
Thisislikeaestheticizinglogicorlinguistics,notassublime(as in metaphysics), but as
I suggested as grammatical jokes. The fragments generated by these jokes form a
"monthage stick in the melmelode hawr, I am (twintomine) all thees thing"(FW223.08-
09). Thisislikesaying,"Iamallthesefragmentsincludingthis fragment and that and this
'I'." In my previous discussion of fragments, this self-reflexive turning expresses
a demand forjustification, or a configuration ofthe condition ofbeing human within
the world as between what Wittgenstein marks as justifications and rights:"When I
say 'I am in pain' I am at any rate justified before myself." --What does that
mean? Does it mean: "If someone else could know what I am calling 'pain', he would
admit that I was using the word correctly"?To use a word without justification does
not mean to use it without right. (PI?289)This last sentence is either
contradictory (an appeal to rights is an appeal to justification) or is a picture
of the limit ofjustification. If the latter, justification operates outside first-
personclaims: itscriteriaarevisibletoothers.
Thusjustification,inthispictureofuse,is not required when expressing pain because
how would I be mistaken about my own painReproduced with permission of the
(not my own hurt). But does the concept o f right, describing my statements as
without justification but with right, attach itself differently to my first person
claims? Justificationfunctions through an interpretive stance from which judgments
can be made. Justification operatesinrelationtonormativecriteria.
DerivedfromLius(thatwhichisbinding,right, justice, duty), 'justification' or
'justify' configures something or someone in relation to theinteractive order
organizing the domain in which this something or someone operates and exists. But
this re-ordering requires a mark to express its success. Such a remark, however, is
the prime means by which this reordering can take place, and thus from ius is
derived iurare, to pronounce a ritual formula or swear an oath. Justice arises not
only as an effect o f our promises and betrayals, but it is constituted as such
promises through whichwebecomecapableofjusticebecausewecanbejudged.
Justicerequiresspeech, because justice is a form of speaking. This speech, however,
must be a speaking of a community, an invocation of the particular (an individual
or an expression or a sentence) by requiring that it express the whole (thus the
standardization of ritual pronouncements and the strictures of tradition). There
is, therefore, at least an isomorphism between language and the function ofjustice:
both require that the whole be present in the particular. This relation is marked
in the derivation o f L iudex, he who points to or showthe law (from whence our
judge). Iudex derives from ius and diet (dex), to speak, say, etc. The collapse in
our word judge of the act ofjudging (judge as verb) and the person who judges
(noun) recalls the same need for the normative to be expressed fully in a
particular,inthiscaseasthegroundofauthority. Andthuswespeakoftherighttojudge
('right' cognate with L. rex).Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
As I suggested earlier, rights can be given, and thus they are not a given, a
ground. Ifjustification is the application ofcriteria ofjudgment, rights are gained
when these criteria are given as yours to apply to yourself. In giving rights one
is giving recognition ofthoserights.
Ifwecompare'Ihavetheright'with'Ihavethejustification'wecansee that the appeal to
rights is a first person appeal, while the appeal to justification is an appeal to
either second person (as if in a monarchy) or third person (as if in a democracy).
Thus we can say "I am justified by my right to X". In this case justification is
the applicationofaright. Butthisright,especiallyinWittgenstein'sdescription,isan
expression whose self-sufficiency is only determined by our judgment that one is
speaking by right (and without justification). How does one conceptualize oneself
if one could not speak about, let's say, spiritual pain by right?This third person
appeal underwriting justification reifies rights away from the particularity o f
persons and communities. The appeal to right by Wittgenstein is, however, an appeal
to the normative usage of language. Normative criteria, whether embedded in
language (or any formal structures) or in one's person (through social recognition
of self-sufficiency, which therefore involves a self-recognition), erase the
differencebetweenfirstpersonandsecondorthirdpersonappeals. Thedifferencewould seem
to be the requirements for the application o f the language o f description
determined asjustificationofright.
Myquestioninghereisnotaboutthefirstpersonstatusofpain (the fact that one could not
not know one's own pain), but is about determining what's at stake in
Wittgenstein's invocation o f a difference between justification and rights.
If one can separate the application of criteria from the criteria themselves, then
criteria are inadequate to describe the relation between personhood (to which are
attached rights) and any totality determining normative standards (towards which
justification operates). Becausetheappealtorightswantstoconceptualizepersonhood(or
particularity) as a totality determining normative standards personhood is both
stabilized (as a ground) and destabilized (as normative). Thus the questions "when
does something mean" or 'when do I know how to play chess?" arise when we view
ourselves as simultaneously a particular and a universal, as a fragment or at
night, or in our attempts to conceptualize both the language games we use to
describe dreams and the language games about our self-loss at night..The following
is another version ofthe Wake which is another version ofthis self- loss:"Yet it is
but an old story, the tale of a Treestone with one Ysold, of a Mons held by
tentpegs and his pal whatholoosed on the run . . .drop this jiggerypokery and talk
straight turkey meet to mate, for while the ear, be we mikealls ornicholists, may
sometimes by inclined to believe others the eye, whether browned or nolensed, find
it devilish hard now and again even to believe itself. (FW113.18-29)The elm and
stone are telling a tale of ALP as Isolde (compare this story with Eliot's telling
of this story) and of HCE as Gulliver, where the Lilliputians tentpeg him down like
sleep and its fragments and details. Someone asks (the text or the reader) to speak
"straight turkey", but even in this request a metaphor for plan speaking can become
theReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
plainfleshof"turkeymeet"(meat). Whynotbuildachurchonthispuninsteadofthepun
onSt.Peter? Ordinarylanguagepausesthe"jiggerypokery"ofthisnight,likethelove potion
Isolde drank, so that to meet is to mate. Do we believe the evidence of our ears
over that of our eyes? Language of the eye or the ear cannot establish certainty.
It is a fact about ordinary language just as it is a fact about ordinary life that
we might "find it devilish hard now and again even to believe itself', where this
itself might be language animated into the form of our understanding or ourselves
as bodies unsure of our status as animate beings.In justification the criteria
used, the totality invoked (society, language, law), functions as a limit to the
particular. In rights the particular (individual, sentence, claim) functions as a
limit to the totality. Epistemological justification is therefore an application
ofcriteria. Aestheticjustification,likewhenepistemologicalbecomesontological
justification, when knowing ifthe bird is a goldfinch becomes the skeptical problem
of determining if the bird is a hallucination, cannot be satisfied by any criteria
because these criteria are missing or themselves require justification.
Ifanylinedidjustifythewholewritingwouldcease. Thedemandforjustification is not
necessarily met by success. To use it by right opens up the complexity in the use
of possession as a justification for freedom, an appeal to citizenship, the
community, in this case the community of speakers, the normative conventionalism
determining the criteria of language (games) expressed as personhood. The appeal to
right here pretends to undercut the demand for justification, but the appeal to
right rests on the collapse ofjustification into personhood. Personhood is not
something that can be denied; by this I mean even theReproduced with permission of
denial of the right to personhood that defined American slavery or describes ethnic
and religious conflicts are tacit recognitions ofwhat is being denied.
Wittgenstein's arguments that we respond to the pain in another as if to their
human physiognomy is true in these cases as well. But is not the case that a right
is an expression of personhood? It can only function as such an expression through
a logic ofjustification that attaches the right to personhood and not to the land
or to gods or to power. (What is a right? Is it like an arm? Do I have the right to
my own body? Who says? Why them? Because they have power? what legitimates their
power? Their power? And yet the stability o f communities is a function ofthe
recognition ofthe legitimacy ofpower). To say that 'rights are human' can be
answered by 'so are justifications'. Human rights are nonsensical: 'human rights'
would not be called rights at all. All rights proceed through the inclusion within
a community where these rights can be acknowledged. Rights, therefore, in their
ambiguous relation to justification, describe a way in which we attach our
interpretations (about what isjust) to what we are.What does the demand to justify
our words entail, demand, require? Modernism might require that the words
themselves justify their sense, answering questions: does this mean? should I read
this? is this art? which is to ask what value do these words have? At any point in
the Wake none of these questions can be answered. Thus nothing within the
textcancountasajustificationbeforethesequestionshavealreadybeenanswered. Thus if
the text could offer a justification that would count as a justification it would
have already been justified.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
The demand for justification before this text requires the interpretation o f what
it means to justify in this case. Every text demands and performs its own
justification. If we canjustify the Wake as art, we assume that we have criteria
determining what art is, in the way we use criteria in evaluating knowledge claims.
But this determination of art is exactlywhatjustificationissupposetoprovide.
Soagainthedemandseemsnottomake sense because we do not know what the demand means.
Y et without justification art seems vague, blind or pointless.You say to me, 'You
are not justified in thinking that.' 'Thinking' here means something like
'believing'. The criteria for justification here will be partly dependent on
what'that'refersto. Thelegitimacyofmythinking,likemyknowledge,seemsdependent on
justified true belief. This justification describes a rationale adequate to the
facts or logic or the rules o f discourse or of evidence. Although I cannot make
the truth o f any particular claim transparent, I should be able to articulate the
facts and reasons that wouldjustify my belief. I can even show how a belief, my own
or someone else's, is a prejudice (of course again this does not make my belief
either true or false, just not justified except as a prejudice).Compare this use o
f 'justify' (knowledge) with Milton's self-purported, putative 'motive' in writing
Paradise Lostwhat in me is darkIllumine, what is low raise and support;I may assert
Eternal Providence, AndjustifythewaysofGodtomen. (1.22-26)Reproduced with
permission.203
Do we read "And justify the ways of God to men" as a promise to show that God is
right? To give God his due? To recognize or establish his rights? No. Is this
instead a promise to show that the form ofthe world and ofhumanity is correct? By
what standard? How does one determine the criteria by which to judge God and the
world (if one already questions God's ways and, therefore, his word)? This goal I
think, therefore, should be understoodironically.
TheironyofthisgoalrestsonthehumansubsumptionofGod's right tojudge: the human
ascension to the possession or the creation ofthe criteria ofjudgment.
Miltonmusttransformwhatitmeanstojudge(andjustify)sothatwe understand our lives (our
very humanity) as a manifestation of God's demand that wejustify our ways to God.
Such ajustification, however, requires the acceptance of God's criteria o f
evaluation, even though these criteria remain unknown by human beings.Justification
goes through the request that our education be a form of purification. Milton did
use justify like this in Areopagitica:This justifies the high providence of God,
who, though he command us temperance, justice, continence, yet pours out before us,
even to a profiiseness, all desirable things, and gives us minds that can wander
beyond all limit and satiety. (733)Thisjustification ofthe ways ofgod is meant to
suggest that we must act against these temptations in order to make ourselves (or
express ourselves as) virtuous: "that which
purifiesusistrial,andtrialisbywhatiscontrary"(728). Thispurification,however,isan
attempt to justify ourselves before God.Reproduced with permission of the copyright
In his discussion ofthe theology ofLuther, Barth argues that "the center ofthis
theology, then, is the demand for faith as naked trust that casts itselfinto the
arms of God's mercy; faith that is the last word that can be said about the
possibility ofjustification before God" (Calvin 46). Calvin followed Luther in this
even more strongly, tying justification to obedience to God by virtue of God's
sovereignty (expressed through predestination).
Bydescribingjustificationasakindofeducation(orpurification),Milton forces
justification from an interpretation into an act. But we must be careful about what
this means. A human life becomes itself an interpretation towards God's criteria of
judgment. Interpretation is embedded within a meaning which emerges through the act
of transforming oneselftowards God (the totalizing form ofmeaning). Ajustification,
as an interpretation,gainsmeaning(andadeterminingscope)initsuse. Thisusemustalsobe
justified in acting toward the good. This may mean nothing to us if we do not
imagine ourselves inhabiting moral totalities (in the way we might imagine
inhabiting linguistic totalities).I think my sketch ofMilton's use ofjustification
is cognate with Wittgenstein's description o f the grammar o f shame. First,
Wittgenstein describes an expression o f hate and derives its meaning as an
interpretation o f the total scene:"At that moment I hated him." --What happened
here? Didn't it consist in thoughts, feelings, and actions? And if I were to
rehearse that moment to myself I should assume a particular expression, I think of
certain happenings, breathe in a particular way, arouse certain feelings in myself.
I might think up a conversation, a whole scene in which that hatred flared up. And
I might play this scene throughReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
with feelings approximating to those of a real occasion. That I have actually
experienced something ofthe sort will naturally help me to do so. (PI?642)This is
clear enough for my purposes. It is important to see that the sentence "At that
moment I hated him" is a judgment or interpretation. It's meaning is, therefore,
part of thatinterpretation(meaningisnotalwayslikethis).
Therecognitionofthishatredandthe fact ofthis hatred can be interpreted further:
"IfI now become ashamed ofthis incident, I am ashamed of the whole thing: of the
words, of the poisonous tone, etc." (PI?643).
Wittgensteinthenaskshowdoesthisshameattachtothishatred. WhatexactlyamI ashamed of?
"I am not ashamed of what I did then, but of the intention which I had." -- And
didn't the intention lie also in what I did? What justifies the shame? The whole
historyoftheincident."(PI?644;underlineadded). Whatisincludedinthis"whole history"
changes and shifts according to how it is embedded in our lives when we remember
this incident. Our moral education might be learning how to describe the limits o f
our "whole history" as a manifestation o f a set o f values.Wittgenstein suggests
that what we call our intentions are rather interpretations of what we remember o f
our "thoughts, feelings, movements, and also connexions with earlier situations"
(PI?645). Learning the correct interpretation not o f our intentions alone but o f
how we figure ourselves with intentions, with shames, with hatreds does not
entailremakingourlanguage. Itentailsremakingourselveswithinourordinarylanguage
figured within organizing limits (for Wittgenstein often normative limits). One
might still expect a battle over what these limits are, for example, over what the
limits of the ordinary are or over how we learn or use particular language games.
This debate (one o f theReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
debates inFinnegans Wake,or rather the pressure deforming language in the Wake,
describesalanguagenotyetformedaroundaparticularhumanbeing. Ourreadingofthe Wake
puts on these words as ours directed at the limits formed by nonsense, negation,
materiality, causation, interpretation, sense, substance, and so on. Seeing the
world as consisting o f these limits [and at times as nothing more than these
limits] means thinking theologically).The figure which Milton uses to describe how
interpretation and meaning are embedded in each other, how we manifest ourselves in
the interpretive histories we use to describe the totalities we inhabit, is
animation. Milton animates books: "For books are not absolutely dead things, but do
contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny
they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction o f
that living intellect that bred them" (720). These books are not to be judged by
men, who have invented "new limbos and new hells wherein they might include our
bookswithinthenumberofthedamned"(725). Thejustificationofbooks,liketheir meaning,
is a function of their use, for even bad books may allow "the judicious reader. . .
to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate" (727). Such a use is a
justification o f the books and the reader, but a justification different from the
judgment about someone'sorsomething'snatureasgoodorbad.
SuchjudgmentisreservedforGod. Books are animated through their potential use as
manifest inhabitations (a "vial") of our moral stances. Is this a version o f a use
by right without justification?Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
Can we find ourselves within a community in which what counts as a justification
becomes unclear? I f the Wake continually requires justification, is it the
justification like that which James meditated upon for America?"Oh, yes; we were
awfully dear, for what we are and for what we do"-- it was proud, but it was rather
rueful; with the odd appearance everywhere as of florid creations waiting, a little
bewilderingly, for their justification, waiting for the next clause in the
sequence, waiting in short for life, for time, for interest, for character, for
identity itselfto come to them, quite as large spread tables or superfluous shops
may wait for guests and customers" (American Scene, 90)James diagnoses this demand
for justification as a waiting for completion in which Americans are thingified as
spread tables or superfluous shops, which are then animated by their waiting, by an
intentionality directed toward this future completion. Justification, itselfj is
enacted as "the next clause in the sequence," life, time, interest, character, and
identity. This is a kind o f picture o f being-within. The analogic reduction o f
justification to the continuation of the linguistic context within which meaning
emerges (a model of James' style) is further analogized back into a psycho-
philosophical description of a human being bordered by "life" and "identity". The
terms connecting these limits o f soul and mind are well chosen. Life, both the
principle of animation (something like energy here)and the totality o f a life, is
in the following "time" abstracted and specialized as the form
ofthisdynamismandasthelimitonanyparticularlife. Thisdynamismandlimitisrefined in
'interest', an intentional stance expressing value (priorities) and possibility (a
moving toward). Thecontentofthispotentialdynamismandvaluationonesuspectsconstitutes
character,bothasapsychologicaltermandamoraljudgment. Thispsychologyis stabilized
into metaphysics by Identity: I am. This T am' describes the formal limits o f a
particular, and is, therefore, in relation to the generality of life stabilized as
a mind. In this model justification requires and is constituted by a model of the
relation between the limit described by the soul and that described by the mind.
Aestheticjustification means not ajustification ofany particular word, but that
each word justifies the whole. Consequently, it is not that each sentence o f the
Wake is a microcosm of the Wake, a holographic reflection as are the heterocosoms
of romantic art or Schlegels romantic fragments. The appearance ofmimicry is a way
ofjustifying the Wake by offering an interpretation of a particular moment,
character, or set of words as an interpretation of the entire book (or let's say of
an entire life). Projecting forward towards our death means within the logic ofthe
Wake projecting ajustification toward that end, the dreamers, ours, or the books.
These justifications are all limited and incomplete, but not because of a limit to
our knowledge or understanding. The limitation is a function ofjustification
proceeding through interpretation. Ajustification is never simply an interpretation
that simulates the text. W. Wimsatt and M. Beardsley's are wrong when they claim
that "judging a poem is likejudging a pudding of a machine. One demands that it
work. It is only because an artifact works that we infer the intention o f an
artificer" (4). Thispictureassumesapoemworksandexistsasanartifact,asamechanism.
Howdoesa poem work separate from its interpretation? What is the output of a poem
that can bejudged.
ForbothapuddingandamachinewecanclearlyarticulatethecriteriabywhichReproduced with
permission.209
to judge if its performance is successful or not. No such articulation is possible
for a poem.A text like Firmegans Wake, consisting o f a continuous commentary on
itself is nothing but enveloping facts and no text: "Yet to concentrate solely on
the literal sense or even the psychological content o f any document to the sore
neglect o f the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is hurtful to
sound sense (and let it be added to the truest taste) a s " (FW109.12-16). What
follows from the ellipse is nonsense, so that one can determine in any sensible way
what ignoring the enveloping facts would mean. What constitutes these facts is also
not clear (nor is the literal or psychological content). Ajustification of the Wake
must include a version of the Wake but in this it is not the Wake, not only because
each interpretation will not be able to include itself as an interpretation,
butbecauseinterpretationalwayspointselsewhere. Thedetectivedoesnotsolvethe crime in
the same way as the criminal commits it. The detective and the criminal might
seemclose,andyetintheirdifferenceliestheentireworldof"envelopingfacts." Wecan more
easily see that the diagnoses o f the disease is different from the disease; but do
we imagine a virus as a criminal? The historian writes history, and in this makes
history, but not the same history he writes about:The boxes, if I may break the
subject gently, are worth about four pence pourbox but I am inventing a more patent
process, foolproof and pryperfect (I should like to ask that Shedlock Homes person
who is out for removing the roofs o f our criminal classics by what deductio ad
domunum he hopes de tacto to detect anything unless he happens ofhimself, movibile
tectu, to have a slade off) afterReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
which they can be reduced to a fragment oftheir true crust by even the youngest of
Margees if she will take place to be seated and smile if I please. (FW165-
66.30-.02)The Sigla used by Joyce to describe Finnegans Wake was a box: ?. "These
boxes," invented into inscrutability, contain his kiribis pouch filled with
litterish fragments lurk dormant in the paunch ofthat halpbrother ofa herm, a
pillarbox" (FW66.29-.31). A 'herm' is a Greek four-cornered pillar on which is
placed a head, usually of Hermes.Again the Wake. Trying to open the shedlock, a
make a home a home, is Shedlock Homes whose reductio ad absurdum is also a deductio
ad domunum, leading to the Lord. How can we touch {de iacto) god, enter into domum
dei, unless we have a slate off our own roof (a chip of the old block; a part for
whole)? If we remove a slate we can see inside, if not another's head, then into
our own, if we discover ourselves (or not) in our children for example. Are these
boxes, our minds, our world, our god, fragments like pieces of crust once they are
"foolproof and pryperfect", or will the youngest o f Margees reduce theseboxes of
ourselves and the world to fragments of the true cross, or the crust of the bread
ofthe body ofChrist. Would this 'youngest ofMargees" have a slade offher roof, or
is it that having taken a place in the world her smile if the text pleases (or more
insidiously if the text or the author decrees) reduces these promises of sense and
benediction to crusts?These boxes, the targets of our interpretation that form new
boxes to interpret, are equivalent to the grammatical soul Keats generated, except
that these grammatical markers have no inside. Keats "soul-making" produced a
becoming within a single grammaticalentity.
ThereisnosuchstabilityintheWake,whereanybox,anysentenceReproduced with permission
marks a becoming in relation to another box, another sentence. This means in effect
that Finnegans Wake (and Philosophical Investigations) do not satisfy one of Keats'
criteria for poetry: "They will explain themselves--as all poems should do without
any comment"(2 January 1818: Letters, n, 21). They constitute new criteria.1In his
Disputed Questions on the Soul, Aquinas asks "Can the human soul be both a form and
a real particular (hoc aliquid)T2 Sir Edward Sullivan in his Introduction to The
Book o f the Kells, cited in McHugh (1980).3". . . speeching, yeh not speeching noh
man liberty is, he drinks up words, scilicet, tomorrow till recover w ill not, all
too many much illusiones throgh photoprismic velamina o f hueful panepiphanal world
spectacunun o f Lord Joss, the o f which zoantholic furniture, from mineral through
vegetal to animal, not appear to full up together M ien man than under but one
photoreflection. . . " (FW611.10-16).4 Wittgenstein's second note about this on
page 59 makes this clear:Supposeitwereasked: Whendoyouknowhowtoplaychess?
Allthetime?orjustwhileyouare makinga move?--
Howqueerthatknowinghowtoplaychessshouldtakesuchashorttime,and a game so much
longer!The translation hides the conflation o f "to know" with "can" exploited in
the German--"Wann kanst du Schachspielen?".
Wittgensteinremarksontheclosenessofthegrammarof"toknow"and"can"at150 (on page 59)
in order to bring out the sense of "mastery' tying knowing and understanding to how
we use language. Ifoneaskswhencanyouplaychess? IfIknowhow,allthetime.
Whatconstitutesknowing here? being able to play the game. One might ask how many
rules can I forget before no longer knowing howtoplay. Thatmightdependonmyopponent
Ifmyunderstandingoftheruleswouldnotmakeit even possible for me to win a game then
this might constitute a dividing line. If asked "when did you stop understanding
that word?" I might not understand this as asking for a time but a criterion like
"when I could no longer use it". This possibility for misunderstanding is
highlighted in the question about chess.
"When"knowinghowtoplaychessisacaseofatonement Atonementwouldbetheconditionwhenone
could not ask of oneselfor look with some stupefaction at someone who asks "do you
know how to play the whole of chess during each move?" This is notjust a knowing
how opposed to a knowing that The playingofchesstakestime--
itisconstitutedbyaseriesofmoves. Asking"when?"asksforatimeseries
andforanarticulationofthecriteriaallowingforplayingchess: forpossibility.
Thispossibilityisnot present in our knowing but in our form of life, in the knowing
how, training, social practice, having an opponent or a board. This temporal
dimension is brought out by Wittgenstein's "How queer that
knowinghowtoplaychessshouldtakesuchashorttime,andagamesomuchlonger!".
Whatconstitutes knowing how can be found as if holographically in every moment of
playing chess, if one does indeed know how to play. This present in every moment is
the "short time". This knowing how 'now' is not experienced as such, and thus it
seems not to be in time at all, rather this taking "such a short time" seems a joke
for it doesn't take any time at all. Is this knowing how then a transcendent realm?
Each move is not only a fragment of the entire game, but a fragment enacted and
implying the possibilities of move and counter-move that constitute the finite
system of chess.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
nTHE SEMANTICS OF IDENnTY AND THINGSReproduced with permission of the copyright
7The Semantics of Identity and MindBoth Wittgenstein and Joyce describe thinking
toward the limit between the animate and inanimate and sense and nonsense through
our involvement within the grammarofourlanguagegames.
FinnegansWakeandPhilosophicalInvestigations describe a dynamic grammar that
constructs a non-psychological T as a shifting marker
throughwhichweinvestourselvesintheselanguagegames. Howweinvestourselvesin these
language games and in the world as our world is one way o f understanding how
language can animate the world, resuscitate a soul, or construct a mind. I might
ask these questions in a number o f moods, for any number o f reasons, most o f
which begin in a sense that the world is dead or inanimate, the soul moribund, and
the mind unmade or something to make. Beginning here is, however, misleading.
Pursuing animation, resuscitation, and construction asks, at some fundamental
level, how we inhabit the forms of our experience as if we ourselves are inanimate.
In asking this we are led to the edge of nonsense, in search o f manuals describing
either how to animate ourselves or how to animate things.T.S. Eliot's The Waste
Land and Heidegger's "Das Ding" want to re-animate the world.
Thustheyarestudiesinwhatitmeanstobeanimateandinwhatconstitutesa world.
WhenIbegananalyzingEliot'sandHeidegger'smethodsofanimation,Iimagined they would
articulate inverse ways of conceptualizing being as identities or things within,
respectively, subjunctive and semantic modes. What I understood as Eliots's
subjunctiveNotes for this chapter begin on page 247Reproduced with permission of
aesthetics, working out a semantics o f identity, I thought would provide a target
for Joyce's figuration o f what I have called the distance between mind and soul.
Similarly, Heidegger's attempt to translate the real into the meaningful, I
thought, would describe an ontological grammar akin to Wittgenstein's enactment of
time in PhilosophicalInvestigations, but in a form that fails to provide a way for
human beings to invest themselves within this grammar (and thus it fails as a
description of our involvement in the world and in language). This limited
investigation ofboth Eliot and Heidegger, however, was soon eclipsed by the
possibilities for understanding how the rejection o f substance as a description o
f what is real can lead to the hypostatization o f identity as a void (in The Waste
Land) or as a grammatical principle from which things and meaning enfold along
fragments o f time (in "Das Ding"). After I had breached the walls o f their texts,
the work of both Eliot and Heidegger seemed two pear trees whose fruit I could not
stop picking.A direct comparison between Eliot and Heidegger and Joyce and
Wittgenstein is no longer manageable within the confines ofthis dissertation. My
analysis ofEliot and Heidegger, however, is still meant to demonstrate what is at
stake in describing the limits of the mind and soul within and against the
conceptual and grammatical limits Joyce and Wittgenstein expose.
Butwhoiscirclingwhomhasbecomeunclear. Thefollowingchaptershouldberead as a preface
to both what is at stake in the animation of things and identities attempted in
Eliot and Heidegger, and as a prologemenon to the grammatical descriptions o f time
and being I will examine in Joyce and Wittgenstein.In his latter work, Heidegger
reconstitutes the ontological claims the world makes on us as semantic functions,
as following a conceptual pattern o f meaningful relations. InReproduced with
permission.214
otherwords,heattemptstoreconstitutewhatsomethingisaswhatitmeans. These ontological
claims and semantic possibilities determine Being, not simply as existence, but as
the functional condensation o f all meanings o f the verb (to be' into those
aspects o f our experience we recognize as things, ourselves, and the world. "Das
Ding" enacts the question 'What is the qualitative aspect ofthings? from within a
language that can enactthe answer as our re-education; the ontology ofthings in
their participation or inhabitation ofBeing can look like a psychology ofthings.
Heidegger begins his essay with the question "What is a thing?" He takes this
question to be asking something like 'How do things exist?' or 'What exists for
us?'. His answer to these question, however, proceeds tlirough asking 'what does
"existence" mean?', questioning the verb o f 'to be' into its ontological and
functional force. We inhabit this force through a redemptive semantics which
transforms the concepts o f identity and predication determining existence, 'being'
and 'is', from a world both containing and against us, into the categorical
semantic ambiguity of the word 'weilen' (dwelling, staying, abiding, lingering)
under the pressure ofthis re-education.The Waste Land exposes as its own animating
principle of order or meaningsomething like the following conditional: If we are
dying, our living is counterfactual. The counterfactual or the subjunctive is both
what is given as possible, determined within and by language and history and
society, and what can be made or created beyond. The relation between quality and
quantity is articulated in The Waste Land through an exploration o f how to make
the subjunctive real, ontological.Reproduced with permission of the copyright
Coleridge, commenting on the mental schema articulated in Wordsworth's Prelude, re-
describes the reciprocal relation between the senses and the world that constructs
the mind. Following what he believes was "partly suggested by m e . . . He
[Wordsworth] was to treat man as man--a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in
contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not
compounding a mind out of the senses" (188).1 What has changed between Coleridge's
Wordworth and Eliot when he writes in "Gerontion"?:To lose beauty in terror, terror
in inquisition.I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is
kept must be adulterated?I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch:
How should I use them for your closer contact?Such poetry is not simply an
expression o f personality. Age and terror and revulsion and the failure of our
knowing and knowledge, the realization that not only can the mind and the world be
confused with each other, but that a failure of courage or of sense or of meaning
can tempt us to deny our mind. What kind o f questions are these?: "Do I dare
disturb the universe?"2or "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" or "I have lost
my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use them for your closer
contact?"3 or "Shall I set my lands in order?" or '"What! areyou here?"'.4 We can
say at least that questions about the limits of knowledge can be understood as
questions about redemption (ofour knowing, ofour language(s), ofourselves). The
possibility ofredemption in The Waste Land underwrites a theory of animation (a set
of embedded assumptions) thatReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
displaces the site of our mind or soul (the between in Finnegans Wake) into the
subjunctive. How does one animate possibility? This sounds like a nonsense
question. I think, however, that one should understand it to mean that Eliot's use
o f possibility highlights the failure o f knowledge, such that the demand to
reanimate mind and world is not a rejection o f this failure (skepticism), as in
pantheism, but a demand to reanimatemind and world from within or as this
uncertainty."What The Thunder Said" in The Waste Land does not promise the sound of
thunder, but the meaning o f a particular burst o f thunder-talk. Joyce gives the
thunder a voice as well, but Wakean thunder is not yet caught up into fragmented
allegories: it structures the world o f "broken heaventalk" (261.28) as a semantic/
syntactic/ phonetic limit between the body o f the dreamer, whose turning in the
night is signaled by these thunderous peals, and the mind or language he finds
himselfbeing or in, which we call the book Finnegans Wake:The fall
(bababadalgharaghtakamminarronkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarr
hounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthumuk!) o f a wallstrait oldparr is retale early in bed
and later on life down through all Christian minstrelsy. (3.15-16)Thunder phonemes
repeat and therefore constitute a rhythmic order: mm, nn, onn, t . . . t, h...
h,bababada,gh... gh,etc. Thisrepetition,likethe"Da/Damata..."ofEliot's thunder,
grows, barnacle-like, through accretion into parodic forms o f human sense:
"konnbronntonner" or "toohoohoord": to be able to bum and thunder [G. konnen,
brenn, tonner] and 'also who heard?'. Does this make the sense of the thunder a
question of training (maybe even scientific training) or of listening or of failing
to hear or failing to beReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
a person who can hear, who can recognize 'me' and 'who' in 'toohoohoord'? Joyce has
included at least 13 words for thunder in this sound: "thunntro" and "tonnerr" pun
the English thunder, German, Donner, Japanese, kaminair, Hindi, karak, Greek,
brontao; French lonnerre\ Italian, tuono, Swedish, aska\ Portaguese, trovao\ Irish,
tomach, Old Rumanian, tun , Danish, tordenen. Does the inclusion o f these multi-
lingual puns in the soundofthethundermakethissoundself-reflexive?
Whatthethunderspeaksisitsname, as if in some comedy, 'thunder thunder thunder.' But
this is not God's 'I am that I am.'The sounds and the name are for us Thunder. They
are for us a semantics discovered in the self-replication o f names in a series o f
phonemes. Language o f this sort is a dreaming into the world, not into ourselves.
Eliot wrote in his essay on Dante,We have nothing but dreams, and we have forgotten
that seeing visions--a practice now relegated to the aberrant and uneducated--was
once a more significant,interesting,anddisciplinedkindofdreaming.
Wetakeitforgranted that our dreams spring from below: possibly the quality of our
dreams suffers as a consequence. {SelectedEssays, 204)What is the ontological
status (is it real?) or the intentional claim (what is it about?) of a dream
exposing the world and not our psychology? Finnegans Wake is such a dream, that is,
the world dreaming a mind; so would the world be if constructed by a demon, or if
our brain was wired into its vat; or ifwe found ourselves in a world which was made
in the way that we were made; culture would be such a dream; so would psychology be
a dream intotheworldandnotintous.
"IBshearingisindoubtingjustasmyseeingisonbelieving" (FW468.15-16).
Tothinkaboutbelievingthreatensunbelieving.ForthemomentReproduced with permission of
philosophy and poetry will seem "the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its
own wrunes for ever, man, on all matters that fall under the ban o f our
infrarational senses" (FW19.35-20.01).A certain awe attends the world and its
adequacy for us. This adequacy can at least be explained as an effect ofnatural
selection. But thejustification ofthe worlds adequacy, its existence as a world for
us, can mutate into a further confusion about how a world is constituted for us as
our own. Or we might ask how we might lose the world not only to skeptical doubt,
but in not knowing how to find ourselves in the world, lost "[tjill human voices
wake us, and we drown".5 In his notes on a philosophy seminar given by Josiah
Royce, Eliot criticized philosophical theories o f knowledge as limited by their
failure to "treat illusion as real" (Costello, 119).6 I f I posit the causes o f my
dream-vision as bio-chemical interactions in my brain or as a function of some
psychological allegory,71 have not explained how the irreality ofmy vision alters
what is a world; how can we survive fantasy? "What we should consider is not so
much the meaning o f the images, butthe reverse process, that which led a man
having an idea to express it in images"(204). Eliot ties this process to the
clarity of visual images in allegorical thinking and poetry. Allegory generates
meaning even without our being aware o f the particular meaning o f an image. This
might be our response to systemic coherence, where the image manifests an order
that constitutes the kind of order determining of a world or an organism or a mind.
Eliot's poetry constructs meaning at the edge o f these allegories (or worlds or
organisms or minds), where we must always ask what is this poetry in relation to
what the worlds are it points to and abuts. This poetry cannot itself function as a
form ofReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
consciousness as might Romantic poetry. Instead, Eliot's poetry describes limits to
both howandwhyweinhabitourformsofmind(s)andworld(s). Thepoetryofallusionand
fragmentation in The Waste Land' therefore, functions as grammatical categories
written as ifthey were ontological categories describing the limits ofbeing human
within the world. Fragments act as interlocking domains, pointing elsewhere, or
switching point-ofview, failing to designate some other something (even the
allusions do not mean as afunction o f their originary texts). The Waste Land
poetic world, enacts subjunctive possibilities (word meanings, other texts, other
worlds and persons, other minds that might read nonsense as sense) as the
ontological description o f our stance toward each other and the world. In other
words, both the conventional pictures o f the world and poetic fantasies and
nonsense do not describe possible worlds, but rather pick us out as the limits o f
all such possible worlds.8The claims that both the world and what counts as the
subject or self are determined and limited, and made problematic or only possible
by our being betrayed
withinandthroughthispoetryasnothingmorethanthelimitofthesepossibilities. Lifeis
counterfactual. Claims about what is real are all limit claims; the borders of
sense and nonsensesketchedinTheWasteLanddescribethesesamelimits: theconflationofthe
semantic and the ontologic draws our psychology into conflicting language games
used to capture the interplay between husband and wife and friends, and living and
dead, animate andinanimate,symbolicandordinary,etc.
Theeffectofthepoetryistorequireajustification for how we inhabit or project or
commit ourselves to different and fluid grammatical (or what we often call
psychological) limits: subject, object, self, other, 'I',Reproduced with permission
'you', 'we', 'they', etc. The patterns of our involvement describe a meta-temporal
order that can count as either a mind (ours or someone else's or the worlds) or a
world (ours or someone else's or a presupposed given).How do we confuse minds for
world(s)? Thoreau can give us a hint about what it means to be confused enough to
ask another version o f this question. In Walden's "Brute Neighbors", he fits the
world to the mind, where this fitting is, itself, our awe:
Whydopreciselytheseobjectswhichwebeholdmakeaworld? Whyhasmanjust these species of
animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this
crevice? I suspect that Pilpay & Co. have put animals to their best use, for they
are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts.
(151)Do the objects we see make a world? "Make" can almost be read as a semantic
pun. Interposing the clause 'which we behold' between the objects and 'making the
world' not only pictures our seeing or an 'I' between objects and world, it
attaches our beholding to world-making. Thus the question 'why do we make a world
with these objects? requires us to answer with another question, 'how do we make a
world?, placing these objects and the world on top o f the poetic and engineering
modeling power o f our mind, [transcendental aesthetic]; But our seeing is a
beholding, or a being held by the objects which might then make a world. These
objects make a world, and our seeing is not a Kantian apperception but a perception
ofwhat Heidegger calls the 'throwness of being". This would translate Thoreau's
question into 'how do objects constitute a world?"; this is one way o f
understanding Hiedegger's question "What is a thing?" in "Das Ding".Reproduced with
permission.221
Thoreau, however, nests what makes a world in the questions 'Why these objects?',
'Why this beholding?', 'Why a world?'. These questions ask for the criteria (a
justification) that determines what counts as a world: why do these objects make a
world? What objects? Look around. Pilpay, falsely believed to have written the
Sanskrit fables
collectedastheHitopadesa(telleroffables),makesfictionalworldsoftheworld. Already in
the pressure Thoreau places on 'beasts ofburden' and 'made to carry some portion of
our thoughts', our language functions as our thought. Animals become animals in our
stories. But if they are not reduced into fetishes, they manifest "a portion o f
our thoughts" (what portion?) to ourselves as the world. We may think, in other
words only what the world offers or the world may only be what we think. We are
returned to Parmenides, even inthe difficulty oftranslation that attends his Greek:
to yap auto voeiv ecmv xeKaisivai.
Wecantranslatethisas'becausethesamethingisthoughtasexists'(57).9 Does this mean
that only what is thought exists? Or that to be thought about and to exist are the
same? Or even as Sparshott suggested, "'Only what can think can exist?' Or even
'Thinking and being are the same?"' (110).10The adequacy o f the world is
understood here as the expression o f meaning, or possibly a theory of meaning, if
what counts as a theory is understood to be a problem about how the world means.
The adequacy o f the world, therefore, can be determined by how one answers (or if
one asks) the question: 'how does the world mean or manifest our thinking (about
it) in what it is?'; or 'how do we use the world to manifest our mind to ourselves
or to express the world as the world?'Reproduced with permission of the copyright
The awe attending the adequacy o f the world can seem to be a description o f the
mind. The psycho-physiologist Warren McCulloch asks Thoreau's question o f the mind
under the aspect o f logical coherence: "What Is a Number that a Man May Know It,
and a Man that He May Know a Number?"11 Although his answer returns us to the
question, it formulates a model o f time as a probabilistic logic expressed through
"all-or-none impulsesoftheneurons"(9). Hesayshisobject,"asapsychologist,"was to
invent a kind of least psychic even, or "psychon," that would have the following
properties: First, it was to be so simple an event that it either happened
orelseitdidnothappen. Second,itwastohappenonlyifitsboundcausehad happened--shades o
f Duns Scotus! --that is, it was to imply its temporal antecedent. Third, it was to
propose this to subsequent psychons. Fourth, these were to be compounded to produce
the equivalents of more complicated propositions concerning their antecedents." (8)
The ambiguity in Thoreau's use of "make a world" is mirrored here in McCulloch's
attempt "to invent a kind o f psychic event." Logic is meant to provide a temporal
invariant that in essence functions as the identity structure constituting both
number and consciousness.
Thismodelcanbeunderstoodasatranslationmachine(ofinputsinto outputs) structuring
time through causal implication ("imply its temporal antecedent") in a hierarchical
system whose final output, grasping an identity (number), mimics its own deep
structure o f simple events as a succession o f organized identities (psychons).
Thoreau and McCulloch both describe the world from within, that is, not as a whole,
and thus as built out of fragments. They describe, however, different kinds of
fragments. Thoreau,torqueingtheKantianlimitbetweenthemindandtheworldinthe stalling
circular aesthetic logic of his sentences, marks out his neighbors, the particulars
that fit within the world. These particulars present themselves to him in/ within/
as his awe and questioning. This may not seem a fragmentation; it is a peculiar
kind. He finds
himselfaskinghowtheobjectsfitsowellintoaworld,asifsuchafittingsurprisesus. Hefinds
himselfin the midst of a quantity of objects, and asks about what qualities (why
these?) fits these particulars within the qualitative whole of our experience and
the world. McCulloch understands what exists as countable, and therefore wants to
translate the qualitativeexperienceofconsciousnessintocountableunits.
Hestructuresthetransitive relation between mind and brain as the instantiation o f
identity as the determining atomic units o f mind-existence. Both we and the world
inhabit this awe and these numbers.One way o f reducing ourselves to quantity is to
call ourselves clocks timing the world and actions and thoughts, speaking,
remembering, returning, and hoping into being someone anyone might see again,
surviving either humiliation or infinite diminishment. In such a clock, what
someone might imagine the mind to be as the limit o f the world, the first moment
must fix all other moments. Such an assumption underlies what was called in the
Fifteenth century the problem o f the Absolute Clock. The Dominican philosopher
Graziadei of Ascoli writes in his Quaestiones litterales:Even though time is the
measure ofall movement, and there is, at the same time, a multitude o f movements,
there is, however, only one numerically single time, and not multiple times; that
is so because the first movement is unique, and time concerns this movement and
properly.'12Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
Duhem explains: "Time is an abstract concept formed by the intellect form every
concrete movement; it remains always the same, whatever the concrete movements are
from which it was formed" (362). This is time abstracted from the world, the
creation of a still point or uniform series o f changes in relation to which time
emerges as an idealized concept beyond the confusion of change and identity in the
world. Heidegger in "Das Ding" and Eliot in The Waste Land twist this abstract
series back into the world of things. These orderings oftime within the world
constitute a semantics ofthings, an animation ofthe inanimate through the
hypostatization o f existing (in various modes and forms) for Heidegger and of
identity for Eliot.Eliot's and Heidegger's investigation ofthe semantics o f'to be'
revolve, I think, aroundthedistinctionbetweenredemptionandjustification.
Youcanseethisrevolution in Eliot's Four Quartets: "There is only the fight to
recover what has been lost and found and lost again and again: and now, under
conditions that seem unpropitious"(EC)13; "Time present and time past are both
perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in
timepast.Ifalltimeiseternallypresentalltimeisunredeemable"(BN). Thisisonewayof
saying we do not know even what redemption might mean. Redemption might require
perspicuous description of ourselves and/or the world.14 But "Words strain, crack
and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
decay withimprecision, will not stay in place, will not stay still."(BN) 'Tor us,
there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."(EC) "Also pray for those
who were in ships, and ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea's lips or in the
dark throat which will not reject them or wherever cannot reach them the sound o f
the sea bell's perpetual angelus."(DS)Reproduced with permission of the copyright
"And every phrase and sentence that is right (where every word is at home, taking
its place to support the others, the word neither diffident nor ostentatious, an
easy commerce of the old and the new, the common word precise but not pedantic, the
complete consort dancing together) every phrase and every sentence is an end and a
beginning, every poem an epitaph." (LG) How does one write an epitaph? Here lies
nothing and above it these words. "The voice of the hidden waterfall and the
children in the apple-tree not known,because not looked for but heard, half-heard,
in the stillness between two waves of the sea." Suchanepitaphissenseless.What can
justify committing ourselves or attaching ourselves to pronouns, to nonsense, to
poetry or logic? Jakobson gives one answer in "What is Poetiy?":But how does
poeticity manifest itself? Poeticity is present when the word is felt as a word and
not a mere representation ofthe object being named or an outburst of emotion, when
words and their composition, their meaning, their external and inner form, acquire
a weight and value of their own instead o f referring indifferently to reality.
(378)Poetry is a mode of linguistic self-reflection, and in this is an animation
and personification of language into self-consciousness (as if a mind). In ordinary
language, words function under the aspect of grammar. Through poetry, in Jakobson's
picture, this relation is inverted such that words gain possession oftheirgrammar
and thus ofthemselves in a kind o f Lockean self-ownership. The personification o f
language proceeds through equating self-reflection as self-possession ('acquire').
Self-reflection and self-possession function through the concepts o f 'weight' and
'value', not through reference orReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
expression. Thisconstitutesaredefinition(maybeareconceptualization)of'value'.
Meaning does not function through reference; in this value is no longer
ontologically determined, that is, the value expressed in self-reflection, in its
creation o f our individualisticwords,isnotdeterminedbythecriteriaofthereal.
Thesewordsdonot lose their ontological force, what Jakobson calls here their
"weight". Value so considered becomes incoherent without the construction of a
domain incommensurable with but able to replace that which was lost (the 'real'
world picked out by reference). Words do not function independently o f ordinary
referential language; self-reflection does not deny the sociality of words (our
common usage) in their functional independence in poetry except
inthedeterminationoftheirvalue. Referenceisembeddedincommonusage,value,for
Jakobson, is (somehow) not. The primacy of sense is replaced with a concept of
self- determined value (whatever that means). In this picture, words are tools only
to and in their own ends, but they have no ends o f their own. In Jakobson's
picture words, phrases, sentences are not valuable because they have a sense, but
they have a sense because they are valuable (the poem as a political fantasy
ofwords functioning as ifanimate minds).Jakobson's definition of poetry, in essence
as a mode of textual self-reflection constructing inherent value as the identity or
meaning of words, places language in an ontological crisis, where the value o f
language, as reflected in its poetic claim on us, is disjunct from the ontological
conditions and criteria describing reality. Is the value of poetry real? All
conceptual work remains legitimate only to the degree that the categories that are
articulated (between intentionality and substance for example) exist. The terms of
existence vary, matter does not exist in the same way that intentionality might,
but matterReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
prohibited without permission.Ill
and intentionality must both fall under the rubric o f a reality (ours) as defined
by an ontology that includes both domains or categories. It is not clear in
Jakobson's definition what common ontology describes the world and this strange
poetic value. The incommensurability o f poetry and the world forgets that it is
human beings in the world and made by the world that make poetry. Jakobson's
picture o f poetry generates a dualism.Jakobson tries to stitch the world back
together by an appeal to a kind o f logical necessity meant to describe an aspect
ofthe world:Why is all this necessary? Why is it necessary to make a special point
o f the fact that sign does not fall together with object? Because, besides the
direct awareness o f the identity between sign and object (A is Ai), there is a
necessity for the direct awareness ofthe inadequacy ofthat identity (A is not A).
The reason this antinomy is essential is that without contradiction there is no
mobility of concepts, no mobility of signs, and the relationship between concept
and sign becomes automatized. Activitycomestoahalt,andtheawarenessofrealitydiesout.
(378)Jakobson believes that poetry allows us to see a double aspect o f language,
its contradictory functioning through identity and through inequality. Thus he
reduces the referential functioning o f language, rather absurdly, to "the identity
between sign and object (A is A)". We can read this identity in two ways. The first
is obviously false: the sign "Lilac" is not equivalent to the lilac flowers planted
in my garden. Words do not look like their objects, nor do prepositions look like
their ostensible relations, or verbs like their actions, or the determiner 'the'
like anything. Jakobson's use of identity must meanReproduced with permission of
instead that words function as if they were the objects picked out by these words
(if one can even talk about objects here). But if "is" means here "as if where is
the contradiction? How a particular sign string picks out something is at best not
exclusively determined by a synonymy between sign and referent. The awareness ofthe
non-identity between sign and object arises when 'lilacs' ceases to function as a
name and is quoted(explicitly or otherwise).15 Thus, 'A is Ai', as the subscript
should indicate (but does not to Jakobson), is a formula o f identity like x=y and
not x=x. But even in saying this I do not mean to suggest that reference or naming
can be explained through the use o f identity. There was never a real identity
between A and Ai, thus the fact that A is not Ai should come as no surprise.
Jakobson thinks that the formal non-identity o f A and Ai is a problem becasue he
assumes that A means Ai through formal identity. Not only does this ignore the
different forms o f 'identity', but why and how should reference be secured through
identity? Consequently, this is not a real antinomy at all16Even if this is not a
real logical antinomy the force o f the double awareness o f the relation between
word and object (or let's say world) and the fact that the word has no such
intrinsic relation remains (at least as a claim). This claim, however, has ceased
to be about language, where there exists no contradiction because reference cannot
be reduced to identity. Jakobson's picture of double awareness describes,
therefore, not our language but an aspect of our conscious experience (an aspect
Joyce calls a "world, mind"). I think we can see a trace of this shift from
language to consciousness in Jakobson's reasoning. This is registered as an anxiety
that compels him to try an answer why reference might find itself akin, at least in
appearance to identity. Jakobson must resolve this antinomy byReproduced with
permission.229
describing this double awareness as a function o f what is ontologically real: that
is he must reconnect language with the world, but not through reference or
identity.Jakobson does this by embedding contradiction as an engine for movement
between concepts and signs within a world which he believes cannot be automatized.
Although change as contradiction should be perfectly describable as a logical
transform, one assumes that Jakobson appeals to some gap that must be jumped
creatively that allows for the alteration o f concepts and signs that allows for
awareness. Because this is opposed to automazation, this awareness must be an
awareness of difference built out of not a transformation between two states, which
could be automatized, but a triangulation between these changes and our perception
as a stable substrate describing an identity. There is a difference here.
Automaztion describes a law like description o f reality, whereas 'mobility', not
only in its appeal to animation, reduces the world to our temporal experience o f
it. That is, without poetry, without our own double vision o f language as
referential and self-reflexive, consciousness is reduced to objects described under
the aspect of mechanical laws. Without this double vision activity ceases, and
death results. With another rhetorical slip, Jakobson equates life with
consciousness, such that this stasis loses us the phenomenal world. Are animals who
do not use language incapable o f being aware of reality? A lot rests on how one
construes "aware". Not simply for us, however.The ontological status of these
claims requires that they not be subjective. The conflation o f consciousness with
life is thus a value judgment: without movement or contradiction poetry and life
are really deadness, not anything at all. It is also an ontological claim, in which
the prime criterion for being alive is movement. Such an ontology built out o f a
false antinomy and an unwarranted equation o f value and ontology (failing
according to its
ownstandardofdoubleawareness)begsthequestionitwasputforwardtosolve. It leaves us
not with ajustification ofart but with a need to justify art that articulates the
relation between poetic value, whatever that is, with ontological force and in
relation to ontological criteria.Thejustification ofa string ofwords through some
version ofidentity, because it pretends to proceed through identity (tautology),
should resolve itself into some kind o f truth claim. Jakobson's version seems to
argue that the "logical antinomy" determining reference and sense (a kind o f
theory o f naming) in its contradictions describes (isomorphically) the movement of
our thoughts, either described or made possible by (the etiology o f this is
confused and incomplete here) which is itself the means, because presumably it
mirrors, the ontological contradictions that is "reality." These contradictions in
our language function at the service of a three-tiered chain of metaphysical
identities fromsignstothinkingandthoughts(concepts)toreality.
Thejustificationofpoetry,its necessity, describes the relation between our minds
and the world according to an axiom ofidentity that yields a description oftime and
mental movement, the loss ofwhich seeminglyisthedeathofrealityandourthinking.
Thepictureunderlyingthismodelisthe equation o f a picture o f time with both the
real and the animate. Time becomes the engine o f mind. Such an equation has an
intuitive force; but it is not a consequence o f this model, but rather a picture
undergirding it. The description of reference, thinking, time, and reality,
however, all function as mythological names. They are unsupported by an ontology,
let alone a logic.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
But as an anthropological finding this model can at least make an odd question seem
more reasonable. How canjustification invoke identity and not lead toward logical
truth, but toward animation instead? This means asking what is the aesthetic force
of identity, if this force cannot be reduced to logical analycity? Both questions,
in order to remain sensible, ask for the missing ontology that Jakobson's model
masks (by his playingwith dialectic and an incomplete picturing o f language as a
certain kind o f naming).A poetry constructed in such a way as to offer its
"justification in every line", orlet's say any kind of self-reflection that loses
the referential or expressive force of language (its dependent attachment to the
world), requires that its senses function as ontologicalcriteria.
Whatontologicalcommitmentisentailedinthesenseof'aroseisa rose is a rose is a rose'?
This is asking what kind of sense is there in nonsense? One of Joyce's answers was
what he called "singsigns to soundsense" (FW13807), "soundscript"
(FW219.17),"sinscript"(FW421.18)or"sinse"(FW83.12). Amusicoftransgression, however,
cannot explain its meaning simply as an opposition to referential or spatial sense.
The condition o f 'soundsense' must speak towards itself and towards the world,
where the worldbecomestheconditionsdescribingcertainkindsoftransgressions.
Onedoesnot imaginethatnonsenseescapestheworldofsenseorofmatterorofanythingelse. Our
speaking o f both sense and nonsense must mark this speaking, and thus ourselves,
as real.If a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, what am I? I might be tempted to
answer with a Popeye-like parody of God: I am that I am that I am that I am. This
does not lose its sense in the same way that Stein's repetition does. I am invested
differently in my statements about roses than I am in those about myself. By
analogy then poetry isReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
committed differently to its statements about the world than those about itself.
What is this difference? When sense has ontological force as a structural function,
we can call that theological language.Is poetry linguistic self-reflection ofthis
sort? or ofany sort? How is the temptation to appeals to identity, underpinning the
truth possibilities o f self-reflection,
implicatedintheconstructionofnotionsofvalueandjustification? Whatleadsfromthe
justification ofpoetry to a theory ofmind? What use or value or sense can a theory
of mind constructed as part of such a justification have? All ofthese questions ask
about how we use the verb of 'to be' as the limit between our conception of mind
and world. The first question asks for either a definition of poetry, which would
require furtherjustification, or for examples of poetry in relation to each other
as they describe themselves. Any generalization about poetry remains so tied to
changing expectations, personal responsiveness, prejudice, and so on that only
poems can themselves make such claimsandgivethemselvesasevidence.
Poemsthenatleastofferanopportunityto ventriloquizeouropinionsasaneffectofreading.
Butclaimsaboutpoetryareinteresting in the ways they justify themselves and less in
the substance o f their description and claims.How can a poem become its own
justification? Because we do not know what it means for a collection ofwords or
phrases or lines or sentences to reflect upon themselves, not understanding any
form of self-reflection besides our own, any claim about poetry's self-reflection
allegorizes our reading of a poem as simultaneously an object which produces
meanings, as a mechanism o f some sort, and as a phenomenologicalReproduced with
permission.233
self-reflection on our own reading, described, we imagine, as the interaction
between the semanticsandsyntaxofapoem.
Poetryis(orcanbe)anautonomousmechanismdirected towards us and an expression o f our
reading towards the poem.Asking "what does 'is' mean?" (a question o f semantics
and syntax) and "what 'is' is?" (in what way does it exist?) are not questions but
riddles. The riddle o f 'to be', even in Eliot's fragmented symbolism o f
subjunctive identities and Heidegger's ontological myth of revealing existing,
asks, as Ammons does in his anti-symbolist poetry, how "this measure moves/ to
attract attention. . . not to persuade you, enlighten you, not necessarily to
delight you, but to hold you" (Sphere, 30). How the world holds us, how things hold
us, and how we behold it and them, in containment or continuity or context or
conflict, as genitive, dative, or ablative relations, requires justification, such
as beauty, goodness,truth, correspondence, coherence, desire, identity, fear,
dread, despair. We inhabit an 'is' through our justification o f our kind of
inhabiting. We can construct this how in art or in a description of our mind or in
moral judgment; or we can express this holding in our questioning o f why this
world holds us? why these things?Russell describes the grammatical distinctions in
our use o f "to be" :The word is is terribly ambiguous, and great care is necessary
in order not to confound its various meanings. We have (1) the sense in which it
asserts Being, as in "A is"; (2) the sense o f identity; (3) the sense o f
predication, in "A is human"; (4)thesenseof"Aisa-man"..whichisverylikeidentity.
Inadditiontothese there are less common uses, as "to be good is to be happy"; where
a relation of assertions is meant, that relation, in fact, which, where it exists,
gives rise to formalReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
implication, Doubtless there are further meanings which have not occurred tome.
(64n)These four classifications can be further described as (1) assertions o f
existence (as in the quantifiers Vx and 3y; or, the Scholastic existentia, that
something is); (2) x=x; and more questionably x=y; (3) Quine writes "Predication
joins a general term and a singular term to form a sentence that is true or false
according as the general term is true or false o f the object, if any, to which the
singular term refers" (Wordand Object, 96), in this case the use o f the copula is
restricted to claims about objects; (4) a definition and in this senseboth an
identification and the inclusion of something within a class or set or category. As
in category 4, these distinctions often function as aspects of each other, or
presuppose each other, collapse into each other.17Prepositional and predicate logic
analyzes the way in which the words 'or', 'and', 'not', 'if... then', 'every',
'some', 'necessary' and so on function in and structure statements or propositions
as either True or False. Lyric poetry, and I am tempted to say most o f what counts
as literature, let's say its narrative force and world-making force,functions
through instantiating the pronominal and the adverbial limits (primarily the
demonstratives 'this', 'that', 'here', 'now') constituting the domain within which
referential language functions. The limits of our language are non-referential.
They constitute the world as temporal. Pronouns constitute our relation to the
structures of our grammar and to the world determined by our perception and biology
as a discursive event. Both pronouns and the adverbs 'now' and 'here' set up an
indeterminate set of referential andmeaningpossibilities.
TheycansubstituteforeachotheraswaysofmarkingaReproduced with permission of the
sentence as a sentence in a language, an utterance as an utterance. Are they
existential markers or temporal markers, guarantors, implicit or not, that in
speaking this sentence I am alive? T points, therefore, in two directions: toward
my inhabitation o f the world and my inhabitation o f language, where my utterance
functions as a reflection o f this act o f uttering. Such self-reflection can then
be used as an allegory onto which statements o f 'I am'candescribeme.
Thisisawayofputtingtheobjectfirst,mythirdpersonstatusasa 'me', which is animated
becomes an 'I am' through self-reflection.Lyric enacts an exemplary expression o f
language (exemplary o f what?) as a referential system constituting the T . A poem
is not strictly speaking about or picturing an 'I ', but causes an 'I ' to become
instantiated as meaningful, marking language as ours by exposing how we speak this
possession and thus offering itself as justification for this ownership.
Justification means making visible the rules (the translation o f the pronouns and
adverbs into 'to be' into 'to have'). Art in this sense exemplifies the
psychologicaland the grammatical, as the limits constituting the negative space
of'I' and 'me', as objective, as an expression o f a body, and thus as 'mine'.
Lyric as the poetry o f being-a-moment and narrative as the poetry o f succession,
o f being-in-the-world are ontological arguments through which we enter the world
as real (but not only through good art, but through songs, phrases, perceptions,
objects, lyric effects or attention, narrative logics, the failure o f which would
be catatonia).How to enter the world and language is tied to how we exit them. This
relation between entering and exiting is the problem of the Sibyl in The Waste
Land. The complicated metaphysics ofthe last section ofthe poem, "What The Thunder
Said", areReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
built from the riddling thematic strands and ontological implications radiating
from Eliot's initial introductory quotation:"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse
oculis meis vidi in ampula pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: SiPuXXa tt QeXiq;
respondebat ilia; a7to0aveiv 0eXa>."For I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in
ajar at Cumae, and when theacolytes said, 'Sybil, what do you wish?' she replied,
'I wish to die.'"Apollo has granted the Sibyl eternal life, but because she failed
to request eternal youth, she continues to age and shrink in size. Her small
withered body is kept in a suspendedjar. Thus, we can recognize two temporal
patterns: continuity and decay. The Sibyl's immortality consists o f her continued
existence and identity as who she is. Although her form changes, the animating
essence within it remains identical in every moment. The Sibyl's soul and body
describe identity and loss. Her personal identity supersedes dynamic change, and
thus separates her from the mortal metaphysical universe in which time, as
Aristotle claims, can best be understood as loss. The Sibyl's containment in a
bottle symbolizes this separation.Change is marked by her shrinking, her continual
decay and loss of physical substance,becominglessandless.
Sheexistswithinaninfiniteregressionconstitutingnot onlyherworldbutherselfaswell.
FortheSibylherimmortalityonlyservestocontinue her suffering as an old and aging
woman. Immortality is an extension through time of an
animatingessence,containedwithinthephysicalformofbeing. Thisessenceisnot separate
from the form o f being, for it is the body itself which is immortal. Her physical
form, however, is endlessly disintegrating. Thus, the continuity o f her being
manifests itself in the dissolution o f this same being: the continuity o f being
flows through the dissolution o f being.Although the Sibyl contains the immortal
and mortal natures o f Christ, the non- transcendental metaphysics o f her being
prevent any symbolic equivalency between them. Without the ability to transcend the
decay o f her body, she remains trapped in a self- destructive spiral, which cannot
regenerate her. Christ's ability to transcend his physical form and reach a
spiritual reality allows him to integrate both spiritual and physical realms
withinhisownidentity. Thisintegrationopensapathwaybetweenboththeserealms, through
which power flows into the material world, and through which mortal flesh can
reachGod. Christhealsthesickandviolatesnaturallawsthroughhisdirectconnection with
the realm of spiritual power, for he is the Son of God (MK. 2.2-12). Similarly,
after his death he spiritually transcends his physical form and is resurrected in
his spiritual form.The Christian pattern of creation involves a complicated
equivalency and transformation between the creator, the act of creation, and the
created. For the Sibyl, however, the identity o f being exists as the dissolution o
f being. Within this model there is no transformation between the mortal and the
immortal. The Sibyl when she asks to die, desires to make a transformative leap
between two conditions o f being: her immortal decayandherdeath.
Thismeanstodisconnecttheidentity/physicalexistenceunitythat sustainsher.
Shewishestoreenterthedynamicsofmortallife,asopposedtoChrist's desire to re-become
pure spirit. The identity of her being, that is, her immortality, however, cannot
be disassociated from her physical form. She might describe us becauseReproduced
permission.238
she has no soul. Change, therefore, cannot enter that substanceless gap between
existence and non-existence. Unlike the Christian pattern o f transformation, the
gap between identities is not contained within the being o f the Sibyl, as it is in
the equivalence between Christ, God and the Word. This equivalence implies an
established transformative link between these three forms o f being, though which
they can become one another. The Sybil's being remains isolated in a single state,
albeit a complex one, but one without the ability to transcend this gap. Although
the Sibyl's immortality is physically dependent on her physical form, there is no
link between this form and her immortal form, which would allow for a
transformation between them. Such a transformation would result in atranscendence o
f either her aging or her immortality, which is not possible.The Sibyl's life
answers a riddle: What can simultaneously and in a every momentbe both what
McTaggart called a temporal B-series and an A-series? The B-series represents time
as a chain of before and afters, as if on a number line. The A-series is the
nuncfluens, the flowing now, that is, an existential mark ofthe present, in
relation, however, to a future and present. Already the A-series works as if it
were a sliding point, withoutprivileginganyparticularnow,ontheB-series. (TheB-
series,likewhatIwill show to be Heidegger's condensation oftime into things,
translates past nows into thing like points--within what Heidegger calls the ontic,
what looks objectively real, the external representation of time as a timeline.)
The A-series, although it fails to capture Dasein's existential relation with the
world determining Temporality in Heidegger, is phenomenological in scope. The
problem in our riddle is how to translate an A-series into also a B-series. The
measure o f before and after, a timeline, a series o f dates, isReproduced with
permission.239
isomorphic with the size ofthe Sibyl, and thus even if she lost her memory, the
changing size ofher body marks and measures, as a real effect, the movement oftime.
The Sibyl was three feet before she was two feet, and now she is two inches. From
this we can project her height if not infinitely divided, then divided to the point
at which she would cease to be alive as the Sibyl, and thus her height, regardless
o f the now, measures time as afunctionofherbeing,herform.
TheSibylcanbeseenasanembodiedsymbolofakind of Time, an ontological clock. In a
typical clock the changes o f state, in a digital clock 12:00 to 12:01, follow a
pattern of repeating, predetermined changes. Even if the Sibyl shrank and then
regrew according to a regular cycle, however, she would not become anordinaiy
clock, even ofthe sort the change in seasons might seem to describe or express. The
changes in her body, even if describing a cycle o f shrinking and regrowing,
contradict the world as we know it, even as Petronius knew it, and certainly they
contradict the logic andfactsofphysics,chemistry,biology,etc.
Thechangesinherbody,therefore,either change the entire world in a fundamental way
(something we know, as much as we know anything, is not true) or her infinite
regression inside herjar functions in an alternate world, she exists in our three
dimensions and then in higher dimension(s) not ours, although similar in certain
ways with the fourth dimensional description oftime. Her changes in state are
relative to our world and her memory changes in substance: she has a
differentkindofbeingwithinasimilarbutdifferentworld. Inthisherlifemightbea picture
of a life in Hell. Is Hell part of our world or just parallel? This is an
explanation ofwhy the bad are not always punished in our world.Reproduced with
permission.240
Immortality conserves identity as subsistent and continuous being. Her continual
shrinkingdescribeschangeasinfiniteregression. Changeortimerequiresasubstrateof
continuity to be visible as such, what Aquinas calls identity, following in the
history of Trinitarian theology, and what Aristotle calls ousia and on following
Parmenides. This difference expresses different kinds o f time and different kinds
o f subsistence. For the time being, we can ignore this difference. Time in both
cases exists as an effect of alterations in form; it is a meta-description
generated from self-reflection, either objectively in the changes in and among
things in relation to the stability of our observing perspective (this describes
the Tractarian non-psychological T ) or subjectively as changes in the form or
consciousness of humans, animals, plants, objects relative to the stability o f
either consciousness or our perceptual frame.18The Sibyl epigraph itselfreplaced a
quotation from Conrad's Heart o fDarkness ("The Horror! The Horror!") that Pound
thought inadequate. Kurtz's exclamation of surprise, judgment, and moral despair
functions at the same level as the utterances and quotations within the poem, and
thus cannot serve to frame the poem itself. The depth of "The Horror! The Horror!"
lies in why Kurtz cried out, in the vagueness or difficulty in understanding to
what it refers, and in the complexity o f vision and understanding necessary to
voice this horror. Conrad internalizes the disjunction between morality and power
that Machiavelli describes in The Prince, translating it into a skeptical problem,
a problemabouthowtoknowtheworldandoneself. ThisiswhatthenonsenseofThe Waste Land
does as well. But "[t]he horror" should be a part ofthe poem, not its frame. The
Sibyl clocking time and the world by her continual loss o f herself (and it) might
haveReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
criedoutfromthesameentrapmentintheincommensurableasKurtz. TheSibylasksfor her
death, as a response to the horror o f life, out o f a metaphysical disjunction
between meaning and reality, that for her is marked by identity (being who she is)
and time (shrinking into an eternity o f isolation), and for Eliot and for us might
describe the ontological descriptive power ofphysics, the indifference ofwhat
Davidson calls sciences attempt to "extrude the concept of causality in favor of
strict laws" (297) and the domain ofmeaningconstitutingsubjectivity,culture,etc.
InthisquotationfromPetronius'Satyricon, the Sibyl is already entrapped within a
foreign language, speaking Greek when she was in fact Roman, and already a story
within the mendacity o f low-character (Trilmachio), decayed already from a
prophetess into a ship in a bottle (her ampulla: ajar for liquids, a container of
feminine essence, but also bombast, inflated talk: proicitampullas; if the Sibyl is
not Cassandra, then at least her truths now sound absurd not just because she
speaks from inside ajar and in a foreign language, but because we put her there).
The Sibyl describes an ontological myth, embodying in her body, identity, and being
an indeterminate allegory, a description with an unclear referent that
conceptualizes asrealaseeminglyphysicallyimpossiblestate.
Thedistortionofherfatefromthe everyday condition o f humanity marks her difference
as an aspect o f our being human. The hypostatization o f the identity o f being as
what counts as existing within the continuation of time describes a picture of how
we think of ourselves: the picture that we
existintime,butaredefinedbyauniqueessence,ouridentity. TheSibyl'spredicament
demonstrates the absurdity ofthis picture (this does not mean we can dismiss it,
however;Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
by claiming that either the principle o f identity as being or time are fantasies).
More importantly, it demonstrates the effect ofthis metaphysical model on how we
are within the world, a model linking subjectivity, here understood to be the
continuity that expresses itself as a sense o f loss, to the metaphysics o f a
world determined by change, time and loss. If we exist as able to speak, we mark
our utterance by either time and identity, an 'I' or a 'now', as our subjectivity.
Subjectivity embedded in time constituted by change functions as identity in
relation to this change. Any domain of personal experience (subjectivity) or o f
possession (grammatical 'I') which functions and exists under the same ontological
description as change (time) generates the condition o f the Sibyl as a pictureof
being human. The Waste Land enacts this picture within an attempt to make it
meaningful, to give it a language within which the ontology o f things and objects,
call this a picture o f science and technology from a distance brought on by the
despair o f thinking oneself an object extruded from an animate tradition o f
cultural existence and integration. Such a mirror hopes to show the way out o f the
mirror.The adequacy o f Eliot's new epigraph lies in its descriptive power in
collapsing the realm o f conceptual self-reflection (who she is: her continuing
identity) into a name
referring,throughoutthediminishmentofthematterofherbody,tothisself-reflection. In
such a state questions o f the form "what is it?" "what is true?" can be confused
with questions o f the from "who is it?" "is she real?"If The Waste Land asks "who
is the Sibyl?", where does it leave us after it becomes the answer? Do we recognize
it as an answer? That would be to recognize it as theexemplarofourownlives.
ItisnotjusttheworldthatwewouldhavetoreachReproduced with permission of the
through this possibility, the world would make us into this possibility. This is
the way in which the claims of our humanity might suffer under the pressure of
natural selection (Darwin) or amorality (Machievelli). Instead of resistance or
despair or irreverence the demands o f this pressure require that we twist the
problem around such that we describe how our human inheritance, our language and
appeals to meaning, our theology and morality can arise and operate within the
ontological descriptions that seem to dissolve their force and efficacy.Eliot
constructs an aesthetic, a language game, a poem in which the Sibyl's predicament,
her soul embodied as a kind of eternity, can seem true or real: The Waste Land in
all of its voices constructs the Sibyl's form of life, her condition, a community
in which she can be understood and which she would recognize as her own; The Waste
Land is the Mind of the Sibyl. Even for us to hear Eliot's personal grip against
the world we would have to recognize her form of life to be ours, and this language
to be ours; the process of reading or of training to survive the poetics of The
Waste Land offers us a language in which we can express or articulate our soul as
the Sibyl's. This logic of paralytic identity turns paralysis into subsistence and
identity into symbolism. We should read "What the Thunder Said" as oracular in the
sense o f Heraclitus: "The Lord whoseoracle is in Delphi neither indicates clearly
nor conceals but gives a sign" (Plutarch, De Pythiae oraculis 404d, fragment 93).
As a sign these words function not as pointers into some secret truth, the
unconscious, a [the] god's mind, or even the future; they mean
withinthelogicofsignswhichistheirownspeaking. Onecouldcallthisanewlanguage game or
a poetics enacting our mind, subjectivity, or soul (we can not distinguish these
here) as a subjunctive stance toward ourselves similar to the Sibyl's predicament
and her desire to die, to re-enter the limits of mortality. The Waste Land
describes being human as being the Sibyl in her glassjar (is she a fly in her fly
bottle?). For The Waste Land, it is the logic, or language game, or poetics, or
form of life that is missing and must be constructed out o f the oracle's words: if
a riddle or an allegory, it can only be understood if we already understand it.
This means the ambiguity ofthe oracle and ofthe poetry stand as a sign of a form o
f life embodied not simply as these signs, but it only exists as an oracle, and as
poetry, once we understand these signs as meaningful and thus make ourselves anew
within or as a mind that could speak them. In this way they point to a mind or act
as expressionsofamindthatisbothoursandnot. Thattheydonotonlypointtous,inour
understanding, allows them to be spoken to us as if by god.As in the machine
symbolism of Yeats (chapter 3) the symbols of identity constituting "What The
Thunder Said", the words we understand as something we can say in a world in which
we might find ourselves, if not now, someday or yesterday, offer themselves as
containers for our minds, and in this offer of our translation into the structure
of a thing we project our essential self, as if that is what our life means to us.
The logic of identity, of equivalence, not the copula, nor the 'is' of existence,
articulates not only what the poetry means but what we mean by ourselves. The
fragments of The WasteLand are dying (or are dead) in the way that we are dead or
dying. This is the crucial analogy.
Thetemptationtowardatheoryofidentityasatheoryofmeaningbuildsminds, as we saw in
Jakobson, because it is the limit of death that constructs our lives asReproduced
permission.
containers (with holes, as sieves ofvarious kinds, shapes, and sizes). To enter
language through identity is as if to enter as a container.The Waste Land wants to
be the answer, whatever that might mean or entail, to the riddle: What is made o f
words but is akin to the Sibyl? It attempts to translate the ordinary disjunction
between these two time series into a form o f being. Such a translation is a
process of symbolization, the engine for generating symbols. Not all symbolization
proceeds through such a translation, which is itself already either
metaphoricoritselfasymbolandinthisapictureofthepossibilityofusinglanguage. The
notion o f time itselfj because it is not an entity within our experience, but can
only be seen as an effect. But does this imply a cause? How would we know that time
is an effect? The very structure oftime looks like what Cora Diamond calls a great
riddle: "'the riddle of life in space and time,' 'the riddle "par excellence'" as
Wittgenstein called it, and which he said was not a question" (268).19 As we saw in
Chapter n, the Finnegans Wake versiono f the great riddle is, in its final version:
"The first and last rittlerattle o f the anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam
whenas it is a. Watch!" (FW607.10-12). When is a man/name not [nothing] a man/ name
whenas it (nested in the world o f objects) is a--but not a thing at all but either
watch Finnegans Wake or when he is a watch, timing theworld, which is to clock
human language against both the world and our fantasies. The Sibylshrinks,
"aWomanoftheWorldwhocanTellNakedTruthsaboutaDearManandall his Conspirators"
(FW107.03-04). But in Eliot's waste land the saint's quest diminishes any woman;
but this diminishment translates identity into the ordering pattern oftime.
Canthiskindoftimesupportasoul? AnAristoteliansoulhylomorphicallyReproduced with
permission.246
identical to the body can produce only the Sibylline immortality. Joyce glosses
"Here is a homelet not a hothel" (FW586.18) when someone gets aetherealized into
desire: "Sylphing me when is a maid nought a maid he would go to anyposs length for
her!" (FW495.6-7). Paracelsus populates the air with the elemental sylph; this
sylph constitutes what in The Waste Land one can call the void and the Sibyl as the
holding of the ampulla. How does she dwell in the world? In a "homlet" and not a
"hothel"?1Table TalkandOmnianaofSamuelTaylorColeridge. 2"The Love Song of J. Alfred
Pnifrock."3 These quotations are both from "Gerontion."4"Little Gidding"5"The Love
Song ofJ. Alfred Pnifrock".6JosiahRoyce'sSeminar1913-1914,ed.GroverSmith.
AlsomentionedinLyndallGordon,Eliot's Early Years, 58.7Psycho-analysis and its spawn
oftherapies and descriptions interprets fantasy as modes or expressions of
sicknessorhealth.
Psychologicalallegoriesconstruedreamsasmeaningfulmanifestationsofembedded
allegoricalscenesorpatternsofrelationconstitutingparticularsetsofpsychological'enti
ties'. These
manifestationpretendtobecaused,althoughthemechanismsofcausationareunexplained;
psychological meaning, etiology and structure, do not map onto the physiology o f
the brain. Cognitive science must reduce all forms of qualia, consciousness,
feelings, etc., to the quanitities describing brains, or logic, or mechanism.
Thisreductionisresistedbyanumberofphilosophicalblackboxeswitheitherspecial
functions or as irreducible states.8 We do not write a theory o f knowing in order
to determine what we know, but as a means for the world to claim or reject us.
9Paremenides ofElea: Fragments, A Text and Translation with an Introduction. Trans.
David Gallop, (Fragment3). Thetranslationismine.
10Sparshott,F.E.LookingforPhilosophy. SeealsoGallop(above)andJ.BarnesThePresocratic
Philosphers, 155-230.11WarrenS.McCulloch. EmbodimentsofMind.
Thisquestiondescribesacertainontological- physiological-logical nexus that would
allow it to be rephrased as "What is a Number, that a Woman May
KnowIt,andaWomanthatSheMayKnowaNumber?" Thepressurethisformulationputson "knowing"
compresses thinking into our species-being.12Cited and translated in Duhem, 360.
13EC: "East Cocker"; BN: "Burnt Norton"; DS: "Dry Salvages": LG: "Little Gidding.
14The Tractatus begins "The world is everything that is the case" in order no"t
only to end with an appeal to silence, but in order tojustify Wittgenstein's
intuition that "The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of
this problem":the problem is a riddle that neither the after life will answer ("Is
this eternallifenotasenigmaticasourpresentone?
Thesolutionoftheriddleofourlifeinspaceandtime lies outside space and time"[6.4312])
15This is the use/ mention distinction described by Quine.16What is being claimed
to be identical with what? An object is conceptualized within a specific kind of
discourse, a language game, or under a particular aspect and equivalence is
asserted according to the terms,criteria,aspectdefinedbythisdiscourse.
Inthesecasestheassertionx=ysuggeststhatundera particular aspect or discourse they
can be construed as the same, synonomous, and thus replacable asReproduced with
permission.247
reflections o f each other: x=y is true because each term can be reduced to or
substituted for the other and thus they become identical as x=x or y=y; x=x defines
x=y describes the relation between x and y.17 An interesting case o f an attempt to
formalize the interrelation between identity, existence, and
predicationcanbefoundinthelogicalontologyofthePolishlogicianLesniewski.
Hisformalization makesexistenceascountable.
Ileavethishereasanoteonlytobringouttheprincipleofcountability[as
anassumption]asakindofKantianform:
thetheoreticalmachineinmylastchapterispartlydesignedto
discoveritselfinthiscounting.
Thisdiscoveiyisthelinchpinbetweenalgorithmicfunctioningand metaphoric self-
description [of course my machine is nothing but the latter- described as if it
were the former].
Lesniewski'slogicallanguagedescribesthecomplexityoftheverb'tobe'throughlogical
relations. The means by which this is done shows the possiblitities, assumptions,
and limitations o f any suchlogicaldescription.
SeeC.Lejewski"OnLesniewski'sOntology"Ratio1(195S),150-76.18 Compare with Alice in
her adventures in Wonderland, 37.19 The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy,
and the Mind.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
8(How) Can things mean?Eliot sketches the smudges on the Sibyl's glass bottle and
mimics the echoing noise o f the world inside the bottle. Hiedgger, in "Das Ding"
recasts the glass bottle into athrownpot,ajug,athing.Whatisthesoulofathing?
Iquotemypreviousdescription: "In his latter work, Heidegger reconstitutes the
ontological claims the world makes on us as semantic functions, as following a
conceptual pattern o f meaningful relations. In other words, he attempts to
reconstitute what something is as what it means. These ontological claims and
semantic possibilities determine Being, not simply as existence, but as the
functional condensation of all meanings ofthe verb 'to be' into those aspects of
our experience we recognize as things, ourselves, and the world. "Das Ding" enacts
the question 'What is the qualitative aspect o f things? from within a language
that can enact the answer as our re-education; the ontology of things in their
participation or inhabitation of Being can look like a psychology of things.
Heidegger begins his essay with the question "What is a thing?" He takes this
question to be asking something like 'How do things exist?' or 'What exists for
us?'. His answer to these question, however, proceeds through asking 'what does
"existence" mean?', questioning the verb o f 'to be' into its ontological and
functional force. We inhabit this force through a redemptive semantics which
transforms the concepts o f identity and predication determining existence, 'being'
and 'is', from a world both containing and against us, into the categorical
semanticNotes for this chapter begin on page 326Reproduced with permission of the
ambiguity of the word 'weilen' (dwelling, staying, abiding, lingering) under the
pressure of this re-education."I want to use this re-education as a way of
sketching how time can be translated into a grammar. Strictly speaking, this is not
meant as a critique ofHeidegger, as much as an attempt to write an exegesis of "Das
Ding" towards the limits of our language exposed under the pressure o f the
concepts o f things and o f time that he reads in his description o f a jug. It is
at these limits that the relation between animation and semantics offers
descriptions o f how we make and inhabit the world in which we find ourselves.I
want to begin with some confusion about one o f the ways the mind emerges in Being
and Time as a way of opening up a set of questions that will lead me through "Das
Ding". To recognize something as countable is to know how to count. Knowing how
constructsthedomainofthecountable. Thisisthewayinwhichpracticesgain ontological
significance. Heidegger in Being and Time, therefore, is correct, I think, to the
degree that he says our being-in-the-world necessarily requires and functions
within pre-established domains of interaction, something like what Wittgenstein
means by forms of life. Heidegger asks, in chapter IV, what allows for the mutual
interaction among Dasein, things, and other humans?: "The Others who are thus
'encountered' in a ready- to-hand, environmental context o f equipment, are not
somehow added on in thought to some Thing which is proximally just present-at-hand;
such 'Things' are encountered from out ofthe world in which they are ready-to-hand
for Others~a world which is always mind too in advance' (BT154;118). Heidegger
thinks, however, that counting disguises this requirement:Reproduced with
permission.250
Even to come across a number o f 'subject' becomes possible only if the Others who
are concerned proximally in their Dasein-with are treated merely as 'numerals'.
Such a number o f 'subjects' gets discovered only by a definite Being- with-
andtowards-one-another. This'inconsiderate'Being-with'reckonswiththe Others without
seriously 'counting on them', or without even wanting to 'have anything to do' with
them. (BT163)I f we clarify Heidegger's mood in saying this, we might translate
this as "we count so we don't have to count what we count". Is the fact that
"count' can also mean 'to matter', 'to have significance or value' an indication of
the hidden structure of what Heidegger calls care[Sorge]inknowing?
ofanecessaiy(orsupervening)relationbetweenvaluingand knowing?Answering this
question, I think, would involve answering why Heidegger attempts to dissolve
empathy into what he calls Being-with, my finding myself already within a world
with others:Dasein is with equal originality being-with others and being-amidst
intraworldly beings. The world, within which these latter beings are encountered,
is .. .always already world which one shares with the others. (Basic Problems, 297)
We can at least ask: Is Heidegger justified in making empathy dependent on Being-
with as a way of grounding Dasein outside of doubt? Does taking a stance toward
others as if they had souls undo my doubt that their souls are like mine?In Being
and Time, Heidegger wants to undo the structuring of our being in the world as a
form of knowing, determined as a relation between subject and predicate,Reproduced
permission.251
quantified in such a way as to insure that to exist is to be constituted as a
metaphyscial form o f identity. The relation between subject and object quantified
in this way constructs our subjectivity, our being, within the realm of objects. If
such an objecthood is to be resisted as the ground ofour being, then one must
reinhabit the meaning ofBeing, recognize as authentic (although the complexity o f
this recognition prevents any brief description) Dasein's being in the world prior
to its becoming my world. The structure of this involvement is exposed
authentically as care (sorge), which is our responsiveness, our being in relation
to time, where "being is itselfan issue." Dasein is "[ejssentially ahead of itself'
(BT458;406), "ahead-of-itself-being-aIready-in-(the-world) as being-amidst
(entities encountered within-the-world)"(BT237; 192). Temporality is understood as
a dynamic involvement within the world against which the identity o f things is
constructed, as a resistance. We must re-enter this temporality through care in
order to re-enter the ground or the meaning of our being as non-things.Heidegger's
conceptualizing ofDasein as Being in the world, Dasein's proximate and for the most
part relation to the world, unwinds the object status o f the world into a
relational disposition that places the world and our relation to it before our
construction of theworldintothings. Doubtasaspeciesoffailuretransformswhatisready-
to-hand(our ordinary usage o f things) into present-at-hand (the presence o f
objects as against us) and therefore into things (or what in "Das Ding" he will
call objects). As things the objects of our dispositions and intentions, o f our
world, lose the guarantee o f their relation to us (in third man arguments, for
example); and thus doubt can work its way into skepticism.Reproduced with
permission.252
Heidegger constructs "the They" in chapter IV as a replacement for matter as the
given form o f our substantiality, and thus as the guarantee o f the world and our
relation to it. How can one be an entity and not an identity? How can one be
relational and still work within our embodied form? The riddle is 'what is both
subject and yet not an identity reducible to a thing?': We--they, us, "das Man."
Underlying the question o f who is Dasein, in chapter IV, is the question cDo we
function as things, as individuals organized as identities?' For Heidegger, it is
the relation between identity and thing that must be avoided, displaced into our
Being-with, our existing as a function of our relations withothersandwiththeworld.
The"wayofBeing"configuresDasein(anditsBeing)as a disposition and a becoming (a
function of time): how do we temporally exist within the everyday? How is this
Being within everyday time a disposition toward others? Why dowe count others as
versions of ourselves?Associating 'mattering' and 'numbering' (a form of knowing)
in 'to count' mightbe justified by 'numbering recognizes, and recognition values'.
Is this order correct: knowingthenvaluing?
Whatdowegainifwereversetheorderandsayvaluing recognizes? Counting is a way of
constructing a set. We can mark value within a set or
betweensetsbynumberingwithordinals. Isthisanexplanationforthemeaningof'to count'?
When it means 'mattering', counting is a way of making value explicit. How can
caring become abstracted into counting? What exactly does counting make explicit
about caring? Heidegger assumes we can care (solicitude) without counting. But can
we care outside o f our need and ability to count (which Heidegger would agree is a
function o f our doubting, i.e. needing to know)? (Wittgenstein's resistance to
scientific knowing asReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
immoral and destructive suggests that a scientific attitude is not a legitimate
form o f life, although it can operate with legitimate language games in some
domains.) This might be a way of asking how skepticism makes empathy possible
(something Heidegger implies,BT163). What is the difference between the symbolizing
procedures (the structure of identities and relations) which define empathy and
solicitude? If solicitude can for Dasein "take away 'care' from the other and put
himselfin his position in concern" (BT158), it requiresakindofself-
symbolization(toallowforthisreplacement). Tosaythatempathy depends on a greater
estrangement between Daseins than solicitude does not at all challenge the similar
conceptual relations that construct an Others as something that can be replaced by
oneself. The ability to "leap in" for someone else, while it structurally agrees
with the condition of the "They", where "everyone is the other, and no one is
himself' (BT165), is a Being-with-another by "not 'mattering' to one another"
(BT158). Solicitude,therefore,cantaketheformofdenyinganother,orfailingtounderstand.
If such a denying is possible, lying is possible. In fact one could understand
solicitude-as- domination as a form o f lying based on the symbolization o f the
other as someone to be replaced (to be used). Wouldn't this kind of leaping in
create conflict? Does this kind ofsolicitude meet with opposition? And can it fail?
Similarly, whatever allows us to feel empathy also allows us to lie. How could we
lie without simultaneously ascribing mental states to others, which we then
manipulate, assuming our mental state(s) can be hidden? Lying requires both caring
("the other is primarilydisclosedinconcemfiilsolicitude",BT161)anddoubting.
Chimpanzeescan bothlieandcount. HowcanwedissolvelyinginBeing-with?
ThepossibilityoflyingandReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
our need to lie arises out o f our solicitude. Lying can function as the failure to
recognize another in the face of one's own desire, such that one can replace one's
desire for another. Since this replacement takes place in the context o f Being-
with, it represents a turning away that for the Other could be understood as a
hiding, This would not be lying only if we could cease Being-with, could erase our
mutual identity within the 'They'. Otherwise we are stuck in a split structure,
within a doubling, where we remain with the other but in thewayofhisnotmattering.
Ontologysplitsfromvaluing. Butwithoutthisvaluingthe ontological relation expressed
in Being-with has not content, and could not describe our everyday existence.
Heidegger is stuck with the 'They' as the domain in which Being-with functions.
Being-with becomes an orientation o f the 'They', within the 'They', as who a
particular entity is (what is ontic if not a "non-committal formal indicator"?
BT152). The content ofDasein is simultaneously its context (and thus Heidegger
seems to avoid the separation between universal and particular). "Our" Being-with,
therefore, is not so easily separated from empathy (as concomitant with lying). The
ontological unity o f Being-with,at the level o f complexity o f Dasein, already
involves a kind symbolization that allows for counting and doubting. Being-with
because it embodies an orientation, and is not simply unconsciousness in the way a
lower animal might be unconscious, must conceive of others within a realm in which
our orientation might fail, creating the possibility for doubt.Heidegger resists
and ignores this possibility in Being and Time. In "Das Ding" "Being-with"
describes our nearness (or relation and involvement both ontologically and
semantically) to and with things. Heidegger's philosophical therapy is directed at
exposing our "Being-with" within the totality ofthe world as an animate whole. This
means that "Das Ding" is a manual for animating the world as a means o f re-
animating being human outside ofthe temptations ofself-reflection that have reduced
being human to consciousness (Descartes) and then to a mode o f knowing (Hegel).
Heidegger's philosophical therapy resists (or Heidegger fails to understand) the
meaning and depth of the scientific stance within and towards the world (partly
because he collapsesscienceandtechnology).
Thisscientificstancewasarticulatedclearlyby Lucretius inDe Rerum Natura: "The dread
and darkness ofthe mind cannot be dispelled by the sunbeams, the shining shafts o f
day, but only by an understanding o f the outward form and inner workings o f
nature" (31). Lucretius attempts to separate psychology, or rather divinity, from
physics, while Heidegger wants to collapse both into a more
fundamentalstancetowardearth,sky,mortalsanddivinities. Thehistoryofscientific
therapy has yet to be written, as has a study investigating the depth of the
question 'how is it?' and its relation to the question 'why is it?' (This is not to
suggest that science reaches"the real in its reality" [DD170]). Heidegger, in "Das
Ding", is partly attempting to usurp these questions, suggesting that in the case
of the jug whose nature he is exploring science gives "no thought to how the
containing itselfgoes on" (171). While I do not think this is true, it opens up the
intersection between science (or knowing) and the question of the meaning ofthings
(or, in this case, ofjugs and containing). This intersection is what allows
Lucretius to offer "the inner workings of nature" as an antidote to "dread and
darkness." Thus,Heideggerbringsusclosetosomeofthequestionsofscience(although he
misrepresents their nature as scientific questions at least). And he is right to
suggest that the meaning of our ontological commitments cannot be given by science
(although IReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
do not think they can be 'given' by his semantic ontology either). Heidegger, at
least, attempts to undo who we are as what and how we know, and in this avoid
skepticism by animatingtheworld.
Herevealsourrelationtotheworldasnotdeterminedorlimitedto representation (knowing)
and asserts that science pictures and structures a world around the equation person
= object + life = automaton; this picture o f science is more akin to vitalism than
modem biology.In "Das Ding", Heidegger's philosophical therapy contests the
semantics and the ontological claim o f ways o f making and being made. One aspect
o f this contestation enfilades along a line between 'making' and 'educating'. The
relation between makingand education, however, is not symmetrical, bound as they
both are to different pictures of whatisgiven.
HeideggerenjoinsPlato'ssubsumptionof'becoming'ineducationand 'recalling' in
knowing. Becoming human, recalling our humanness, through the reconceptualization o
f our being in the world in relation to things, proceeds throughrecalling our
nearness to things as things, before they emerge as objects o f our knowing, as
some predicate attached to a subject. But what can this 'before' mean here?
Heidegger collapses (as a function of his holism, although there is some confusion
here, I think, as well) four possible interpretations of this 'before':1.
historical before2. psychological before 3. false consciousness 4. loss/ recovery
Historical loss describes the diminution and rejection of the Pre-Socratic
expression of the relation between humans and the world (the conception ofBeing), a
rejection that, he claims, precipitated the philosophical confusion ofWestern
civilization. This loss, however, has a psychological analogue in the way
subjectivity is formed within the context ofourparticularculturesandsocieties.
Ineitherthehistoricalorpsychologicaldimension, however, Heidegger is faced with the
possibility that our relation to Being remains an unrecognized existential-
ontological reality (described in Being and Time) or that this relation has been
lost and must be recovered (a possibility which was partly responsible for his turn
towards historical interpretation).8.1 MatterHeidegger wants to make the relation
between mathematical description and semantic expression into the riddle: What's
the difference between an atomic bomb and ajug? Theybothlooklikeajug.
Theirdifferenceistheirsimilarity. Isn'tabomb something like a jug? They both bring,
or 'gather', atoms together. Atomic bombs do not always go off. I can use a jug to
hit you over the head: it might not destroy a city (or even a world), but it might
kill you. Not anyone could build an atomic bomb. Uranium, or any fissionable
material, is hard to come by. But even if I did not understand the physics, that
is, if I could not make it the first time, I could follow someone's instructions. I
wouldn't know how it worked or why I built it in the way I did, but I could make it
without any conscious commitment to the laws of science underlying it, except for
my faith that such a combination of stuff could produce an explosion. It might seem
likeReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
magic to me. Could I make a jug, even if I just followed instructions, and not know
how it works as a jug, or even how my making worked? I am nearer to the inside o f
a jug than I am to the inside of an atomic bomb.Let's ask the question again:
what's the difference between an atomic bomb and a jug? I can mistake myselffor
ajug, but not for an atomic bomb--even ifI know that I ammadeofatoms.
Imightcallyouajug-head,andmeanyourmindisavoidorthatyour ears look like jug-handles
or that you look like a cartoon character. If I say you're an atomic bomb, I might
mean you hurt a lot o f people. That you might metaphorically explode and
transgress the limits o f human behavior in some kind o f orgy o f violence.God
made us like we make a jug, formed out of clay. Is that more reasonable than that
we were made and determined by the same laws of physics made articulate and used to
construct the atomic bomb?Feynman asks at the beginning of his Lectures on Physics:
I f , in some cataclysm, all o f scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and
only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement
would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic
hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things
are made o f atoms-- little particles that move around in perpetual motion,
attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon
being squeezed into one another. (1-2)How much rests on the atomic constitution
ofmatter? What is the role ofjustification and value in this sentence? Language is
reduced to its informational content. This informationReproduced with permission of
is communicated within a kind o f scientific fragment: a basic descriptions o f the
relations which determine the physical world as the physical world. The world
consists of an exceedingly large number of particles or parts. These parts have
specific and law-likerelations describing their interactions as a function o f
their distance from each other, at a little distance they attract each other, but
at a smaller distance they repel each other.'Atoms' answers the question 'what are
we made of?' Modem materialism does not necessarily dissolve the mind into material
interactions, rather these interactions
describeaparticularlimittowhatcancountasanexplanation. Itrulesoutspiritormagic for
example. What counts as an atom, how atomic relations constitute matter and how
mathematical descriptions capture fundamental relations and constituent aspects are
allquestions beyond saying the world is made of atoms. Scientific knowledge
describes the world in such a way that we can act through that knowledge to predict
events, to alter events and forms, to discover how the givenness of our world works
and determines itself as a world limited by the same limitations binding us.
Heidegger asks what is the nature of determining what the world is as a world,
through knowing. This question does not ask about the nature of reality nor about
what constitutes the real or the world. In fact it forecloses that question in
order to demonstrate that at the most fundamental stage of the recognition of a
thing (or non-conceptual seeing) our stance toward the world is determined as
meaningful. And thus Heidegger attempts to describe epistemology as a form of
semantics, or rather to dissolve epistemology into an ontological semantics, where
what counts as 'ontological and
'semantic'iswhatistobediscovered(ordescribedorunconcealed). Whatthisineffect
entails is the transformation o f what Heidegger understands as Science's question
(a lot is already hidden in personifying science here, in not asking about
different sciences at different times as defined in the practices of different
scientists) from 'what is the real thing (object)?' into 'what does a thing mean?'
That Heidegger phrases his question as 'What is a thing?' indicates that this
transformation must take place in our understanding of'is', and in this the
question ofour figuration and picture ofthe real is bound with whatit means to be
(the question ofthe meaning ofBeing). One ofthe goals of"Das Ding" is to replace
sein, ist with Gegenstand, stehen, vorstellung, Weilen (west; verWeilen),
versammelt, ring and gering within a coherent idiom.Heidegger describes a vessel as
"something self-sustained, something that stands onitsown"(DD166).
ThisiswhatHeidegger'slanguagepantomimes,whathecallsour saying, and by this he means
the ordinary logic through which a thing is a thing, as "the
thinglycharacterofthething"(DasDinghafledesDinges). Athingbecomesanobject
(Gegenstand) when or if "we place it before us" (against us; ob-, gegeri). An
independent, self-supporting thing may become an object if we place (stelleri) it
before us, whether in immediate perception or by bringing it to mind in a
recollective re-presentation. We make a thing into an object by this placement or
standing (stelleri). Placement is a presentation of the thing as against us, as a
form distinct from other forms. Heidegger obscures what
thisplacingconsistsof,howwedoit,whywedoit,andsoon. Anaccountofthegenesis of our
fall into an object world would force Heidegger into metaphysics.Our stance toward
the world can be defined by this placement in which objects appear in our
"immediate perception" (and in this it is not a placement o f the object but
our placement o f ourselves before the fact). Recollection replicates this stance
by presenting the world, representing things as presentable, and thus as presenting
the thing asknowable: representingmeansknowing.
Whatisrecollectedisthestancedetermining the thing as object. This stance because it
defines an object as an object, in the way that social relations are inscribed in
and as the commodity in Marx, embodies in the object, andthus the object mirrors
our being human knowers. If we discover a world of objects, it is because we have
become objects ourselves. We might call this one way ofbecoming objective. This is
at least true for science which "always encounters only what its kind o f
representation has admitted beforehand as an object possible for science" (DD170).
This link between our stance and the world justifies Heidegger's assumption that
the reformation o f being human can proceed through saving things from objecthood.
Heideggerdoesnotofferajustificationforhiswaytowardreformation. Partofthis
reformation consists of embedding value in the world (the quadrature or fourfold)
outside ofthe demand and criteria forjustification (ofknowledge, belief, ofsense or
nonsense).1 The form o f the jug is lost to the jug acting and our use resides not
in our acting but in the time-series constituting jugging (the jug).Heidegger, for
example, counters skepticism with the assertion that "[t]he jug remains a vessel
whether we represent it in our minds or not" (DD167). But this is not an argument
or an invocation of what tempts us toward doubt or even a counter to the Cartesian
dualism that sets up the problem of mind and world that is one ofHeidegger's
specific targets. The temptation he is diagnosing here is our tendency to see the
self- standing independence ofthejug (ofthings) as a function ofits being made or
oftheReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
description of how it is made. The onlyjustification for ignoring the force of
skepticism, if we ignore his final goal to undo the unity between knowing and
being, he offers here, although it is less an offer than a strategy, appeals to a
scientific principle, that something is first what it is when it is made.Clearly
the jug stands as a vessel only because it has been brought to a stand. This
happened during, and happens by means o f a process o f setting, o f setting forth,
namely, by producing a jug. (DD167)Self-sustaining and supporting (Selbstandigen)
determines the jug as a thing, but not as an object. Does this "standing on its
own" (<das in sich steht) ("Das Ding" 158) happen during the process of producing
the jug? "Clearly the jug stands as a vessel only because it has been brought to a
stand" (DD167).2 Standing on ones own is not the same as being brought to a stand
(Stehen). In confusion we understand self-support "in terms of the making process.
Self-support is what making aims at" (DD167). Our confusion, it seems, is to
understand the meaning of "self-support" as determined by the "making process." For
Heidegger this is a kind of category mistake. The 'meaning' of thejug can only be
its use. One would expect that Hiedegger, even at this early stage o f the essay,
would suggest the way in which the meaning of 'self-support' is bound by its
inclusion in our intentions, practices, language, and so on. Instead, he
personifies making, itself, giving itan intention that is satisfied (if successful)
in "self-support": "Self-support is what making aimsat."
Heideggerdistinguishesherebetween'meaning',orthedeterminingofidentity (and
therefore this is already a site o f confusion between meaning and ontology), and
'causation', the "making process." Heidegger, however, is careful how he invokes
cause,Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
and in fact reinstitutes the confusion between meaning and cause, attaching it not
to the jug,buttothe"makingprocess"throughhisascriptionofintention.
Heidegger(orrathermy interpretation) makes explicit that all descriptions o f cause
(even in science) inscribe an intentionality (described by laws) that provides an
agency for any particular cause. The way this agency (or intentionality) attaches
to other 'things' (how and towards what 'effect' something is animated) can be
confused (and can describe the difference between science and phenomenology, for
example). Heidegger's goal, therefore, is to reconfigure the lines o f animation
(intention) in such a way that they make an animate world (the concept or the sense
o f an 'animate world' is exactly what is at stake in such a picture).The jug is
brought into the same world as the earth, being made o f earth, and thus
itcanstandontheearthbyvirtueofthisidentityinmaterial. LockeintheEssayonHuman
Understanding refills Descartes definition of matter as extension with solidity:
This of all other, seems the Idea most intimately connected with, and essential to
Body, so as no where else to be found or imagin'd, but only in matter: and though
our Senses take no notice of it, but in masses of matter, of a bulk sufficient to
cause a Sensation in us; Yet the mind, having once got this Idea from such grosser
sensible Bodies, traces it farther; and considers it as well as Figure, in the
minutest Particle o f Matter, that can exist; and finds it inseperably inherent in
Body,where-ever,orhowevermodified. ThisistheIdeabelongstoBody, whereby we coneive
it to fill space. The Idea o f which filling o f space, is, That where we imagine
any space taken up by a solid Substances; and, will for ever hinder any two other
Bodies, that move towards one another in a strait Line, fromReproduced with
permission.264
coming to touch one another, unless it removes from between them in a Line, not
parallel to that which they move in. (Q.iv.1-2)Two bodies cannot occupy the same
space. Bodies fill space, and this filling while it canexist at many points in
space (within the pre-existing dimensionality o f space) marks the limit between
other bodies. Locke is ignoring permeability, but if such permeability is described
at a macro-quantum level there is no problem. Permeability requires holes. It is
possible, however, although improbable, that a truck might drive through a 'solid'
hill becauseofquantumtunneling. ButifweimaginethatLocke'sanalyticdescription
captures the logic o f our senses and perception then it captures the rules we
apply to our perceptionsinordertoproduceorrecognizebodiesinspace.
Heideggerassertsthat common substances resist each other, but interact through this
resistance. It is the nature ofearthtoresistthingsmadeofearthandsoon.
Lockedefinesbodiesthroughtheirformal integrity described as their possession ofa
particular area of space. Heidegger's use of, what I consider, a Lockean version of
matter, however, is less about the nature of matter than it is about the semantics
of being 'in space'. Locke's matter, therefore, means to be self-standing and self-
supporting. To be 'in' matter is to be constituted in this way.Such a vision of
matter and being-in describes not only things but people, or rather "Man in the
State [ofLiberty]". In this State men "have an uncontrollable Liberty, to dispose
of his Person or Possessions" (Second Treatise, ?6). In order to provide the
justification ("justifie to the world") for representative government, Locke must
establish a limit to arbitrary power ("Just and Natural Rights") in who someone is,
in their ontological-socialstatusasself-standingandself-supporting.
ThenaturalstateofbeingReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
human is a "State o f perfect Freedom to order their Actions, and dispose o f their
Possessions, and Persons, as they think fit, within the bounds o f the Law o f
Nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the Will of any other Man" (Second
Treatise, ?4). Andthus"everyManhasaPropertyinhisownPerson. ThisnoBodyhasanyRight to
but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are
properlyhis"{SecondTreatise,?27). Self-ownershipdeterminesthestatusofMan against
the power o f others. The scope o f power is limited by rights (as justification)
and expressed through ownership o f Property. Given his use o f this ontological
picture underlying both the status o f matter and men (not women o f course) in
Locke, Heidegger's transformation of matter (as self-supporting objects) into
mutually related things within and in relation to the earth, sky, mortals and
divinities can (and should) be read as a political allegory. There is a lot in
stake in such an allegory (I do not have the space to pursue such an allegory
here).Our making seems to place the jug as self-standing outside o f our
perception, and thus to constitute it as a thing and not an object. This is not
true, however:It is, to be sure, no longer considered only an object of a mere act
of representation, but in return it is an object which a process of making has set
up before and against us. Self-support is what the making aims at. But even in
truth we are thinking o f this self-support in terms o f objectness, even though
the overagainstness {Gegenstandlichkeit) ofwhat has been put forth is no longer
groundedinmererepresentation,inthemereputtingitbeforeourminds. ButReproduced with
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from the objectness ofthe object, and from the product's self-support, there is no
way that leads to the thingness o f the thing. (DD169)The jug is not a jug,
however, because it is made. It becomes a jug once it can be used as ajug. If that
uses pre-exists the making then it is made to fit that use. If such a use does not
yet exist, then it only emerges as a jug, out o f the background, once that use is
recognized and it, as a particular kind o f thing, is recognized as that use.This
picture of what something is within the semantics of its use opposes Heidegger's
picture of scientific reduction: "the wine became a liquid, and liquidity in turn
becameoneofthestatesofaggregationofmatter,possibleanywhere." Thismeans wine=liquid
=a state ofmatter. This equation describes the substrate ofall reality as matter,
as substance. When Heidegger says that the "states o f aggregation o f matter" are
"possible anywhere" he means that matter has been reduced to a quantity within a
single frame.
WhatHeideggerisresistinghere,ofcourse,isthereductionofthequestion'what is real?' to
the question 'what does it consist of?', asking instead the questions 'how do we
use it?' or 'what does it do?'.Themodemworldisaworldorganizedaroundquantity.
Timeandspacefall under sets of points in a meta-space which maps our travel or
experience in the world as a function o f speed, so that faster means less
distance. The Flugmaschine (airplane) and the Rundfunk (radio) shrink space; Film
shrinks time by translating the seasonal time scale through which plants live into
a representation taking a minute, or the sites of "altesler Kulturen" (ancient
cultures), as if their identity and inhabitation and animation exists in their
stones or the aura of their landscape, are transplanted by film into our present.
OurReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
space machines and time machines can present themselves to us while they present or
shrink the world so that we know it is the world they show us ("Der Film bezeugt
uberdies sein Gezeigtes noch dadurch.. We reach the world through our machines,
whichjustify their veracity through the transparency ofthe mechanisms, which can
film themselves,asinPersona,filmingthemselves. Thesemachinesfunctionastest
apparatuses, by and through which we determine what is real. For Heidegger, science
asks and answers the question, 'what is real?' This reality is guaranteed by
translating things into the logic described by machines, onto film or into
radiowaves or into a machine producing an asymmetry o f forces (an airplane), in
which the world is regularized into distance or rather into quantity.In such a
world, where the real is measured as quantities, "everything is equally far and
equally near". Science, according to Heidegger, places the world under the rule of
identity, where everything in its reduction to quantity, is equal ('gleich') under
this rule: this is how Heidegger understands objectivity.3 This is logically
equivalent to Marx's description o f exchange value, where use-value, the
qualitative value o f a product determined by its function and utility, is reduced
to a quantitative system o f equivalency. What Marx calls a Fetish generated by
capitalism, Heidegger calls an object generated by science and technology. Even if
this picture is true, how does objectivity or quantification erase the difference
between 'near' and 'far' so as to dissolve distance? Heidegger works against
objectivity here by foregrounding the meaning of far and near as describing
relative distancefromaparticularperspective.
Thus,heispositingtwolanguageswhichexpress
andembodyopposedandseeminglyincommensurablecriteriaforwhatisreal: theReproduced
permission.268
mathematical and the semantic. The mathematical produces the object, opposed to us
in an objective and meaningless space. The product o f the semantic is the thing,
constituted by what it does within an implicate order in which the real emerges as
that which is used (and thus within the quadrature o f earth, sky, mortals and
divinity each thinks, implies ontologically and reflects the other, through how
each determines the entelechy (its
actualityandcompletion)formingthefunctionofoneforanother). Heideggerassertsthat one
cannot move from the mathematical to the semantic, from the object to the thing. If
we have moved from the thing to the object, from the semantic to the mathematical,
what prevents the opposite movement? Even if these are incommensurable descriptions
o f the real, if the mathematical has replaced or overwritten (a palimpsest) to
varying degrees, the semantic, the possibility for this overwriting must exist
within the semantic.If something like this model is correct, then Hiedegger's
prohibition of moving from object to thing marks off our phenomenal semantic
relation to and within the world from any process o f being made, except our being
made by [a] divinity whose making determines us as usable for them. This is a way
of conceptualizing a necessary domain of intentionality as the world in which we
actually function.8.2 Whatisathing?:FunctionalismHave we lost our nearness to
things through a process o f history? Again andagain, like our innocence, as we
each mature? Is our nearness our everyday condition which we fail to see? fail to
see in varying degrees so that we actually live within a worldReproduced with
permission.269
whichisnolongernear? Allofthesequestionsaskifwecanwerecoverourselvesifthe world
remains as it is?If there is a single standard for what is real then there is no
distance, distance is redefined. Is this a re-definition o f space?Nearness
describes a conceptual relation between different categories or kinds, and thus is
not reducible to a single standard o f reality. The problem o f nearness is the
problem o f incommensurablity. Emerson wrote in one o f his journals: "There is
every degree of remoteness from the line of things in the line of words" (Journals
4:303).4 Human beings and things are constructed at the nexus o f such category
distinctions. This is why Heidegger thinks that the question "What is nearness?"
(DD171) is so important in determining the human relation to things: "Near to us
are what we usually call things.But what is a thing (Doch was ist ein Ding)"
(DD166). How is 'is' used here? How we read 'is' is what is at stake in the
difference between a 'thing', that which is near, and an object which is over
against us. Do we say a thing is a list of properties we predicate of a thing or of
all things or of thingness? If a thing is not these properties then this 'ist' is
not being used as a copula. Heidegger's immediate answer is "Ein Ding ist der Krug"
("A thing is a jug"). But does this suggest that all things are jugs? Why not say
"A jug is a thing"? This would agree with our desire to take this jug as an example
o f a thing. Heidegger makes the jug, instead, exemplary o f thingness: he can get
to the world, the quadrature,throughjugness.
Asanexampleajugisamemberofthesetorcategory 'things'. Heidegger wants to undo this
kind o f objectification o f things into a category. The exemplary status of'jug',
therefore, at least recognizes the force ofthe questionReproduced with permission
'what is a thing?' as asking for the identity ofthingness (x=y or x=x: the
difference between these is partly what's at stake in the essay). But answering
'what is a thing?" with "a jug" is a kind of mistake, at least an acknowledgment
that we do not know how to answer Heidegger's question.What would count as an
answer to a question o f identity? In mathematics it seems clear: 5+5=10. We can
substitute either side of the equation for the other, and thus algebraispossible.
Identity,therefore,seemstodescribesynonymyandthroughthis describes how words mean:
morning star = evening star. Thing as thing, and not as a particular thing, cannot
be picked out ofthe world like an object and put in such an equation. A thing is
the same as what? Another thing. Such self-reflection cannot yet
answerthesecondincarnationofHeidegger'squestion: "Whatinthethingisthingly? What is
the thing in itself?" Heidegger's version of a thing = thing will be "the thing
things", but this does not make any sense within our language, as a function of the
logic of 'is' that we understand. Heidegger must dissolve 'is' into nearness, a
language function describing a resolution o f the categorical difference between
quantity and quality. The quality of being a jug determines the jug as a jug, and
therefore as a thing: an identity.Heidegger asks "what is the jug?" This is not the
same kind of question as "what is a thing?". We can answer this question with
little ambiguity: "A vessel, something of the kind that holds something else within
it." "A vessel" answers "what is a jug?" with its function. A jug has a use first.
It becomes a thing (what it is) by having this use. Thus 'what is a thing?' asks
'what does a thing do?' But I imagine I still would not answer 'a thing things" or
'a jug jugs'. To what question might we answer this? I might say this in a
language that included x=x but not x=y, that is, a language without metaphors. O f
course, in our language we understand "a thing things" as a metaphor. A thing is
what it does and thus the noun 'thing' becomes a verb, becomes its function. Ajug's
nature is not brought about by making, because the use of anything is not
determined by making. Making something fulfills a use that pre-exists. Even if we
find a new use, or a use, for a found or already made object, it becomes what it is
to us through that use. The thing has to emerge as something within the scope ofour
concerns, as a part ofthe relations that constitute our world.Heidegger opposes
function to form as involving two different ontologies. Function determines the
real through nearness, something like an implicate order or series.5 Form
determines the real as substance and order: "That is why Plato, who conceives of
the presence of what is present in terms of the outward appearance,. .. everything
present as an object of making (des Gegenstand des Herstellens- arfahren)"(DD168).
What about representation, or the identity ofthings as form or as substance, as
Aristotle conceives of it in Book VII of the Metaphysics, is determined by
understanding, as Heidegger believed Plato did, "everything present as an object o
f making"(DD168). Similarly,whataboutunderstandingtheoriginofanobject(orthing) in
its making leads to an object overagainst us, or to identity as a function of form,
or to thehypostasisofknowingasbeing? Heideggerslipsoutofthisknotofquestionsand
assumptions by redefining "making" as "what stands forth" and not as that which
stands "against us" (iGegenstand). Heidegger recognizes that making is not the same
as representing, but if this making determines identity both making and
representing areReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
determinedbyasimilarkindofknowing. Standingforthimpliestwothings: "Stemming from
somewhere", having a beginning and an origin, a thing became, and thus did not
always exist as such, and it had a cause; and once made it exists within "what is
already present" (168). But neither standing forth nor standing against reaches
across the noumenal boundary to "the thing qua thing".6Heidegger investigates
things-in-themselves by investigating the onto-semantics o f the '-in-' sandwiched
between 'thing' and the self-possessive 'themselves'. The sides and bottom do not
hold the wine because we do not pour the wine "into the sides and bottom" (in den
Wcmdung und in den Boden). The sides and bottom are impermeable, but they do not
yet hold (noch nicht das Fassende). Because we pour the wine into the void formed
bythematerialformofthejug,thisvoidholds: DieLeereisdasFassendedesGefafies ("Das
Ding" 161). Heidegger determines identity as that which can be entered--by 'in'--
the empty space o f the jug is what the jug is as vessel because that is where the
wine is wheninthejug. Thefunctionofthejug,itsholding,takesplacethere.
Thislinksspace andidentitynotbypossession,butbyanequivalenceofbeing,byidentity:
theemptiness is where the wine is at another time. Die Leere in moment 1 = Der Wein
in moment 2 in the space defined by the sides and bottom. Possession implies a
separation, successivebeing as the space between, where the emptiness implies the
possibility o f replacement as wine, and where the wine implies the possibility of
replacement as emptiness. What exists is always permeable over time, and thus
existence requires not solidity vis a vis other objectsbutinterpentrability:
isthasbecomein(into). Theexampleofthejug,therefore, is hardly arbitrary. It
represents how things are: being a thing means by implication ?Reproduced with
permission.273
entering into o f being entered into. Even the scythe, while it does not seem to
have two states (empty and full, in varying degrees), cuts by entering into a
stalk. Already, with the jug to be means to be that which is containing, that which
can be entered or can enter (thewine). The jug as a vessel contains (or in
Hiedegger's language, holds); we are close to the jug jugs.Heidegger recognizes the
obvious in a comedy o f falling over: Butthejugdoesconsistofsidesandbottom.
Bythatofwhichthejugconsists,it stands. What would a jug be that did not stand? At
least a jug manque, hence ajug still--namely, one that would indeed hold but that,
constantly falling over, wouldemptyitselfofwhatitholds.
Onlyavessel,however,canemptyitself. (DD 169)We have a riddle: What would be a jug
that did not stand? answer: a jug. Such a misfit jug functions as a jug, but all at
once and outside of our use of that function (except as a joke, maybe). The failure
ofajug still marks it as ajug. This riddle, however, pretends topicture a jug
outside o f its essential form; a jug has sides, o f course; how silly, what would
a jug be that did not stand up? Is this standing what it means to have bottom and
sides? It can stand with these. But the silliness should ask what would a jug be
without bottom or sides? Nothing. Not even a not-jug. If the answer were a not-jug,
this would be like a jug exclaiming, I wish I was never bom. Heidegger's riddle
says, 'I wish I was never a jug.I'd rather be a bomb!' So I fill the jug with
explosives, with uranium maybe. But to be nothing could only result from an
alternate history, either for me or for the species.Reproduced with permission of
But ifI say, 'I don't want thisjug to be ajug, but I want it to be me,' and then I
fill it with circuits, or I paint on a face and put it into my bed; or I discover
I'm an object and I want to be a thing, or I'm a product of evolution and history,
but I want a teleology, so I fill myself with a soul. The potter makes the void, he
does not form the clay except as an accidentaleffectofshapingthevoid.
IfIpainttheamphoraamIpaintingthevoid?If I make a jug without an inside, a solid
jug, then I have made the form of a jug but not a jug. If I simulate the form of a
tree I have not made a tree; but if I simulate the functioning, the physiology o f
the tree in its actual working, then I have made a tree regardlessofitsform.
Notalltreeslookalike.IfIsimulatethefunctioningofahuman being, then I have made a
human being. In Cognitive philosophy this is called
functionalism,andservesasajustificationforthemechanizationofthemind. Buteven here
everything rests on what we mean by human being, and, as we might o f Heidegger, we
can always ask what does a human being do?8.3 A Thing is a Temporal Condensate of a
Semantic ChainA void is necessary but not sufficient to hold something; one also
needs a material
limitbywhichtocreatethevoidandkeepitstableandimpenetrableinnormaluse. Ajug holds
wine by creating a barrier between the liquid and the forces of dispersal,
primarily gravity. This material barrier separates two categories or kinds of
being: liquid (a state of matter operating as a substance in relation to our
interaction with it) and, for simplicities sake, the force (ofgravity). Even ifwe
revert to a pre-Newtonian scientific model and say the barrier is between the wine
and its tendency to fall toward the earth and spread itselfReproduced with
permission.275
into the largest container possible, we have two categories: the thing, call this
the existent, and its essence or tendency. Thus this is not a reduction into a
single category of equidistantandidenticalpointsoratoms.
Substancefunctionsasafulcrumwithwhichto lever essence and existence into contact.
Substance is, therefore, the point of categorical unity o f exactly the same kind
as nearness Heidegger posits as constituting a world. But there is a difference
between Hiedegger's nearness and the nearness o f substance. Heidegger builds a
reductive chain from substance to making to quantify through which science
functions. I will call this description through measurement. In this chain one can
see that the only point of categorical unity is in the making, between need, will,
goal and form and substance. The categorical unification o f how the jug works with
its substance istranslated into a determined unity between why the jug is made with
how the jug is made towork.
Makingleadsonlytosubstanceifthejustificationfornotonlywhyitismade(its
use)isunderstoodasansweringalsowhyitwasmadeinthewayitwas. Thisjustification
describes how the world works. Heidegger wants to prevent us asking why the jug is
self- standing, or rather from asking 'how does the jug stand?'. Such a question
leads us to the world, but not the world o f the fourfold. Because in this world we
are not used (by divinity). Use cannot counter the indifference of how the world
works. Hope might not find an adequate niche in either the mechanisms o f the
umwelt or the scientific descriptions of it. Hardy pictured this as tragedy:. . .
the whole field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without
features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse of skin. The
sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white vacuity o f countenance
with the lineaments gone. So these two upper and nether visages confronted each
other all day long, the white face looking down on the brown face, and the brown
face looking up at the white face, without anything standing between them but the
two girls crawling over the surface o f the former like flies.(Tess o f the
d'Urbervilles, ch. xliii)'Nature', the force of external or given coherence,
tinkers with our humanity, erasing our
faceandthenobsofmeaningattachedbypatheticfallacytoitsface. Itbecomesmore inhuman by
being cast as monstrously human, and then looking without eyes upon our
owndiminutionintoinsect-likeinsignificance. Theprocessofourspeciesbecomingself-
consciousnessinrelationtotheworldshrinksSibyl-likebeforethisindifference. Wearethe
Sibyl as a species.The particular usage of this jug may be to transport the wine,
to measure it, tostand as a work of art, or an um for the dead, to cook with, to
drink from. Are these all separate identities, or does this simply describe the
limits ofjugging?Asking 'how does the jug's void hold?' pressures the semantics o f
'void' and 'hold' into a new usage. A void takes 'what is poured in' and keeps
'what is poured in' (DD171).
Heidegger'sascribesintentiontothejugsothathowitholdsseemstosetup an ambiguous
acting where the jug is both taking and keeping. Heidegger calls thisambiguous,
which can only be true if the taking and keeping take place simultaneously. This
according to Heidegger's description is not true: taking happens first and then
keeping,thejug-thing,nowajug-person,takesthewineandkeepsit. Theambiguityisa
functionoftheidentityofthejugbeingitsholding,literallyhowitholds. ThustheReproduced
permission.277
ambiguity is a function of the demands of identity, that it be something that
extends over successivemoments,notsomethingelseineverymoment.
Heideggerisattemptingto figure the thing in time, constitute the thing as what
expresses timing (why not making time?). The unity ofjug asjug, the resolution
ofthe ambiguity between taking and keeping, between what is done and what was done,
therefore, is determined by the possibility for which the taking and keeping take
place, that is, 'the outpouring'.Function, the 'for which the jug is fitted as a
jug", determines the jug as jug by resting (beruhi) [again why not constituting?]
the jug on the possibility that excavates a fixture forthisjugtoenterintoasajug.
Thegroundofidentityisthefuturepossibilityinwhichthe function ofthejug can be
fulfilled. This future transposes the selfishness ofthe taking and keeping (can we
call this the immoral jug?) into giving (the moral jug?): "The holding of the
vessel occurs in the giving of the outpouring." 'Occurs' does not make sense here:
how can past actions occur in putative future actions? This use o f 'occurs' is
justified (but not explicitly) by the following description:1. "Holding needs the
void"2. thenatureofholdingisgatheredingiving3. giving constitutes what is given
(let's say the wine) as a poured gift4. thejug'scharacterconsistsofthispouredgift5.
if the jug remains a jug it can give again, so that the fulfilled possibility
remainsa possibility by virtue of its previous use.
'Occurs',therefore,means'becomes'andconsistsofanothertimeline. Theuseofthejug
happens in the ordinary world as a series o f actions. The function described by
this seriesReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
describes the jug as jug, and thus the jug becomes a jug through and by virtue o f
this function. Suchauseoffunctionisbestunderstoodasapseudo-mathematicalorlogical
function: / (jug) ([outpouring (giving) n holding (taking and keeping)] r>jug). In
such a function, 'outpouring', 'giving', 'holding', and so on are functors.This
pseudo-logic provides the leverage to generate a meta-description that can
stabilize the transformation of identity into existence as a temporal unity. It
gives us a relation between two temporal orders organized around implication,
understood as a becomingbyvirtueofwhatsomethingisbythisbecoming.
Thusthiscannotbestrictly causal, because identity is always a further effect and
never a cause except for after the fact. In the world o f Heidegger's jug all
causes are final causes, just as all forms o f 'to be' express existence.A jug is a
jug if it gives through taking and keeping and then outpouring (with the
understanding that this 'then' is a temporal marker outside of the jug as jug, that
is, its identity).(DD172).
Theunityoftakingandkeeping(holding)andoutpouringconstitutes
thefull(voile:asinafilledupjug)natureoressence(Wesen)ofgiving. Thisessenceis the
'poured gift' (das Geschenk). Geschenk has been translated as poured 'gift',
although it means simply 'gift', but like 'gift' in English 'Geschenk' is the
nominalization o f a verb 'schenken' or 'give'. Thus giving becomes giving if a
gift is given. The past tense prefix ge- marks the gift as already given, or rather
as a gift-thing within the economy o f giving. Once poured the pouring ceases, but
the poured gift remains poured and remains what it is as gift. Every point in the
time-line that describes how the jug is used, from taking to keeping to outpouring
to giving to gift, its jugness is totalized as implicit in the completedReproduced
permission.279
action. Thus, even ifthejug is empty its identity as gift exists as its potential
to give, but this potential is always actualized in our recognition ofthejug asjug.
Thejug acts because it is totalized within our time, while the jug is an object
when it is totalized within its own time. The time-line that constitutes the jug is
reduced to a unit which we recognize as ajug. Thus a unit of our time is condensed
into the jug, and that is its identity. The things around us, therefore, exist as
what they are as condensations o f different temporal series. This is the form o f
'to be' as implication organized as function and identity. A thing is a time series
that includes all possibilities o f its being what it is (all other moments in the
timeseries)atanyandeverymoment. Athing,therefore,asafunction,isdescribed through
and as a semantic chain consisting of a set of functors describing a succession
(and thus enacting a thing-specific temporality).8.4 The Ontological-Semantics of
WeilenThe interaction of these thing (time-condensates) form the world. How does
thisinteraction world? The unity or coherence o f the world is determined through
the products o f these series, the poured gift which enacts the identity o f the
jug as what it is. This poured gift, however, functions not only by virtue of the
jug but in relation to us: "The giving o f the outpouring can be a drink, The
outpouring gives water, it gives wine to drink" (DD172).With the gift as a gift we
enter the world from the thing. "Im Waser des Geschenkes weilt die Quelle" ("Das
Ding" 164):Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
In the water of the gift lingers dwelling (stays) the spring. In the spring the
rock dwells (weilt), and in the rock dwells the dark slumber ofthe earth, which
receives the rain and dew ofthe sky. In the water ofthe spring dwells (weilt) the
marriage o f sky and earth. It stays (weilt) in the wine given by the fruit o f the
vine, the fruit in which the earth's nourishment and the sky's sun are betrothed
(zugetraut)1 to oneanother
Inthegiftofwater,inthegiftofwine,skyandearthdwell(Weileri) [respectively]. But the
gift ofthe outpouring iswhat makes thejug ajug. In thejugness of the jug, sky and
earth dwell (Weilen). (172)Heidegger clusters things into a cosmogony o f dependent
relations, where this dependency evokes indeterminate causal relations (grapes,
from which we make wine, require sun and earth in order to grow because o f the
causal mechanisms producing photosynthesis, nutritional exchange, plant stability,
etc.). The relations between water, spring, rock, earth, sky, rain, sky, and sun,
however, do not function through these implied causal mechanisms. Their evocation
is not meant to invoke them. Our recognition o f their dependence is meant to
forestall our asking for either further causal elaboration or for ajustification
for this picture o f their relation.How do sky and earth dwell (sustained and made
visible or meaningful as sky andearth) in thejugness ofthejug? Things dwell or stay
or linger (Weilen) in each other. At this stage in the essay Hiedegger has re-
defined the Scholastic concepts o f existence and essence as the criteria for
being:1) Thingness, akin to quiddity, or essence: a thing is what it does as a
functioning temporal entelechion (something is if it functions as part of a series
of acts).Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
2) Existence, the potential to be 'in': an expression o f replacability, where the
x=y describes the potential for x and y to replace each other within a common
domain, that is, through mutual containment within a mutually describing category.
The criterion used to determine if the sides and bottom of the jug hold the wine is
whether "we pour the wine into [7/T] the sides and bottom" (169; underline added).
Each element, wine and void, for example, is only identical through their mutual
articulation o f a common space. Thus identity is determined as thepotential to be
'in' (in, into) the other; they are in each other without remainder, not as
described by the phrases 'the book is in the library' or 'the piston is in the
engine', but akin to Spinoza's use o f 'in' in his axioms concerning God: "All
things which are, are in themselves or in other things" (Ethics).The borders o f
this usage are sketched by the use o f 'in' in 'the boy is in the man', 'in my
life', 'in my heart', and even 'I was never in the in-crowd'. 'In', used in these
ways, marks the relation between two logical or grammatical categories in which
this relationship is both not reducible to the any one category and yet one o f the
categories functions as a totality (as void does in Heidegger's jug). Heidegger's
use o f 'in' describes the distance betweentwo
ofEmerson'suseof'in'inthefollowingquotationsfromhisessay"Circles":
Menceasetointerestuswhenwefindtheirlimitations. Theonlysinislimitation. ..
Infinitely alluring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to
swim in; now, you have found his shores, found it a pond, and you care not ifyou
never see it again. (169)Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
We learn that God IS; that he is in me; and that things are shadows of him. (170)
This distance, between the social (Thoreau's "seeing through another's eyes'") and
epistemological idealism pressures things-in-themselves back into our ordinary
involvement with others. These others are, however, things. (Heidegger constructs
humans as things, opposing the construction o f humans as objects).
Heidegger'suseofWeilenoverlapshisuseof'in'. "Thegiftoftheoutpouringisa gift because
it stays earth and sky, divinities and mortals": the criterion for being a gift is
this staying (it stays: weilt), and thus the outpouring can be justified as a gift
if it stays these four. The justification o f a semantic distinction, "is this
justifiably called a gift?", resides in the use of 'weilt' (stays) in a novel
fashion. One obscurity isjustified by another. We might ask, "how does this
outpouring cause this staying o f the earth, sky, divinities and mortals?" Stays
suggests an action or event that configures the world in a particularway.
Whyaskifthisisagiftifthecriterionforbeingagiftissoobscure? What kind offunction is
'Weilen'?How does an outpouring 'stay' these entities? (Thoreau would ask "why
'earth and sky, divinities and mortals?' What are these?") Heidegger can answer the
'how' but not the 'why' and the 'what': "Yet staying is no longer the mere
persisting of somethingthat is here. Staying appropriates." This staying, and
therefore its function as the criterion determining something as a gift (this
'something,' however, is an aspect o f something: Whitehead's unity o f internal
diversity), is not an apparent action. I can not say, let's make a test: 'Is this a
staying? or is this? Does this stay or does this?' Thus, its semanticReproduced
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obscurity marks it as a function different from the non-action of someone 'staying
put' or from the action o f 'taking off.' Staying happens as the world. It seems
not to have a context in relation to which it can happen, except in its blinking
away before the forms apparent in representation. Its failure happens as the loss o
f the world. Does the radical skeptic really lose the world? Insisting on a real
loss (really) can itself have no adequate criteria. We ask instead, can we exist
ever outside o f a world? I f we lose the sense o f our categories or assertions o
f existence, as both our existing and that which exists, we have lost the sense of
existence.8Theworldemergesastheworldofearthandsky,divinitiesandmortals: "Yet
staying is now no lnger the mere persisting of something that is here" (DD173;
underline added). Heidegger creates a temporal confusion: does this now mean 'at
this point in the lecture' or 'in our (his) thinking' or does it mean 'now that the
jug emerges as a jug through its functioning as a jug'? In other words can we say
that there exists two kinds of staying: (l)one as a function of form and
representation called normally identity and determined by persistence and (2)
another that underlies this one or emerges under the proper gaze as an
appropriating? Or is there just one form o f 'staying' that is mistaken under the
aspect o f representation. A "persisting o f something that is here" is no longer
staying "now". This 'now' is not the 'here' determining staying as identity. 'Here'
is construed here as the site o f the real, the present moment formed as the space
o f the world in that moment. 'Here' functions as the criterion for being real. So
why not say 'something that is here', what does 'persisting add'? Persisting links
the phenomenal present spatialized as a 'here'to a chain of"here's", all ofwhich
constitute both time andReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
theworld. Howisthe'now'thatmarksthenewmeaningofstaying(asnotaformal
identityofsomethingovertime)relatedtothispictureoftime? This'now'marksthinking as
an outpouring, as a gift that appropriates. What this thinking appropriates and
what the outpouring appropriates condense ontology away from the divisions between
mind and world. Thinkingnowisnotdeterminedbyanadequacyofrepresentation,butthe
belonging to the subject that allows it to emerge as such. Consequently, the
confusion of the 'now' semantically marks this now as a point of condensation for
two temporal series: the series defined by Heidegger's words and the series
described by the functioning of thejug. The jug, as a thing, builds its substance,
if we can call it that, within the same 'now' of our thinking. Can thinking or a
thinking or a thought exist in the same 'here' as a jug?
Weareontheedgeofacategoryconfusion. Butifweaskcanajugexistinthesamehere of a
thought, we are tempted to say the jug can exist in our thought, so that the
thought becomesametaphoricalherethatcansupporttheimaginedjug. Thisshouldseema
misuse o f 'here'.All we can say is that 'now' has entered into the semantic matrix
organized around Weilen. Heidegger continues to unfold this semantics. Staying
"brings the four into thelight o f their mutual belonging" (DD173). Mutual
belonging gives o f f some kind o f metaphorical light, or rather mutual belonging
make the four visible as mutually belonging. The circularity here is exactly o f
the sort as the confusion in the meaning o f the previous 'now'. The staying does
not create their mutual belonging it makes what already exists visible. Visible to
us? If the answer were yes, then we could still be confused about whether we create
the belonging or if we just suffer from false consciousness about theReproduced
permission.285
realnatureoftheworld. Thisvisibilityfunctionsforthefour,andforusifwefunctionas one
o f the four. Heidegger says "the four" are brought into the light o f their own
relationship. This is not light for them, but light caused by them. (The world both
through thejug and as the quadrature makes itselfvisible.) How does staying,
pouring wineoutofajug,bringtheearthandsky,mortalsanddivinitiesintovisibility?
Theunity o f the action o f outpouring that determines the jug as a jug ("staying's
simple onefoldness") betroths and entrusts the four to each other.At the level
ofdescription ofthis betrothal all four are the same, "at one" Heidegger calls it.
Their abstraction into a unity effect their unconcealment: their becoming true.
True for us? Or true to us? The outpouring enacts this unity o f the four, that is,
it abstracts them into a mutual belonging that determines the world as a world (as
coherent and complete). But this outpouring acts upon this abstraction which it has
itself created: "The gift o f the outpouring stays the onefold o f the quadrature o
f the four" (DD173).
Thisdoubleness,stayingintoaonefoldandstayingtheonefolditself,marksthe
complexityofthesemanticandtemporalcharacterof'Weilen'. Theoutpouringdoesnot stay
the earth and sky, divinities and mortals into a unity o f mutual belonging and
then staythis unity. Staying, therefore, does not enact anything, it does not make
this unity or act in time as we understand it (as succession or even as a present).
Heidegger wants to pressure matter into function (a hyloentelechia).9 This
criterion o f being as that which acts and is by virtue o f turning 'into' (or
maybe one should say being is what can function as a palimpsest: a palimpsest-
being) allows the void, even in its absence to do the holding at every moment by
being the wine as a holding. ThisReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
distorts the criterion of presence, that Derrida attacks, into another axis where
it remains one criterion for being, but within a matrix that includes the absence
of the void, the a holding o f the jug, the wine itself. The semantic force o f
holding as a partial entelechia (I use the plural here because nothing is itselfthe
completion of a function, ofjugging) happens without being present as such. But we
can say that the sides and bottom do not hold because they cannot enter into an
identity with the wine being held in the way the void can (even though it is
replaced). It's replacement is a categorical replacement. This is why Heidegger
shows that the air within the jug is not a void. Both a void and holding function
within the same logical category. Thejug as much as it does consist of clay can
only be anything, let alone a jug, if it includes this logical category, that is,
this relationbetween void and holding. But what does it mean to 'include' here? How
does a thing, a jug, include a conceptual semantics determining a void as a
holding?This is Heidegger's initial answer: "And in the poured gift the jug
presences as jug" (DD173) ['7m Geschenk aber west der Krug als K r u g In the gift,
however, staysthejugasjug.]
Thecontradistinction,hereamockdialectic,between"stayingthe onefold" ["verweilt die
Einfalf'], the acting ofthe outpouring determining the world as world, and the
particularity of "the staying in the gift" ["/m Geschenk. . . west'] through
whichthejugbecomesajugislostinHofstadter'stranslation. Isaythisisamock dialectic
because not only is there no sublation (aufhebung), it is exactly the conception of
matter as following a succession of states that disguises the jug as jug. What is
is alwaysgiven. It is not made nor does it function as a cause or emerge as an
effect. Heidegger is articulating a holism in which the semantics of our language
open, in 'weilen' for example,Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
as a function of our dwelling in language,10condensing the categorical distinctions
in our uses of 'to be' into or as things and the world. The functioning ofthejug,
as an action, which at every semantic functor--taking/ keeping/ holding/
outpouring/ gathering--
completesbyimplicationallpreviousandfutureaspectsofthejugsfunctioning: tohold
implies, by a kind of ontological or aesthetic [the distinction between these
begins to blur] implication, outpouring. Time is condensed in the semantics o f
things away from causal chains and into implicate unities:W e view action only as
causing an effect. The actuality o f the effect is valued accordingtoitsutility.
Buttheessenceofactionisaccomplishment. To accomplish means to unfold something into
the fullness of its essence, to lead itforthintothisfullness-producere.
Thereforeonlywhatalreadyiscanreallybe accomplished, But what "is" above all is
Being. Thinking accomplishes the relation of Being to the essence of man. It does
not make or cause the relation. Thinking brings this relation to Being solely as
something handed over to it fromBeing. Such offering consists in the fact that in
thinking Being comes to language. Language is the house o f Being. In its home man
dwells.("Letter on Humanism", 193)In "Letter on Humanism" Heidegger wants to
distinguish the human from the inhumane in the way that he wants to distinguish
between the animate and inanimate in "Das Ding" as determining the nearness of the
world and our thinking within and through our actions, our speaking, and our
stances toward ourselves, toward the things, and contexts presenting themselves to
us.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
Implication o f the 'to hold is to love' sort, an implication that functions as an
answer to a question like 'how do I know I'm loving?', Heidegger calls gathering:
The gift gathers what belongs to giving: the twofold containing, the container, the
void,andtheoutpouringasdonation. Whatisgatheredinthegiftgathersitself in
approriatively staying the fourfold. This manifold simple gathering is the jug's
presenceing. (DD173)"Belongs" asserts a totality called 'giving' that is the
essence of the gift which means the outpouring from the holding, that is the taking
and keeping, constituting the void o f thejug as jug. That which is gathered also
gathers--following the same pattern o f abstraction allowing Weilen to enact
simultaneously the world and the jug. This gathering o f the aspects ofthejugs
conceptual (how and for the sake ofwhich) functioning because it can function as
itself, that is, abstracted from its material embodiment in the jug, can 'stay' the
fourfoldpreviouslydescribedasstayedbytheoutpouring. Theoutpouringarticulatedthe
doubleness o f 'staying', which defines the relation between particular and
universal as holisticcontext.
Outpouringexposes'staying'asthisrelationshipandinthisunconcealsthe world (the
quadrture) as a world. Heidegger's attempt to articulate the semantics of this use
of 'Weilen', and, therefore, to describe the ontology ofthing and world requires a
matching semantic condensation in the jug itself. This requirement is determined by
the conception ofBeing as the condensation ofthe uses of'to be'into ontological
force. The effect o f this is to allow things to mean, but at the cost o f losing
the materiality o f substance and therefore requiring a conceptual identity
determining the thing in relation to theconceptualidentitydeterminingtheworld:
staying=gathering.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
"The jug's presencing is the pure, giving gathering o f the one-fold quadrature
into a single time-space, a single stay" (DD174): Das Wesen des Kruges ist die
reine schenkende Versammulung des einfaltigen Gevierts in eine Weile. Der Krug west
als Ding Der Krug is der Krug als ein Ding. Wie aber west als Ding? Das Ding dingt.
("Das Ding" 166).The Hofstadter translation loses the continuing unfolding of the
semantics of "weilen'by foreclosing how it enacts the jug (assuming it is through
presencing). The essence (Wesen) of the jug is the pure (and perspicuous and
offhand, ordinary or mere) giving of the gathering of the onefold (simple)
quadrature in a singular Staying (under a temporal
aspect)andDwelling(underaspatialaspect)[Weile]. If1Weilen'canfunctionasthe
nominative Weile, then the functioning ofthejug can constitute what exists with the
ontologicalforceofwhatAristotlecalledousia,substance. Themechanismforthis
nominalization works through the semantics o f 'in' which determine the relations
between and among whatever exists through appropriating and giving. 'In' could
function as the criterion for being before because the economy of what in the
"Letter on Humanism" Heidegger calls the subjective and objective genitive rests on
the assumption that only what exists can be appropriated and given.The gift stays
the quadrature as its own: a gift can only function as a gift within an ontological
context determining what it is and which it opens up as its own. In this dwelling
it becomes a thing: Der Krug west als Ding. Heidegger is skirting tautology: it is
what it is because it acts as it is in a world in which it can be what it is. In
this picture what something is is already given, it is neither made nor does it
emerge. Time hasReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
becomeanunfoldingofadynamicanalyticsemantics: Thethingthings. cTothing',asa verb,
means 'to gather through appropriating the quadrature's staying (dwelling) in a
lingering for a while: into [a] this, into [a] that thing; Essammelt, das Geviert
ereignend, dessert Weile in einje Weileges: in dieses, injenes Ding ("Das Ding"
166). The demonstrative pair 'this . . . that' determines nearness and famess as a
function o f this appropriating. The patterns of stability or of identity that are
required in order for change to appear as change is translated into a structure
ofbeing that allows for particular and thus unique relations within and toward the
world. "Staying, the thing brings the four, in theirremoteness,neartooneanother.
Thisbringing-nearisnearing. Nearingisthe presencing o f nearness, Nearness brings
near--draws night to one another--the far and, indeed, as the far. Nearness
preserves farness" (DD178). Heidegger translates identityinto a functioning that
embeds particularity within a totalizing whole along a semantic chain o f
equivalencies that determine what a thing is as a subjunctive configuration o f
something as what it is within a world.If the world is this possible state of
affairs, how does one or does a thing get into it?
InspiteofHiedegger'susageof'nearness'asakindofnominativeexpression,thatis, as a
form of being, it is not a "container", [t]he thing is not 'in' nearness, 'in'
proximity. Nearness is an activity, a "bringing near", and thus has no insides in
the way that being a thing does. Nearness brings near in the way that thinging o f
the thing does. Nearness is like thinging (verb) and not like the thing. But isn't
the thing its thinging, and doesn't this thinging proceed through being entered?
This seems to invoke a metonymic as opposed to a synecdochic function. The thing
stays the quadrature "in the simple onefold o f theirReproduced with permission of
self-unified quadrature." This seems to mean that one can put these into a
description of an eco-system with semantic implications: Earth is the building
bearer, nourishing with its fruits,tendingwaterandrock,plantandanimal"(DD179).
Canthisdescriptioncounter the indifference o f physical laws and the effects they
describe (in very simplified forms)?The onto-semantics o f 'in' translates
intentionality (the aboutness o f language; in this case how language picks out or
attaches to things) into a form o f possession: an ontological implication and
metonymic nearness. Nearness describes a categorical proximity between
intentionality (aboutness) and what is. This means that nearness descibes a unity o
f categories (but not into meta-category). This preserves famess
(relativedifference)throughinthedistinctionsdeterminingthesecategories. Thesepoints
o f categorical unity are things. Thus famess functions not between things but
within things: the distance between the taking and the keeping or the holding and
the outpouring, between the giving (jug) and the gift (wine). Something cannot be
7<<' proximity. This is a category error: 'inness' is an expression of nearness. To
be 7n' is to be replaceable. If we pour the wine into the void, can we justify this
use o f in by saying they are equivalent at an ontological level? They are mutually
implicating by functioning as a place holder forthe other. They are not, therefore,
equivalent in relation to each other, but they are equivalent within a system o f
mutual exchange stabilizing the jug as an intransitive holding.A thing is not in
nearness, but rather in thinging, which as we saw is analogous to nearness, is "in
the simple onefold". This means a thing is what it is as a function of the semantic
series determining a thing as a thing in the unity o f the world determined by the
same functional semantic series of the thing: the thing stays itself and in this
staying stays the world. These functional semantic series at the abstract level o f
their unity, and thus for Heidegger their level o f interaction or at the level at
which they can replace each other, as the wine replaces the void, constitute the
semantics and the referent organizing Heidegger's use o f'Weilen'. The aspect
ofthis verb that suggests 'dwelling' captures this inness as both the expression
and the criterion for Being. This might suggest the riddle, 'what is inside
itself?' with the answer: 'everything.' I am not sure this captures the double-
logic here; rather the riddle should be 'what is in what it itselfcontains?' If I
answer 'a jug' I'm not sure I know what I could mean. But if I answer 'the world',
I canmakesenseofthat. Consequently,Icanonlyanswer'ajug'ifIcanmakethejugaworld. If
everything functions as a possible world, and if such worlds constitute themselves
as worlds (and thus they cannot reveal themselves as such but constitute themselves
as worlds), then the distinction between particular and universal or context
reduces to determiningthatwhichmakestheseworldsworlds. Theworldandthings-as-
worldsare constitutedbysemantics. Thissemanticsdescribesaself-
reflexiveteleologyorentelechia that at every point in the functioning of a thing
condenses the entire series in the thing. The thing becomes a system o f
possibilities, where unlike in Aristotle, these possibilities asthe unity o f 'to
be' constitute actuality, the ontologically real. These possibilities are not
actualized, as form or anything else, but used within an actualized totality. Thus
the reality,theBeingofthingsmeansthepossibilitiesoftheiruse. Athingisfundamentally
subjunctive. Thesubjunctivemodeofthingsisactualizednotinthemselvesorinobjects
but in the totalities which they themselves are and in the totality o f the world
(quadrature as onefold).Each thing spatializes its function, that is, the changes
which constitute its use, such that it exists through these changes as they reflect
the totality o f changes. Thus things become the still-points for themselves and in
this stability structure their changes as auniquetemporalsequence.
Eachthingdeterminesaparticularkindoftimeexpressedas and expressing what they are.
Time is scattered as condensates o f possibility throughout andastheworld.
Theorderednatureandrelativeindependenceofthesethingsas condensates o f time
determines them as controlled dynamic systems that constitute in their very nature
the means by which time is expressed as time: their identity as things, which is
totalized at any and every particular moment or aspect o f their functioning, in
relation to whichtheunfoldingoftheirchangingpositionandfunctionisorderedastime.
Thisisa descriptionofaliving,animatebeing:
thusthingsthingandappropriateandgatherand dwell or stay or linger.These verbs 'to
appropriate" and 'to gather' and 'weilen' are descriptions, however, and it is
exactly their ontological status that is at issue. They do not have any ontological
force separate from our use o f them as descriptions. They are liable o f misuse,
confusion, false attribution: language exists as much as anything else, but does it
exist or function or mean in the way that jugs do? In Heidegger's attempt to
replace the hylomorphic (matter/form) unity o f substance that Aristotle's
constructs in order to counter Plato's reduction of matter to form he in effect
reduces matter to a kind of functioning that replaces matter with a conceptual
semantics constituting a temporalReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
series. The interaction between user and use is dissolved into the idealism o f the
pure function, such that the semantic description ofthis function reduces identity
into a transcendent form; call this the point o f categorical unity or intersection
(the metaphoric use of mathematical language is not arbitrary here), in this case
designated by 'wer/en'.Heidegger describes 'matter' in this way:Earth is the
building bearer (bauend Tragende), nourishing (nahrend) with its fruits, tending
(hegend) water and rock, plant and animal.. . . The sky is the sun's path, the
course ofthe moon, the glitter ofthe stars, the year's seasons, the light and dusk
ofday, the gloom and glow ofnight, the clemency and inclemency ofthe weather, the
drifitng clouds and blue depth ofthe ether... (DD178)The earth is the source, the
out of which (bauend) that upholds (Tragende) through its nourishing and tending,
the organized forms of matter we recognize (mythically pictured). The sky is a
path, a course, a glitter, the season's, light and dusk, gloom and glow, clemency
and inclemency, drifting and blue depth. In all o f this the sky is used, and thus
emerges as the sky as a function o f these uses. The uses o f both earth and sky
are differentbutcomplementary. Theearthismothering,parentalandshepherding(inthe way
that "Man is the shepherd o f Being" in "Letter on Humanism"): bearing, nourishing,
and tending. The sky is that which the sun, moon, stars, year, day, night, weather,
clouds, and ether (whatever that is) display it. This displaying, for the most
part, enacts a system of oppositions (or negations) as the possibilities ofBeing
for both the sky and its limiting or determining objects and concepts.Reproduced
permission.295
TeXsuiTi Kai 8vxeA^ xeia (ct verbum temporale nomini)They are called mortals because
they can die. To die means to be capable of deathas death. Only man dies. The
animal perishes. (DD178)Animals like things have only their functioning ahead and
behind them; they do not have death, like humans do, "ahead of itselfnor behind it"
(DD178). Did we not know that we die? Or that we are called mortals because o f
this immanent and imminent death? Our education proceeds from the fact o f death
towards the semantics o f death.In Being and Time, Heidegger writes "By its very
essence, death is in every case mine, in so far as it 'is' at all. And indeed death
signifies a peculiar possibility-of-Being in
whichtheveryBeingofone'sownDaseinisanissue"(BT284;240). Daseinis ontologically
constituted in the "mineness and existence" determining the particularity of
DaseinasDaseinforitself. Identityandexistencemeetindeathandnotingenesis:11"Death is
the possibility o f the absolute impossibility o f Dasein. Thus death reveals
itselfas thatpossibility which is one's ownmost, which is non-relational, and which
is not to be outstripped [unuberholbare]. As such, death is something distinctively
impending. Its existential possibility is based on the fact that Dasein is
essentially disclosed to itselfj and disclosed, indeed, as ahead-of-itself.(BT 294;
251).Death exposes what in "Das Ding" should be understood as the semantical
structure of 'in' and 'myness'. The possibility (Death) o f an impossibility
(Dasein) describes a limitReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
that determines death as absolutely interchangeable (that is, interchangeable
without remainder): one forms the limit ofthe other as a totality.Death is an
ontological and grammatical limit determining our living, not only as dying, but as
a limited totality, "as ahead-of-itself'. (It is this relation between ontology and
grammar that I need here) Dasein is always an issue for itselfthrough the
multiplicity o f its stances mediating between its throwness (enmeshed within the
historical, social, existential givens) o f Being and being ahead-of-itself. The
distinctiveness o f this fate which is never overcome/ outstripped can twist
possibility into function such that Dasein functions always toward this death. The
Cartesian jug head with its pineal gland attaching spirit to its mechanical arms,
even if the possibilities o f our Being are not knowable, sketches being human as
living like a jug as thing, unfolding at every point, as a temporal series attached
to ontological possibilities (not just existential possibilities as in Being and
Time).12If things become animate, if they are to us what they do (being acts
through ontological implication), how are humans functional? If meaning is
determined, or emerges, through use, then divinities function to use us, and
through and in that use we gain a being as things analogous to how things function
as things for us. Death is the limit of our functioning, in the way that becoming
an object is the limit of a thing, forming itself outofuseintosubstance:
"AstheshrineofNothing,deathharborswithinitselfthe presenceing ofBeing. As the
shrine ofNothing, death is the shelter ofBeing" (DD178- 79). 'Nothing' is 'that
which in every respect is never something that merely exists, but
whichneverthelesspresences[west],evenasthemysteryofBeingitself'(DD178). Does
nothing merely exist? Heidegger translates the Parmenidian One, constructed out o f
the impossibility ofthinking ofanything (even ofnothing) that does not exist, into
the functional implication that determines Being (or uses o f'to be') as a
collection of collected (gathered) temporal series, hyloentelechia, emerging, or
totalized as things, as determinate subjunctive modes. The world consists o f the
collection o f these subjunctive modes. Heidegger is recasting what Duns Scotus, on
whom he wrote his habilitation dissertation, and Peter Aureol call potential time,
a domain oftime separate from physical and heavenly movement (as Being). Rejecting
the Aristotelian picture o f time as determined and enacted by these physical
changes, Duns Scotus followed Augustine's conception o f time as an internal
measure separate as such from movement and the world. The developing realism of
Scholastic philosophy, however, resisted Augustine's conclusion that time only
exists within the mind. Potential time, therefore, describes both our measuring o f
time and the possibility o f time which we find described in external movements and
in things.ParmenidesandAristotledescribetimeasthatwhichisandthatwhichisnot. This
definition is translated, following the theological pressure of Augustine (and
Biblical descriptions o f the ontological possibilities exploited by God,
especially in Joshua), into "[t]ime consists o f something that exists outside the
mind and o f something that does not exist outside the mind" (300). Averroes
elaborates in Commentarrii in Aristotelis libros de Physico audilu:Time is composed
of past and future; but the past has already stopped being and the future does not
yet exist. Time is composed o f being and nonbeing . . . .Reproduced with
permission.298
Itisthesameformovement;nopartofmovementisinactuality. Whatever part one designates,
it is already distant; therefore, it is also composed o f what has already ceased
to be and what is not yet.Such things do not possess a complete existence; these
things receive a complete existence from the mind. The mind conceives the
indivisible that exists in reality.13Averroes use o f exist, however, tied as it is
to Aristotle's use o f ousia and energia (potential), Time and movement are
continuous, and therefore indivisible, within the world.Duns Scotus turns
Augustine's reduction oftime to the mind back into the world. He locates potential
time, a description of a time sense separate from physical change, in theworld.
Similarly,Heideggerlocatesthecompletionoftherelationofbeingand nonbeing in the
thing, and in so doing reforms this opposition as distorted descriptions that
pretend to describe nothing or non-being outside ofBeing. We instantiate Death as
Nothingbyenshriningitastheconditionofthebeyond. Nothingisenshrined,andassuch exists
or functions in our world not beyond it. The riddle o f the beyond forms itself as
a totality; or Nothing as a limit constitutes the world as a totality. This is the
way in whichthe god emerges as what cannot be compared. Heidegger answers Anselms
riddle, in Proslogion,describingandformingthelogicalbasisforHisexistence,
"Whatisthatthan which no greater can be conceived?", with 'What exists."
Everythingweighsonexistence. Theweightof'what'in"whatexists"canturn the answer into
a question: "What exists?" and the answer "What exists" at least allowsReproduced
permission.299
existence to mimic identity. (What the thunder said; is what we say--not what we
say it said, but what we say.)Heidegger describes animation as a therapy to undo
metaphysics and its (or our) forming ourselves (as humans) into animals that
perish; We must recover the way to our capability as mortals: not to make us anew,
but for us to see ourselves as o f old. Under the aspect of what Heidegger calls
metaphysics, in which being is determined as
representation,humansaredescribedasanimals,"alivingbeing"(DD179). Lifeisadded to
our being, as electricity animates Frankenstein's monster's body, or as holy words
animate a golem, or as god breathes into the shaped dust to make man. Objects
cannotbecome things, however; nor can bodies become human. In Die Grundbegriffe der
Metaphysik(??44),14Heideggerdistinguishesbetweenmineral,animal,andman: astoneexists
without a world ('weltlos), the animal exists within a diminished world (yveltarm:
world-poor), and man exists within his world-making (yveltbildend).In summarizing
Heidegger's methodological introduction to an unpublished course on the
Phenomenology o f Religion in 1920-21 Theodore Kisiel paraphrases Heidegger's
phenomenological description of factic experience, both as an activity and as that
which is experienced:What is had, lived, experienced in factic life experience is
more than a mere object for a subject and its theory-forming activity, it is a
world in which one can live. (One cannot live in an object.) This formal indication
of the world can be further articulated formally as our environment or milieu, as
that which encounters or confrontsus.
Itincludesnotonlymaterialthingsbutalsoidealobjectivities,likeReproduced with
permission.300
those o f science, art and religion. In this environing world, there also stands
the with-world, that is, other humans socially characterized, as relatives,
superiors, peers,strangers,andnotasinstancesofthescientificgenushomosapiens.
Finally, in the very same world also stands "I myself" the self-world. (154)13Our
factic life experience articulates three umwelten: the given environment o f
material and ideal objects, the with-world o f social relations, and the self-
world.Twenty years latter in a 1941 lecture course published as Grundbegriffe
Heidegger translates these tripartite existential distinctions into the ontology o
f Being:To what "is" belongs not only the currently actual, which affects us and
which we stumble upon: the happenings, the destinies and doings of man, nature in
its regularity and its catastrophes, the barely fathomable powers that are already
present in all motives and aims, in all valuations and attitudes o f belief.(Basic
Concepts I.?2)16The actual describes the order o f the world presented earlier as
"that which encounters and confronts us." The actual also describes the normative
powers in us, akin to the "ideal objectivities," understood as also a proximate
order determining us. The limits of Dasein that allowed for Heidegger's existential
analytic to describe its presence in its engagements have been dissolved, but not
to expose the mechanisms of our being let alone our biology or consciousness. We
are given to ourselves in and through the history o f ourembodiment within a world
of beings, outside o f what being, existing, worlding, thinging means.Reproduced
permission.301
The actual slips into the possible, but not, however, through an Aristotelian
dialectic, but as the description ofthe world towards-us. Ifthe actual is the
descendent of the 'towards which', 'in relation to which' ofDasein, the possible
describes the stances, the intentionality of Dasein:To what "is" belongs also the
possible, which we expect, hope for, and fear, which we only anticipate, before
which we recoil and yet do not let go. To be sure the possible is the not yet
actual, but this not-actual is nevertheless no mere nullity. The possible "is," its
being simply has another character than the actual.(Basic Concepts I.?2)Possibility
and actuality are not bound or determined by substance, but are rather the
conditions or grammar of being: both the possible and the actual 'are'. The grammar
of this 'being' is another semantic chain (best described, although the passage is
rather long, in "Letter on Humanism"):[T]hinking is the thinking of being. . . .
Thinking is--this says: Being has fatefully embraced its essence. To embrace a
"thing" or a "person" in its essence means to love it, to favor it. Thought in a
more original way such favoring [Mogen] means to bestow essence as a gift. Such
favoring is the proper essence o f enabling, which not only can achieve this or
that but also can let something essentially unfold in its provenance, that is, let
it be. It is on the "strength of such enabling by favoringthat something is
properly able to be. This enabling is what is properly "possible" [das "Mogliche"],
that whose essence resides in favoring. From this favoringBeing enables thinking.
The former makes the latter possible. Being is theReproduced with permission of the
enabling-favoring, the "may be" [das Mog-liche]. As the element, Being is the quiet
power" ofthe favoring-enabling, that is, ofthe possible.. Ofcourse, our words
mogliche [possible] and Moglichkeit [possiblity], under the dominance of "logic"
and "metaphysics," are thought solely in contrast to "actuality"; that is, they are
thought on the basis o f a definite--the metaphysical--interpretation o f Being as
actua and potentia, a distinction identified with the one between existentia and
essentia. When I speak ofthe "quiet power ofthe possible" I do not mean the
possible o f a merely represented possiblitias, nor potentia as the essentia o f an
actus o f existentia; rather, I mena Being itself, which in its favoring presides
over thinking and hence over the essence of humanity, and that means over its
relationto Being. (196-97)The grammar o f 'possibility' is bound to that o f
'thinking'. These grammars pivot around a set of, what I think should be called,
functions: embracing,favoring, enabling, andpossibility}1 Functions are transitive
in that they can be used to link different aspects of being or different
grammatical levels. 'Embrace', for example, relates being to essence through
relating thing and person. This last use allows 'embrace' to be seen as love or
favor. Favor is a bestowing, but of essence. This essence understood as enabling
redefines favoring' in relation to this 'enabling?. Such enabling presents being as
possibility because it is attached to letting being be, that is, the function is
inverted so that it is directed not from us to the world but from the world toward
us. This double movement functions as a link between world and us, but one
understood as subjunctive and neither constitutive nor object-like. It is
nevertheless real.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
The last modality about which he has little to say explicitly is the necessary
{Basic Concepts I.?2). In the 1941 lecture the modality of necessity is unexamined,
or rather collapsed into descriptions o f Being. In "Das Ding," in effect,
necessity will underwrite the chain o f semantic implication that unites the
functioning o f the jug, that is, its temporality, as what it is. Meaning, because
it expresses always a final cause independent from our actual usage, but rather as
a possibility within the world, is a form o f necessity. Something is what it is
necessarily; it could not not be what it is without ceasing to be this.Mortals
necessarily die; this necessity is experienced as a possibility. Living and
thinking through this possibility is what it means to be capable o f death. What
constitutes this being "capable o f death as death"? Heidegger suggests: by coming
to oneself "in the shelter of Being'. This shelter is death. 'Sheltering' means to
be both ahead and behind. A shelter is the limited whole ofthe world, and as such
marks the difference between my world and the world. This difference enables me to
call my world a world.18How does death shelter Being? This is the same question as
How does being become present to itself? How does what exists become conscious or
self-reflexive? I ask what is a mortal? and answer 'myself. This question, however,
is a riddle because the entire sentence "I ask what is a mortal? and answer
'myself?" can also stand as an answer, andsoon. Thisself-
reflectionmeanstobecomemortalwithintheshelterofBeing.The gift ofthe water can
become ajug, or thejug can become a world and the water a canopy. Counting
abstracts things into the concept o f quantity, determining identity as that which
can be counted. Patterns best described by numbers organize a syntax, between
sound-tones or between poetic lines, or between a magnet and a fallingReproduced
permission.304
rock. Theseenablingpatternsemergeinthemorecomplicatedsyntaxofmusicorpoetry or
physics.If things emerge as forms under the aspect of our knowing and
representation they exist as identities separate from time or related as non-
temporal moments determined as identities. Making, even ifunderstood as a
transcendental aesthetic, functions as a form of representing, o f knowing, and
thus ignores how things present themselves to us within the circle of before us, to
which we respond, and as already ahead-of-us, determined by our expectations or
uses, to which we recall:When and in what way do things appear as things? They do
not appear by means o f human making. But neither do they appear without the
vigilance o f mortals. The first step toward such vigilance is the step back from
the thinking that merely represents--that is, explains--to the thinking that
responds and recalls. (DD181)The inexplicable and unfathomable character of the
world's worlding lies in this,that causes and grounds remain unsuitable for the
world's worlding. (DD180) We cannot think the world as a description (language or
art) or explanation (science). 'Making' functions through cause and effect, that
is, making is always a picture of evolution and thus o f identities and changes
describing an ontological language. Heidegger believes that this kind of language
constructs a world as representation, within Berkeley's formulation "esse =
percipi, Being equals being represented" ("Moira" 82).'9So nestling, they join
together, worlding, the world.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
Nestling, malleable, pliant, compliant, nimble--in Old German these are called ring
and gering. The mirror-play o f the worlding world, as the ringing o f the ring,
wrests free the united four into their own compliancy, the circling compliancy
oftheir presence. Out ofthe ringing mirror-play the thinging ofthe thing takes
place. (DD180)The gap between identities and moments brought out by Zeno in his
defense of Parmenidian One is not overcome by examining the relation between finite
or infinite, or through calculus, but is erased in the semantics of 'ring' and
'gering', in the qualitative relation in which things emerge as things and the
world emerges as world. Gering in modem German diminishes a gap into a short
distance, a trifle; the differences described by formal identities, the structured
separation constituting quantity and number, is translated into a qualitative
relation, a mere separation, a nothing much. Is quantity simply ignored in this
semantics?"Thinging is the nearing ofthe world" (DD181), or the translation of
objects describedbynumberorascountableintoqualitativerelations: nearandfarcaptures
perspective,andthusdoesnotuniversalizeintoequa-distant,quantifiableparts. Thinging,
as a qualitative relation, is non-formal and non-generative; instead it is "the
thinking that responds and recalls". What kind of consciousness or state of
thinking or being responds and recalls?Out of the ringing mirror-play the thinging
of the thing takes place.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
Thethingstays-gathersandunites--thequadrature. Thethingthings world. Each thing
stays the quadrature into a happening ofthe simple onehood of the world. (DD 181)
The ontological force of being human and even of thinking, therefore, is not a
function of description or explanation, but ofwensende Verhaltnis. 'Mirror-play' is
a traditional image o f the mind. Heidegger uses it here as a description o f the
world as conscious. But the focus here is on the mirroring as an essential
relation, constituting the quadrature as this relating. This sound good without
making a lot of sense: it's all hidden in the mirroring.
Heideggerdiveststheuseofathingfromtheuser. Bydissolvinghumanagency, will, and
intentionality he effectively animates the thing. A thing enacts a usage; things do
not emerge as ready-to-hand within either an interpretive description or in
relation to our existentialinvolvement.
Heideggerhadalreadydissolvedhumanbeingsinourordinary
involvementin"DasMan"inchapterIVofBeingandTime. Thisdisappearancedescribes our
knowing how or rather our involvement outside of the hypostatization of self-
consciousness and identity. In Being and Time our engagement remains within and
with the world. Our thinking remains specifically intentional. Heidegger attempts
to dissolve the predicative logic supporting subject and object, or the real as
countable, as constitutedthrough identity, in the relations enacting our
involvement. The existential analytic and its circumlocutions describe this
relational enacting and involvement as the ontological conditionofourbeing.
Thisontologyorrathertheontologicalcommitmentsthatthese relational involvement's
entail are entrapped within a hermeneutic circle that transfers theReproduced with
permission.307
cite of Cartesian doubt from the subject to language itself. Thus in order to
dissolve the threat o f skepticism, Heidegger must establish the ontological ground
o f language. The way to language that determines Heidegger's famous turn involves
the exploration of the ontologicaldimensionoflanguage.
Thisgroundcannotbeestablished,butcanonlybe invoked or enacted. Thus the absence of
other individual human beings in Heidegger's description of "the They" and their
exclusion in "The Thing" occurs differently, or rather
theontologicalstatusofdifferentsitesarebeingcontested: ourinvolvementintheworld as
opposed to our involvement in language. In his attempt to make language ontological
Heidegger approaches, albeit from a different ground (from within qualitative
relations) the drive toward an ontological language in Cognitive Science, a
language to instantiate qualitative states within (as opposed to Heidegger's
palimpsest or vague dissolution) quantitative patterns.
Heideggerarticulatestwokindsoftime. Science,evenofanAristoteliansort, gives the
object its own time, but embeds it in a system of causes described by strict
implication (although human beings may not be able to describe these system of
causes). Heidegger, however, makes the time of the thing its doing and thus the
succession of actions between us and the thing. Time condenses as the thing by
making visible as such its standing alone, its structure or substance. Unlike in
Being and Time where ready-to- hand described an economy ofuse between Dasein and
an object as tool within the structure of our concerns, in "Das Ding" we as mortals
are taken up by the world, by the thing. Both we and objects disappear in the
condensation o f time that constitutes both things and the temporal possibilities
available to us.20 The stability o f scientific time, andReproduced with permission
thus the stability ofthe identity ofthe object over and against us, on the other
hand, is a function of its description under a particular rule (or formula).
Identity determined by use animates the real (which is no longer substance) with a
meaning expressed as what something does. This form o f identity-functionalism
precipitates a synesthesiac collapse of a temporal series (a doing) into the thing:
what we recognize as a thing when we see theform of the jug. Heidegger does not
want form to bethecriterionforidentity.
Thecriterionforidentitybecomesinsteadanunderstanding ofthe semantics ofjug syntax:
void-holding-outpouring-giving-gift-giving-outpouring- holding-void- gift into the
earth, sky, divinities, and mortals, as the conditioning category and relation
(weilen) determining the unity of the quadrature. Each word describes a jug- state
and a relation to the other functors or jug-states.The circle o f language meets
itself in the thing circling from out o f the world circling as the world described
in the circle of sense of the world worlding, thing thinging through which we
become things inside ofthings or worlds inside ofworlds:If we let the thing be
present in its thinging from out of the worlding world, then we are thinking of the
thing as thing. Taking thought in this way, we let ourselves
beconcernedbythething'sworldingbeing. Thinkinginthisway,wearecalledby
thethingasthething. InthestrictsenseoftheGermanwordbedingt,wearethe be-thinged, the
conditioned ones. We have left behind us the presumption of all unconditionedness.
(DD181)This is a circle from 'letting be present' to 'thinking' [".. .wesen lassen,
denken . . . "]; or is this the point from which two overlapping circles copy out
the thing thinging itself fromReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
out ofthe worlding world, neither on top or underneath, but in the thing as thing?
This is not, however, a hermeneutic circle inlaying our descriptions inlaying our
involvement in the world. What or who is inside what or whom? If we "cannot live in
an object", we can live in a thing. Ifwe are to make sense of"Das Ding" we must ask
'how can we enter the thing?"
Thiscirclingof"lettingthethingbepresent"into"thinkingthethingasthing" circles us,
or imagines us as the limit of the animate world. We are be-thinged bybecoming
things, and in this becoming we expose our condition as a thing to the world.
Worlding and thinging draw us.What does it mean to inhabit the thing? or to be a
thing?If we think of the thing as thing, then we spare and protect the thing's
presence in the region from which it presences. Thinging is the nearing o f the
world. Nearing isthenatureofnearness.
Aswepreservethethingquathingweinhabitnearness. The nearing ofnearness is the true
and sole dimension ofthe mirror-play ofthe world.(DD181)
Iwillretranslatethisfirstsentence: Ifwethinkthethingasthing,thenweconservethe
essence o f the thing in its space-world (Bereich) from which it emerges and abides
(west). These changes are primarily of emphasis in order to draw out the semantic
mechanisms constitutingthinkingthethingandworld("DasDing"173-74). Ifweare"dieBe-
Dingteri" a thing is "Bereich". To think the thing as thing means not to conserve
the thing butitsworld.
Inconservingtheworldweplaceourselvesinthepositionofthething,we
acknowledgeitsworldasours. 'Conserve'combinesL.'servare',topreserveandprotect and
L. 'con', a form o f 'cum', 'with, together'. 'Conserve' can, therefore, be
construed asReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
a form o f'weilen "verweilt esErde undHimmel, die Gotttlichen und die Sierblicheri'
("Das Ding" 170/ We enter the thing by preserving its world as ours, and thus we
replace it as the wine does the void. Consequently 'nearness', which is enacted
through 'nearing' the world through 'thinging' the thing, is what is real. The
black box in this thinking is how the relation between particular and universal, or
rather between thing and world, can beovercome.
Thisovercomingtakesplacethroughthecategoricalunityeffectedby lweilen\ This suggests
that Heidegger has translated space into 'nearness' and time into 'weilen'. The
mechanisms ofthis translation and the descriptive rules or the mechanisms
(thehow?)of'nearing'and'staying'remainhidden. Heideggermakesthesemechanisms
oftranslation the transcendental conditions ofour inhabitation ofboth ourselves and
the world. Asanunintendedeffectofthisthinking,Heideggershowsthattheproblemof
justifying thinking or being within the world requires a conceptual thinking on the
borders between science, philosophy and art that interrogates the mechanisms o f
'nearing' and 'staying' as they function as a 'making'. Heidegger highlights the
process of our and the worlds making by trying to resist reducing the real to
making or to substance. Similarly in resisting the temptation to justify or ground
his thinking, he conceptualizes our essential conditionedness by circling into a
myth that outlines the mechanisms o f its making as the limit of our involvement in
the world.What is the shadow outline o f this making? Do we understand what we are
looking for when we ask how are we made or how do we make the world?We can circle
into the world into ourselves or into ourselves into the world: this is
ourKantianheritage. Emersonpicturedthisas"Natureislovedbywhatisbestinus";but
this love is a redrawing ofconcentric circles endlessly. Emerson draws circles in
spirals of replacement, totality failing and following totality towards doing
"something without knowinghoworwhy"(175).
Ifweforgetourselveswelosethehowandwhy,or"Iam not careful to justify myself' (173).
Justification settles us. Emerson's experimenting, as he calls it, "unsettle[s] all
things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane" (173). The loss
ofjustification proceeds from asking forjustification: "The eye is the first
circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this
primary figure is repeatedwithout end... Our life is an apprenticeship to the
truth, that around every circle another canbedrawn..."(166).
Thereisnottranscendentworldortranscendentknower,but the 'eternal generator abides .
. . somewhat superior to creation": the stability of anaufhebung in relation to
which the world appears as the world changing, the world worlding. In this shift
from 'I', the unsettler to the eternal generator, itself circles the eye with a
horizon, as if Emerson conflates the transcendental aesthetic describing the
'science o f a priori sensibility' o f the first Critique with the aesthetic
judgment, a 'critique o f taste,' ofthethird.
TheunsettlednatureofNatureservesasthecriterionforourknowingand being and our
failure: "People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any
hope for them" (174). "Hope" proceeds in the unsettling o f circles as the future
or let's say subjunctive circle o f the generator, a spiral or line pointing
through and beyond anyparticularcircularlimit.
Sohesays,"Greatnessappealstothefuture"(Self-Reliance, 137). In this state the world
is never just ours. Making another world ("to draw another circle" [175]) or
finding oneself beyond oneself and the coherence o f a 'past' world ("'when he
knows not whither he is going'"[175]) recasts our subjectivity knowing asReproduced
permission.312
"the soul [that] generates matter" ("Poetry and Imagination", 450). "Imagination
animates" (451): soul-making can not only be about the soul but in its power to
make the world.How do we enter into this making and animating?What is the horizon
ofjustification? The fundamental implication that defines the relations ofjugging,
the semantic, temporal chain determining thejug asjug. Justification must act in
two directions. It must control and determine the categorical relations around
which the demand for justification arises. Scenes like: 'this is x.'; 'Why is it
x?'. Heidegger must forestall the asking of this 'why.' As we have seen every term
in describing the temporal-functional series o f 'jug' provides an implicative link
to another. This links are often categorical: from holding to gathering for
example. Heidegger, however, has posited function as the ground o f being, and thus
within the semantics o f identity only 'weilen1articulates a fundamental
categorical relation: between time, space, aspects o f the world, human beings, and
divinities. Its functional flexibility, its ability to constitute the other terms
from taking to 'gering,' allow it to displace demands forjustification into
explications o f its meaning. It describes, however, a condition o f all
beings,ofboththingsandthequadrature,andinthisenactsBeingitself. Thisenacting
animates. Thus,justificationdissolvesintoanimation.Heidegger splits value from
justification. Heidegger is not asking the constructivist questions 'how do we make
a world?' or 'how is it that we, human beings, can find the world at all, or as our
world, or as a world?' (the kind of questions, with some philosophical
modification, that could make sense to McCulloch). Nor is he asking 'whyReproduced
permission.313
these things (or any thing or any particular set of things) make a world?',
Thoreau's ontological-semantic justification question. He describes how we fit (how
we experience fitting) the world from within language as a fitting together of a
semantic puzzle that will pickouttheworld/formoflifeinwhich'weilericanworkandmean.
Theintentionality of his language addresses not us but this 'weilen' determined
world-Being. In this puzzle notallpiecesareofequivalentvalue.
Asetofpiecesthatseemclosesttotheshape- functioning o f the jug are more 'valuable'
because they are nearest to the reality o fjugging. There is no single nearest part
o f the world to the jug--the analogy fails because the world is not an
accumulation of solid-edged things. This resistance is because, like the latter
Wittgenstein, Heidegger resists viewing the world from sub species aetemitatis,
which for Heidegger means as a function of quantity.He cannot, however, abandon
quantity. The following quotation answers the question 'How can you get qualitative
distinctions to describe quantity?':But things are also compliant (ring) and modest
(gering) in number, compared with the countless objects everywhere o f equal value,
compared with the measureless mass of men as living beings.Men alone, as mortals,
by dwelling attain to the world as world. Only what conjoins itself out of world
becomes a thing. (DD182)Hodstadter's translation o f 1gering' as 'modest' in the
first sentence and then as 'conjoins' in the second marks the emergence of meaning
here as following the same conjoining it describes.
HeideggerwhenhefirstintroducestheOldGermansenseofringandgering has given the
possible meanings, possible translations from which we can make sense ofReproduced
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his usage. The coherence ofthe quadrature takes place through 'nestling': "So
nestling, theyjoin together, worlding, the world" (DD180). The unifying force
ofgering works in compliant and complementary relation to the emergent force o f
ring, to become a specific unity, to surround and contain, to resist (modem German,
ringen): this emergence,
however,isofthefour"nestleintotheirunifyingpresence"(DD180). Whatarethe semantics
of 'weilen' in this aspect-sliding ring, gering worlding? From the 'ringing mirror-
playthethingingofthethingtakesplace"(DD180). Theunifyingrelationsamongthe
quadrature, determining the world as the world, determines the thing as a thing.
Heidegger etymologizes ring, 'combine,' and gering, 'small,' 'close,' 'little,'
back into the old German 'nestling, malleable, pliant, compliant, nimble' in order
to determine essence (W esen) and existence and identity outside o f the
fragmentation attending identity.Heidegger will not ask why these pieces? Why these
things constitute a world? These questions would be answered by an explanation or
description of how the world was made (the question 'why are human beings like they
are?' would be answered with a Darwinian history of our evolution) or of who has
given us the world (God or parents) or how do we find ourselves in the world.
Heidegger continually maintains a disjunction between representation and making.
The animation of the world proceeds through the transformation of all forms of
being into actors, personified mirrors. The four 'mirror' each other 'mirroring';
mirroring does not pick out the particular forms of the quadrature. The image o f
the mirror or the act o f mirroring are figures for identity, for being. A mirror
mirroring, however, is different from saying 'this picture mirrors the world.'
There is even a greater difference. These mirrors mirroring mirror each other
mirroring. This meansReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
they each enact a collapse o f the particular and context as what they are (mirror)
and do (mirroring)foreachother.
Thereunityarisesbecauseamirrormirroringanothermirror can functionally enact the
mirroring o f another mirror. It is always the world mirroring, not a subject, and
thus the mirroring never becomes a particular image (which would require the world
to be constructed from within a knowing subject). This use of 'mirror' and
'mirroring' should not be understood to make a claim about what is real. Its claim
should be understood to describe the meaning of a world. Such a world can not be
fully meaningful, nor can the viability, that is, the justification for this
semantics (for the use of 'mirror', for example) be determined, without asking
Thoreau's "why do these things make a world?" Consequently, Heidegger's semantics
tell us more about 'meaning' than 'being'.How do we count the matter ofthe world?
But things are also compliant (ring) and modest (gering) in number, compared with
the countless objects everywhere of equal value, compared with the measureless mass
o f men as living beings. (DD180)Heidegger suggests that under the aspect of number
things gering and ring, and in this they are particular. Number here has already
pressured number into a qualitative distinction, built around a 'logic' or
'aesthetics' of identity. Number defined as numerical identity (x=x; x=y) ceases to
be countable. Number here is not a semantic function, describing or allegorizing or
mapping something into its logic, but functions ontologically as both the
groundless ground ofbeing. This means that ifeverything can be reduced to number or
quantity, then number and quantity become senseless. Heidegger's description
ofscienceandtechnologyasmakingthingsdistancelessisthustwofold. Objectscanbe reduced
to each other, and thus are neither close nor far. This reduction is not
descriptive but constitutive of what is real and therefore number can no longer
function as a description o f particulars. I do not think number functions this way
in science ortechnology or, for the most part, in mathematics. Mathematicians are
often accused of being closet mathematical realists, arguing in public that
mathematics is a language-game, but in private hypostasizing number into entities.
Heidegger assumes that science and technology function as if they instantiated an
unwarranted mathematical realism.When are objects countless and the mass o f men
measureless? Heidegger's answer is 'when objects are o f equal value, that is,
reduced to an equivalence everywhere'; and when human beings are beings + life.
Quantifying the world into objects makes them uncountable.
Theequivalenceofobjectsreducesallobjectstoasinglevalue,wheresince each x = y, all
objects collapse into a single term, x or y. Such a reduction makes them
uncountable because the are inseparable. The "[mjeasureless mass of men" do not
live in any appropriate world: neither in a world that fits within the logic of the
thing nor in aworld that is theirs, and thus not replaceable. As being + life they
form a reduced identity, X. Heidegger imagines authentic counting as the counting
of categories not particulars.Heidegger wants to resist this equalization, and
convert 'scientific reduction' into semantic a description (development from Being
and Time and its existential analytic description):
absorbtheworldwithinhislanguageofthinkingasthecountertothe absorption o f the world
into mathematics. In the "Letter on Humanism" he marks the turn toward language
away from an existential analytic, in which our phenomenal experienceReproduced
permission.317
constitutes our being (Dasein) as stances and involvement's framed within a
hermeneutics, not o f language, but o f time as the limit o f both Dasein and the
question o f Being (what exists), to a semantic ontology:For thinking in its saying
merely brings the unspoken word ofBeing to language. The usage "brings to language"
employed here is now to be taken quiteliterally. Being comes, lighting itself to
language. It is perpetually under way to language. (239)"Thinking brings... Being
comes, lighting itself... under way to language"; what does this describe? The
circularity of"Being.. lighting itself', the agency ofthinking "put[ting] its
saying of Being into language as the home of ekistence" ("Letter", 239), and the
intimacy o f language "raised into the lighting o f Being" animates and personifies
Being, thinking, and language, as actors and acting, in their becoming visible as
what they are. They function as both minds (animate agents) and worlds (grounds and
context) making visible each other as the other in this functioning, as if before
the differences between these hypostasize into subjects and objects, or selfand
world, or particulars and universals. These relations and 'entities', however, are
not part of a transcendental deduction. Such a deduction would require
justification: why these and not other categories or beings or aspects? why
lighting? how does one light the other? Heidegger removes human agency, the
temptations toward skepticism and subjectivity by excludingthe demand for
justification from his questioning. Rhetorically he does this by presenting his
thinking as a description that acts ontologically ("Thinking is a deed . . .its
sayingReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
merely brings the unspoken word o f Being to language")- Thinking describes
thinking, and in this thinking implicates the world, undermines subjective
reductions o f being, etc. The equivocation of being "equally near and equally far"
(DD177) is opposed bynearness--through which the world and things appropriate each
other (fit and mutually belong together) in the mirror-play and the staying/
dwelling of the ring and gering. Nearness is therefore an ontological value, giving
and staying and dwelling through which we understand the earth as nourishing, the
sky as sky, the divinities as "beckoning messengers", and mortals as capable of
death. Things are not of equal value. How do we recognize or live within this
unequal value? How can things have any value that we can recognize? Not by being
made, but by dwelling within the reflective implications that determine the world
as world within a mutually reflective totality of relations.Anima mundi seu orbis
How do these fragments oftime (or function) make a world? The world is a unity as a
function of the functioning of a thing (not an effect, because the function of any
particular thing includes the quadrature and presents the world as world, it does
not form it). Thisseemsabsurdifweincludemorethanonething. Isthequadrature'stayed'in
different ways in and for each thing? In other words, things as the condensation of
different function-time series produce each a different 'staying' or 'dwelling' of
the world. The difficulty o f the world functioning as a world determined by these
fragmented times returns Heidegger to the problem of many times (and possible
worlds) 15th century philosophers found themselves facing.Reproduced with
permission.319
I f time arises as a function o f movement then different movement rates produce
different times. 15th century philosophers posited an Absolute measure in relation
to which all of these different rates were regularized as time. Appealing to
Aristotle, this absolutemeasureisbestdescribedinthecelestialmovements.
Thisleavestwoproblems. How does this celestial movement determine time for us in
our everyday life and within the sublunar world? That is, how do we experience
time? and what is the temporal relation between the celestial clock and the
different movements describing change in the world? The second question takes a
peculiar medieval form derived from the incident inJoshua (10.12) where God stopped
the movement ofthe heavens but time continued on earth:
"thesunstoppedbuttimewenton"(Confessions,XI.xxiii[30]). Augustine constructed time
as a function o f the soul, and thus he could untie the world from time.
Aristotelian versions o f time, however, require movement and a uniform physical
periodicity for change to emerge.Ockham attempts to resolve, or rather integrate,
Augustinian and Aristotelian times:Thus one sees how a man does not see heaven can
perceive the movement of heaven, once he perceives himself as existing in an
existence subject to change (se esse in esse tranmutabili), meaning once he
perceives his own coexistence with a mobile moving uniformly and continuously, or
once he grasps the proposition, I coexist with a certain body moving continuously
and uniformly.Second, as has just been stated, when we perceive that we exist in an
existence subject to change, we perceive time essentially, for we perceive then
thatReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
something moves continually and uniformly--and this is to perceive time essentially
It suffices for him to grasp the proposition, I coexist with a certain body moving
continuously and uniformly; in fact, that is the concept proper to the movement o f
heaven. (Duhem, 318-19)Ockham develops the role ofheaven intwo other arguments, but
he concludes only, as he does here, that celestial movement is accidental to time,
but supervenes on it. What Ockham recognizes is that time requires a conceptual
uniform and continuous temporal order that includes both us and the world. Our
knowledge o f this movement, although it may arise from observation and induction,
requires only our existential acknowledgment
andcontainmentwithinafundamentaltemporalorder. Thisacknowledgmentfollows through a
double perception: of ourselves as subject to change in relation to an external
temporal order with which we coexist.Walter Burley develops Ockham's solution and
formulates the nature of the absolute measure as necessarily the first movement:I
assert that in perceiving any movement whatever, we perceive the first movement in
a confused way; in fact, we perceive that there is a simple and uniform movement
which is the measure ofthe movement we are perceiving. But whether this simple and
uniform movement is the movement of heaven or some other movement, we do not
perceive. Thus when we perceive any movement whatever, we perceive the first time
in some way; in perceiving any movement whatever, we perceive the first movement in
a confused way moreover, in perceiving anyReproduced with permission of the
movement whatever, we perceive the particular time that results from thatmovement.
(Duhem, 326)The first movement and its extension as the temporal order o f the
world constructs a coherent and singular time-world. Without this originary ground
time could fragment into different time scales and rates, if not within the same
physical world, at least at different future time (or at past times):" .. the word
time does not signify something single, distinct in its totality from allpermanent
things,whosenatureorbeingcanbeexpressedbymeansofa definition. But we must imagine
that this world signifies that first continual and uniform movement, and that it
also signifies at the same time, the soul that conceives the before and after and
what is between the two in this movement." (Ockham, Tractatus de succesivis, in
Duhem, 306)Although Ockham argued that a fixed body was required for local movement
to appear as movement and that this fixed body need not be an actual body in
nature, but can be an abstract concept. He develops this same idea in his
description oftime, but hesitates to described the standard in relation to which
time emerges as an abstract concept. Nicholas Bonet, a contemporary of Ockham,
however, draws this conclusion. He distinguishes between two kinds oftime: natural
time which is constituted by as many different times as movements, and mathematical
time, which is constituted through abstraction in relation to asinglestandard.
ThisiswhatDuhemcallstheAbsoluteClockandwhatGraziadei developed into the series that
wound back reaches a point of unity between natural and mathematical worlds:
Even though time is the measure o f all movement, and there is, at the same time, a
multitude o f movements, there is, however, only one numerically single time, and
not multiple times; that is so because the first movement is unique, and time
concerns this movement first and properly. (Duhem, 360)When Heideggerjettisons the
making ofthe thing as part of its identity, he loses this series. As we have seen
the consequence ofHeidegger's functional description ofthings fragments the world
into multiple times. How are these times stabilized into a single world or time?
They cannot be stabilized into a single time without invoicing either (1) physics,
to construct something like an absolute clock describing a mathematical order or a
physical order o f ontogenesis or (2) a perceptual apperceptive order (as do
Augustine and Kant). The first, while it does not reduce the world in the way that
Heidegger fears(physical laws are not the world nor can any science, except in
special cases [physics and chemistry] reduce one level of complexity to another),
it does problematize the animation o f the world, reintroduces the problem o f
substance, and reintroduces a metaphysics o f science. What is the relation between
physical descriptions of time and our perception of time?. The second, filters the
world through our perception or knowing or mind, and, therefore, places us on the
edge of a skeptical teeter-totter.W e recognize change in us and change in the
world. I f these are different, how are they related? Heidegger answers we are
things, and these things enact time as the functioning through which they emerge at
any point as what they are. But what kind of functional description, or semantic
embodied series captures our functioning? Things are units o f time, but these
units are not stabilized relative to each other nor are they uniformReproduced with
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except as semantic concepts. There are many times: only what counts as a thing
stabilizes the concept o f time as what is.21Kant in On the Form andPrinciples o
fthe Sensible and the Intelligible World, a precursor to the first Critique,
proposes that time is not a concept, as Leibniz argues against Locke in the New
Essays, but a fundamental, pure intuition: "you conceive all actual things in time,
and not as contained under the general concept oftime, as under a common
characteristic mark" (?14)22 In the Critique o fPure Reason, this has becomeTime is
not discursive, or what is called a general concept, but a pure form of sensible
intuition. Different times are but parts o f one and the same time; and the
representation which can be given only through a single object is intuition.
Moreover, the proposition that different times cannot be simultaneous is not to be
derived from a general concept. The proposition is synthetic, and cannot have its
origin in the concepts alone. It is immediately contained in the intuition and
representation o f time. (A 32/ B 47)The unity o f time is not established by God,
being, or an Absolute clock, but rather by objects which constitute a world within
the singularity o f an intuition.Heidegger in "Das Ding" redescribes this being in
time within the singularity o f an intuition by refiguring or turning inside out
the world and things and mortals and divinities as 'weHen'. 'Weilen', to stay,
linger, dwell, functions as an absolute clock-- that is, the pressure that
translates the ontological into a semantic condensation is stabilized, as are all
things, all temporal series, in the semantics of 'weilen' taken into the implicate
totality of whatHeideggercallsthequadrature.
Inthechainofimplicationconstitutingathing--Reproduced with permission of the
each functor depends on. the categorical difference between its descriptive force
and 'weilen'. Alloftheseotherfunctorsaswordsdescribethefunctioningofthejugwithin
thesemanticsofourordinarylanguage. Thereisametaphoricclaritytothisimplicate chain
that is missing in Heidegger's use o f'weilen'. The sense of 'weilen' does not
attach to the jug through its function, as do the other terms, but through the
personification of the jug that allows it to 'take', 'gather', 'outpour',
'gather'-- and 'dwell': to claim these wordsasexpressiveofitself.
'Dwell'heremarkstheentrancesi'weilen'intothe dimension of function. The more
obscure meaning of 'weilen' as 'staying' flattens the temporal order described by
function into semantics, where the meaning o f this world requires the construction
o f a world-organism, a form o f life, in which this semantics can have meaning.
The object o f "Das Ding", therefore, is an attempt to construct this form of life
through the elucidation of the semantics o f'weilen'.The syntax o f function that
describes the jug, however, cannot describe either the world or us. The relation
between things, therefore, requires this further abstraction into stasis--or rather
into the subjunctive. But it is exactly this subjunctive that needs to be described
in order for 'weilen' to function as the categorical functor between the
descriptive and functional temporal series and the world-constituting relations
ofthe quadrature (Geveirt). Not only must Heidegger describe humans as things, but
he must also describe the world, the quadrature, and in this redescribe how all
three can describe a function, an identity, and an unfolding of time, a time
series, as an implication that includes the others. Such an attempt would
precipitate the skeptical dilemmas he is trying to avoid. The emergence ofthe
opposition between making and given, where the given is emergentReproduced with
permission.
in our relation to things and in their functioning, must also include our species
history. Heidegger's question about how the world emerges as a world must also
include Thoreau's question 'why do these things make a world?'. Our self-reflective
awe includes not just the philosophical question 'why is there anything instead o f
nothing?', but the questions'whythesethingsinsteadofothers?whymeinsteadofanother?'
Buildinga mind stabilizes this questioning by integrating how is this world mine
with why is this world mine, not instead of another's but instead of simply 'not
mine.' I can make myself in order to make the world. Heidegger wants to forget this
question in the givenness of things.1Translating Geveirt as 'fourfold' as does
Hofstadter, confuses the categorical distinction between the kind of coherence
among earth and sky, divinities and mortals and that which is achieved in the
abstraction o f the einfaltigen\ these domains are distinct and cannot be reduced
one to the other, but complete each other while retaining the other category as a
set o f relations or possibilities that enact the world in a particular way.2 Der
Krug steht als Gefass doch nur, insofem er zu einem Stehen gebracht wurde.
3Heidegger'spictureofscience: Scienceobscureswhat'thejug-
characterofthejugconsist[s]',when science, as he believes it does, claims to
"inform us about the reality of the actual jug" ("die Wissenschaft
konneunsuberdieWirklichkeitdeswirklichenKrugeseinenAufschluflgeben").
Thisisaclaimfew
scientistswouldmake,andattheveryleastisstrictlyspeakinglogicallyimpossible.
Inductioncannot lead to certainty. The question science asks is 'How does this
work?' It collapses why-questions and what-questions into how-questions.
Heidegger's claim, therefore, that science pays 'no heed to that in the vessel
which does the containing.. . to how the containing itself goes on" is false.
Science specifically provides an answer to "how the containing itself goes on". Its
answer is embedded within a system of mathematical (broadly speaking) descriptions,
simplified and idealized in order to answer this how. Heidegger's question 'how
does the containing itself go on?' asks not for a causal description but for a kind
of transcendental deduction determined within phenomenological limits (and
therefore exploring the semantics of 'containing') and describing a set of
ontological possibilities. 4TheJournalsandMiscellaneousNotebooksofRalph
WaldoEmerson.5 If we can use Bohm's description o f quantum relations as a
metaphor.61say a noumenal boundary although Heidegger makes a distinction between
the Ding an sich and Ding als Ding, because he asserts that from the thing qua
thing we may reach thing in itself (DD168), but more
importantlyrepresentationandmakingformthethingitselfasthenoumenal.
Andthustheysetuptheir own failure.7traut: cosy, secure, within, intimate, close.
trauen: trust, believe in, venture, dare, marry.zutrauen: believe sombody is
capable of doing something.8 If the world always stays in this outpouring, beyond
or forgonen by our representations, we can only discover it in following this
outpouring in whatever world we find ourselves in. Losing the world might seem to
suggest instead the possibility that 'this world', accompanied by a wave of an arm
(my arm?), is aReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
true or false world. This can mean either that this might not count as a world,
requiring some tests, an examination o f world-criteria, or that this might be a
true-world or a false-world.9 Aristotle's hylomorphism determines substance as
matter determined by form, in a similar conceptual
unity,inorderprimarilytoresistthePlatonicreductionofmattertoform.
Realisminmodemphilosophy argues for the irreducibility o f category in order to
resist what is often understood to be, but should not be, the scientific reduction
to 'matter'.10 See On the Way to Language; "Letter on Humanism"; "Dwelling Building
Thinking".11 ". . . Dasein's going-out-of-the-world in the sense of dying must be
distinguished from the going-out-of- the-worldofthatwhichmerelyhaslife[desNur-
leben-den\. Inourterminologytheendingofanything that is alive, is denoted as
"perishing" [Verenden]. We can see the difference only if the kind of ending which
Dasein can have is distinguished from the end of a life. Of course "(tying" may
also be taken physiologicallyandbiologically.
Butthemedicalconceptofthe'exitus'doesnotcoincidewiththatof "perishing". (BT 284-85;
240-41).12 See Sein undZeit, 88.u Averrois Cordubensis, lib. IV, comm. 88; cited in
Duhem, 301.14 Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 29/30.15The Genesis ofHeidegger's Being and Time.
16Basic Concepts, tr. Gary E. Aylesworthy, 21-22.17 The following is a schematic
translation o f this passage: Thinking: (Being, essence) embrace; Embrace (thing,
person) = love =favor, Favor = bestow essence as gift: Favor = essence of enabling
= unfold as letting it be; enabling= possible (essence of favor): Being enables
thinking; enables = make possible; reintegrated into Being as enabling/ favoring2
possibility o f Being.181 am not finished with perishing and dying, as i f anyone
could be!, but I don't want to recapitulateexistential descriptions- but to work
out the relation between grammar and ontology--you could read that here as
possibility and necessity as stances toward oneselfand the world- and thus not as
logical (modal) possibilities.19"Moira (Parmenides VIE, 34-41)" in Early Greek
Thinking, tr. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi.20 Although Heidegger never
articulated it as such, this construction o f things as functions responds to
Putnam's twin-earth argument and its consequences for functionalism narrowly
conceived as a model for the mind.z,How does form emerge as the kind of thing I
should be or am, if I do not already understand form, at least of others, as who
they are?22 In Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770, tr. and ed. David Walford and Ralf
Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) 373-416.Reproduced with permission of the
9.1 Thunder-talk9'Weilen' in The Waste LandHowdowedwellinandstaytheworldaslanguage?
Science,Heidegger imagines, stays the world into quantity, while he stays it into
semantics, into the quality of being a thing and a world. Eliot asks in The Waste
Land, I imagine, 'How do we dwell in and stay language as our world?' Heidegger's
transformation of ontology into semantics mutates, in the poem, into a translation
ofthe semantic into the subjunctive under the aspect o f a more restrictive
aesthetics o f identity. Eliot's questioning does not undo Heidegger's work, but it
shows how the giveness ofthe thing is also made against the fantasy o f the
subjunctive. Thus, The Waste Land highlights our language into a subjunctive mode
through which we constitute ourselves in language (at the very least investigating
the way in which pronouns and names and voices have a claim on us, or 'we' on
them). How do we approach the inanimate through the subjunctive?How do we dwell in
and stay language as our world? I find this question in another kind of semantic
play on 'weilen' in a fragment Eliot quotes from the opening scene ofWagner's opera
Tristan undIsolde:Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zuMein Irisch Kind,Wo weilest du?
Notes for this chapter are on page 398Reproduced with permission of the copyright
A sailor sings these verses. Isolde, mistakenly or not, interprets them to be about
her: "Who dares to mock me?" She is th e 'you'. Asking "where you dwell?" to a
woman figured as nothing but a pronoun can be understood as another way of asking
'How do we dwell in and stay language as our world?' A provisional answer, that
will prove not to be an answer at all, but a restatement o f the question is the
invocation o f memory and desire withwhichthepoembegins.
Theenvironmentandtime(figuredasApril)arestayedinto poetry through the Coincidentia
Oppositorum, "mixing/ Memory and desire" (2-3). I find
thismixinginTheWasteLandoperatic. Howisthisenactmentofstaying(notreallya stasis) or
lingering or dwelling through the fragments different from the astonishment of soul
Kierkegaard describes as an effect of Opera? Certainly the power of The Waste Land
is not the "exuberant gaiety" that is the power o f Don Giovanni. This gaiety is
the expression of"his voice, the voice ofthe sensuous" (96). How would we describe
thevoices in The Waste Land?Heidegger leaves us in a world of things, with neither
people nor the scientificlogic with which to build these things into people. This
is something like the world in which Tristan finds himself in The Waste Land.
Heidegger wants to get to the organic coherence of the world as a form of life that
can speak 'weilen' with the ontological force that he needs to reconstitute a
particular thing into staying, dwelling, being the world, avoiding the traditional
attempts to link particulars and universals (examples, exemplars, forms, versions,
reflections, and so on). Heidegger's romanticism remains akin to Schlegel's in his
attempt to reconstruct a semantics with ontological force. His attempt, however,
blocks offany questioning ofthe giveness ofthe world (like Wittgenstein, he
wants to disconnect 'how the world is' form "what is higher. God does not reveal
himself intheworld'(TLP6.432);Heideggerbothbeforeandafterhisturn("dieKehre")
rejects this kind o f transcendence: Wittgenstein and Heidegger always had alien
views concerning logic. What is common between them, however, is not just their
appeal to the ordinary and to the grammar of language (albeit in different ways)
but their failure to understand the depth of questions about how the world is). For
Eliot some possible world speaks 'verwielen' and from this speaking he must
construct its semantics, in this case the semantics o f thunder.What is created in
an by The Waste LcmdlThe attempt to justify the poetry results in an appeal to and
requires the constructionofakindoftheoryofmind. Whythisisremainsamystery.
Ifmindsfunction within an ontological universe described by science, by strict laws
describing a totality of possibilities, then these constructions have force only in
so far as they articulate themselves in relation to such an ontology. When Eliot
deciphers "What The Thunder Said" as "The spoke the thunder/ DA," the etymological
force o f DA, and its inclusion inDatta (give), Dayadhvam (sympathize) and Damyata
(control) does not get taken up into mythological or theological promises or
stories separate from the physics of thunderstorms and the indifference of these
natural processes to our concerns, understanding, and meanings.
Howdoesitgettakenup?Orhowarewetakenupbyit?Is this thunder the voice of our
beginning as human beings, or our end? Vico and, through him, Joyce settled thunder
at the beginning of humanity, driving our ancestorsReproduced with permission of
into caves and into society. From our havens listening toward heaven, our
"forebears" (FW572.06) mimicked onomatpoetically thunder into language:The first
men, who spoke by signs, naturally believed that lightening bolts and thunderclaps
were signs make to them by Jove; whence from m o , to make a sign, can numen, the
divine will, by an idea more than sublime and worthy to express the divine majesty.
They believed that Jove commanded by signs, that such signs were real words, and
that nature was the language of ove. The science o f language the gentiles
universally believed to be divination, which by the Greeks was called theology,
meaning the science o f the language o f the gods. (NS379)The world requires
divination, and thus "Sibyls and oracles are the most ancient institutions of the
gentile world [721, 925]" (NS381). Divination, as the form of what Vico calls
"poetic metaphysics," "seeks its proofs not in the external world but within the
modificationsofthemindofhimwhomediatesit"(NS364). Themythicconsciousnessisgripped
by a kind o f idealism that resists the conscious articulation o f the question
"Are the signs I see in the world actually in the world or a function o f my
interpretations?""Because o f the indefinite nature o f the human mind, wherever it
is lost in ignorance man makes himselfthe measure of all things" (NS120). What is
the nature of this ignorance? In this case it is the ignorance attending finding
ourselves fragments (represented or acted out in our ignorance of the meaning of
The Waste Land). Eliot's ignorance is not directed at the world and its workings
but toward God and thejustificationoftheworld.
ThisisagainakintoVico'sdescriptionofpoeticmetaphysics:Reproduced with permission of
So that, as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by
understanding them (homo intelligendof i t omnia), this imaginative metaphysics
shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non
intelligendofit omnia)......... for when man understands he extends his mind and
takes in the things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of
himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them. (NS405)How do we extend
our mind into our mind? The Waste Land requires us to remark our ignorance of the
significance or nature of our own believing and of our visions as self- reflexive
ignorance: our ignorance of our ignorance.Vico explicitly grounds the poetic and
the mythic in the same logic, or poetic wisdom. Eliot's project in The Waste Land
is ostensibly the same (or similar). What is the poetic logic Eliot uses to expose
the mutual relation between poetry and myth? (This is another way o f asking what
does the poem create?). I do not want to explore this question
byexaminingEliot'suseofmythorhisuseanddistortionsofquotations. Vicooffersa way into
a more interesting question about how we enter into the correlation (an origin)
between language and consciousness. If Vico's history is too obscure, then, at
least, his argument that human consciousness derived from mythical consciousness
and that this mythical stance toward the world articulates a poetic metaphysics
places the logic of origins within the logic of coherence determining language as a
language, a consciousness as a consciousness, or a mind as a mind. These logics of
origin and coherence are akin toHeidegger's configuration of the thing as the
staying of the quadrature. The logic of origin and coherence in The Waste Land
function as the aesthetics (or justification) ofReproduced with permission of the
fragmentation within the poem. Eliot's aesthetics o f fragmentation is the poetic
enactment of the Sibyl's condition described in the poem's epigraph. Such an
aesthetics attempts to organize language, consciousness, and the world within and
around the inhabitation o f the concept o f identity represented (or enacted) by
the Sibyl.Unlike Vico and Joyce, Eliot does not ground the speaking o f the thunder
in the "first men, stupid, insensate, and horrible beasts" (NS374). Eliot does not
give us a complete thunder language, nor the integrated language or form o f life
evolved, evolving and expressing the infrarational mind of someone, but rather the
grammatical (the linguistic forms, examples, usages, bits) limits between thunder
language(s) and the minds and times and societies in which they made sense, between
the theology of God's languageand the insensate forms o f nature's indifference to
make our kind o f sense. offers different kinds o f education: an incarnation
versus T&ks(h*,xxj:Then spoke the thunder DADatta: what have we given?DADayadhvam:
I have heard the keyDADamyata: The boat respondedThe thunderReproduced with
permission.333
"DA/Dattat" if heardfrom the beginning of time or humanity pretends to describe the
transformation of a sound into a phoneme and then into a ritual language. If heard
as a beginning, "D A . . D A . . DA" decomposes our language back into phonemes and
then into exclamation and then noise. Even if someone spoke Sanskrit fluently
"Datta," "Dayadhvam," and "Damyata" sound outside o f any ordinary language game,
not with philosophical weight but with religious mass. This language is alien. It
must mean, but no one can understand it like they might 'this is my house.' It
might mean, however, 'this is my house.' The order of sounds that makes a language
is the same order of sounds that makes thunder. This is true even if all we can
understand by thunder is its physical causes. Science speaks the order of the
universe.What can this language mean against physics?Thunder disturbs the universe.
It disturbs us with a question: "Datta: what have we given?" To whom? we askback.
Who is this 'we'? The thunder speaks to me not because it is a language but because
it threatens me into a 'we'. What have I given to you? The thunder can turn 'you'
into an 'us'. If we mimicked thunder to create language, this means we formed
mirrors through which we could see ourselves as both individuals and as human
beings. Thunder-reflection is self-reflection.The demands of this 'we' can be taken
up in friendship as it is in the line following "Datta . "My friend, blood shaking
my heart." At night or when we turn our ears toward ourselves the blood sounds our
own thunder, shaking us into life as much as the thunder into fear: 'My friend, my
heart in my chest, and in our language as I write myselfReproduced with permission
into concepts, and into the world, my friend, as passions circulate amongst us.'
What kind o f language is this?We reach the foundation of who 'we' are:By this, and
this alone, we have existedWhich is not to be found in our obituariesOr in memories
draped by the beneficent spider Or under seals broken by the lean solicitorIn our
empty roomsBy what alone have we existed? By giving or not giving? By friendship or
blood or daring and surrender? This "By this" cannot be found in descriptions after
the fact, or in memories, in further representations edited even in our own minds,
or in our own giving of things and money within the law, under the auspices of
order and definition, or in the places and spaces we possessed. Either we do not
know what 'exist' means here, or we do not know giving, friendship, blood, daring,
or surrender.Do we mistake the unrepresentable for the inexpressible? or for our
privacy? The demand to sympathize (Dayadhvam) is ironically answered by a picture
of solipsism, "each in his prison." The pain I feel is my pain and not yours, but
'my pain' and your response to my pain is not determined by either my knowledge o f
it (I experience it, or in other words, I pain: pain!) or your knowledge ofthe
truth ofmy pain. You respond to my expressionorthemanifestationsofmypain.
Wittgensteinremarks,What makes it so plausible to say that it [the pain] is not the
body? --Well, something like this: if someone has a pain in his hand, then the hand
does not sayReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
so (unless it writes it) and one does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer: one
looks into his face. (PI?286)I can, however, fall into absurdity and find it not
plausible to acknowledge the other as human.
Peoplehavebeenknowntofallintoparts,bothinPetrarchianpoeticloveblazons
andinAliceinWonderlanddistortionsandeverynight,asleep. Asleeponeloses
ontologicalaccesstoone'sface. Inpartialanswertooneofmyinitialquestions,'whatis
being created?', I can answer "Faces are not being created, nor even found.' The
language of The Waste Land is attached to human beings through a collection of
names: Marie, Madame Sosostris, Phoenician Sailor, Belladonna, The Hanged Man, Mrs.
Equitone, Saint Mary Woolnoth, Philomel, Stetson, Lil, Albert, Bill, Lou, May,
Sweeney, Mrs. Porter, Mr. Eugenides, Tiresias, Elizabeth I, Leicester, Phlebas, and
Hieronymo. Not all of these names are names o f human beings who had once lived. Is
there any significance inreplacing the face with a name? It in effect turns all
names into pronouns.These words do not speak in the context o f god: the voices are
extracted fromeverydaylife.Itistheordinarywhichbordersonhysteria.
ThisisEliot'stransformation of a feminine voice into a parody ofMozart's Queen
ofthe Night:"My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. "Speak to me. Why
do you never speak. Speak."What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? "I never
know what you are thinking. Think." (Ins.l 11-114)Reproduced with permission of the
Hysteria attaches one's nerves to oneself. These "nerves" are a physical synecdoche
for a mental condition, a hysteria played out against human indifference and
uncaring and alienation within a marriage. The same hysteria can stay a person in a
disintegrating relationship: "my nerves are bad . . . stay with me." (This is one
way o f 'staying' the world inalanguageoflove.
ItisoneoftheconclusionsofEliotthatsuch'staying'isdamning). The husband here has
lost or renounced his voice (a sibyl-like diminishment); he functions in these
lines as a metaphysical 'I', a limit determining the scope of but not included
within the world, dominated by the women's speaking. But the absent husband's
implicit authorial position (maybe as bricoleur) means he ventriloquizes her
speaking, and sheventriloquizes his soul (the negative outlines o f his face
sketched in his absence). Catherine Clement, in her book on Opera, asks about what
she understands as patriarchal fear: "What haste, what hatred drives them to reduce
woman to her image?" (28). The image of women in The Waste Land is described by
speaking. Is the image of the diva, her body,herface,hersinging,orhervoice?
InTheWasteLandoneoftheimagesdescribing thelimitbetween
silenceandsong(whichisitselfthelimitbetweensilenceandspeech) and between desire and
possession is female hair:Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread our
in fiery pointsGlowed into words, then would be savagely still. (Ins. 108-110)Do we
imagine this scene parodies lightening and thunder? Parody requires judgment,
enacting mimicry within a structure ofvalues. To suggest that parody is the origin
language is to mock the question o f origin when it is understood as answerable by
something like parody. Joyce's use o f Vico's stages o f history (including the
theory that speech imitates thunder) suggests exactly this kind o f parody,
transforming putative origins into limits. (What motivates parody? a tool in what
game? A chimpanzee will mimic other chimps and humans, but why not parody them?)Is
Eliot pursuing a similar project of transforming origins into limits? Maybe. There
is at least a confusion between parodies and rumors:Only at nightfall, aethereal
rumoursRevive for a moment a broken CoriolanusWhat are "aethereal rumours"? They
are night-words, but aethereal words can be from Godandtherumorspromises.
Buttheserumorsre-animate(revive)ifonlyforamoment, the fragmented body o f
Coriolanus. By what does Coriolanus exist? At night we lose our body. We might find
ourselves in any body. We can find ourselves as a we-body, as "the They" .
Thisisagainpartoftheinstabilityofpronouns. TheserumorsinFinnegansWake (a "foull
subustioned mullmud"; Sebastian Melmoth, one o f Wilde's masks and, therefore, an
expression of and a disguise against rumor or exposure [228.32]) are
"Allwhile,. . . , preying in his mind, son o f Everallin, within himself, he swure"
(228.03-04). Some 'he' swore and was sure that he was who he was (which could be
anyone). Recalling Stephen inPortrait ofthe Artist as a YoungMan, or Joyce,
himself) a young man, the dreamer (maybe here thinking through HCE) reincorporates
himself in the possibility o f leavingReproduced with permission of the copyright
himselfbehind by leaving the (or a) world behind, remembering or traveling or
writing or sleeping:He would split. He do big squeal like holy Trichepatte. . . He
take skiff come first dagrene day overwide tumbler, rough and dark, till when bow
of the shower show of the bower with three shirts and a wind, pogoda permettant,
crookolevante, the bruce, the coriolano and the ignacio. (FW228.05-11)In 'his'
splitting and flight, weather permitting (R.pogoda, 'weather'), in a search for
wisdom or escape from the world (permanent pagoda), God willing (Deo volente),
fleeing debt (crook and levant), 'he' becomes Robert Bruce, Coriolanus, and St.
Ignatius Loyola; or rather he is the qualities these names describe if they become
adjectives (or as if the adjectives become a single name or description o f his
being in this flight, while reading maybe): Robert Bruce, silence; Coriolanus,
exile; and St. Ignatius, cunning.This flight or movement away and towards marks
subjective historical time,
fragmentingtheworldandconstitutingatransportable'I'betweenthefragments. This 'he'
is "recorporated, (prunty!) by meteoromancy and linguified heissrohgin" (FW228.20-
1). This mysterious "meteoromancy" suggests a divination through reading meteors, a
reading of chance streaks, instead of stable stars (although there is some
regularity in meteor showers, there is no regularity in any particular meteor which
bums away in the atmosphere).
Byreadingthechancefireworksoftheskyweallegorizeourselvesasboth unstable and unique.
Reincorporating, in this case, proceeds not only through meteoromancy, but through
"linguified heissrohgin," on first reading another description of the Wake as a
linguified language of rogue/roving names (G. heifieri). The collapse ofReproduced
permission.339
Roh (G. raw) and heifi^ G. hot), the raw and the cooked, as one kind of human limit
between kinds o f societies, between humans and animals, in the confusion o f names
(heissrohgin; and one's personal investment o f oneself in identities, language
games, relationships, and so on) describes the action o f recorporation as a self-
interpretation. To be "recorporated, (prunty!) by meteoromancy and linguified
heissrohgin" means to gain formasanegativespace,
orratherasthesubjunctivenexusofthesetofpossibilities describing our stances toward
the future and within language. Meteoromancy, therefore, is the divination o f the
ephemeral, the generation o f predictive interpretations, through and as the
instability o f identity (names and faces) enacted through the possibilities o f
language which constitutes, in effect, any pronoun.Two of the related figures for
this kind of self-interpretation in The Waste Land is a dismemberment into parts (a
human hand or God's hand) and navigation:DADamyata: The boat respondedGaily, to the
hand expert with sail and oar"Damyata" means 'control,' but whose over what or
whom? The instability of the 'ground' o f the undrinkable sea replaces the stasis o
f the drought and desert. And land has become a boat over which some expert hand
has control, a dismembered hand controlling a dismembered land (a boat). The mind
separated into a prison but answered by sympathy. This is a hand not attached to a
person. It could be anyone's. The boat, a floating jug, "responded/ Gaily," as if
alive, with quickness, as if not dead, animated by theReproduced with permission of
controlling expert hand. But whose hand? This boat scene is allegorized into a
scene of love? lust? caring? power?The sea was calm, your heart would have
responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedientTo controlling handsSomeone's heart
could respond like a boat, and in this it could describe human love in the daring
of surrender or the exaltation of control or love of God, the 'your' becoming a
hypothetical 'thou' to God's 'I'. The hand like those attacking the blindfolded
Christ can be anyone's. The skill to control a boat, should one find water, can
become someone's through education. This skill is a quality, but ofwhose hands? The
'we' includes "your heart" and some "hands." "Your heart" is mock essence and love
of what is always subjectively vorhanden, marking something as human, but without
that which is to be marked. This 'we' cannot attach itself to persons.The body is
remade into an 'I' casting between the logic of aridity and stones and a further
remaking of these fragments into order (this logic of aridity will generate four
subjunctive worlds):I sat upon the shoreFishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my hands in order?How would this ordering change the world?
What kind of question is this? Some 'I' asks himself or herself'if I should act or
enact an order (determined how?) on the lands that form my world?' Should I refit
exactly these words into a world? Why exactly do theseReproduced with permission of
things not make a world for me?' A science ofthe mind bom our ofwhat Vico called
ignorance, but Freud called the unconscious, and what we respond to at time as
intentionality, what Brentano called the essentially mental, or which Wittgenstein
called the grammatical (as the limit organizing our negotiations between the
psychological and the physical) understands the form o f this not as an analogue
for the identity o f things, the position Heidegger attacks, but as the analogue
for the structures o f the mind:The human mind is naturally inclined by the senses
to see itself externally in the body, and only with great difficulty does it come
to understand itself by means o f reflection.This axiom gives us the universal
principle o f etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and
the properties of bodies to signify the institutions o f the mind and spirit.
(NS236-37)Bishop argues that Joyce develops this insight into the practice of "an
extended 'abnihilization ofthe eytm' throughout the Wake (353.22 [I. ab nihilo,
'from nothing'])" in which he "shows the body lying everywhere under the surface of
language (L. lingua, 'tongue'])" (198).Finnegans Wake and The Waste Land enact
different kinds of crucifixion. Finnegans Wake crucifies God through his embodiment
or incarnation as human: this is the crucifixion ofsleep, the realization ofthe
limits ofthe body, that allows for or opens up the possibilities of mind or spirit
that we interpret as dreams or as soul. The Waste Land crucifies human beings, as
if we were already asleep: a crucifixion of vision, orReproduced with permission of
dreams themselves. Crucifixion can seem like standing in air. Air is the only
element missing (or diminished) in The Waste Land: we are buried in earth, burning
burning in fire, drowning in water. What Karl Barth takes as "the positive relation
between God and man", Eliot takes as the demand the world makes on us, to ask, what
Barth asserts: "The righteousness of God is our standing-place in the air--that is
to say, where there is no human possibility of standing- whose foundations are laid
by God Himselfand supported by Him only" (The Epistle to the Romans, iii.21). How
do we stand "before an irresistible and all-embracing dissolution of the world to
time and things and me, before a penetrating and ultimate KRISIS, before the
supremacy o f a negation by which all existence is rolled up"? (iii.21). Where do
we stand when we ask "Mein Irisch Kind,/ Wo weilest du?" In a
subjunctiveAfterAfterAfter. PhlebasthePhoenicianhasdrowned,daringtosurrenderto
despair and falling from his ship, a mock Fisher King and Christ.. He has performed
thefinal act of dissolution, which the Sibyl desires but cannot consummate.The
first stanza o f "What The Thunder Said" describes Jesus' imprisonment andhis death
from the perspective o f those watching it, those remaining in the physical,
material world, where death is not transformation but loss:After the torchlight red
on sweaty faces After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony
placesThe shouting and the cryingPrison and palace and reverberation Ofthunder of
spring over distant mountainsReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
He who was living is now dead.This succession o f "after" clauses, although
sounding paratactic, grammatically invoke and then fail to complete a logically
conditioned temporal succession of"after this, then that." "After" combines the
force o f the conditional "i f with a claim not simply o f logical inevitability,
but o f temporal order: o f intention ("after this, I will") or historical fact
(after this, that happened") or rather awkwardly a kind of modal present ("after
that, I do this"). What is done or will be done or was done after the torchlight is
repressed until after the frostysilencewhoseafterisrepresseduntilaftertheagony.
Eachoftheseantecedentsas part of a temporal sequence are markers in time, taking
the place of a subject, an T (thus in the preceding sentence the ease by which I
can say "the frosty silence whose 'after"'). The consequent to the "after X"
grammatically requires a temporal marker, for example,"After the torchlight, the
shouting and the crying began." (This would not be required if the consequent
included a human subject, as in "after the frosty silence, Joe spoke." Time markers
act as subjects, and subjects organize and mark the present, and thus determine
what counts as after and what before.) A temporal marker could be replaced by a
preposition chaining this event (the shouting and crying) to another. But such a
preposition is missing as well. The fragmentation ofthe paratactic 'after's', the
fragmentation oftemporal and causal linearity, is extended back into the logic o
f'after' (the temporal B-series, historical time or physical time, measured time)
dissolving the temporal force o f 'after' into a triply asserted pause. Language is
turned into metaphysics by turning the psychological fears ofPrufrock into an
ontological description ofthe collapse oftemporal succession and grammatical
structure into waiting.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
Do I dareDisturb the universe?In a minute there is timeFor decisions and revisions
which a minute will reverse.I do not mean that the metaphysics of The Waste
Landjustifies any kind of answer to this question (not even the authority
oftradition). Rather it justifies the question. ( For Albert the Great this would
be what would determine the poem as literature and not philosophy, which can
articulate answers. It is implicit within Aquinas' theology that neither philosophy
nor theology can give definitive answers, but rather reformulate the possibilities
answering and determining the questions we ask.)How does one turn descriptions into
questions? After After After x, y, and z, The shouting and the cryingPrison and
palace and reverberationO f thunder o f spring over distant mountainsHe who was
living is now dead."The crying" could be followed by any number o f prepositions,
linking "the CTying" logically with the "[pjrison and palace and reverberation:
cryingfor: over the loss and suffering of Christ or our own dying (self-pity);
crying in: the Sibyl in her prison or us in ours caught in solipsism or in crimes
and sins or glories and power in palaces; crying as: becoming the limits o f our
lives, the walls, or the physics o f our own noises or voices [reverberating];
crying by, with, on, etc.: translating our emotions and outbursts toward objects
and translating these back toward our concerns. The possibilities, and the very
suggestiveness of our prepositional expectation is caught up by the beginning "O f
thunder" in the succeeding line: "The shouting and the crying ... Of thunder of
spring over distant mountains". Consequently, we are (or at least I am) tempted to
transpose this backwards and read the line as 'The shouting and the crying of
prison and palace and reverberation.' Things cry here, physics cries and shouts.
This'prison and palace foreshadows the interpretation ofthe third word ofThunder-
speech:Dayadhvam: I have heard the keyTurn in the door once and turn once only We
think o f the key, each in his prison Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours Revive
for a moment a broken CoriolanusEliot casts the prison as an image for our
solipsism.idealism. Thethunderorthesublimedescribesormarksthelimitsbetweenthe
phenomenalandthenoumenal,andinthismarkingdissolvestheworld. Theworld remains as a
reality beyond, but other minds exist beyond our knowing. Eliot in the notes quotes
Bradley:My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts
or my feelings. Ineithercasemyexperiencefallswithinmyowncircle,acircleclosed on the
outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others
which surround it.... In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul,
the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.Reproduced with
permission.This is the irony of some kinds of346
Bradley disconnects both external and internal sensations from their meaning, which
would bring in language and thus the biological, social, historical context and
identity (what Wittgenstein calls our form of life) organizing these sensations as
sensations. Eliot uses Bradley as a light to both blind and illuminate. He invokes
other mind skepticism and traces a limit (a circle, a prison, a palace) between the
self and knowing and being known byothers. Thisismoreofadistractionthanitisuseful.
Bradleyalsodigsamoatbetween sensations and meanings (in the way Eliot quotes him).
In reading The Waste Land it is the question 'What does it mean?' that continually
forces itself upon us, before the question 'Do we know Eliot?' or 'Does anyone know
us?' These questions become more legitimately, 'Does The Waste Land know or
describe or understand us? or we it?' This isthe disjunction that the Sibyl finds
herselfin: she still experiences our world but it is not her world, and thus her
experience is nonsense.I f we extract the nonsense, or the prepositionless prisons
and palaces, which might describe ourselves, our condition, or our world, then we
are left with something like: "after the torchlight, the frosty silence, the agony,
the shouting and the crying ofthunder of spring over distant mountains, He who was
living is now dead..." The grammar recovers part o f its temporal logic, or rather
language gains a new temporal metaphor, a new way of determining the priority of
relations within and through which the meaning of sentences map the ontological
rules o f succession. We are offered a temporal algorithm:He who was living is now
dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience.Reproduced with
permission.347
With these lines we have entered that interval in time between death (Good Friday)
and resurrection (Easter). Phlebas is dead, the old moment has passed, yet we have
not re- entered the next moment. This "He who is dead" could be some particular
person, marked in the poem as Phlebas, or Christ, or Tiresias, or someone we know,
or even ourselves.
Thesplittingbetweenthirdpersonsingular'He'andfirstpersonplural'We,' between dead
and dying, divides the difference between being an object, third person- dead, and
being alive, our first person-dying together. 'Weilen' is translated into patience,
except this 'staying' has become a form o f dying.9.2 On the road to objecthoodWhat
is this dying? The gift o f water can become a jug, or the jug can become a
worldandthewateracanopy. Eliotcallsthis"DeathByWater":Phlebas the Phoenician, a
fortnight dead, Forgot the cry o f gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and
loss.A current under the seaPicked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fellHe
passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool.Gentile or Jew0 you
who turn the wheel and look to windward,Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and
tall as you.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
(underlines added)In this picture o f being human, identity seems to arise out o f
the question 'what am I such that I can die?' McCulloch's question, "what is man
that he can know number?", under the pressure of this logic could be answered with
'I am that whose shelter is or who is sheltered [this question cannot get behind
this distinction] by number.' But this answer is incomplete without knowing what
number delimits from within and makes visible as such.Is number a concept like
death? Number might describe the limit o f quality, or qualia, phenomenal
experience. Our counting, therefore, even counting ourselves as one, as part o f a
sum o f people, makes present the qualities we experience as a person through which
we also describe others. How do we count ourselves as being addressed by any poem,
text or word?Wecanenterapassagethroughitsverbs. Thepressureagainstformandnumber
inPhlebas'deathpassagemovesthroughtheverbs. Phlebasforgot: Phlebasacts,but acts
against himself(he remains Phlebas to us but he has forgotten, our personification
of the dead), reanimated enough so that the loss ofthe world is his loss. In this
loss of memory Phlebas, the Phoenician trader, loses the predicative use o f 'loss'
in relation to 'profit'. The sea picked his bones: The world acts against Phlebas'
body. The peristalsis of profit and loss that he forgot is picked up in the next
stanza in his own rising and falling, which also calls back the "deep sea swell."
Phlebas, as Phlebas, is now nested not within his body but in this periodicity
(semantically uniform and continuous, if not in the movement o f real waves). "As
he rose and fell" Phlebas' identity, what he is, collapses into the verb "passed."
He does not act, even through the negation o f his forgetting, butReproduced with
permission.349
becomescoextensivewithaparticulartemporalseries: "Hepassedthestagesofhisage and
youth/ Entering the whirlpool." Phlebas' personal regression, from age to youth,
reverses the fate o f the Sibyl. Can we call this death? The purity o f the
burning, the transcendent promise o f "O Lord Thou pluckest me out" closing "The
Fire Sermon" opens in this drowning the "river's tent" that began "The Fire
Sermon." Beneath the absence of the "empty bottles, sandwich papers,/ Silk
handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette boxes, cigarette ends/ Or other testimony
of summer nights" Phlebas passes (this 'passing' is not a living) his life. Nested
in world-time and passed through his end to his beginning,Phlebas enters, and is
further nested within at least an image o f absolute movement, "the whirlpool."
Instead of entering into either hell or climbing unto paradise with Beatrice, Eliot
invokes Dante by translating both the comedy into a failed harrowing and Beatrice
into symbolic metaphysics, into the water itself, as both the context and guide, or
at laest as the means of change. To enter the whirlpool as if the subject of an
episode of This Is Your Life! is to enter "the womb ofthe sea." The ocean
represents a characteristically feminine dynamic creative principle, through which
both death and resurrection are enacted.Although this symbolic designation is clear
in The Waste Land, Eliot specifically draws this picture in "Ash Wednesday":Blessed
sister, holy mother, spirit o f the fountain, spirit o f the garden...Sister,
motherAnd spirit ofthe river, spirit ofthe sea,Reproduced with permission of the
Suffer me not to be separated.The sea and the creative dynamic it represents,
opposes the process o f differentiation and identification: "suffer me not to be
separated." The waters o f the Thames listen, in The Waste Land, with maternal
silence: "Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song."
Buttheydonotspeak,norcanPhlebas. WecanfollowPhlebastothewhirlpool but not into it.
We are not dead and have not forgot; we are addressed and entreated to "consider" :
Gentile or JewO you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who
was once handsome and tall as you.Phlebas, who is now dead but was once like you,
marks, as does any name, the limit of finititude. Could this, can this, does this
force us into an existential crisis, into dread? If not, then what? If we resist
our inclusion within the initial two categories of Gentile or Jew are we immune
from the dread of the vision? If we lose faith, then how do we see Phlebas? If we
can read the symbolic links that structure the poem with mythic force then are we
not already reading as Gentile or Jew, as a function even of our difference from
thesefaiths? TheGentileandJewatleastwerehandsomeandtallasPhlebas. Infactthe
particularity o f the equation 'either G or J is like P who died' forces us to
understand this, regardless of whether we hear the poem as addressed to us, as an
equation describing human kind. This ritual and its obscurity make it impossible
for us to read this from within as if we, ourselves, made this claim about Phlebas.
In this way we are both inside and outside ofthe poem.Reproduced with permission of
We turn the wheel oftime, or the wheel of fate, or the wheel of our bicycle as we
movethroughtheworld. Thisturningmimicsboththecircleofthewhirlpoolandthe periodicity
ofthe rise and fall ofthe sea, and like profit and loss is not predicated of
something. But unlike any ofthese previous clocks, we are the "human engine" ofthis
time, "like a taxi throbbing waiting" (ln.217) for the engine o f the world to push
us into the future. Counting abstracts things into the concept o f quantity,
determining identity as that which can be counted. Patterns best described by
numbers organize a syntax, between sound-tones or between poetic lines, or between
a magnet and a falling rock. These enabling patterns emerge in the more complicated
syntax of music or poetry or physics.Patterns are the form of animation, activated
by the "synthetic perfumes, unguent, powdered,orliquid--
troubledandconfused"ofanunidentified'her'(86-89). Already, this 'her' and her
artifice "drowned the sense in odours," into nonsense and the double
threatofdesireandmemorywithwhichthepoembegins. Thelossofsense(thinking, language,
rationality) and the senses (the world) construes feminine artifice as a cause of
solipsism, upheld because this 'her' is already her artifice and thus more thing
than human. The only marks ofthe human are the 'her' and the absent (male) target
ofthese odorswhose use o f 'sense' identifies him with this speaking: stirred by
the airThat freshened from the window, these ascended In fattening the prolonged
candle-flames,Flung their smoke into the laquearia,Reproduced with permission of
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.While the odors (emitted from "her
strange synthetic perfumes") can contain and drown "the senses," they are contained
within the air currents which lead through a strict causal chain from "vials o f
ivory and coloured glass" to stirring the pattern on the ceiling: these odors
stirred by the air fatten the candle flame, which functioning like a transducer
flings smoke to stir the patterns on the ceiling. This stirring is a
phenomenological effect and again marks an T at the limit o f language. "Stirred
by" leads to 'Stirring", the animation o f patterns in the coffered wood, a
physical causal chain generates a qualitative effect within the world limited by
the T .This causal chain is fragmented into a conversation in which the speaker's
inability to 'stir' her husband, I imagine, ends with a renunciation of a
confirmation of a phenomenological isolation:"You know nothing? Do you see nothing?
Do you remember"Nothing ?"The wind is unheard (In. 175), the river empty of
possible debris, nymphs "and their friends, the loitering heirs o f city directors"
are departed, no longer loitering, without forwarding addresses. The emptiness and
the midden heap of modem life that is its subjunctive shadow is answered by poetic
ritual ventriloquism:By the waters ofLeman, I sat down and wept... Sweet Thames,
run softly till I end my song,Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or
long.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
The conflation o f Psalm 37, Lake Geneva (Leman) where Eliot convalesced, and the
archaic noun Leman (lover) marks the inhabitation of the 'I' as the limit of a
particular world marked by these particular sentences (words are always borrowed;
but here sentences and phrases determine a cultural-grammatical pattern into which
an 'I' can be marked or in relation to which a stance can be taken (T or F,
expressive, assertive, and so on).
An'I'cannotenteraword:ourrelationtowordsisnonsensicaloutsideofsome grammatical
pattern.What is the grammar o f 'living,' 'being dead,' and 'dying'? He who was
living is now deadWe who were living are now dyingWith a little patience.The lines
"He who..." and "We who..." follow an similar syntax, and thus both we and Phlebas,
or Christ, or the Fisher King, are contained within the same temporal series, not
before and after but living then dying then death. We are alive and he was alive,
apparentlyatthesametimeinthepast. Eliotestablishesanequivalencybetweenour condition
o f being (alive) and Phlebas'. Phlebas, however, has died and we are in the
midstofdying. Thus,inthis'now'weexisttogetherinthesyntaxthatdescribesusboth.
Phlebas' has been changed from being something to becoming nothing but a memory and
a name(s). Although we have left the state o f being alive, we have not advanced in
our decaytotheconditionthatwouldresultindeath. ArewesimplylessdeadthanPhlebas? We
know each other, we recognize and are recognized within the circle of our prison or
palace by our dying and death. Why not by our living?Reproduced with permission of
If we imagine we have to learn to be human through a lesson in and on death (as if
learning is the same as constructing or being engineered by natural selection into
being human, which it might be), the usual story goes something like this:I am as
you are, as he and she are alive. You are no longer as I am: will you return?
WillIbenolongerasIam?Mybeingasyouareisasamenessthat mimics being here together at
all. Identity is like being alive. Loss is dying. Will we all become stones or find
ourselves turned into vultures. Will you prey on my body and will I then return to
being as you are?How do we imagine the category of death could claim us? We build
our culture, our social relations through our emotional relations, through playing
our sameness (our identity as replacements for each other in getting food, in
mating, in power and status) as if that sameness describes our being. But any such
existential monologue presupposes thought: and this is thinking our being mortal as
the limit to being. This thinking is not the recognition of limited power. Those
limits are set by the world and physiology and circumstance, as much for animals as
for us.The logic o f this kind o f monologue requires the attribution o f similar
mental states to others as a means o f defining a possible future. This results in
the recognition o f the category of human beings as a construction of our being in
the world, what we now call evolution, as operating like our recognition. Thinking,
or let's say being human, generates an anxiety about being human, about being alive
or dead. The abstraction o f our
humannessisinitiallynotintoqualitiesorproperties,race,cultures,orwhatever, butinto
loss. Saying'our'marksthelimitsofourhumanityasacategorythatcanbelost. IfIcan
lose my life, I can lose my humanity. Science formalizes this insight. Literature
might describe these limits as the possibility of what it means to be human,
Science from its technological manifestations in stone tools and industrialization
to its theoretical models in evolutionary theory and physics describes these limits
as effects o f either operations on the world or in the modem world as effects of
laws operating on us. Literature explores the meaning o f these limits as the
operation o f the world on us, and science either offers a means o f operating on
the world or o f describing the operation o f the world on us as ordered but
meaningless. The force behind the question 'What did the Thunder say?' asks 'What
can indifference say?': what can we understand or interpret indifference to mean?If
the question 'What is life?' is understood as "What distinguishes animate and
inanimate objects?" biology offers a description o f the difference:animate objects
are self-replicating systems containing genetic code that undergoes mutation and
whose variant individuals undergo natural selection . . . . animate systems have
three characteristics that allow them to evolve. They have (1) heredity, (2) a
basis o f variation in their hereditary material, and (3) populations consisting o
f variant individuals undergoing competition and differential reproduction in a
changing environment, that is, natural selection occurring on the basis o f
differences in fitness o f these individuals.(Edelman, Topobiology 5-6)This
descriptive definition ofthe animate is structured around the formation
ofidentities of relative stability, not o f purity: temporal extensions which
resist entropic pressures described by the second law of thermodynamics through
self-sustaining self-replication.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
As self-replicating systems animate objects constitute a hierarchical structure of
overlapping continuous identities, whose relative stability constitutes them as
identities. Richard Dawkins, using principles developed by W.D. Hamilton, argues
that evolution should be understood as an effect ot the self-replication ofDNA
through its construction o f survival machines (plants and animals). DNA forms the
most fundamental identity extension for all terrestrial animation. Evolution
constructs other self-replicating systems which define unities o f extension both
as individuals and species. Human bodies, beyond themselves, contain a number o f
different identities so defined: genes, cells, body systems andorgans.
Humananimalsconstitutefurtherhigherlevelidentitiesandsystems, primarily species and
other groupings (including societies) matching or describing underlying genetic
similarity and thus stability. These identities, however, are not who we are. They
characterize a limit in relation to other limits described within the ontology
constructed through the possibilities o f self-replication at a particular level o
f complexity. DNA describes a constituent and functional molecular identity.
Individuals describe a constituent and functional identity in relation to similarly
constituted and acting individuals. One cannot put anymore philosophical weight on
these distinctions than this.1The Sibyl is a meta-description o f this kind of
identity, and she is, therefore, a kind of measure of our species-being from
beneath that description; or she is a measure of an individual life from the
perspective o f a cell; or she is a measure o f our DNA as the
defininglimitofourspecies. WearenevertheSibyl,buttheSibyldescribestheidentities
within which we function. But I have got the direction of time wrong here. The
Sibyl in her diminishment rewinds her identity backwards towards her emergence as
anything.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
How can time go backward by going forward? The Sibyl is the answer (but then so are
we as human beings from generation to generation or as versions ofthe dead
Phlebas). The Sibyl describes a kind o f continuity that stretches back to our
beginning, marking this continuity as continual loss, and thus as despair.In
Eliot's The Cocktail Party an unidentified guest asks Edward after his wife has
left him "Are you going to say, you love her?" Edward replies,Why, I thought we
took each other for granted. I never thought I should be any happier
Withanotherperson, Whyspeakoflove?We were used to each other. So her going away At
a moment's notice, without explanation, Only a note to say that she had goneAnd was
not coming back --well, I can't understand it. Nobody likes to be left with a
mystery:It's so . . . unfinished.The loss of Edward's wife is the loss of the
given. This loss begins a new time, instantiated in three parts: a going away (at a
moment's notice), a blank "without explanation", and a being gone marked by a note.
The moment o f going is personified as her amanuensis,
givinghernotice.Thisisatimeorganizedaroundherabsence. Thelackofexplanation
expresses her absence. Justification is, therefore, a mark ofbeing a person and
being present. This absence is sandwiched, as the lack o f an explanation, a why,
between this moment's notice and "a note to say that she had gone." If she had
never returned heReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
would have eventually realized that she had gone, or he might have imagined that
she had been kidnapped, and the mystery would be about if she had gone not why she
had gone. The time o f going and being gone would not be determined as a function o
f her intention. This intention and the lack of explanation constructs the gap
between the going and the being gone as the subjunctive possibilities constituting
her will as her own. I f the relationship is finished then what is unfinished? The
blank moment, the moment when shewas still present but going, in which she could
have given an explanation, surrounded by 'the moment's notice' (which is not notice
at all) and the her note, provides the syntax of time without its semantics. The
semantics in this case is, however, her actually going. And thus Edward can see the
change in his world after the fact, but he is not a part of the timeline that is
marked by her going and being gone. They mark a doorway throughwhich his wife left
and which remains open. This is why it is unfinished. This time (his loss) has no
meaning because although his world has changed he does not recognize
himselfinthatworld. Hisworldhaschangedbutheisnotinhisworld. TimeforEdward is
nothing more than what one could call the meta-syntactical order of limits: a knot
of not's and no's (notice, note, not, nobody) constructing communication,
continuity and change, and identity as a set ofpossible interpretations through
which Edward projects his attachments as the world. The moment of no explanation
only exists as it were outside ofthe world as a set o f subjunctive possibilities.
Edward, therefore, can neither experience this loss as his own loss (as opposed to
a loss within his world) nor can he translate this change into a history (and
therefore give it meaning).Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
The Unidentified Guest recognizes the unfinished mysteriousness o f this change,
but pursues how losing the given ofour world means a loss of ourselves (in other
words picturing the loss o f his wife as what it is exactly not: a loss o f
himself):There's a loss o f personality; Or rather, you've lost touch with the
personYouthoughtyouwere. Younolongerfeelquitehuman. You're suddenly reduced to the
status of an object --A living object, but no longer a person.It's always
happening, because one is an objectAs well as a person. But we forget about itAs
quickly as we can.(CPE 307)A person is either constituted as a self-generated
subjunctive or as an object. Either I inhabit my thought of myself, function within
the subjunctive, or I am "no longer a person." Someone is real to me only in so far
as they function within the pattern in which
Irecognizethem,asIrecognizemyself,withinthissubjunctive. Existinginthis subjunctive
world, however, seems supported or at least dependent on others functioning within
its limits. Edward's wife not only becomes invisible to Edward, but Edward becomes
invisible to himself except as an object.Why an object? The loss ofthe given
ofyourselfis the loss ofyour imagined 'you'. It maybe that I am no longer a
husband, or attractive, or happy, or my future is no longer whatitwas.
Myidentityandpersonhoodisconstitutedinthesubjunctiveoftheimagined past of what I
before took for granted (defining my expectations) and the subjunctiveReproduced
permission.360
possibilities opened up by the mystery, in this case, between her going and her
being gone. I have a finished and an unfinished personhood. I am not determined by
my own thinking,
thatis,Iamnotmarkedwithinmyownsubjunctiveorganizationofwhatisgiven. The world
described by Lavinia's absence, the record o f her going, the birth o f a moment,
and herbeinggone,thebirthofwriting,reduceEdward'sexpectationstothatabsence. He can
no longer construct his expectations and his hopes within a language which includes
both himself and the world. This failure turns him into an object. He becomes the
object describedbyHeidegger'sversionofscience: living+object.
Ourpersonhoodsupervenes on our objecthood, which we try to ignore or forget. The
indifference ofthe new time, of
oursubjunctivecontainmentwithinthisindifferenceormysteriousness,makesobjects: the
battle for personhood is over who or how whomever can mark oneselfas a set of
possibilities, that is, to determine or believe ourselves the subjunctive of the
world.These subjunctive enactments can be described as social roles and acts, doing
or functioning, and pretending or becoming:When you've dressed for a partAnd are
going downstairs, with everything about you Arranged to support you in the role you
have chosen, Then sometimes, when you come to the bottom step There is one step
more than your feet expected Andyoucomedownwithajolt. Justforamoment You have
experience ofbeing an objectAt the mercy o f a malevolent staircase.Reproduced with
permission.361
Or, take a surgical operation.In consultation with the doctor and the surgeon, In
going to bed in the nursing home,In talking to the matron, you are still the
subject, Thecentreofreality. Butstretchedonthetable, Y ou are a piece o f furniture
in a repair shopFor those who surround you, the masked actors; All there is ofyou
is your bodyAnd the 'you' is withdrawn... (CPE 307)After putting on the cocktail
party role, an act o f will or choice by which one enters into the possibility o f
meeting others, I descend the stairs. I am not thinking about walking.So I might
say my body is walking if I can imagine its expectations proceeding as if from it
and not from me. This might happen at night, or awake I might remember this as my
condition at night. "There is one step more than your feet expected/ And you come
down with a jolt." This is the moment's notice when my feet find the world
different than they imagined, I imagine. This jolt of lightening brings the world
against me. Unlike in Being and Time, however, the stairway as ready-to-hand does
not become an object present-to- hand, rather I become present to myselfas an
object.2 The staircase becomes animate, with a malevolent intentionality directed
against me. Our animation of the staircase proceeds from our ignorance about the
causes o f our failure to find the expected step. The worldhasceasedtobeours.
Inthelossoftheworldwetranslateourselvesintothe temporal limit describing the loss
of the world as going, in the moment's notice in whichReproduced with permission of
we find our feet have expectations, and the gone, in which we understand ourselves
as acteduponbytheworld. Thistranslationgeneratesthesubjunctivepossibilitiesasan
unexplained why in which I cannot choose, nor function myself within or as a
subjunctive mode. Iamanobjecttotheworld:apuppet.Doctors and nurses, "masked actors"
surround you the patient becoming a body becoming a piece o f furniture, that which
holds humans above the earth, temporary foundations of our humanity as against our
animality. We have become the ground of our being, nothing but organs, bones, and
gristle. How is being surrounded by actors, this could be a description of a
cocktail party, surrounded by cocks screeching "Co co rico co co rico," different
from having "everything about you [ajrranged to support you in the role you have
chosen"? One has been excluded from the actor's guild, from the set of
possibilities from which one can choose to be. As "the centre o f reality" I
subject the world to the whims of possibility defining me. To be in a world is to
be an object within someone else's world. As an object I have been condensed into
the contentless syntax defined as the limit, the tangent between going and gone, an
object to others: a chair.A patient on the table, already an object, awaits death:
He who was living is now deadWe who were living are now dyingWith a little
patience.We are dying and, like the Sibyl, we are not (yet?) able to reach that
point of absolute dissolution.
Herdesirefordeath,however,isreplacedintheselineswithpatience. Tobe patient is to
endure. Endurance builds up an idea of identity: a continuity of being in the
midst of events. Thus, its primary meaning is indurate, or to harden, to establish
a perspectiveandanidentityunaffectedbyexternalreality. Asacorollary,therefore,
enduranceistheextensionofbeingfromonepointtoanother. Thisdefinitionexposesthe
underlying conception o f being from which the primary meaning is derived. Patience
transcends immediate conditions by a strict condensation of identity away from the
destructive change threatening it. Patience, therefore, becomes the action o f
living, or the extension ofthe principle oflife, inthe midst ofdecay and death. Yet
we were alive inthe past, for we are dying now. Thus, this extension becomes an
extension o f the past moment ofliving into the decay ofthe present: a
reverberation ofspring among the mountains o f desert rock.
Thisreverberationrepresentsthedynamicforceofbecoming. Itsexistenceinthe dying
world, however, is by virtue of its hardened endurable form. Consequently, it
cannot become the actuality of spring, for it cannot break through its own opaque
and hardened being. Thus we cannot see spring, just as we cannot see the past. All
that remains is sound. Patience transcends the present, but the direction o f this
transcendence istowardthepast(anegativedirectioninrelationtotime).
Thus,itcannotbridgethegap between the present and the future; it is not a positive
recreative transformation between an identity in the present and a potential
identity in some future present.We have left the paralysis of the Sibyl's non-
transcendent realm. But we have yet to direct this recreative transcendence into
the actuality o f nature, where it can become more than a mere sound. Our patience
describes the content between 'a moment's notice' and the note we leave behind as
the subjunctive. Life is counterfactual.Reproduced with permission of the copyright
This is life in The Waste Land (the waste land): Here is not water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy roadThe road winding above among the mountains
Which are the mountains ofrock without waterThis "here' consists o f impenetrable
identities called rocks and the idea o f absent water. "Here is not water. .
asserts existence (here) through negation. Thus, this world consists ofthe idea
ofwater, our abilityto negate this idea, and rocks. This initial 'Here' has a
universalizing force (in that it seems to describe a world or a state) such that a
logical structure emerges: rocks = not-water. This is not, however, an analytic
synonymy, but rather a conception o f meaning as identity which expresses the law o
f the excluded middle. But the not-water negates the idea of water attached to the
poetic voice. This T , or the poem, is the excluded middle, an excluded limit, who,
or which, points toward the water it negates and toward the not-water which is the
rock. I use the phrase 'not-water which is the rock' because what is being asserted
is 'Here is this world' or simply 'here is only rock'. This voice or this line by
articulating the existent through both negation and assertion determines this voice
or this line for us as the categorical marker among indicative identity (this is
rock: and thus the logic o f reference), semantic identity (this is not-water: and
thus a logic o f meaning), and subjunctive abstraction (this could be water:the
logic o f possibility). These lines could describe our condition.This world expands
in the next line: Rock and no water and the sandy road.Reduced into the metaphysics
ofrock (ofidentity) this becomes Rock + 0 + sandy road.Reproduced with permission
Do these add up to a world? Can we get a world through paratactic addition? We can
only move in this place on the road. Do we imagine that this road was made by
people? A road functions like the idea ofwater, a possibility. We say the road
moves through the mountains, but the road is static. The road moves or winds as if
unfolding through our walking even before our walking. We recognize a road as
itself a proleptic picture or manifestation of our own experience ofwhat the road
promises. Can you step into the same road twice? The road snakes winding, the skin
o f a rock serpent, "above among the mountains". The idea of water and of negation
translate as a kind of effect into the "Here", where this road as something made
recalls an origin, a making in which the mountains were negated, and transformed.
The 'is' of existence in "here is not water..is not continued in the mountains,
"[w]hich are mountains of rock without water": the mountains are the mountains (an
identity), but also "the mountains o f . . . " (predication). These mountains
consist of what is, that is, "of rock without water'. The mountains are what they
consist of, which is what exists as being (the rock) and not-being (not-water).
Three uses o f our verb o f 'to be' function identically here.The road which was
above, and because above among the mountains, move us up. This movement makes
apparent that what is above is the same as below. Transcendence,
pursuedasanallegory,cannotbetowardanotherplace. Castingtheworldunderthe category of
not-water excavates not the space for transcendence, but the space in which we
place ourselves within this world. No-water means "We are here". What transcendence
is possible, here, offers itself in turning us out o f the space made by the n o -
water.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
We move not on the road but by virtue o f the road, but this virtue once called
forth places us on the road:If there were water we should stop and drink Amongst
the rock one cannot stop or think Sweat is dry and feet are in the sandIf there
were only water amongst the rockWe seem to be moving, although not towards any
promise.can neither stop nor think. We should stop for water, we would or we might
or it would be good if we did, in order to drink. The water would answer to our
need, but without water we will not or cannot stop. The next line, however, inverts
'there were water we" into "Amongst the rock one cannot stop or", from a plural
possibility of community to an abstract One. "Should" becomes "cannot"; one moves
by necessity as if by a law of
repulsionbetweenthelivingorthehumanandtheinanimate,rocks. Butwhathumanity remains
in "one", already abstracted into a categorical identity, and thus akin to rocks?
But a kind o f parallelism identifies one's inability to stop "amongst the rock"
and the absence o f "water amongst the rock" that suggests that we Narcissus like
find ourselves in or even as water. The absence ofwater is, therefore, the absence
ofhumanity or our humanity. Againwearemarkedasthenegativelimitofthisworld.Can sweat
be dry? Are we moving and yet always touching the ground? Someone's body has become
an object where sweat is never water in the world but only one imagines salt, but
that residue is not apparent. The water from our body is dry, which is nonsense.
without permission.We are moving because we367
In what we imagine is his argument against motion, Zeno pictures an infinite gap
between movement and being in space: "That which moves, moves neither in the place
in which it is, nor in that in which it is not" (Freeman, 47). This is either a
confusion in the definition of movement, which should be understood as a
metadescription, Ax, or a problem in representation solved by the calculus. For
Zeno in his defense o f Parmenides the possibility o f contradiction determines the
limits o f what can exist. Earlier Thales had argued that life is movement. Thus
Parmenides argued not only that what exists is unchangeable, unmoving, continuous
and ungenerated, but that this existence includes us as living beings. Eliot
attempts to include being human within a logic o f identity that does not lead to
Parmenides' totality, as a metaphor let's say x=x, but to fragments, or x=y; x=z;
z=a; etc. This equality between disparate identities is, however, not underwritten
by self-reflection or any metaphoric version of the associative law.The road is
always both a totality relative to us (and thus we can disregard the earth's
changed position and the totality of altered relations things and people have to
the road), and thus we can step into it twice. The road is also determined as a
road through ourmovementonit,anetchingoftimepointingalwaysforward. Theroadasaway
inscribes hope in its proleptic winding.Dead mountain mouth o f carious teeth that
cannot spit Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sitThere is not even solitude in
the mountainsBut red sullen faces sneer and snarlFrom doors mudracked houses
A dying earth, if not already dead, gap-mouthed (the dead soldier on the ground in
Guernica) becomes person-like in death, gaining a coherence through its inanimate
stasis; death brings the world into human form, where life like the Hyacinth
garden, or the possibility o f "April with his showres soote," turns the enervation
o f will into the sign o f human death:"They called me the hyacinth girl."Yet when
we came back, late from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I
was neitherLiving nor dead, and I knew nothing,Looking into the heart o f light,
the silence.Oed' und leer das Meer.Water from the empty sea is reduced to the
absence of spit. Water is what Quine calls a mass term, where the plural is the
same as the singular: our investment and use o f these words invokes our existence
within a confusion between identity and containment; to avoid this confusion, and
thus to mark our relation with God is what motivated Quakers to insist on using
'thee' and 'thou' in conversation to distinguish singular and plural uses ('ye' and
'you') of the second person; what's at stake in this? the loss of this distinction
has a moral and an ontological consequence; but if we can call this, along with the
Quakers, a confusion, it is also a connection, a dissolution in the way Heidegger
attempts to dissolve identity into function, between identity and existence. The
absence o f water excludes the grammar of these words and thus this link. But is
not the realm of the dead aReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
world which lacks exactly this link between identity and existence, at least human,
mortal existence?The emptiness (leer) is transposed into the leer ofthe "red sullen
faces [that] sneer and snarl" . The emptiness o f the sea in the world o f neither
living nor dead (the dying?) becomes in the world o f still dying, in the midst o f
the dead, populated both by mudracked houses (memory ofwater: like the mountains
translated into static objects by the loss of water) and hostile faces (why nothing
more than faces?). The living world with its hyacinth girls draws the world as only
this possibility o f love and nothing else: a poem. Asthis possibility shrinks the
world becomes repopulated with meaningless objects, not as metonymies or metaphors
of love or the beloved, but ofthemselves; the waters recede, the
desolationofpossiblebutvanishingfecunditybecomesadesolationofthedead. A metonymy o
f itself? A metaphor o f itself is an-identity: a=a.Our dying coalesces the
metaphors into personification; can one then stand, lie, or sit on these teeth or
in this hole of the mouth?: "[0]ne can neither stand nor lie nor sit". This reads
like a description o f an ambush in the desert o f the American west, the hero
without a home surrounded by enemies in mud houses and from the mountains. The
proving ground where a hero becomes a hero: a world of difference and identity
formulated by the possible negation o f the hero, o f substance. The world can be
reconstituted if these threatened negations are themselves negated, and the world o
f "Oed'und leer das Meer" would return. But it was this silence that led to
mountains in the first place.This fragmentation cuts life off from other forms of
life:Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
And the dead tree gives not shelter, the cricket no relief,And the dry stone no
sound of water. Thisrealityiswithoutwhatthetextcodesasfemininecomfort.
Itisoneofimpervious substance, resistant to any penetration that would allow a
communal transference between things.
Objectsservetoreflectthemselvesintotheexternalworld. Fromthesereflections an object
builds a relational dependency and interconnection, which, as it arises out of its
ownidentity,doesnotbreachthewallsofitsintegrity. Theseshadowsaretheunreal
projections o f being in a world where they can have little actual connection with
the putative physical substance o f the rocks and trees from which they are formed.
Yet they havedefiniteform,whichis,however,self-createdamomentbefore. Shadowcanstand
for mind because it has an ontological claim on us and is generated from the
quantifiable interactions of rock and sun, and yet exists only as an absence, a
hole in the light, a seemingly substanceless quality.Only There is shadow under
this rock,(Come in under the shadow ofthis red rock),And I will show you something
different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind youOr your shadow at
evening rising to meet you;Man has become a sundial, where he stands in the center,
himself unchanging, surrounded by the shadowy manifestations o f time ("each in his
prison"). Shadows generated through the interaction o f identity and time oppose,
or are at least fundamentally different fromReproduced with permission of the
images cast by the non-regenerative identities ofrock. Eliot will not speak ofthis
temporal process. The voice in The Waste Land rejects the beginning and end, the
points oftransformation. He is interested in the gap between these moments as a
paralytic moment o f incomplete transition between distinct states o f being.
Withinthisparalyticgap,anT despairsofeverreconstructingthere-creative
relationshipbetweenidentities. T-despairarisesfromone'sowncontainmentwithinthis
fragmented world. The metaphysical fragmentation ofthe world creates, or mirrors,
the emotional separation between people caught in such a world (what kind?):I will
show you fear in a handful o f dust.Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zuMein Irisch
Kind\Wo weilest du?With hysteria and opera, the lack o f women amidst rocks and
water, returning to the earlier voices and the failure to construct or retain or
protect the social, the only ethics available here is the identification o f
oneself with the despair o f loss.A lover separated from his or her beloved (but
the status o f women is partly what is questioned by a metaphysics constructed
through such a personal grouse; this does not mean one can make psychological
claims on the basis o f a derived metaphysics o f identity. Calling it logocentric
and patriarchal do their work as allegories, as further metaphysics, not
inappropriate when one gives a different kind of content to a higher level
symbolism, buthereitisthemetaphysicalstatusof'women'thatisatstake.
Notare'women'good?Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
but are they real? an anxiety that the quiddity o f humanness that is under assault
by the world, or at least in Eliot's mind, cannot be separated from a version of
our form of life at thesociallevel.
Thisisafterallapoembuiltoutofvegetativemythsofrebirth.Buthow can one generate
caring, concern, values of any sort from things? Or from fear in a handful o f
dust? This is human fear attending the 'dust' in 'dust to dust', to be cast onto
our grave, as that from which we were made and as that out of which we were made:
our fear.I am on the edge of a further turn into the operatic. The Waste Land
requires 'our' operatic participation in responding or rather accepting the burden
o f the poem's pronouns as 'ours'. (What in the poem is an aria and what a
recitative? Are such distinctions stable within the poem?). The Waste Land and
opera move toward the same limits (under philosophical pressure opera asks about
the ontological claim such singingmight have on us; a literary form of such a
question would ask how can or do or should we become this 'us' [who would the 'we'
be?]).Toward what limits does opera approach? Opera can be configured, at least,
around three different limits: between singing and speaking (as in Schoenberg's
Moses und Aron, within a musical totality describing the world, God, or being
human), between desire and sense (as in Mozart's Don Giovanni), and between the
mechanical, often understood as the music itself and the human, let's say the
expressive (as in Offenbach's TalesofHoffmann).
Alloftheselimitsareunderstood,withinopera,asthreateningdeath. What kind of death
and for whom? Catherine Clement's describes how we, as male and female, approach
this limit:Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
This is how opera reveals its peculiar function: to seduce like possums, by means
of aesthetic pleasure, and to show, by means of music's seduction (making one
forget the essential), how women die--without anyone thinking, as long as the
marvelous voice is singing, to wonder why. (iOpera, 59)If this is true, then
music's pleasure is that it offers ajustification (for death, or killing, or
singing) as a ground (or a distraction: are these the same?). Justification is
structured as an organized forgetting and remembering enacted through
identification and distancing (entering into the grammar ofthe music through
allegorizing one's relationship to the characters/ singers in the opera). Gregory
Nagy, in his discussion of how Archaic Greek lyric oral poetry constructed the
rhetorical forms for poetry, epic, and history, discovers this same structure in
the linguistic relation between mnemosune and lethe:As Detienne points out, lethe
is not only the opposite of mnemosune 'remembering': it can also be an aspect o f
mnemosune. For example, the goddess Mnemosune is described in the Theogony of
Hesiod as giving birth to the Muses, divine personifications of the poet's power,
so that they, through their poetry, may provide lesmosune 'forgetting' of sadness
and of worries for humankind (53-55); whoever hears the Muses no longer memnetai
'remembers' his own ills (Theogony 98-103). (53)This is, of course, one way of
understanding how the fragments and allusions work in The WasteLand.
Areader'srecognitionorunderstandingofalineorallusion(evenifthismeans only 'this is
a conversation; or 'this is a wife') and ignorance of or confusion about a line is
structured as a remembering and a forgetting, collapsing, as in opera,
justificationReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
into the grounding logic of the aesthetics (of our reading the lines as poetry). It
is unclear, however, how I can allegorize myselfin relation to the poem, and,
therefore, it is unclear what is being justified.The Waste Land consists of
operatic gestures. What counts as a gesture within The Waste Landl A fragment, an
allusion, a quote, a glimpse, a name. Because no conversation, action, event or
reference has anything approaching narrative completeness or contextual clarity,
every passage can do no more than gesture toward its completion of relevance or
meaning. A gesture, therefore, becomes an interpretive conclusion. Can Irecognize a
gesture if I cannot attach the putative gesture to a body, face, or a mind? These
gestures are versions ofHeideggerian 'weilen' and are understood within the poem
togeneratelanguage. Isthisanordinarygestureofawomanortheoperaticgestureofa diva?:
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread out in fiery pointsGlowed
into words, then would be savagely still. (Ins. 108-110)Gestures occur at moments
(or at the nexus) of incommensurable inputs, systems, or domains (worlds). Gestures
of this sort are not language but determine the contextual
limitswithinwhichlanguagewillmakesense. Theymarkthelimitsofourinhabitationof
language and the world, and thus show the boundaries o f something analogous to the
Tractarian metaphysical T . In saying this, however, I do not mean to put forward a
theory about language and gesture or about this metaphysical T . My goal is rather
to navigateReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
within the site o f incommensurable language games (The W aste Land) in relation to
the kinds oflimits articulated inPhilosophicalInvestigations andFinnegans Wake.This
operatic stance (in and towards The W aste Land) if attached not to Eliot but to
the intelligence or horror or disgust or seduction of his poetry, is what
Kierkegaard, vertriloquizing as the aesthetically motivated A in Either/Or,
describes as his love of Mozart:Immortal Mozart! You to whom I owe everything--to
whom I owe that I lost my mind, that my soul was astounded, that I was terrified at
the core o f my being--you to whom I owe that I did not go through life without
encountering something that could shake me, you whom I thank because I did not die
without having loved. (49)This is one way o f describing the limit towards which
opera approaches. A loss o f mind precipitates an astonishment of soul. The beloved
is that which terrifies A as if it were death. But this terror is exemplified and
expressed through a ridiculous and impossible list
ofconquests(inDonGiovanni)andbysinginghumanrelationshipsintononsense. Opera turns
the Romantic sublime, which might make us feel ridiculous, into the ridiculous (by
this I mean the opera, or the nonsense of The Waste Land). To lose that which
causes A to lose his mind "would demolish the one pillar that until now has
prevented everything from collapsing for me into a dreadful nothing" (49). Living
at this limit between living and dying, insanity o f mind and clarity or
expressiveness o f soul, in other words to risk death, preserves A's humanity or
the fact of his being anything (which of course he is not!).Reproduced with
permission.376
Don Giovanni's desire exposes this essence, or constructs this essence as the
meansbywhichmenrecognizethebodiesofwomen. ButDonGiovanni'sdesire,as sensuous
desire, can construct only the external form of femininity, as if women had no
insides, no subjectivity, no soul. It is through this failure that the souls o f
'women' are created. The opera "The Tales ofHoffmann", however, is structured
around the acceptanceofthelimitsofsensuousdesire.
Itthenasks,ifwemakethiswoman,makea Woman (Stella, the poet Hoffmann's "real" love)
out ofthree women (his fictional loves), like constructing a copy o f our beloved
out o f bits o f pictures o f many different women, do we have a woman, or merely a
clever simulation?Nicklausse explains, at the end of "The Tales of Hoffmann", that
the three woman Hoffmann has loved, that the three stories he has told (and for us,
the audience, enacted, embodied, imagined, displayed, and sung in his own voice as
well as in those o f the women and men involved, although of course all these parts
were not sung by our Hoffmann), are fictitious and used to describe one woman:
Stella. This does not make a lot of sense. Stella seems to actually like our Hero
enough to send him the key to her dressing room. Do we listen and watch this opera
and ask: What does Hoffmann want of Stella? or What does Hoffmann think love is?
The structure o f the opera masks these questions behind its solution ofthe
identity of Stella. She can be divided into three parts: young girl, courtesan, and
artist. She can be divided, exposed, and most importantly reducedtotheseparts.
TheoperaisnotaboutHoffmann'sloveorevenhisfailures. Instead it asks and pretends to
answer what makes a woman something to desire? What is a woman such that she is a
being that can be desired? and thus How can 'we' construct aReproduced with
permission.
woman such that 'we' can desire her or become her? Opera continually asks this
question, not simply because o f patriarchal politics (although this is important),
but because it is not at all obvious how one can desire another being which one
recognizes as not oneselfj and thus as something that cannot be known with any
certainty, which I take to mean to know as another mind. How can one define oneself
as a being existing within the internal space o f the mind, as a subject, as if one
identified oneself by content, love and desire that which remains a form? It is not
so simple to say that men treat women as objects. That is only true if one uses
"object" as a metaphor. In opera, women are desired because it is impossible for
men to love them as objects. Would anyone love a rock, a bit o f ground unless it
was more than an object, personified somehow, entrapped within a system of values
in which it functions as an extension of someone's identity within some particular
grammar or social context?Thejob of "The Tales ofHoffmann" is to make a man's mind
into a woman's, and failing that to make a man's mind into the body of a woman. The
body of the opera appears to be a story about three of Hoffmann's love affairs. We
enter into his imaginative world,intowhatpurportstobehismemoriesandthusintohismind.
Thesehistories, however, do not recapture or recapitulate the past. In the
melodrama o f opera, the identity o f the beloved is described by a mythic history
(organized around desire, generic forms and social types, social power, and so on).
This identity in opera is determined by its thematic limits, by the possibility o f
moving from speech to singing (and back again), from desire to possession, from the
inanimate, or the mechanical, to the animate. Kierkegaard asserts that opera, in
its enactment o f the musical, does not describe theReproduced with permission of
achievement o f consciousness (which would require language, not opera). Thus the
"immediate-erotic stage" constituting music (as demonstrated in its exemplar,
Mozart) "must not be thought o f as persons on different levels with respect to
consciousness; at all times I am dealing only with the immediate in its total
immediacy" (Either/Or 1.74).
Musicdescribesthelimitbetweentimeandsense(ornonsenseifyouwant). ThisIthinkjustifies
Kierkegaard (or A) in situating the dialectic of opera and music before or outside
ofthe Hegelian figuration of human thinking (or being) as grounded and always
taking place through consciousness. Hegel pictures human beings, as did Descartes,
as defined by their consciousness, whereas Kierkegaard wants to re-posit the soul,
not as having any particular content, but as constituting our stance toward
ourselves though our interactionswith others (such a stance might in certain
moments be defined as being conscious or self- conscious). This concern
transplanted from "Don Giovanni" to "The Tales ofHoffmann" could take the form of
the question 'Is the identity of this woman a mind of a soul?"This is a question
that merges into both the articulation o f the subjunctive possibilities shadowing
the despair of The Waste Land and the fragmentation and death that threaten it. It
is one ofthe ironies ofthe poem, that the epigraph makes this fragmentation the
object o f desire and the subjunctive a motive for horror. How do you reach death?
Or how do you know you are dead?Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living or dead, and I knew nothing,Looking
into the heart o f light, the silence,Reproduced with permission of the copyright
Oed' und leer das Meer.You might not be living or dead if beauty faced you as
memory built as a Grecian urn, even if later you assume that "only by", what the
Four Quartets calls, "the form, the pattern,/ Can words reach The stillness, as a
Chinesejar still/ Moves perpetually in its stillness", and "thou art desolate, can
e'er return." Statue-like you "could not speak", nor see, nor know anything.'
"[Mjarble men and maidens overwrought" into silence emptytheir heads, like the
little town Keats describes, turning themselves into jugs by becoming the void and
that void filled by "Oed' und leer das Meer" (Desolate and empty sea).We bury the
dead to keep them out of our world. How can one be neither living nor dead? Is this
third state made visible in "The Burial of the Dead" the patience or the dying
discovered in the speaking o f the thunder? Light has no heart to see. But such
looking drags the markers of space (light) and time (sound) into a synesthesiac
succession of dimensions: the heart of light is silence, and when the light fades,
when the electric circuit between clouds and earth cycles to completion, the heart
o f darkness might be the soundofthunder.
Icanonlylookintosilenceifmymindbuildssoundanditsabsenceinto a visible universe. The
confusion between seeing and hearing, while logical nonsense, mimics being neither
living or dead. How can such confusion determine a mind as a mind? A human from an
animal or a thing? Through love one can become a voided world oneself and lose the
beloved as a mirror o f ones own desolation.The sound reverberates against the
rocks and slopes o f the wasteland. The sound is an echo, not of or with the
reality of spring, but with the imprint of spring's force, an extension of spring;
an intangible manifestation from the past to the present: sensoryReproduced with
permission.380
phantasms, as Aquinas would call them, auditory shadows whose form, source,
referent exists as both some lost originary sound and as the causes ofthose sounds.
In The WasteLand, this thunder, as it foretells that which never comes, becomes an
ironic exposure of the land's dryness, a travesty o f hope. Language has changed
here. The modeling o f the world and o f a social relations, by dolphins and
chimpanzees as well as by humans, allows us to predict behavior, to plan and
negotiate within the complex social world all ofthese species function within. It
gives us the ability to lie and trick. We might ask, "what does the thunder mean?"
The answer might be, "It means it will rain"; or "It follows lightening'" or "God
spoke." In every case the meaning of the sound is its cause, understood
synecdochially when raining; understood metaphorically if God speaks. The thunder
in "What The Thunder Said" does not invoke any of these, nor can it mean or predict
these; no God speaks, no rain falls, no lightening nor no physics orders the
ontological universe of the poem. The thunder foretells its own primacy; it
foreshadows its continued sounding, marking this world as always before the rain,
the lightening and God.There is not even silence in the mountainsBut dry sterile
thunder without rain.This intangible reverberation oflife arises again two stanzas
later:Who is the third who walks beside you?When I count, there are only you and I
together But when I look ahead up the white roadThere is always another beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman
--But who is that on the other side o f you?
"Whoisthethird.. ."seemstoaskforidentification. Butthe'I'isaskingifthethird,this X
exists. It is always possible that the person "wrapt in a brown mantle" if not o f
one's own party, race, group, and so on, may not be recognized as a person. The
temptations of psychosis stand before us like religious visions o f Christ. Who one
is collapses into that one is. The questioning here, and the temptation to
psychosis it dramatizes collapses the distinction between essence and existence
that allowed Aquinas to construct identities
withinasimultaneousaxiologicalandontologicalscaleleadingtoGod. AccordingtoEliot,
these lines were "stimulated by the account o f the Antarctic expeditions," casting
them as a form o f psychosis generated by the landscape. This is the loss o f a
human world and its replacement by our mind writing out o f our control onto
desolation. This story o f seeing three as a fantasy in snow ironizes Christ's
resurrected journey with two o f his disciples, after he had been crucified and
entombed. Christ, as the hooded hangman, the Fisher King, suggests the spiritual
incarnation o f the "white road" through The W aste Land. This road is the
transitive link between death and rebirth figured as the theological or psychotic
functioning of our mind. This does not mean either story should or can be dismissed
or therapized into sense. Nor does it offer itself as a psychosis replacing our
common experience.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
9.3 ThevisibilityofthesubjunctiveIn the next stanza Eliot unites the image ofthe
"reverberation ofthunder ofspring" with Christ as the reverberation o f spirit, but
through a shift in perspective back into human life, into the process of dying:What
is that sound high in the airMurmur o f maternal lamentationWho are those hooded
hordes swarmingOver endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth Ringed by the flat
horizon onlyMaryliesbeneaththecrosscryingin"lamentation"forherson.
Hissacrificenomatter what hope o f resurrection it will bring, must always be a
loss to her. And this loss and this cry must be spoken for all those dying in The
Waste Land, and for the Great Mother Earth itself. This cry blends with the
reverberation of spring and thus it is tied to the maternal womb of the river and
the sea, from which The Waste Land must be recreated.Eliot transposes the sound of
spring, the imagined force of water, and the maternal lamentation into a woman in
The Waste Land. She is an artist, who creates through her own body, as does
Phlebas, and even the red rock:A woman drew her long black hair out tightAnd
fiddled whisper music on those stringsIn a line of dissolution is this woman
playing Nero as "they" all drown?3 The strands of her hair suggest the currents of
the sea and the streams of a river rushing over rock. The strands o f her hair
recall the maternal Thames and the sea currents picking Phlebas' bones.Reproduced
permission.383
These strands ofboth water and hair reverberate through her creative will, and
become music;shecreatesanaestheticanddynamicexpressionofcreatedbeauty. Withinthis
music, however, there whistles a parody of creation; bats masked or deformed with
baby faces. Is this music akin to the words generated from the hair?Under the
firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread out in fiery pointsGlowed into words,
then would be savagely still. (Ins. 108-109)Firelight and fiery points animate
language, savagely. This is the Sibyl again, speaking the Heraclitian logos in "The
Fire Sermon":When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about the room again,
alone,She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the
gramophone.(Ins. 253-56)A woman brushing her hair returns to make music or language
with a gramophone. She is, however, no longer even an electro-static transmitter,
but an automaton interpreting and expressing her folly (her passions) through
mechanically reproduced performances. This
doesnotmakeherapriestinterpretingherownwords(asanoracle). Thismusicexists only as a
comment o f someone else, marked by another indefinite pronoun: "This music crept
by me upon the waters" (ln.257). Who hears the music? Is it the same music? Again
this line could be a part o f a causal chain linking fragments: the woman put on
the recordReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
causing someone (a 'me') to hear the music speak. The music itself has dropped out,
except as a figure (as in Finnegans Wake an intentional limit) we follow as it
continues "along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street" (ln.258). These women-with-
hair are indistinguishable from a single woman or the idea o f 'women'.What
proceeds from these strings sounds another "and". The silence ofbat speech does not
prevent our mammalian recognition of our baby-selves in their faces, not in sound
but in violet light. Bats follow like sound the fiddling o f hair, displayed in its
beauty, an already dead part o f a woman's still living body. These bats parody
music, poetry, the created. Such a parody forms these shifting aspects o f waste
land fragments as the world itself. The poetic structure describing the change from
line to line, and the symbolic ordering of this shift, constitutes an oscillation
between a domain of space and a domain of sound or time:A woman drew her long black
hair out tight And fiddled whisper music on those strings And bats with baby faces
in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wingsAnd crawled head downward down a
blackened wallAnd upside down in air were towersTolling reminiscent bells, that
kept the hoursAnd voices singing out o f empty cisterns and exhausted wells.We can
mark these ABABAABB: 'A' marks a spatial domain and 'B' a sound/time domain. Even
in "A women d r e w . . . " the action o f drawing her hair puns into a line-
drawing, something like a Degas pastel describing the woman and the world around
the axis o f this drawn out hair, the hair drawn for us here in these lines. In the
next line "[FJiddled whisper music" acts 'on' those strings, sounding against the
lines o f the previous line. We do not understand what music on those strings can
mean but for the never visible movement ofthe woman. The causal force ofthe woman
drawing her hair disappears in the ambiguity of"drew' and the tension of"hair out
tight". She becomes a musician after she makes her music: what was she before? This
is a way of asking what realm of potentiality is articulated in The Waste Land: the
potential for meaning, for entering into the world as a person with an identity
stabilized beyond the confusion ofpronoun reference in the poem?And bats with baby
faces in the violet lightWhistled, and beat their wingsAnd crawled head downward
down a blackened wallAnd upside down in air were towersTolling reminiscent bells,
that kept the hoursAnd voices singing out o f empty cisterns and exhausted wells
This recognition in the light of our phylogenesis, of our common ancestry, suddenly
finds volume in our whispered music becoming whistled and the fiddled sounds on
this human hairbecomingbeatingwings. Whisperingpromisessomesecretsandthreatensthe
dissolution o f the whispered sea currents against Phlebas' bones.This devolution
of sound through our kinship with these bats (are they representations of our
words? or of the pre-reflexive soul Stephen Daedulas rendered fromReproduced with
permission.386
astorytomatchhischanging: "abat-likesoulwakingtotheconsciousnessofitselfin darkness
and secrecy and loneliness . . [Portrait, 183]?) follows down, away from the light
but further into space, repeated in the next line by the inversion o f towers. The
incommensurability or the synesthesiac collapse of sound and time into space can
easily describe how we inhabit an 'I' in 'a world,' or find ourselves organized as
if we were a world. The problem ofwhat this sound mean, just as the problem of what
the thunder said and meant, lies as much in us as it does in the sound or towers.
Aristotle animated Plato's mythic cave metaphor ofthe relation between truth and
appearance, between 'I' and 'world' by analogizing the problem into the biology
ofthose bat denizens ofthe cave:Therefore, since the truth seems to be like the
proverbial door, which no one can fail to hit in this respect it must be easy, but
the fact that we can have a whole truth and not the particular part we aim at show
the difficulty o f it. Perhaps, too, as difficulties are oftwo kinds, the cause
ofthis difficulty is not in the matter or facts (Ttpayiiacnv) but in us; for as the
eyes of bats are to blaze of day, so isthe mind of our soul to things which are by
nature most manifest of all.(M?/.993b9-ll)The eyes of bats are like the "mind of
our soul." Light is like the ordinary or like things. The Waste Land is not a world
of light, but consists of sketches of the world arranged to make visible the soul
dying or waiting. It brings out the soul, sharpens our hearing o f the voice as the
mark of humanity and not the face. Bats in this poetic darkness do not see
anything. They whistle, crawl, and beat their wings. A bat-soul moves down,
paralleling the upside down towers, inverted caves inverted down. We imagine bat-
baby-faces, butReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
their moving bodies would have disappeared against the "blackened wall." The bat-
soul becomes a sinister ciying. What is the relation between the soul and the
world? Eliot answers here with 'what is the relation between the bat and the
missing light, symbolic sense, darkness, sound, the towers, bells? Our poetic meta-
eyes can see this bat and these towers and hear these sounds, just as a bat could
see itselfwith its bat-eyes in such a darkness.
Thesubstanceofthebellsdissolvesintoreminiscenceandthetowersinto
soundandtime,clockingtheirinversionintothevoid. Inthelastlinethevoicessinging like
the fiddled whisper music acts upon the substance of the world, this substance here
being empty cisterns and exhausted wells.In the following stanza, the alteration
between lines is compressed into an
alterationwithinlines,agreaterproximitypromisingresolution. Theorderofthedialectic
is less rigid, but still structuring a kind o f poetic meta-change as an opposition
between space and sound, primary change. A decayed hole among mountains; moonlight
followed by singing grass; an empty chapel as the wind's home; no windows and a
swinging door (movement). These oppositions are punctuated by tumbled graves, and
after the swinging door by dry bones and a standing cock on the rooftop. The sound
o f the cock's species
nameistakenupimmediatelyfollowinginarepresentationofhissoundingcall: Coco rico co
co rico. The bones we are told will harm no one. This is an answer to the fear in a
handfulofdust,areplytoourowninternalshakinginthisgraveyard. Safetyresidesin stasis,
and if the world still reminisces in its toiling of the time, and the cock warns of
the coming day, this time is time past, and the day is "a flash of lightening." But
we do notglimpse the world. The lightening is a substanceless line o f energy, the
animal sounding aReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
mock pre-thunder, that like the inverted towers simply clocks a moment without
illuminatingtheworld. Thislighteningisfollowed"then,"inoneofthefewcasesofa temporal
designation o f order in this section o f the poem, with a damp gust; faint
moonlight, the grass singing o f line 386 intensifies into lightening and the then
into a damp gust. But a damp gust is no longer a song, and the promised meaning o f
lightening andthe wind "bringing rain" never occurs. The language o f nature, the
signs o f the weather do not answer our need. We are left waiting with the limp
leaves (Ins. 394-5) "for rain."What kind oftime is kept here? Keeping something
like time is keeping a void, and our living becomes avoiding voids, turning these
seeming gaps between moments, in a certain logic, the 'contra' in 'contradiction,'
into identity. But such a stability is not continuing if it removes change, by a
turning into objecthood. 'Avoiding,' like berrying, means a kind of skipping past
the pits of change, inverting as Eliot has these towers so that they become
cisterns. But again the effect is backward. We need to turn cisterns intotowers,
our avoiding becoming like a voiding we will go. How do I void a void? Tolling
reminiscent bells, that kept the hours. Sound and time without a cause and without
changes in the present. This tolling is the same over and over, a tolling the limit
between now and the past, or experience and memory. Here the tolling, following a
world- collapsing-synesthesia, accompanies the voiding o f height and the loss o f
ground; a set o f clock hands stuck on six o'clock, not twelve, translating space
into sound. The word is not, however, reanimated by memory; but a subjunctive
interaction in an ABAB dialectic between spatial and temporal symbolic ontologies
temporalizes possibility into parody. Such a temporalization transplants our
expectations from the world into language.Reproduced with permission of the
Wittgenstein remarks, "It is in language that an expectation and its fulfillment
make contact" (PI, ?455). Hope is human:One can imagine an animal angry,
frightened, unhappy, happy startled. But hopeful?And whynot?A dog believes his
master is at the door, but can he also believe his master will come the day after
tomorrow? --And what can he not do here? -How am I supposed to answer this?Can only
those hope who can talk? Only those who have mastered the use o f language. That is
to say, the phenomena of hope are modes of this complicated form of life (If a
concept refers to a character of human handwriting, it has no application to beings
that do not write.)(PI, p. 174)What about language, or poetic language, that
engenders hope as a possibility o f being human? This asks how as human beings do
we inhabit the temporal possibilities of language without losing the world, more
specifically in The Waste Land, without losing the physics ofthunder and the irreal
visions ofour waking dreams and fictions?Wittgenstein argues that the
intentionality of our language is not attached to the world, but rather intentional
statements (I wish that x; I expect y; I have a suspicion about z) are matched by
statements that describe their fulfillment, verification, denial, failure, etc.
(see ?? 136, 429, 458).An order is own execution." So it knows its execution, then
even before it is there?--But that was a grammatical proposition and it means: If
an order runsReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
"Do such-and-such" then executing the order is called "doing such-and-such".(PI?
458)Approaching one kind of poetic voice approaches nonsense, as in Finnegans Wake
where (when) the rules or grammar organizing intentionality in our ordinary
language are excluded in poetic language such that nothing can satisfy as either a
description o f fulfillment (of intentionality) or as an adequate interpretation of
truth-value, reference, intentionality, meaning. This changing o f the language
into the non-intentional (which is sometimes described as non-functional language)
does not dissolve language but redirects
intentionalitytowardussuchthatwedescribethefulfillmentoflanguage. Asadescription we
function as quoted statement, the cite of language's self-reflection not our own.
Language replaces us; poetry can describe this replacement and resist it. Such
poetry distrust words, and rightly so. The magic of language is its danger.Poetry
that constructs the reader as its intentional target enacts a peculiar kind of
conversion: the conversion into a counterfactual.If there were waterAnd no rockIf
there were rockAnd also waterAnd waterA springA pool among the rockIf there were
the sound of water onlyReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
Not the cicadaAnd dry grass singingBut the sound o f water over a rockWhere the
hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop dropBut there
is no waterIn this passage there are four possible worlds, each following the
other, built from simple metaphysics, which if we hold water to invoke the human,
or at least the living, then these worlds or pictures o f being human as a
possibility, negated by the world, but functioning nevertheless against it. These
worlds can be described as (1) subjunctive flux ('I' as absolute limit), (2)
generative transformation ('I ' recast as flux and identity), (3) musical ('I' as
sound), and parody ('I' as bird song):1) If water and no rock: a waterworld of
total flux or chaos, an inversion of rock and not-water. In this subjunctive
(world) change or indeterminacy is marked by the negationofidentity(rock).
Identityisnegatedfromwithinthesubjunctive.Thereisnoground on which to stand in this
world, and thus the T , functioning much likeWittgenstein's metaphysical 'I'. The
'I' is split. It is constituted as this subjunctive world: a world constituted by
its desires and in its alienation from the world of rock. The poetic T is
constituted a t the limit o f the world o f rock and fragments as itself
subjunctive. The instability ofthe 'I'within the world ofrock is so great as to
make this subjunctive fantasy the limit ofthat world. The 'I' does not exist within
the poem in any recognizableform.
ItexistswithinthepoemthroughtheexpressionofwhattheworldofReproduced with permission
rock is not. Thus, it enters the world of The Waste Land (the waste land) through
and as this subjunctive.2) "If rock and water, water, spring and pool": this
describes a spiraling symbolic transformation from the concept of identity (rock)
through opposition by conceptual flux or generation (water) into sublated forms o f
generation and identity (springandpool).
Therepetitionof'water'crystallizeswaterawayfromitsoppositionto rock into theform
ofgeneration (water, water). The nature ofgeneration is focused into a spring, a
source that rewrites the doubling ofwater into a mating, which produces an effect,
a pool, a version o f a determinate identity. A pool mimics rock in its form and
expresseswaterinitscontentormatter. Thestructureofthesubjunctiveworldinthislineis a
story o f self-conversion into both flux and indetity in a stable world.3) "If
there were the sound of water only": sound is an effect of "water over a rock."
This sound, caused at a distance, posits a world beyond sight and counter to
cicada, the cricket that fails to comfort, and the dry grass singing. There exists
two kinds o f sounds, both defined by their cause. In the first case (identity
resistance), cicada and dry grass sound through the vibrations caused by the
resistance o f two impenetrable extensions ofthe same kind rubbing against each
other. In the second case (categorical resistance) sound is generated through the
categorical difference, within the semantics ofthe poem, between rock and water
(abstracted through their difference into a more fundamental material resistance
generating sound). One can imagine the friction betweenReproduced with permission
the dry grass igniting into flame. The water can wash away the rock in a kind of
parody of penetrability.
Thissoundisnotthunder,whichistheharbingerofwaterandnotacauseo f water. I f the T is
split into the first world in order to mark its access to any world, and if in the
second world it is converted through a symbolic logic into a specific form within a
rock world, then the content o f these worlds is now sound.4)
"Butsoundofwaterover... wherethe. or"arockwherethehermit- thrush sings" gives this
bird's world as double: a mimic of the water or an echo,memory, or parody manifest
as a dynamic pool against the rock. The hermit-thrush's
"dripdropdrip"song,inaworldwithwatermimicswaterinanonomatopoeia. Thismight be a
language. This might be a primal scene describing a natural referential language or
the speaking of nature to itself. The last four nominal drops of the bird's song
shapes mimicry into a rock parody o f water. In a world without water such songs
are subjunctive or an alien nonsense that we would hear like we might hear the dry
grass singing. Is this song the words o f the Sibyl? or the singing o f a woman in
an opera? ThefirstsubjunctiveworldisconstitutedbythemissingT
asbothitssurrogateandasan expression o f its desires. These desires constitute a
limit, but only a subjunctive limit, to theactualityofrock.
Thusthesubjunctiveconstitutesboththecontentofthe'I'withinthe world of rock and
fragments and an escape from that same world. In the final subjunctive world the
janus-stance o f the T , towards itself as the subjunctive world and towards the
world of rock (as a limit), structures the world as fantasy or parody of itself.
The content of the 'I' has been displaced into sound according to the same
translation inReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
opera o f women into form at the limits o f the voice (speech/ singing), o f
desire, and o f the human (animate/ inanimate).Time as the limit o f the world is
enacted through the shifting content o f these subjunctive possibilities. When
Eliot ends the poem with "I say upon the shore . . . These fragments I have shored
against my ruins" this T exists between these limits, but not as a limit. The poem
does not figure an T within the text except as either an object or as the
subjunctive. Thestructuresofidentity(rock:space)andchange(water:sound)are
activated, animated into a dialectic o f shifting between these subjunctive
possibilities. The T , as either a pronoun which we can speak or as the poetic
voice, is always outside these possibilities. He is not their limit, they are his
limit, just as sound and space are. This is to say that the missing subject of the
poem is victimized by time and space as is the Sibyl andthe operatic figures and
stances o f the woman (women) in The W aste Land.The poem enacts the condition
ofthe Sibyl described by its epigraph. The WasteLand is organized around an
aesthetic atomism in which language and the world are broken into an admixture of
obdurate "echoes' and "rocks," or images, voices, and phrases that exist as
differentiated identities, a system o f limits. Eliot undoes the human
intovoicesandtheanimationofsymbols. Consciousnessstabilizedthroughidentity,asa
measure o f the world or as a mode o f self-reflection, made ontological, made
visible, allegorized into matter and into fragments, looks like changes of the sort
victimizing the Sibyl, although one might also imagine someone getting bigger or
changing kind, mutating. Thislastpossibilityis,ofcourse,whatwecallevolution.
Imightfindmy education, mediated by my speaking in an oracular voice, enacting my
language as mineReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
and as coherent, embodying truth or sense, or my form of life, as a desire to
stabilize myself in my speech. I might shape my words into rocks and water, water,
spring and a pool in which I can recognize myself. But there might not be any
water, in which case will I recognize myself in these fragments? Evolution
describes not only the phylogenesis o f life, but pictures meaning as continuity
(survival), replacement (extinction and death), and succession (reproduction and
generation), traced through and by means ofthe stability of DNA or Life.
Phylogenesis and ontogenesis do not recapitulate each other so much as provide the
language enacting the meaning o f change in both a coherent picture and in despair:
the despair of the Sibyl and The Waste Land. This is the way tragedy means, by
preserving, within scenes o f anxiety and crisis the syntax (systems o f order)
describing our mind (consciousness, soul, psyche, and so on) and our world
(environment, context, God) asours.
ThecostofthisstabilityinTheWasteLand,however,isthatallthatiscreatedis a subjunctive
counterpoint and the sacrifice of 'women' to sound.The ontological problem of The
Waste Land is to reintegrate the pattern of identity (the Sibyl's immortality) and
the pattern o f change (the Sibyl's decay) within the gaps between identities
holing a world. The holes in this world emerge as a consequence o f the
hypostatization o f identity into an ontological ground. This is a world where
infinite regression is possible: the tortoise and the hare both never reaching the
finish line, never passing each other. In such a world the model of salvation lies
in death and resurrection. This sets up the archetypal problem ofwhat one could
call temporal ontology. How does one moment, and the identities it contains or
defines, affect, cause and become another moment? Even if we think the calculus,
with or without Leibniz's infinitesimal, can keepReproduced with permission of the
the arrow in flight at every point or moment, the relation between change or time
and identity or pattern or stability determines our conception of matter or
substance or atoms or representation or realism. The status ofwhat exists and its
description in recent years has been expressed as the problem o f realism and
representation. These debates ask what is the relation between concept and matter.
Are there irreducible domains of reality or experience? (Intentionality? Grammar?).
Can reality be reduced to some form or kind of matter described by strict laws:
consciousness to physiology (eliminative materialism) or of all effect to atomic
causes (although few physicists would claim this).The theology o f creation and
recreation sets up a basic underlying cosmological perspective relating change and
being. The Waste Land is Eliot's purposefully failed attempt to reformulate such a
creative theology (metaphysics), masquerading as a myth, within the spiritual,
physical and emotional malaise o f modem life. The last section o f the poem
instantiates the gap between identities, and represents that intangible now, where
life exists but does not change. Eliot has removed the dynamism from time by
displacing change into the projection ofmeaning and desire into a subjunctive
shadow ofboth the poemandtheworldofrock.
Inthismomentthereisstasis,strugglingtobecomedynamic.The last section o f the poem
represents a symbolic attempt to reintegrate identity
andchange,representedrespectivelyasrockandwater. Thus"WhatTheThunderSaid" is not a
representation o f decay, but on an expanded and metaphoric scale it is that space
between the dissolution of one moment or identity and the recreation of another,
described asakindoflanguage.
WithinthissectionthereexistsasymbolictensionbetweenidentityReproduced with
permission.397
(a continuity o f a distinct being, itself unchanging and unitary) and dynamic
transformation: rock and water. The primary state which must be overcome, in The
Waste Land, is the paralytic gap between dissolution and regeneration, or the gap
between dissolution (the Sibyl's decay) and death. The transcendence o f this gap
involves a transformative leap between one state ofbeing into another. Thus the
goal ofthe fifth section is to integrate the creative process of change within the
logic of identity; this is what the poem understands as reanimation, and what it
finds impossible.1To what degree does self-replication constitute self-
consciousness?2This is the point one could begin a critique ofBeing and Time. The
economy between Dasein and tools,
objects,things,asalwaysparticularsfailstocapturethematerialityoftheworld.
Thegivenessofthe worlddescribesourinclusionwithin"DasMan",withinananimatetotality.
ForHeideggertheworld neveropensupasmaterialandobjective.
Daseinisnotobjectified,andtherefore,oureveryday
involvementintheTheyfailstopickoutothersasfellowDasein.
Thedehumanizationofothersdescribed as our everyday involvement in the They, I
think, is tied to Heidegger's failure to imagine the inanimate world against us,
turning us into objects and animating itself as a totality.3 The woman, as a causal
node, an indefinite identity, recreates music from her own body,albeit a dead
extension o f her head, a translation o f some living past (cells) into the dead
present (hair cells), as the object and synecdochially an image o f a 'woman' and
'beauty.'This woman establishes a temporal connection between the creative water
image existentbefore The Waste Land and the sterile identify of The Waste Land in
the present, of which sheisapart.
Time,themostfundamentalpatternoftransformation,re-arisesasanaestheticecho from the
dead cities o f the past; the falling towers o f the city above the mountains
reaching toward the earth, parodies o f her drawn tight hair (among other more
obviousthings) perched above the dry womb o f the earth.And upside down in air were
towersT olling reminiscent bells, that kept the hoursAnd voices singing out of
empty cisterns and exhausted wellsIn these cisterns and wells there can be no life,
no movement, and hence no sound, for they are simply driedshells.
Yetfromoutofthisstaticbarrennessvoicescanbeheard. Thereisnoapparentsourcefor
thissound.
AsinanOperaanotherwomanhasbeenkilled,sacrificedbytransformingthepossibilityofat
leastsomeman'srelationwithsomewomanintoontologicalclaims.
Withoutatemporaldesignation, such a 'then' or 'when,' etc., the use of the
conjunction 'and' to define the relationship between phrases leads to a confused
building o f composite images, with unclear temporal order and hazy causal
connection. A self-reflexive time continual changes itself back into itself every
life the same life but lost.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
mTHE SEXUAL ONTOLOGY OF THE PSYCHEReproduced with permission of the copyright
10The Sexual Ontology of the Psyche10.1 Conversation with God and SelfThe question
"Who is the third who walks always beside you?" is answered, in The Waste Land, as
the sound of "maternal lamentation", as "hooded hordes swarming/ overendless
plains", by a women drawing "her black hair out tight", by aridity, all forms of
"memory and desire", but desire breeding backwards into memory. Under the aspect of
this aridity, by the fact that "we have existed", The Waste Land becomes a version
of what Wittgenstein called "[m]emory time": "Memory time. . . is (like visual
space) not a part o f the larger time, rather the specific order o f events and
situations in thought // memory//. Inthistimethereis,e.g.,nofuture"(BigTranscript?
105).1Atimewithout a future describes a phenomenological cocoon, a bubble of the
now, opposed to historical or "physical time, the order o f events in the physical
world" (B ig Ttranscript, ? 105). In Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein asserts
that "[w]hat we understand by the word 'language' unwinds in physical time. (As is
made perfectly clear by the comparison with a mechanism.)" (PR ? 69). Eliot,
however, did not imagine that language functioned only through historical or
physical time, through event and action ordered as the past, present and future.
The W aste Land, instead, constitutes "memory time" as a kind o f language. This
language is built through a poetics that collapses images, voices, words, and
phrases into a logic, a set o f relations, defined by the concept o f identity
(x=y), into an admixture ofadumbrate "echoes" and "rocks" that cannot mean within
the "world" because languageNotes for this chapter begin on page 458Reproduced with
permission.399
does not have the power to order historical time through the logic o f identity
that determines what is real and true within this world.This kind of aesthetic
atomism, similar to Wittgenstein's Tractarian logical atomism, although functioning
within a different linguistic domain, cannot create a future: things only signify
within memory and as differentiated identities. The Waste Land pictures this
confrontation between "memory time" and "physical time" as a tragic impasse.
Finnegans Wake challenges and rewrites this conception of the relation between
language andtime.
Joycedoesnotdenythesignificanceofidentity(astautology,forexample)in how we mean,
but he attempts to enact, through his description o f our "noughttime", our no-
time, night-time, experience, a poetic logic of the future. This "poetic logic", as
Vico describes it, "insofar as it considers things in all the forms by which they
may be signified" (NS 400), should not be understood as a theory o f meaning, but
rather as an investigation of how we mean at the limits of sense. At these limits
the construction of the possibility of a future (at least for us to continue
reading), as an effect, articulates a what I think shouldbe called a theology of
our "nat language" as a part of our ordinary language.
Iflanguagemeansanythingwithin TheWasteLanditattachesitselftotheworldas a form of
everyday, common hysteria, something like speaking "demotic French" in London (In.
212), or asking oneselfor someone else, as ifone could no longer tell the
difference between a joke and a plea, or between Shakespeare and "O O O O that
Shakspeherian Rag", "Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?" And do
we answer: "Yes I am alive because I have something in my head"? How do I know? Why
would that make me alive? How can an emotional (or a social or historical) crisis
take theReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
formoftheontologicalriddles: "Whatisreal?"or"AmIalive?" Insuchconfusion,ifwe all
took notice o f what has passed, we might all be surprised that "death had undone
so many" as if we had been surprised by someone turning on the lights.The narrator
asks, "Shall I at least set my lands in order?", and then a voice concludes-* these
ruins shore my ruins into a shore on which I sit asking shall I at least set my
lands in order? What would it mean to set one's lands in order? In the third to
last line o f the poem Eliot recalls Kyd's Spanish Tragedy as a fragment "shored
against my ruins" : "Why then De fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe." Eliot invests
himself in these fragments as Hieronymo does when he pretends madness in order to
avenge his son's murder.
Hieronymowritesaplayinwhich,whileperformingoneoftheparts,hekillsthe murderer. If we
must write a play, create an extraordinary context in order that we may act with a
kind ofjustice (but if this is our play how can it be a justice for others?), then
morality, even o f a demented sort, requires the creation o f a supporting world,
an ontology. If words are not binding then neither is the World; "These are the
letters that all men refuse" in Karl Shapiro's moral "Alphabet". If one's fellow
human beings seem notto understand this alphabet, one might speak to God; Augustine
asks, in his Confessions, "allow me to speak before your mercy, though I am but
dust and ashes (Gen. 18: 27). Allow me to speak: for I am addressing your mercy,
not a man who would laugh at me. Perhaps even you deride me (cf. Ps. 2: 4), but you
will turn and have mercy on me (Jer. 12: 15)" [I. vi (9)]. Eliot reconstitutes this
conversation through organizing his fragments around forms of authority--but the
demand that leads to his response is not simply his gripe or his failure. The
ontological riddles "what is real?" and "Am I alive?" act as theReproduced with
permission.401
demands of language to act as prayer, or as the way through which we might act or
will or judge or entail obligation, speak our commitment, or be entitled or enabled
throughlanguage.In Finnegans Wake Augustine's conversation with God is replaced
with aconversation with the missing matter ofa sleeping body and ofthe world
(whose?), and with a missing consciousness and meaning (again whose?).2 These two
axes are something like Aquinas' division o f our mind into intellect and will. The
night world reveals the telos ofthese two axes to be beyond, something like what K.
Rahner calls in The Foundations ofChristian Faith a "holy Mystery", the 'asymptotic
term' that "presents itselfto us in the mode ofwithdrawal, ofsilence, ofdistance,
ofbeing always inexpressible, so that speaking of it, if it is to make sense,
always requires listening to its silence"(69, 64). But again these 'asymptotic
term[s]" are always directed simultaneously towards oneself and towards the world.
I think these two directions should be expressed respectively as Augustinian and
Thomist theological descriptions of the intentionality of our language. For my
purposes, here and now, I will only sketch these theological descriptions as
seemingly opposing limits that Joyce twists into a new proximity, a new geometry
crystallized out of "soundsense"(121.15)or"sinse"(83.12)or"sinns"(330.18).
InAugustinewefindan allegorical distension ofthe everyday into himselfand towards
God, a collapse of metaphysics into confession. Aquinas inverts the implosive force
of Augustine's formulation of the relation between the human and the divine into a
hierarchy of shifting sets of ontological relations and identities moving toward
Absolute Actuality. FinnegansReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
W ake writes out our ordinary experience o f the night as between these two points:
"Is this space o f our couple o f hours too dimensional for you, temporiser?" (154.
25-26).The Wake's syntax of nonsense, therefore, is, mirroring Ashberry's
description of the temporal articulation of how we are:"Only out of such 'perfectly
useless concentration' can emerge the one thing that is useful for us" our coming
to know ourselves as the necessarily inaccurate transcribers o f the life that is
always on the point o f coming into being." (67)3The temporal physics of the Wake,
the logic of succession organizing its words and grammars and stories, "under
articles thirtynine ofthe reconstitution" (596.09) (a remaking o f the world by
remaking our language), under the pressure o f "sublumbunat[ion]" (607.21) becomes
metaphysics: we ask and are asked "Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out
already) its world? Its the same told of all. Many." (18.18- 20). This question can
be retranslated into, How is that which exists put together such that it is, and
such that it exists within the possibility that it can mean something, or how can
we read anything least o f all what we all know or tell ourselves. "Its world" is
the same as "the logos of somewome [women; womb] to that base anything" (298.20),
where "base anything" suggests a logarithmic base of infinite possibility (an
inversion of Aquinas' Aristotelian vision of God as Absolute Act).The Wake, the
sleeper, Joyce, and any reader still awake are all the "simpletop dumbfool". . .
holy mooxed and gaping up the wrong phace as if you was seeheeing the gheist that
stays foreneast" (299.13-16). This "wrong phace," very likely the sleeper's and our
own, as part of a "Theoatre" (587.08), pursues both the "Theoccupant thatReproduced
permission.403
RueandredfulandthewholeinhibitanceofNeuilands"(348.14-16). ThepresenceofGod in his
own dreadful script, recalling Augustine, that writes the inhabitants and
inhibitions and repressions into whole new islands, New Ireland, new world, New
Jerusalem. Such a pursuit places us all in "theoperil" (223.28) "phac[ing]" with
"[n]either a soul to be saved our a body to kicked" (298.36) "the howtosayto
itiswhatis hemustwhomust worden schall"(223.27-28), the Wakean version o f God's "I
am what I am." Excavating this "fimdementiaUy theosophagusted" (610.01) as a mind,
the fundament o f its world, a "self- exiled in upon his ego" (189.06), both god-
like and god disgusted exposes the totality of what is through our moral stance
toward the world, an investment in the relation between whatweareandwhatis.
Thesubstanceofthistheology,however,isasmucha fundament than a foundation, the
litterings of events, identities, phrases, desires, expectations etc. "matters that
fall under the ban of our infrarational senses" (19.36-20.1). In this excavation I
will limit myselfto "[e]xpatiat[ing] then how much times we live in" (55.04), to
exploring what is at stake in such a theology through how the possibilities of
being anything are enacted through the Wakecm grammar distorting the relation
betweenbefore and after.Augustine in his Confessions examines his soul, as that
which is "aware of intervalsof time", in order to determine the measure of the
present. He reduces, in a kind of infinite regression, one hundred years to a year,
a year to a month, a month to a day, a day to an hour, an hour to a durationless
moment no longer "divisible into past and future." Time can only be constituted as
existing as a form o f being (as real) in the present, and yet this present cannot
be measured or understood through an analogy with space: "theReproduced with
permission.404
present occupies no space." Augustine has reduced what McTaggert called a B-series,
a timeline o f befores and afters, to something like his A-series, or rather the
existential condition o f the "now" characterized as a form o f being (and thus a
durationless point). Each series constitutes different language games What do we
measure when we think we are measuring or comparing longer and shorter times past,
or imagining times that will be? We are on the edge of subliming our language into
metaphysics. Augustine, however, follows this reasoning into the soul to reach
something like Plotinus' definition o f time "as the Life ofthe Soul in movement as
it passes from one stage ofact or experience to another"[3.7.11], If we reimagine
the soul as our form of life and expand experience into the complex interactions
between language games this is not unlike how time is exposed inWittgenstein's
PhilosophicalInvestigations. Because ofhis separation between the grammatical and
the psychological, however, time is not hypostasized into a metaphysical category.4
For Augustine, if time is the measure o f "the present consciousness, not the
stream of past events which have caused it" (Xl.xxix [39]), then the way in and
through which we articulate time in our everyday practices constructs our relation
with the world and its passing as our conscious mind.Time gets broken into complex
distensions of expectation, attention and remembrance. This distension, a version
of which is at work in the interaction between language games in Investigations,
fragments the mind, so that Augustine is always faced with losing himself:. . . I
am scattered in times whose order I do not understand. The storms of incoherent
events tear to pieces my thoughts, the inmost entrails of my soul, untilReproduced
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that day when, purified and molten by the fire ofyour love, I flow together tomerge
into you.(XI.xxxi [41])Joyce transforms and inverts this plea to God for
integration into a riddle o f being and remaining in what he calls "sollemn
nupitalism". "Sollemn" contains the roots "Soil" and "Sol", which mean respectively
to make foul, defile, and the sun united as the foul and the sublime as the
everyday 'soul'. What Augustine calls the "terror and love" of God's word and the
distension o f the self as time becomes for Joyce the "Pluralbilities" o f "the one
subtrance o f a streamsbecoming" (FW597.07-08). Thus we can enter into Joyce's
construction of our moral and existential disintegration as and mapped into the
night through two versions of what he calls "the first riddle of the universe":the
first riddle ofthe universe: asking, when is a man not a man? .. --all give up?;
when he is a . . .Sham (170.3-24).The first and last rittlerattle o f the
anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam whenas it is a. Watch! (607.10-12).
"Whenas",notwhereas, this"nam",aninvertedman,aname,an"Iamnot"inarchaic English, a
sin in Cornish, "time" ("an am") and "life" or "soul" ("anam") in Irish, is a
watch, ticking away this last rittlerattle of "anniverse". The soul and time are
not only a watch, in this both a rhythm and a dumbshow, but the negation and
fragmentation o f our being human into versions of ourselves, of ourselves a sham
(originally a fraudulent trick, and therefore an imposture cognate with shame, both
related to the Gothic ga-hamon, to dress [to cover oneself]). This is as if someone
becomes themselves a whim, (Old Norse) "to let one's eyes wander" from oneself.
Finnegans Wake makes sham and whim cognate,Reproduced with permission of the
or rather they both mark the distensions of "a nam" along a single axis in two
directions. One becomes a whim as part o f a whole, from the perspective o f God,
as one becomes ones own writing, and thus read as if without depth, or a sham in
the interactions with others and with oneself--one's other shams.The Wake's
deconstruction of reality is the simultaneous destruction of identity and the
connections between "things," in a reality which is "moving and changing every part
of the time"(l 18.22). The words o f the Wake lose their source and their end, and
exist as constant becomings of meaning, which never coalesce into a determinate
identity of meaning. Thus,-Which was said by whem to whom?--It wham. But whim I
can't remember. --Fantsy! funtasyonfantasy,amnaesfintasies! (493. 16-18)The first
question begins by asking for the identity of a particular word: it asks "which,"
implying a single word among many. The next part o f the question, "by whem," is
derived from "when" and the German "wem," meaning 'whom". Thus, "by whem to whom"
asks for the identity of the speaker and the person spoken to, and for the time at
which the word was spoken. This Word lacks any relationship to time or being, for
the word is only fantasy,fancy.Oritis"Vanitas,vanitasvanitatum,omnisvanitias."
Asitisemptyof meaning and identity, it has no actuality ofbeing. Yet in the river,
L. amnis, in which it swims, [by whem (by swim) it wham (swam) but whim (swim)] it
exists as fintasy, a wake on the water, caused by the fin of the empty word. This
is the word as fish, anotherReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
version o f Christ, transposed into (w)hem (him) whom (wh)am (wh)im-- or "him whom
am I'm", "I am who I am": self-reflection, as a question (whom?) and a statement
("It wham"--i[']m), as the surface of language. This statement moves from an "I am"
transposed into third person (it), the voice o f the world, answered by "but whim,
and thereforeoutsideofknowing,representation,memory,possession: "ButwhimIcan't
remember." "It wham .. .But [by] whim" is being in the world without possessing the
world as one's own, but not being possessed by it either. Even if we deny any
transitive force in this statement, it merges the existential use o f "to be" with
predication. This confusion constructs a subject: what exists, what swam or wham?
The subject we discover is already asking, "Am I an it or an I, a him or a me?"
Person becomes as unclear as verb. Do we ask "It wham when? yesterday?, or where?
to the store? with what? its fins?, etc."? Nothing, let alone no one, can answer.
Without any possibility of answering, by the very force o f nonsense the
observation or exclamation o f "It wham" can not be determined to be either
transitive or intransitive. We read the intentional force o f the language but
without picking out a target, without attaching it to a subject. This intentional
force moves forward within another register, the register o f whim, that picks
outourdemandformeaningascomical. Butthefinalexclamationof"fintasies"is followed by
"And there is nihil nuder under the clothing moon." We cannot escape beingthe butt
o f the joke, we cannot remain neutral or grammatically indefinite (And there is
nothing neuter). And yet there is nothing under the clothing, no essence that can
be graspedoutsideofourgrammar. Allofourlanguagebecomes"whim"inwhichwe construct the
sentences, through "Fantsy" or imagination, in which any version of anyReproduced
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word will have meaning. How our intentionality attaches to the world functions
through the demand that there be a world, and thus that there be a world which can
be lost: a God dies everynight and continually within our language.This disengaged
intentionality describes the economy between consciousness and
unconsciousnessinsleep: anoldstoryabouthowwegetoutsideofourselves. M. Marcovich, in
his article on Heraclitus in Realencyclopadie der classischen
Altertumswissenschaft, reconstructs a fragment found in Clement's Stromateis
(3.21.1) as "Death is what we see when awake, and what we see when asleep is waking
reality (urtap)."5 The allegorical shifting and borrowing between 'death', 'sleep',
'being awake', and 'waking reality' played out in Finnegans Wake works according to
a distorted logic of opposition similar to that organizing this fragment.
Perception is determined by the limit of the state one is in, either awake or
asleep. These states are asymmetric: death, not sleep, marks the limit of
consciousness, which is identified as what we possess as ourselves. Sleep, however,
is limited not by wakefulness itself (how would we know thedifference?), but by the
relatively more ordered ontology excluded as the world presenting itselfto (and
through) consciousness. The asymmetry between wakefulness and sleep implies that
sleep derives from wakefulness, presupposes the state of being awake in a way that
being conscious does not imply or derive from being asleep. Seemingly it is death,
as thelimitofconsciousness,thatimpliesorderivesfromconsciousness. Withinsleepwe
lose our ability to posit ourselves as subjects (Gilson's role for being as
existence), and thus we are submerged in an ontology, a universe whose opposing
limit is the reality of consciousness.Reproduced with permission of the copyright
Awake we gain the world because we can posit it as real and find ourselves within
it, as ours to be lost, and thus threatened by death. Sleep functions as both an
analogy for our waking state (it is our experience) but also as an image or mock
experience of death. Heraclitus in order to show how sleep becomes a way into death
shifts our mode of inhabiting the night from seeing (opeopev) to touching,
affecting (owtxsxai):A person in [the] night kindles (owtxexai) a light for
himself, since his vision has been extinguished. In his sleep he touches (artxsxai)
that which is dead, though [himself] alive, [and] when awake touches (artxexai)
that which sleeps.6We have shifted from the mind to the body, looking for how we
are limited as substance, as stuff and such. The first fragment writes us as a
limit of death, wakefulness is more fully a ground for our being, and thus its
limit is not sleep, but death; here death is written as
thelimitofourbeingawakeandasleep. Thesymmetryofthisformulationdescribesthe limits o
f what we are as something more like the grammatical limits Wittgenstein invokes in
the Tractatus: "The limits of my language means the limits of my world" (5.6). My
language and my world limit me, I do not limit them. Rather I enact and embody them
as mine. Thesymmetrybetweenlanguageandworld,betweendeathand/orsleepandour living
can only be maintained if we ignore the way they posit us as subjects determined by
theselimits. Theselimitsare,however,alwayslimitsorganizedaroundan'I',asaformal
limitwithoutcontent. ThisT,aswhatisatstakebothwithinandastheselimits, constructs a
fundamental asymmetry between all posited states o f being.
Thetheologyofdeath,forexample, inTheEgyptianBookoftheDead, becomes following this
analogy in the Wake, a theology of sleep, where HCE, the erstwhile maleReproduced
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hero, "the first pharaoh Humpheres Cheops Exarchas .. .subjected to the horrors of
the premier terror of Errorland" and its "nekropolitan nights" (62.21-25). When we
are lost to the world we are limited by that very loss; when we regain the world we
find that we have actually regained ourselves as that which is to be limited or
lost. To fall asleep is thus to become a metaphysician: we learn every night that
the application o f criteria determines what counts as real, and that these
criteria as they construct an ontology construct ourselves as real. What is made
real here? Not a 'thing' at all, but consciousness, mind, unconsciousness, meaning,
or whatever other vague term or description of the mental stances that allow the
intentionality of our language to pick out both something in the 'world' and
'ourselves'. The limits of our states of consciousness are thus death and waking
reality; sleep lies twisted behind these, limited by the others but not limiting
them.The relationship between these limits expresses itself through what we
sometimes call time. If we explain these relations as a function of changes between
states, we find
ourselveswithsomethinglikeAristotle'scharacterizationoftimeinthePhysics. Aristotle
argues that time requires a stable substratum in relation to which change can
become apparent: [time is seen to exist only as an effect]. This stability is built
into the physics of existence by defining time as "not number with which we count
but the number o f things which are counted"(Phys. 220h.8). Finnegans Wake is a
kind of commentary on this hypostatizing o f identity as the criterion o f being
within time. This commentary constructs a non-representational metaphysics in order
to embed minding "in the Nichtian glosserywhich purveys aprioric roots for
aposteriorious tongues this is nat language at any sinse ofReproduced with
permission.411
the world ... in the lexinction oflife.. .this daylit dielate night ofnights"
(83.10-27). How does one become oneself, let alone into the world or into marriage
or friendship, if time takes it all away? Aristotle says,In time all things come
into being and pass away; for which reason some called it the wisest o f all
things, but the Pythagorean Paron called it the most stupid, because in it we also
forget; and his was the truer view. It is clear then that it must be in itself..
.the condition ofdestruction rather than ofcoming into being (for change, in itself
makes things depart from their former condition), and only incidentally o f coming
into being, and o f being. (Pfrys. 222b. 17-23)Before this time peal we lie
"lossassinated by summan" (241.02), adding someman or something into
someman(thing), "in the search for love of knowledge through the comprehension o f
the unity in altruism through stupefaction"(604.33), a search, the first on a list,
ending with "death and life are these" (605.03). One cannot escape either counting
or summan or stupe/acrion (is this the state o f being dead to the world or being
defined as a fact?): what do the 'facts' in our sleep point to?Finnegans Wake
attempts to rediscover the wisdom o f time without forgetting our losses, turn
counting into becoming, "for if we look at it verbally perhaps there is no true
noun in active nature where every bally being-please read this mufto--is becoming
in its owntowneyeball"(523.10-12). ConvertingAristotleintothe"sinseoftheworld"
means converting Aristotle into Augustine and Aquinas and then both of them into
Anna LiviaPlurabellae (ALP) and ALP into her mate H. C. Earwicker (HCE) and HCE
into his sons Shem the penman into Shaun the spaceman and into their sister Issy
(whatever she mightReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
seeasherself)andsoonintoathousandandonevisages,etc. Thesevoicesand authorities,
however, do not organize a Waste Land. What we count as our becoming must include
our investment in language as under threat of nonsense, of our own loss and
becoming through language: "Why, wonder o f wenchalows, what o szeszame opem, v
doer s t doing?" (333.01-02): why would meaning get mapped onto sex? and throughout
it all our world waxed and waned. This language is a provocation to ask and an
invocation in asking how to invest, embody, represent, describe, express, call,
inhabit, project, exchange, determine oneself in language? What limit is there to
these verbs?10.2 "aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues"The "lexinction o f
life" at night and in ourselves and the logical grammar providing its purchase on
ourselves and the world will seem in the Wake a picture ofevery person, place and
thing in the chaosmos o f Alle anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkey as
moving and changing every part of the time: the travelling inkhom (possibly pot),
the hare and turtle pen and paper, the continually more and less
intermisunderstanding minds ofthe anticollaborators, the as time went on as it will
variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changably meaning
vocable scriptsigns. (118.21-28; underline added).The darkened world ofthe Wake
blurs the meanings ofwords into "three score and ten toptypsical readiongs"
(20.15), and in so doing fades the defined limits o f meaning associated with a
particular identity. The primal, undifferentiated darkness of the unconscious rises
up and clouds the "glosses" (304.F3) of reason, of knowledge and ofReproduced with
permission.4L3
definition: "mayhisforeheadbedarkenedwithmudwhowouldsunder!",andinthis divide into
identities (20.16). Time as number counts as reading, except when both we and
language fall asleep, when what we mean to ourselves falls out of any functional
unity (consciousness) and into a riddle (not even a question mark).The riddle
setting the world into "chaosmos" is between the "hare and the turtle pen" racing
across the paper, the substratum in relation to which change, or rather the words
become visible. The between, the beginning and the end, from which and toward which
the hare and turtle whirl along describes an infinite regress as the words or the
meaning before us "wham. . . [b]ut whim", an interpretive gap, a "fantsy", between
us and the text that frustrates any seemingly ordinary understanding of a sentence
or the book.The force ofZeno's paradox ofthe hare and rabbit running themselves
into infinities is not simply logical (for the paradoxes can be made to disappear).
The paradox embodies our necessary commitment to forms of differentiated identity
(or grammatical distinctions), which we understand as descriptions of the forms
determining our experience, our very real sense oftime as loss and thus as
unwisdom, that marks the emotional, social, and metaphysical boundaries between
land and sea, ourselves and others, and the past and present articulated in The
Waste Land. In that world the question of time can be posed as How does a moment
and an identityjump from itself into being something else? The gap between two
moments, between two identities, must be built inthe substanceless action of
becoming, through which being reaches beyond itself. Within the Christian pattern o
f creation being generates becoming in order to conserve identity as the
fundamental ontological unit. In the Wake Joyce inverts this relationship, such
thatReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
being, the substance of one's own identity, one's own body, "by its corrosive
sublimation" becomes "one continuous present tense integument" (185-86.36-01):
being sublimed into the ordinary, into the body lost in sleep which is the mind
lost in time. Joyce immersed himself in the intangible "now," in which all things
take place. This "now" is the gap between identities; it is the night time "hole
affair" ofFinnegans Wake: the "lapses lequou asousiated with the royal
gorge"( 151.28-9). One o f the central mysteries within this "seemetary" of the
night is not only how the "trapped head" pulls himselfinto the world of
consciousness, but analogously how and why identities are created within this flux
o f the present; what is the mechanism of movement from identity to identity, the
movement, which Aristotle defines as time, from before to after? In this other
people offer themselves not only as limits to our own desires, power, identity, but
as versions of our own unconscious.In the face o f this loss, this "noughttime",
Finnegans Wake demands from us a theology,asifthenothingnessdemandedofGodcreation.
Theologicalexegesisis predicated on defining what are essentially ontological
relationships, the most fundamental ofwhich is the relationship between being and
becoming inscribed within conceptions of creation. Change within these conceptions,
to the degree that they can be translated into something like Zeno's paradoxes,
functions through the transformation o f one moment, one identity, into another.
Matter within the Wake becomes "Sure, what is it on the whole only holes tied
together..(434.21). Matter as a set ofpoints or identities is negated in its
substance but not in its form. Why only this? The logic of negation configures
matter,waking life, as the limit of our noughttime experience, a kind of double
negative thatReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
foregrounds form over matter or content. This is a way o f etching time into
language: "Signs are on o f a mere by token that wills still to be becoming upon
this there once a here was world" (608.26; underline added). This sign (what sign?)
is written on and out o f a whim ("are on of a mere": contingent, accidental), by
God I want to say, but only by another token, a sign, "by token". "Signs . . . by
tokens" will becoming still: the hypostasis o f a moment that we all can now share,
point to as "this there" that was once a "here",aworld.
Onecancallthistheproblemofself-reflection,representation,or presence. But how do
these signs "will"? These "signs", 'by token" defined, seem animate, or rather
conscious of choices which one can will. Their will is directed against the loss o
f a world: a recognition that the contingency o f here, not simply in Hegel's sense
ofa vanishing incompleteness, but in our continuous possession of"a here" that
shape signs not as representations, but as forms and modes o f willing. Will in
this sense is not ours, but always a world's, or let's say an instantiation of
possession or investment within an ontologic in which we find ourselves--our world.
This is in many ways Augustine's insight, that the metaphysical import o f
Christian theology, through the identity and creative power of God, does not
articulate 'what is' as being of the sort that can be represented, as things or
planets or people, but as being as a kind o f willing. When Joyce rewrites signs as
forms o f a will (whose will remains a question), he links the deontic (obligation
and entitlement) with the alethic (necessary and the possible) aspects oflanguage
(as all forms ofwilling, being willed, requiring or allowing willing) with the
"mere... here", the ordinary shams or whims ofour being not ourselves and the world
not being the world (of at least a moment ago). Whose to sayReproduced with
permission.416
whether this is an allegory of our waking life or our sleeping life? The rhyming
"mere .. .there . . . here" enacts both how a mirror makes here or there a there o
r here and the "soundsense"ofthesea,orsomethinglike"Oed'undleerdasMeer".
Thesemeanings describe a boundary (arch, mere), a margin between land and water,
drawing its own signs on itself. But what have we gained by marking the "here" as a
"mere", a part, a sham, "by token," built or reflected as a will as and on the
flowing ocean? To talk of being as becoming has little force to shape our
understanding unless we can commit ourselves to such a mere (mirror) metaphysical
fantasy, as if this fantasy functions as an expression of what exists for us and as
ourselves in the way that Gilson argues that the primary function o f "to be" is to
act as an existential verb asserting "X exists, is real" :Que Ton dise il est, il
existe, ou il y a, le sens reste le meme. Toutes ces formules signifient Taction
premiere que puisse exercer un sujet. Premiere, elle Test en eflfet, puisque, sans
elle, il n'y' aurait pas de sujet. (L 'etre et I'essence, 275).What does Finnegans
Wake pose as its subject? Whose or what will is articulated as its signs?One can
claim with some justice that Finnegans Wake describes not a subject, but 'the
creative becoming o f being as a continuous becoming', and yet such a claim does
not mean anything to us. If this claim is true, it cannot be true in this form, it
cannot mean as anything within the grammar of what we mean when we say "I'll see
you tomorrow." The differenceliesinhowweinvestourselvesinthesetwostatements.
Wecannotinvest ourselves at all in a claim about the Wake's metaphysics unless we
recognize it as something like our world. And yet everything in the text resists
such a recognition. WhenReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
we enter Finnegans Wake we enter the limit of how things and words matter to us,
both in their substance and significance: "propounded for cyclological, is,
studding sail once more, jibsheets and royals, in the semblance of the substance
for the membrance of the umbrance" (220.30). The "cyclology" describes Vico's
cyclic model of history that Joyce uses to structure the Wake. This cyclic history
wedded to logic and the following "is" reduces the circle into a tautology, where
the beginning is the end. The "semblance of substance" that confronts us in our
dreaming heads articulates as real our memory o f the shadows (umbrance) o f the
past cycling into the future. Our nocturnal states expose our existing but not as
ourselves, not as or in relation to substance, but within fantasies and nothings.
The non-existent past and future, one could even call them memories and desires,
constitute the durationless insubstantial present that opens up the possibility of
substanceinourconsciousworld. Thus,the'cyclological"turningsofourmindfollow
"heliotropically noughttime" (349.7), "a slip of the time between a date and a
ghostmark" [473.8], "seeking spoor through the deep timefield" (475.24) in order
that "we may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we're presurely destined to
be odd's without ends" (455.16).Entering into our mind, which is most fully done
when asleep, dissolves matter, and mattering, into the possibility "[ifs"] of
matter and mattering within time, both experienced and measured, as the trace
limits of"odd's without ends: "Odd's", or odd is as odd does, or marked out as
unique, as a singular identity, but without ends. Being "without ends" is what
Joyce calls elsewhen in the Wake "Art: the imperfect subjunctive", a future
constructed our of an unfinished past, but, therefore, not in relationReproduced
permission.418
toobjects,whichdonotexistwithinthefuturenow. Thusourverybeingisconstructed out of
and as a future, at this point, a collection of "ifs" marking out a unique moment.
Odd is without ends is also odd without evens, a way of counting to infinity with
half a deck, and in this an imperfect subjunctive. This counting o f number is what
Aristotle called time (Phys. 4.14). Numbers cannot be understood to be odd separate
from the concept of even. The odd numbers, however, measure the absent even. One
might call this a music, counting silences as Augustine does: "What happens when we
measure silences and say that a given silence lasted as long as a given sound?"
(Conf. Xl.xxix [39]). How can we compare nothing to something? Both Joyce and
Augustine pursue this seeming nothing in and as Soul, something like a confession
of sin in order to findgoodness. Such oddness without end describes the
interpretative "cyclologic" animating the Wake and any reading of it or any phrase
within it. How to recognize our being "without ends" when we "phace", face and
phase into, nothingness in sleep and in death, and even the temptations to both the
blankness o f nonsense and the "tootoological" emptiness of sense, is another way
of answering a riddle in which one finds oneself strung out as both a sham and a
whim.If we are to enter into the theology of the Wake, then we must remember a
theology ofthe bible, following the Wake's command to "[r]enove the bible"(579.10),
removing (or replacing) and remaking (or renewing) the bible "[w]ith tears for his
coronaichon, such as engines weep, Was liffe worth leaving?" (230.24-25). The logic
of creation reenacted in Genesis 1through 4, unifying the disparate versions and
the buried sources out o f which these were constructed, follows from a continual
process o fReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
separation, from the earth and the waters to Adam and Eve from each other, from
paradise,andfromGod. ThemetaphysicsofGod'sactions,hiscreating,isequivalentto the
effect o f our sinning; in this a fortunate fall can be justified as a function of
God's initial acts. The theological possibilities that allow Paul Tillich to claim
that sin is separation, therefore, have a necessary metaphysical basis.The pressure
of nocturnal nonsense in Finnegans Wake constructs a "Theoatre" (587.08) o f "one
continuous present tense integument" (185.36-186.01). Time becomes a God-
theater,atheology. Inordertounderstandhowweareembodiedwithinthistime- theology, we
must learn how we transform counting, the succession o f moments we perceive as
time during the day, into becoming, into time as a creative flux. This
transformation is exposed as the "noughttime" described and enacted within
FinnegansWake, where matter becomes "on the whole only holes tied together. . . "
(434.21). The darkened world of the Wake blurs the meanings of words into "three
scoreand ten toptypsical readiongs" (20.15), where the identity o f a word
dissolves into a plurality of meanings. The primal, undifferentiated darkness of
the unconscious rises up and clouds the "glosses" (304.F3) of reason, of knowledge,
and of definition: "may his forehead be darkened with mud who would sunder!"
(20.16), and in this divide into identities. Time as number counts as reading,
except when both we and language fall asleep, when what we mean to ourselves falls
out of any functional unity (consciousness) and into a riddle (not even a question
mark).One can claim with some justice that Finnegans Wake describes not a subject,
but "the creative becoming of being as a continuous becoming," and yet such a claim
does notReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
meananythingtous. IfthisclaimabouttheWakeistrue,itcannotbetrueinthisform,it cannot
mean anything within the grammar of what we mean when we say "I'll see you
tomorrow." The difference lies in how we invest ourselves in these two statements.
We cannot invest ourselves at all in a claim about the Wake's metaphysics unless we
recognize itassomethinglikeourworld.
Andyeteverythinginthetextresistssucharecognition.When we enter Finnegans Wake we
enter the limit o f how things and words matter to us, both in their substance and
significance: "propounded for cyclological, is, studding sail once more, jibsheets
and royals, in the semblance of the substance for the membrance o f the umbrance"
(220.30; underline added). This "cyclology" describes both Vico's cyclic model of
history that Joyce uses to structure the Wake and our psychology. This cyclic
history and psychology, wedded to logic and the following "is", reduces the circle
into a tautology, where the beginning is the end, where we are ourselves. But in
the Wakean "sinse o f the world" (83.12) "the first riddle o f the universe" is
"when is a man not a man? . . . --all give up? --; when he is a . . . Sham"
(170.03-24). In Finnegans Wake we are ourselves by not being ourselves. The
"semblance of substance" that confronts us in our dreaming heads articulates as
real our memory o f the shadows ("umbrance") o f the past cycling into the future.
Our nocturnal states expose our existing, but not our existing as ourselves, as or
in relation to substance, but within fantasies and nothings. The non- existent past
and future, one could even call them memories and desires, constitute the
durationless, insubstantial present that opens up the possibility o f substance in
our consciousworld. Thus,the"cyclological"turningsofourmindfollow"heliotropically
noughttime" (349.7), "a slip of the time between a date and a ghostmark" (473.8),
"seeking spoor through the deep timefield" (475.24) in order that "we may come,
touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we're presurely destined to be odd's without
ends" (455.16).Entering into our mind, which is most fully done when asleep,
dissolves matter, and mattering, into the possibility ["ifs"] o f matter and
mattering within time, both experienced and measured, as the trace limits of"odd's
without ends": "Odd's", or odd is as odd does, or marked out as unique, as a
singular identity, but without ends. Being "without ends" is what Joyce calls
elsewhere in the Wake "Art: the imperfect subjunctive," a future constructed out of
an unfinished past, but, therefore, not in relation to objects, which do not exist
within the future now. Thus our very being is constructed out of and as a future,
at this point, a collection of"ifs" marking out a unique moment. Odd is without
ends is also odd without evens, a way of counting to infinity with half a deck, and
in this an imperfect subjunctive. This counting o f number is what Aristotle called
time (Phys. 4.14).7 Numbers cannot be understood to be odd separate from the
conceptofeven. Theoddnumbers,however,measuretheabsenteven.Onemightcall this a
music, counting silences as Augustine does: "What happens when we measure silences
and say that a given silence lasted as long as a given sound?" (Conf. Xl.xxix
[39]).How can we compare nothing to something? Joyce and Augustine pursue this
seeming nothing both in and as the Soul, something like a confession of sin in
order to find goodness. Such oddness without end describes the interpretative
"cyclologic" animating the Wake and any reading of it or any phrase within it. How
to recognize our being "without ends" when we "phace" (FW12.10), face and phase
into, nothingness in sleepReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
and in death, and even the temptations to both the blankness of nonsense and the
"tootoological" emptiness o f sense, is another way o f answering a riddle in which
one finds oneself strung out as both a "sham" and a whim ("It wham. But whim I
can't remember" [FW493.17]).Augustine in his Confessions examines his soul, as that
which is "aware of intervals oftime", in order to determine the measure ofthe
present. He reduces, in a kind of infinite regression, one hundred years to a year,
a year to a month, a month to a day, a day to an hour, an hour to a durationless
moment no longer "divisible into past and future." Time can only be constituted as
existing as a form o f being (as real) in the present, and yet this present cannot
be measured or understood through an analogy with space: "the present occupies no
space." Augustine has reduced what McTaggert called a B-series, a timeline of
befores and afters, to something like his A-series, or rather the existential
condition of the "now" characterized as a form of being (and thus a durationless
point). Each series constitutes, what Wittgenstein might call, different language
games. What dowe measure when we think we are measuring or comparing longer and
shorter times past, or imagining times that will be? We are on the edge of
subliming our language into metaphysics. Augustine, however, follows this reasoning
into the soul to reach something like Plotinus' definition of time "as the Life of
the Soul in movement as it passes from one stage ofact or experience to
another"(3.7.11).8 For Augustine, iftime is the measure of "the present
consciousness, not the stream of past events which have caused it" (Conf.Xl.xxix
[39]), then the way in and through which we articulate time in our everyday
practices constructs our relation with the world and its passing as our conscious
mind.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
In the nocturnal world ofFinnegans Wake our everynight practices rewrite the
theology ofthe Bible, following the Wake's own command to "[r]enove the
bible"(579.10), removing (or replacing) and remaking (or renewing) the Bible
"[w]ith tearsforhiscoronaichon,suchasenginesweep, Wasliffeworthleaving?"(230.24-
25). The logic o f creation reenacted in Genesis 1 through 4, unifying the
disparate versions and the buried sources out o f which these were constructed,
follows from a continual process of separation, of the earth from the waters and of
Adam and Eve from each other, from paradise, and from God. The metaphysics o f
God's actions, his creating, is equivalent to the effect o f our sinning; in this a
fortunate fall can be justified as a function o f God's initialacts.
ThetheologicalpossibilitiesthatallowPaulTillichtoclaimthatsinis separation,
therefore, have a necessary metaphysical basis.10.3 "Renove the Bible": the logic
of creation in GenesisSome years before Joyce "writhefiilly rate in blotch and
void," YHWH floated thewor(l)d on the deep (Ps. 24.1,2) and "the earth was without
form and void" (Gn. 1.2). In the Priestly description of creation in Genesis, God
does not exist within the text prior to his creative acts. His identity is
empowered solely through his own creation and His possession o f the series in
which he is defined as an origin: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the
earth"(v.l). God's first creative act does not, as a subsequent or simultaneous
effect, create time. In both Hebrew and in English one can distinguish three
grammatical readings o f this opening phrase:Reproduced with permission of the
1) verse 1 is a subordinate temporal clause to v. 2 and v. 3: one would translate
this as 'when God began creating... the earth was a formless void (v.2)... then God
said(v.3)." Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac) proposed this interpretation, defending
it on "the order ofthe acts of creation," for water must have been created first,
as its existence is not explained when it first appears in v. 2 92) v.
1isamainclausedescribingthecreatioexnihiliooftheprimalchaos described in v. 2.3) v.
1 is an independent main clause describing the total creative act. It, therefore,
has a disjunctive relationship with the succeeding two verses, which
cannotberesolved. Itrepresentsaseparatetheologicaltradition,whichhasbeenjuxtaposed
with what is primarily a Babylonian myth, and serves to introduce the Priestly
description ofthis myth.Any resolution o f this ambiguity requires and constitutes
a theology o f creation. Any theology "fundamentialy" built across or within this
unclarity begins in untangling versions of identity, conceived by Augustine, in his
Confessions, as "constant eternity" (XI..x [12]) and, in my interpretation o f the
text, as a-temporal forms o f created being.Verse 1 does not describe the process
of creative transformation from nothing into something, but it describes the
creation of the primary identities of being by God. The origin of "the heavens and
the earth" lies in the agent of creation, not in the material substance or non-
substance, the beingness or non- beingness, of what existed before. GodReproduced
permission.425
hasnottransformedonestateofbeingintoanother. Ascreationisgenerated,atthis point,
solely from and by the agent o f creation, the text, in effect, dissolves the
"before," and substitutes a node of power, God, as a mathematical origin. But as an
origin without a before, God becomes enmeshed within the series o f moments which
can unfold only from his own power, and in relation to his own identity as
"origin." This series, however, is actualized within the temporal succession of
God's creative acts. Time is present without being created; God is present without
creating time; being is present as the logos of power, distinct from flux.The
ontological pattern ofverse 1, erasing all movement, all flux, in the static
identity of created being, shifts and is re-constituted into a potential ontology
of temporal flux and becoming, a dynamism of substance, in verse 2. The "spirit of
God" opposes the "deep":
"Theearthwaswithoutformandvoid,anddarknesswasuponthefaceofthe deep; and the Spirit
of God was moving over the face of the waters" (v.2). In its nature, water is
opposed to the qualities of created being, and is even described as encroaching on
God's creation in Jer. 5.22 and Ps. 104.7-9. And yet it appears to have physical
presence, which is understood to be a (non)presence: it is formless being. The
opposition between the "spirit o f God" and the "waters" represents a 'potential'
conflict between the negative actuality o f deconstructed chaotic (non)presence and
the Spirit's positive creative potential to construct forms of being. The creative
principle, the "Spirit of God," has become disassociated from God himself and thus
has become an element within the metaphysicaluniverse in which being "exists."
God's spirit is spatially limited in relation to chaos, that is,Reproduced with
permission.426
it is not infinite, for it moves in relation to this chaos and in relation to the
physical (non)presence o f the waters.Within verse 2, Spirit does not interact
with, or alter the form of the deep, or of the waters. The formless nature of being
does not change or alter its identity or position. Being, therefore, exists without
being involved within the dynamics of temporal change. Movement, and hence change,
is solely a function of spirit, transversing through and withinspace.
Temporaldynamismis,therefore,acomponentofGod'sspiritandnotof the physical presence,
the chaotic beingness, o f the "waters". The separation o f God's creative presence
from God himselfrepresents an ontological crisis. This crisis re-enacts God's
creative process, which will increasingly become defined as a process of
differentiation, separation and loss. In verse 2, God has lost his creative power
to the metaphysical universe o f created being, just as he lost his temporal
independence "in the beginning".The images o f "the waters" and the "Spirit o f
God" disappear in verse 3, as does the possibility o f their unification in the
recreation o f time in the infinite calculus o f their meeting.
Thetextrecastsitselfintheontologyofidentity(non-flux)introducedinverse1. God
reappears; created being reappears. Verse 3 establishes a structural equivalency
between the creative process of differentiation and God's verbal commands, the
formal cause of created 'reality.' The process of God's creation becomes a process
of verbal identification, where the actual act of creation is the word, the voice,
the language of God "And God said, *Let there be light'; and there was light"
(v.3).Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
The text fails to describe a "real" becoming trapped as it is within a hermeneutic
circle that establishes the ontological primacy of identity by overlooking the
present. Thus God's initial creative act, which begins a series of
differentiations, fails to take place within the text. We are told there will be
light, and that there was light, but we are not shown the moment when there is
light. "Let there be light" looks forward to a moment o f becoming, which is not
itself but which it causes by its looking forward. "And there was light" looks
backtothebecomingoflightfromwithinacontextinwhichlightalreadyexists: an absent
moment of the past is revitalized with the quality of presence found in the
present. Creation becomes a form of knowledge, a hermeneutic hypothesis, that
structurally excludes the "I am he who is or who am" from the "now" of creation.
The "present" of Being (YHWH) is disjunct from the "present" o f His creating, and
hence from dynamic becoming and loss. God is consigned to the before and after
framing creation. As an integration o f imperative and subjunctive moods, "Let
there be" serves as a command that articulates a possibility, a command that frames
the succeeding "light" as an effect. This"Let" frames itself as a subjunctive yet
to have happened, before the fact, as if letting loose the light, allowing the
light or granting or offering the light to his creation. "Let" expresses,
therefore, the boundary ofthe category ofthe real separate from its physical cause.
"Let" marks the category of possibility embodied in both God and his language prior
to the category of existence, and thus separates out will from creating and from
speaking. Godspeaks'belight'onlywithinthecontextofthepossibilityopenedupbythe force
of "Let..." The question ofhow our words attach to the world is translated into God
as a gap between his willing and his speaking. God's creation functions through our
recognitionofthecategoriesofbeingbetrayedbyGod'sspeaking. Goddoesnotsay, "Light!"
The phrase "And there was light", in describing the effect of God's subjunctive
command, admits, instead o f denies, that language cannot speak with the
ontological force ofthe sort suggested by, but not expressed through, God's
command. God is given a language that can create the world through translating the
problem o f reference in human language into an internal division within God.The
light that God creates in verse 3, therefore, does not emanate from any material
cause. He creates light before he created the sun, stars, and the moon. In verse 5,
this immaterial light and darkness gains a substanceless temporal character and
identity: "God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night." As light is
called Day, it becomes Day: a day without any material form or cause. As darkness
is called Night, it becomes night: a Night without any substance or material being.
Through the interaction of the substanceless beings of Day and Night, the first
temporal cycle is completed: "And there was evening and there was moming"(v.5). The
temporal transformation between Day and Night is not based on an underlying
dynamism within the process o f creation, nor within the nature o f "the heavens
and the earth." Changedoesnotariseoutof,norisitcausedby,createdbeing.
Thequalityofthisfirst temporal cycle is purely the result ofan opposition in Day's
and Night's quality ofbeing, which is translated into time through the alteration o
f identity within a temporal frame consisting o f the categories o f day and night.
Change remains purely a function of God's creative power. This power functions
through the differentiation of static identities of being; thus, time, at this
point, is notReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
dynamic. Within the first diurnal 'scene,' the earth, the heavens and the light
cannot act, cause or effect themselves or each other. Night and Day are attached to
qualities of presence, that is, light and darkness, are not temporally related, but
simply differentiated. The identity o f all being in a particular moment alters in
character, and becomes another moment. The identity, the integrity, ofbeing is not
destroyed, it is simply replaced. Thus, God's creative acts take place in an
established temporal cycle, which is based on an alteration in being, from Night to
Day, from light to dark, and from evening to morning. Identity remains; only the
context in which being is expressed changes. Thus, creation remains a process o f
identification, and not a manifestation or an ordering o f an underlying flux. Time
exists as God's calling light Day and dark Night. Time is enacted through God's
naming, and is a function of the meaning o f Day and Night as opposed to the
experienceorrealityofchange. Anoppositiongeneratedoutofatemporalbecoming, however,
is fundamentally different from the simultaneous presence of, but formal separation
between, the waters and the land. Temporal becoming has been leveled into a single
plane oftemporal presence: night and day simultaneously exist. 'God,' therefore,
haserased the syntagmatic becoming inherent within the existential experience
ofNight and Day. This flattening is the effect of subliming our language into an
"unmoving mover", of forgetting our failure to speak God's actual creating.Time
exists only in God's creating. God's creative acts take place within a
temporalsuccession. Godhimselfnevercreatestime. Evenwhenhecreatesnightand
dayhefailstodefineamechanismthatwillcausetheirsuccession. Time,however,isnot
banishedfromthetext. Theclause"inthebeginning,"whateveritsrelationshipwiththe
without permission.
first and second verse, places God's creating within a pattern of succession, which
is relative to the future "now" from which the text is written and or/read. Thus
the static forms o f being are temporalized simultaneously through God's creating
and through the human interpretive description of this act. God and humans, holding
the static forms of created being between them, meet in a temporal unity built out
of the isomorphic structure defining human experience and divine creating: in a
succession of identities. The succession o f days defining God's creative acts
establishes syntagmatic becoming as a limitation on God's power, a temporality that
God does not create Himself, although he creates the structures through which this
change is understood.In verse 11, God integrates the insubstantial being o f light
and darkness within particular material forms ofbeing:And God said, "Let there be
lights in the firmament of heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them
be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the
firmament o f the heavens to give light upon the earth". . . and God made the two
great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the
night; he made the stars also. And God set then in the firmament o f the heavens to
five light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night and to separate
the light from the dark. (v. 14-18)The sun and the moon "separate the light from
the darkness", and therefore "rule over the day and over the night'. The temporal
cycle between night and day mirrors the process of creation, in that the function
of the heavenly lights is to separate the day from the night. God creates a
hierarchical universe, consisting o f material forms o f being, which embody,
in varying degrees and in different contexts, his power to rule and differentiate
'reality.' The qualities o f Day and Night are integrated into the material
structure o f the universe.In Genesis, the generative force behind the alteration
from Night to Day does not arise from a dynamic temporal quality embedded within
the created universe. Temporal change flows through specifically defined
identities: time becomes a relational matrix
unitingbeingwithinauniversedefinedaccordingtoaprincipleofdifferentiation. God's
creative acts divide the universe according to a language and a grammar (a
relational pattern), whose locus o f meaning lies within the concept o f being as
identity, where what counts as real can be placed into the equation x=y, outside o
f any idea o f temporal flux. Thus, God's creative commands divide the external
primal universe into identities o f being: being defined and discriminated by
difference. He divides the light from the darkness, the "waters from the waters,"
the land from the water, and the day from the night. These divisions serve to
crystallize the nature o f created being and pull the earth from its formless
state.God's actions are themselves contained within a diurnal 'scene.' God did not
create the universe in a single moment of infinite and eternal presence, but in a
succession of days.
Godcannotcreatebutthroughtime,throughasuccessionofactswhichconstitutea series o f
creative moments, expressed diachronically, syntagmatically. God's presence
functions through a becoming in time, and, therefore, he cannot create except in
time. The disjunction between God, in the before and after, and his creating, in
the surrogate present
oftextualpresent,allowsforatemporalcontinuitywithoutcreatingtimeasflux. The chaotic
"now" in which creation takes place, in which being must exist and be lost, is
erased by the causal axis leading to us. Time is castrated of its "nows", but
survives as a succession of identities formed through a principle of
differentiation. In the Wake this kind o f creation and theology is called "the
substrate o f apart form hissheory whre the Theophil" (163.24-25).The Wake
resurrects the elided "now", the eunuch time bereft of its dynamic function,
created in Genesis. The Wake translates this eunuch into the feminine ALP; the
NewTestament,ontheotherhand,resurrectsthiseunuchasChrist. IntheGospelof John
temporal becoming flows through a series of identities, which are united within
what willbecometheTrinitarianGodhead. Theprocessofrelatingtwomomentsintime becomes
the process of relating the being, i.e., the identity, of one moment with another.
The gap between these two moments corresponds to the substanceless action of
becoming, through which being becomes, or reaches, another moment. This is the same
gap that provides for the transformation between God and Christ, and which is
integrated into the being of both of them. Thus within Christ the gap between the
beginning and the end is self-contained and totalized within his identity. Christ
is the substance o f his own being, and transcends the intangible space between two
moments: he is "the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and
the end"(Rev. 1.8). His identity, therefore, defines a process of creation, or
temporal becoming. The breath of God becomes transformed into the spirit of life,
which is equivalent to Christ. As in Genesis, time still flows through identity,
but this identity is self-renewed.Within the Gospel ofJohn, as one ofthe sources
for this Trinitarian theology, creative change is both an objectification away from
God, and a return to him, not withinReproduced with permission of the copyright
the same moment, but within the same identity: "In the beginning was the Word, and
the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all
things were made through him, and without him was not anything made" (Jn. 1.1). The
Word represents a symbol o f relation, connecting God and man, spirit and flesh in
the person o f Christ. They are connected through the symbolic transformation o f
their identities,suchthatthecreated,thecreating,andthecreatorareultimatelythesame.
Itis primarily out o f this re-conception o f creation within this transformation o
f identities that the logic of the Trinity arose, with the subsequent re-conception
of the relation between being and identity. One sees this already in Clement o f
Alexandria when he interprets the Genesis "In the beginning" to mean "the first-
bom" and thus translates it as "In Christ the Son" (,Stromata VI.7.58.I).10As in
Genesis, time still flows through identity, but in John this identity is self-
contained. Consequently, creative change is both an objectification away from God,
and a return to him, not within the same moment, but within the same identity.
Through this identity, which is Christ, man returns to God: "I am the way, and the
truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me." The light that
separated the day from night, and represented the creative spirit o f God, re-
enters the world, through Christ, as a connective pathway leading to God: "I am the
light ofthe world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the
light o f life". The light o f life is God: "God is light and in him is no darkness
at all". Thus, God and Christ are one: "For in him (Christ) all the fullness of God
was pleased to dwell". Light, as the division between the substanceless Day and
Night, and between the physical day and night, now unifies the creative process o f
becoming within the equivalent identities o f God and Christ.Identity, as the
operative mode of relation, reconstructs primary reality within being, and outside
o f time. Thus, the temporal pattern o f becoming becomes locked into a
conceptualframework,basedonthetransformationbetweenidentities. Theprocessof change
between cause and effect cannot be understood in terms of identity. Identity
presupposesapermanentrealityofbeing,aspecificidentity,underlyingallchange. Thus, we
can only understand every point between the alteration o f one thing into another,
in termsofanotherpermanentthing;weonlysee"things"nottheactualityofchange. The
transformation o f one thing into another becomes understood as an alteration o f
identity, from one "thing" to another, or from non-existence to existence. The
process of this change between these identities becomes locked into a temporal
structure, where the identityofbeingwithinamomentdefinesthatmoment.
Howonemomentbecomes another, or how one thing becomes another, becomes lost in an
intangible and inexplicable leap between identities. The Johnniane solution to this
separation of identities is to posit identities of substanceless being, which
interpenetrate each other and share existence, butwithin different conceptual modes
ofbeing: they are ofthe same substance, that is, ofthe
sameessence,andyettheirmanifestedbeingsremaindistinct. Theinitialpatternof
substanceless creation in Genesis is expanded into the underlying cosmological
pattern in the spiritual universe o f the first chapter o f John.Thus, the gap
between the identity of one "thing" and another, and between two different moments,
merges into the equivalency between the creator, the process ofReproduced with
permission.435
creation, and the manifestation of this creation. Thus, the Word is God: it is the
act of his creation,anditisChrist.
Thisistheunderlyingpatternofbecoming,unitingbeingand time within the symbolic
allegory of the Christian universe.10.4 Anna Livia PlurabelieIf Christ is "the
beginning and the end", where and who and when is the between, or rather the Beta
through Psil Consciousness, even as it creates itselfas self- consciousness, moves
toward an objective space into which it projects itself or in which it finds the
others that populate experience. Consequently, in waking life, just as in the
Christian ontology o f creation, that which "lies" between the beginning and the
end, that is, the present, exists as an unself-reflexive subject, from which we
watch and create objects but which is not itselfan object. Within the Wake,
however, the present becomes a kind of existential object modulating continually
into a self-reflexive subject that creates a subjective space in which objects
disintegrate into their own temporality, into unconsciousness. Thus the Wake
deconstructs identity and the connections between things, in order to enter the
temporal space of the present, the reality which is "moving
andchangingeverypartofthetime"(118.22-3). This,ofcourse,isthe"reality"ofALP:In the
name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilites, haloed
be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven. ( 104.01-
03)The name of Allah and the hallowed name of God becomes the "Ever living", the
ever becoming mother, the Turkish ana. She creates "plurabilites" which are not
identities butReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
a complex of potentialities and possibilities ("pluralities") which open the self
to desire and loss and tears, the ability to weep (Fr. pleurer). ALP creates the
pluralities of existence. These pluralities are identical to the very process of
their creation. Thus, from "plurablities" one can derive "weepable-ness", which is
the watery tears o f the river, Anna Livae Plurabella. She is the beautiful
("pluabelle") river that contains and gives life: "Amingst the living waters o f
the living in giving waters o f' (462.04).These "plurabilities" are the unnamed,
unnamable manifestations o f ALP: "Her untitled mamafesta memorailising the
Mosthinghest has gone by many names at disjointed times"(104.04-05).
ALPwritesahistory(a"memorailising")oftheimmanent phenomenological "realic" that is
herself beneath and between the identities whose end is the Christian God. This
"mamafesta" is a mother feast where ALP, the body on which and through which this
history is written, becomes the Eucharist, the body and the blood linking identity
to identity.ALP casts herself into the "now," the transitive gap between moments
and between identities that the Old Testament tries to ignore and that the New
Testament erases in the Trinitarian Godhead:Between me rassociations in the
postleadeny past and me disconnections with aplompervious futules I've boodle full
of maimeries in me buzzim and meadears runs sloze.( 348.05-08).ALP first
recapitulates the causal axis between before and after defining time in Genesis. If
we read [a]plomb as the French Mead', the future becomes permeable to the
postleadenyReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
past, a future built on the phallic post o f metal that performs futile intercourse
(from L. futilis andfutuo) overcoming the present. But beneath the intercourse
ofthe past with thefuturewefindALPwithadifferentvisionoftime,evolvingoutofherself:
"I'veaboodle fiall of maimeries in me buzzim and medears runs sloze." "Maimeries"
(breasts and memories) fill the gap between past and future. These memories are
maimed into sullage. Sullage is the postleadeny past translated into ALP and so
maimed (a mangled phallic post), held within her buzzim, and then remembered in the
world as the sound of the river. This sound coming after the "woid" introjects
itself in the present, "in the muddle is the sound dance" (378.29), a potent
version o f Eliot's failing "reverberations o f Spring" .In this then we return to
ALP's and HCE's "sollemn nupitalism" (599.12) and their sexual conjugation: "On to
bed! (577.36). The religious seriousness invoked by "Sollemn", must ride through
not only sex, but the conflation o f the foul ("soil") and the
sublime("sol")asourconstantcondition. Connectedwith"soli"issullage,which,whileit is
sewage, is also the fertile silt deposited by a river. Thus the word contains all
that is needed for a seed, the fertilized ovum, to grow ("the seeds of light to the
cowld old sowls"593.20).
Withintheworditselfthereisanintegrationofthecreativeprincipleof the light, o f
consciousness and its differentiations, associated with HCE, and the dynamic
processofbecomingassociatedwithALP. Thelightcomponentofthewordrefersthe dawn of
Book IV, the light streaming from God and HCE: "Calling all downs to dayne... A
hand from the cloud emerges, holding a chart expanded. The eversower of seeds of
light to the cowld ole sowls" (593.02; 19-20). When this light (hce, hce, a
repetition approaching identity, and maybe f. haec, this) hits the litters (litter,
letters) of the Wake,Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
we get a description o f ALP as "sollemn" containing as she does, in one o f
Joyce's earlier notebook entries,seaweed on wallsmud flatstin cans, dead dogs, old
boots all sewage discharged in11The decayed being o f the past exists concurrently
within the river. Thus, we are in a much more dynamic creative reality than in The
Waste Land, where being and change function in seemingly different ontological
worlds:The river sweatsOil and tarThe barges drift With the turning tide Red sails
WideTo leeward, swing on the heavy spar.In The Waste Land, the river, the creative
force, is relatively impervious to being, as between oil and water, and as such
cannot overcome the stasis o f identity, while in the Wake being (HCE) and change
(ALP) interpenetrate each other. In Eliot's poem, it is anReproduced with
permission.439
abstract aesthetic reverberation ofsound, the voices oftradition and authority,
completely without substance, logic, or essential force, which move from the past
into the future through the present. In the Wake, however, the gap between the
postleadeny past and the "aplombervious fiitules" consists of a "boodle" of
deformed and maimed memories ("maimeries"). (Compare this to the bats with baby
faces in The Waste Land).Joyce is trying to reconstruct substance in order to
expose how our ontological commitments proceed through collapsing both the world
and ourselves into the deontic (obligation and entitlement) and alethic (necessity
and possibility) dimensions o f our language. These maimed memories are contained
within the sound itself, which is the word o f the river. Memory exists itself as
an expression marking a moment o f time. But for whom? These memories are within
the "buzzim" of ALP, which is herself (her bosom) and the sound of the river. ALP
exists as sound within the domain of grammar, not within what passes for
psychology. Her memories work within this grammar not on herself, the
sourceandendofthesound,butonherson,Butt,orShemthepenman, whoishere transformed into
ALP: "me awlghul omegrims" (348.05). or me (Butt) ALP [alpha omega], O Mega: 0 Big;
O me grims: 0 me grin/ grim; megrim: migraine: head; Grim as God: o my God! With
this call we all, as Christ did when he accused God o f forsaking him, lose
ourselves, and a moment is marked by that loss, by that cry. Butt cries out (about)
not only his transformation into ALP, not only to "omegrims" with his judgment on
himself and his mother "me awlphul", but cries: "and medears run sloze". The waters
of the river, of ALP, is made up of others, her children (me dears), her beauties.
This sets up a pattern of creation that is simultaneously a collapse of identities
(Butt:Shaun:ALP)Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
and a manifestation o f identity in others. These tears as they leave ALP form
defined identities, drops ofwater:It was so duusk that the tears o f night began to
fall, first by ones and twos, then by threes and fours, at last by fives and sixes
and sevens, for the tired ones were wecking, as we weep no with them. (158.20-24)
"[A]s we weep no with them"? This disconnection "with them" means in weeping these
tears ALP (k)no(ws) them as we might 'no' things at night, as negative spaces, what
will later be called "trancitive spaces", so that we are not with them, but they
constitute our own loss of ourselves (to sleep or time or death). This is a way of
symbolizing what is not there, of seeming to say what cannot be said. While we
cannot articulate ourselves as nothing, as dead, as not, and in this sense cannot
get outside o f language, we can articulate 'nothing', 'death', 'not'. This
articulation, however, cannot work through reference or identity (we cannot answer
"what is it?" with "nothing" and mean this "nothing" ontologically). Nothing"
emerges at a higher level of abstraction, at the level of meaning within the
sentence, at the level o f grammar at which Wakecm nonsense functions.
Ourexpressionsoflossbecomebecomingsofform. Butwhathasbecomeofsubstance and our
relation to it?ALP's breasts are maimed into "maimeries" by the children (medears)
pulling her into themselves as they run into the future. Her dear tears are formed
out o f herself and thrown into the procession "A and aa ab ad abu abiad. A babbel
men dub gulch o f tears" ( 254.17). This is another creation myth, another version
of the Bible in two 'sentences'.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
The 'facts' in this new world are letters and numbers, and thus we must read these
sentences at that level.The initial indefinite article is doubled by the succeeding
command o f "and" into "aa". These three terms when contracted form "a an' aa", or
a stuttered An(n)a. Indeed, in Swedish A and in Danish and Norwegian aa means
river. The first and second term in
thisserieseachconsistofoneandthreelettersrespectively. Thesecondtermina standard
numerical progression of whole numbers, or of moments, or of identities would
consist of two letters. If we read this series numerically, therefore, the elided
middle term between one and three arises as the third term as if called forth by
its absence. Thus the beginning, "A" (one) and the end, "and" (three), generate the
between "aa" (two). The two letter structure is repeated in the fourth term, the
two letter "ab". This term does not replicate the doubling o f the initial "A", the
origin, but introduces the second letter o f the alphabet and thus redefines the
numerical series into an alphabetical series. This series, however, is interrupted,
as was the numerical series, by the elision o f the expected "ac" and its
replacement with the Latin ad, to, toward. The inclusion of "to" further conflates
the alphabetic series with the numerical by repeating the third terms count (two)
in the Latin semantic pun (to). This "disconnection ofthe succeeding" ( 228.17)
introduces a preposition o f movement, and thus serves to define the proceeding
series by its looking forward. And if this end is not the identity of the
mathematical and the alphabetical it might turn us back toward the source o f their
mutual generation.We have read only half-way through the first sentence: "A and aa
ab .. The alphabetical numerical series o f this first eight letters is answered,
mimicked, copied in theReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
last eight letters, and thus emerges as a picture, or rather a schematic o f how we
become in our counting in our language. This is the picture:A and aa ab/ ad /abu
abiad.(8) (2) (8)The indefinite singularity o f the "a" repeated, sung or strung as
a series emerges as a pattern in which the "and" is translated into the
mathematical operator "ad(d)". One might imagine our stuttering in sound, as an
expression o f a will to speak, to configure ourselves within the world, abstracted
into a reflection o f this stuttering into a representation, that is, into a
symbolic operator. "Ad" creates an expectation ofan end, a movement toward
objective space, seemingly satisfied with the inclusion of the father (Arabic, abu)
into the series. Theeightlettersonthissideofthecentral"ad"coalesceintoonlytwoterms:
"abu abiad". The second word, "abiad"(white), continues to sound in Arabic. HCE is
invoked as the "White Father", the European God, the white imperialist entering
Africa,conquering those countries where Arabic is spoken. The polyphonic confusion
o f terms and principles o f progression in the first eight letters is pushed
toward an end where the father "abiad[s]", awaits, continues, abides, in tautology.
This parody of Christ's claim tobe "the Alpha and the Omega" does not rest on the
replication and leveling o f the beginning and end; but describes a beginning
moving toward an end: a between.The eight letter bookends, the past (ALP) and the
future (HCE), isolate the toward
(ad)asadescriptionofthepresentasakindofsubjunctive. Thesignificanceofthe number
eight in the movement from nothingness to creation is described by Augustine in his
Confessions. In his dissection of how time gets measured through sound and
language, Augustine invokes Ambrose's evening hymn, "God, Creator o f all things" ,
and then analyzes how this phrase describes God's creation from nothing:'God,
Creator o f all things'--Deus Creator omnium--the line consists o f eight
syllables,inwhichshortandlongsyllablesalternate. Sothefourwhichareshort (the first,
third, fifth, and seventh) are single in relation to the four long syllables (the
second, fourth, sixth and eighth)... .But when one syllable sounds after another,
the short first, the long after it, how shall I keep my hold n the short, and how
use it to measure the longs, so as to verify that the long is twice as much? ..
.They do not exist.. .Therefore it is not the syllables which I am measuring, but
something in my memory which stays fixed there. (Xl.xxvii [35])The logic describing
the relationship between the short and "single in relation to the four long"
syllables recalls Joyce's "odd's without ends", and links this syllable
interaction, in Joyce's case letter interactions, with this Creator o f all things:
on one side o f "ad" ALP and on the other "HCE". The measuring of time in words,
for Augustine, is measuring ourselves, our memory, and therefore a measuring of
nothing in relation to the Ideality of God.
ThemeaningofJoyce'sversionof"God,Creatorofallthings",inhishymntothe night, forces
this Creator both into the missing substance, used by Augustine to describetime,
and into language. Joyce is making time language, and forcing God into grammar.
This 18 letter description o f the Wake writes the ABC's as a modulation o f the
tautologically repetitive 'a and a a a' defining itselfas marking a succession of
moments(?) or minds(?) or generations(?) that in the marking separate out into
noise (or poetry). This returns us to the Biblical story of continual separation,
and, therefore, to theReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
fall of language from its ontological connection with God into Babel: "A babbel men
dub gulchoftears." Thisalphabet,however,remainsa"mamafesta[tion]"ofALP'sweeping and
is thus a "babbel men dub", from the Arabic "Bab-el-Mandeb" ("the gate o f tears"),
"gulch o f tears." This doubled "gate/gulch o f tears" replicates the different
perspectives o f conqueror and vanquished. The Arabic, o f course, is the repressed
language o f thenatives, who understand the "White Father" as forcibly opening, as
if raping their mother tongue, the "gate of tears". The "White Father", however,
speaking in English sees only the manifestation of his crime, the eroded ravine
filled with a torrent oftears that he gulps (from M E. gulchen, to gulp) into his
"mawn" (91.24).These tears are ALP's children ("medears"). We must, however,
distinguish betweentwoaspectsoftearsandcrying. Masculinetearsformthemselvesoutofa
question: "And, Cod, says he with mugger's tears: Would you care to know the prise
of a laird?" (54.20). This question asked o f God the Cod can be translated "would
you care to know the price/praise of a coin (F. laird), or the price/praise of a
lord?" How can we separate the coin with its image of a lord from the lord himself?
the king from divinity? This coinage is smelted out ofthe fiction that a piece of
metal, a symbol, can be identified with actions, things, and people. This kind o f
exchange is based on what Adorno calls a principle of identification, what in
theological terms we could call the naming and the creation of man in God's image
(Negative Dialectics, 146). The principle of identification is a symbolic economy
that sets up equivalencies between goods and coins, between coins and lords,
between lords and god(s). This economy, however, can function as a system of
exchange only because these equivalencies do not describe identities, but rather
serve toReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
hide fundamental inequalities. Thus the price of a coin is simultaneously the
necessary loss and sacrifice people must pay in such an economy and the
transubstantiation o f work and goods into coin.In this picture o f patriarchy, God
selling and God creating are the same. Thus it is the masculine voice that asks o f
itself: "If I sell whose, dears? Was I sold here' tears?" In the first question,
Shaun the spaceman looks to the future and considers becoming a father and selling
ALP's dear tears. Then the Oedipal identification with the father devolves into
memory, into an identification with the children, asking whether he too was one of
"her" tears sold here.Themaleiscastontwosidesofthecoin: theenslavingpatriarchandthe
victimized (spent) child. So ask him: "Did a weep get past the gate ofyour pride?"
(145.12-13). The Pride ("prise o f a laird") that ties one to coins and to God
represses the weeping that is ALP which exists prior to patriarchal selling. It is
this weeping the father (abu in Arabic and a rune written in the procession o f
letters in ALP) makes into coins and
sells.Withoutcryingthemaleisleftwithonlyonewaytowatertheworld: he,asthe
Wakesays,"Pee[s]forPride"(296.05)fromhismale"prise"(prize). Onemightcallthis
watering with an identity, with one, 1,1.ALP's "feminine" weeping, however, is the
movement o f the present as a continuous becoming (ALP) into the potential o f the
future; and any weeping is a remembrance o f the past becoming into the present
(maimeries in me buzzin). The conjunction between creating and losing generates a
"why". A "why" uttered in the face o f such change is an expression o f the
collapse o f what one could characterize as theReproduced with permission of the
Augstinian self-directed and the Thomist world-directed theologies. In Augustine we
find an allegorical distension o f the everyday into himself and towards God, a
collapse o f metaphysics into confession. Aquinas inverts the implosive force o f
Augustine's formulation o f the relation between the human and the divine into a
hierarchy o f shifting sets of ontological relations and identities moving toward
Absolute Actuality. Finnegans
Wakewritesoutourordinaryexperienceofthenightasbetweenthesetwopoints: "Isthis space
of our couple o f hours too dimensional for you, temporiser?" (154. 25-26).Our
expression of confusion forms a kind of statement, a mark of particularity that
acts as an "ad" in our Babelling "gulch of tears".12 The tears arise as a continual
"Why" (the why we ask ourselves as we read the Wake):But the river tripped on her
by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: "Why, why, why! Weh, 0 weh! I'se
so silly to be flowing but I cana stay"! (159.17-19)These whys do not function as,
what S. Bromberger calls, "normal form" why-questions. Normal form why-questions
begin with a "why" and are followed by "an interrogative question designed to ask a
whether-question-i.e., a question whose right answer in English, if any, must be
either 'yes' or 'no'" (86).13ALP's "why" is not about anything that can be
asserted. It has no intentional target. Once this intentionality is disengaged
'meaning' becomes the expression of a grammatical distinction or shift between
what, withintheWake,looksliketheologicallanguagegames. Thisshiftingdescribesakindof
time. The brook is broke into the tears that "for a thousand of tears had gone eon
her and come on her" (159.11). The "medears", the "by ones and twos, then by threes
and fours .Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
. express themselves through "why, why, why?" This is the story o f asking "why"
forming itself as a "whim" within language."[S]eeheeing the gheist" (299.14) of
Wakean nonsense, we can still make sense of the question "Why is this an answer?"
We continually ask 'why read?', 'why this?'. Our continual "why", a "weh" (way;
why) through which we are conscious and measure our time in relation to the text,
is itself a door between two incommensurable language systems, the "nat language"
that generates this continual "why?", and thus our asking o f it as well, and the
indicative language of predication that can be evaluated as true or false, answered
by a 'yes' or a 'no'. Thus ALP's "why, why .. .weh" asks 'why way?'; her
"streamsbecoming" asks not "what way?". The ontological instability o f the Wake
generates why-questions not what-questions: "Was liffe worth leaving?"10.6
MasculinetautologyThis feminine process of becoming is opposed to the masculine
creative, sexual process o f repetitious identity, the continuous imprint o f man's
own image and being on the supine woman:while the man to be is in a worse case
after than before since she on the supine satisfies the verg to him! Toughtough,
tootoological. Thou the first person shingeller. Art, the imperfect subjunctive.
(468.16-09)"Toughtough" suggests the German taufen, which means "baptism", a male
baptism o f the female maybe, or the repetitious HCE expressing himselfthrough and
as ALP, or ALPReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
becoming this repetition, the why returning to counting. The male creative act is
also tautological repetition, which is too logical.Logic is the rational process of
relating defined symbolic quantities or qualities; it is the process o f
transforming identities into rationally equivalent and, hence, related series o f
concepts. In this tautological creative process the man is worse off than before,
since the verge (his penis) is satisfied only to the verge (the shore of the river,
of ALP), and thus the woman remains outside o f his tautological equation. The
man's movement through eros toward thanatos leads toward self-annihilation without
the renewing transformation into the other, which is to break beyond the
solipsistic limits o f Kantian metaphysics: the verge. The meta-sexual symbolism
here traces the logic o f our metaphors as they construct the logic o f relations
defining substance. This tautological process is opposed to the fluidity of the
relations within the flux of the river, of which art is an imperfect imitation o f
the streams "subjunctive", underlying connective, quality (226.14-17). The result
of the male creative process is a loss of creative energy, where he is worse off
than before. In other words, his creative process is one-directional and not one of
renewal.This too is a part o f the principle o f identification, where, as Adorno
asserts, "non- identity is the secret telos of identification" (Negative
Dialectics, 149). Self-annihilation in theotherisneverrealized.
YetJoycegoesbeyondthelimitsofidentityandcreatesakind of dialectic between "Thou the
first person shingeller" and "Art, the imperfect subjective." Structurally the
"Thou" functions within a subject/object grammar. The "Thou" is both object
(identified as a 2nd person) and simultaneously a subject (1st person): such would
be "man's" definition o f YHWH as the first cause o f creation. The voice that
identifies theReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
"Thou" does not recognize itself nor claim the authority o f 1st person. This voice
gains its identity in the succeeding sentence: "Art, an imperfect subjunctive."
This voice is both "Art", the Wake and its created consciousness, and an archaic
form of "are", the verb associated with the second person "Thou". This verb,
however, as an "imperfect subjunctive" functions as a continuous movement o f what
we call our past. Whatever our motivations or desires, they remain incomplete, and
thus create a future for us out o f our investment in our being ("Art": are) these
possibilities we desire. This is a form of not-being-toward-an-object. The
dialectic moves between the 2nd person verb and pronoun, and yet neither the "Thou"
nor the voice speaking through the verb can create themselves as objects. They
exist as subjects who never translate themselves into an other, for such a
translation is self-annihilation and tautological. This voice, therefore, stands
outside of the creative power generated by the principle o f identification and
differentiation that we associate with YHWH and HCE.The feminine creative process
constructs itselfas ALP, who contains
hyperbolicallyallchange,alltime,inacontinualrenewal: "Mammywas,Mimmyis,
Minuscolinie's to be.. .The same renew" (226.14-17). This well known passage,
unlike the earlier assertion that "Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle's to be"
( 215.24), begins to explain the mechanism o f time embedded within ALP's identity.
The vowels in "Mammy" and"Mimmy"mimicthevowelsineachrespectiveandsucceedingverb.
"Alphabettyverbage" is introjected into the consonant world ofMMMY as if verbal
tense were pulling being behind it. This pattern is foregone in the future tense.
Identity begins to dwindle into the Italian minuscoline (feminine plural), very
tiny "plurabilities". The future as aReproduced with permission of the copyright
final goal is ahead of being and thus contains a vmmis-cailin (Gaelic, a young
girl, a maiden, and one would suspect a virgin). The future then becomes a negative
feminine space, but also a looking forward to a time when ALP's youth will be
subtracted from her. Such a dwindling old woman recalls the Sibyl that Eliot
invokes in the epigraph to "The Waste Land", with, however, the inclusion of what
both the Sibyl and Eliot could not remember: "the same renew." In the Wake constant
renewal creates an eternal now of "tocoming", of self-transformation and movement
toward the forever mysterious space of the "minuscoline". This is the present
missing in Genesis: "all in the tocoming o f the semperetemal apeel spry with it"
(508.29).ALP contains all time, as does Christ, but she herself is not an identity
o f being as Christ is. "In the becoming was the weared, wontnat!" ( 487.20-21).
The Word has become Old English wyrd, time, change, becoming, but also destiny and
fate, the space of the future created through the becoming that was, is, and will
be, as a description of ourselves within our grammatical distinctions. This
"weared" is apparently "wontnat." A complex word that sandwiches a phallic "t"
between "won" (victoiy and one) and "nat" (night and not, null, zero). Thus are
Christ, HCE, and all dreamers and readers o f the Wake (whatever their gender)
crucified and linked with the world o f identity (God) and theworldoftime(loss).
Simultaneouslywithinthiscosmologyonefinds"wantnot"and "wont (dwell, abide) not".
The interpenetration of the command to not desire (to abide) and to not abide
creates an unsettled tension, a disruption that undercuts itselfjust as it
attemptstocompleteitself(likefindingan"a"in'abide',"abiad"). "Wontnat"becomesa
compressed but inverted version of "A and aa ab ad abu abiad", inverted because the
"won" is crucified into "nat" and the "to" replaced with a "t". And what is most
important in this inverted logos is the replacement o f desire with unspecified
movement, and thus the failure to create an objective space toward which one can
move.This "weared" can never be resolved into the relatively static categories of
language, and therefore not into any Word: "In the beginning was the gest he
joustly says, fortheendiswithwomen,flesh-without-word"(468.05-06).
Thebeginningisnotthe sameastheend.
Inthebeginningwasajest,anadventure,astory,agesture,andan "enterruption" (332.36),
the change ofthe established pattern ofrelations, a mutation that sprung from "he
war", the jousting spear slung horizontal from desire for a damsel that cannot be
named, captured, nor held within identity or tautology.We must be careful not to
repress the "with" and read this as "the end is women." Rather this end must be
read as either a masculine movement toward and into a relationship "with women",
and/or an expression o f masculine fear o f women, who possess the end and
therefore must be avoided or killed. The first reading asserts that the existential
reality grounded in flesh and in the present possesses the identities which frame
it. It inverts the dynamics o f possession and identity by creating a new sense o f
possession. Ifwe look back a page we find: "thinking himselfinto the fourth
dimension and place the ocean between his and ours" ( 467. 22-3). Within the Wake
the sleeper's and the characters' possession o f themselves is impossible, as it is
in time, within the "fourth dimension," where our selves unravel before the
constant intrusion o f change. "His" and "our", therefore, represent the faith in
identity, in possession, that holds our conscious
selveswithintheontologyofdifferencedefinedbyYHWH. Theyarenot,however,theReproduced
permission.452
ground o f our being, if one can call it that, which lies, instead, within the
ocean between "I" ("our"), first person plural, and "he" or "it" ("his"), third
person singular: "Thou art" --"It wham"?The relationship between subject ("I") and
object ("it") is explored in Joyce'scharacterizationof"women,flesh-without-word".
Thetransformationofthe"word"into flesh is analogous to the transformation o f an
"it" into a "thou" discussed by Buber in I and Thou. This transformation redefines
the relationship between subject and object by establishing a verbal consciousness
created out o f the instantiating equation o f an "I" with the speaking self and
the animation of "things", or of an "it", through its recognition as a "thou".
ForJoycetheend,whatinthelanguageofconsciousnessisunderstoodasan identity or an
object, becomes the actualization of a relationship "with women." Women here are
categorically defined, reduced to the existential condition o f mortal flesh, as
opposed to the conceptual objectification o f words. While such a reduction is
certainly a violent limitation on women, it does transform "women" into a "thou"
and not an object, an"it".
Fleshbecomesthecommonrealityofbeingforboththeselfandtheother;andasthe ground o f
being becomes actualized as a presence which can define itself and interact with
the "I" as an equivalent "I", that is, as a "you" within the grammar of this
recognition.10.6 The limits of 'why"The over 800 river names in Book I, chapter 8
cannot name this flesh, this "polycarppool"oftheunconscious.
Althoughinsleepyouarenolongeryourself,you
stillstreamalong,untired,throughthesubjunctivetiesofcreation: "Theuntiretiesof
liveslivingbeingtheonesubstranceofstreamsbecoming"(597.07-08). Beingis transformed
into an active becoming ("livesliving") which cannot be totalized within an
identity, but remains unentire, incomplete. Both Faust's "In the beginning was the
Deed", and Yeats' "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" totalize the action
o f being within an equation identifying the subject with the object, the beginning
with the end. For Joyce, the incompleteness that moves through "livesliving being"
is united within a single "substrance".
Substanceispunnedintoasubstratethatisaperspective,aviewing,a
tranceratherthanabeing. "Trancitivespace"(594.03)isfilledwith"substrance",which
isnotsubstanceatallbutsubjectivityreflectingitselfasitbecomesitself: "everybally
being is becoming in its owntown eyeballs" ( 523.12).In Book IV, the feminine
dynamic o f becoming begins to hide behind the coming light of day, or rather it
fades into the gap between the developing identities of consciousness. The a
Wakening sleeper must re-constitute being as identity. The father (abu) in ALP must
be identified, differentiated, and established as a final end:Or, but, now and
airing out her mirgery margery watersheads and, to change that subjunct from the
traumaturgid for once in a while and darting back to stuff, if so
beyoumayidentifyyourself withhiminyou...sincethenourtoomanyofher, Abha na Life, and
gettin on to dadaddy.(496.25-31)One must clear one's head o f the waters o f Anna
Livia, for a moment and alter the subjunctive flow o f becoming into an identity
that is you. This is the transformation from "pluralities" of "Abha na Life" into
the male creative process of "dadaddy." The last line ofReproduced with permission
the book moves as close to the world o f identities and nouns as possible without
stepping out of the immanent "river of lives": "A way a lone a last a loved a long
the"( 628.15-16). The word is no longer "aplomb" (vertical), rather it moves like
the spirit of God, in the second verse o f Genesis, across the surface o f chaos
not yet ready to transform the unknown into the known.Within the fluidity o f
change the source o f creation is known, but the manifestation, the identity ofthis
creation remains a mystery: "Ofcause so! And in effect, as? (615.11). If the
sleeper is to wake up he must jump from the 'the' to an identity. This re-beginning
is the renewal o f the creative flux o f the "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's"
withwhichthebookopens. Withinthis"streamsbecoming"onelosesone'sselftothe flowing
totality o f the eternal now. It is only when the world is fragmented into a
complex o f non-becoming identities that reality gains a definable substance o f
being: "The untireties o f livesliving being the one substrance o f a
streamsbecoming" (597.07-08). "Untireties" are not entire; they are incomplete.
When one is asleep one is no longer entire, or in complete control of oneself.
Where does one look for oneself? In other peoplemaybe,callingitlove.
Yetwithinthe"streamsbecoming"onecontinuestostream
along,untired,throughthesubjunctivetiesofcreation. "[Ljiveslivingbeing"represents
the transformation of identity and being into the action of living. The "untireties
of livesliving" are equated with "the one substrance of a streamsbecoming". We
remainwithinthe"hauntingcrevices"betweenidentities: "Verbumprincipiantthroughthe
trancitive spaces!" (594.02-03). The dynamic creative process is equated to the
underlying, all inclusive, trancitive space o f incompleteness.Reproduced with
permission.455
The Bible tries to reduce why-questions to what-questions, to confuse meaning for
substance as a way o f excluding the kind o f ontological instability creation
myths explicitly domesticate. The process o f creation, as it is understood in
Genesis, and as it is a return to consciousness and identity, hypostatizes creative
power (transformation, becoming, making) into static forms that undermine this very
creative power. God destroys himself. Thus, it is God who must be reborn. His
rebirth flows through an equivalency between the created, the act of creation, and
the creator. Yet this rebirth remains within an ontology o f identity, and thus it
generates, in the image o f itself, a fragmented world o f identities. Joyce,
however, recreates reality by defining creation within the "chaosmos" of the
present, playing between the residual forms of identity associated with HCE and the
dynamic becoming of ALP. Finnegans Wake continually follows and conflates being as
becoming (ALP as "riverrun") as it leads to the discorded identity of HCE (Howth
Castle and Environs). This is the movement of the first sentence. Joyce has
reintegrated the present into a creative ontology by defining creation as a
becoming o f potential, grounded in both the doer (ALP) and the doing (HCE). For
Joyce, however, it is ALP whoultimately becomes Christ, who drowns herself as did
Phlebas, and loses her identity, but gains the eternal ability, the
"Plurabilities," to become, to renew, and to always be a becoming o f herself.But
is ALP as this becoming only a figure o f speech? a transcribed desire for god
reconfigured at the edge of a syntax associated for Joyce with the strange
interaction between identity and being, internal consciousness and expression,
which describes Augustine's exploration o f the Trinity, as much as Freud's
articulation o f identityReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
determined by desire and fear? In De Trinitate Augustine discovers the Trinitarian
relations and identities embedded in our actual thinking, practices, and being, or
rather he derives out of our experience the shifting set of relations leading to
and expressing the Triune God. Joyce pursues a similar theological goal, but one
grounded in the ordinariness o f our nocturnal life and one that rewrites
Trinitarian Identities into flux, but a flux out o f which a consciousness may
emerge. Self-reflexively dynamic ALP replaces through her "corrosive sublimation"
the world of identities naming HCE. This process of replacement mimics Augustine's
replacement in De Trinitate of how mind, knowledge,and love determine our knowing
of the world with how memory, understanding, and will redefine these Trinitarian
images in self-knowledge: in knowing what we already know as ourselves. The complex
relation between knowing and self-knowing rewrites the absolute nature of mind into
the "notion of love as a 'search"'(72).14 In other words, Augustine follows the
"certainties with regard to the nature of mind", defined by mind, knowledge and
love, into a study of our sensory awareness of becoming in time, within ourselves,
andtowards God. Finnegans Wake embodies such a study in the "finnecies of [its]
poetry wed music" (377.17).Music can seem an "A and aa ab ad abu abiad. A babbel
men dub gulch o f tears" (254.17), and in this approach mathematics. A mathematics
o f this sort articulates an order, a pattern, a logic of forms: a syntax
pretending to generate out of this logic a content (even if only at the limits of
sense). Poetry asserts that its essence lies not in its parts so much as in its
organization. At this level of abstraction Peter Caws' description of poetry makes
sense of such a mathematics: "words that belong together, to beReproduced with
permission.
remembered and recited in a given but not intuitively obvious order" (241).15 From
this he makes the important observation that the first and in many ways most
significant poems we leam are the alphabet and the ordinal numbers. This belonging
together functions like syntax does for Quine, which determines what strings count
as legitimate within a language. Poetry can, therefore, be understood as syntax.
But a syntax for what? What is the meaning o f the syntax o f this kind o f
nonsense? The creative logic, the relationship between being and becoming, in
Finnegans Wake enacts this question as, what Geoffrey Hill calls, the menace and
atonement attending, maybe notjust ofpoetry, but ofbeing human. Finnegans Wake
becomes a special kind of poetry in which we have to discover what goes together
and why it remains apart. In constructing this syntax we build and
uncoverTrinitarianversionsofourselves,identitiesconstructedastime: mindand memory;
knowledge and understanding; love and will oscillating into each other through our
own "present tense integument". We measure ourselves in reading the Wake as it
measures us, and in this count ourselves as countable into being "to becontinued's
Tale".But even this measurement is only another language game, although one in
which we crucify ourselves: one might call this a grammatical game with ontological
consequences.1Big Typescript, translated and cited by David G. Stem, in
Wittgenstein on Mind and Langauge, 157.
2ForadiscussionoftheabsentsleeperseeJohnBishop.JoycesBookoftheDark: FinnegansWake.
3Reported Sightings.4 I will investigate the complexity of how this works in
chapter 13. 5Ed.A.F.vonPauly,G.Wissowa,etal.
Marcovichreplacestheprobablycorruptfinalword'sleep'with 'waking reality'. Although
this reconstruction remains controversial, it is supported by the logic of
opposition found in the proceeding phrase, a logic animating much of the
Heraclitian corpus. A similar logic o f opposition is o f course central to the
working o f Finnegans Wake.For an alternative reconstruction see D-K: Diels, h.
rev. W. Kranz. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 6th ed. Zurich, 1951.5Heraclitus:
Fragments, A text and translation with a commentary. The fragment is found in
Clement's Stomateis 4.141.27 The Basic Works o f Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon.
8Plotinus,7volumes,trans.A.H.Armstrong.
Ifwereimaginethesoulasourformoflifeandexpand experience into the complex
interactions between language games this is not unlike how time is exposed in
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Because o f his separation between the
grammatical and the psychological, however, time is not hypostasized into a
metaphysical category.9 See Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary,
translated by John J. Scullion S.J. Also Tanalch: The Holy Scriptures. Also Walther
Eichrody, "In the Beginning: A Contribution to the Interpretation of the First Word
of the Bible" (1962), Creation in the Old Testament, ed. Bernhard W. Anderson.
10ClementofAlexandria, Stromata.Liber7, EnglishandGreek,translatedbyFentonJohn
Anthony Hort and Joseph B. Mayor.11 Finnegans Wake: A Facsimile o f the Buffalo
Notebooks, VI.B1-VI.B.4, preface and arranged by David Hayman, VI.B.40.47.12The
grammar of this "why" is, therefore, very close to Wittgenstein's description of
the statement "I understand" that I examine in the first chapter o f my
dissertation.13SylvainBromberger,"Why-Qustions",InMindandCosmos:
EssaysinContemporaryScience and Philosophy.14Augustine: Later Works.
15Yorick'sWorld: ScienceandtheKnowingSubject.Reproduced with permission of the
IVWTTTGENSTEINIAN TIMEReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
11The Ontology of TimeThe previous chapter was meant to show how the measurement of
ourselves in the measurement of time makes the variety of syntaxes we use and
inhabit visible or audible as semantic (or symbolic) systems. A sustained reading
ofthe Wake, tracing through the grammatical shifts that enact time as an aspect o f
the limit between sense and nonsense and between ourselves and the text,
precipitates a version o f the same crisis that Karl Barth describes, in The
Epistle to the Romans, which I earlier claimed informs Eliot's poetics. I asked,
"how do we stand 'before an irresistible and all-embracing dissolution of the
world, o f time and things and me, before a penetrating and ultimate KRISIS, before
the supremacy o f a negation by which all existence is rolled up" (iii.21).
Finnegans Wake shows that this crisis, as it was for Adams, threatens less the
world or our language, as our status within both. I suggested earlier that the
vanishing o f any intentional target for Wake&n language (pointing as it ostensibly
does at the vanished person asleep) both picks us out as its target (again exposing
a crisis about how we constitute our world as ours) and displays itself as an
intentional mechanism within which the world emerges as the shifting limits between
grammatical and symbolic relations. Finnegans Wake is a temporal
descriptionofthehumanmindenactingthisvanishingintentionality. Thisdescription(or
enactment) o f time instigates and demonstrates as way o f thinking toward the
limits o f sense. This thinking is what I understand as the construction o f a
theological languageand stance, traced along a complicated interwoven
epistemological limit described by skeptical doubt, science, and a resistance to
the ontological claims o f poetic metaphysics,Notes for this chapter are on page
492Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
Vico'stermforthemythologicalimaginationsofmoreprimitivepeoples. Thetranslation of
thinking into an enactment of time was systematized along a single continuum (as
opposed to the shifting multiple times in Finnegans Wake and Philosophical
Investigations)byHegel,especiallyinthePhenomenologyofSpirit. Iwillnotinvestigate
Hegel's phenomenological dialectic here, but I will use an aspect o f this
dialectic as a path from Finnegans Wake to PhilosophicalInvestigations. This aspect
ofthePhenomenology should be understood as elaboration ofthe becoming ofmind (both
historically and philosophically) through the intentionality o f the dialectic, an
intentionality describedbyourinteractionswiththephenomenalworld.
Iwillbrieflydescribeapattern o f temporality (although for Hegel this should be
understood as becoming and not time)that unfolds subjectivity through a shifting
intentionality.Augustine's description of the dialectic from mind to soul describes
anhermeneutic education, as does Finnegans Wake, that remakes our human stance
toward the world and God by remaking the forms within which we configure both this
stance and the world. We discover God and ourselves within our language and
practices. One way of understanding Wittgenstein is that he constructs a dialogic
dialectic of fragments between our practices within language-games and totalities
(from sentences to form(s) of life). Dialectic might sound misleading within its
sense o f linear movement toward truth, missing the circular and repetitive
perambulations that describe (or that the reader is forced to follow in)
Philosophical Investigations. I use it, however, to describe the way in which any
entry into the landscape of philosophical problems and ordinary language enacts a
path from some problem to others through alternative descriptions. This path
may return to the same problems again and again, but even in this circularity these
problems change shape and color. The nature ofthis change (something I will discuss
in the next section) alters the nature of our relation to the world described by
these problems by and in our language, and thus provides a picture ofa kind
oftemporality. Wittgenstein spoke with approval of the dialectical method:. . . the
dialectical method is very sound and a way in which we do work. But it should not
try to find, from two propositions, a and b, a further more complex proposition, as
(C.D.) Broad's description implied. It's object should be to find out where the
ambiguities in our language are. (74)1These ambiguities shape the world because we
inhabit them, and through them our inhabitationoftheworldbecomesvisible.
Thus,ourthinkingabouttheseconfusions,ata fundamental level and as it does for
Hegel, describes the limits in relation to which we live.
ThepictureofhowWittgensteinthinks(orwrites),therefore,displaystheworld. The depth
ofthe world is equivalent to the depth ofhow we think (not necessarily ofwhat we
think).2The problem o f time can be understood as the problem o f the specious
present, our phenomenologicalexperienceofchangethatfigurestheworldasflux. D.Stemhas
shown how Wittgenstein's grammatical analysis developed through his analysis o f
his own temptation to first construct a phenomenological language of our momentary
experience (in response to the skeptical temptation to say that only the present
exists, and thus only my present exists).3 Wittgenstein realized that a claim like
"all is flux" is a misuse of 'flux': "Language can only say those things we can
also imagine otherwise"Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
(Philosophical Remarks, 54).4 Wittgenstein's analysis o f 'all is flux', however,
always proceeds from the assumption that it is a phenomenological description ofthe
world, in whichcaseitisnottruethateverythingisincontinualflux.
Theleavesareblowninto spiraling relative to the branches to which they are
attached. In addition, as a phenomenological description the claim that "all is
flux" describes our sense of the present constantlyescapingourgrasp.
InPhilosophicalInvestigations,Wittgensteinrecalls Augustine's description ofthis
passing:Here it is easy to get into that dead-end in philosophy, where one believes
that the difficulty o f the task consists in this: our having to describe phenomena
that are hard to get hold of, the present experience that slips quickly by, or
something of the kind. Where we find ordinary language too crude, and it looks as
if we were having to do, not with the phenomena of every-day, but with ones that
"easily elude us, and, in their coming to be and passing away, produce those others
as an average effect". (PI?436)5There is a confusion here between "all is flux" as
a description o f our experience (which is false) and as a description of the
ground of the world, as if from the ultimate End (which is nonsense). Why imagine
the world from the End? "All is flux" opposes and can be negated by our identity or
being. "All is flux" expresses the fact that the we can be lost intochange.
Itneitherdescribestheworld(asmetaphysics)orourexperience(as phenomenology), but the
fundamental limit in relation to which we organize our being as something opposed
to the world. The kind o f writing which describes this limit (that often describes
or has the form of a log on a river) is history. What my analysis of theReproduced
permission.463
temporality ofFinnegans Wake partly was to show was that one way o f describing our
involvement in language is as time.Hegel, at the beginning ofthe Phenomenology, in
"Sense-Certainty", generates the initial stages o f becoming out o f and through an
involvement (containment, stances, and actions within and towards) in cognition,
akin to that which 1 describe here as our involvement in language. This
involvement, however, is understood to be defined by our cognition, and functions
within a vast array o f technical distinctions (concepts, ideas, T , subjectivity,
and so on) describing the relation between human knowledge and the
phenomenalworldastheymakemanifesttheAbsoluteintheirinteraction. Hegel,inthe
Phenomenology ofSpirit, attempts to construct a condition in which the logic of
relation that figures a subject knowing an object dissolves into a fundamental
temporality (of course, he understands this as a discovery and not a
construction).6 The Hegelian dialectic drives to replace things with relations.
Even at the beginning ofthe phenomenology, or at the beginning of the history of
our knowing in "Sense-Certainty," being becomes history: "the dialectic o f sense-
certainty is nothing else but the simple history o f its movement"(109). The
universal categories defined by language in sense-certainty, T, 'Now', Here1, and
'This', become the surrogates for subjective being. In the chapter following
"Sense-certainty" the dialectic through an ontology o f perception will dissolve
these universals into qualities. Similar processes continue throughout the
Phenomenology and effect the dissolution o f Being as identity into the Becoming o
f time. When reading Hegel in this way, one begins to sketch a metaphysics o f time
that defines the ontological necessity o f History understood as the interaction o
f temporality and representation (i.e.,Reproduced with permission of the copyright
cognition). Hegel configures representation, both as our cognitive understanding
and as texts or objects, within a subjectivity dissolved through its knowing,
thinking within the containing processes ofbecoming in Time. Hegel understands this
configuration to be literally the history o f the world derived from an ontology o
f time that underlies the conditions for knowing.11.1 Knowing timeHistory, the
representation o f time as what is past, pretends to answer an ontological question
that Wittgenstein, in the Brawn Book, breaks down into an underlying grammatical
confusion: "Where does the present go when it becomes past, and where is the
past?"(108). In this question, one has mistaken the "present" for a "thing" and
thus one has constructed a conceptual logic, a sentence, by means o f a false
analogy between saying "the present event passes by" and "a log [on a river] passes
by". Wittgenstein is concerned about exposing the infelicitous form o f relating
time and objecthoodthatmakesthesekindsofquestionsinsoluble. Onecansaymore.This
mistaken analogy is one in which an intangible idea is objectified and subsumed
within the category o f objects. Time has not been sublated into another term, or
condition, but istranslatedintoitsantithesis,intothatwhichitnegates.
Howthenisthisfalseanalogyto be distinguished from the many "new similes" that
Wittgenstein uses to clarify philosophicalconfusion?
Oneisfacedwiththeneedforsomesystemofevaluationfor correctness or falsity.
Wittgenstein's answer:Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
We are inclined to say that both 'now' and 'six o'clock' refer to points in time.
This use o f words produces a puzzlement which one might express in the question:
What is the "now"?' --for it is a moment oftime and yet it can't be said to be
either the 'moment at which I speak' or 'the moment at which the clock strikes',
etc., etc. Our answer is: the function ofthe word 'now1is entirely different from
that of specification o f time. This can easily be seen if we look at the role this
word really plays in our usage of language, but it is obscured when instead of
looking at thewhole language game, we only look at the contexts, the phrases o f
language inwhich the word is used. (BB108)One must determine the function ofthe
word "now", its use in the total language game used to talk about time. One must
understand that the relation between "today" and the date is like that between "a
hammer and a nail", and not like that between "a hammer and a mallet". A hammer and
a nail are both elements within a specifically defined practice. Analogically, they
both have a meaning within the same language game. A hammer and a mallet, however,
are both elements of different, although parallel, language games. Wittgenstein's
claim, therefore, is that the relation between 'today' and the date function within
a single language game. I want to say, however, that today functions in a language
game with yesterday and tomorrow (A-series). Any date functions in a language game
of specific dates, a history (B-series). Wittgenstein's argument, therefore,
attempts to dissolve this difference.'Today' and date can function in a single
language game--as in 'today's date'. 'Today' and the date can also function as
different expressions of how one figures oneselfReproduced with permission of the
as part o f a history. (They can also work as analogues for events: thus the shift
in English from a date [June 6] to T have a date' [an assignation or appointment]
uses 'date' as a metaphor for the event. This is, ofcourse, a different usage
of"date" and thus its logic does not counter that described by Wittgenstein.) Time
is itself not actual (not an entity)
butanobjectiveeffectintertwinedwithourperception. Iamusingactualand'objective' here
in a way descended from Frege:A thought, admittedly, is not the sort o f thing to
which it is usual to apply the term 'actual'. The world of actuality is a world in
which this acts on that, and changes it and again undergoes reactions itself and is
changed by them. All this is a process in time. We will hardly admit what is
timeless and unchangeable to be actual.Now is thought changeable or is it timeless?
The thought that we express by thePythagorean Theorem is surely timeless, eternal,
unvarying." (Thoughts, 372)7Is time (a date or 'today' as words or concepts)
something which is acted upon, that is changed and "itself experiences reactions
and is changed by them"? And yet can we say that time is "timeless, eternal,
unchangeable"? My discussions o f Heidegger's "Das Ding" and Joyce's Finnegans Wake
demonstrate that time is not a concept with that kind of stability. But as a word,
'time' describes (mentions) this changing; it describes a limit. If you ask me
'what time is it?', I cannot say 'no time' (except as nonsense or as part of a Zen
koan, for example). I might say 3 o'clock, and I might be wrong. I can communicate
the time, but can I communicate time? Is not any communication a form oftime, an
ordered description of a process of change. This model of time as a kind of
semantic process (both nested and serial: a sentence) is what undergirds
Heidegger's description ofReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
the thing in "Das Ding". The communication oftime as a sentence (or as a language
game) is always self-reflexive in that this communication manifests anyone's
containment within this temporality. Such containment, however, is not expressed as
the present, or as flux, or as something passing, but is itselfa grammar marking
the particularity of meaning as both emerging from and resisting the totality (that
is, it is not all meanings) o f language. Thus, 'what time is it?' has as its
target a specific time (or date), but as part o f a particular language game it
enacts a temporal order as the limit o f my involvement within this game(ifI do not
know the time, I feel as ifthere is a pause in time, at least for the moment of my
initial confusion; time has paused because I have slipped out o f the temporal
order enacted by the language game. I have, however, other temporal orders which
can always emerge as dominant).Wittgenstein shows how we build ourselves into
metaphysical cul-de-sacs by mistakingananalogyforadescriptionorforourexperience.
Heunderstands'allisflux' to be primarily a statement about our experience
translated into a claim about the world. "All is flux", just as date and today, as
I have suggested, however, figures our lives astotalities within the greater
totality of change, as part of history. Speaking of Jakob Michael Lenz and a trip
into the mountains o f over 170 years before, Celan in 1960 puzzles out the date on
which that trip took place:Perhaps one should say that each poem has its own 20th o
f January inscribed within it? Perhaps what is now in the poems which are written
today is just this: that here, most clearly, one seeks to remain mindful of such
dates?(Cited in Derrida, 310)Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
Remembered behind 1960 and this speech, only 15 years before or since 1939 or 1933,
is not just the loss instituted by Time or any other personification of life aging
into death, but extermination;Black milk o f daybreak we drink you at nightwe drink
you at noon death is a master from Germanywe drink you at sundown and in the
morning we drink and wedrink you(Celan, "Death Fugue")This of course is the moment
for a melodramatic pronouncement on the value of memory- - which would then be
countered by a list of the abuses of history that have supported tyranny, delusion,
prejudice and hatred. Art cannot redeem the past, nor can history prevent many
injustices; but the dynamic between the unique, the momentary, the living and the
represented that Celan finds in art recapitulates the dynamic between being and
representation in historical epistemology. This dynamic generates temporality as
the actual condition for our being: cognition, the interaction between subjectivity
and representation, generates Time.This conception of temporality suggests that
poetry defines an ontologic, a metaphysical logic in a Viconian sense: "That which
is metaphysics insofar as it contemplates things in all the forms o f their being,
is logic insofar as it considers things in
alltheformsbywhichtheymaybesignified"(NS127). Thesesignifiedformsenmeshour
consciousness within a network of relations that function as fundamental
ontological definitions (showing what is as what it is): the production of meaning
becomes theReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
production of fundamental ontology. Thus for Rilke a poem condenses a condition of
being into a single word; for Celan that word is a date, the mark o f being in
time, the condensation o f being into the singularity o f the moment, and thus into
an assertion o f existence. The poetic representation o f being becomes a way o f
marking oneself as a limit to past-time and at the same time as a mark o f the
distance between a mark as an identity (as if a grave stele) and our containment
within the dynamic processes of nature or languageorbiology.
Historyusedtosuppressidentitymirrorshistoryusedtopreserveidentity. The moral
control over history becomes confused with the sheer opacity o f time; history
constructed is time constructed, or as Benjamin writes "Telescoping o f the past
through the present" ("Theory ofKnowledge", 60). Such constructions express and
definethepowerandidentityofpersonsandgroups. Suchconstructionscreatean aesthetics
oftime.Wittgenstein's corrective analogy that today and date are related not as
hammer to mallet but as hammer to nail is correct in our ordinary usages of these
words to mark time as over and against us. But the analogy fails to capture our
ordinary (or poetic, which I think is an ordinary use oflanguage) use ofthese words
to express within different language games our containment within phenomenal time
(today) or within serial time (date).
Andthesearenot,ofcourse,theonlywaysofexpressingandenactingthis containment.
Inrelationtotheentiresystemoflanguage,"now"anda"log"areformally equivalent, but
functionally different. They are formal identities without content, whichcan both
serve as targets for expressing our sense o f loss. (There are many ways o f using
aReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited
tool, as Wittgenstein continually demonstrates. My question here is how do these
tools, words and sentences, express a legitimate depth in our language?).What is
the logic behind our false use of "now"? It is not simply that we understand the
present as an object like a log, but that we necessarily represent ourselves as or
attach ourselves to objects or nominalized relations, states, and identities
within. This representation o f ourselves never functions within a single language
game, but always as the locus ofa complex system ofrelations and reflections; it
necessarily understands itself simultaneously through a variety of grammars. It is
not simply the present that is objectified in "Where does the present go?" but also
an aspect of ourselves (allegorized as subjectivity, soul, identity and so on),
which forms the limit within which this statement does its work. "Now" like our
subjectivity can simultaneously seem to exist and to have
changed(vanishedintime,tobereplacedbyanother"now"). Thisis,ofcourse,differentfrom a
log as an object, but not from a "log" as a word which is given a double existence
both as referent and a marker within and o f our subjective consciousness and
memory. In other words the analogy is not only constructed in order to equate a
"log" with the "present", but to offer a target onto which our sense o f loss can
be used to describe our relation to the world as if that worldwere also us. We
invest ourselves in a chain of analogies from Time to being, from subjectivity to
being, and thus from object to representation.
Inthispassage,Wittgensteindefinesthelinguisticrelationshipswithin language but, at
this point, he has an attenuated sense o f the ways in which we construct both what
one might call our subjectivity and our loss within language.Reproduced with
permission.471
All representations within language can function like a form o f our subjectivity
(maybe our investment in the world as an T ) . Consciousness would be the primary
mode ofsubjectivity,butitwouldnotbetheexclusivemode. Itis,therefore,noteven
innocuous to say "Where does that log go?" (it is no less dangerous than asking
where the present goes). Once this question is phrased, this log goes the same
place as "the present" goes. We do not only represent the log or the present, we
represent our consciousness of these, and thus we represent our perception
splitting into objects and into reflections on itself (as subjectivity, as
something that can be lost). But o f course it is both object and subject, both log
and the present and itself (it in a sense absorbs and becomes what it
represents)andalsononeofthese. Thusnolanguagegame,whichisalsoapartof subjectivity,
totalizes the subject within itself. Without this totalization subjectivity must
continually play itself between subject and object, recognizing itself as both the
consciousness of the log and of a particular present which is not the same as the
other presents out which it has and will construct itself (as awareness). Our
subjectivity thus can recognize itself as an object and as a subject, just like it
can recognize "the present" as subject and object, as ifit were a log and as ifit
were not, as "now, I ..." and a "Where did the present go?" We can invest ourselves
in our use o f 'now' or the present as part of two language games; the first
centered on "now" as an experience, and thus ironically as a surrogate for
consciousness understood as an existential subject, and the second centered on the
present as a surrogate for consciousness as an object. Both are valid because
unavoidable for subjectivity to understand anything, but when they are confused one
mightbe tempted to picture the present as a log on a river.Reproduced with
permission.472
Meaning, therefore, is not only referential in pointing to objects, as in Frege,
but is referential in pointing to the self; Thus if Wittgenstein says that Freud
did not discover the unconscious but instead introduced a new vocabulary within the
grammar o f psychological discourse, then what he is saying in essence is that we
construct our subjectivity within a particular grammar. (The entire Phenomenology
is such a grammar, and thus in order to move the subject from a representation to a
recognition o f itself as an other, to a simulation ofthe other as itself and thus
into being, and so on into "Absolute Knowledge", Hegel's grammar must be complete
and absolute). This does not mean that our subjectivity is that grammar, but it is
constructed within it and in relationship to it, butt also exists outside of it,
existing as the need to construct ourselves within that grammar (there would be no
need to effect this construction if we did not also exist outside o f this
grammar).Wittgenstein constructs temporality within the linguistic logic of
metaphors, but elides the relation between temporality and subjectivity. Thus he
ignores the way in which the existential reality oftime and loss is enacted within
the grammar of speaking abouttime.
Hegelconstitutesbecomingalsowithinasystemofrepresentation,butasa form o f
subjectivity.Representation does not capture being, it is rather what being is when
understood as an object, an identity. Our movement from our intention to our
representation defines Beingassuch.
ThismovementiscompletedintheHegelian"AbsoluteKnowing"through the final
actualization o f the potential categories o f identity first constructed in sense-
without permission.
certainty: 'Now', Here', 'This', and T. The movement of Spirit in "Absolute
Knowing" falls into three moments:1) the object o f consciousness "presented itself
to the Self as vanishing": as an other whose being within the knowing o f the Self
is necessarily unstable and changing. This is the condition of "sensuous things".2)
theobjectispositedasaThingbythesubject: throughakindofapperceptive projection, or
what Hegel calls an "extemalization of self-consciousness". The identity of the
object expresses or reflects or forms the identity o f the subject, i.e. the
willing and knowing which is what being is in its "absolute essentiality"(792).3)
amomentsuchthatknowingandbeingexistbecausetheyhavea "meaning"[Bedeutung] "not only
for us or in itself, but for self-consciousness itself. . .self- consciousness
knows the nothingness of the object,. . . , because it externalizes its own self
--for in this extemalization it posits itself as object, or the object as itself,
in virtue of the indivisible unity o f being-for-seIf."[788]: the relation between
self-consciousness and its object, between us and our object, is defined by its
meaning, i.e. its significance as an expressionofourbeing.
Thisisaxiologicalontology,inthattheobjectgainsatruthvaluethrough its significance
[Bedeutung] and relation to us: its value as our reality.This extemalization is a
representation in otherness, that is also the object itself, necessarily an element
in both its being and our being, and thus within the "unity o f being- for-self'.
The movement from meaning to representation ignores the conceptual aporia
separatingrepresentationandintentioninHume'scritiqueofinfiniteregression. Instead,
Hegel understands that our movement is a movement into the subjective constructs o
f ourReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
representation. Time arises through our representation ofwhat lias been' as 'now1,
which must be surrendered to our memory in order to be replaced by the now that is
but which we cannot know as now except when translated into a representation.Self-
consciousnessisin"communionwithitselfinitsothernessassuch. Thisisthe movement of
consciousness, and in that movement consciousness is the totality of its moments."
Consciousness is constituted by the temporality that it creates within the fissure
between intention and representation.Thus in the Encyclopedia Logic Hegel can
construct Being beyond representation: [Being] is not to be sensed, not to be
intuited, and not to be represented, but rather, it is the pure Thought and, as
such it constitutes the beginning.(86)Being is not an object to be grasped: it
cannot be sensed, intuited, or represented as Being. The "Knowing1in Consciousness
"is to be indicated only in its process of coming-tobe"(789).
EvenwhenBeingapproachesthinghoodin"ObservingReason",itis"thebeing o f the T" that
is a "Thing, and, moreover, a sensuous immediate Thing"(789): "The Thing is T; in
point of fact, in this infinitejudgment the Thing is superseded; in itselfit is
nothing; it has meaning only in the relation, only through the T and its connection
with it"(791). Thus our object, knowing itself, is a 'Thing' through its creation
of our knowledge of it, its relation "through the T" and its "connection with it,
"which is our, really Hegel's, representation of it.For Wittgenstein, in the Brown
Book, temporality cannot be represented as a thing (as a log); which means that the
essence or the form of time is not expressed in language, in the interaction of
identities, which after all define thingness. Thus when we speak ofReproduced with
permission.475
time we do not say what we mean. Wittgenstein has extended Hegel's examination o f
the failure o f language to capture the being o f objects to its failure to capture
beings in general. The object fails to materialize in our saying. It exists within
our knowledge only as our intention or criterion. Apparent meaning (the criterion
for truth or actuality) defines the object as a potential, that which is meant and
is to be actualized in our knowledge through our representation of it. As a
criterion it picks out what it would mean for a particular object to be that
particular object. Saying translates what meaning points to (not the object itself)
into the realm of what can be known. Meaning constructs the realm of what can be
said.The failure to say what is meant assumes that meaning is prior to saying; we
can ask what is meant because this meaning is understood to exist (because it
asserts the existence of a real object that is marked by our intention but not our
saying), although it hasnotyetbeensaid.
Onemustassume,asHegelcertainlydoes,thatoursubjectivity contains a realm o f
intention separate from the realm o f manifestations, which somehow picks out an
object and acts as the criterion for determining the truth o f our representation
ofthis object.In the initial stages of the Phenomenology knowledge grasps the
object not through representation but through this criterion, the intention
informing our language. This criterion is grounded in an identity between our
being, our existence as such, and our knowing: being = knowing (74). Our knowing
will be actual if the object is actual within, or as, our representation. The
criterion becomes a field o f potential that defines Being and knowing within a
grammar of intention activated by the subject.Reproduced with permission of the
11.2 Inhabiting timeWe begin to see here the significance ofWittgenstein's
formulation ofthe problem ofTime. The present is mistaken for its manifestation in
the transformation ofthings or identities, and then translated into the metaphor o
f movement. These manifestations, the logs rambling down the river, are mistakenly
read as the meaning or realization o f Time, which functions as the potentiality
(the condition) o f Being: Time = potential Being. For Wittgenstein this movement
from potential to actual, because it equates two different conceptual genres, is
unjustified.We experience and know temporality, however, through the particularity
of our being. This particularity should not be simply understood as our
subjectivity. It is more
importantlythespecificconditionsthroughwhichTimeismademanifest. Withoutthis
particularity it would be impossible for us to recognize Time as change. Being
becomes the relating o f this particularity to this condition o f change in order
to construct the "reality" of things. (To deny this is simply to deny "things".)
Being itselfis the mediation o f this relating. Thus the log is not simply the
false embodiment o f the present. It manifests the Criterion (the standard defining
what qualifies as real) determining the form
ofourownsubjectivityorpresencewithinTime. Andassuchitdefinesasystemof meaning; it
defines the Criterion defining our inclusion within what Hegel calls the Absolute,
but which is simply Actuality or reality. Time, therefore, functions as the
potentiality o f form: the manifestation o f formal identity in the conceptual
structure o f thepresent, the limit and necessary condition ofBeing, whereas the
formal identities ofReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
language function as the potentiality ofcontent: the feigned manifestation
ofcontent in form, being in identity, which establishes the potentiality o f this
content.Any conception of time is limited by the fact that it cannot be observed as
a real entity, but can only be seen to exist through extrapolation from its effect
on space and matter:timeiscontingentonmaterialityandconsciousness.
Inspiteoftheabstract, contingent, immaterial, non-substantive essence and nature o
f time, it functions as the absolute condition and limit on our existence.
Finnegans Wake transforms time (both as interpretative descriptions and enactments
o f change) into grammatical shifts in order to elide this limit. Opera, in a kind
of inversion, transforms time, music itself, into the forms o f plot and character,
what is and can be lost through death, and, therefore, being, in order to elide
this limit.I would like to chance another excursus in Opera, not only as a
counterpoint to the musicality of the Wake (the form of its nonsense), but as an
investigation of how the picture o f time (a log on a river) that Wittgenstein
undoes can be lodged within an introjection o f ourselves (variously conceived)
within the systematic force o f change and time.What is the seduction ofthe mind?
Ivan Nagel, after identifying the thematic conflict in Opera Seria as menace and
entreaty, expands their power to thematically organize opera, by analogic
extension, into the ontological structure organizing the universe o f Opera:Space
and time: they stand for domination and freedom. But they also stand for a
pureandimpurerelationshipintheworld. Timeisimpure,becauseiniteveryReproduced with
permission.478
object, every man is one thing and then an other. Thus disloyalty, betrayal become
the clock o f freedom, and finally the madly accelerated hour stroke o f the modem
age. ThatisperhapsthedeepestthemeofDonGiovanni.(118)The impurity o f time is judged
from the perspective o f Being understood as the ideal form o f identity. In this
equation, Space (the realm o f Being as identity) symbolizes Society,
butinthisitmustalsogird,standfortheWomen. Time,althoughanabstractionbuiltout
ofperceived effects (and thus impure), unsheathes, bares (?) Don Giovanni in order
that he might run through space(?), slash it(?), defeat its dominion. For Nagel,
Don Giovanni, in spite o f Catherine Clement's protest that his rapes cease to be
rationalized as rebellion, represents the excess and the promise o f the French
Revolution.Don Giovanni is built on a temporal logic, but one in which such
symbolism is less neat. I'm not sure that Space and Time can function as symbols
unless this symbolism is builtoutofanontology.
Nagel'sspace/timefictionisclosertoananalogywhichgathers its rhetorical strength
from the ease by which any small set o f events and characters can be mapped onto a
set o f oppositions.Don Giovanni, when confronted by the Commendatore, rejects his
demand that he renounce his life, his identity and his history. He rejects change,
if that change includes himself.
Hisrejectionofsocialnormsismorelikeanattemptatbecomingpurebeing(as opposed to
impure time), in the same sense that opera itself attempts to replace the
temporalrelations,outofwhichpolyphonyisbuilt,withmonodicidentities. Although Don
Giovanni protects himselfas a pure identity (as opposed to change), he reduces the
woman around him, the women he conquers to temporal markers. They are, asReproduced
permission.479
Kierkegaard assures us, without psychical individuality, that is, without content
or subjectivity--so long as they are on this list. Don Giovanni is the Being that
creates Time.Don Giovanni's power, contradicting Kierkegaard's fiction, can
certainly fail (as it does repeatedly in the opera). In being desire he can only
succeed with desire: if he cannotreducethewomantonothingbutdesirehewillfail.
Tobuildasouloutofthis Opera one would have to reduce it to an ontological network
in which feminine repetition and negation would dissolve the form of serial time
described by Don Giovanni's list into spirit.The oddness of finding Opera as an
enactment ofthe creation or dissolution ofthe mind reflects the kind o f pressure
the tension between the conative forces describing animation (often figured as
love, lust, desire, dread, fear, and so on) and the organizing
formsquantityincreasinglycapturedinmodemepistemologicalmodelsofthinking. Music and
voice or silence and singing or noise and melody can serve to enact in the kinds of
unities o f form they produce to enact the analogies o f animation that philosophy
and literature picture. (One could do a history of this.)Don Giovanni values woman
as woman. A woman is a piece of wax on a stove. If she melts the properties by
which I knew her, her coloring, her smell, her shape have disappeared. Is it still
a woman? Don Giovanni offers a woman, as a gift o f his desire, the certainty that
she is not only a woman no matter what her shape or social status, but that her
value is absolute, essential to her being. Don Giovanni desires the essence ofthe
being ofwomen. For a woman to be transformed into her essence, however, is for her
to lose her being, to become a mark on a list, to exist as this essence within
serial time.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
Ifwe can believe the list, then Don Giovanni by trading a woman the certainty of
absolute value for the being (her name, her identity) reduces her to serial time:
Ontological map of Being creating a Serial Temporalityife of DG: serial progression
Names of women: moments in timeDonna Elvira, one o f Don Giovanni's past lovers,
refuses to be reduced to pure form, a mark on a list. She exclaims, "I must
hasten . . . I must go . . . All I can feel within my breast is revenge, rage and
contempt." This refusal generates a conflict between Don Giovanni's history o f
succession, where memory consists o f nothing but names on this line and the future
consists o f nothing but further conquests o f women with regard to shape or size
or personality, and a Donna Elvira's new history of redemption or revenge. If we
place Donna Elvira's temporal path on the map ofDon Giovanni's temporal path it
describes a temporal loop:Temporal Loop (DE) and Serial Time (DG)DEPast
ofdesireanimatinghim. Massettosaystohim,"LetyourgentlemanmakeyouintoaDGNowGiovanni
pretends to be a chameleon, each mask a host for the parasite algorithmReproduced
permission.481
gentlewoman." Everyone at first assumes that being, or identity, what a person is,
is determined by the form someone takes. This mistake is what allows Giovanni to at
first seduce his victims. They believe his exterior; they accept the promises and
thus the offer o f transformation he gives them (to be a bride, a gentlewoman,
etc.). Clement is making the same mistake when she claims that Don Giovanni's is
nothing but the clothes which Leperello puts on to fool Donna Elvira. Don Giovani
is not his cloak, he is his desire. Elvira's failure to expose Leperello arises
because she holds on to an ontology of identity which is conserved over time. She
recognizes the real Giovanni when he speaks to her. She assumes the voice and body
is the same after Don Giovani has left. Don Giovani'sformal identity is tied to the
immediacy of his desire, but the identity he defends against the Commendatore and
which determines his actions remains constant over time. His essence is constant.
This essence can be expressed through particular formal identities (in particular
moments), but it cannot be represented by those same forms. In this way Don
GiovannidoesdescribetheessenceofmusicasSchopenhauerdefinesit: asa representation o
f what cannot be represented in itself (the Will).Donna Elvira's ability to return
and confront Don Giovanni, attributed as it is to heaven, is predicated on a
ability to act over time outside o f the immediacy o f form and desire in which Don
Giovanni operates. Spirit, or heaven, functions, therefore, as the guarantor of
identity over time. Donna Anna and Don Ottavio both sing,Heavens, what a noble
sight! What refined dignity!. . . .Within my heart I feel a strange emotion..
.about this unhappy woman (DE).Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
Another temporal loop is exposed as Donna Anna recognizes in Donna Elvira a similar
pain to her own. In recognizing herselfin Donna Elvira, she uncovers the identity
of her attacker. Although Don Ottavio resists this identification because he
recognizes himself in Don Giovanni (he acknowledges him as his kinsman). Don
Giovanni's exposure takes place through the appearance o f Donna Elvira, but this
appearance is conditioned over time, and is not constructed in the immediacy o f
desire. The recognition o f pain as opposed to desire "assails" Donna Elvira "with
doubt", such that the "words uttered so softly, the way he changes colour, these
signs are all to obvious, they have quite convinced me." The frame or grammar in
which the actions and identities o f our characters function has been transformed
into a meta-temporal grammar founded upon the collision of not just Donna Elvira
and Don Giovanni, but ofthe two temporal patterns and the identities these patterns
generate. When Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Don Ottavio call on heaven to "protect
the zeal within my heart" and to avenge my betrayed heart" they are calling on an
ontology opposed to the serial time built o f moments without content. An ontology
constructed out ofthe immediacy ofdesire claims, as we all might, that the only
reality exists in the now. The past and the future are not physically real. An
appeal to Heaven constructs a reality that because it includes both past (the
memory o f Don Giovani'scrimes) and the future (his punishment) recognizes a
reality beyond the physicality of the physical. We recognize memory and justice as
a function o f the biology o f our brains, the social and cultural structures,
grammars, rules etc.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
The end, even at this point, is determined by the dissolution of Don Giovanni's
temporal ontology into that of the women. This happens when a woman of the past
flyingon her temporal loop intersects every new woman marked by Don Giovanni's
desire: The Dissolution of Don GiovanniDE DA [past]moments when DG meets a woman
Once every serial moment is frustrated by a temporal loop, the woman have in effect
dissolved being defined in the immediacy o f its physicality into a meta-being that
transcends time: the soul. This soul is represented in the opera as the
Commendatore. It is this final intersection that exposes the essence o f Don
Giovanni, demonstrating that this essence, which defines his identity, is also
trans-temporal, and as such is a form o f being similar to that being (spirit)
which is the Commendatore. Don Giovanni materializes as a form o f spirit and thus
can be captured and taken away by the soul o f Donna Anna's father.For Don Giovanni
being(s) [women] are potential markers in time. His desire and power (identity)
dissolves being into temporality. The temporal loops described by the women attempt
to re-constitute being within a subjectivity greater than any moment. They identify
this subjectivity with Heaven, but it is simply the frame from which
contradictorygrammarscanfunction. Inthiscasebeinggeneratedoutoftemporality
represented by the women following their temporal loops and the temporality
generatedReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
out o f being defined by the serial time o f Don Giovanni's list. The women's
identities are not self-contained within the immediacy ofthe moment as is Don
Giovanni's. They exist overtime,suchthattimeisre-configuredasafieldcreatingbeing.
TheyforceDon Giovanni to fail and in that failure to cease to function as the
immediacy o f desire and form. In order to overcome the immorality ofDon Giovanni
they must function as logs on the river. A log built out of our subjectivity is a
temporal loop dissolving along the serialprogression o f a river.The possibility
for our separation o f time and space is a result o f their mutualdependence and
indeed their unity. This unity requires that space, as substance, function as ifit
were a subject moving into the objectivity oftime (the women onto Don Giovanni's
list), while time gains an overarching subjectivity that asks as a great maw
dissolving the identity of being (the temporal loops that finally suck Giovanni
into Hell). For matter to exist at all requires a scale o f relation that cannot be
defined tautologically by matter itself. Differenceisnotchange.
Wereachthelimitsoflanguage,becauselanguagewhatever difference and deferral it might
entail, cannot construct within itself, as anything meaningful, change itself.
Language makes change a necessary pre-condition for its ownmeaning. It can display
it, point to it, call it names, enact it but it cannot describe it (language itself
is already such a description; this is why attempts to embody time appeal to
nonsense). And yet temporality is not the unutterable; it is what we utter although
not what we mean. Just as narrative, or even a sentence, needs a temporal 'space'
in which to unfold its meaning, being itself exists through its movement through
moments. The nature of the moments cannot be described as/or through being: it
defines their outline or theirReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
content. Music does not come closest to grasping temporality, in grasping the
limits of our existence. Change cannot be expressed as a syntax. I take it as the
conclusion o f Don Giovanni, Finnegans Wake, and Philosophical Investigations that
our investment in time functions through the way we figure meaning (and thus
semantics) within grammatical (and syntactical) shifts.Temporality and being,
'now1and 'here', become different because they each function through a contingency
with the other that the other cannot itself determine. If "consciousness is the
totality o f its moments" (as it is in Hegel), it must understand itself at any
particular moment as not all there; its past and its future, and its movement
toward itself in otherness is itself what we call time stringing being into our
knowledge. Our knowledge, under the rubric of skepticism, consists of nothing but
forms. It is out of theseforms,
outofthepotentialityofcontentimplicatedinformbytheplayofconflicting grammars and
logics, that poetries, philosophies, and operas construct bodies and souls. We
might as well call this body and soul a mind.Finnegans Wake, Opera, and, as will
become clear, Philosophical Investigations, construct a mind as a shifting set of
limits. They construct a mind not simply as or by an analogy, but in order to
negotiate between and among inwardness and exertiority, type and individual,
language and music, sense and absurdity. We recognize ourselves within the forms o
f art, including philosophical art, because they can successfully construct an
aesthetic entity equivalent to our subjectivity, which performs a similar
negotiation between different grammars and worlds in order to construct a
continuous temporality. Art, in its attempt to approach Thoreau's fantasy of seeing
through another's eyes as ifReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
through the eyes of God, by presenting us with the subjectivity of an other that is
not fully human, cannot help but suggest that the confusion we need to fear is not
that between an automaton and a human, but between and automaton and God.Hegel
recognizes a similar limit in the a trans-subjective frame, the continuity from
Sense-Certainty to Absolute Knowing, providing the continuity in temporality
(becoming) that Being conceived within formal identities cannot give. For Hegel
this trans-subjective frame is Spirit, the condition ofBeing as Becoming that marks
existence as necessarily historical. Spirit is generated as a necessity out ofthe
interaction between our subjectivity, or cognition, and change translated into
language and representation.The present is neither a mystic point, nor, as
Wittgenstein demonstrates, a thing or anidentity.
Itisaconstructionofoursubjectivity;itistherealmofbecomingbeyondthe objective form
of language but within our intention, within the criterion of meaning used
toconstructknowledgeandmeaning. Thisrealmofintentionenfoldsthemovementof
subjectivity between self and text--and thus between moments. The present offers
itself as Spirit, not simply as the frame o f temporal continuity but as the
substance o f being asbecoming.AtthispointHegel'stheologyconfrontsBenjamin's:
spiritastemporalityagainstspatialtheology.
ThetheologyanimatingBenjamin'smaterialismplaysbetweenhis messianic need to redeem
the past in memory (the completion o f the dead) and in action (toward utopia) and
his spatial conception o f the mystic configurations and monads
communicatingtheinorganicandmysterioussubstanceofhistory. Benjaminwritesin"Re the
Theory ofKnowledge, Theory ofProgress" thatReproduced with permission of the
... historyisnotjustasciencebutalsoaformofmemoration. Whatscience has
"established," memoration can modify. Memoration can make the incomplete
(happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something
incomplete. Thatistheology;butinmemorationwediscovertheexperiencethat forbids us to
conceive o f history as thoroughly a-theological.. . (61)
Historydoesnotexistwithinanoumenalrealmbeyondoursubjectivity. Historyas
"memoration" moves life beyond the present, beyond the phenomenal plane oftexts,
intothe realm of ontological values that Benjamin calls theology and into our own
subjectivity constructing these values. In Benjamin these values are embodied in
messianic logic empowering the dialectic o f history, which is our becoming (i.e.
our creation o f ourselves as history and therefore through memory, action, and
hope). By ontological values I mean the necessary axiological hierarchies
generating any criterion for determining actuality which we recognize as real: the
values that attach a 'reality' to our subjectivity in spite of the irrevocably
unbridgeable epistemological estrangement. (Hegel's chapter on "Sense- certainty"
demonstrates this estrangement, and within its logic invokes a double hierarchy
ofvalues: essentiality/inessentialityandimmediacy/mediacywhichempowersthe dialectic
throughout the entire Phenomenology). We construct and function within a continuity
of substance that exists beyond the present, much like our brain constructs avery
elaborate visual field from limited visual stimulus. Theology is a faith beyond the
knowing of sense-certainty, beyond immediacy and essentiality, that re-constitutes
knowing within the continuity of Spirit: the creation of Being out of the temporal
fragmentation of our subjectivity in successive moments. We exist beyond the
immediateReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
in the mediacy oftime. This theological mediation allows for the possibility for
the present to redeem the past (Benjamin, Origin, 34-36). This present functions
like Hegel's subjectivity (or Heidegger's hermeneutic circle): it serves to
structure the continuity of temporality out of our cognition, dissolving the
separation between subject and object, phenomenal and noumenal in the becoming of
history. Thus Benjamin's theology is reconciled to the logic underlying Hegel's use
of Spirit.Benjamin will not override the dialectical movement o f history in
anything resembling what de Man calls a "synchronic juxtaposition." Benjamin
constructs a history of power broken into discontinuities that can only be
reconstructed in diachronicjuxtapositions, where the mystic unity ofthe moment, the
identity ofthe individual, of subjectivity in its singular date, exists in the
silence between these juxtapositions. Benjamin cannot ultimately replace becoming
with being, and must rely on the silence, in which voices occasionally crystallize
as words, as the trans-subjective medium in which memory can be invoked and can
redeem the oppressed.The dynamic between the realm o f intention and
representation, between meaning (criterion) and truth, becoming and being,
subjective and objective cannot be epoxied into thematerialityoflanguage.
Thecontext,grammar,anduseandthesubjectivity,intention, and silence in which meaning
is enacted transform our thinking into temporality itself. To ask whether time
exists beyond our cognition, beyond ourselves is to ask nonsense; it is to think of
temporality as an object like a log.What I mean to say by this, but which I could
only pretend to prove in some other essay, is that our cognition o f time
simultaneously and necessarily constructs the paradigmReproduced with permission of
through which meaning is possible. Meaning organizes reality within an axiological
hierarchy determining ontological value and significance in order to define a realm
of actuality in relation to a subjectivity challenged by the minatory presence o f
its own dissolution.Time is the creation of art just as it is the construct of our
cognition. Temporality, disguised as the Phoenix ofBeing, becomes an aesthetic
image ofour subjectivity simulating the play between intention, where the text
becomes the realm o f intention pointing toward some beyond, and representation,
where it becomes the verbal effect of someintention.
Farfrombeingsimultaneous,thisdoubleness(asonlythebeginningofa multiplicity of
conflicting vectors) brings the diachronic beasts of change and loss into our
perception as the condition of our existence. Representation and art bring death
into our own subjectivity, and thus can be said to generate the cognitive reality o
f time.Derrida interprets Celan in relation to this threat and its dramatic
transformation in language into the redemption of communication:The name September
arises in a poem, a poem which "speaks"; it is readable to the extent that it is
caught up within a network o f marks which signify and are, by convention,
intelligible; it has its share in the poem's beauty. But to the same extent, it
pays for its readability with the terrible tribute of lost singularity; what is
encrypted, dated in the date, is effaced in it, the date is marked in marking
itself off. (330)A date marks the singular moment by translating this singularity
into a standardized convention which can then be exchanged and understood within a
social community.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
Thus Derrida claims that the date effaces itself in a kind o f "synchronic
juxtaposition.". Derrida structures the moment as an identity (engaging in the
disanalogy o f the moment as a log), whose content is mired in paradox but whose
identity remains constant and reiterable. This iterability forms the trans-
subjective frame providing the continuity between moments. This iterability,
however, is predicated on the effacement ofthe singularity the date refers to
(337). This singularity, the 'actual' date, if we follow the logic o f Derrida's
use o f "effacement", is encoded within the semiotic date only to be
markedoverandlosttotherecurrent"modernity"ofthesignifier. Derridascrupulously
avoids reinstituting a Kantian noumenal realm. But he also avoids Hegel's
subjective realm o f intention. The 'now' that 'has been' is marked as that which
is effaced, and the signifier becomes a palimpsest. By avoiding the notion o f a
subjective Criterion, Derrida dissolves any notion o f a temporality generated
through subjectivity. The real becomes restricted to the immediate: the signifier
and the moment.The date, however, can neither be effaced nor communicated: it is
not a thing but a condition o f being circumscribed and defined by the movement o f
subjectivity between identities in different moments. A date refers to time by
representing things understood as
identities,whicharesometimesstableandatothertimeschanging. Torecapturethe
temporality of texts one must not construct reading within an atemporal mode of
renewal and ossification (interpretation and assertion), but one must negotiate
between the diachronic unfolding of the text and the diachronic realm of meaning,
or intention, the text reticulates through its representations of identity.
Ultimately it is the not that time provides the possibility for poetics, but that
art actualizes the possibility o f time: ArtReproduced with permission of the
becomes the origin and the answer to our existential terror, but always within the
logic of history, always within this very terror as a kind of irony. The irony of
terror is built out of the contiguity of tradition translating the individual (a
particular) into the context of history (recognizing oneselfas the exemplar or
expression ofthe Volk, for example) or in translating the individual into the self-
redeeming continuity ofmemory that protected the Jews in their diaspora and which
preserves destroyed lives and cultures, if preservation can be so immaterial,
tenuous, and tragic.1In Wittgenstein's Lectures: Cambridge, 1930-32, ed. Desmond
Lee (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). 2Thejustification for Wittgenstein's hostility to
science is poorly understood. He does not in general
concernhimselfwithhowscientiststhink(intheirdifferentfeilds),butwithwhattheythink.
Heidegger makesthissamemove.
ForWittgenstein,thislimitationispartlytheresultofhisconcernsabout mathematics and
psychology, both describing the limits ofscience.3 See the last two chapters of his
Wittgenstein on Mind and Language.4For Stem's discussion of the history of
Wittgenstein's anempts to construct a phenomenological language and then his
abandonment of this attempt see both chapter 5 and chapter 6 in his Wittgenstein on
Mind and Language.5"(Augustine: Manifestissima et usitatissma sunt, et eadem rusus
nimis latent, et nova est inventio eorum.)"6The separation between noumenal and
phenomenal reality is predicated on equating Being with a conceptofobjecthood.
Thisseparationisthustheresultofobjectification,andthusis notthecauseofa
subject/object economy but a result7In Gottlob Frege, Collected Papers on
Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy.Reproduced with permission of the copyright
12The T in the nature ofPhilosophicalInvestigationsModels of time are invariably
models of animation. We invest ourselves in the marks oftime ('now', 'date',
'today', and so on) in the same way as we invest ourselves in our use o f 'I'.
These investments lead to philosophical confusions and serve as vehicles of
redemption. This redemption can proceed through a model o f thinking which is often
a model of animation (as with Benjamin). Under philosophical pressure, however,
this investment can seem to describe the principle o f life as dynamism plus
identity. Such a picture o f life erases the grammatical investment from which it
was extracted.Wittgenstein courts this danger in the preface to Philosophical
Investigations. Following a list o f the philosophical subjects he investigates,
Wittgenstein describes the shape o f hiswriting or of his thinking in relation to
these subjects within a picture of animation (one can take this as one picture
among many o f the soul o f Investigations) -.I have written down all these
thoughts as remarks, short paragraphs, o f which there is sometimes a fairly long
chain about the same subject, while I sometimes make a sudden change, jumping from
one topic to another, (be)The list o f philosophy is ballasted by a length o f
chain, local areas o f continuity matching in some sense the objects ofphilosophy,
and rocked by "sudden change," from the inclusion of"other things." One could
imagine this description ofthe book functioning as a kind ofjustification for the
form ofthe list of his philosophical topics. This description can read like a
philosophical picture ofthinking, ofthe world or ofphilosophy built out ofNotes for
this chapter are on page S31Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
metaphorsofdynamismandidentity. Thebookisorganizedthroughcontinuity(local identity)
and change, founded on the relation between identity and change that finds
philosophy in between the fragments o f (change) Amdmander and Heraclitus and
(identity) ParmenidesandZeno.
OneofWittgenstein'sstrategiesincombatingourphilosophical extraction o f ourselves
from our language games is to transform philosophical theories and concepts into
aesthetic pictures and justifications. This is true o f his own philosophy aswell:
he unwinds the Tractatus and other earlier philosophical temptations and models
into apoeticsoflanguagegames. Thispoeticsbothgroundshisanalysisofconceptsintheir
everyday use and picture our involvement in language and philosophy through our
interpretive allegories and our allegorizations o f ourselves into language.
Animation is one ofthe central motifs for such allegorization.
PhilosophicalInvestigations could as well be
calledapoetryoffragmentsandapoeticsoffragments(orfragmentation). Thiscollapse of
poetry and poetics marks Wittgenstein as a modernist.The preface describes
Wittgenstein's involvement in language as his involvement in philosophy.
Philosophical Investigations begins (with the preface) with an aesthetic
justificationforthefragmentedformofthebook. Fragmentsrequirejustificationbecause
they require the construction of (an) interpretative frame(s). This means that a
fragment (or its justification) must teach us how to read it, and thus the preface
attempt to teach us how to read Investigations. Consequently, I will analyze
(through a kind o f exegesis) the preface as a fragment o f Philosophical
Investigations that begins and enacts our involvement and investment in language as
bound by aesthetics: metaphors, fictions, conversation, fragments and so on.
Wittgensteincallshimself'I'inthepreface. IntheTractatus,Wittgenstein describes a
non-psychological or metaphysical 'I' that forms the limit to the propositions that
constitute the facts ofthe world. Is there a non-psychological 'I' inPhilosophical
Investigations? Investigations is organized to dissolve our metaphysical attachment
to this kind of question into nonsense. One of the ways, however, this non-
psychological 'I' emerges (as a local, not a metaphysical limit) is in the failure
o f language games. There are a number o f ways in which language games fail and
succeed. The peristalsis o f this movement in and out of language games describes a
kind of temporality enacting a kind of theological limit (one ofthe ways grammar
becomes theology: ?337). Another kind of language game failure, however, is
philosophy understood as metaphysics:Whenphilosophersuseaword--
"knowledge","being',"object","I", "proposition", "name" --and try to grasp the
essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used
in this way in the language-game which is its original home? (PI?116)A lot rests on
how "original home" is understood here, and how the appeal to ordinary language
accommodates the different kinds o f sublimation o f the word "knowledge."
Knowledge can be sublimed in a theory of knowledge where we might presume the
requirement for knowledge is absolute identity, or it can be sublimed as in
Steven's use of "knew" (and "self' and "song" and "maker") in "The Idea of Order at
Key West":And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the selfThat was
her song, for she was the maker. Then we,Reproduced with permission of the
As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there was a world for her Except
the one she sang and, singing made.Wittgenstein suggests that the expressiveness o
f poetry (as a version o f self-interpretation) resists the philosophical attempt
to link necessity with essence as a way o f describing the conditions, the given,
of our being human.1To explore the relation between poetry and philosophy is to
investigate the nature and role o f what counts as the given in poetry (a poem).
Iunderstandsuchaninvestigationtomeanthatourpoeticuseoflanguage,our investment in
language or poetry, articulates a relationship to the ontological limits (what is
given as the real) in relation to which we live. The sense o f poetry would then be
a function ofthis relationship, that is, its sense could be understood as
meaningful or true, whatever these might mean, through the analysis and
articulation o f this relationship and these limits).What counts as a limit is
continually at issue: "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it,
for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably" (PI ?
115). Philosophy, in Wittgenstein's hands, becomes a poetic response to what seems
like logical necessity in order to break the hold these picture and false analogies
have on us, and an attempt to present the correct (at least in particular
circumstances)grammarofourlanguageuse. Wittgensteinassertsthat"Philosophyought
really to be written as a poetic composition" partly because it is a response to a
logical aesthetic, at best, or, at worst, to a logical prejudice (CV24). But what
kind of poetic composition?Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
Wittgenstein utilizes a number o f recurrent metaphors and analogies throughout
Investigations. ThedominatemetaphorsinthePreface,however,"[d]rawingtheirlight and
currents o f the air/ [i]nto their mass and depth" revolve around 'nature' (and
landscape).2 The grammar o f 'nature' opens up a site o f contestation between
metaphysics, in which nature can be understood as essence, and science, in which
the natural is understood as defined by causal connections, and Wittgenstein's
method, in which nature describes our ordinary embeddednesss within language,
language games, human practices, and forms of life. Does Wittgenstein's use of
nature, or let's say thejustification o f his philosophy described in the Preface,
describe a poetics or philosophy of fragmentation that addresses the motives and
effects ofthe fragmentation oftime, identity and world described in Keats, Adams,
Eliot, Heidegger, and Joyce?Wittgenstein provides a list of many of the subjects of
his Investigations in the preface:
"[t]heconceptsofmeaning,ofunderstanding,ofaproposition,oflogic,the foundations of
mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things." This is a description
ofphilosophy that clanks into the vagueness of "other things" [undAnderes] in a way
exactly at odds to the demands oflogicjustifying these other problems as
philosophical problems. The anti-climax ofthese "other things" can be read as a
diminishment or a promise. What are these other things, at least? Do we imagine
thatthinking can be described by a list of traditional things to think about?These
philosophical subjects do not form a given set ofquestions and responses,determined
by clear conceptual boundaries, towards which someone thinks. Investigations could
never have been called 'The Problem ofMeaning' or 'OfReproduced with permission of
Understanding'or 'Logical Propositions'and so on. It consists of"the precipitate of
PhilosophicalInvestigationunified not by a specific subject (although there are
rough limits: o f Wittgenstein's two major concerns it concerns the philosophy o f
psychology more than the philosophy o f mathematics, but this is a way o f saying
it concerns the limits ofthe mind as opposed to the limits oftruth). A precipitate
[Niederschlag] is a kind of
resultoreffect,atraceofthinkingthatisitselfanotherformofinvestigation. Thevery
first sentence of the Preface, therefore, describes the kind of self-reflexive form
organizing the book. The investigation ofthese subjects takes place from within the
language of these problems. And thus this investigation is another version o f this
language (not the language of theory, however, but a description of how one might
be gripped by how or why something means, for example). Each remark, therefore,
remarks on itself as a redescription of a previous picture (this is one way of
explaining why Investigationsbegins with a quotation, a picture of language-
learning, from Augustine). How does this self-reflection take place?Wittgenstein's
philosophical self-reflection proceeds through the invention of primitive and
specialized language games as objects o f comparison with our misleading and our
everyday language games, through the description of our ordinary usage of language,
through metaphors and analogies, through grammatical jokes, and so on. He pressures
those points or moments when a language game fails (the point at which we start to
theorize for example). This pressure shifts incoherence not simply back into
coherence but from one point of incoherence to another, describing the distinctions
in our languageusageastheshiftinglimitsbetweenlanguagegames. OneofthewaysReproduced
permission.498
Wittgenstein describes these limits is as and through invented "intermediate
cases": language games that simplify an aspect o f our use in order to highlight
the logic o f our ordinaryusage. HesaysA main source o f our failure to understand
is that we do not command a clear view oftheuseofourwords.--
Ourgrammarislackinginthissortofperspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces
just that understanding which consists in 'seeing connexions'. (PI?122)These
connections are made visible by intermediate cases because they sketch the limit of
the frame through which we view something in relation to another frame: "We
predicate ofthe thing what lies in the method of representing it. Impressed by the
possibility of a comparison, we think we are perceiving a state ofaffairs ofthe
highest generality" (PI?104). In what sense is language or the world fragmented?
Our language games or rather their grammar provide frames through and in which we
and the world are figured as sensible.
Investigatingthegrammar(thelogicoraestheticsofourusage)ofourlanguage means to make
these frames visible, to configure language as a complex set o f shifting frames.
This in effect means to display our language as a set o f fragments within which
and in relation to which we figure ourselves and the world.Wittgenstein suggests
that the kind of necessity that can lead to Kant's transcendental deduction, where
the question is what is necessary for cognition or knowing to be possible, can not
be described or captured in rules (that is, this necessity cannot be said). The
problem of knowledge is translated into how we understand language. The site o f
this understanding is within or in relation to language games.Reproduced with
permission.499
Wittgenstein explores the nature of how words function within these language games,
in a typical self-reflexive move, by describing the grammar o f the word 'game' in
order to show that it has no essence, but is rather part ofa complex set ofuses
that mark any particular use o f 'game' (as in 'a game o f chess') as related to
another usage (a guessing game or football) as if by family resemblance.
Wittgenstein distinguishes between the demands of philosophy for the definition or
the essence of concepts and our everyday use of concepts in differing degrees
ofexactitude and vagueness. If one looks at the examples of how we use a word like
'game' to describe our games we cannot find nor describe the essence of being a
game, nor can we determine or describe the essential criteria for using the word
'game'. We find instead "family resemblance"; "for the various resemblances between
members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc.
overlap and criss-cross [kreuzen] in the same way.--And I shall say: 'games' form a
family"(PI?67). Ifwords"haveafamilyofmeanings"(PI?77),thenonecannotdiscover an
essential meaning o f a word. Meaning is not a function o f a word having a
particular meaning or essence which we then grasp. He suggests that the "concept of
a game is unbounded", that what a game is cannot be determined by a rule or
expressed as an essence (gameness).The interlocutor responds, "But then the use o f
the word is unregulated, the 'game' we play with it is unregulated." This assertion
is answered by, "It is not everywhere circumscribed by rules; but no more are there
any rules for how high onethrows the ball in tennis, or how hard; yet tennis is a
game for all that and has rules too" (PI?68). One can imagine that a coach might
invent rules for how high and hard to throwReproduced with permission of the
a tennis ball--but would this rule have to include a description ofwhen it is
allowed to throw a tennis ball and not hit it with a racket? Even if invented these
rules do not determine the rules that make tennis a game--but are really rules for
a particular player in relation to his coach. The game will not be forfeit ifthe
player breaks these rules of serving (even if he loses the point). One could also
describe the laws of physics (which are themselves descriptions) as rules
determining what kind of games can be played. Within this picture the laws of
physics function as ontological limits (along with ourbiology, the construction of
the court, the economics that makes such courts and such games [or leisure]
possible, and so on). We can not ask, sensibly, however, how the relation between
physics and human biology makes tennis possible as a human activity which we call
'a game.' We can ask what makes the activities we perform in playing tennis
possible, but the concept o f 'game' is not meaningful as an expression o f physics
or biology. Learning a word is always learning a language, or rather one must
already function within language games in order to understand what counts as a word
let alone whatitmeans. Thismeansthatonealwaysfindsoneselfwithinlanguagebecauseoneis
always within a human form oflife.In dictation to Alice Ambrose, Wittgenstein
claims that "In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say 'Let's get a
rough idea', for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections
between the roads. So I suggest repetition as a means of surveying the
connections." Investigations consists of following and escaping these roads (or
paths) in a search for clarity:Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
The same or almost the same points were always being approached afresh from
different directions, and new sketches made. Very many ofthese were badly drawn or
uncharacteristic, marked by all the defects of a weak draughtsman. And when they
were rejected a number oftolerable ones were left, which now had to be arranged and
sometimes cut down, so that ifyou looked at them you could get a picture o f the
landscape. Thus this book is really only an album, (ix)The "result" of his
Investigations of family resemblance shows that our uses of a word (or words), the
language games in which they function, describe "a complicated network of
similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities,
sometimes similaritiesindetail"(PI?66). Thislandscapeofcriss-
crossingpathsleadstoconfusion: "Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from
one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and
you no longer know your way about"(PI?203). I f these paths are language games,
then how 'consciousness' means (or appears) in the sentence "I was conscious of my
fault" is not the same as in "The patient regainedconsciousnessatthreea.m."
Istheproblemofconsciousnessalwaysaddressed by the word "consciousness"?The degree o
f vagueness and clarity in our use o f words is not stable. This instability
undermines the picture o f learning language as learning essences or names. Such
learning takes place already within language: "nothing has so far been done, when a
thinghasbeennamed. Ithasnotevengotanameexceptinthelanguagegame.Thisis what Frege
meant too, when he said that a word had meaning only as part of a sentence" (PI?
49). Wittgenstein analogizes philosophy's attempt to stabilize meaning as the
demandReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
tosketchasharplydefinedpicture"corresponding"toablurredone... ifthe colours in the
original merge without a hint o f any outline won't it become a hopeless task to
draw a sharp picture corresponding to the blurred one? Won't you then have to say:
"Here I might just as well draw a circle or heart as a rectangle, for all the
colours merge." Anything--and nothing--is right.--And this is the position you are
in ifyou look for definitions corresponding to our concepts of aesthetics or
ethics. (PI?77)Wittgenstein's analogy describes an incommensurability between a
demand o f clarity associated with a method of drawing and the object to be
represented. The fact that color and shape are related as visual properties o f
objects (forms which our eye is built to recognize or construct) suggests that such
an incommensurability should be resolvable. The contradiction, however, is a
grammatical one.Wittgenstein extends this grammatical incommensurability to
aesthetics and ethics. He claims that definitions do not capture our aesthetic and
ethical concepts. While this is unsurprising for words it might seem surprising for
art and morals. Words seem both more amenable to definition (one can give a list o
f common usages), but because one understands that one can use language often
without being able to give definitions of the words one uses (a definition of'the',
for example), the limits ofdefinition are obvious. Moral and aesthetic definitions
are seldom understood as descriptions (as is a definition of a word), but more
often than not as prescriptions (moral maxims or proverbs). This is confusing.
Moral and aesthetic definitions are interpretations of our practices within
particular communities (whether we think that this implies a relativism or not one
shouldReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
still be able to recognize that morality and art arejudgments of actions or of
particular cases). The meaning ofthese interpretations orjudgments cannot be
encapsulated in a definition ofthe objects ofjudgment, but onlyinthe process
ofmaking thejudgment. We cannot say what is good, but only how it is good. Would
the criteria for particularjudgments constitute a definition? Sometimes colored
squares form lines o f demarcation between them, and sometimes they do not. There
are always questions about application. Unlike in the Tractates, in Philosophical
Investigations this incommensurability isnot a dividing line between language and
silence. In some cases our confusion is a functionofmisappliedcriteria.
Wittgensteinaskshimself(oranyone)tocompare knowing and saying in the following
cases:how many feet high Mont Blanc is-- how the word "game" is used-- how a
clarinet sounds.One's initial comparison might conclude that one cannot say what a
clarinet sounds like, but one can both know and say how high Mont Blanc is.
Wittgenstein, however, says that "if you are surprised that one can know something
and not be able to say it, you are perhaps thinking of a case like the first.
Certainly not of one like the third"(78). Of course we cannot say how a clarinet
sounds. Our failure is surprising if we imagine that knowing this sound is like
knowing the height o f a mountain.Incommensurability of one kind arises ifwe fail
to recognize the limits of our mediaofdescriptionandrepresentation.
TheselimitationsaretiedtotheformsofourReproduced with permission of the copyright
sensoryexperience. Languageseemstoofferthepossibilityofsynesthasia,andsuch
synesthasia seems to describe who we are as the nexus ofour sensory inputs.Describe
the aroma of coffee.--Why can't it be done? Do we lack the words? And for what are
words lacking?--But whence comes the idea that such a description must after all be
possible? Have you ever felt the lack o f such a description? Have you ever tried
to describe the aroma and not succeeded?(PI?610)Why do we want our descriptions to
be reenactments or reanimations? Language might be a form o f memory, but it is not
only that. We want to reenact the memory o f the thing as if it were its own memory
that is enacted in our language. Description is confused with animation, where the
drive toward an adequate description o f my experience can only be satisfied by the
animation o f this experience within language.The distance between Wittgenstein's
intentions (temptations, requirements, sublimations) and the intentions of his
sketches is a form of self-reflection, the discovery of an interiority in or
between language and the world. This is to say that one form of self-reflection is
the expression of self-reflection as a metaphor of language:Suppose we expressed
the fact that a man had an intention by saying "He as it were said to himself, 'I
will. . . . '" --That is the picture. And now I want to know: how does one employ
the expression "as it were to say something to oneself'? For it does not mean: to
say something to oneself. (PI?658)The subjunctive "as it were" provides the
possibility for intention to be mapped into 'saying something to oneself, and thus
pictures an intention or willing as a self-reflexiveReproduced with permission of
loopbetweenanagentsaying,an'I',andadescriptionofintention('Iwill...'). This circle
wants to collapse the act of willing into the description of content that is what
is willed. TheTractarianpictureofthewillseparatesthisactionintothenonsenseofthe
metaphysicalT andthecontentoftheworld. IntheTractatusthewillentailsonekindof limit
to the world:6.423 O f the will as the subject o f the ethical we cannot speak.And
the will as a phenomenon is only ofinterest to psychology.6.43 If good or bad
willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the
facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.In brief, the world must
thereby become quite another. It must so to speak wax or wane as a whole.The will
enacts values andjudgments (determining the world as happy or unhappy) and thus is
not a part of the world, which is "the totality of facts"(l. 1). The will is
therefore not the will, not a thing or state or organ at all, but the form or
meaning of the world. If weignoremostofthedifficultyandcomplexityof
thispictureofthewill,wecanatleast see that such a picture is also a response to
this picture of self-reflexive commentary--a disengagement between the agent and
the description. The first wants to configure the 'I' as language and the other
wants to configure the 'I' beyond language. For Wittgenstein, in Investigations,
both are confusions.Wittgenstein describes three different kinds (or agents) of
intention. The first is described by and in the sketching of different versions or
views of language (of meaning, understanding, logic, mathematics, consciousness and
so on).. This sketching is theReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
precipitate, which he then intends to organize as a part o f a further sketching
(making clear):It was my intention at first to bring all this together in a book
whose form I pictured differently at different times. But the essential thing was
that the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and
without breaks.Whether a failure o f will or understanding his initial intentions
are unsuccessful because the sketches resist his intentions. In this resistance
they express a kind of will or intention oftheirown.
TheyareanimatedbecausethesubjectiveforceofWittgenstein'sintentions cannot form
these remarks as objects. This is because these fragments are not objects, in spite
of being precipitates of his thinking. Forming all of his remarks in a continuous
whole would mean to configure them under the aspect of a philosophical thesis, and
thus asaworldwhoselimitonlycontainsan'I'understoodasanexpressionofthisthesis. For
Wittgenstein, however, no such totality is possible because we can neither get
outside of ourselves, as an T to be configured under an aspect, or outside ofthe
world, sub speciesaetemitatis.There seems to be a separation or a distance between
my willing and my doing, and this distance must be traversed, and that traversal
would require willing myself to move--and thus I am forced to will willing. If T am
not myself'my will' how do I will my willing? Or how is my will mine? Wittgenstein
argues that these questions are senseless: "I can't will willing; that is, it makes
no sense to speak of willing willing" (PI?163); to willing willing is to fall into
an infinite regress.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
To say "When I raise my arm 'voluntarily' I do not use any instrument to bring the
movement about. My wish is not such an instrument either"(PI?614) is to say against
Platothatthebodyisnotaninstrumentofthesoul. Willingasavoluntaryactionisthe
animating principle ofbeing human, what Aquinas calls the rational soul. If the
will is not an instrument then it is an action; but an action is not the will but
the manifestation ofthe willaswalking,talkingetc.(PI?615).
Wecansay,however,thatthewillisan interpretation o f an action that highlights the
agency involved in the action. The statement 'I will myself to walk' is an
interpretation o f the fact that I walked after breaking my leg. The concept o f
the will, however, has a causal function (or at least force): 'I walked because I
willed myselfto walk.' Such a causal concept is more like an animating principle
accompanying any action not determined by instinct or by our autonomous nervous
system (even being under someone else's will must be accompanied by my willing
intheirname). Theconceptofthewill,whateveritsontologicalstatus,collapsesacausal
function into an interpretive function as an aspect (or even an entity) o f the
mind or o f personhood (to not have a will of one's own is to be an automaton or
can be given as an excuse for acting outside of human obligations):Why do I want to
tell him about an intention too, as well as telling him what I did? --Not because
the intention was also something which was going on at that time. But because I
want to tell him something about myself, which goes beyond what happened at that
time.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
I reveal to him something o f myself when I tell him what I was going to do.-- Not,
however, on grounds o f self-observation, but by way o f a response (it might also
be called an intuition). (PI?659)What Wittgenstein reveals in his intention to
shape his book into a natural order is something about himself, about his
attachment to the philosophical uses o f 'essential' and 'natural order'. The
variety of forms he imagined for his book were all dictated by an essence, by the
requirement that the text not form only local continuities punctuated by
suddenjumps. Wittgenstein's description ofthe Investigations sets offthis demand
for a natural order as his own demand. This is a confession. The demands o f this
intention andthis natural order suggest that the Investigations is both a failure
and unnatural. The ideals expressed by this intention is a putative requirement or
criteria assumed to describe the truth of any investigation.Wittgenstein describes
his "failure", and in this offers a justification for Investigations' current form.
He claims to have attempted to construct a 'natural order' by 'welding together'
[.zusammenzuschweifien] his remarks into "such a whole"[solchen Ganz]. Such welding
produced a 'crippled' text: "my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force
them on in any single direction against their natural inclination [natiirliche
Neigung]." The attempt to produce "a natural order without breaks" generates
instead a crippled, in this sense, degenerate artificial being? or society?
ofthoughts. The natural order o f the putative whole is opposed to the "natural
inclination" o f the fragments, which gain a kind of organic animateness.Reproduced
permission.509
A 'natural inclination' figures these fragments with a nature. This nature is not a
picture of essential being (or identity) or even proximate cause (or logical
necessity). These fragments have 'natural inclinations' within an interpretation
comparing their fragmentation with the ideal of natural order. Such an
interpretation works out the grammar o f 'nature' for a whole, limited totality or
universal, and for particulars, thoughts, examples. The details of language and
thought conflict with the demands of logicalorder:
"Themorenarrowlyweexamineactuallanguage,thesharperbecomesthe conflict between it
and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a
result o f investigation: it was a requirement)" (PI? 107). The crystallinepurity o
f logic, a super-order, is the sublimation o f logic into 'the bottom o f all
sciences.-- Forlogicalinvestigationexploresthenature(Wesen)ofallthings.
Itseekstoseetothe bottom of things and is not meant to concern itselfwhether what
happens is this or that" (PI?89). Logic is simultaneously the universal form
(sublimed) and the essence (the bottom) o f all things. Logic does not pursue "Das
Wesen aller Dinge" [the essence (nature) o f all things] in "Tatsachen des
Naturgeschehens" [the facts of natural occurrences] nor in the "causal connexions"
o f science. Wittgenstein understands logic to be, as Frege argued, independent o f
psychology (and thus o f the empirical facts that Mill and the early Husserl
grounded in logical and mathematical relations). Wittgenstein, however, develops
this independence away from ideal language Frege posited to correct the errors o f
ordinary language and from the quasi-facts o f new logical discoveries:Reproduced
permission.510
it is, rather, ofthe essence (Wesen) ofour investigation that we do not seek to
learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain
view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand. (PI?89)"Der Natur
der Untersuchung" and "unsere Untersuchung wesentliche" lies neither in a 'natural
order" nor in an essence that would serve as an answer to 'what is a proposition?',
'what is a word?', 'what is language?', etc. Wittgenstein's Investigations "are
trying to understand the essence o f language--its function, its structure" (PI?
92). This essence is "something that already lies open to view and that becomes
surveyable by a rearrangement". It is not something that "lies beneath the surface"
(PI?92), nor inphenomena,norinthepenetrationofphenomena(PI?90).
Itisdirected,"asonemight say, towards the1possibilities' ofphenomena" (PI?90). What
are these possibilities, or rather how are we to understand this invocation o f
Kant and his transcendental deduction in relation to the analysis o f grammar and
the construction o f language games that constitutes Wittgenstein's method? These
possibilities function and exist as the form our language and perception and
thinking. These possibilities are the enveloping possibilities
determinedbytheworldandourinvolvementinit. Thisisnotatranscendentaldeduction to
determine the synthetic a priori given ofour own mind; even ifwe might posit a mind
by determining a set o f possibilities--these possibilities constitute limits
within which we make sense, they are not constitutive forms o f our mind as in
Kant; one cannot determine
whetherthesepossibilitiesareexternalorinternalbecausetheselimitsareneither. They
are, instead, objective in Frege's sense in which the equator o f the earth is
objective although not actual.3Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
The resistance these fragments mount against the welding into a natural order is in
"thevery natureoftheinvestigation[NaturderUntersuchungIs'theverynatureof the
investigation' the same as the 'natural inclination' o f these remarks? Do we say
that our writing expresses our thinking? Or is writing our thinking? The whole in
which these fragments work is not in relation to the imagined ideal o f a natural
order without breaks, but within the investigation: 'I have written down all these
thoughts as remarks . . . . I sometime make a sudden change, jumping. . . '.Does
the animation o f these fragments describe how the inanimate is animated for human
beings through our awareness ofthe incompletion ofour lives? Ifthis animation does
not describe a mind, how does the transformation o f language and sentences into
things that function, act, incline, etc. express the workings and the form(s) of
our life and ofournaturalhistory?
AlthoughIwillanswerthisquestionmorefullyinthenextsection, a preliminary answer
would be that our animation is at least partially a grammatical effect (an
organization o f a grammatical 'I' within a temporal order). The nature of the
investigation and the natural inclination ofthese fragments ofthought compel 'us',
together in this thinking, to enter into another picture of nature:For this compels
us to travel over a wide field ofthought criss-cross in every direction.--The
philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches o f
landscape which were made in the course o f these long and involved joumeyings.(bc)
The natural inclination of a thought, the form of its links, the grammar of its
expression, its grammatical inclination, the unfolding of its logic is limited by
the grammar of a particularReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
setofconcepts. Lookedatgrammatically,therefore,noparticularconceptcanbeself-
standing. Putting any interpretive weight on a picture or a concept will create a
gap between the scope of this picture or concept and the grammatical limits of the
language articulatedasandinourlanguagegames. Thisisthespacewhichwefillwithanalogies
and in which philosophy works (or does not).The nature o f the investigation
"compels us to travel over a wide field o f thought criss-cross in every
direction." How can the nature o f the investigation compel? And this compulsion
from one Natur sends us into another, a wide field, a landscape. The continuity
ofthe book is a function ofthis common landscape and thisjourneying, such that the
'I' thatjourneys functions as the limit ofthese sketches. Thisjourney is notlinear:
the text was edited, reduced, and continually rearranged. This arrangement serves
as the main constituent of thinking the ordinary into clarity, overcoming the
disguises of our grammar and our forgetfulness of the obvious. Why should we be so
forgetful? "The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by
arranging what we have alwaysknown"(PI?109).
IfIamremindedofsomethingIamnotrelearningit. IfIam reminded about how I am riding my
bike, I might find myself slipping off the pedals. Or Imight feel amazed that I am
riding at all, that I learned to go so fast on two wheels, and in this amazement I
might look around me and feel a greater amazement in the fact ofthe road and the
sky and at life. Each moment of self-reflection can itselfgo in either direction:
toward paralysis or awe and joy.We cannot see the landscape at all as a landscape
without these sketches. Such sketches illustrate our involvement with language,
that is, they illustrate us. The landscapeReproduced with permission of the
of language is neither inside nor outside what we are. These sketches are one way
of constituting ourselves as something at all. This is a way o f saying that self-
reflection is a peculiar kind o f limit.Wittgenstein pictures us as flies:What is
your aim in philosophy?- To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. (PI?309)A
fly in its bottle is an image of nature contained. But do we think that, as an
image for philosophy, we have made this bottle and translated ourselves into some
beyond so that we do not see our making. Maybe such making is literature and such
forgetfulness is what Derrida means by philosophy's denial of writing, in which
case we have translated ourselves into this fly. A clear picture ofthe trap only
allows our translated and reduced form, the 'I' of our grammar, to escape. The trap
itself, pointing as it does to some mysterious purpose, only shows our transcendent
presence. But this is not a metaphysical
transcendence,andwearenotleftwithTractariansilence. Thistranscendentpointis
something like metaphoric or aesthetic transcendence. It is what is captured in the
phrase "the nature ofthe investigation." This nature is our ordinary involvement in
our world. "The aspect o f things that are most important for us are hidden because
o f their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something --because
it is always before one's eyes)" (129). How is this importance determined? or known
at all or as 'importance'?The fly-bottle forms a limit, a picture of our world as
if within a clear sphere, but this limit does not act to distort what we see (or
let's say minimally) but rather to restrictReproduced with permission of the
the scope of our world. We cannot see the glass because we have no way of
contrasting it with what we see:We predicate of the thing what lies in the method
of representing it. Impressed by the possibility o f a comparison, we think we are
perceiving a state o f affairs o f the highest generality. (PI?104)One thinks that
one is tracing the outline ofthe thing's nature over and over again,and one is
merely tracing round the frame though which we look at it. (PI? 114) This frame
expresses itselfas a necessity, a must, that confuses the requirements or the
criteria organizing a picture or a language game with the nature of what we see. We
forget the distance between our descriptions and what is because we fail to
recognize our involvement within these descriptions. This is also a lesson
ofFinnegans Wake: "Wipe your glosses with what you know" (304.F3). Neither the
glosses (interpretive frames and explanatory emendations) nor what is seen
constitutes knowledge (although they may constitute knowing). This knowledge is
something like 'enveloping facts' and thus suggests that not only does it form the
context o f our seeing (that is our knowing functions through and within what we
already know) but what we know functions as the corrective means by which we enter
particular language games or locally definedepistemes.)An aspect (how we see
something, a cube, a face, our language, ourselves) and animage (the thing
presented) can be seen as aspects or images, as embedded interpretations of each
other. Wittgenstein calls them akin, and then in a subtle form of self-reflection
describes seeing this kinship as both the result of imagination, and thus o f
creation or interpretation, and ofperception, and thus ofpresentation, that which
is given: "Doesn't it take imagination to hear something as a variation on a
particular theme? And yet one is perceiving something in so hearing it" (PI p.
213). There is a limit, however, to what I am calling here 'embedded
interpretation.' Both "[s]eeing an aspect" and imagining are subject to the will.
There is such an order as "Imagine this", and also: "now see the figure
likethis";butnot:"Nowseethisleafgreen." Thefactthatweseethegreenofaleafcan
bedescribed,andinthiscaseexplained,byphysicsandourbiology. Thismightjustify
Wittgenstein's claim from a page before that "To interpret is to think, to do
something; seeing is a state". When he says a few remarks latter that the concept
of an aspect ('I am now seeing it as . . . ") is akin to imagining and is a form of
seeing, and in both cases is subject to the will, he seems to have contradicted his
initial claim that seeing is not thinking but a state. This contradiction follows
from exploring the grammar o f 'seeing an aspect', a function of the family
resemblance between meanings of words. But the effect of this contradiction or
multiplicity is the demand that the sense of these two remarks bejustified in
relation to the other. This is not the same justification for the fragmented
character of the text as a whole, or of any particular fragment or set of remarks.
It is akin, but this justification describes as the limit o f these fragments the
journeying and the ordinariness of our involvement in the world (form of life). It
is a picture of this fragmentationfromtheinside.
Thisinsideisthe'I'asembodiedwithinourlanguage games and form of life. This 'I'
labels our involvement within language games, in our form o f life, and in our
interpretations allegories, concepts, metaphors, fly-bottles, engines,Reproduced
permission.516
and so on. The T cannot be pictured as anything at all; the conceptual structure o
f our forms o f life are slippery and vague because we cannot get outside o f them.
Language games, by comparison, are more defined because we slip in and out o f
them.Such an T , therefore, is a kind of aesthetic interpretation. Does this mean
that we enter into language games through such interpretations? We animate language
both through(1) theuseoflanguage,asiffromthelimitsofourformoflife,asafunctionof
biology, within history and culture, and through (2) the functioning o f language,
o f words withinsentencesandofsentenceswithinlargerholisims.
This'I'isfiguredthroughthis use and within this functioning as a point o f shifting
within the totalities o f sentences, metaphors, language games, fictions, worlds,
form(s) of life. We can find ourselves bothwithin and outside of language games.
Language games can function within our form of life (we can use them) or our form
of life can be read under the aspect of such games (where our form of life can seem
constituted by [a] language game[s], and in this sense these gamesfunction)."When I
read a poem or narrative with feeling, surely something goes on in me which does
not go on when I merely skim the lines for information." --What processes am I
alluding to? --The sentences have a different ring. I pay careful
attentiontomyintonation. Sometimesawordhasthewrongintonation,I emphasize it too
much or too little. I notice this and shew it in my face. I might later talk about
my reading in detail, for example about the mistakes in my tone of voice. Sometimes
a picture, as it were an illustration, comes to me. And this seems to help me read
with the correct expression. And I could mention a goodReproduced with permission
deal more o f the same kind. --I can also give a word a tone o f voice which brings
out the meaning ofthe rest, almost as ifthis word were a picture ofthe whole thing.
(PI p. 214)If a picture can model my speaking of a poem, then the picture
illustrates the poem in the same way in which my reading it does. If a poem 'moves
me', such movement is not a
processthat"goesoninme",butratheramarkofhowIinhabitthislanguage. This inhabitation,
however, is an interpretation, that is an illustration ofthe poem. Do the fragments
ofInvestigations give 'a word a tone ofvoice which brings out the meaning of the
rest'? The totality of language is present in every sentence. This presence is not
a proof or a justification of the fragment as it is in the Tractaius (It is the
characteristic mark o f logical propositions that one can perceive in the symbol
alone that they are true; andthis fact contains the whole philosophy of logic"
[6.113; see also 5.47]) or by the criterion Keats gives for a poem ("They will
explain themselves-- as all poems should do without any comment [2 January
1818])4(This is a way of construing the romantacism of logic). These fragments
function as both interpretations or illustrations (sketches) ofthe landscape o f
our language and ourselves and as expressions o f an aspect o f our language and
ourselves. The limit of interpretation is determined by our involvement in our
language not by any special form of words. This involvement might be dictated, more
or less, by circumstances or context, but it remains a function of my involvement:I
have a theme played to me several times and each time in a slower tempo. In the end
I say "Now it's right", or "Now at last it's a march", "Now at last it's a dance".
--The same tone ofvoice expresses the dawning ofaspect. (PI p. 206)Reproduced with
permission.518
This tone ofvoice marking a recognition ofa criterion or a model in a particular
performance (an example) expresses the involvement within the forms o f experience
that Wittgenstein expresses when he asserts that he will only accept as his own
property, his ownvoice,thoseideasthatbearhisstamp,histone:
"Ifmyremarksdonotbearastamp which marks them as mine, --I do not wish to lay any
further claim to them as my property"(x).
Tosayherecognizeshimselfinhiswork(let'ssayasanexpressionofhis intentions) like he
recognizes a march in music is not meant to describe an argument between a picture
and an example. Does he say 'I could have written these words'? Or when he reads
his words does he inhabit them as if expressing his beliefthat X? Do we recognize
Wittgenstein's hand in his words as we might recognize his face in a picture?What
constitutes language as property, especially for a philosopher famous for
arguingfortheessentialpublicnatureoflanguage? Thisclaimofownership,or renouncing o
f ownership, is partly a response to his own vanity, as he claims, and to the
distorted theft o f his voice:Up to a short time ago I had really given up the idea
o f publishing my work in my lifetime. It used, indeed, to be revived from time to
time: mainly because I was obliged to learn that my results (which I had
communicated in lectures, typescripts and discussions), variously misunderstood,
more or less mangle or watered down, were in circulation. This stung my vanity and
I had difficulty in quieting it.(ix-x)I do not want to investigate the publishing
history surrounding his work, nor the psycho- dynamics o f intellectual pride and
power in Wittgenstein's conception o f teaching and thinking. One can at least
suggest that his vanity is also a function o f his concern thatReproduced with
permission.519
thoughts be properly expressed, or even that what constitutes truth is as much (or
more) a function of expression than of the content of any particular claim. In
reading Wittgenstein one should always ask what is the difference between an
example or a metaphor and an argumentoraclaim.
Howandwhereonemakesthesedistinctionsoftenconstitutes thinking for Wittgenstein.
This is one way of understanding "What I am looking for is the grammatical
difference" (PI p. 185). In Wittgenstein's philosophy o f distinction and
expression (or form) misrepresentation is a greater failure than the mangled theft
of his ideasmightatfirstseem. ItisalsotruethathedidnotpublishtheInvestigationsinhis
lifetime. Thisultimateresistancetopublicationbearssomescrutiny. Initselfitisa
statement about what and how philosophy functions within the impersonal relations
created in the modem university and in publishing. But the importance o f this
resistance is also linked to his use of remarks and fragments. He says,I should not
like my writing to spare other people the trouble o f thinking. But if possible, to
stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.[[I should have liked to produce a good
book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it.]]
(x)As in Emerson, writing toward stimulating others into thinking means how to read
him is always at issue. Thus, we can understand his hesitancy to publish as a
concern for his work not to be read as his thought, but as his thinking: a
philosophical novel as opposed to a philosophical tract.Wittgenstein writes so as
to draw the right kind of picture of the limits marking language and mind, limits
understood as the ordinary condition o f being human, as shiftingReproduced with
permission.
between aspects o f a defined set o f ontological commitments. Language in this
sense is not directed at things, or the world, or others as such but functions
through and as a complexmatrixofcommitmentsthatresolveintohowoneis.
Theworld,things,artifacts, others are figured through shifting expressions o f
being (understood as an evolving set o f practices), a continual projection o f
what counts as real through commitments arising out of de facto commitments to what
one is oneself not through self-definition.Although we inhabit language, we do not
'inhabit our head'. The singularity of my perspective cannot be claimed as mine, as
if I said "'At any rate only I have got THIS"'(PI?398).
Wittgensteinimmediatelyasks"Whatarethesewordsfor? Theyserve no purpose," at least,
I want to add, as an act o f communication. But how do I inhabit my language if not
through my claim that the world is mine? This claim 'I have got THIS' is nonsense
if understood to be about my perception, but it expresses an ownership o f a
perspective within language that is refracted through my manifestation within
language (whatWittgensteincalls'hisstamp'). Onlywhatcanbeownedbyotherpeoplecanbe
ownedatall. Wittgensteinasks"Inwhatsensehaveyougotwhatyouaretalkingaboutand saying
that only you have got it? Do you possess it? You do not even see it" (PI?398). Why
do we not see this 'THIS"? This claim is a modified version of Wittgenstein's
earlier rejection of a picture of my world as if a visual field converging on an
eye. I cannot see or say the limit o f my world or else it would not be a limit.
One mightrathersay(althoughmisleadingly)thatthelimitofmyworldhasmeandnotIit: "if as
a matter of logic you exclude other people's having something, it loses its sense
to sayReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
that you have i t . . . . Inasmuch as it cannot be any one else's it is not mine
either" (PI?398). Thisisagrammaticalremarkabout'beingmine'.Wittgenstein ends this
remark with a description o f another picture o f a landscape: Think o f a picture
in a landscape, an imaginary landscape with a house in it.-- Someone asks "Whose
house is that?"--The answer, by the way, might be "It belongs to the farmer who is
sitting on the bench in front o f it". But then he cannot for example enter his
house. (PI?398)One should not confuse a representation ofa house for the actual
house. This picture of representation is meant to illustrate the metaphor of a
'visual room' as the picture underlyingtheclaimthatmyphenomenalexperienceismine.
Justasthefarmerinthe picture cannot enter his house, the 'I' who imagines his world
as if it were this visual room "can as little own it as I can walk about it, or
look at it, or point to it." If I move so does the 'visual room'; I can never move
from the limit o f my world into it, and thus it is not anything that can be owned
or identified (even in saying this I have not pointed to anything).In the Preface,
the ownership of words and their configurations as ideas, methods, stories,
perspectives are disputed as the point at which representation and thinking (as
versionsofconsciousness)canbecontested. Thedesiretopublishoutofwoundedvanity (or to
counter the mistakes o f others as opposed to his own) is contrasted with his
desire to publish generated by re-reading the Tractatus in order to "explain its
ideas to someone. It suddenly seemed to me that I should publish those old thoughts
and the new onestogether: that the latter could be seen in the right light only be
contrast with and againstReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
the background of my old way o f thinking." As part of a truncated genealogy (a
Tractarian beginning and an Investigations end) a context would be established that
would establish a point in comparison with which the entire Philosophical
Investigations could be seen as a way of doing philosophy different, but still
related, to the drive to establish the limits of logical truth in the Tractatus.
Would this context, however,establish his thoughts as his own (for others or
himself? Is this my thought in the way these words are mine or not mine?)?:For more
than one reason what I publish here will have points o f contact with what other
people are writing today. --If my remarks do not bear a stamp which marks them as
mine, - I do not wish to lay any further claim to them as my property." (x)One
imagines that this stamp would throw out of court those "more or less mangled or
watereddown"versionsofhisthinkingthatotherscirculated. Wittgenstein,however, makes
a curious claim here: what is 'my property' 'bear[s] a stamp which marks them as
mine.' What is this 'stamp'? The physiognomy o f words that allows us to understand
them as particular words within particular sentences with specific meanings somehow
also expresses (at the sametime?) the physiognomy ofWittgenstein's identity- or
should I say soul and thus of his body? ("The human body is the best picture of the
human soul" [PIp. 178]). In the Tractatus the grammar of 'my world" required a non-
psychological 'I' describing the limit of the world. Has this 'I' been translated
from its vanishing metaphysical limit to a more localized limit surrounding or
determining the application of particular language games (or sentences) with an
expression oftheir origin into aReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
particularform? Suchanorigin,sinceitisnotthecauseofasentence,describes,instead, an
aesthetic 'I' (a particular form that expresses, and thus is a kind of
interpretation).In the Tractatus Wittgenstein both claimed to have solved the
problems of philosophy and yet to make "no claim to novelty in points of detail"
(27). The power of the Tractatus is in showing how what we know means, that is, in
arranging and
interpretingintoclarity(statingthetruthsoflogicintherightform)whatistrue. This
clarity o f expression, form and arrangement allows him to claim that "[h]ow far my
efforts agree with those o f other philosophers I will not decide."Wittgenstein
claims that to see his new thoughts "in the right light only by contrast with and
against the background of my old of thinking". The Tractatus, like the remarks or
sketches that constitute Investigations, will serve as an "object of comparison." A
sketchistothelandscapeasaremarkistoourpractice. Onecanmakeanynumberof different
kinds o f sketches. The arrangement o f these remarks serves to bring to light
another picture within the landscape of our ordinary and philosophical practices.
The object of this arrangment is "to bring light into one brain (Gehim) or
another."Philosophical Investigations can be seen in the right light through a
comparison to the Tractatus, a comparison ofnot only a method ofthinking, but the
scope and application ofthis thinking as a way of marking and constituting
particular kinds of limits. In the preface to the Tractatus Wittgenstein wrote the
following:The book deals with the problems o f philosophy and shows, as I believe,
that the method o f formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding o f
the logicofourlanguage. It'swholemeaningcouldbesummedupsomewhatasReproduced with
permission.524
follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak
thereof one must be silent.The book will, therefore draw a limit to thinking, or
rather --not to thinking, but to the expression ofthoughts; for, in order to draw a
limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides o f this limit (we
should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought).The limit can,
therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side o f the limit
will be simply nonsense. (27)Even a realm o f nonsense cannot be seen from within
language. The articulation o f what can be said clearly (the formulation of a
language into the form oftautology) and what this clearly means (tautology) takes
up the majority o f the book. Clarity in language describes what can be known as
true. The more controversial last part ofthe Tractatus describes the limit between
what we can know and is true and nonsense. (I think this last 'part' begins at
6.342, "And now we can see the relative position of logic and mechanics"; I say
this because the discussion of mechanics describes the limit between cause and the
realm ofwhat I think we can call interpretation: will, ethics, and aesthetics). The
will becomesin his latter work the target of philosophy; aesthetics as a form of
philosophy and in the invocation of art (painting, music, and poetry) comes to
describe the limits of sense fromwithin language; ethics becomes transmuted into
modes ofbeing within forms oflife. If the metaphysical 'I' is replaced by the
shifting concept of form(s) of life, both constituting and constituted by our
language, our practices, our biology, our commitments, by bothReproduced with
permission.525
anyone's particularity and the totality organized around this particularity, then
ethics are enacted within and as any particular form of life.To see Wittgenstein's
sketch as a picture of some landscape means not only to see each remark as either
an observation or a work of art, but to enter into the limit described by the
sketch, to see an arranged, edited and delimited version of a trip set out in an
album. Theironyofdescribingthisphilosophyasanalbumofsketches,setsouta subterranean
frame that includes Philosophical Investigations as both the problem to be solved
and a consequence of this problem, an attempted solution. In remark 38 he writes
"For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday." What counts as a
holiday and what counts as ordinary life, what counts as seeing (and
misinterpretation) and seeingintherightlightisalwaysinquestion.
Thesedistinctionsdescribethedifference between a sketch and the light (the
arrangement, the context o f comparison) by which we see it and the light by which
we understand, or rather by which we understand ourselves.This last is the light in
our brain.Wittgenstein's use ofthe image oflight is invariably related to his
philosophicalgoal o f presenting a perspicuous view o f our language use, to make
visible what is already obvious. This use o f light is entwined with a quasi-
religious use that describes thinking as if the limits of the world illuminate us:
Is what I am doing really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it
from above. And if that happens--why should I concern myself that the fruits o f my
labours should be stolen? If what I am writing really has some value, how could
anyone steal the value from me? And if the light from above is lacking, I can't in
any case be more than clever. (CV57-8)Compare this to both Keats and Adams. I
claimed that, for Keats, "The proverb does not illustrate our life, we illustrate
it. Thus soul-making is seeing ourselves as an illustration and the proverb as a
description to be illustrated. The transformation o f Proverb into proverb and our
life into an illustration becomes an actualization--not as a change of being but as
a transformation o f aspect: the proverb is not strictly speaking a description
ofourlife,butitisawayofseeingourselves: adescriptionofmeaningasopposedto
experience, that is why we illustrate it." The meaning o f our life emerges through
how weuse our life to illustrate language (let's say poetry). Wittgenstein's
description o f himself, his thinking, illuminated between the limit o f the world
(which he cannot see) and his sketches of the world as he finds it spotlights his
activity as an illustration of his sketches
onlyifitisilluminatedbythislimit,thislightfromabove. Whatisthislight?I said that
Adams called "for a more radical transformation, an objectification of oneself...
It is as ifthe demands ofthe world require that we become proverbs ourselves, not
illustrations, become types not tokens." Although the mock identification with the
formulaic is alien to Wittgenstein (as is the implicit praise or acceptance of
science), the sense of containment within a system within which our practices gain
meaning is akin to Wittgenstein's picture o f language. One cannot push this too
far, and I only mean it tobring out that Wittgenstein's sense of containment within
language is different from that of Keats'. For Keats we apply language (at least
proverbs and by extension poetry) by illustrating it with our lives. Are
Wittgenstein's philosophical sketches like Keats'Reproduced with permission of the
proverbial illustrations? If these pictures are interpretations, then are they
justifications of or for thinking? Do we collect the pictures for our album to
prove we went to Greece? An album exhibits a set of possible perspectives. Such an
album describes the same limit relation between a non-psychological T and the world
as described in the Tractatus, except that this 'I' is continually reconstituted as
or at the limit of the shifting landscape.In the Tractatus the position ofthe non-
psychological 'I' as the limit ofthe world was first introduced in the preface as a
description of how one should or could read the Tractatus: "This book will perhaps
only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which
are expressed in it--or similar thoughts. It is therefore not atext-book."
Understanding is dependent on an identity of thought (or an approximate
identity,thespaceofindeterminacy). Ourunderstandingmeansstandingatthe metaphysical
point (or T ) from which it was written. We, if we are to understand, must become
an T . 5 The common perspective in Investigations is our grounding in our ordinary
lives as human beings: K[t]he real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man
at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him.--And this means: we fail to
be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and powerful" (PI?129).The album of
sketches that constitutes Investigations is not static, nor is our
understandingafunctionofenteringintoametaphysicalposition. Animplicationofthe non-
psychological T understood as a metaphysical limit was to require that
understanding function as a common mental state, a set o f brain functions that
mean every time 'understanding' such that one could say 'this is the true
understanding state'. ThisReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
requirement contradicts the initial insight that one can speak of a non-
psychological 'I'. Wittgenstein shows that picturing understanding as a state is
mistaken.A light can emerge, as it were, from within our language as well.
Wittgenstein gives a sketch ofhis sketching highlighted as ifby philosophical
search lights emerging from conceptual problems: "We must do away with all
explanation, and description alone musttakeitsplace.
Andthisdescriptiongetsitslight,thatistosayitspurpose--fromthe
philosophicalproblems"(PI?109). Ifaphilosophicalproblemisdissolved,isthe
philosophicallightextinguished,orjustdrownedinagreaterlight? Theinvisibilityofthe
ordinary would become visible and force philosophical problems into relative
invisibility.This visibility must be both the light animating the truth of
Wittgenstein's thinking from above and a light cast by his sketches back onto the
philosophical problems: "Our investigationisthereforeagrammaticalone.
Suchaninvestigationshedslightonour problem by clearing misunderstanding away" (PI?
90).One cannot construct a phenomenological language in which the world is fully
present. His philosophical attempt to construct such a language, or earlier to
describe what is logically true, partly arose from a picture o f reality as divided
between language and our experience. An adequate language would establish a
completely transparent relationbetweenthese.
Wittgenstein'srejectionofthisdesireconstitutesarecognitionthat it is not a failure
of language that prevents this adequate description of world or experience.
Whenhesaysourordinarylanguageisperfectlyadequateheissuggesting that the drive
toward what Derrida calls presence is not a problem of logic or language, but a
problem of education. The perspicuous description of our use of language is part of
an education that remakes our involvement within language as perfectly adequate.
This too is impossible, but it is a response to the source o f our disquietude. It
is never the presence ofthe world that is the problem, but our presence to the
world or to our language or to ourselves:So how do we explain to someone what
'understanding music' means? By specifying the images, kinesthetic sensations,
etc., experienced by someone who understands? More likely, by drawing attention to
his expressive movements.-- Andwereallyoughttoaskwhatfunctionexplanationhashere.
Andwhatitmeans to speak of: understanding what it means to understand music. For
some would say:tounderstandthatmeans:tounderstandmusicitself. Andinthatcasewe
should have to ask 'Well, can someone be taught to understand music?' for that is
the only sort of teaching that could be called explaining music. (CV70)
"[Specifying the images, kinesthetic sensations, etc." ofmusic would mean to
construct a phenomenologicallanguage.
Anadequatelanguagewouldhavetoincludenotonlythe music but an ideal and functioning
human being 'understanding music'. If we all could understand music differently
then how can we speak o f an ideal? Rather, understanding is not a state ofmind but
is a description ofsomeone's involvement in a piece ofmusic. Oneway o f indicating
this involvement might be with "expressive movements", another might be by day-
dreaming (a certain glazed look) or imagining the next note or bar or progression.
An education into this understanding thus cannot be specified outside of our own
recognition o f our own involvement in music. This may include learning a
particular set of language games or practices, or it may involve a certain kind of
silence. OurReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
educationwillonlybeadequateifwerecognizeitassuch. Sucharecognition,however, entails
an activation o f our form o f life as biological and social human beings:
"Appreciating music is a manifestation ofthe life ofmankind" (CV70).
Wittgensteindoesnotsaythatheincludespicturesofhimself. Rather Investigations
consists ofnumerous mini-Tractati, each marking a world and an 'I' as its limit.
Thislimit,however,existsasmuchwithinthepicturingasoutsideofit. The position ofthe T
, both Wittgenstein's and our own, is embedded in the landscape ofthe problems and
of our forms of life. This 'I' is never the same. The metaphysical limit described
in the Tractatus allows an absolute (or close to absolute) identity between
Wittgensteinandanyonewhowouldunderstandhim. ThesketchesoftheInvestigations are not
only edited and assembled in an album, but sketching is different from viewing
sketches, sketching the landscape around Mycenae is different from looking at a
picture of that landscape or from seeing it oneself. Much o f the Investigations
works at making clear our ability to stand in for each other, to open up a
possibility for understanding, for understanding an 'I' as part of an 'our'--
through the uniqueness of any particular 'I': a possibility determined by its
impossibility.1In philosophy we often confuse a requirement for thinking x with an
effect of thinking x; a requirement of thinking x might be the consequence of
thinking y.2 The poetry is from Charles Tomlinson, "The Order of Saying" in The
Flood, p. 12.3 See The Foundations o f Arithmetic.4Letters, n, 21.5 This is exactly
the opposite of what I am attempting by enacting an 'I' as an 'our', and thus as an
T by education and as a member of a given human 'our.' One can write oneself into
an artificial intelligence.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
13.1 Physiognomyofthesoul13 Grammatical TimeIn my analysis ofFinnegans Wake I
attempt to describe its articulation of a temporal grammar enacted through our
shifting semantic commitments within a kind of sexual aesthetic at the limits of
sense. In this chapter I will examine a set of responses to the threat of nonsense
attending our pictures of time as these are articulated in
PhilosophicalInvestigations. Onecouldcharacterizethissetofresponsesasmusical, which
in this sense suggests both the mathematical and the poetic articulation o f and
playing with time (which is to say, music organizes time in the way building with
blocks organizes space). One way we could couch our responses to this threat would
be by explicating Wittgenstein's statement that "Understanding a sentence is more
akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think" in the face of the
Wakean "How to UnderstandtheDeaf,ShouldLadiesleamMusicorMathematics?"(307.21-2).
(Whydo we respond to our doubt and confusion by descriptions of the limits of mind
or by constructions o f mind(s)? By the construction o f a woman, for example, in
Offenbach's "Tales ofHoffmann" or the construction oftemporal becoming as a
feminine principle in Finnegans Wake?)Much o f poetry can be understood as
different versions o f what H. Vendler, in
WordsChosenOutofDesire,identifiesinWallaceStevens'poetryas the"transformation of a
spatial object into a temporal event.. .The temporal unfolding of the momentNotes
for this chapter begin on page 569Reproduced with permission of the copyright
becomes in its turn itselfan aesthetic object" (7). Ifwe believe Bertrand Russell
that differential equations are the best description oftime (or the change we call
time), what valuecanpoetryorliteraturehaveinitsdescriptionoftime?
Orifitdoessomethingelse, like express our bafflement and despair at the losses
precipitated or made possible by the ontological force of time, what value can
poetry have if it cannot grasp the fundamental mathematicalaspectoftime?
Whatkindoffuturecanonebuildoutofpoetry? Whatisat
stakeinourconceptualizationsandourpoeticizationsoftime? Sincethesearenotthe same
thing, what is offered, solved, pictured, enacted by each, by mathematics and
poetry, and by the different forms of philosophy that attempt to link these realms?
In this chapter, aesthetics becomes more explicitly a form o f the soul mutating
into a mind through the fragmentary poetics, as a form of philosophy, that
instantiates, resists, and expresses Stravinsky's insight, as Adorno claims, that
"the linguistic and the organic [are] only possible in a state of decomposition"
(Quasi urnfantasia, 147). Our making o f the world out o f whatever given or set o
f categories one imagines, seems unable to capture our own making (I mean also our
own biological making) even if others like ourselves inhabit our made worlds. Self-
reflection, however, builds all sorts of meanings derived and dependent on not only
who we are but what we are. Much of Heidegger's work involves attempting to think
prior to the separation o f these two questions. Such thinking does not mean
reducing one to the other, but requires the protection of the claim both questions
have on us. Wittgenstein does this in a number of ways, but most importantly he
does this through the interpretive, aesthetic pressure his fragments and his
metaphors induce in the reader. He sets up aesthetic barriers to protectReproduced
permission.533
his separation o f grammar (our language use) from phenomena, moibus-strip twisting
us back into our practices and our being.1 In order to pressure grammatical
analysis into the aesthetics o f our temporality, I will constructs the limits and
interaction between sense and nonsense along one o f the axes Wittgenstein uses to
map our form o f life, whose ends are marked by the sentences "Understanding a
sentence is more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think" and
"The human body is the best picture o f the human soul". Why does Wittgenstein
invoke the musical and visual, appeal to metaphors o f the metaphoric at these
limits, as expressions reflecting back toward language? Our misuse ofwords pushes
us not only into confusion, but into art. How are these aesthetic appeals like his
assertion in the Blue Book that "[a]s part of the system of language, one may say,
the sentence has life" (5)? What justifies Wittgenstein's attempt to limit our
inquiry into the logic determining a form of life by these two curious appeals to
art, justifying these limits aesthetically?The role o f temporality is very complex
and often disguised and displaced into
grammaticaldescriptionsinPhilosophicalInvestigations. Asageneralquestiontoshape at
least the targets of my analysis, I will begin by asking 'How is the problem of
time displaced into a problem of language in Investigations?' In the "Big
Transcript" Wittgenstein articulates his abandonment ofa phenomenological language
ofthe present moment for a grammar o f time within language:Language cannot express
what belongs to the essence o f the world. Therefore it cannot say that everything
flows. Language can only say what we could also imagine differently.Reproduced with
permission.534
Thateverythingflowsmustlieinhowlanguagetouchesreality. Orbetter:that everything
flows must lie in the nature of language("Philosophy", ?91).While language and time
are no longer opposed as either incommensurable (as they are in the Tractatus if
language is reduced to tautology) or as confused and incomplete (in his later
attempts at figuring a phenomenological language), the nature o f time as flux
remains the same. In Philosophical Investigations the effect o f understanding
language from within language transforms the nature of time. In this passage
temporal flux marks the limit or the "nature" o f language. As we have seen, the
nature o f the investigation into the nature o f language, in Investigations, is
not described as a flowing, but, rather, as a description o f animation, a
wandering on paths (language games) and a shifting between paths. The nature
oflanguage has changed partly because the conception oftime is now understood from
within language. In the Brown Book, Wittgenstein argues that describing time as
"flowing" is a disanalogy. His cure fails to address why we make such a mistake,
and thus simplifies language, at least 'time language' into nothing but
communication, disguising what is at stake in both our relation to time and how
human forms of self- reflectionworkthrough(our)temporalawareness.
IntheInvestigationstimeisrewritten into four primary sites o f grammatical change
(these sites are neither exhaustive nor authoritative in this form, or any form):1)
the actions, changes and transformations within language games (a kind of
unconscious time)2) the confusion about our involvement in the present in which we
imagine that we have to "describe phenomena that are hard to get hold of, the
present experienceReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
that slips quickly by, or something of the kind" (PI?436) (I discussed on aspect of
this in the previous chapter).3) the enactment ofthe possibility ofthe future in
our use of 'hope' or 'expectation' and so on as contrasted with the picture of
possibility as itself a subjunctive mode shadowing reality (the future as a
machine)4) the enactment ofa kind oftemporality as a grammatical horizon or dynamic
limit (as one ofthe forms ofour life) through our shifting between or out of
language games (paths).Iwillnotexamineallofthese.
InfactIwillonlytosketcharoughdescriptionofan answer to the following question: How
do the aesthetics o f the Investigations describe agrammar o f time and limit the
inquiry into the way we construct our subjectivity within particular grammars?Can
we think of the displacement of time into grammar as an attempt to conceptualize or
protect a soul? If Wittgenstein cannot successfully prevent the objectification
oftime as a being or ifhe can't answer the attraction ofusing a metaphoric
identification o f time with thing-like behavior, then he has not asked the right
questions about either our difficulties conceptualizing time nor about what is at
stake in the clearly problematic ways in which we confuse mental events, like
understanding, with states and substances.
Wittgenstein'sdescriptionscannotprotectusfrombecomingthings.Thus we find ourselves
at the limit ofwhatever motivated Wittgenstein to claim that "[t]he human body is
the best picture of the human soul", as a picture of being a human thing, and the
claim that understanding is more like understanding a musical themeReproduced with
permission.536
than we think, as a metaphor for our isomorphic involvement in both time and
language.. Reaching this limit (between "the human soul" and music [time]) suggests
that the problem o f temporality in the Investigations is also a problem o f the
aesthetics o f the text.Is Wittgenstein's claim that "[t]he human body is the best
picture o f the human soul" a theological claim? Iltham Dilman successfully argues,
I think, that Wittgenstein's use o f 'soul' is "not a hypothesis that human beings
have souls and that a human being's soul is not something he possesses -in the way
he may possess a liver" (191). He cites especially Wittgenstein's remark "My
attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not o f the opinion that
he has a soul" (PI p. 178). To have an opinion is to believe something that one
could possibly doubt (T thought you had a soul, but now I see I waswrong').
Wittgenstein uses soul to suggest that we recognize human beings from within our
commonality as human beings. I suggested earlier that this means that we see each
other as examples of each other, and thus we as human beings (even in our evil)
express this species being in our particularity. We approach animals as examples of
life in a similarway.
Thesoul,forWittgenstein,therefore,isamarkandexpressionofthesame distinction between
the animate and inanimate that describes Aquinas' description o f the soul earlier
from within our practices: "Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead is
not the same" (PI ?284). Dilman, however, also argues that the grammar o f our
(human) use o f 'soul' "makes sense only in the framework of certain moral values
and that a spiritual life is one that bears a relation to these values" (191).
While he argues thatWittgenstein in his early work thought about ethics as
spiritual in this way he does not connect this spiritual sense of the soul with his
initial description of the soul as our humanReproduced with permission of the
frameofreferencewithinwhichweappeartoeachotherashuman. IDsanalysisofthe grammar o f
the soul is limited and does not take in Aquinas' description o f the soul, for
example, which attempts to make exactly this kind o f link between both uses o f
the 'soul'.Without its theological backing is the use o f soul in Wittgenstein a
metaphor, either living or dead? To say I treat you as if you have a soul is to
describe my stance toward you as within the same form of life. The claim another
human form has on me to be treated as a human body is the manifestation o f a soul,
the manifestation o f my particularityasanexpressionofourcommonhumanformoflife.
Similarly,the physiognomy of the word claims my attention (as does a musical theme)
and demands that I orient myself to it either as sensible, in which case I enter
into a language game in which it makes sense as what it is, or I reject it as
senseless, as not of a form I can recognize. Although the relation between language
games and forms of life is complicated (language games express forms o f life but
it is not clear if a different language games always implies different forms of
life; similarly both language games and forms of life include practices and actions
and so on), such an exclusion sets up the possibility that this word or musical
theme will be rejected as part of my form of life entirely, that is, rejected as
not human. (This is the danger Finnegans Wake courts). This is what I earlier
called an ontological demand, a theological crisis, described in The Waste Land,
signaling an anxiety about our inclusion in or exclusion from the world (a crisis
about our stance toward the world).Wittgenstein uses 'physiognomy' both to describe
meaning (PI?568) and to describe a temptation to say that words have "different
characters in different contexts" and yet they each also have "one character. . . a
single physiognomy. It looks at us" (PIReproduced with permission of the copyright
p. 181). The stable shape of a word appearing as a word does not, however, function
separately from the language game in which it functions: "[How do the meanings of
the individual words make up the sense o f the sentence 'I still haven't seen him
yet'?] The sentence is composed o f words and that is enough"(PI p. 181). This
shape o f words seems toabsorbmeaningaspartofitsform.
Thistakingupofmeaning,however,isa consequence ofour stance toward and use ofwords:
The familiar physiognomy of a word, the feeling that it has taken up its meaning
into itself that it is an actual likeness of its meaning--there could be human
beings to whom all this was alien. (They would not have an attachment to their
words.)-- And how are these feelings manifested among us?--By the way we choose and
value words. (PI p.218)How could these human beings use language or mean anything?
If "meaning is a physiognomy," the failure to take meaning into the physiognomy of
words would mean, if words were still to function as part of a language, that the
physiognomy would have to be attached in something else, maybe to the sentence or
to the sound or tones or to facial expressions accompanying speaking (in which case
their written language would have to include marks correlated with these
expressions).In the assumption that words have a single physiognomy, that they look
at us, Wittgenstein counters "But a face in a painting looks at us too" (PI p.
181). A painted face looks like a face because we can recognize it as a face
(people have faces): "The arrow points only in the application that a living being
makes o f it" (PI?454).Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
We want to say: "When we mean something, it's like going up to someone, it's not
having a dead picture (of any kind)." We go up to the thing we mean."When one
thinks something, it is oneselfthinking"; so one is oneselfin motion. One is
rushing ahead and so cannot also observe oneself rushing ahead. IndeednotYes:
meaning something is like going up to someone. ((PI??455, 456, 457)
Ourpicturesofourlanguageuseareboundupinmetaphors. Thesemetaphors,asis explicit in
this case, are the means by which we allegorize ourselves into our language.
Thinking or speaking describes a movement that changes one's relation to the world,
in a way like going up to a person does. If I go up to you I instigate a
relationship in which everything means something to you and me, even if I do or say
nothing else ("going up to someone" means to enter into that space within which
attention is demanded, although the
limitsofthisspacevaryfrompersontopersonandculturetoculture). Howisthinking like
"rushing ahead"? This seems like a description of the limits of self-reflection,
but only if going up to someone is not oneself (can we run up to ourselves?). In
ascribing a physiognomy to words we allegorize them as persons, where their meaning
is like their mind.13.2 Understanding, or Not, How Not to Go OnThe clearest
invocation ofthe possibility ofthe future as an essence ofour form of
lifeintheInvestigationsoccursinWittgenstein'sdiscussionofhope: "Onecanimaginean
animal angry, frightened, unhappy, happy, startled. But hopeful? And why not?" (PI
p.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
174). How are the workings of "the phenomena of hopes" (as one kind of "Meaning")
related to the grammar ofunderstanding entered into through Wittgenstein's
description of "how we go on", in a mathematical series, for example, or in reading
Finnegans Wake? The collapse and slippage between these two kinds o f meaning
determine the limits o f the problem of "meaning" in both the Investigations and
the Wake. In this, these texts come up against Melville's short story "Bartleby."
The story describes the frustration and attraction of a narrator who, as a lawyer,
has hired Bartleby as a scrivener. Bartleby, however, soon begins a slow
renunciation o f the claims and authority human beings (or society) have on him by
reducing his own will to nothing more than a refusal to do anything. Bartleby
slowly dies. How could Joyce and Wittgenstein answer or respond to the rejection of
any possiblejustification of life, understanding, communication, community, or hope
expressed by Bartleby? Bartleby's refusal to reply to all requests put on him, to
all interchange beyond his "I'd prefer not to" leaves him a cipher, part o f a code
lost to language because it (I mean "he") is lost to all human community, existing
at the limit of language, except for his, therefore curious responses (why respond
at all?). Hehas lost any future. We inhabit the possibility of a future as the
ground of our being, signaled by our hoping, but embodied in our language and thus
susceptible to denial.Bartleby's refusal o f meaning answers a child's asking "What
should (or can) I do now?" : heanswerswithhisownacceptanceofhisboredom.
Whyisitorhowcoulditevenbe possible for a child to ask such a question? (What is
signaled by the difficulty o f knowing whether to ask "why" or "how" here?). If we
have forgotten the child's question what have we replaced it with? Are our everyday
practices enough like those o f animals to sayReproduced with permission of the
that this question is no longer relevant in the way it is not for them? How (and
why) does the justification Bartleby fails to find underlie our uses o f language?
Bartleby has reduced himselfj in a kind o f devolving exhaustion, to a single
intention attached to a single desire: to refuse through a complete disengagement
from all external, relative to his single intention, demands and intentions. This
intention is circular, a continual negation o f the future and therefore an
assertion o f a presentness, which does not even include any desire (except his
resistance). Without a future or a future directed set o f desires Bartleby has
erased hope from his world. He has diminished himselfto the edge of humanity. He
remains human primarily through the exercise of his will to resist the demands or
appeals directed toward him. This is a way of again asking what is the theological
dimensions ofWittgenstein's use o f the soul in Philosophical Investigations?I f
the moment seems to describe human consciousness, the structure o f the futureas a
possibility seems to be described by a machine. Wittgenstein analyzes the
figuration ofthe future as a machine:The machine as symbolizing its action: the
action o f a machine--I might say at first--seems to be there in it from the start.
What does that mean? --If we know the machine, everything else, that is its
movement, seems to be already completely determined.(PI? 193)In this the
possibility o f a movement seems determined by the structure o f the machine. The
parts could o f course fail, but "in many cases we don't think o f that at all. We
use a machine, or the drawing of a machine, to symbolize a particular action of the
machine." The machine symbolizes its own action, and thus it embodies as the aspect
of its structureReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
a kind of self-reflection in which its future is determined as a function of what
it is. In this
itsfunctioningfollowsanidealizedpathalreadytranscendentwithinitsdesign. Amachine
seems to generate time through its determined changes in state, the unrolling of a
pattern determined by its structure (or seemingly what in the Tractatus
Wittgenstein calls, with some ambiguity as Ramsey points out, "the form o f
representation [which] is the possibility that the things are so combined with one
another as are the elements o f the picture" (2.1511). Machine time can be
described by a diagram o f the machine itself,where its future actions, its
description o f its own changes by those changes, is derived from "the movement of
its parts from it [the diagram] (Just as we can give someone a number by telling
him that it is the twenty-fifth in the series 1, 4, 9, 16....)." Such a series , a
time-line ofbefore and afters, and our translation into such a machine would
translate McTaggert's A-series into a B-series, the existential now into an
objectified history, the formula o f dynamism Adams uses to figure himself within a
Godless universe.Wittgenstein diagnoses the mistake in this picturing o f the
machine's future movements as if these movements were objects "already lying in a
drawer and which we then take out." These future movements are the way we configure
the future for the machine. If faced with an actual machine we no longer assume its
parts will not fail. Thus we can see the machine under two different aspects: the
putative movements in (1) the machine-as-symbol which functions "far more
determinably than in (2) the actual machine."
Thepredeterminedmovementsinthemodelofthemachinesymbolizingitself might seem to be
already present in the symbol itself (PI? 193). The motion o f the machine, the
movement describing time, seems condensed into the design of the machineReproduced
permission.
made manifest in the machine itself as if the machine were a drawing o f itself at
all possible moments.Wittgenstein goes on to investigate this seeming presentness o
f the future in the machine as symbol: "When does one have the thought: the
possible movements o f a machine are already there in it in some mysterious
sense?-- Well when one is doing philosophy" (PI? 194). Putting philosophical
pressure on our descriptions of machines separates the concept of the possibility
of movement from our actual usage of the "phrase 'possibility of movement' when we
are talking about a given machine". We imagine because of the defined character of
the parts and actions of a machine that the possibility of its movement is somehow
part of it, "like a shadow of the movement itself."2 This possibility, this shadow,
we imagine attached to that which is (or can) move; we imagine an entire world
constructed out of possibility and tangent to every actual movement and change.
Aheadofit?alongsideit?Wittgenstein asks how we use the phrase "possibility of
movement when we are talking about a given machine?" An answer:We say "Experience
will shew whether this gives the pin this possibility of movement", but we do not
say "Experience will shew whether this is the possibility ofthis movement": 'so it
is not an empirical fact that this possibility is the possibility o f precisely
this movement'. (PI?194)If we say Adams wants to formalize himselfj so that he
describes a kind of logical engine, does one ask o f him "Will experience show
whether this formula (or any description) is a
formuladescribingbeingasaformula?"Apossibilitydoesnotexistwithintheworld. This
is not an intentionality ofgears and wheels, but a figuration ofbeing human as an
effect of a being described by the mechanisms ofthe world (made visible for Adams
in the laws of physics). Human beings become fictions ofthe world, fictions which
we can best interpret through, at least for Adams, a kind of metaphorized science.
What happens when we separate "the possibility o f movement" from a particular
usage and hypostatize it as somehow present in the machine, finding the future
somehow present in the present? Would Wittgenstein's therapy dissolve Adams'
translation of himself into a machine (dynamo) or formula, his analogizing himself
as a possibility made manifest through the workings of nature? If one becomes a
formula one's future is determined, present in the formula itself. At the very
least this is a misunderstanding of thenatureoftheuseofmathematicsinphysics.
Thisusageisimmenselycomplicated. Mathematical functions can serve as
representations, interpretations, measurements, descriptive metaphor and so on.
Does this mean that mathematics functions as a language? How could a mathematical
syntax correlated with data function like a full blownlanguage?
Couldsyntaxembodyafuture? AnaspectofAdams'misunderstanding, however, exposes a deep
problem: what is the relation between description and metaphor? A more fundamental
version of this question is what is the relationship betweenalgorithms and
metaphors? In this question there lies another book (fully present?). But this
question points at the nature of the mistake Wittgenstein is investigating. The
confusion about the future, as if it were present in the present, arises whenever
we imagine that the meaning or future sense of something lies in a picture of it,
in a symbol, in the thing-itself when we are not using it but when it serves to
stand for itself. Their are twoReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
confusions here. The first confusion follows from the extraction o f signs and
objects from their ordinary use into some meta-description. In the second
confusion, the process of symbolization makes visible the future in such a way that
it gets attached to any meaningful unit within this process as ifpart ofthe
physiognomy ofthis unit. Things can symbolize themselves. What Wittgenstein is
exposing here is the grammatical structure of the future, and the temptations for
distortion that attend our functioning within symbol systems:"But I don't mean that
what I do now (in grasping a sense) determines the future use causally and as a
matter o f experience, but that in a queer way, the use itself is in some sense
present." But of course it is, 'in some queer sense'! Really the only thing wrong
with what you say is the expression "in a queer way". The rest is all right; and
the sentence only seems queer when one imagines a different language game for it
from the one in which we actually use it. (PI?I95)The sense o f the future being
present in a word or in the 'now' is the result o f how these words or any 'now'
emerges and functions within a grammar which describes the future within its
symbolic processes. Because this symbolic structure can seem to collapse into a
word it seems to excavate within a word a possibility for meaning which is at the
same time a possibility for the future. This future, however, is not present in the
word in any real sense. It is rather a part of our grammar. Because words and the
'now' function within language (or a symbolic grammar) they can symbolize
themselves (as can a machine). Thisself-
symbolizationextractsthewordorthe'now'fromitsgrammar. At this point the future (or
meaning) seems "in some sense present" in a "queer way." WeReproduced with
permission.546
have brought the word or the 'now' to the surface without its grammar, and thus the
future use seems present in the word.When we attempt to describe our experience as
if this experience were not embedded in language games, as if we grasped the future
first before our use of the word 'future' in a particular language game, our
experience seems odd (Cf. Edward's failure to lose himself when he loses his wife).
For Wittgenstein this oddness is an effect o f a mistake. Adams, however,
translates himself into machine metaphors because o f a failure of moral language
(of the sort MacIntyre describes in After Virtue), which makes any morality
incoherent. This incoherence he understands as an effect of the collapse of an
ontology (theology) in which a moral stance is binding because it is embedded in a
set of ontological commitments. Adams' asks, in effect, can we make moral sense in
any version of our language? One could also ask what kind of moral pressure do
science and technology place on the coherence of our ordinary language? (This
question is one result of my inquiry).Earlier I presented a scene describing one
way o f recognizing the force o f this question. I wrote, "As in the machine
symbolism of Yeats the symbols of identity constituting 'What The Thunder Said',
the words we understand as something we can say in a world in which we might find
ourselves, if not now, someday or yesterday, offer themselves as containers for our
minds, and in this offer o f our translation into the structure of a thing we
project our essential self, as if that is what our life means to us. The logic o f
identity, o f equivalence, not the copula, nor the 'is' o f existence, articulates
not only what the poetry means but what we mean by ourselves. The fragments of The
WasteReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
Land are dying (or are dead) in the way that we are dead or dying. This is the
crucial analogy. The temptation toward a theory o f identity as a theory o f
meaning builds minds, as we saw in Jakobson, because it is the limit o f death that
constructs our lives as containers (with holes, as sieves ofvarious lands, shapes,
and sizes). To enter language through identity is as if to enter as a container."
And Wittgenstein might respond: "Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it
life? -- In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?--Or is the use its
life?" (PI?432). We have two kinds ofuse here. Does use give signs a kind oflife,
as ifthe words are puppets or wind-up toys; or are they hammers and saws, with no
hidden strings or engines.
Thedifferenceseemstobeoneofhowmediatedourrelationistothesewords. Do we give them
their power to then go and do their work, or is their energy and use always
intimately ours. But Eliot or Joyce might also asks 'Do all uses offer the same
life?' Shouldn't we also be debating about kinds o f life? This would be to revisit
the history and conceptual logic ofthe development ofthe soul from distinct
eschatological and psychological souls, what Arbman called, in his study o f the
Vedic soul, the free soul and the body-soul, into a unified soul under the semantic
rubric of the free soul. J.Breamer argues that a similar conceptual unification
took place in Greece, where Homer's description o f human beings under the aspects
o f many souls, the body-soul (thymos, noos, and menos) and the free soul (psyche)
is later unified in the Psyche. Aristotle in his history of the soul in Book I ofDe
Anima organizes the development of a united soul around the principle of movement
(kinesis) and of perception (disthesis). Such principles define one set o f
criteria for animation. Aristotle transforms these criteria into theReproduced with
permission.548
characterization o f the soul as "the first entelecheia o f a natural body that
potentially has life" (De anima. 11.412a). ( I do not explicate what this means
here; I think, however, Heidegger's animation o f the thing is a development o f
this definition o f the soul as a descriptionoftheworld.
Itrytoshowthisinmyanalysisof"DasDing"; partofwhatI need here is the idea that we
enter into language through the figure of its animation)."In use it [a sign] is
alive" describes our use o f words as if tools, where the hatchet vanishes into an
extension o f our arm. Or as if I found an order floating my way and I accept it as
directed to me. I accept it into me; this is my act o f will and understanding. The
order is an algorithm and once understood takes over my body (or mind) and I act.
So someone might say "There is a gulfbetween an order and its execution. It has to
filled by the act of understanding." Can we refuse the order if we understand it?
Wittgenstein does not invoke the will, but points to the will as a negative, as
what would answer his question: If I give an order to someone--"How does he know at
all what use he is to makeofthesignsIgivehim,whatevertheyare?"(PI?433).
TheWillfillsthisrole,butof course to offer the will as an answer here is simply to
offer another black box. Is this different from becoming alive?If it is asked: "How
do sentences manage to represent?"--the answer might be: "Don't you know? You
certainly see it, when you use them." For nothing is concealed.How do sentences do
it?--Don't you know? For nothing is hidden.Reproduced with permission of the
But given this answer: "But you know how sentences do it, for nothing is concealed"
one would like to retort "Yes, but it all goes by so quick, and I should like to
see it as it were laid open to view."(PI?435)Wittgenstein resists the view that
language "goes by so quick." This sense of effervescence expresses a
dissatisfaction with ordinary language, which can seem "too crude" to capture
phenomena that, as Augustine writes, "easily elude us, and, in their coming to be
and passing away, produce those others as an average effect". What eludes us when
we use language? Nothing. Then why do we insist that something eludes us? If we ask
"how do sentences do it?", mean something or anything, we have made them into
agents,withintention,willandtheabilitytoact. Theanimationofthesesentencesmakes them
surrogates for ourselves and thus embeds them in the world we imagine ourselves
inhabiting. Sentences seem limited by time if they are extracted from their grammar
(usage). If words (or sentences) function like agents then their ordinary usage,
their grammar, functions like time does for us. What eludes us about a sentence
when we remove that sentence from its use is its use.The simplicity with which
Wittgenstein would like to describe the way sentences represent, that is, in their
grammar, as if how they represent is that they represent, where representation is
itself the how, suggests that the complexity o f the question, and its animation of
language is a function of how sentences are embedded in time. We cannot ask how a
sentence represents because that is what sentences are (when they represent), but
we can ask how sentences describe the limits of our temporal environment (because
this is what we do when we speak). Speaking can seem complex for simple reasons, as
cognitive scientist Herbert Simon argues:
Aman,viewedasabehavingsystem,isquitesimple. Theapparentcomplexityof his behavior
over time is largely a reflection o f the complexity of the environment in which he
finds himself. (65)I quote Simon here only to suggest that the role o f time in our
characterization o f our confusion over how a sentence represents marks time as the
environment o f language.One cannot correlate a clock, a temporal scale, to time
itself or to the world as one can a ruler to space. 12:00 does not pick out
something in the world. We use 12:00 to mark or form the totality of our experience
as a limited whole (limited temporally, and thus possessable). This marks our
relation to the world as a meta-description. An atomic clock or the world, itself,
constitutes time as the expression of the limit of the real. Different kinds o f
clocks reveal different kinds o f worlds.'Grief describes a pattern which recurs,
with different variations, in the weave of ourlife.
Iftheman'sbodilyexpressionofsorrowandofjoyalternated,saywith the ticking o f a
clock, here we should not have the characteristic formation o f the pattern
ofsorrow or ofthe pattern ofjoy. (PI p. 174)A poem ("The Prelude") or a novel (The
Brothers Kamarozov) or a movie (Penny Serenade), might, however, serve as such a
clock, in broad outline and in specific scenes generating emotional responses
triggered by the alternating series o f representations forming a narrative. The
Waste Land removes the narrative structure and pattern of identification that
usually allows for the creation of emotional responses in an audience.Reproduced
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The fragments and bits o f dialogue, the shifting T makes the unstable scenes and
moments of clarity grammatical shifts that funnel our emotions into our frustration
over reference, or the underdetermined meaning ofthese references within the
'meaning' ofany particularsetoflines,andintotheshiftsbetweensenseandnonsense.
Thisalsoisaclock, where ourjoy and sorrow maps onto our understanding and confusion
or our investment ofemotional significance into moments ofsublimity, ofrecognized
authority, of unconscious resonance, ofcliche, ofvoice and pronoun (taking the
position of T , 'you', 'we' and 'they' [this last being a significant
conceptualization o f one's own understanding, subjectivity, and self as an object
relative to the poem])The nature o f clocks: The number-signs on both analog and
digital clocks are non- referring signs. This is not the case with spatial
measurements, where the numbers on a ruler pick-out a defined set of points in the
world. If I am walking some distance and I glance at my watch ever so often and say
at 2:00 I am here, and here is across from X. Or At 10:30 1 was reading The Waste
Land, or I was reading the line "My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad, Stay with
me." In the first case time is correlated with place. This correlation allows us to
answer the question 'How far away is the moon?' with the temporal designation three
days. The correlation is really a triangulating mapping o f the numbers in the
watch world and differences in the space-world onto my experience or possible
experience: both place and time refer to me. But is using a measure o f time the
same as using a measure of space even if both measurements resolve themselves in my
subject position? In my "I am here" the demonstrative tells me to establish my
position atReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
this point, seemingly saying I exist at the point now. This 'now' is a temporal
frame organizing and expressing the possibilities of succession within my relation
to space.3How do we measure ourselves in relation to the future? How do we measure
the future as ours? One answer might be 'in hope.' Plotinus distinguishes between
what is in timeandtime.
ThisseemslikethefallacythatWittgensteinarguesagainstintheBrown book, but Plotinus'
version does not just reify time. It translates time into our being alive, our
soul: "Time is the life (Coorjv) o f soul in a movement o f passage from one way o
f life (Piov) to another" (in.7.11.43-5). (Is time, therefore, a possibility of
movement animating, as a kind of potential, the soul?) This is a description of the
modifications of our stances within and towards language games within our forms of
life. ?(C)riv and piov, while not identical with any of Wittgenstein's terms,
describe aspects of what he means by formsoflife.
Thelifeofthesoulandwaysoflifetogethermanifestformoflifewhenit describes our common
humanity; this is a way of understanding our form of life under the aspect o f what
Wittgenstein means by the soul when he says "The human body is the best picture of
the human soul" (PI p. 178) and "If one sees the behavior of a living thing ones
sees its soul"(PI?357). In this last case one recognizes a living thing (not
necessarily a human being) as distinct from an automaton. In the first case one
recognizes a humanbeing as distinct from an animal, a recognition ofthe possibility
that the body in front of mecanhope:
"Onecanimagineananimalangry,frightened,unhappy,happy,startled. But hopeful? And why
not?" (PI p. 174). Wittgenstein continues, "Can only those hope who can talk? Only
those who have mastered the use of a language. That is to say, the phenomena of
hope are modes of this complicated form of life. (If a concept refers to a
character o f human handwriting, it has no application to beings that do not
write.)" (PI p.174).Hope is a temporal mode, a kind o f expectation diminished from
being probable into being possible (when it is not used as a synonym for
"intention').4 Human beings can invest themselves in this possibility as if
discovering themselves in their language,
discoveringtheshapesoftheiridentityintheexpressionsoftheirdesire. Thelossofhope is
used to explain the surrender of life: 'he died because he lost hope.' Hope can be
used to mark uncertainty: 'I intend to go to the moon, or at least I hope to.'
Statements of my intention abstract potential actions into a picture o f the
future, that is to say, our investment in the statement "I intend to X" is part of
a story that imagines my actions completed in the future.Consequently, I say of
someone else "He seems to believe . . . . " and other people say it of me. Now, why
do I never say it of myself, nor even when others rightly say it of me? --do I
myself not see and hear myself then? --That can be said." (PI p. 191). I am
invested in my use of intention and beliefin the way I am invested in my use of
lI': "Think of the fact that one can predict one's own future action by an
expression of intention" (PIp. 191) The fact that intention can devolve into hope,
while indicative of a loss of power relative to the world and to others, also
exposes the future as not simply the extension of my will (as if an algorithm). A
prediction of the future pictures the future as completed, drawing a line from my
present through a story o f my actions to a future. My stance toward the future
when expressing an intention is as it were a stance toward a story in which that
future has expression (or means the completion of my intention). When IReproduced
permission.554
express hope I have not drawn such a line between now and tomorrow. Hope describes
a stance toward desire or intention, a stance, as it were, from the future looking
back, characterizing my present intentions as possible. Why is hope not a stance
toward the future as is intention? I f an intention is a prediction, o f my future,
o f what I will do, hope is a description o f myself in the present. How is such a
description possible? When I say 'I hope someday to have a house in Greece' I am
saying that I want a house, but I am unsure if I will successfully obtain one. Have
I erased "intend' and replaced it with hope, as if Ihad in mind the present and the
future without any intervening story (a story expressing faith maybe) connecting
these two moments? Hope is an interpretation o f my intentions. My intention is a
story of continuous action from now to the future (a future figured
withinthestory). Thusaninterpretationofintentionisaninterpretationofacompleted
action,anactioncompletedinthefuture. Mydoubtsaboutthepossibilityofthis completion,
that characterize many uses of hope as opposed to intention, require that I view my
intentions as it were from their completion, or from any moment of completion
within the story. This viewing orjudgment, therefore, takes place as it were from
the future. For example when 'I say I hope to go to the store', I might only mean
'I intend to go to the store.' But if I say 'I hope I can go to the store' I
underline my uncertainty that I will be able to go to the store. This uncertainty
arises as an evaluation o f the stories I might tell myself about going to the
store. For example 'given the weather, I will not be able to walk to the store.'
without permission.
13.3 The theology of sentences
Tofindourselvesinthefutureistofindourselvesinourlanguage. Machines describe
intention and humans express hope as two different ways o f making present the
possibility of a future. The adjudication between machine time and human time as
both aspects of our stance within our language toward ourselves, language, and time
constitutes a debate about the soul. Philosophical Investigations and Finnegans
Wake describe the limits of our humanity within such a debate. They, therefore,
articulate a kind o f theology. Not, however, a theology o f the word, but o f the
phrase (answering how we inhabit meaning) derived from Frege's "Es genugt, wenn der
Satz als Ganzes einen Sinn hat; dadurch erhalten auch seine Theile ihren Inhalt"
(Grundlagen ?60). I call this theology in order to indicate the demand this kind of
conception of meaning places on our conceptionsofholism.
Itaketheologytodescribenotmetaphysicalclaimsaboutthe essence ofthe world or
existence, but to describe the relation between totality (in versions of holism)
and Actuality (in Aquinas' sense of existence being the highest form of
actuality).5Investigations and the Wake are theological delimitations of what can
count or function as (a) Mind(s). I say they 'are' this, but what is hidden in this
'are'? Do they describe, define, function as, mimic, exist as, enact, appear as,
invoke, evoke, expose, express,orembodythesedelimitations?
Thestatusofbothofthesetextswithintheirown reflection on mind, what they are, is not
a question about their truth value. How would we determine if they are true? What
would count as the criteria for truth here? They do not refer to a mind or minds;
or rather, if they do refer to something like a mind thatReproduced with permission
simply displaces the question of what they are or if they are 'true' to the truth
of whatever this mind is and to the legitimacy and form o f their referring. How
can we approach a mind? Maybe when we talk to someone or read a message or a
treatise or some remarks. The complexity built into the 'are' in 'Investigations
and the Wake are .. .' determines both texts and the problem o f 'to be' as
'theological delimitations of what can count or function as (a) Mind(s).' I am
describing a version o f the relation between theology and time that begins to set
out how we convert ourselves in and out o f kinds o f time inInvestigations.The
form of Wittgenstein's description of our embedded inhabitation of our language and
world, unlike Heidegger's in Being and Time, generates time as a grammatical effect
not as an existential condition. Our sense of time is more like a report about the
relation between our practices and actions (linguistic, physical, emotional,
cognitive, etc.) and what counts as the world within the complex interaction o f
these practices. "WhoIam"isanembodimentofadynamicmetaphysics,theexpressionof which,
however, cannot constitute a substance, but rather constitutes a kind of aesthetic
with moral force. Such an aesthetics is better understood as theology: the
expression o f a complex totality o f shifting practices that do not represent or
describe our ontological uniqueness, but enact and actualize, these practices. (How
is this a form of Aristotle'senergeia or entelechial Energeia describes the self-
supporting activity, as opposed to the incomplete process ofdynamis, that describe
a functioning toward an end. But as an activity, energeia describes this end in its
activity; it is self-generating according to a similar structural logic of
dialectic mediation in Hegel, leading to absolute knowledge asReproduced with
permission.557
energeia leads to the Prime Mover, the "energeia o f nousf' [Meta. 1072b], The
soul, as "the first entelechia of a natural body that potentially has life," enacts
a similar circular movement allowing for the soul to cause the movement of the body
or other things by being their final cause. The point o f this brief comparison is
to draw out the structural circularity that describes grammar or our involvement in
language as describing a kind of energeia, where form o f life describes an
entelechia not understood as a final cause but as a grounding limit that actualizes
[as opposed to causing] our human language as human language. Such comparisons are
dangerous because they ignore both the philosophical and historical complexity
involved in both cases. Courting that danger is necessary, I
think,ifwearetounwindtheconceptsofmetaphysicsintotheiraestheticforce. This does not
mean that one should ignore the conceptual logic o f Aristotle's terms and the very
different conceptual logic underwriting Wittgenstein's analysis and grammar [as
part of the very different histories in which they thought], but it does mean that
the form of this logic has a metaphoric force that can constitute a language game,
as an object of comparison, which engages our involvement in our own language more
fully than would a more conceptual and historical analysis.6)Let me return to the
'who I am' as "an expression of a complex totality of shifting practices that do
not represent or describe our ontological uniqueness, but enact and actualize these
practices."--This is not to say that the 'I' is some hidden limit, an ich-in- sich.
It is not a thing in the sense that it can or cannot be represented. Representation
would be beside the point. One cannot, after all, represent a commitment, a
gesture, a feeling, a desire, an understanding, a disposition except as ordering
time.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
The declaration or report "I understand" does not describe a mental state.
Wittgenstein describes a situation in which someone is presented by someone else
(A) with a mathematical series (4, 6, 8, 10): "He watches A writing his numbers
down with a certain feeling oftension, and all sorts ofvague thoughts go through
his head. Finally he asks himself: 'what is the series of differences?' He finds
the series . . . and says: 'Now I can go on'" (PI?151). What counts as
understanding the series here is not just writing down the correct numbers of the
series. A computer could generate such a list, but does it understand the series?
The processes within the computer for determining the formula of any series o f
numbers does not describe understanding the series as some mathematical process.
The computer uses a set of algorithms or heuristics to match the series of numbers
with a method o f generating them. Such procedures describe ways o f going on (with
the series), but not an understanding either o f the series (as a mathematical
series for example) or o f what it means to go on. But why should we be concerned
with "what it means to go on"? Wittgenstein is arguing that there is no common
process called understanding that is common to all cases of understanding. In the
case of the computer we might say that the computer must embed its generation of a
particular series within an understandingmodule.
Thecomputerwouldbeinastateofunderstandingwheneverthe mathematical description of a
series could be inputted into this module. This picture ofunderstanding, o f
course, says nothing about what it means to understand, other than attaching "I
understand" to some mathematical process. Wittgenstein could respond, speaking for
the computer, "And how can the process o f understanding have been hidden, when I
said 'Now I understand' because I have understood?!" The computer would have
to feel the tension o f not knowing, that is express its uncertainty as a set o f
behaviors that it could interpret as confusion (the computer would have to be
human). In the same way, "Iunderstand"isaninterpretationofwhatIdo,ofmygoingon.
Thisinterpretationisa way of describing my behavior in language, in a way that I
figure my stance toward the future as my intention in language or my interpretation
o f my stance toward my intentions as hope in language. "Understanding",
"intention", and "hope" do not describe mental processes, they describe my
expressions and actions as meaningful within language. This language is accessible
to everyone who speaks my language, and thus my understandings, intentions, and
hopes are not private states: "Try not to think of understanding as a 'mental
process' at all.. . . In the sense in which there are processes (including mental
processes) which are characteristic of understanding, understanding is not a mental
process" (PI?154). There is nothing within my head that justifies my response but
the circumstances in which I am embedded, the context around or within which my
statement makes sense as about something.The statement "I cannot go on" is not only
a description (or interpretation) of my behavior, it is also an expression of my
exclusion from the language game in which a series makes sense. If I say "I don't
understand what you mean" our conversation stops, or you mightstartexplainingagain.
Imightstillstareatyoublankly,unabletomakesenseof your words or apply them to some
situation. I am, as it were, excluded from the language game. IfI finally make
sense ofwhat you are saying I might say, 'Now I understand.' "I understand"
expresses my re-entrance into a language game and thus functions as a
grammaticaldistinction. Itservestomarkachange.Reproduced with permission of the
"I don't understand" and "I understand", and the innumerable expressions o f 'now I
can go on' (including facial expressions, sighs, pauses, and so on) mark the
margins of language games, describing our stances toward language games as opposed
to within languagegames.
Theexpressionofinclusionorexclusionis,therefore,aconfigurationof a self or subject,
an 'I', that has meaning only as a grammatical expression of a change. This is, of
course, not a change in state (when I understand I am not in a state of
understanding). Itisratheragrammaticalmarkerbothformyself(constitutingmeinan
interpretation in relation to both language and others) and for others who
recognize this as a kind of signal. Consequently, such remarks (and there are many)
describe a grammatical and public time. This is a reconstitution of the Tractaricm
show/ say distinction and its description ofthe subject as the limit ofthe world as
a variety oftemporal distinctions within Investigations. I think, however, the
temptation to dissolve temporality in grammar confuses the way in which this
temporality works and emerges. I think Wittgenstein
mistakesthetheologicaldimensionsofhisownwork. Thekindoftemporalskepticalconfusions
that lead to either Parmenides (no change) or Heraclitus (all change) are submerged
under the Cartesian threat (the residual power ofpicturing as a metaphor for
Wittgenstein is a part of his resistance to investigate the ontological dimension
ofInvestigations, which would mean thinking more fully into "form o f life").My
world waxes and wanes through the breakdown and shiftings between actingthrough and
within seamless language games, marking a kind of change in our world. Such
markings constitute a temporal experience (seemingly a way o f measuring ourselves
and the world). This would require default language games directed toward our loss
understanding or meaning (under certain pressure time might serve as such a default
language). These kinds o f language games constitute not only the night-time world
o f the Wake, but they order our self-reflection as a series o f unanswerable why-
questions (resisting answering our losses of selfand world with what-questions,
with our reduction into substance).All o f this is a way o f saying that we do not
experience time at all. Time functions as a grammar (ours) expressing us as
seemingly against a world (ours), as musical notes against noise, or as something
like the inaudible melody emerging as, what Charles Rosen calls, "a structure
ofsound" out ofSchumann'sHumoresk:The inaudible in Schumann's music is not
conceived, as in Bach, as a theoretical structure which can only be imperfectly
realized in sound, but as a structure of sound which implies what is absent. The
actual heard sound is primary, a sound here o f improvising an echo, an
accompaniment to a melody which exists only in its reflection; a performance which
does not bring out this shadowy quality and the flickering uncertainty o f the
rhythm is a betrayal o f the score. In Bach the notation implies something beyond
the reach of every realization, but in Schumann the music is a realization which
implies something beyond itself. (10)Using the "structure o f sound" as an analogy
for time, and therefore for the T , is important to me because it describes the
absent dreamer in Finnegans Wake. Joyce inverts Schumann's musical structure. The
inaudible becomes 'the actual heard sound", a nonsense that "implies what is
absent." The logic o f the unconscious, while appearing as a masque o f characters,
points always to a single unconsciousness (one could say anReproduced with
permission.562
exemplary one). Once we enter into the associative, non-narrative logic of the
Wakean dream we find that any paragraph provides us, as John Bishop says, "with as
set of vectors that point to an absent content--'the presence (of a curpse)' --into
the 'eyewitless foggus' of whose 'trapped head' the process of reading the Evening
World leads." The (unconsciousness of our "humptyhillhead," our "one stable
somebody" "aslip" in the text, becomes the underlying organizational locus around
which the text can be understood, aroundwhichitwaswritten.
Thislocusistheinaudible,andthetemporalconditionsof our form of life emerge out of
the ontological crisis attending everynight.The enfolding o f syntax and semantics
in Finnegans Wake follows the description of musical intelligibility that
Schopenhauer gave in his later essay "On the Metaphysics of Music" :music is a
means o f making intelligible rational and irrational numerical relations, not,
like arithmetic, with the aid of the concept, but by bringing them to a knowledge
that is quite direct and simultaneously affects the senses. The connexion o f the
metaphysical significance o f music with this its physical and arithmetical basis
rests on the fact that what resists our apprehension, namely the irrational
relation or dissonance, becomes the natural image of what resists ourwill, and,
conversely, the consonance or the rational relation, by easily adapting itselfto
our apprehension, becomes the image of the satisfaction of the will, (n, 450-51)The
will becomes visible in music (in our hearing music) as the description of an
interpretive stance we take from within music: 'I understand this music (or as
music)!' orReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
'I do not understand this music (or as music)!'. This hardly does justice to
Schopenhauer, but it does resonate with Wittgenstein's description o f will as an
interpretive stance within language.How is "Understanding a sentence. . . much more
akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think" (PI?527). Understanding
must be distinguished from "the hearing of a tune or a sentence: these are mental
processes" (PI? 154). Such hearing, like "a pain's growing more and less," is a
perceptual state with defined duration. But my understanding of a word is not a
continuous experience (as if all the words I understand paradebeforeme).
Howthenismyunderstandingakintounderstandingathemein music? Wittgenstein says,What I
mean is that understanding a sentence lies nearer than one thinks to what is
ordinarily called understanding a musical theme. Why isjust this the pattern of
variation in loudness and tempo? One would like to say "Because I know what it's
all about." But what is it all about? I should not be able to say. In order to
'explain' I could only compare it with something else which has the same rhythm (I
mean the same pattern). (One says "Don't you see, this is as if a conclusion were
being drawn" or "This is as it were a parenthesis", etc. How does onejustify such
comparisons? --There are very different kinds ofjustifications here. (PI?527)I can
understand music (at least I can recognize that something is music from within a
form of life within which that music makes sense as music), but how can I explain
what it is about? "About" seems like the wrong word here. Music is contentless as
something that can be translated into words. Thus the point at which I can say I
understand musicReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
but I cannot explain it marks a kind of limit point (as Wittgenstein says, this
phrase of music "is as if a conclusion were being drawn" etc.). These analogies are
justified primarily by their success in explaining how this music is music, or how
it might mean something as music. The criteria for the success o f my explanation
might entail you saying "I understand".Wittgenstein's point in making this
comparison, however, is to show how our understanding of a sentence (in ordinary
life) might be like understanding music. A failure to understand marks the
boundaries ofour involvement, it does not describe this involvement. This boundary,
however, is our point o f entry into music (or a language game). Wittgenstein
focuses his remark on the point o f incommensurabity between languageandmusic.
Thisincommensurabilitysignalsourinclusion(orfromtheotherside our exclusion) within
a language game. The content of our inclusion (signaled by an awareness of an
incommensurability--our inability to explain what the music is about) is the demand
that we either recognize the logic of the music within which our stance toward the
sound is as toward music, or we reject this logic and therefore the music as
anything but noise. Thus this incommensurability signals an ontological demand, a
demand to recognize something as a particular thing ("Theology as grammar), but
acknowledging (or accepting) the limits of grammar as the limits of my world. My
claim that I understand or do not understand this music can be intoned (another
kind of meaningful sound) or be accompanied by certain facial expressions that
suggest my intention to either learn or reject these sounds as music. My stance in
the face of mis- or non-understanding, with its vector of learning or rejection,
signals a shift in my state if this state is understood as aReproduced with
permission.565
grammatical state--or rather a shift in the sense of the world. Such a shift
changes what is included within that world as sensible, determining often times
what and who has a claim on me.The expression o f these ontological demands
(whether to learn a new grammar within which I recognize both Stravinsky's Les
Noces as music and myself as hearing music), like the patterns described by my
failure or success in performing within language games, keeps time. This time is a
measure o f "the life (C(C)t|v) o f soul in a movement o f passage from one way o f
life (Piov) to another." One way o f imagining the soul, therefore, is as a
description o f the changing expressions o f my stance toward the world in which
this stance involves a choice (or a possibility) to recognize the essence of
something, what something is, within a world, form o f life, language game within
which I function. This amounts to a temporal aesthetic. Such an aesthetic attempts
to negotiate among what Wittgenstein calls, in Alice Ambrose's notes, the
"solipsism o f the present moment: 'All that is real is the experience o f the
present moment'," the problem o f duration, and the relations made visible in
language games as aspects, attitudes, states, and pictures(p. 25-28).7We inhabit
our temporality neither within a solipsism of the moment,nor as an epiphenomenon,
nor as a given, but as a modulating set o f temptations that both limit and make
possible our language use. Wittgenstein resists William James' "'The present
thought is the only thinker', which makes the subject o f thinking equivalent to
the experience." It is this equivalence and its temporal solipsism that suggests a
stream-of- consciousness as a picture of our consciousness.8Reproduced with
permission.566
In Investigations and the Wake, time functions, emerges, and disappears through
expectation, hope, belief language games, in the narratives describing memory,
actions, intentions, and so on. This suggests that there is not a unitary sense of
time, but rather a variety o f temporal grammars, themselves shifting in such a way
that our sense o f time changes and flies and crawls (and in this change create
another temporal grammar, alwaysatthelimitofsense).
ThetherapeuticgoaldeterminingmuchofWittgenstein'slater philosophy seems to dissolve
our temporal awareness in the transparency o f our ordinary language use (the time
described by any particular language game). At the same time he
rejectsthestructurallysimilarmachine-as-symbol-futurity. Therelationbetweenthe
grammar o f time enacted in our practices and the meta-temporal limit generated by
and excluded from these practices remains obscure. His discussion of this in the
Brown Book I find incomplete. All versions of time and the differences expressing
them are grammatically embedded: they are just at varying distances from our other
practices.Philosophical time creates the illusion o f no-time, not only in its
drive toward viewing ourselves sub specie aetemitatis, but in its use of picturing
and representation as the form of truth. But what is the effect of turning this
picturing into 'mere' metaphor? Representation as a form o f knowing is in my sense
a-temporal. We confuse these versions o f time with consciousness, self-
consciousness, and forms o f unconsciousness. Understanding marks a grammatical
limit that creates one dimension of time, but in this it only exposes the
grammatical embodiment of time in all our language games (I want to say here,
invoking Augustine, time is our 'soul'). That we are not self-conscious, i.e., when
'time flies', means time is experienced as a function of our activity and not as a
function ofReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
our self-reflection. 'Crawling time' is more the condition ofbeing aware ofthe
disjunction between this self-reflection and our actions. But in each case time
remains a function of our grammar, an expression o f our grammar. The emergence o f
time as such a grammatical condition, as an effect within and as our being within
our form o f life, posits
ourpracticesasfunctioningwithinatotalitythatlimitsusaswhatweare. Icallthisthe
emergenceofatheology. Wittgensteindoesnotinvestigatethemeaningofthis grammatical
condition, and thus he does not bring out the moral and theological implications of
our stances toward ourselves within language. But he shows a number of sites where
this morality can emerge.The effect of grounding our thought in the ordinary, in
our grammar, therefore, I think, generates our being as theologically embedded. The
consequence of the concentration on the ordinary seems to me to generate a theology
as the limit o f the ordinary, and thus suggests the significance o f form o f life
as a dynamic conceptual limit, or the different voices and names Kierkegaard
assumes around the limit of Christianity. For Kierkegaard, religion serving at a
distance from philosophy constructs and requires moral obligations and
descriptions, a resistance to the ontological. I invoke Kierkegaard here partly
because I have often used both philosophy and art in a way that is cognate with his
masks. But I do not don these forms in order to resist either science o f
ontological limits, but rather to expose their claim and describe ways of meaning
or inhabiting languageinrelationtothem.
InWittgenstein,unlikeinKierkegaard,whatIamcallingthe theological has an ontological
force. I do not mean that it is metaphysical in his sense; itReproduced with
permission.568
does not make essential claims about reality, but rather acts to temporalize the
world as what we are.
InPhilosophicalInvestigationseverythingseemsbothaudibleandinaudible. Is
Wittgenstein's questioning directed at an absolute limit as is Augustine's
confession and Aquinas' dialectic? The shift from the Tractatus with its
transcendental limit beyond saying, but determining all forms of value and
constituting our being, to the Investigations can be described as the
reconceptualization of the limit toward which any self-reflection (description) and
interrogation takes place. The Tractarian limit between the world of
factsandthenon-psychologicalT outsidethisworldistranslatedandembedded,in
Investigations,withinlanguageandhumanpractices. ThislimitinInvestigationscannot be
articulated as such within it. Investigations describes (although it is not this
'itself) a shifting set of temporal periods from within our form of life: the limit
of being human that describes temporality is within (not outside) our form o f
life.1How should one understand the interaction and difference between being and
identity in the Investigations?2 It is not a possibility o f movement that is
denied in the sentence "It's not possible to move this desk without removing a good
number o f the books on top o f it." This is really a limiting condition on an
already determined possibility.3 From the functioning o f signs in any measurement
or awareness or constitution o f time I am tempted intotwodirections.
Ifmeasurementandexistencecoincidethenoneisboundtoaskiftheexistenceof
timeisontologicallywarranted. Thiscansoundlikephysics,thespatializationoftime,orthe
dimensional description of space-time, in Minkowski's diagrams, as layers of space
and time extending as apictureofmovementthroughacube.
Theontologicaldescriptionoftimemightalsoleadonetomodal logic or to something like
Quine's spatialization of time and the elimination of tense (in relation to the
descriptionofmeaninginWordandObject).
WecanlinktemporalmarkerstopronounsasQuinedoes:
"Wecantreattheindicatorwords'now'and'then'onaparwith'I'and'you',assingularterms...
'I now' and 'I then' mean 'I at now', 'I at then'; the custom just happens to be to
omit the 'at' here, as in 'redwine'(173).
Quineassumes,ashesaysthat"thetemporaryandshiftingobjectsofreferenceof'I' and 'you'
are people, those of 'now' and 'then' are times or epochs" (173).
Thiscanseemmisleading. Benviniste,in"SubjectivityinLanguage,"arguesthatpronounsdo
not in fact refer, but mark the dependence of language on a formal subject: "these
pronouns are distinguished from all other designations a language articulates in
that they do not refer to a concept or to an individual." "There is no concept 'I'
that incorporates all the I's that are uttered at every moment inReproduced with
permission.569
the mouths o f all speakers, in the sense that there is a concept "tree" to which
all the individual uses of tree refer"(226). There exists no "lexical entity" to
which I can refer. "How could the same term refer indifferently to any individual
whatsoever and still at the same time identify him in his individuality?" I refers
to something "Exclusively linguistic: I refers to the act of individual discourse
in which it is pronounced, and by this it designates the speaker." This designation
is distinguished from reference to objects(bodiesetc.).
Thiscreatesthecategoryof"person",anddoesnotasinQuinereferto"people". The confusion
o f reference arises from a vagueness in the description o f indexical reference:
[T]here seems to be no description, not even an indexical one, capable o f giving
the meaning of T.
Forexample,'theuttererofthesewords'willnotdoasadefinition,sinceIcouldusethat
descriptiontorefertothepersonIampresentlyquoting. Thesemanticsoftheword'I'seemsto
come to no more and no less than the fact that it use it literally is to refer to
oneself. (Bach, 176)Bach argues, however, that third person reference distinguishes
between Iocutionary meaning o f sentence
anditsillocutionaryforcedeterminedbythespeakersintention.
Thatisthemeaningof'he'candescribe the meaning o f 'he' in "He is G', but its
referent can only be determined through the intention o f the
speaker(whothespeakermeanstobereferringto). Thevaguenessortheindeterminacyofpronoun
reference and the possibilities for mistake (Bach's example of replacing a picture
which someone refers to blindly with someone else) suggest that "[reference occurs
only at the illocutionary level, where the speaker's referential intention plays
and essential role" (186-87).3 Is intention parasitic on the semantics of'I'?4
Hoping, intending (in the sense o f expecting) are what Wittgenstein calls a state
(not a process): Expectation is, grammatically a state; like, being of an opinion,
hoping for something, knowing something,beingabletodosomething.
Butinordertounderstandthegrammarofthesestatesit isnecessarytoask:
"Whatcountsasacriterionforanyone'sbeinginsuchastate?"(?572)
Askingwhatkindofcriteriondetermines anyonebeinginsuchastateaskswhatkindofstateis
expecting,hoping,knowing,beingabletodosomething? Weknowtheyarenotmentalstates.s For
breif discussion o f Aquinas' development o f Aristotlian actuality see Joseph
Owens "Aristotle and Aquinas"inTheCambridgeCompaniontoAquinas, 50-55.AlsoSTIa.7.1.6
Another way o f doing this would be to write a synthetic text as if from within the
historical period, for example to describe and analyze Aquinas' Summa Theologica as
if from within the theology o f the Summa itself.7In Wittgenstein's Lectures,
Cambridge, 1932-1935.8 Wittgenstein objects to the metaphysical temptation to say
only the present is real, not to using 'the stream o f consciousness' use as a
means o f describing our phenomenal experience.Reproduced with permission of the
VMACHINE TIME: THE SCIENCE OF BUILDING A FUTUREReproduced with permission of the
14Machine Time14.1 Constructing a time machine (the Self-Inductor) at the limit
between cause and interpretationWe can ask for the distinction between the animate
and the inanimate, as it were, from inside the security of acting as animate
creatures. What would it mean to ask about this distinction from outside our
inclusion within these interpretative distinctions. As I suggested earlier this is
how cognitive science begins. Its ultimate goal would be the replacement of the
psychology we have developed from within our interpretations of our experience with
a psychology built from experimental data describing the causal structures
andinteractionsofourbrain. Thus,thequestionhowcouldwebuildthedistinction between
the animate and the inanimate outside (relative to non-causal language games) of
ourinterpretativelanguagecanonlybeansweredbyscience. ThatisnotwhatIam pursuing
here. I am asking instead what does it mean to be so built or so described (as an
effect within a causal chain)?I am building in this chapter a causal aesthetic,
turning causal principles (a simplified scientific world) into an allegorical
picture o f building a mind within itself, but limitedbyitsworld.
Inmanywaysthismodelwillenactanaspectofthephilosophical
aestheticofthedissertationasawhole. Themockengineeringinthischapterwillnot,
therefore, be an exercise in cognitive philosophy, but in philosophical aesthetics:
an allegory about how ontological limits describe ways of making sense through the
processNotes for this chapter are on page 613Reproduced with permission of the
o f building. Call this thinking by making machines as fictions that excavate how
an T becomes an 'our' and difference becomes a time.My machines arejugs which think
ofthemselves as minds. Such a fiction means something within a variety of contexts
(in philosophy or science fiction or cognitive science).
Mygoalhereisneithertoexplorethatmeaningnortheassumptionsofthose contexts and uses.
I am using these machines (as fictions and as causal models) to make visible the
possibilities of orienting ourselves within the causal limits these machine(s)
describe. Thisorientationismeanttopressuretheconfusedcollapseofmodelsof animation
and mind into interpretive allegories (in order to give them a kind o f ontological
force) that I described in Jakobson and Vendler and in a different way in Romantic
fragmentsingeneralandinKeatspowerfulimageofsoul-making. Soul-makingforme, operates
toward the limits of person-making not as a replacement for person-making (for
science). In this sense this engineering exercise is a theological exercise meant
to question how we apply our interpretations o f art and texts and others as
versions o f minds.If models of mind underlie many of our aesthetic models and many
of the ways in which we enter, exit and interpret ourselves within metaphors,
allegories, and language
games,thenmodelsofthemindcanmakevisibledifferentkindsofaesthetics. Thismight
meanthattheoriesofmindshouldbeunderstoodasaestheticmodels. WhileIthinkthat this is
true, for the most part, this does not diminish these theories, nor does it tells
us much about what kind of aesthetics these are. A full analysis of a theory of
mind as an aesthetic would require another dissertation. What my machine(s) are
meant to do is to showthekindofaestheticsuchtheoriescangenerate.
Inotherwords,howwouldwewith permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
inhabit a world described by and large by causal and mathematical limits as
meaningful without ignoring those limits? My machines suggest a way o f beginning
to orient ourselves in relation to these limits in a way that will move beyond the
kind of pictures of the subjunctive enacted by both Heidegger in "Das Ding" and
Eliot in The Waste Land. This is why I think it describes a kind o f theology.In
answering the question cwhat does it mean to be built or described as an effect
within a causal chain?' I have attempted to build a set of theoretical machines
that perceive time by figuring themselves (in a fundamental sense) within the
temporal order they perceive.1 By this process the machines construct themselves
within a world of temporal surfaces: they figure themselves continually and as the
succession o f limits that determine their experience as anything. This is a
picture of the writing at limits that I have
investigatedinWittgenstein,Joyce,Eliot,Keats,andHeideggerfromtheunderside. Itis not
meant to generate a theory, but to offer itselfas another writing toward and at
these limits.This means I have experimented in a form of Science Fiction, in which
I have attempted to slice an aspect o f the logic o f human temporality out o f the
conscious/ unconscious logic ofthe human mind. The problem in constructing a Time-
perceiving machine is in constructing a future, which means constructing a
fundamental ontological belief that the future exists. I have attempted to build a
theoretical machine that perceives time.
Suchatimemachinesimplifiesourconsciousapprehensiontothebasicprocessof determining
successive differences. I will use bits of this machine in order to analyze the
conceptual logic and organization which allows and constructs our phenomenal
perceptionReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
o f time. High-level problems in the organization o f mental processes can be
explored by building simple machines, or systems, not in an attempt to model what
actually happens in the brain, nor to offer an explanation o f how a particular
agent might function in a real machine, but in order to model these conceptual
problems and their solutions as functions and processes.I have constructed these
theoretical machines, or rather one evolving machine, not in order to model the
brain or its evolution, nor even to posit a possible construction of a real machine
or set of algorithms to be included in some artificial intelligence machine
(although it has some relevance to this). My machines are manipulations, within an
imaginary and impossible world, o f the theoretical problems involved in the human
inhabitation within time as a grammatical limit. These machines pressure the
problem of time into the kind of clarity that allows the structure, and more
importantly the significance, of temporality to function in relation to the more
complex problems of consciousness and language. I will use my machines to explore
and explain the organization and conceptual problems attending any attempt at
modeling "reality" as meaningful and not just as a "thing".In effect this means
questioning the relation between the possibility o f meaning and the possibility
oftime at the limits ofsense and nonsense. How can you build yourselfinto a grammar
using only causal mechanisms? In my attempt to build such a grammar I am trying to
outline the point of conceptual confusion around which language breaks down
intononsenseinFinnegansWake,forexample. Iamtryingtoapproachorwriteator within the
limit described by the soul. This means I am trying to figure causal mechanisms
at the limit o f the interpretative relations that I have described so far. These
machine masks will not disprove Wittgensteinian or Jocyean grammar, but will
describe a causal language game(s) evolving toward the limits these grammars
describe.I return first to a description of philosophy I introduced in the second
chapter. Kurt Godel, in explaining his philosophical work, described philosophy as
the analysis of concepts, and science as the use of these same concepts.
Engineering philosophy into a machine, a philosophy machine, allows us to
reconceive and merge Godel's distinctions within a model o f thinking where the
analysis o f concepts, categories, and logics follows from their construction and
use in an evolving machine.I will begin this process of construction with the
hypothesis that human language and the logic of human temporality simultaneously
create each other as systems of symbolization organizing the world and one's
relationship to it. Time requires a kind of syntax, a structure allowing for
symbolic exchange between different representations of mental states. Instead of
the pure syntax of calculus, the syntactical structure of temporality mirrors the
structure of symbolic communication in human language, such that to construct a
future is to construct a language. Thus, consciousness functions through or within
the construction of human time (specifically of a future which mimics the structure
of the present) and the simultaneous or contingent construction of human language.
Language and temporality simultaneously create each other as systems of
symbolization that organize the world (our experience) and one's relationship to
it. (By symbolization I mean the process by which relationships and identities are
configured into particular structures and/or signs).Reproduced with permission of
In my analysis o f Wittgenstein I showed how the sense that the future meaning o f
a word is present in its form (or the sense that future is somehow present as a
possibility in thepresent)displayedhowweinhabitourgrammar.
Weexperiencechangethroughour shifting position between language games and through
our functioning within the temporal
orderdescribedbythegrammarofparticularlanguagegames. Thesenseofthefuture arose as
an interpretation o f our relation within the structures o f the grammars that
describe our forms o f life. I will use my machines to excavate this grammar. Thus
in constructing a future my machine(s) will, in general, abstractform from
particular contents, and in so doing articulate a symbolic and syntactical
structural relationship between external and internal states that will come to
stand for the future.I list the following as the engineering assumptions and goals
underlying the construction o f my machine(s):1) Temporality functions through a
syntax, a structure allowing for symbolic exchange between different
representations o f mental states. The syntactical structure o f temporality
mirrors the structure o f symbolic communication in human language, such that to
construct a future is to construct a language.2) One can identify two forms
oftemporal syntax: (a) a simple equivalence between past states and current states
that allow for short-term predictions based on simple patterns or causal
associations between a small set of inputs and (b) a more complex syntax that
functions as a continuous future.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
3) My problem is to turn the Turing test around. Instead o f attributing a thinking
and/or consciousness to a machine, I need to construct a model in which a machine
will attribute its mental state and condition to another machine (or at some point
to a human).4) self-consciousness arises from a model o f other minds as forms o f
one's own mind.5) The possibility ofthe future (that is a symbolic structure
defining the future) is built by using structures derived from meta-temporal
identities, identities that extend over time but whose contents, except as a
markers o f identity, are meaningless.14.2 A time machine linguistA Time Machine
constructs a diachronic ontology, a logic organizing and determining the forms o f
existence by nesting them within the phenomenal field defined by the machine, as a
mechanical surrogate for the individual subject. A time machine, like the one built
by H.G. Wells, spatializes time, in order that the appearance of a succession of
momentsisdeterminedbythemovement,asonaplain,ofthefieldoftheobserver. In Wells'
machine a strangely immaterial metal-like bar serves as a transitive link between
the machine (as the physical embodiment and protective encapsulation of the
individual subject) and all other times. Consequently, the transitive bar functions
as a verb whichReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
translates the subject into the future or past, both ofwhich serve as predicate
objects, in essence defining the subject. Wells' Time Machine, therefore, defines
and functions through the logic o f the copula.The disguised use o f this
linguistic metaphor in organizing Time highlights the fundamental cognitive
dependence o f the conceptual structures o f time and language. Language works as a
form o f external memory. In this sense language and memory both transport
information through time. We use this memory as a means of actively re-shaping
elements o f our experience, including other people, into forms and relations that
allow for thesuccessofourgoals. Inthissenseweattempttore-
formulatethroughakindofviral infection, the internal state, the descriptions o f
the world and the goals embodied in these descriptions (goals are often understood
as ideal descriptions of self) of other people.If language is a form of memory,
then we should expect our memories to function
throughakindoflanguage(asystemofsymbolicrelations). Thisiscertainlytrueof Minsky's
K-Iines. K-lines wire together a set of agents active during an experience, and
thusformamemoryofthatexperience. Theconnectionsbetweenagentsvaryinstrength, forming
a hierarchy of levels. A K-line, to the degree that it links agents within such a
hierarchy of relevant levels, sketches a set of relations within a loose syntax.
Minsky organizes the formation o f these K-lines within "societies o f memory." New
K-lines are attached to the most recently active K-lines. When (Jack) (Fly) (Kite)
are connected by a new K-line, predicates, that is, the K-lines defining each o f
these terms, e.g. (Male) (Outside) (Young), are attached to the relevant agent,
e.g. (Jack). Because these older K- lines are used to describe the new elements, as
predicates, they are in effect nested withinReproduced with permission of the
the new K-line. IfK-lines are used to form "societies ofmemory", therefore, they
build syntactical trees. Minsky never addresses why the world should be categorized
in this way. Nor does he examine how such categories would be constructed so that
we could recognize them. What his model o f memory does demonstrate is the
temptation to describe ourselves and our biology within grammars built from our
language.Predication links Well's Time Machine to all possible times (the set o f
possible objects). Although K- lines set up a more complicated set o f relations
and associations, these relationship are organized in a rough equivalent o f
predication. The Time Machine works not only like parser, it reduces all
temporality to the form o f what we understand as memory.
Ourexperienceoftime,inspiteoftheroleofconsciousnessandmemoryin determining
continuity and particular expectations, is quite different. For Well's the content
of all possible moments is pre-determined and already established within the
synchronicplainon(orin)whichthemachinetravels. Oursenseoftime,however,and also
unlike the closed temporal-spatial loops described in Godel's solution ofEinstein's
gravitational field equations in General Relativity, is of a totalizing alteration
or change in the entire universe, where the content o f future moments is
understood as undetermined and therefore not yet real. In our experience there is a
logical distinction between change (a physical process) and Time (our construction
of this change into a form we can perceive). Time arises as an effect of our
phenomenal observation of a succession of changes, determined in relation to the
relative continuities of other objects or events, and in relation to the continuity
of the phenomenal frame through which we represent reality (what we call our
subjective consciousness).Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
14.3 Generatingthepresentfromlanguage "A Rose is a Rose is a Rose"To perceive time
we must represent or model it. Any such model must organize sensory input within a
temporal structure. Such a structure is difficult to imagine because the word
"structure" defines spatial relationships, and thus can only be used in a vague
metaphoricalsensewhenusedtoorganizetemporality. Whatwerecognizeastemporal structure
is really repetition (of the sort that orders and constructs music--which is the
formal art of structuring time in relation to sound).Human attempts to re-create a
continuous present rely on repetition in order to split the sound o f the word
(signifier) from its concept or meaning (signified and referent). In other words,
repetition dissolves the symbolic content of a word by erasing semantic difference.
As meaning is dissolved, the temporal dimension slows to nothing more than an
awareness of the progressive loss of meaning in the sentence. Our experience of
reading non-sense exposes a curious relation between our awareness of temporal
succession and language.A single image is not splendor. Dirty is yellow. A sign of
more in not mentioned. Apieceofcoffeeisnotadetainer.
Theresemblancetoyellowisdirtier and distincter. The clean mixture is whiter and not
coal color, never more coal color than altogether.Reproduced with permission of the
The sight of a reason, the same sight slighter, the sight of a simpler negative
answer, the same sore sounder, the intention to wishing, the same splendor, the
same furniture. (Stein, 463)Unlike some o f Lewis Carroll's nonsense lyrics, this
passage plays between sense and
nonsenseintheattempttoconstructwhatSteincalledacontinuouspresent. Whatwe apprehend
as sense defines a frame, a set of expectations, which the subsequent non-sense
dissolves. The failure ofthe frame to interpret the semantic content ofthe words
throws us into an interpretative loop. We interpret that loop as a failure to
progress beyond the immediate context.Language is not simply structured serially,
that is, it does not function through a
successionofwords.IfitdidStein'spassagewouldclearlymakesense. Languageis structured
through a series of nested domains. In a highly repetitive sentence, "Rose is a
Rose.. these nested domains (syntactical categories) collapse into a tautological
chain. In Stein's non-sense passage semantic meaning marks a stable moment (or
frame) which disintegratesintoindeterminacy,butstillwithinastablesyntax.
Theeffectistomodela mind capable o f formulating short-term predictions, but
incapable o f organizing the facts (the words) in order to satisfy these
predictions.Stein wants to think like a chimp. D. Premack, in his attempt to
evaluate the degree to which the chimpanzee has a theory of mind, formulates a
distinction between simple and complex states. Simple states are "hard-wired,
automatic and reflex- like, and encapsulated" (172). He defines these states as
"seeing, wanting, and expecting". The pathways determining each o f these (with
varying degrees o f complexity) are tied to directReproduced with permission of the
sensory input, such that their is little mediating control by the organism over
these states. Complex states, however, are highly mediated states in which some
level o f decision- making is required in order to determine the state. The
prototypical example is belief. Belief arises as a mediating and, some would say,
conscious response to particular forms ofdoubt. Premack distinguishes two forms
ofdoubt (and consequently ofbelief): doubt in the veracity o f sensory information
(epistemological doubt) and doubt in the information communicated by a member o f
one's group (fear o f deception).Epistemological doubt is countered by conscious
attempts to construct an external means of determining the truth of sensory input:
observation, experiment, analysis, reason, art, religion. Premack characterizes
epistemological doubt with three questions: "Do I really see X?" "Do I really want
X?" "Are my expectations well founded?" If we ignore the problem of their
linguistic form, these questions describe a critical process of categorization.
Epistemological doubt of this sort is predicated (and expresses or functions
through) a distinction between truth and falsity. In other words these questions,
defined by their use of "really" and "well-founded" require doubt to be in place in
order to be asked. They appear initially to be questions o f domain. These
questions are what I would call questions of syntax concerned about what belongs
where as what. In other words syntax defines a set o f domains that taken together
define the form and legitimacy of a particular string to function within language,
that is to be intelligible. Syntax, however and to what degrees of specificity it
is defined, constructs the possibility of determining legitimacy or, in relation to
our epistemological doubt, truth. Syntax implies an established semantics, just as
questioning the truth of X requires the possibility of falsity.Reproduced with
permission.582
falsity. Syntaxdeterminesthedomainoflegitimacyasameansofstructuringthe possibility
of doubt (or failure). Because a particular word might not be legitimate, syntax
divorces the criterion for truth from the content of the word. The specific form of
an entity is understood as variable and possibly false. This does not mean that a
grammarians strictdefinitionofsyntaxdeterminesthesenseofasentence.
Syntaxisitselfmuchmore fluidthancommonlysupposed.
Strictsyntacticalrulessimplydescribethecenterofa syntactical domain. One can still
make sense of words used within an incorrect syntax as long as they still reside
within the domain defining their relationship with other words (andthus its
legitimacy as a member of a meaningful string). Once a word, however, can no longer
be related to other words in a meaningful way, that word has left the syntactical
domain that determined its legitimacy (and thus its meaningfulness). Thus one can
see why a cognitive scientist like Schank argues for semantics over syntax. He
should be arguing,however, foramorebroaddefinitionofsyntax,asyntaxthatdetermines
relationships through the activation of semantic content within a particular domain
(a possiblesetofrelations). Schank'sscriptorframeisasyntacticalstructure,onethat
determines the legitimacy or meaningfulness of words by the establishment of a set
of possible meanings, albeit possible meanings determined by previous knowledge.
Belief as a form o f long-range prediction depends on a syntactical elaboration o f
the present in order to create the possibility of a future.The possibility of
Premark's second form of doubt is dependent on the what R. Seyfarth and D Cheney
call, in their study of meaning and language in Vervet monkeys, the attribution of
mental states "such as knowledge, beliefs, and desires to others" (126).Reproduced
permission.583
In their study they conclude that Vervet monkeys in spite of the character of three
specific calls and the different responses these calls cause in those who hear them
in warning of a snake as opposed to a martial eagle or a leopard do not have a
language because they cannot determine the difference between a knowledgeable
audience and an ignorant audience (127). They apparently cannot evaluate the
knowledge o f those around them, because their communication is not attempting to
change the mental state of their audience.
Itissimplyasignalactivatingalearnedresponse. Theattributionofamental state to
another seems to require the ability to choose. Making a choice (a kind ofthinking)
involves constructing a world, a frame, or a domain of relations organized
according to a particular grammar (a set of rules and values).Chimps make choices.
Do they then make conceptual worlds? In an experiment a female chimp was trained to
add and count. Part ofthe training procedure required the chimp to play a game
where two piles of candies were counted out. Whichever pile the chimp first point
to was given to another chimp sitting in front of her in a cage. The object of the
game was to get the most candies. Whenever the candies were counted out the chimp
invariably pointed at the larger pile, thus losing. When numbers written on cards
were substituted for the candies, however, the chimp was always able to point to
the smaller number, thus insuring that she would be rewarded with the larger number
of treats.One could speculate. When the chimp saw the food an instinctual grab/eat
rule (or agent)determinedherchoice.
Sheplayedthecandygameusingherinstinctualrules.She needed instead to nest the candy
game within the her instinctual game, by replacing the instinctual mechanism for
achieving her desire for the most food with the mechanismReproduced with permission
defined by the game. By encoding the "amounts" o f candy within a numerical domain
the relationship between the two piles can be determined without invoicing the
grab/eat rule. Thisinformationisnolongerstoredasanimagewithinthegrab/eatrule.
Thenumerical domain indicates the value of each number in relation to the other,
not in relation to the chimp or her desire to eat. The failure of any abstract
system to define this kind of personal relation requires that its values be
accessed and assessed from another domain and according to another grammar. In this
case, the chimp can then apply the rules o f the candy game to these "amounts" in
order to determine the winning choice.Any abstract system sets up a play between at
least two different systems or domains. This recursive interaction creates a kind o
f consciousness, because it creates the illusion o f free choice. This choice is
not in any sense free, it is simply the mediation o f one domain by another. The
chimp evaluates how to get food [an algorithm defined by CHOOSE THE MOST DESIRABLE
and THE MOST DESIRABLE IS THE MOST FOOD] through the algorithm of the candy game
[CHOOSE THE LEAST FIRST], The transcription of candies into number allows both of
these algorithms to function together.The three systems of relations in the
previous experiment are all defined as systems o f value. These systems o f value
are really systems o f meaning because they are sets o f relations. Semantic
meaning within any discourse is primarily the articulation of a
particularsetofrelations. Weassumethissetofrelationsisnotarbitrary. Thismeans they
are constructed according to a particular logic. This logic is a logic of
difference.The statement "x means y" requires at some level, although not
necessarily at the conceptual level Saussure suggests, that the notions "x" and "y"
be understood as "not z",Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
"not w". Even to say this, however, requires that the notion "x" be crystallized in
such a way that such a comparison is possible. How do we know that 'x' is not the
same as ly'? We know this because they sound different, or because their shapes are
different. Shape and sound serve as common denominators. Thus to speak o f
difference requires that "x" function within a realm of common terms or qualities,
which means a realm of pre- established possible relations and configurations. Thus
what I first called a logic of difference is a difference mediated by a
commonality. This common context is not given, but is constructed. (On a
fundamental level, however, the initial contexts would be created primarily out o f
the biological structures used to interpret our interactions with our environment).
Value is determined through differences expressed within a common context. A common
context means in relation to a binary descriptive system: between two similar
phonemes, between more and less, and so on. Values generated out ofthese metaphoric
matrices are re-coded into more complex systems o f relations. We can easily see
how this works in the chimp experiment. How can the chimp nest the rules o f the
candy game within its instinctual grab/eat game? Encoding the amount o f candy in
numbers created a domain of pure value organized around more and less. This
information was embedded in the world o f the candy game where the output o f the
algorithm CHOOSE THE LESS selects the lesser value. This value is eliminated and
the larger value is transferred into thedomainofthechimpsgrab/eatrule.
Ineachcasevalueisdeterminedbyhowtheeventis encoded within a system ofvalues. The
situation facing the chimp is successively translated into different conceptual
worlds, where the meaning o f that information isReproduced with permission of the
determined by the values (in this case simple algorithms) organizing the relations
within that world.Thus, thinking is a process ofworld-making. A Dutch psychologist,
de Groot, discovered that chess masters through a process o f implicit pruning do
not see bad moves. They act within or through a grammar or a domain defined
exclusively by good moves. They construct a conceptual world of good moves. This
world defines what they see: it defines the moves the chess master recognizes as
possible.How does someone determine which of the possible moves or relations is
correct, best, or relevant? This is too large a question to answer here. I can
suggest, however, how we determine the relevant from the irrelevant within a frame
or grammar in a general way. In an obvious way relevance is a function of
understanding how something functions within a frame or domain. Frames must be
extremely flexible to be able to handle the high degree of uncertainty and
complexity of our experience. If we re-define determining relevance as making a
choice we can make some progress. Choice arises through a kind of recursive nesting
of domains and grammars. The interaction of these domains and grammars selects
relationships from each that are integrated within a new domain and grammar, thus
constructing an alternate world. This world defines what is possible. One assumes
that at some level or in some world one is left with only a single possibility.
This choice (really an algorithm) is transported to higher levels o f organization
where it appears like we have made a conscious choice.Reproduced with permission of
14.4 A wink in time means twoBefore we can build a belief in the future, we must
build awareness. We can build a basic time detector by using difference detectors,
or what Minsky calls time-blinking:Any agent that is sensitive to changes in time
can also be used to detect differences. For whenever we expose such an agent, first
to a situation A and then to a situation B, any output from that agent will signify
some difference between A and B. (240)While time-blinking partially removes the
problem of comparing two inputs from different agents without requiring synchronous
and identical frames (a trick it does largely by having a temporary memory), it
does not explain how difference is translated into an ordered succession o f
moments. One could, however, easily input the recognition o f a perceptual
difference to a kind o f tape, as if marking a date or a second, which is then
advanced. Suchaprocedurewouldrecordsuccessivedifferences,whichcouldfunction like a
clock for human beings. It could never generate something like temporal experience
for a machine. By what process is temporal order perceived and organized such that
consciousness understands itself as the present? Do all the inputs that make up
consciousness run through a single agent (an agent dangerously close to a
homunculus) in
rapidsuccessioninorderthatwecanperceivedifferenceandcallthatdifferencetime? If not,
how is the information that our brain receives, processes and constructs, all at
different rates, constructed into a now? The formation of defined moments is a
process of constructing meaningful information. A moment, therefore, defines those
"differences that makeadifference."
Timeisaninformationstructurewithinwhichwefindourselves.Reproduced with permission
Thus our machine must generate representations o f its world in succession in which
it finds itself. It has to turn itselfinside out.14.5 "Be! Verb umprincipiant
through the trancitive spaces!"My machine lives in a world o f simple objects. As a
time machine it does not recognize objects as objects, but objecthood, as that
which can be noticed as something, which it perceives in what it considers a
partial instant o f time. It does not recognize the world or the environment, but
only something that triggers its optical apparatus as a somethingtobenoticed.
Itsopticalapparatushasalreadysimplifieditsphenomenalfield into this categorical
perception, which we can call the set o f objects. This information is sent to the
Optical (O) input agent which registers this information within a formally defined
phenomenal field. The machine can rcognize separate example of objecthood within a
range from 1 to 5. This phenomenal field is defined by a set o f switches (5) that
representanobjectbybeingonandrepresentnoobjectbybeingoff. Thusthemachine optical
apparatus can immediately register up to 5 objects. An initial input, N l, once it
has set these switches (once the optical information is represented as an internal
state), is transferred to an Optical analyzer agent where it again sets a similar
set of switches. If the next input (N2) to the Optical input agent resets the
switches, it is registered as a different moment and is thus sent on to O
difference detector. The difference detector records that adifferencehasoccured.
IfitsinformationisidenticaltoNl,nochangeofstatetakes place. Because our machine has
only one sensory input at this point, the failure to registerReproduced with
permission.589
difference is understood as non time; the first moment "continues" because the
first state continues.Once Nl has reset the difference detector, indicating a
different moment registered as a change o f state, it enters a feedback loop. The
detector's switches are then immediately reset by N2 (if there is an N2). N2 is
similarly sent on a feedback loop but at twice the rate. Immediately after N2
resets the difference detector, N l resets it again.This difference is converted
into a value indicating the difference between these two states (degree o f
change). The second cycle resets the detector to N2, before the next signal from O
input is received.Although it is not necessary to separate the process of detecting
change from that of determining the degree of change, their functional difference
allows us to split the presentintotwophenomenalelementsorinteractingmodels:
anexperientialmodelandan evaluatory process. The difference detector, as the second
element, serves as a kind of short-term memory within the phenomenal experience. It
has, however, changed the nature o f the information perceived by the machine. Both
kinds o f information determine the nature o f the present. It is the detector's
separation from the initial model o f changethat allows the machine (to the degree
that it is defined by its internal processes) to be aware of change. This means
that the difference detector makes change, as defined by the 0 input agent,
meaningful. The moment is actually not defined by any single state but by two
states defined in relation to each other, embedded within the degree o f difference
determined by the difference detector (so that Nl and N2 will be stored together as
PI and P2). The difference detector, however, is inadequate for any short term
memory. WeReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
need a memory that encodes the consciousness o f the machine, and that requires
that the information from both agents be stored. Both Nl and N2 are sent into a
single short term memory unit (they are connected by a simple K-line). This unit is
organized within short term memory (STM) according to two parameters: the ordered
received (representing temporal succession) and degree of difference.. Short term
memory (STM) stores both our experience o f change (suitably simplified) and a
particular fact about these experiences.
Thesearenotidenticalbitsofinformation.Theanalyzerdeterminesthe relevant facts for
the time machine. Given the formally defined character of the phenomenal field,
this information can be used to actually structure STM. (There are 10possible
values 1 through 5 and -1 through -5 defined in relation to the second state (N2):
there is no O, o f course)Optical Difference Machir (N2 Input State)Difference Valu
(fact)N1 = P1Optical Inupt Agent (Change detector)Optical Difference Detector
without permission.Experiential OrderShort Term Memory591
This is, ofcourse, not a model ofhuman perception. We have eliminated some ofthe
criticalproblemsinconstructingamodelofoursenseoftime. Theworldandthe
informationfromthatworldisimmeasurablysimplified. Inmymachine,theformal continuity
between moments is built into the form in which the sensory input is represented (a
defined set o f switches). With only one kind o f sensory information (number of
objects), we do not have the problem of synchronizing and integrating the
information from different senses (and their processing agents within the brain).
The initial formation o f the moment is defined by the limit inherent within the
speed by which the optical apparatus can convert its sensory input into a set o f
objects. Changes that take placeata
ratefasterthanthemachine'sphysicalabilitytorecognizeasetofobjectsare simply not
registered.14.6 The logic of short-term predictionIf my machine can recognize
patterns, such that the number of objects defined in one moment is always followed
by a defined number in another moment, it can make short-term predictions. Once a
pattern has been established, it can be recalled and run through a memory recall
agent (another difference detector) at a rate faster than the information processed
by the Optical agent. I will not spend much time constructing the mechanics of such
a process. What is important in this problem is less the way in which this
information is stored, than in the syntactical logic it necessarily generates. The
logic here is simple: if x (a certain number of objects) is registered it will be
followd by yReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
(another number ofobjects). Such predictions can, ofcourse, only happen ifthere is
a pattern to be recognized.Initially Short Term Memory (STM) is evaluated to
determine a match with the initial optical input (Nl). If a match is found (through
difference detectors attached to each memory slot), then the entire temporal unit,
containing two states (PI, P2; remember PI) is transferred to the Memory Recall
Agent. Nl and PI are processed as identical. The P2 state will not have an initial
correlate state (it is run before N2). Because a prediction is based on
understanding P2 as if it were N2, P2 must be understood as an N,butnotastherealN2.
Consequently,anysuchpredictionsrequireasymboliceconomy allowing for the conversion
of Px into *Nx (where * indicates this input has an ontological claim equal in
value but different in kind). The creation of an Nx state represents the creation
of a temporal syntax. In order for the correlation of P2 with Nx to function as an
expectation of N2, the machine must be able to act (or change its state as with
Pavlov's dogs) on the basis of this correlation.In Pavlov's bell experiment a
similar temporal logic is manipulated. The equation o f food = salivate is re-wired
to bell = salivate and is therefore based on an associated equivalence between food
and bell. This equivalence, however, does not take place within a synchronic plane.
It works because the sound of the bell recalls an established pattern recorded in
memory. The P2 state of food following the PI state of the bell is understood
asthesameasanNstate. Asymbolicinterchangetakesplacebetweenthepresentandthe future
(patterned on a previously established relationship). A structural relationship has
been established between these two diachronic states, which allows the content o f
one state (the bell) to stand for the content of the other (food).Predictions based
on short term memory are stimulus dependent. They disappear as soon as the
environmental stimulus that suggested them disappears. They define only a
temporaryandunstablefuture. Amachinewithonlythiskindofmemorycouldnot engage in any
long term planning. Such plans require an ability to invoke the possibility of the
future on command, as well as much more complex reasoning and creative modeling.
14.7 The continuous future: hearing of and speaidng in the new world orderThe Time
Machine's world is now a rectangular plane, on which, at some unspecified but
unreachable distance, a number o f objects flash in and out o f existence. This
plane is divided into a series of parallel districts (wide strips). The number of
objects ineachdistrictchangeindependentlyofthenumberofobjectsinotherdistricts. No
machine, o f which now their are many, can see the objects (the number o f objects)
in a district other than the one it is in. The machines can move to other
districts. To prevent any machine from becoming a part ofthe object field ofanother
machine, all machines will move along the same line and can move around each other
if one machine is in the way of another. (The eyes move to the side o f the
machines head. The machines bump into other machines and then move around them; I
will not include this perception and response
withinmymodelinghereforavarietyofreasons. Thinkofthisbumpingandmovmentas a function
o f the machine autonomic nervous system)(see Figure A).Reproduced with permission
Figure AObject FieldOOObject FieldObject FieldDistrictsFor our machine to survive
in this world it will need, in addition to the optical system (0 input; O diffemce
detector; memory, etc.), a vocal generator (V) an auditory sytem (A) and more
complex memory and recognition processing. A picture o f these systems, while
confusing in its details, at least gives a sense ofthe increase in complexity that
we need to make this simple world meaningful in even the smallest degree (Figure
B):Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
prohibited without permission.achin595
14.8 Another blueprint of time Figure Binput SelfPattern RecognizerA STM(no match)
A/O lvalue tQLDifference DetectorNSTM (match)InputO Diffe rence Detec or0 STIlemo
jecalLA/O LTM14.9 Mental imperialism: to make the world the mindThe goal o f the
machines in this world is to find and cohabitant with another machine within its
district through the recognition of its vocalization of its perception of
thenumberofobjectswithinthedistrictitfindsitself. Thismeansamachineistryingto
recognize that another machine 'exists' within the first machine's 'time-world.' A
machine will recognize another machine as an external expression o f its own
temporal perception o f its time-world. Its time-world becomes its awn time-world
by beingReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
prohibited without permission.0 LTM (Patterns)596
externalized (recognized) as an external limit (the other machine) o f its own
internal perceptions (in other,words it orients itself toward the world as if that
world is both its world (defined by succession) and not its world (marked by its
recognition o f another machine as another machine within its world).A machine will
now have a vocalizing agent (V) through which it will express the degree of change
between two moments. This machine talks time. This vocalizing agent will receive
this information from the O Difference Detector ater every five machine moments.In
order to hear these vocalizations, each machine will also have an auditory agent
(A). Topreventconfusingthemachine'sownvoicewithanother's,thevocalizingagent will
signal the auditory agent that it is speaking. Confirmation that a voice is the
machines own can be confirmed using two methods. Because the distance between the
vocalizing agent and the auditory agent is always the same, the rate at which the A
agent receives an input after it receives the signal from V will always be the
same. In addition the signal from V will also initialize the auditory agent at the
specific value to be vocalized and thus the auditory agent can function as a
difference machine where the difference between input and initial state should be
0. This information is shunted into its own special memory.14.10 Time and the other
The auditory agent will have a different causal history, or in terms of my temporal
machines, a different time-scale than the Optical agent. Organic brains receive
information from their sensory inputs at different rates depending on the distance
from the brain to theReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
sensory receptor, the distance between processing agents in the brain, and the
different rates at which these receptors and agents work. The more complex the
sensory model of the world, the more complex the temporal model generated from each
sense. Such complexityrequiresmediation.
Inmymachine,sensoryconflictarisesfromthedifferent rates and content of the
information processed by the O and A Agents. The mediation between these agents is
accomplished by constructing a common structure in which the differences in their
content can be expressed independently o f each other.The auditory agent in the
machine will construct a short-term memory using a difference evaluator, similar to
the O Difference Detector. Because the information received by A is already
mediated by the optical agent, it cannot be used to directly model the number of
objects in the external world. This auditory information describes the internal
state of other machines. The Auditory Agent, therefore, will evaluate differences
between its auditory inputs (between machines) only in order to develop a time
scale for its auditory perception. (In a more advanced machine it would be possible
to begin to determine which inputs originate from the same machine). The machine
has two sensory inputs.
Twoidenticalauditoryinputswillnotbemistakenforasinglemomentunlesssuch an identity
occurs "simultaneously" at O and A. These two different forms o f sensory input
require the machine to construct its own internal representation o f time in order
to mediate the differences, conflicts, and confusions between the auditory and
optical time- scales. Because the auditory input communicates the degree of change
perceived by what we know is another machine, this information must be evaluated in
relation to the degreeo f optical change perceived by the listening machine. Unlike
the O Agent, the A Agent isReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
supported by another more fundamental agent that batches together two auditory
states into a single auditory moment. The A Agent we are constructing interprets
these momentsasmeaningfulpackagesofsound. Whymeaningful? Meaningisusedhereonly to
indicate that these inputs do not refer to the same thing as a machine's initial
optical input, but must be related to the information generated from its own
Optical Difference Detector.The difference values generated from its Auditory agent
can have little sense to our machine. If we first imagine the machine's auditory
sense without reference to its
alreadyestablishedopticalsense,webegintounderstandtheconfusion. Itcanhear
information communicated from beyond its own district. It has no idea how many
machines it can hear nor can it tell the difference between one machine or another
(all machine voices are identical and it senses are not refined enough to
distinguish between thedistanceofvoiceexceptwhentheyareagoodnumberofdistrictsaway).
This auditory information can only be used to define a series o f random
differences marking the changes that they themselves cause in the auditory
perception apparatus of our machine: an auditory time-scale or map.If, however,
these auditory inputs can be compared with the vocalizations of our machine, or
even better with the values generated from the Optical Difference Detector, this
auditory information no longer simply serves to define a time-scale in which it is
the difference between inputs, and not their content, which carries information..
The machine will test all o f its O short term memory slots (with priority given to
the most recent). Once it finds a match (again through a difference test), it will
wait for 5 moments in orderReproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
to retest the match, which will have to match not only in value but also in the O
memory slot it is found. This means that a test will take at least as long as 5
moments, slow but necessary if a district is as wide as the distance it takes sound
to travel for 5 machine moments(itmightbefilledwithsomedensegasorevenwater).
Thisretestingwillalso reduce the problem o f false matches (where a degree o f
change value o f +2 could be obtained by a 5 moment followed by a 3 moment and a 3
moment followed by a 1 moment). It is, o f course, not even necessary that a real
match, from our perspective, take place.
Itisenoughthatitseemslikeamatchtothemachines(althoughanyfalsematch
willdissolvefairlyquickly. Itisunlikelygiventhenumberofpossiblecombinationsinour 5
object system that the difference ratio between moments would remain the same in
twodifferent districts for more than 3 moments). The machine edits out A inputs
different from its own internal state as "noise" once a match has been discovered.
14.11 Looking for Mr. GoodmachineIf a machine fails to find an auditory match with
its own O Difference Detectorafter 3 vocalizations ( in order to give machines
which have not yet vocalized but are within the same district time to communicate
with this other machine before it moves), it moves the distance possible in 3
moments, and then trumpets its degree o f change value. (The machine has eyes on
the sides o f its head so that it can see, and thus function within theprimaltime-
scalethatdeterminesitsmomentsanditsrateofvocalization). Ifit processes a match in
transit, the machine will stop and retest the match. If it finds a match then it
doesn't move. Both machines are in the same district and, therefore, happiness!
Once a positive match has been made three things will happen. First, a pattern
detector will correlate a signal from the Optical Difference Detector sent every
Optical moment with its matched auditory input. It will discover that the match
happens every 5 moments. Second, the correlated auditory and optical information is
stored in Auditory/Optical Long-Term Memory (A/O LTM). Third, a signal is sent from
theA/O mediating agent to V in order to re-initialize the timing for vocalizations
to match the vocalizationsofthemachinethatiswithinthedistrict.
(Iamignoringthecaseofmore than one machine in the district, although the districts
are large enough to accommodate more than one machine). At the Vocalizing Agent a
difference detector is installed in order to detect the change from the previous
vocalizing timing. This information is then sent to A/O LTM. The A/O LTM,
therefore, is organized as a series of bifurcated units representing an Auditory
value and an equal Optical value within the domain marked by the change in
vocalization timing.14.12 Meta-temporal identities: the modeling of others as
syntaxThe A/O Evaluator has constructed a meta-temporal identity within LTM, an
identity (not yet an entity) that organizes temporal information (two levels of
abstraction above the initial perception of change), instead of representing
particular temporal states. The A/O Evaluator has integrated the O agent and A
agent, and in so doing has created a more abstract and mediated information
structure. The information in the A/O LTM, because it is distinguished from the
machine's own vocalizations, represents the external world. This is an external
world, however, that includes representations of what theReproduced with permission
machine recognizes as internal states. By matching A input with its own phenomenal
perception the machine models itself within itself by modeling another machine
(although the machine understands this as simply a sensory input). As a model for
humans, this describes consciousness as a means ofconstructing a model ofthe minds
ofother humans in order to predict their actions and manipulate them.It is not
quite so simple, however, to ascribe this A input to another machine when
itisimpossibleforonemachinetoidentifyanotherasthesourceofthisinput. The machine
must first recognize its internal state, the information generated by A, V, and O,
as its own internal state. In my machine self-realization emerges from the
synchronization o f the machine's vocalization with the vocalization represented by
the matched auditory input. This synchronization is a kind of internal state
change, caused, however, by an external stimulus. Because the machine is able to
separate out its own vocalization, it can distinguish between I and not-I in
relation to this vocalization and its recognition as a vocalization generated from
its optical system. By matching the auditory input with its O Evaluator input it
constructs an informational object that represents the not-I as the I, and the I as
a not-I. This information, the meta-temporal identity, can have not meaningful
significance, however, before it is used in some control function.The short-term
memories generated by those auditory inputs that do not match the machine's own
degree o f change value have little significance, until the matched inputs cease.
Once this happens, there is no longer an internal representation o f the temporal
history o f the A agent. It is critical for our objective o f constructing a
temporal syntax o f thefuturethatthisnothappen.
WhilesuchacontinuoushistorydoesnottakeplaceinourReproduced with permission of the
brains, an analogous history is written in our external representations of time.
The earliest o f these are the notations and sticks and bones, identified by
Marshack, marking the lunar cycle. There are curious parallels between these 35,000
year old markings and the internal symbolic economy ofthe machine. These markings
are a record ofexperimental observations. One cannot imagine a use for them unless
their exists a cultural logic, supported by long-term prediction and planning, into
which the notations fit. Once could imagine something like, "Every other lunar
cycle, at the first quarter moon and the final new moon, we will do X." These
markings become signals both of time and correlated human activity. The need to
determine events through this kind of record keeping suggests a complicated social
organization that requires some objective form of organizing its activities, and
which supports a wide variety of cultural activities (where questions of correct
timing might cause conflict without an "objective" time map).The markings, however,
are non-arithmetic. This means the lunar cycle is not defined by a number o f days
(nor are any o f the phases), but by grouping markings in a general pattern. Thus
the number of days may vary between the full and half moon in any month (depending
on the observations of the scribe), but their basic temporal relationship
remainsthesame. ThiskindofgroupingissimilartothecreationofdomainswithinA/O LTM.
Thus the regularity of the moon changes is analogous to the less regular, but still
periodic, vocal timing changes. In the human mind the creation of organizing
syntactical domains is largely a social phenomena, and thus needs to be
externalized. Because my machines only form very simple social groups, these
structures cannot be supported by culture.Reproduced with permission of the
The ability to perform this kind o f representational abstraction requires the same
kind o f ability to derive form from particular content that I am trying to build
into the Time Machine. For early humans, a single mark stands for the idea, the
concept of a unit relative to the lunar cylce, and not its particular content
(except to the degree that an event or action is meaningful in relation to the
logic of the notational series as a whole).Similarly the grouping o f these units,
because they lose the particularity o f their content, can be used to "mean" a
particular lunar period. These kinds of representational systems are symbolic
languages, where markings, like words, are generalized in their meanings (word less
so than the marks for days) so that they can be exchanged and organized within
ameta-structurenotoverwhelmedbydetail. Symbolizationisaprocessofsimplification that
allows an event to be reduced to a particular representation that can then be used
to form other meaningful statements. All units within these lunar calendars must be
relatively identical, in the way that words define events in relation to pre-
established categories of meaning.For our machine a continuous representation of
time will be used, like it was in early human bone markings, to define a continuous
temporal structure in which all machine activity can take place. If the A input
ceases to match the O Evaluator values, the A unmatched STM is shunted and nested
within the A/O LTM. By nesting I mean the informational structure generated in the
A unmatched STM is translated into the language, the form, of the A/O LTM. The A
unmatched STM provides a temporal link
betweentheendingofonemachinematchtothebeginningofanother. Theinformationit stores
in A/O LTM must fit within the parameters previously set up to accommodate the
matched information. The unmatched information (e.g. a difference o f -3 between
the machines internal Optical difference and its auditory input) has no meaning in
relation to thematcheddifferencevaluesof0,unlesssimplytoindicatematchorunmatched.
This kind o f simplification, or abstraction, is necessary if the unmatched STM is
to function in relationtoA/OLTM.
Theeffectofsuchanesting,therefore,istoignorethecontentof the Auditory (A) unmatched
STM, and simply use this information to mark the primary temporal units constructed
in the Optical Agent. The structure of A unmatched STM is used to augment and
continue the structure ofAJO LTM.. Once this is accomplished, the A/O LTM can be
understood as a continuous, simplified representation, through external
surrogates,oftheinternal temporalstructureofthemachine.Because the A input and O
input values are correlated with each other, their content is in effect erased.
Because each memory slot in A/O LTM encodes so little information, it becomes in
effect a series o f marks which are themselves marked by the change in vocal
timing. Sensory input is organized within a structure generated in relation to an
internal state change. The A/O LTM models both external and internal time within
asinglestructure. Evenmoresignificantlythelevelofabstractionoftheinformationused by
the A/O Evaluator has allowed the creation of a model of the structure of time
divorced from its content (defined in relation to a unit o f difference, not an
instant in time). Our problem now is to figure out how to use this structure.14.13
Negative entropyReproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
The A/O LTM gives our machine the ability to make a long range prediction. We must
assume that at least one machine can outlive a number of its matches. If so, the
only pattern a memory analyzer o f A/O LTM could identify would be that every vocal
synchronization change will be followed by another change after a period o f time.
Because the content of the A/O LTM is so poor, if a change in vocal synchrony
occurs and recalls the memory of past changes (that is, the pattern of such
changes), it will recall the temporal structure embodied in the LTM. Thus, whenever
a new match occurs a long-range prediction would be possible: this vocal change
will be followed by a series of differences (temporal units) which will themselves
end in a new vocal timing change.The structure supporting this prediction (the
moments represented by the O DifferenceDetector) will be in place until this
expectation (the next vocal timing change) has been met, at which point it will
begin again. Attached to the A/O Evaluator will be a memory recall agent that will
work in parallel with the Evaluator, but will also organize both A and O input
within the temporal structure imported from the A/O LTM. We have a future.14.14 Re-
building ourselves in the otherThis leaves us with two problems however. How can we
integrate the otherperceptual, evaluatory, and memory agents into this structure?
And what is the significance o f the two states (match and unmatched) within the
temporal series in the A/O LTM?The notion of the future, dependent as it is on a
society of machines (identical in everything but life-span), requires a society of
different sensory agents. Is it necessary,Reproduced with permission of the
however, to integrate the O LTM, with its patterns and short-term predictions,
within the long-term future of A/O agent? If our machine receives optical
information that triggers a short-term prediction, we might want this to signal the
A/O Evaluator. But the A/O agent could not understand this kind of pattern (between
numbers of objects). Such a pattern would not be reflected in its degree of change
information. The only patterns it could recognize, other than the change in vocal
synchronization, is the shift from its shunting of matched to unmatched information
to LTM and a correlation between a matched auditory
inputandeveryfivesignalsfromtheOpticalDifferenceDetector. IftheAagentcould activate
a pattern recognition agent to evaluate the unmatched A STM that would be sensitive
to more abstract patterns o f difference (every degree o f change 2 is followed by
a degree o f change 4), and if we pretend that these patterns are present in some
districts, then our two memory structures could be integrated easily by running
them both throughthe same memory recall agent. The existence o f such patterns in
the machine world would indeed be convenient, but then so is the bipolar structure
of water.We have three sub-agents, constituting three internal time scales, not
fully exploited in modeling time: the (1)V Difference Detector indicating a change
in vocal timing, the (2) A/O Evaluator's awareness that every match happens after 5
optical moments, and the (3) A/O Evaluator's (one o f its internal agents) ability
to detect the shift from matched to unmatched outputs to memory. (1) and (3)
constitute long-term regularities, while (2) is a short-term prediction that can
act as the structural content organizing the temporal structure enabling long-term
predictions.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
The machine's change in (1) vocal timing finds its analogue in the death o f the
external matched signal: the first registers as an internal change; the second as
an external change. We still do not know if our machine understands this as the
death o f its machine mate. An existential understanding ofthe loss ofthe matching
voice would require (ifwe ignore the lack o f a mammalian brain, or some might say
any brain) an analogic equivalence between the A/O Evaluator shift to unmatched
memory output and the death o f itself. It seems unlikely that a machine without a
more developed symbolic life couldunderstand this loss. The predictive power of
this kind of system, however, remains stimulus dependent. When the stimulus
vanishes, the future disappears.14.15 ThepursuitofdeathIf we could make a higher
level analyzing agent to determine and chart the larger patterns of change in A/O
LTM [(3): matched to unmatched], we might be able to stimulate the machine into a
weak awareness of the subjectivity of another machine encoded in the A/O LTMs meta-
temporal identity. The A/O Evaluator sends a signal tothis agent when the shift
from matched to unmatched occurs, and this signal causes this Pattern Recognizer to
recall previous shifts and their defining vocal timing domains. The Pattern
Recognizer could construct an information structure that charts the internal state
changes against the representation o f catastrophic loss o f the external matching
voice.The information such a chart could encode is rather simple, and the
prediction that follows even simpler: every vocal timing change will be followed
not only by another, but also by the loss ofthe not-I representation. Because the
representation ofthe not-I is used towith permission of the copyright owner.
determine the actions o f the machine (it stays and observers), its loss results in
a change in action (the machine now moves). Before moving can be a form o f
mourning, it must also representalossofbeingforthemachine. Ifweremovethemachine's
eyesonthesideof its head, it will lose its primary temporal portal. It will still
have its auditory input (and STM) by which it can chart a different temporal order,
but the loss of this primary information will be recorded with the shift from
matched to unmatched in the A/O LTM and will be noted by the A/O LTM Evaluator.
This sensory loss, and the time/ memory scale it constructs, can stand for, can
symbolize, the loss o f the external voice and the change in vocal timing. The
prediction that a loss o f the external voice will necessarily follow a change in
the machine's own vocal timing will also be tied to another internaleffect:
thecommandtomoveanditssubsequenttemporarylossofsightandthetime- scale that sight
generates. This causal structure (Cause [external loss] and Effect [internal loss])
mirrors the vocal timing change and is nested within the basic structure generated
from that timing change. Our sense o f the future is growing more complex.14.16
Learning from the futureThe bifurcation o f the memory and predicative domain
defined and signaled by thevocal timing change sets up a meta-time scale at which
level internal symbolic exchanges begin to make some kind o f sense. The O agent
wants to be able to predict when it will fail, and when it's short-term predictions
will be irrelevant, while the A/O wants to be able to predict when it will have to
shift its memory output from matched to unmatched. Our machine could not discover
such detailed information, nor could these agents as they nowReproduced with
permission.609
stand actually want anything. They would first have to need this information as a
means to act. But what is important here is the conceptual problem this presents.
For the Optical Agent the loss of the external voice could stand for its loss o f
sight, and because it happens prior to its effect, it could serve as a short-term
prediction (generated out of a long-term prediction structure). This represents an
internal symbolic communication, where one loss can stand for another. The signal
itselfwould go from the A/O Evaluator to the O Agent. This signal is not, however,
caused by an algorithm: if shift to unmatched output, send a signal to O that loss
of sight is imminent. The meaning ofthe
shifttounmatchedoutputisdeterminedbytheA/OLTMPattern. Itconcludesfrom previous
patterns that the shift means a loss o f sight. This is a conclusion based on an
internal analysis (abstraction) from a lower level abstraction (A/O LTM) which is
in turngenerated from lower level sensory modeling. This is not the most elegant of
control structures (but neither is much of our learning compared to "lower"
animals: human weavingcomparedwithspiderweaving).
Ithastheadvantage,however,ofmakingall predictions a function ofmemory (they are
learned), and not of pre-programming.14.17 Inside a Chinese box: when structure
becomes content within larger structuresA matched memory state (any input of value
0) within the A/O LTM, re- interpreted in terms o f the time scale generated from
the Optical Agent, stands for 5 Optical moments. If a match has been found, then
every five O moments will result in a matched input to A/O LTM. The Pattern
Recognizer attached to A/O EvaluatorReproduced with permission of the copyright
functions as a symbolic catalyst linking the two time scales. The Pattern
Recognizer has the power to include in any memory state within A/O LTM a
representation of the 5 O moments.
(Unfortunately,ourmachineistoosimpletoneedthiskindofsymbolic transfer. Without this
need and use all one can say is this machine has the conceptual structure that
could allow this integration o f two time-scales as a form o f its temporal
consciousness).14.18 The I as the not-I: using the future to build other machines
Things are not so easy for the A/O LTM Pattern Recognizer (not to be confusedwith
the A/O Evaluator's Pattern Recognizer). It can learn to expect the loss of the
matched input, but not when, except to the degree that it can know it will happen
before the next vocal timing change and before the next loss of sight. In fact the
initializing vocal change and the loss of sight define the domain of the matched
memory. At the level of abstraction found in the A/O LTM Pattern Recognizer this is
enough information to constructourmeta-temporalidentityinexistentialterms:
adomaindefinedbytwo internal state changes and consisting of a model of internal
perceptual states, but which arenotthoseperceptualstates.
Thelossofsightcanstandforthelossofthisdomain. A feedback loop from the A/O LTM
Pattern Recognizer could signal the loss of the matched domain to the A/O
Evaluator, and thus eliminate the previous hard-wire instruction to shift its
output to LTM when it no longer computes a match between A inputandOinput.
ThetranslationofauditoryinformationintoalanguagetheOagent can understand ("you will
lose sight"), and the reverse translation ("you must shift toReproduced with
permission.611
unmatched memory"), in spite ofthe physical improbabilities, constructs the
symbolic structure that allows for vocal timing changes to stand for a future state
o f the machine. Because this state is in the future, it is a not-I. Because this
state, while recognized as the representation of the machine's internal state, is
built from and also represents an external input, it is a not-I. It is easy for the
machine to recognize itself in the auditory external input (the not-I as I). But
much more difficult to recognize the I as a not-I. The future provides the
"distance", the abstraction that allows the I (the internal state of the machine)
to function as a not-I equivalent to the not-I it already recognizes as a
representation of itself. Thus, the machine cannot quite recognize the death of the
other machine, but it can recognize the loss o f the external auditory signal that
it uses to model its own internal state with the new and different life (internal
state) the future offers it. It can believe in the possibility of the future.This
is kind of self-deception, used like fiction, to jump into the possibilities that
logic cannot capture. It makes the machine what Stanislaw Lem might call a self-
inductingmachine. WhenErgtheSelf-Inductorwounduptheclockprincesswiththekey to her
life, stolen by a terrible human paleface, he had to play with time (and make up
stories) in order to hide the fact that he had simply fabricated a new key instead
of pursuing the mad human through space. Our machine builds (or represents) its
world, including other machines, within a hierarchy of abstractions, in order to
establish the analogic connections that will allow it to identify (self-induct)
itself with an other by self- inducting itself into the future not as itself, but
as the not-I represented in A/O LTM.Reproduced with permission of the copyright
Our machine builds a temporal map in order to make long term predictions. The
Optical memory recall Agent can be nested within the A/O LTM recall Agent, thus
integrating both time-scales within a single time sense. This is possible because
the temporal structure that the A/O LTM Recall Agent remembers is both continually
active anddevoidofanycontent. Eachmomentissimplyastructuralmark,and,becauseitis
defined by degree o f change values, it recognizes not single phenomenal states,
but the dynamic two state moments stored in O STM and O LTM.In a more complex
organism like human beings, however, this future structure, built out of internal
changes caused by external inputs that simultaneously represent an other and the
self (that is, there is a distinction between other and self, but the other can
sometimes be used to represent the self), can abstract others to the point that
they can stand for oneselfnot only in the future possibilities of life, but in the
future possibilities of death.
Outofthisallculture,includingtechnologyandlanguageisbuilt.1This exercise can seem
as a conceptual counterpoint to Heidegger's analytic description of our being
towardthefutureinBeingandTime.
Iamlookingatdifferentwaysinwhichbeing(orbecoming)canbe described.
Iamnottryingtodescribebecomingatallhere. Rathermymachinesaremeanttofunctionas such
a description.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further
Epilogue: But what have I denied the existence of?I claimed earlier that my
machine(s) would serve as an allegory about how ontological limits describe ways
ofmaking sense through the process ofbuilding. In what way are these machine(s)
allegories? Commonly, an allegory is an ordered set o f relations
withwhichorintowhichatextorsituationiscorrelatedortranslated. Inthissense
allegories are applied. Such applications are fraught with dangers and confusions.
A possible interpretation is not always probable. Furthermore the application o f
an allegory can confuse the interpretive relations within the allegory with a
causal explanation of events or histories (e.g. Freud or many political
allegories). My machine allegories are very different. In fact in themselves they
are not meant as allegories at all. The process of making them, o f correlating
aspects o f my experience o f the world in relation to a clear set of ontological
limits should be understood as allegorical. I am not writing an allegory of things
or o f the world these things inhabit but an allegory o f the making o f these
things and their world. The allegory does not have content, but the process of
making the machine(s)does.
Thisisanallegoricalprocessinwhichtheengineeringlimitsconfronted in building the
machines opens the world as a system o f limits, organized aroundcausation, but
directed at removing black boxes (homunculus or God or soul or the unconscious).
Suchremovalcreatesanallegoryoflimitswithinwhichwebuildaspectsof sense as a way o f
orienting ourselves within the world and or experience.Reproduced with permission
My machines have few places to go, confined as they are to their world, but they
haveawhentogointoorremainwithin. Thiswhenisasyntaxwithaverysimple semantics. Their
processing builds a temporal envelope whose surface is constructed through the
mutual correlation of a machine's own actions (vocalization) with its recognition o
f another and with the limits o f the world (not to mention the perversity o f its
creator). In many ways the construction o f a similar envelope has been the project
o f this dissertation. I have attempted to construct a context within a set of
texts in order to make visible the ways in which our negotiations within and
towards sense and nonsense generate temporallimits.
Howweinhabit'I'and'our'expressesourinvolvementinlanguageat the level o f symbolic
functioning that confuses the future and the present (time) and
meaningandtheword(grammar). Wefunctionasandwithinfragmentsoftimeand language
through which we expose and disguise the limits of how we are, not just what orwho
we are.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction
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