Tractatus Pangrammaticus [6.124]

Logical propositions describe the scaffolding of the world, or rather they set it forth. They are not 'about' anything.

This is my translation of the first two sentences of proposition 6.124 of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. My dissatisfaction with the Pears & McGuinness translation, which runs,

The propositions of logic describe the scaffolding of the world, or rather they represent it. They have no 'subject-matter',

stems in part from its use of "they represent it" for "sie stellen es dar", which, like the standard rendering of "übersichtliche Darstellung" as "perspicuous representation" smuggles the concept of representation (normally "Vorstellung") in for "Darstellung", which should really read "presentation" (the Miles/Rhees translation of the Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough gets this right, by the way) and in part from the rendering of "'handeln' von nichts" as "have no 'subject-matter'", instead of the much more literal and colloquial "are not 'about' anything".

We now pangrammatically replace "world" with "history", "logical" with "pathetic", "describe" with "prescribe" and the impersonal "anything" with the personal "anyone". Giving us,

Pathetic propositions prescribe the scaffolding of history, or rather they set it forth. They are not 'about' anyone.

But this is not quite enough. I want to suggest that presentation is to logic what resentment is to passion. (Please try not to understand that too quickly.) Now, in German, "nachtragend" means "resentful" because "nach" means "against" and "tragen" means "to carry". Thus,

Pathetic propositions prescribe the scaffolding of history, or rather they hold it against. They are not 'about' anyone.

I want also to call logical propositions "(philosophical) remarks", and pathetic propositions "(poetic) strophes". So we now have,

Remarks describe the scaffolding of the world, or rather they present it. They are not 'about' anything.

Strophes prescribe the scaffolding of history, or rather they resent it. They are not 'about' anyone.

(For an early version of this idea, see Jay Thomas' Bad with Titles, which has the virtue of linking it to Gary Norris' reading of Emerson's "Circles": "He claps his wings to the sides of all the solid old lumber of the world." I took the liberty of associating Emerson's lumber with Wittgenstein's scaffolding, for obvious reasons.)

Unprepared Paper

In my first post this year I said of Josef Albers that "his colour studies depended on the arrangement of colour samples that were not prepared (indeed, unprepared) for the study of colour interactions. Ordinary colour." Albers believed that not only should we not use paints in the study of colour, we should not use "prepared paper sets representing specific color systems." Rather, we should arrange colour samples gathered in the working environment of colour: "waste strips found at printers and bookbinders; collections of samples of packing papers, of wrapping and bag papers, of cover and decoration papers . . . cutouts from magazines, from advertisements and illustrations, from posters, wallpapers, paint samples, and from catalogues . . ."

The analogue of this approach in poetry is called Flarf. Instead of using a prepared lexicon of poetic diction, the poet collects waste strips and cutouts from the working environment of emotion and arranges them in "interaction studies". Now, Tony and I have been disagreeing about whether the "poetic effect" (Kitasono's "vague" term) of Flarf depends on what is true (or even imagined) of the sources (often found by Googling key words). If my analogy here holds, then the source of the text that goes into a work of flarf ought stand in the same relation to the poetic effect as the colour effects of a patch of Armani grey stands to the suit advertised in the source from which it was cut. That is, none. The suit (the picture of it) was "unprepared" for the arrangement that its colour came to participate in.

Flarf is made of emotional materials that are unprepared for poetry.

Borrowing from Kitasono again, I want to say that the undeveloped aesthetic feeling of a line like "I could only kill in self defense," can contribute to a larger poetic effect like that of "I Am Not the Pilot", regardless of the purpose for which those words were originally assembled, just as the colour of the suit can be extricated from the selling of the suit by carefully cutting out a section of the ad.

I'd still say that there is an important "critical" effect to be derived from discovering the sources (just as something may be learned from deconstructing one of Albers' interaction studies into its source material and thereby connecting a laboratory effect to a "real world" situation.) But the poetic effect of the arrangement of brute (flarfy) feelings on the page precedes this critical exercise and does not depend on it.

Tractatus Pangrammaticus [1]

In late September of last year, Gary Norris started a discussion about the bearing of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on poetics. A lot of great observations were made, not least by Jay Thomas, with whom I pursued a number of shiny peripheral issues throughout October on his blog. Jacques Derrida died, Laura Carter finished the Egret Party, and George W. Bush was soon re-elected. It was an eventful fall, to be sure. I'm thankful to everyone involved. One of the things that began to take shape was the Tractatus Pathetico-Poeticus -- a shadowy, complicated somnambulist of a book (the tractatus Tony Tost would write in his "complex sleep", I suggested at the time.)

I propose to begin to reconstruct some of the ideas we discussed back then, this time under the title "Tractatus Pangrammaticus". The number in the square brackets does not indicate a sequence of posts but the reference proposition in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which is available in hypertext here. There are, finally, three tractati. The first is Wittgenstein's, the second is the Pathetico-Poeticus, and the third is the articulate balance between them, all the usage in the world, the Pangrammaticon itself. (I've long known that it can be easily deconstructed and, in a sense, what I propose here is to lay bare the schema of its grammatology.)

All this will hopefully become clearer as we proceed.

To begin, then, let's look at proposition 1:

The world is all that is the case.

The basic operation in rewriting this is simple to explain. Throughout, "logic" is replaced with "passion" ("logical" with "pathetic") and, accordingly, "philosophy" is replaced with "poetry". "Logic is to philosophy what passion is to poetry," is the schema that will guide us. There are two core consequences, one of which will concern us later [6.34], and the other which must be raised at the outset. What is to passion as the world is to logic? My answer is "history". But history is not "the case" (though, as I have quipped, it may be "on your case"). History happens. So we have our first proposition.

History is all that happens.

The second tractatus is, you will note, rather easy to construct. The hard part comes in working out the third. Here, however, Wittgenstein himself may help. After all, his later work was an attempt to flesh out the schematism of his early attempt. The task here is to construct the "obiter dicta", the passing remarks, that articulate the interstices between the world and history.

Wittgenstein said that error of the Tractatus was to begin with something as large as the world. He should have started with a lamp or a tree.

It is the case that this lamp is on.

Or,

It is the case that there is no door in the frame.

But he could also have said something more, perhaps, profound, namely,

This is the world.

Then, we ask, what do we put in the shadow Tractatus?

This is history.

So far so good. Now, what are some pithy remarks to set into the fissure between these two propositions?

We've just had a discussion recently here at the Pangrammaticon about the definite article, and I think Wittgenstein's objection to the scope of this reference still holds. So, we try,

This is my world-history.

This is my body.

This is my body, the world, our history.


World-history is all that happens and is the case,
all that is on my case.

Notice that struggling subjects and objects here (my, the, our), notice the modicum of humour. That is the stuff of pangrammaticism. The Pangrammaticon articulates all the usage in the world. It is perfectly useless.

Future entries will be shorter, I hope.

The Body Ink

Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt.

Hamlet

Tim grew weary and Tony couldn't sleep; maybe "spritely" was the wrong word. Here are some interpretations, summaries, comments and questions.

First, there is the issue of the very idea of articulating embodiment with the definite article, i.e., using the "construction 'the body'" (see Tim's 12:15 AM comments to my last post). Since Tim does not object to the word "body" alone (11:14 PM), the alternatives are easy to spot: "a body", "my body", "this body", "her body" all suggest concrete, particular references. We should probably also allow "the body" when used in constructions like "the body I was given" or "the body we found in the basement". Tim's objection goes to any reference made to "the body", without further stipulations, allowing us to ask "Whose body?" to be followed by the answer "The body in the abstract." I think I basically agree with Tim on this question, though I'm not sure Tony's poem about Jackson Mac Low is the best example of this failing.

Moreover, Tony is right to point out that we will then have to give up the definite article in many other contexts, especially "the mouth" and "the language". And these two examples of his are, I think, particularily well chosen because when we talk about "the body" in the abstract we mean, I think, precisely the articulate connection between the mouth and the language, and this might be a reason to grin and bear "the body" in some cases.

Second, there is the issue of the theoretical censure of practical poetry. Tim spots the offending phrase in Tony's poem and asks his infamous question. Now, is this already an act of theoretical censorship? Clearly, if Tim had said from the outset, "But Tony, there's no such thing as the body," it would be. But he waited (baited?) until Tony defended his poem "in theory", i.e., with the words "in the abstract". Tim could then let his theoretical verdict be known: there's no such thing as the body in the abstract. Whatever may be true of Tim and Tony, and whatever they may worry about, I don't think poets should be required to "point to this or that theory or figure and say 'see, I'm right.'" I don't think theories should be allowed to determine how complicated our bodies, or complex our sleeping, should be.

Third, there is the general issue, which I think I'll leave open for now, about the relation between the body and the text, or how best to deal with "embodiment". In what sense is a white page with black marks on it like a pool of bruises? I think Tim's distinctions do make sense, and, taken out of context, his examples do suggest a problem. That problem itself may be more complex, however, than using or not using the phrase "the body". (And is surely more interesting than how the post-structuralists in Iowa read Foucault.) I guess I'd ask whether Tony's earlier invocation of "the mouth", doesn't adequately prepare the way for "the body" and its "imaginary circumference". Or whether it really is as sleazy as Tony suspects Tim thinks it is.

Fourth, if I was to get actors to perform the dialogue that started this, I'd ask to them play it with straight faces.

Finally, I don't think Tony meant a virtual arm wrestle, and I very much hope to witness the real thing one day. Maybe we write poems because we can't arm wrestle with everyone . . . except in the abstract. The Armwrestle.

The Body, Inc.

Tim and Tony have had two brief but spritely encounters (here and here) on the body. I'm sure I won't be able to settle the issue but here are some of my views on the question.

Consider the sentence

This is my body,

which has a bit of a history. Christ said it while holding out a piece of bread. This was translated into Latin as "Hoc est corpus meum", which famously gave us "hocus pocus". Now, here's an interesting bit of trivia. William James said that "the whole hocus-pocus of erkenntnisstheorie begins" when the "concrete particularities" of "intervening experiences" between idealities and realities (which he also called "intermediaries") are made to evaporate, leaving only abstract schemata. I take it Tim's objection amounts to something along those lines.

Next, consider Descartes' peculiar claim in the Discourse on Method (Ch. 4).

I could pretend [feindre] that I had no body.

This also of course implies the ability to make sense of a sentence like

This is not my body.

(Not, mind you, "That is not my body.") Wittgenstein's remarks in On Certainty, as I read them, display the implausibility of that kind of pretence. In any case, I find myself generally in agreement with Tim (and James) that conceiving of the body "in the abstract" is a phenomenological error. But I am suspicious of statements like "The notion of embodiment is a massively more complicated issue [than Foucault's use of it as a stable term in his history suggests]," because I don't want to give anyone the right to tell me how complicated my body is. What is "disrespectful to the experience of having a body" is the act of calling a material reference to it into question. This is the line that has been so elegantly crossed and recrossed in the exchanges between Tim and Tony.

I have a feeling that Tony's aesthetic needs "the body" as a "single material signifier", needs to be able to indicate it with a single, simple gesture--"a child's body", "a pool of bruises". And I think he is right about this.

It is true that the sentence, "This is my body," is ambiguous. But its ambiguity may be very simple, cleaving (despite the threat of deconstruction) into an assertion on one side (the body's empirical aspect) and an injunction on the other (the body's normative aspect). There are gestures that say, "This is my body," and which are clear indications of significant material. Sometimes you are asked to confirm the body. Sometimes you are asked to obey.