Studies in a Dying Culture

Robert Vienneau’s blog Thoughts on Economics has an entry Wittgenstein and Marxism on my Wittgenstein, Marxism, Sociology: An Annotated Bibliography.

More importantly, Vienneau provides his own bibliography Wittgenstein and Soviet Communism, mostly in connection with Piero Sraffa and referencing articles from New Left Review.

There is also this noteworthy article:

Robinson, Christopher C. (2006). “Why Wittgenstein is Not Conservative: Conventions and Critique“, Theory and Event, V. 9, N. 3.

Robinson begins with a characterization of Wittgenstein as a flaneur in the city of language. He is loathe to tag Wittgenstein’s seeming anti-modernism as conservative.

More importantly, this description of the city suggests nostalgia for the old way of life that has been mistaken for an expression of political conservatism on Wittgenstein’s part. I consider this conservative appellation “mistaken” because it hides more than it reveals, particularly the political dimension of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that places him in a fairly large category of theorists beginning with Weber and Arendt, who struggle intellectually against the public hallmark or apparent telos of modernity: the supplanting of politics by bureaucracy. A thorough anti-modernism is not to be found in these writers. Indeed, such an orientation is imaginable only in a religious community like that of the Amish or in a Luddite-type movement. Wittgenstein’s opposition to modernism occurred from within the throes of modernity. And it was directed at the soporific effects of the authority assigned to scientism by various philosophical schools or circles. It was expressed only occasionally as nostalgia for old, active political forms of life.

Robinson asserts that the recognition of the conventional enables us to alter accepted ideas rather than passively accept existing institutions. He also applies Wittgenstein’s distinction between surface and depth grammars. He summarizes Wittgenstein’s three uses of the notion of convention and how they apply in language games, also maintaining that Wittgenstein was not a behaviorist. His reference to convention is not conservativism, but a redirection away from ideal and metaphysical languages towards the ordinary language in which all language practices are grounded.

To attain this “clear view” (a physical impossibility that serves nevertheless as a goal) is not an epistemological project that results in a privileged knowledge of the essence of language and language use. Nor is it a matter of transcending the prejudices, inaccuracies, and uncertainty of everyday language to achieve an Archimedean vantage. The clear view of uses that produce meaning involves travel into the plurality of language games that compose what we think of as language. Because this plurality is not reducible to some underlying, unifying grammar, what might be termed a “conventional description” of a painting, an action, a book, or anything that requires understanding might be orthodox in one language-game and viewed and responded to as novel, provocative, humorous, or absurd in another.

Robinson thinks this is a good thing, but it looks like a retreat to irrationalism to me.

Politics is not eternally inscribed in the order of things as metaphysics would have it. What is was not always and can be changed.

For some critics of Wittgenstein, his philosophical worldview is dominated by a nostalgic and ideological desire to return to the Vienna fin-de-siecle that encouraged his industrialist father’s financial and assimilative successes. It has been argued by the cultural historian J.C. Nyiri and the philosopher G.H. von Wright, a student of Wittgenstein, for example, that Wittgenstein’s aristocratic upbringing, his family ties to the Hapsburg Empire, education, friendships, and his readings of Spengler, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and the anti-Semitic misogynist Otto Weininger, reveal a deep affinity for or consistency with conservative tradition and thought. However, similarly anecdotal evidence pertaining to Wittgenstein’s friendships with a number of Communist thinkers and activists, his avowed indebtedness to the radical economist Piero Sraffa, along with his never realized plans to move to the Soviet Union to become a laborer or field hand, could lead to a far different conclusion about is personal politics, as Allan Janik has observed in response to Nyiri’s work.

If we going by anecdotal evidence, Robinson makes the case malgre lui for the essentially reactionary character of Wittgenstein’s thought, whatever other political influences were in play. Indeed, the case against him becomes stronger once we discard purely biographical for philosophical considerations.

After discounting any affinity of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for fascism, Robinson proceeds to address the charges of “epic theorists” Marcuse and Gellner. Re the notion that philosophy leaves everything as is:

It was directed against forms of epistemological hubris embraced by philosophers. To argue that philosophy cannot give language a foundation, nor discover or uncover one, certainly does not leave “everything as it is” for practicing philosophers. The very idea of a First Philosophy, for one, would be affected and transformed. Wittgenstein’s remark needs to be contextualized as part of a sustained dispute, within the language-game of philosophy, against the idea that ordinary language can be somehow transcended, purified, or have its underlying logical or pre-Babelian form revealed by philosophers and theologians armed with special techniques or a privileged stance outside of language.

This however, strikes me as the usual red herring against transcendentalism, unimpressive.

This criticism of Wittgenstein is a kind of projection because it is designed to preserve the putative and privileged fixity of the epic perspective. That is to say, the entrapment of theorists to their fixed, epic self-image is expressed in the inability to see the motion or horizontal freedom of the Wittgensteinian theorist. From the other direction, the travel between language-games enjoyed by Wittgenstein in the pages of the Philosophical Investigations serves to illuminate, by contrast, the orthodoxy of the epic theorist wedded to a selective and overly romanticized historical tradition that might appear conservative to some.

Cute, but rather a tired game.

Another telling point is Wittgenstein’s relaiton to science. Wittgenstein has an engineering background, but:

Indeed, one way of gauging the turns in Wittgenstein’s thinking between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations is by foregrounding the remarks on science. While under the influence of Spengler’s Decline of the West, an influence exhibited in the remarks from the early 1930s, Wittgenstein conceived of philosophy’s role in relation to science as one of writing “the synopsis of trivialities.” These trivialities were any new facts discovered by scientists that were then reported to the public in simplistic, journalistic form. For Wittgenstein, following Spengler, a sure sign of culture’s degeneration is when the importance of the arts and the idea of cultural genius were defined reductively in terms of their service to science, mechanics, and mathematics. It is important to note that Wittgenstein never accepted the scientism of Logical Positivism. He contended consistently that although philosophy may serve to set the logical limits of the world of facts and offer a coherent picture of reality useful to scientists, philosophy could never adopt the methods of science.

This may be, but this very rejection of positivism is predicated on positivist premises, and as an escape route is not to be trusted.

“Significantly, Wittgenstein conceived of science critically as a conservative force in the culture.” Science sends people to sleep again, says Wittgenstein. “For Wittgenstein, science is a coercive, pacifying force in the culture.”

Although philosophy possesses neither an epistemologically privileged nor culturally authoritative vantage in relation to science, it can make visible science’s limitations and the conventional foundation it shares with all other human practices. The leveling effect of this idol destruction is unmistakable. The critical character of philosophical observation and description is exposed in this relation between philosophy and science. It is a point of convergence between the philosophical project of Wittgenstein and that of his harshest critic, Herbert Marcuse.

This last point is, regrettably, quite true.

The word-object relation that is the focus of the philosophy of language animating science and bureaucracy facilitates this speeding up of things. That is, language is conceived in science and bureaucracy as a tool designed to re-present and communicate features of the physical world. The sinews of definition accomplish the attachment of language to reality: The meaning of a word is derived from the object it re-presents. Meaning is only obscured and distorted when language is used creatively to express things not found in physical reality.

This is reminiscent of the argument about instrumental reason. Yet there is something about it that itself seems quite mythical.

Robinson sees Wittgenstein’s position as a self-criticism of the Tractatus.

In condemning the soporific effects of faith in the inevitability of scientific progress and the values of speed and efficiency attendant to bureaucratization, Wittgenstein also encounters the simplistic, static picture of language presented in the Tractatus. As mystical as portions of that work were, it was nevertheless held up by proponents of Logical Positivism and Empiricism as an exemplar of the worldview they embraced. As noted, many of the criticisms of Wittgenstein expressed by those who see him as conservative turn on the remarks that feature individual transformation and improvement as conforming responses to forces in the world. The changes I make, according to this view, are designed to make myself fit in and become more acceptable to the world. The self-criticism Wittgenstein performs in the Philosophical Investigations, together with his desire to have the new book published with the Tractatus, is not an act of conformity, however. Rather, it should be read as part of a defense of eccentricity philosophy must embrace and live. This defense is similar to the argument of J.S. Mill, but Wittgenstein conceives it as mode of awakening from a sleep induced by science that occurs both personally in the philosopher opposed to the pandering to science by fellow (Positivist and Empiricist) philosophers, and also in a newly enervated civilization that creates a culture.

Ironically, Marcuse’s critique of bureaucratic language bears close affinity to Wittgenstein’s.

The thrust of Wittgenstein’s work is to show philosophy to be an anti-bureaucratic language-game and a way of life that is a marked contrast to the disciplinary constraints and objectifications lived by bureaucrat and client alike. But therapy needed to be performed for this contrast to be fully realized by philosophers trapped in a conception of language and truth as merely representational. Most often in treatments of Wittgenstein’s work, his criticisms of metaphysical philosophy as “a house of cards,” his willingness to dissolve philosophical problems to achieve personal peace, and the advice he gave students to resist the temptation to become professors of philosophy are emphasized. But the larger effect of these insights and admonitions of Wittgenstein for philosophizing and theorizing is that they evince or disclose language as a varied, traversable, changing landscape that can be neither transcended nor burrowed into. These criticisms, therapies, and the enlarged conception of language they presume give way to a deep passion for the freedom or anti-dogmatism and the humanizing effects the philosophical style of life afforded the practitioner.

I remain unconvinced.

From the conclusion:

Wittgenstein locates himself and humanity in the hurly burly of language. Philosophers have been unique in their mistaken belief that they have a privileged place hovering above language, but all they have actually managed to do is extrapolate static pieces of language and equally static examples to illuminate the putative stability of these pieces. Since the source of criticism cannot be the contrast between the absolute and the relative, the general and the particular, the privileged and the unprivileged, the truthful and the opinionated, and since criticism does exist in the world, the source must lie elsewhere. Wittgenstein finds it in motion among language-games. This motion is made conspicuous by its absence from the philosophical views of those who claim Wittgenstein conservative.

The charge of conservatism leveled against Wittgenstein’s philosophy relies on an image of the philosopher as existing within a language-game that resembles a prison. Criticism is considered inconceivable because, so the charge continues, Wittgenstein eliminates those higher levels of conceptualization that distinguish philosophical heights from the ordinary. This is accurate only if a philosopher finds herself or himself anchored in one language-game for a lifetime. This fixity is almost impossible in the world Wittgenstein describes. He posits a plurality of language-games, themselves expanding and contracting, abutting and overlapping, whose rules – even those that distinguish one language-game from another – are permeable. The peregrinations of philosophers, as well as others, engender notice of differences between language-games. These differences among the constellation of language-games one travels throughout life are both the source of criticism and what we might call individuality.

The implication of Wittgenstein’s perspective for political theory is that he exposes conservatism, a celebration of a form of nationalism or disciplinarity, in the fixity of the political theorist. Of course the image of the theorist on the mountaintop, on society’s periphery, as an exile, as well-fed and clothed homo sacer, is a metaphor or allegory for the uniqueness of the theorist’s perspective in comparison to that of the citizen. Wittgenstein’s criticism of the epic self-image of the theorist responds to the ethical blindness encouraged by the fixity and transcendence this image rests upon. He counters with a traveling image that is immanent, picture-shattering, and certainly not conservative.

This could have been copied right out of the postmodern playbook. It’s all about the fake populism of taking down the philosopher a peg. And where does this get us in terms of real critique? Nowhere, just a pretentious excercise.

See Robinson’s footnotes for further insight into his game plan. Note Wittgenstein’s deeply reactionary Spenglerianism in footnote xxxvii. See esp. footnotes xv-xvii for further references on the politics of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.