Well, I haven't been able to gather my thoughts very effectively the last few days. But the woodstove is roaring this morning & I have had a couple of cups of strong black coffee. If that isn't preparation for reading Wittgenstein I don't know what is. Actually, I want to backtrack a little, since I have the sense that I've been skimming over the surface of your remarks. I'm mostly thinking of your remarks on the 26th of this month.

[A] In the simplified language W experimentally imagines, he introduces the use of this & that--but these are far from simple concepts, at least in Vietnamese, the one language other than English I am (close to) competent to speak about. In VN you use a different word when saying "this pen" (cai but), but another when saying "this dog" (con cho) & so on for different classes of objects. And in W's story, it would be "cai slab" if referring to it, but "day la slab" if naming it ostensively--"this (thing) is a slab." Actually, it's much more complicated than this. [And as is usual I have for technical reasons eliminated all of the diacritical marks from my VN examples.] The conclusion I draw from this, in the current context, is that language is by definition complex, that even an experimental "primitive" language almost immediately effloresces into something with its own currents & eddies of sound, color, meaning, orthography, & etc. So, what can we learn from a "primitive" language if no such thing exists in nature? One thing we can learn--& this is where W is going, I think--that that earlier views of language, including his own in the Tractatus, are inadequate as explanatory tools. And, from what I think I already know about W's later views of language, I'd say that he comes to the conclusion--if W ever comes to a conclusion--that in understanding language (as a philosopher) one must begin with the acceptance of both complexity & inconsistency, i.e. pluralism--a philosophical conception of language that is symmetrical with the ways in which people (as opposed to philosophers) actually learn & use language.

[B] You ask whether teaching a language can ever be imagined in "a pure state." In some ways, from another angle, I have touched on that in [A] above, but can we generalize about teaching, perhaps with assistence from my own learning of Vietnamese? It appears that VN makes a semantic distinction between "This is a table" & "Look at this table." Teaching / naming is one language game, learning / using another? Well, now I've wound up confusing myself. I'd better sit on this a while & come back to it.

[C] I was wondering whether you had a response to my suggestion about the Theory of Types? I think there is something going on there.

Imaginative rehersals: I'm a big Leonard Cohen fan & on his latest CD, Ten New Songs, there is a tune called "In My Secret Life":

I smile when I'm angry
I cheat and I lie--
I do what it takes to get by
But I know what is wrong
And I know what is right
And I die for the truth
In my secret life.

Cohen extends the syllable /die/ in the penultimate line of the stanza in what must be one of the most subtle uses of self-deprecating irony ever in popular music. There's another song on the album about day dreaming, about which more later. And I will get back to the text we are ostensibly discussing soon, honest.

"If the dreams we have in sleep have a similar function to day dreams, part of their purpose is to prepare a man for any eventuality (including the worst)." [Wittgenstein, Culture & Value, (73), 1948]

[8, 9] Counting in Vietnamese: Counting is more than a merely internal, private affair. True (as Wittgenstein has it), I memorized the cardinal numbers in Vietnamese--muoi, mot, hi, ba, bon, nam, sao, bay, tam, chin--but it was only by going out into the world & using them that I actually learned how to count. After I had been living in Hanoi about six months, I was one day walking down a sidestreed near the Cathedral that led to one of my favorite cafes. There was a young woman with a couple of baskets sitting on the sidewalk & as I drew nearer I could see that she was selling kitchen impliments--knives, scissors, peelers, etc. I'm a cook & love this sort of stuff, so I stopped to have a look. There was a small pair of scissors with a mechinism I found interesting, so, holding the object between us I asked, "Bao niheu tien?" [How much money?] "Ba nghin" [3000 dong (25 cents US)], she replied. But I heard, "ba muoi nghin" [30,000 ($2.50 US)], an amount reasonable for a small pair of scissors in my world. For a month--until my language skills improved enough to tell her that I realized I had overpaid her, that girl made a beeline for me whenever she saw me coming. In her world, I was the man who paid an order of magniture too much. When I was finally able to tell her I had realized my mistake, we both had a good laugh. "Nguoi My rat giau!" she said as we were parting--"Americans are very rich!" This story illustrates, I think, that counting is a socially mediated activity. Why in the world would one of our ancestors bothered enumerating something if not to tell another soul something significant, or to buy something? "When a child learns this language, it has to learn a series of 'numerals' a, b, c, . . . by heart. And it has to learn their use . . . ." [9] "When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things." [I Cor. xiii. 11.] Oh, but in my dreams I am just a little baby mouthing syllables! I am polymorphously perverse!

[2-7] This series of remarks is pretty clearly involved with setting up the conventional picture of language that needs to be re-thought; Wittgenstein is a "theraputic" philosopher & he is here laying out the etiology of the case.

It is not Language, but, as you say, a mosaic of language games plural, none of which are required to line up exactly with each other or exactly with the world, as in the positivist model.

I continue to dream in (poor) Vietnamese. I wonder if that means the dreams themselves are impoverished? Perhaps not--in my dreams I speak like a child, though not exactly like a Vietnamese child--so maybe my dreams are merely childish. On second thought, I'm not so sure my dream-Vietnamese is a child's language--the learning of a language not one's own (as an adult?) does not follow the same pattern as a child's learning, I suspect.

Language games: [7] I like the notion of game tiles pushed around on a board, as long as they are irregularly shaped & don't always line up perfectly--a jigsaw puzzle with imperfections. Each little intelligible section can be thought of as a "language game" & the whole, finally unsolvable puzzle is the language game of language games. The crucial insight--one that Wittgenstein's logical positivist pals could not accept--was that the puzzle, by definition, contained discontinuous areas. Godel did for mathematics what W did for language. And you have already mentioned Heisenberg's uncertainty principle--when we apply analytical tools to language we change the language under consideration.

The big "move" in 7 is the one that says all the language games together form a language game. Is there a connection here to Russell's Theory of Types?

When two language games come to sit together at a table, palyfulness & caution are in order!

[6] Word & Thing: That's the mystery, isn't it? For a poet, the notion that there might be some direct linkage between the word mountain & a /mountain/ is profoundly attractive; it drives much of Wordsworth's poetry as well as Pound's notion of the "ideographic method," which is based on Ernest Fenollosa's mis-translations of Chinese poetry. Don't you love it?

You write, concerning the example in the final short paragraph of 6, "The tendency is to say something more general about the relation of language to the mechanism, as if language is like this steam engine. To say this, however, implies an Archimedean position outside of language that enables us to see it as a whole -- in the same way we can see a steam engine as a whole," & this has wide resonance for me, both as a poet, realizing that every context is different, and as a philosophical pluralist, believing that no single, self-consistent description of the world can ever be a total & adequate description. Here we are back to Heisenberg. There is no Archimedean point, no fulcrum on which to get purchase. So now I (provisionally) understand 6 as using a shifting perspective to suggest that the model proposed by Augustine, being metaphysical & static, cannot even begin to describe human language.

I don't want to get totally sidetracked by anthropology (even though it was my undergraduate minor), so let me say that I share your sadness at the effacement of cultural difference. I would suggest that different forms of life emerge from & create distinct environmental & social conditions & just as we should preserve biodiversity, both for our own selfish ends (medicines, air) & in a more general ethical sense, we ought to preserve forms of life--never know when one might come in handy, after all. The market is an ass.

Pain: Okay, I understand this. There is a fundamental bodily identification; but, my bluetick hound is old & sick right now & while I don't come to her exactly as I would come to a suffering human, she says in her way, "This hurts" & I respond by saying, "Yes, sweetie, I know it does." So if we are going to understand the dynamics of forms of life to this fundamental level, we will have to include animals. I suppose that with dogs & cats & a few other species, we already do partake in the forms of life of animals. Still, giving the body its due, I remain an epistemological skeptic when it comes to "getting inside" another culture. Marriage may (potentially, in some cases) be an exception--some of my Vietnamese friends urged me quite seriously to "get a Vietnamese girlfriend" in order to learn the language. My Vietnamese teacher, a rather proper middle-class woman of fifty & the mother of two grown sons, surprised me one day by saying, "The best place to learn a language is in bed." Those Vietnamese, very pithy! I refrained from asking her if that was where she had learned Russian. At the same time, when you write, "Other cultures allow us to at least entertain alternatives that would be unimaginable if we were to think of cultural boundaries as impermeable," I understand this to be ethically true if not practically true. (Maybe when we're done with Wittgenstein in a couple of decades we can move on to the American Prgamatists--if we are able to move at all by then.)

Anthropology, Clifford Geetrz, Jean-Paul Dumont & pulling back the stage curtain (only to reveal another curtain): Last night I had a dream that I had returned to Vietnam, a place where I have spent about twenty percent of my time over the last four years). In my dream I was moving back into my old apartment in Hanoi when the landlady, Ba Hanh, showed up & (very apologetically) told me that she had someone else who had to live there, so I had to move to a hotel--that is, a place for visitors or tourists. By the way, since this is a discussion about language, in my dreams I speak Vietnamese. Badly. Same as in waking life. So, this wasn't so much about uncertainty in the study of subatomic principles as about the impossibility of taking on another form of life completely. I'm attracted to Geertz' notion that the human body binds us together in certain forms of experience, but even here I am skeptical--in Vietnam, the human body is different. Shaped differently. Arranged differently. Held differently. Even with my passion for the country & culture I will always live figuratively in a hotel there.

[6] I'm having a difficult time following W's argument in section 6. I don't yet get what he means by "training." Is he saying that the sort of training described by Augustine might lead to one kind of understanding but that such an understanding would be changed if it occurred under other circumstances? What is the relationship between training & understanding? I'm going to turn to the commentary & see if that clears things up.

Clifford Geertz: My old anthropology professor Jean-Paul Dumont would say that the anthropologist-visitor to another culture--even a visitor endowed with perfect good will--will inevitably witness a performance, behavior "staged" for him. And even when you get behind one performance, pull back one set of curtains, you are confronted by another stage & yet another performance. If there is a never-ending regression of performances between human cultures, how much more profound is the problem across species.

[5] Let's talk about training. W. seems to be distinguishing training from learning or understanding. Am I reading this correctly? I admit confusion when W. directs us to the example in [1] & says, "we may perhaps get an inkling how much this general notion of meaning of a word surrounds the working of language with a a haze that makes clear vision impossible." Does he mean that out usual way of thinking about language is so infected by the Augustine word-thing view of language that we cannot think clearly about what is really going on? That reading of [5] would make sense to me.

I had never thought of the private language argument in terms of cross-species interaction. I had instead thought of it as an argument for the social qualities of human language. When a creative writing student tells me that she writes "only for myself," usually ask, "then why are you taking this class?" A class is, after all, a public forum. A poem that has never been read by a reader other than the author is not really a poem, though it can of course become a poem later, when it aquires readers (as in the case of Emily Dickinson). Since language as a system of meanings flows from our form of life, to use Wittgenstein's term & our form of life is fundamentally social, meaning only emerges from i-behavior. Or that's how I have always thought about W's private language thought-experiment. An animal such as a chimp or a dolphin could in principle derive meanings out of i-behavior within its form of life; still, as close as we are genetically to chimps, we do not swing from trees. The problem of cross-species language (as opposed to simple communication--I communicate with my dogs every day) remains profound.

Bodies: to have a human body circumscribes a form of life. Just so with dolphins. Perhaps because mammals all seem to like to play, we can share the form called play with dolphins; but is dolphin play, or even chimp play, similar to human play? The distances are vast & I am still inclined to think my student--& like you I am ever-grateful to my students--was being sentimental when she claimed that "animals have language, just different from our own." Look, I've just returned from a year in Vietnam & I can tell you that even within the human species, forms of life differ so greatly as to make mutual understanding at least difficult.

I want to follow out this idea of a bestiary of possible languages I raised a little earlier: the whales, the chimps. I have a bright student, a biology major, in my Imagining Science course this semester & this morning we watched fifteen minutes of an interview with Stephen J. Gould in which he was asked about the transgenic crossing of a human with a chimpanzee. Gould averred that it would be a very interesting experiment, but then stated unequivocally that "it must not be done" because, he said, it would be hard to imagine a more unethical experiment--an experiment that would produce, possibly, a being who would be able to use human language to tell us about "the chimp side of its nature," thus getting round the fundamental assumption behind Wittgenstein's remark, in Culture & Value, that, "If a lion could speak, we wouldn't be able to understand him." Anyway, my intelligent & sensitive student took Gould to task for impugning the value of chimp consciousness. "Many animals have languages," she said, "just different from ours." Since I had to get on to introducing the notion of paradigms that hour, I told her that we would spend an hour of class time later in the semester on problems of language, but suggested that whatever it is that animals are doing when they "communicate," it might be best to call it something other than language. What is much more difficult to explain to such a student is just exactly what it is about human language that differentiates it from all the other forms of animal communication with which we are familiar. Superficially, they look the same. But in fact I think we denature animals' i-behavior (where "i" stands, a little lamely, for "interaction") by equating it with human i-behavior; given what we know of biology, it appears that even plants exhibit i-behavior in the form of chemical secretions that are highly specific as to circumstances in the environment. What dolphins do, what tomato plants do, is amazing. We ought to stand in awe. Why do we need to believe that those beings are up to the same stuff we are up to? It's a big damn world.

When I teach creative writing, I begin with the assumption that the writer's job is not self-expression, but allowing language to speak. This runs exactly counter to what most people think poetry, fiction & etc. is about.

I agree that there is a self-critical intention behind Wittgenstein's description of Augustine's model of language. This would be characteristic of Wittgenstein's personality (I'm drawing on the Ray Monk biography); as austere as it appears, Wittgenstein's philosophy extends & develops the concerns of his own psychology / psyche. And despite Wittgenstein's despairing tone in the Preface, Philosophical Investigations is more "put together" than it appears--than it is intended to appear.

I am also convinced by Deacon's argument as you summarize it. I am particularly struck by the deconstructive move that collapses the various culturally-induced dualisms that tend to structure our reality. Such indeed are the "bad habits" of thought, but like other bad habits they are devilishly difficult to leave behind. What begins as a critique of language & the way in which it structures thought leads, inexorably, in Wittgenstein, to a philosophical way of life that demands of the adept that he/she be conscious every minute: Roshi Wittgenstein. I cut my philosophical teeth on Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought so I am pretty comfortable with an evolutionary description of language--language as organism--as long as we are careful to avoid the simplistic reductions of the so-called "evolutionary psychologists," cheif among them Stephen Pinker. In Pinker's 800 page book on language there is one index entry under poetry & it deals with sound-play as a primitive quality of language. (Really, this would go without saying, except that the Standard Model--derived ultimately from Augustine &/or other early thinkers drawing on Classical philosophy--has such a hold on the popular & scholarly imagination--insofar at that imagination considers language at all--that some good Wittgensteinian therapy is in order. The problem is, as noted above, that following Wittgenstein's lead requires a certain amount of discipline.)

[3.] A further thought on "communication": Fifteen years ago now I had an extended after-dinner conversation with a roommate who believed that it wouldn't be long before we humans were having conversations with dolphins & whales. This was out in California & the conversation took place within a couple of hundred yards of the Pacific, so it was an attractive enough notion, especially given the setting. I hadn't yet read Wittgenstein's remark, in Culture & Value, that "If a lion could talk, we wouldn't be able understand him." Nevertheless, I had a gut feeling that the matter was somewhat more complicated than my roommate thought it was. I tried to make clear this distinction about the difference between communication & language, but also to suggest that by language, I meant something specifically human. I said, before the meal broke up with some ill-feeling, that I was willing to grant that dolphins might have language, but that it would be dolphin-language & that translating between dolphin-language & human language was qualitatively different from translating between human languages. Come to think of it, my roommate's point of view was profoundly anthropocentric: he wanted to treat Dolphinese as if it were equivalent to, say, Vietnamese. Translating between human languages is difficult enough, to say nothing of translating between the languages of different species, if they exist outside human evolution.

Woke up this morning with the thought that the difference between language & communication is crucial. The vulgar view is that language is nothing but a means of communication; poets & at least a few philosop-hers know better.

[1, 2] "That [standard, conventional] philosophical concept of meaning has its place in a primitive idea of the way language functions." In the paragraph Wittgenstein is (slyly?) setting the reader up for a fall. Of course one may imagine the builder & his assistant operating in the way described--but the imaginary picture depends upon assumptions about language that are not part of the simple, primitive system. W. as can be seen with the example of the grocer & the 5 red apples, wants to suggest that we know a great deal about how to use language that cannot be captured by Augustine's sweet little fancy, not by the standard positivist theories of language current when W. was writing.

[1.] I accept the definition you offer, for Wittgenstein, of primitive. It may have been just a tangent on my part to pursue the problem of definition. As with you, the word primitive usually raises a red flag with me. I think by "elemental" I was suggesting something like "simple." And, as you point out, Wittgenstein is developing, in his way, the notion that language is not simple. Hadn't he spent most of WWI, under horrific conditions, scratching notes in a little book, hoping to demonstrate that language was reducible to propositions about pictures, only to discover, slowly & painstakingly--& with ruthless honesty--that such a description of language would not stand? The nostalgia for Augustine's picture of the infant in the bosom of the family is also a nostalgia for Wittgenstein's own lost certainty about the simplicity of language. (Aside: There seems to have been a moment of rich cultural self-confidence in Vienna in the decade before WWI--a self-confidence that gave rise to Klimt, Webern, Berg, Freud, Schoenberg. And Wittgenstein. Music & philosophy & the visual imagination--all reinvented. (Second Aside: Fraiser possesed an astonishing intellect typical of the great Victorian mania for collecting things; he also structured his collections--of customs, myth, religious practice--in a typically Victorian manner that valorized Progress. One thinks of Francis Fukuyama & the purported end of history.)

You still have a 5th grade paper on Teddy Roosevelt? I admire this.

By "primitive" does Wittgensteing mean decomposed? Elemental?

[1.] Many years ago when I was an undergraduate at the University of Washington, I sat at a small desk in front of a window overlooking some trees & wrote an essay for an anthropology course I was taking & in that essay I argued that the Kwakiutl Indians wrote "noun poetry." I then attempted to explain what that sort of poetry might be. I wish I still had the paper, but it has vanished somewhere along the line of my many movings. I recall that I suggested that there were also "verb poetries," but I can no longer remember what examples I put forth. I was careful, good cultural relativist that I was & remain, not to valorize one or the other sort of poetry. As I recall, I was attempting to show how one or the other sort of poetry might arise from environmental factors. The Kwakiutl had the good fortune to live in the Pacific Northwest, where the forests were full of game & the streams, rivers & ocean were full of fish. Clearly, their situation in the world affected their social structures & out of those social structures grew a poetry. A poetry of things. The visual art of the Northwest coast tribes is stunningly particular in the way it accumulates things & beings.

At first glance it would seem that Augustine's view of language bears some resemblance to my notion of "noun poetry," but I want to be very careful here. The Kwakiutl certainly had access to verbs & all the other parts of speech & gramatical structures that any language group employs. It is a famous maxim of modern anthropology that there are no primitive languages. So, while I agree that Wittgenstein is not using Augustine merely as a straw philosopher of language, we must account for what Wittgenstein means by the word primitive. Is he merely under the sway of 19th c. views of culture & language? I don't think so. By primitive I think Wittgenstein means something like "not fully conceived." Perhaps he should have written childlike instead of primitive? Childlike goes to the heart of the family metaphor Wittgenstein develops in PI, certainly. Intimacy & trust, yes.

[1.]* Without, I confess, having read more than bits & pieces of Augustine's Confessions, I have used this notion as Wittgenstein uses it with my freshman writing students. That is, I have pointed out that most of them naively imagine that writing involves pulling a word off the shelf in their brain/mind in order to express a meaning & that combinations of words express complex meanings . . . . A little reflection, I then suggest, makes this view problematic. "What are some of the problems you encounter in getting your thoughts on paper?" I ask. Often, a student will respond that her thoughts seem to go "all over the place" & note that "getting organized" is a problem. I submit that to conceive of writing as "organizing" pre-existing thoughts is, while widely thought to be of the essence, a profoundly mistaken way of looking at the act of writing. Is it Heidegger who says "language speaks"? Must be. An instrumental view of language necessarily disregards this dynamical quality of language, this poetic quality. Any meaning that manages to get written is a sort of collaboration between the author & the language & the world of intractable things (see William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey").
____
*Chris, let's agree to number our own remarks to correspond to Wittgenstein's in PI 3rd edition (Prentice Hall paperback), since I think that's the one we both are reading.

I take two things from the Preface, maybe three. The first is that the difference between the Tractatus & PI is that in PI Wittgenstein has come to realize that human beings have lives as well as thoughts. The second impulse I take from Wittgenstein's almost pathologically modest Preface is that he conceives his task in poetic terms: "I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own." [PI vi] That, too, is the task of poetry, at least since the beginning of the 19th c. & probably always, everywhere. Finally, it has been suggested by contemporary thinkers like George P. Landow that Wittgenstein would have been attracted by computer-enabled hypertext. There is a sense in which the Philosophical Investigations aspires to be a hypertext document, in which the various paragraphs could rub up against each other in different ways, could form & reform different "family relationships" as required (or desired) by the reader. So, perhaps we need to take a critical perspective on Wittgenstein's notion that a book of philosophy has a "natural order"; or to consider the possibility that the natural order might be one consisting of more than a simple narrative dimension.

Oddly, as I have been writing this, I have been listening to the NPR 100's presentation of John Cage's 4" 33', also Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." Yes, silence. That would be where we begin & where we end. Actually, I don't think either of these seminal compositions made the final 100--this was a kind of "also rans" show.

Here is the text of the poem, written specifically for David Rakowski to set to music as part of the song cycle, "Suddenly, A Wind Goes Over." [Editions Peters score No. P67616] The poem also appears at the end of Magical Thinking. Here's how the poem came about: Davy Rakowski & I had met at Yaddo & after that corresponded for a while. Sometime in the early 90s Davy called me up & asked me to write some poems "with wind in them." I had been reading my old teacher Sandra McPherson's poems at the time, including a triolet from, I think, her third book. I also had Wittgenstein in mind, especially the ending of the Tractatus (about which there has been so much debate & just plain disagreement). Sitting in my office, for some reason I pulled the RSV bible off the shelf, turned to the concordance & looked up wind. In Psalms I found "Days are like grass the wind moves over." That evening I wrote my own overdetermined triolet & shortly after that Rakowski set it to music.

For Wittgenstein

Days are like grass the wind moves over:
first the wind & then the silence—
what cannot be said we must pass over
in silence, or play some music over
in our heads. Silently, a wind goes over
(we know from the motion of the grass).
Days are like grass; the wind goes over:
first the wind & then the silence.