Forgive the self-referential moment, but we have been added to The Wittgenstein Portal. (Sounds a little like a jumping-off point for time travel or universe-hopping.) Using the Portal, I discovered the following (as far as I can tell anonymous) paragraphs from a report on a conference. I offer them here as a clear summary of some of the issues we've been going over.

Wittgenstein and Forms of Life "The meaning of words in a language is not given by a kind of inner definition carried around by the speaker, or by a direct labelling of things in the world by words, but by the way in which the word is used within the language speaking community in what Wittgenstein called "the language game". Hence "The meaning of a word is its use in language." (PI §43) As the use of a language is part of a wider network of social practices, that means to properly understand the meaning of a word, you have to understand these social practices. This explains Wittgenstein’s famous remark that, "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." (PI, IIxi). When the lion talks, therefore, what it says can only be understood by someone who can share the social context of the lion. For Wittgenstein, language is not just a means of communication. To a large extent, language defines our whole experience of the world. "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." (Tractatus, p184) These reflections on the connection for Wittgenstein between language, society and the world explain why scholars are so interested in the role of ‘forms of life’ in Wittgenstein’s thought." [TPM]

There is an interesting point raised later in the report that we should not fall into the error of supposing that forms of life & language games match up exactly; extrapolating from that, I'd say that a given form of life can & must involve the use of multiple language games, which fairly often come into conflict with each other.

I think I suggested earlier that we have as humans an ability to move more or less smoothly between language games, between forms of life; but it must be emphasized that this is an ability to deal with inconsistencies, aporia, contradiction & etc. We "deal with" various language games despite the fact that different games involve us in vastly different roles & demand that we take different perspectives. Just this morning, Chris, you & I were involved in a series of meetings with colleagues as we mapped out our proposals for curricular change; then both of us went off to teach. We went from talking about teaching (from an institutional if not bureaucratic perspective) to practicing teaching. These, certainly, are different forms of life. At the same time, I have mentioned to several people lately that my teaching increasingly seeks to expose students, when appropriate to the classroom situation, to the institutional & bureaucratic structures that shape the language game in which we are engaged. For personal & ethical reasons, I am seeking to allow one language game to penetrate or (to return to my tiling metaphor) overlap each other. So is the skill we possess in moving between & choosing among language games itself a language game? This, I suppose, would return us to the theory of types, which as you pointed out Wittgenstein sought to banish. Is it necessary that the interpreting-language-games language game be in a higher position of generality? (I don't think that such a game can be said to be ontologically privileged.) Do we get into logical trouble, though, if we posit any meta-game?

Laughing at a funeral: You raise the issue of appropriateness of behavior n & you also foreground with your joke the inadequacy of behaviorism. (Very funny joke, by the way. I keep looking for a language game in which I can use it.) Jokes are orchestrated mistakes, you think? Mistakes, errors, slips, as Freud pointed out in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, are revealing. For Freud, such slip-ups revealed our "true wishes" or "real selves," but can't they also be seen as revealing the structures & relationships among our language games? I want to be careful here, but when you say that you do not want to participate in a language game in which jokes about child abuse are acceptable, my perverse poet's imagination tries conjure up a language game in which such a joke would not only be acceptable but necessary. Just consider for the moment the value of some of our more vicious satirists: Swift, of course, but also someone like Jerzy Kozinski. (I am thinking in particular of The Painted Bird, in which rape & the torture of animals is presented without comment & in which the grotesque sometimes transforms itself into a very black joke.) So perhaps there are two senses of the word joke that need to be teased apart: 1) to take lightly, to make light of; but also 2) to hold up for examination a terrible moment of insight. One language game looking at another.

Okay, we don't want to live in that world, we don't want to inhabit that form of life, but we need a language game that can afford us a view of that way of life: literature?

I've been reading my students' ideas about the way technologies of writing affect what is written & have been struck by how common is the idea that thought precedes language; that language is a transcription of thought. This makes so much sense but is so obviously wrong. I'm trying to figure out how "Slab" & "bring-me-a-slab" & "Bring me a slab" are similar & different. Does it matter that a word may be used as a sentence or a sentence understood as a word? My sense is that Wittgenstein is not so interested in the semantics as in pointing out that we know what we mean in certain situations. It is this knowing-what-we-mean that is irreducible, that flows directly from our forms of life.

What is understood: at the end of remark 20 W points out that in Russian one says "stone red" not "the stone is red." In my attempts to learn Vietnamese I have run across many such "subtractions," particularly having to do with time. In Vietnamese one assumes the present tense unless the context or the grammar indicate otherwise. These are things one simply knows because one has a Vietnamese form of life.

The idea of different temperaments or tunings brings me back to another metaphor that has been hovering in my thinking about these early remarks. That of tiles, or tessellation. The tiles, though, are not regular (though each may be self-consistent & even beautiful). The tiles are language games. Sometimes they nestle up against each other & make interesting, useful & beautiful larger patterns; but we can never assume that the surface can be tiled completely, without gaps. This is not a jigsaw puzzle to be "solved"--there is pattern but no solution. Only human being moving the tiles around & telling stories about what they see.

aporia: or 'apory' in English, is the cognitive perplexity posed by a group of individually plausible but collectively inconsistent propositions. For example, in Pre-Socratic times, philosophers were involved with the following incompatible beliefs: (1) Physical change occurs. (2) Something persists unaffected throughout physical change. (3) Matter does not persist unaffected through change. (4) Matter (in its various guises) is all there is. There are four ways out of this inconsistency: (1-denial) Change is a mere illusion (Zeno and Parmenides). (2-denial) Nothing whatever persists unaffected through physical change (Heraclitus). (3-denial) Matter does persist unaffected throughout physical change, albeit only in the small - in its 'atoms' (the Atomists). (4-denial) Matter is not all there is; there is also form by way of geometric structure (Pythagoras), or arithmetical proportion (Anaxagoras), or abstract form (Plato). To overcome aporetic inconsistency, we must give up at least one of the theses involved in the inconsistency. There will always be different alternatives here and logic as such can enforce no resolution. The pervasiveness of apories throughout human inquiry has led sceptics ancient and modern to propose abandoning the entire cognitive enterprise, preferring cognitive vacuity to risk of error.

I realize this definition is very basic stuff for a philosopher, but I want to consider it here in light of Lois Shawver's description of two of W's voices as, first, the "aporetic voice" & second, the "clarifying voice." The Investigations, I think we will agree, is a difficult text: any descriptions of its literary qualities (including voice) ought to be welcomed by the reader. To be honest, I had only a vague notion of what aporetic means & had to look it up. (The definition I found is above.) At least I know what "slab" means. Oh, wait. Suddenly, that is problematic too. In your office this afternoon you said (& it made sense to me) that you hear an "above" voice in the Investigations, but also an "inside" voice. Inside the flow of the text? Tonight, I'm trying to map your two voices onto Shawver's. Your "above" voice would be her "clarifying" voice, right? And your "inside" voice would be her aporetic or Augustinian voice--her problematizing voice. Clearly, W is setting himself problems, thinking "out loud" about them & then offering his own hard-won clarifications. The metaphor that comes to mind is one of whittling away at something until one has a perfectly exposed bit of twig, a tiny flute that can play one important note. W's philosophy then becomes a chorus of such flutes. Different pure notes, not all in the same system of tuning. W famously said that philosophy ought to be written like poetry, so it is important to consider the literary qualities of his language.

The ordering is neither natural nor mental. Important. This afternoon I was sitting in my office waiting for a phone call. I picked up the Investigations & opened to remark 20, which I had looked at last week, but only superficially. Perhaps because I approached the text so casually, I was caught off-guard. The idea that a word can be a sentence & a sentence be a word just about knocked me off my chair. One of the interesting things about Vietnamese (my perpetual exemplar) is that each syllable is spelled separately, i.e., with space around it & while most words consist of a single syllable, a significant number consist of two syllables. To someone like me, just learning the language, these compound words present a real problem: In one context the same pair of syllables can be read as two words, while in another context it is obvious to a native speaker that a single word is being spoken. Historical linguistics could probably explain this phenomena, but native speakers "just know" when two syllables should be read or heard as one word & conversely when each syllable should be heard as a single word. If there is a rule, no one has been able to explain it to me. It seems to me that 19 & 20 are important steps in undercutting the prevailing positivistic view of language promoted by, say, Stephen Pinker. Extending this line of thought in a different direction, I would suggest that W's formulation of the language game as a descriptive apparatus presents an almost insurmountable hurdle to those in the Artificial Intelligence community who believe that 1) language can be described as a unity & 2) reproduced mechanically.

This may be too much of a tangent, but in my recent work on & with hypertext theory & practice, I have run across the assertion that a book is independent of any particular instansiation in material form. That is, a given book is a sort of platonic Idea. I am very suspicious of this notion, even though I can see that it is superficially true. I have a body--doesn't a book have a body? I would be a different person if I were six feet tall or female; why, then, doesn't the body of a book affect its personalit? Or am I making a category mistake here, imagining that books & persons can be thought of as somehow similar?

Your remark about the confessional quality of The Philosophical Investigations is exactly my take as well. We don't argue with poetry. You can like or dislike The Wasteland, accept its view of the world or reject it, but you can't really argue with it. It's simply there like a Surat painting. In Culture & Value (I think) W says that philosophy should be read / written like poetry. In any case, your personal, passionate & confessional response to Wittgenstein is a recognition of his--& your--poetic qualities.

"The result is frustration: the completeness and eternity achieved in past philosophical systems have proven to be provisional, perfectible, and sources of confusions for generations of future philosophers." I like this & simply want to reiterate Dewey's remarks about the way most philosophies before Pragmatism substituted imagined unities (beautiful, beautiful unities) for the actual messiness & incompleteness of the world as it is. And then compounded the mistake by comparing the actual world to the imagined & finding it wanting. The genius of Pragmatism--& The Philosophical Investigations, I believe--is the way that they accept what everyone actually knows in their bones--that there are different ways (language games) of talking about or dealing with the world (forms of life?). "Talking about" & "dealing with" if not identical are certainly parallel activities.

Obviously, we're misusing the word misuse in this discussion, irony being one of the myriad violations of the language-as-simple-naming model.

Let me jump to the macroscopic view here for a moment. A way of catching my breath, really. We began by discussing W's treatment of Augustine's (clearly insufficiently complex) view of language & then watched as W began to develop a model with increasing complexity. But at some point in these early remarks comes an intellectual "tipping point," after which the nature of the project is transformed. At least that's the way I'm reading so far. Despite the fact that we find it hopelessly incomplete, Augustine, I think, wants to posit a complete theory of language. We know, of course, that Wittgenstein had attempted the same thing in the Tractatus. But we are lead--as W himself must have been led--to see that positing a complete theory of language is philosophically misguided. The question What is language? which seems so simple on its face, turns out to be incoherent. (When does Godel prove incompleteness for formal systems?) The mistake in the question is imagining that language is a) one thing & b) whole. John Dewey, in Experience & Nature, addresses this sort of error directly in his criticism of the various Idealisms that have flourished throughout the history of philosophy: "One of the most striking phases of the history of philosophic thought is the recurrent grouping together of unity, permanence, (or the "eternal"), completeness, and rational thought, while upon another side fall multiplicity, change and the temporal, the partial, defective, sense and desire. This division is obviously but another case of violent separation of the precarious and unsettled from the regular and determinate. One aspect of it, however, is worthy of particular attention: the connection of thought and unity. Empirically, all reflection sets out from the problematic and confused. Its aim is to clarify and ascertain. When thinking is successful, its career closes in transforming the disordered into the orderly, the mixed-up into the distinguished or placed, the unclear and ambiguous into the defined and unequivocal, the disconnected into the systematized. It is empirically assured that the goal of thinking does not remain a mere ideal, but is attained often enough so as to render reasonable additional efforts to achieve it." [John Dewey, Experience & Nature 57]

Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, qualifies his initial description of communication (setting aside for the moment the more vexed field of language). In 1948 Shannon published his landmark A Mathematical Theory of Communication. He begins this pioneering paper on information theory by observing that "the fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point." He then proceeds to so thoroughly establish the foundations of information theory that his framework and terminology remain standard.

". . . or approximately." Yes. We have moved from thinking of language as a coherent, unified system of communication to thinking of language as something closer to an ecology. And most recently we have touched on licit & illicit uses of language, which raises a fundamental question: by whose authority is one use--your "presently" for example--ruled illicit while another is approved? Linguistics solves the problem by stating positivistically that language changes & one usage is not to be preferred to another. I accept this, but would observe that users of language still feel or sense some usages as licit, some illicit. I don't think we can "scientifically" banish that feeling on the part of users of language; a rich account of language will have to include the fact that users feel some ways of using language are correct while others are incorrect. I want to suggest that this distinction is fundamental to language & constitutes one of the elements of language games.

The uses of tools: That's a good point you make about the useful misuse of tools. A former student of mine wrote me the other day, copying a letter of recommendation she had written for my pending academic promotion. Immodestly, I quote it here: "I recently read an article in a pedagogical review that addressed the issue of teaching inexperienced, first-year writers: writers who may hate writing and are most likely afraid to do it. The article stressed the importance of “enabling” the student. I think of supplying the beginning writer with a tool-belt, attaching more and more tools over the course of the four years, and slowly teaching the student how to use the tools. Eventually, when the student graduates, she should have a working repertoire of “tools,” and the confidence to apply them to projects in ways that are useful to her own creative conceptions. When I arrived here in North Carolina [for graduate school], I felt very “enabled.” Professor Duemer [had] introduced me to the tools I might find helpful, and encouraged me to use them however they would be useful. He watched and supported me as I successfully used a ruler to pound a nail into the wall. The result, if I may say so, is a student and writer who had no idea that she would actually have an advantage over the other MFA students upon arrival; a student who will always take a risk, who will always be thinking of how else she can do something, what else she will do; a student who is, comparatively, unaffected by the limits that product-based artists and writers impose upon themselves." Well, obviously, my life is a success (I say this with a sense or humor but without irony) because I have had one student in twenty years who got the drift. In any case, my student L. is confirming your observation that "Surprising or transgressive uses of tools are the source of metaphor in language." (I really do question, though, your assertion that a butterknife is sometimes better than the right screwdriver for turning a screw. And surely there is something right about the fact & the symbolism of the sentence, "I got the shovel out of the shed to dig a grave for the dog.")

But what we're talking about here, I think--how language allows us to get the drift. Is that a nautical term? We need to deal more fully with metaphor, but I want to highlight a few of the remarks in your last entry, motly to agree with them: 1) When you write, "The appearance of uniformity in language and world is philosophical artifice," you underscore in a sentence much of W's project. In my own small way, I have tried to write a poetry that stood in opposition to over-simplifications of experience. 2) [manana]

[17] "Think of the different points of view from which one can classify tools or chessmen." Okay, I will: Tools: by size, by color, by material(s) from which they are made, by the physical properties--leverage, friction, etc.--they employ, & so on. I have a small shed in my backyard, 10' x 12', made out of pine, with a tin roof. Inside I have constructed a small storage loft. There are shelves along one wall & a sort of workbench made out of an old door at the end opposite the door. Though I may be mistaken, I will assume that all of the objects in my shed have names, even if I don't know what they are. (What is that little curved piece of brass that came with a light fixture called?) Only some of the objects are tools; others are materials; yet others I would simply call objects--at the moment, all the screens from our windows are stacked against one wall. (Objects, I suppose, might always be able to be decomposed into either tools or materials, but is such a decomposition offer an analytical advantage?) So, given at least two & possibly three classes of things in my shed, how to I organize them? How do I make use of them? To some extent, I try to group like things together: various sizes of nails on the same shelf & near the nails, various screws. Even within this subset, though, I am forced to create little piles--or bags, or jars--of miscellaneous things that it would make no sense to separate out any further. I've got whole crates of nameless or nearly nameless stuff that's too good to throw out. Too good because it might find its way into one meaningful system of use or another. In consequence, I have a plastic bowl full of odd screws, hooks, fasteners, washers, pins, & whatnot. One view might argue for the uselessness of such a collection--it is literally & fundamentally indescribably in general, abstract terms--but I go often to this little bowl of things & finger through it looking for just that one thing that I need to complete some task. (Sometimes I find it, sometimes I don't.) On the other hand, all the tools for working with dirt--shovels, picks, hoes, rakes--are stacked in one corner near the door, so that when last week I needed to dig a grave for a dog, I knew exactly what I wanted & where to find it. And even if I had originally organized those tools by placing them together because they all had the quality of having long thin handles with metal instruments on one end, I would still have know which corner of my shed to go to & which things to pick up. To grasp.

So it is with language games. The shed has an infinite number of possible organized states, though a much larger infinity of chaotic ones, I suppose. I move from one system of organization to another, incommensurate, one--usually with ease, but occasionally with difficulty. The moments of difficulty are particularly interesting, no? In any case, Wittgenstein has led me to understand that the analogy of my shed is more useful for talking about language than was Augustine's little scene of hearth & home. A problem has just occurred to me, though: who teaches & who learns the system(s) of organization in my shed? Chessmen: Well, you get the idea. Anyway, I'm better with tools than with chessmen, so I'll leave that example for you to work out, if you like.

[17] Here we fnd the crucial insight in this first movement of the Investigations. This remark represents an important rhetorical turn. There are different classes of words & we will arrange them depending on the "aim of the classification" & upon (quite astonishing in its audacity) "our own inclination." There are potentially (though we choose among them) infinitely many "points of view." How do we choose among them?

[11, 12] Words as tools, parts of machines each part having a context / use. The relationships between parts might constitute a grammar. R. Crumb's Mr. Natural was famous (in my day) for exhorting, "Get the right tool for the job!" Context is everything. Okay, we employ tools in a certain order to achieve certain ends, but is this mere instrumentalism? I have the sense that what Wittgenstein is after is more interesting. If we must get the right tool for the job, how do we go about knowing which is the right one? (Presumable, we know what the job is.) Selecting the right tool in context must have to do with a kind of moral accuracy.

Phenomenology of Teaching, Redux: I invited a guest lecturer to one of my classes recently, a gifted scientist. After I introduced him, he began slowly, haltingly, he rocked back & forth on his heels, hugged himself & looked generally uncomfortable. He stood near the computer where he could see on the monitor the slides he was projecting for the class & talked to the monitor. But after a few minutes a change came over him: It was like watching a bird begin to sing. He began to relax & enter the familiar language game of teacher / student, or scientist / layman. He became highly fluent & animated & the class relaxed, too. Because everyone knew what they were supposed to do. Everyone knew the rules of this / these language game(s). Oddly, as the "extra professor" sitting along the side of the class in a folding chair, I was the odd-man-out. I had not particularly specified role in this language game, so that when I offered a comment, sometimes I was more like a student & sometimes more like a professor. All of which suggests to me that teaching--& language itself--is fundamentally about social relationships. (I assume we will come back to this notion in the context of the private language argument. There are no truly solitaire games; meaning is always shared meaning.)

Aside: This afternoon I was talking to the freshmen in my hypertext course about how we make sense of texts as readers & writers. I was pushing the idea that we pop back & forth between reading & writing almost unconsciously--sometimes you see the vase, sometimes the two faces. I'd had them working with cut-up bits of Melville & Whitman, trying to get them to make their own texts out of this limited universe of raw material. After they had been working at this for about half an hour, I asked for volunteers to read what they had written. After several students had read fragments of their texts, I asked the class, "Who is the author of these texts?" The first responses were, confidently, "We are." But it wasn't long before--as I had hoped--a counter movement set in, suggesting that Melville & Whitman had to get some kind of credit. I was trying to discredit the commonsense (& analytically impoverished) notion that writing is self-expression, replacing it with the idea that meaning emerges as a kind of collaboration between perceiver & perceived, between text & reader, between mind/language & world. In my universe of reference, this is a Wordsworthian idea: in "Tintern Abbey," the poet makes the claim that we humans "half-create" the raw world of nature with our (essentially linguistic) consciousness & memory. Students, especially honors students like these, have distinguished themselves by being good in relationship to texts--submitting themselves to the text's authority. My little exercise was designed to get them to be bad in relationship to texts. Well, I'll be happy if I get them as far as Romantic literary theory; post-modernism can wait until they are sophomores. We become fully-enfranchised readers & writers when we become aware that we are playing language games & can take a playful & often deadly serious attitude to our use of language.

I really do intend to get back to the text of the Investigations, but humor me long enough to pursue this question about functional & dysfunctional violations of Types. To begin: distinct language games can occupy different Types. That is, we can easily imagine a language game X about which one or more language games, X' & X'', exist; it is also possible to imagine that any of these language games contain other language games or overlap with them in various combinations. Where does that leave us? I want to suggest that it leaves us having to negotiate moves between one language game & another more or less seamlessly &--this is important--with a certain awareness. Perhaps there is a language game "about" negotiating between language games. Okay, I'll stop before I tie myself in another knot--I've got to go to class now & teach an easy text: Darwin's Origin. Afterthought a couple of days later: This ability to negotiate with awareness between l-games without letting ourselves get tied up in meta-thoughts or entangled in infinite regressions of meaning--this is one definition of competence in a language, also one definition of sanity.

Sorry to have dropped out of the conversation for so long. This format seems to work best when a certain momentum is maintained. And thanks for coming back to the theory of types. I've actually gone back now & thought a bit more about what was a spur of the moment notion. I first ran across the Theory of Types, not in Wittgenstein or Russel, but in Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Bateson was an anthropologist, but anthropological philosopher might serve as a better epithet. In the 1950s Bateson developed a theory of schizophrenia that R.D. Laing would later popularize & extend. I'm not sure how contemporary biological models of mental dysfunction would fit with this view, but, in brief, Bateson proposed that Schizophrenics had been victimized by a violation of the theory of types: As children, he says, their parents consistently said one thing but meant another, Alice in Wonderland-fashion, creating a permanent state of paradox, or double-bind. "I love you," coos a mother, but with a look on her face that says, "You disgust me." In order to cope with what is essentially a paradoxical & impossible world, the victim of such treatment develops a way of thinking that slides between Types without recognizing the shift. Bateson offers the following pair of syllogisms as an example of the difference between normal logical typing & of this other sort of thinking:

Men die.
Socrates is a man.
Socrates will die.

& this "mistaken" example.

Men die.
Grass dies.
Men are grass.

The first example is of course right as rain & has been since Aristotle; the second example is, well, poetry, I think. I'm not quite sure what to make of this. Metaphor is a violation of Types. What is the difference, then, between a functional & dysfunctional violation of Types? (I have no intention of romanticizing madness here.)

"What is learning? In Wittgenstein's view it has something to do with the traversability of language-games." This strikes me as right. (You also touch on what we might call education as indoctrination, but let's come back to that a little later.) The ability to move from one language game to another requires imagination. In my vocabulary, the term imagination has both aesthetic & moral valences. It is imagination that holds language together, but of course imagination is to some extent a linguistic process, so we have the Gnostic symbol of the snake with its own tail in its mouth. Language, as you say, is fragile, but also strangely powerful & resilient.

"You are teaching," I said in response to your question about the baby. Is the baby learning or acquiring? And in either case, learning or acquiring what? We were talking about language & so I meant, at that moment, learning language. But the child might also have been learning about the shape(s) of human faces; and the shape(s) of human faces cannot be separated out from language. The baby might have been learning (but were you teaching?) the smell of another human's breath. I am skeptical of the psychologism of the word acquiring.

This afternoon when we were actually speaking face to face, I suggested the notion that maybe "there is no teaching, only learning"--I love pithy little apothegms like this, but I suspect, alas, that it is wrong. "What am I actually doing when I'm standing in front of a class," I asked. I don't think we ever got around to answering this question because you asked, "What am I doing when I am speaking to a baby who cannot understand the meaning of my words?" "You are teaching," said I. "What is the difference between language -learning & language acquisition," you asked? We didn't answer that one either, just nodded sagely in each others' direction. But I want to go back to my question about teaching. Wittgenstein begins the Philosophical Investigations with a parable about teaching, though his attitude toward the story from St. Augustine only emerges slowly over the course of the first dozen or so remarks. Wittgenstein himself was a teacher--a university professor revered by those students tough enough to subject themselves to his therapeutic method; he also taught what we would call elementary school for several years during a period of his life when he was engaged in severe self-reflection & trying to be of some practical use in the world. (Am I remembering the Ray Monk biography correctly? He became a schoolteacher between the First & Second World Wars--after he had published the Tractatus (and become disillusioned with it?)).

When I posed the question, "What am I doing when I stand in front of a classroom full of students?" I was in a phenomenological frame of mind. I wanted to get at the actual texture of the experience. So: standing there, I am saying words that refer the students to concepts they 1) are already conversant with, 2) have encountered in their reading for the course, or 3) are just being introduced to; I do not lecture from notes, so I am making connections on the fly; I am often engaged in asking questions that will A) enable my students to make connections on their own & B) lead them beyond my questions & discourse (these are what I would call poetic questions, leaping questions); I am also able, given current technology, to present my students with images that illustrate the concepts with which we are dealing.

I had the opportunity last Thursday to become a student in one of my own classes: My colleague Sarah Melville came to my Imagining Science course to talk about Ancient Science. She is an expert in ancient Near Eastern languages & culture: I invited her because I wanted to my students to have a sense of where their own scientific traditions originated. Sarah used the same technology as I do, but projected mostly words on the screen in front of the class. She used only a few images. When I teach the same course I use mostly images & weave a text around them. I don't offer this as criticism, only description. One might think that a poet, which I claim to be, would be more enamored of words.

Take the previous two paragraphs as description. What kind of analysis can we make? The first thing that comes to mind is that when I am standing in front of a classroom full of students, I am making connections--both for myself & (I hope) for the students. (More description: There is an element of performance--occasionally I remark to myself, this is going really well, sometimes, this is in the fucking tank.) Anyway, after this interrogation of myself in the classroom, I conclude that what I am doing is , at its most primitive, W's "ostensive teaching"; but most of what is going on is a negotiation among various possible positions, some presented by me as teacher, some presented by the students as students. But do you see how easily these roles turn inside out & become the other. I am often the student, exclaiming, "Yes, I didn't see that before." The students, in this situation, are free to become teachers. I have been instructed by many of my students over the years--I have even endured the occasional pedantic lecture from same!

To return to the beginning: there is both teaching & learning, but they exist in a complex & simultaneous dance. (In the foregoing, I have stepped back to discuss teaching-in-general. Does this shed any light on the teaching-of-language? Learning of language? I am prepared to accept the conclusion that it does not.)