THIS ISSUE <15.3contents.html> ALL ISSUES
TALK BACK MUSE
IATH
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PMC Logo
Wittgenstein's Legacy: Metagrammar, Meaning, and Ordinary
Language
*David Herman <15.3bios.html#herman.bio> *
/ Ohio State University/
herman.145@osu.edu
© <#copyright> 2005 David Herman.
All rights reserved.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Review of:
Walter Jost, Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary
Language Criticism. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2004.
1. Ambitious in scope, richly integrative, and extensively
researched, this study demonstrates its author's familiarity with
ideas from multiple fields of inquiry, including classical as well
as modern rhetoric, critical theory, philosophy, and literary
modernism. The chief aim of the book is to work toward integration
and synthesis; drawing on theorists ranging from Martin Heidegger
and Kenneth Burke to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, and
using the poetry of Robert Frost to work through the author's
focal concerns, the book seeks to develop a framework for
interpretation in which "grammar and rhetoric, philosophy and
literature, reason and desire, reference and semiotics, truth and
antifoundationalism" might be brought into closer dialogue with
one another (1). More precisely, Jost characterizes literature and
philosophy as the termini of his discussion, suggesting that
rhetoric can be used to negotiate between these discourses (7).
Hence, although the four chapters in Part II develop extended
readings of Frost's "The Death of the Hired Man," "West-Running
Brook," "Snow," and "Home Burial," respectively,
the present book is more about exemplifying a specific kind of
critical inquiry, interpretation, argument, and community
activity than it is about a particular poet, historical
trajectory, literary period, or cultural moment. Frost's poems
present me with an occasion to rethink a nexus of questions
about the everyday and the ordinary, language, experience,
common sense, judgment, and exemplarity; to question
assumptions about the grammatical and rhetorical possibilities
of literary criticism; and to reexamine what I take to be
underappreciated resources for criticism to be found in the
traditions of rhetoric, hermeneutic phenomenology, pragmatism,
and so-called ordinary language philosophy and criticism. (4)
2. The introduction further specifies what the author means by the
"ordinary language criticism" mentioned at the end of the passage
just quoted and also in the book's subtitle. Ordinary language
criticism, in Jost's account, takes inspiration from the ordinary
language philosophy pioneered by Wittgenstein, refined by J.L.
Austin, and recontextualized by Cavell (Claim, In Quest, Must; see
also Baillie and Cohen). For theorists in this tradition, people
learn (and later use) concepts thanks to their place within a
larger form of life and the modes of language use associated with
that form of life. Although abstract logical definitions play a
role in specialized discourses (e.g., certain forms of
philosophical analysis), in other discourse contexts boundaries
between concepts are fixed by "situated criteria, the features and
functions of things, the behaviors and actions of people in
certain circumstances in which we operate with our words" (8). For
example, when I hear someone say /plank/ in a conversation I do
not try to match that person's usage against an abstract mental
checklist of necessary and sufficient conditions for "plankness"
in order to make sense of the term.[1 <#foot1>] Rather, I monitor
whether the ongoing discourse is about the construction of ships,
archaic practices of meting out justice at sea (as in /walk the
[gang]plank/), or political campaigns, and I draw an inference,
possibly incorrect, about which concept of "plank" is appropriate
given the broader context in which the term /plank/ is being used.
"Plank" is irreducibly caught up in these contexts of usage; there
is no single, decontextualized meaning of /plank/ (cf. Herman
2002), but rather multiple, partly overlapping meanings, each
determined by the use of the term in the situated, rule-governed
modes of discourse production and interpretation that Wittgenstein
called "language games" and Jean-François Lyotard "phrase
regimens." Further, these language games are not wholly autonomous
practices but can impinge on one another, as when through a
metaphorical extension /plank/ migrates from the language game(s)
of the shipwright to those of the politician and the pundit. The
key insight here, though, is that /plank/ does not denote "plank"
prior to its being used in some language game or other, even if
only the stripped-down "games" in which dictionary definitions or
the rules of logic are used to map out semantic relationships
among terms.[2 <#foot2>]
3. But what would be the specific brief of an ordinary language
criticism "consistent though not necessarily coextensive with
ordinary language philosophy" (9)? How exactly would students of
literature, say, draw on (post-)Wittgensteinian language theory to
study "literary thinking across or askew to fields and theoretical
specialisms, attending to the background complexity of everyday
life and ordinary language as they shape the form and content of
literary works" (10)? In one statement of method, Jost suggests
that "ordinary language philosophy and criticism can be taken as
nonstandard uses of ordinary language to investigate ordinary
language 'on display' in literature" (43). But this formulation
raises further questions: What is the difference between a
nonstandard use of ordinary language and non- or extra-ordinary
language? How do the sophisticated philosophical and rhetorical
theories Jost uses to describe the nature and functions of
ordinary language--and to analyze its deployment in Frost's
poetry--themselves relate to everyday communicative practices? Do
ordinary language philosophy and criticism constitute
"metalanguages" that can be brought to bear on the
"object-language" that people use in contexts of everyday
communication or in literary representations of those contexts?
Or, rather, do the philosophical underpinnings of Jost's approach
militate against this view, given that ordinary language theorists
posit not a binary division between "ordinary" and "specialized"
languages, but rather scalar relations based on graded
prototypicality--with everyday exchanges forming the central or
prototypical case from which more or less technical, register- or
purpose-specific uses deviate more or less markedly? In the domain
of literary theory and poetics, how might ordinary language
criticism (construed as an investigation of /displays/ of ordinary
language in literature) build on the prior research of scholars
such as Mary Louise Pratt, who criticized the Russian Formalist
idea of "literariness" by arguing that it is based on a conception
of non-literary language as a "vacuous dummy category," and who
analyzed literary works as "display texts" in which norms for
using ordinary language remain in play, though in modulated form?
4. I return to some of these questions below, in connection with
Jost's extended interpretations of Frost's poems in Part II of the
book. But it is important to note at the outset that, besides
appealing to philosophical precedents set by Wittgenstein, Austin,
and Cavell, Jost (who was himself trained as a rhetorician) seeks
to ground the practice of ordinary language criticism in a
rethinking of the ancient /trivium/ of grammar, rhetoric, and
logic/dialectic. In turn, this rethinking both enables and is
enabled by the author's close readings of Frost's poetry. The
introduction describes how Jost's study draws on, while also
recontextualizing, each component of the /trivium./ To synopsize:
* /Grammar/ helps specify particular grounds of judgments
underwriting human life and the means by which speakers
organize conceptual parts into wholes (14).
* /Rhetoric/ bears on the specific circumstances surrounding
people's acts and words and how they invent new words and
actions in new circumstances (14). Here Jost seeks to
reclaim elements of the rhetorical tradition from what he
characterizes as Paul de Man's reduction of "'rhetoric' to
an unstable figurality in which binary topics and proofs
('ideas') are subordinated to and subsumed by tropes and
figures ('images')" (16).
* /Logic/ concerns sequences of actions and words and "the
general gestalt patterns that connect actions to other
actions, beliefs to further beliefs, judgments to further
judgments" (14). Relatedly, /dialectic/ concerns order and
community, i.e., how members of a community achieve
coherence (or not) by participating in an inherently
collaborative attempt to "order the ordinary" (14).
In the new, post-postmodern dispensation, each member of the
/trivium/ becomes less a discrete analytical domain than a
heuristic framework (or form of practice) in synergy with the
other two.[3 <#foot3>]
5. Part I of the book is titled "Rhetoric: An Advanced Primer" and,
sketching out the general theoretical framework on which the
author draws in later chapters, begins with a chapter called
"Dialectic as Dialogue: The Order of the Ordinary." Along with
chapters 2-4, chapter 1 provides a foundation for Jost's extended
readings of individual Frost poems in the second part of the
book--though Part I also draws on the poetry in developing those
very foundations. (The book includes, as well, an Appendix that
reprints seven of the Frost poems used as case studies; it also
features extensive notes replete with bibliographic information
about key rhetorical, philosophical, and critical sources.)
Chapter 1 explores consequences of (and remedies for) an
assumption that Jost argues to be pervasive throughout the history
of Western philosophical discourse: namely, that "because everyday
life presents endlessly diverse and shifting scenes of opinion and
custom expressed in equally impermanent and equivocal words of
ordinary language . . . , both the everyday and the ordinary are .
. . illusory" (27). Radical forms of skepticism in contemporary
thought leave untouched the grounding assumption that everyday
scenes of behavior involve unsystematic action, opinion, or
desire--or, for that matter, the related assumption that the
non-systematicity of everyday action is threatened by co-opting
ideologies which seek to systematize, and thus distort, the domain
of the ordinary.
6. Controverting these assumptions, Wittgenstein, Cavell, and their
fellow-travellers conceive of the ordinary and the everyday as
"fundamental yet evolving cares and commitments of human beings in
community with and against each other--hence of everyday language
as a human habitat and even 'home' in which we dwell, the
linguistic hub of activities constitutive of the human form of
life" (32). Here, the metaphor of the hub stems from Jost's
refusal to draw a sharp line between everyday and non-everyday
language use; instead, like Wittgenstein, he posits a continuum in
which relatively more specialized uses radiate outward from less
specialized linguistic practices (37). The chapter moves from a
discussion of this general philosophical reorientation and its
implications for skepticism, to a discussion of Frost's "The Black
Cottage," a dramatic monologue whose narrator is "a homegrown
skeptic about the home of the everyday and the ordinary" (54).
Jost argues that the narrator's skepticism is bound up with his
tendency to speak as if all statements were tools that can be used
in the same way--a tendency that eventually causes him to drop out
of language games altogether.
7. Chapter 2, "Rhetorical Invention: Notes toward an American Low
Modernism," and Chapter 3, "Grammatical Judgment: It All Depends
on What You Mean by 'Home,'" continue to lay the general,
philosophical groundwork for ordinary language criticism also
provided by Chapter 4, "Logical Proof: Perspicuous
Representations." Chapter 2 characterizes Frost's standard
rhetorical posture as one in which "the language (style,
structure, grammar, rhetoric) of practical problem solving,
commonsense reasoning and beliefs, the rhetoric of the everyday
and ordinary . . . often intermingled with philosophic meditations
on their origins and ends" (64). Jost argues that whereas high
modernism sometimes tries to escape from (in order to "purify")
everyday life, Frost practices a species of low modernism that
focuses on overlooked possibilities in everyday life as well as
everyday linguistic usage (69). Taking issue with Frank
Lentricchia's (Kantian) understanding of Frost's poetry as
private, affective, noncognitive, and "therapeutic" in character
(78), Jost argues instead for a synthesis of the hermeneutic
aesthetics of Gadamer with American pragmatism in the
Emersonian-Jamesian tradition. This synthesis, he argues, reveals
a strand of low modernism (in writers as diverse as Frost, Henry
James, D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson)
complementing the high modernism of Mallarmé, Joyce, Kafka, Musil,
and Mondrian:
High and low both seek new integrations of our divided selves,
but whereas high modernism makes language (reading and
writing, communication) overtly difficult and strange in order
to break its readers free from the grip of an everyday
perceived to be suffocating and conventionalized, low
modernism makes language deceptively easy and pleasurable in
order to entice us into tripping over connections we had
habitually overlooked. (85-86)
Frost in particular engages in topical invention, writing poems
that catalog elements of the ordinary, not to defamiliarize the
ordinary but rather to "recommunalize a precarious everyday" (93).
8. Chapters 3 and 4 shift from rhetoric to grammar and logic,
respectively. In chapter 3, Jost builds on Wittgenstein's
philosophical recontextualization of the concept of grammar, i.e.,
his interest in what might be termed "metagrammar." For the later
Wittgenstein, the grammar of our language carries in its wake an
entire metaphysics--as when (in English) the form of a statement
such as "X is having a pain in his leg" causes speakers of the
language to assume that pain is wholly private and internal,
rather than being constituted at least in part by the verbal and
other performances by which people display and communicate the
experience of being in pain. More generally, a major task of
philosophy is to disentangle the structure of sentences from the
structure of the world. Chapter 3 suggests that Frost's
low-modernist poetry is marked by an analogous concern with
(meta-)grammar taken in this sense; his work, too, explores broad,
philosophical implications of ways of framing statements about the
world. Thus, for Jost, both Wittgenstein and Frost resist the
age-old codification of rationality in the form of the predicative
proposition, whereby "subject-object predication defines a priori
what counts as the statement of a definition, argument, or truth
judgment" (102). Wittgenstein's later philosophy suggests, rather,
that we judge statements as true or false using criteria embedded
in particular language practices that are in turn geared on to
specific situations of use (cf. Addis). What counts as a true
statement about, say, the length of a plank will depend on whether
the statement is made in a shipyard, a backyard, or an institute
for theoretical physics. Likewise, Frost's low-modernist poems
reveal a "preoccupation with the grammar of 'proof'" (97),
focusing on "the various claims of reason and its language games
of 'belief,' 'proof,' 'argument,' 'knowledge,' 'truth,' and the
like" (98). Jost uses the 1939 poem "There Are Roughly Zones" to
argue that in Frost's poetry "metaphysical categories of
explanation" ("soul," "mind," "heart") give way to "'rough zones'
of explanation, meaning, and value"--the center of gravity
shifting, as it does in Wittgenstein, from metaphysics to
rhetorical talk, from substances and properties to "arguments and
emotions . . . whose reality we experience in working our way
through the poem" (121).
9. Chapter 4 opens with an account of Michel de Certeau's
distinction, in The Practice of Everyday Life, between hegemonic
discursive "strategies" and subversive "tactics." Suggesting that
both strategies and tactics (cf. universals and particulars, rules
and cases, generalizations and future instances, laws and their
application) belong to rhetoric, Jost argues against "contemporary
misconceptions that experience 'must' be--not only in everyday
life but in art--politically or culturally shocking, 'radical,'
'unheard-of.'" On the contrary, "'to have an experience' is
indifferently both confrontative and, in Dewey's language,
'consummatory,' a blended tension of difference and completion"
(123-24). Far from having to be wholly aligned with tactics to be
authentic, experiences must be anchored in discursive strategies
to some extent if they are to be intelligible--"haveable"--at all.
10. Positing a scalar relationship rather than a binary division
between strategies and tactics, the chapter then situates
Aristotle's distinction between enthymeme (or argument) and
example along this continuum, locating argument at the strategic
end of the scale and example at the tactical end. Arguments
involve rule-governed deductions from determinate generalizations;
examples, by contrast, enable rhetors "to structure relatively
indeterminate situations from past particulars or cases" (124).
Jost devotes the rest of the chapter to a discussion of relatively
tactical dimensions of Frost's poetry. Frost's local tactics
include jokes, riddles, and paradoxes, quasi-proverbial locutions,
portraits of characters engaged in "drifting conversation," and a
variety of tropes. More globally, the poetry throws light on the
issues of exemplarity and exemplification. Focusing on "Two Tramps
in Mud Time" as a key tutor-text, Jost suggests that the poem
exploits the relative indeterminacy of generic terms ("work,"
"need," "love," etc.) to recall "past uses [of the words] as
examples, as possibilities, . . . that may thus be used as
resources for the future" (139). Further, invoking a number of
disjunctive pairs (work/play, frost/water, practical tramps/poetic
narrator), the poem thereby furnishes "many /examples/ of
unity-in-division, related to each other by analogy" and
"rhetorically [moves the reader] to a new 'place' (topos), by
virtue of our having experienced several plausible examples, whose
terms then become, in Kenneth Burke's formulation, 'equipment for
living'" (144). The final section of the chapter engages in an
extended account of epiphany and epideixis, which for Jost
constitute distinct language games. Whereas epiphany is the
hallmark of high modernism, epideixis is the paradigmatic mode in
Frost's low-modernist poetry. Compared with epiphany, epideixis
involves "a more /gradual/ but also more overt evocation of the
background patterns and premises of a position" (151); it has to
do with speech more than psychology; and entails communal rather
than personal realizations and changes (152-54).
11. Part II of the book is titled "Four Beginnings for a Book on
Robert Frost." Chapter 5, "Lessons in the Conversation that We
Are: 'The Death of the Hired Man' (Invention)," draws on theorists
as diverse as Alasdair MacIntyre and Carol Gilligan to explore how
the conversation portrayed in that poem involves a dialectical
interplay of ethical-rhetorical performances. Chapter 6, "Naming
Being in 'West-Running Brook,'" uses the poem to argue that Frost
gives voice, in the idiom of the everyday, to the questions about
being and time, language and interpretation, also asked by
Heidegger but in a distinctly philosophical idiom. In Chapter 7,
"Giving Evidence and Making Evident: Civility and Madness in
'Snow' (Proof)," Jost returns to issues of rhetoric in particular;
in his account, the poem demonstrates that "knowing another is not
a logical grasping of an object but a rhetorical seeing
(acknowledging) of another, one who has a rhetorical claim on us
to respond" (234).
12. Chapter 8, finally, is titled "Ordinary Language Brought to Grief:
'Home Burial' (Dialogue in Disorder and Doubt)" and is one of the
richest, most probing chapters in the book. Here Jost builds on
research stemming from Wittgenstein's critique of the
private-language argument--his criticism of the assumption that
the experience of pain and other sensations involves a kind of
"inner language" to which only the experiencer has access. In the
author's interpretation, Frost's poem likewise works through
philosophical issues bound up with skepticism about other minds
and their "/qualia/" or ineliminably subjective states of
awareness (see Freeman; Levine; Nagel). In a manner consonant both
with Wittgenstein and with the broader "second cognitive
revolution" to which his work has helped give rise (Harré,
"Second"; Harré and Gillett), Jost argues that critics of the poem
have made the mistake of trying to peer into "the 'inner' workings
of the characters rather than the outer behavior and scene of
their speaking, as though straining to penetrate the characters'
words to grasp the mental anguish within" (249). Instead (to shift
for a moment to a vocabulary slightly different from Jost's), the
characters' pain is enacted discursively; i.e., their words and
behavioral displays give rise to inferences about emotional states
located in and emerging from--rather than preceding--this
multiperson episode of talk (cf. Harré, "Discursive"; Harré and
Gillett).
13. Rather than presenting at this point a more detailed summary of
the engaging, often line-by-line interpretations developed in Part
II, I would like to highlight two broader issues raised by Jost's
readings of the poems--and more generally by the approach outlined
in the book as a whole. The first issue concerns the metagrammar
of Jost's own project, i.e., the norms governing Jost's
argumentational moves and combinations of critical, philosophical,
and rhetorical discourses as he articulates the project of
ordinary language criticism. At issue, in other words, are the
norms accounting for Jost's own intuitions about what constitutes
a "legal" or acceptable statement (or combination of statements)
framed in the context of ordinary language criticism. The second
broad issue involves rhetoric rather than grammar--specifically,
the rhetoric of /stability/ in terms of which Jost casts ordinary
language criticism as an alternative to and defense against
radical forms of skepticism. This issue concerns the relation
between the rhetoric of stability and the conceptual underpinnings
of ordinary language philosophy. It also concerns the specific
rhetorical purpose served by the author's emphasis on the
stabilizing role of ordinary language in the approach that he
advocates.[4 <#foot4>]
14. First, then, what exactly is one /doing/ when one engages in
ordinary language criticism? More specifically, how does one
formulate statements that would be deemed
acceptable--grammatical--within this language game about language
games? The question arises because of the language Jost himself
uses; specifically, Jost's readings of Frost sometimes suggest not
just a parallelism but a more fundamental equivalence between
philosophical and rhetorical discourses, on the one hand, and
Frost's poetry, on the other. For example, chapter 6 characterizes
Frost as a "communicator and rhetorician--one who resists romantic
expressivism and transcendentalizing in favor of a nonessentialist
account of self and Being, and Heidegger's postromantic elevation
of Being over man in favor of man's naming of being, and does so
precisely by holding these (and other pairs) in tension" (214).
Similarly, describing Frost as a "hermeneutically adept" poet
(211), the author argues that "we can apply it [i.e., Heidegger's
notion of the "retrieval" of a human being's past possibilities,
traditions, heritage, such that they are not merely absorbed into
the world] by proposing that the image of the backward ripple in
the outgoing brook that so fascinates Fred signifies just this
concept of 'retrieval' and its hermeneutic cousins
'appropriations' and 'application'" (198). These statements
suggest that Frost's poetry allegorizes concepts of Heideggerian
phenomenology; doing ordinary language criticism would be
tantamount, in this instance, to showing how literary discourse is
inter-translatable with specialized philosophical language--in
this case, philosophical discourse concerned with temporal aspects
of (the human experience of) the ordinary and the everyday.[5
<#foot5>] Yet the philosophical tradition on which ordinary
language criticism draws does not assume that specialized
languages are reducible to or wholly commensurate with less
specialized usages; it merely assumes that every language emerges
from and is intelligible because of a particular situation of use.
Indeed, ordinary language philosophers insist on the
/non-equivalence/ of language games that might appear to be
inter-translatable /prima facie/, but that on closer inspection
prove to be anchored in incommensurate norms and conventions,
different forms of life.
15. We return here to an issue broached earlier: namely, the relation
between ordinary language criticism and the literary (and other)
uses of language that it studies. True, Wittgenstein's
philosophical project was based, in part, on a rejection of the
distinction between metalanguage and object-language formalized by
Rudolf Carnap, among others. Rather than attempting to develop a
logically purified metalanguage--an ideal language that, imposed
from without, would purge ordinary language of its ambiguity and
vagueness--Wittgenstein and those influenced by him sought to find
a logic immanent to language itself.[6 <#foot6>] But to be
self-consistent, ordinary language philosophy cannot equate
grammar with metagrammar, the situated use of language with the
(differently situated) philosophical study of such language use.
One must assume that the same heuristic distinction continues to
apply, /mutatis mutandis/, in ordinary language criticism.
Arguably, however, when the author writes that "Frost's own sense
of judgment at the beginning of American modernism /supersedes/
traditional epistemological accounts" (102; my emphasis), his
verb-choice again flattens out the difference between Frost's
poetic project and the ordinary language critic's way of
characterizing that project. Likewise, when Jost notes that
theorists of ordinary language and literary practitioners converge
on the same themes and symbols, his account implies a similar
convergence of grammar and metagrammar, i.e., of the use of
everyday language and of theoretical descriptions of that use: "It
is an abiding theme of Wittgenstein, and of Stanley Cavell in
regard particularly to Emerson and Thoreau--Frost's own
models--that 'home' is the place, and symbol, of the everyday and
ordinary, and not least the symbol for and the place of our use of
ordinary language in, for example, talk and gossip" (168). Complex
mapping relationships need to be spelled out more fully here. If
it is to distinguish itself from thematics, ordinary language
criticism cannot merely point to the discursive field from which
concepts such as "home" and "the everyday" emanate and in which
they are embedded. Beyond this, it must specify how a given text
participates in this global field. At issue is the metagrammar
that determines what a text can and cannot say without being
shunted to a different zone within the field, thereby entering
into different kinds of relationship with other texts in the
domain as a whole.
16. The second broad issue mentioned before concerns the rhetoric
rather than the (meta-)grammar of ordinary language criticism.
More specifically, it concerns the rhetoric of stability used by
Jost throughout his study. For example, in the introduction, the
author sets up his analysis by suggesting that "rhetorical
investigations . . . are stabilized in the /sense/ of a community,
and the question becomes what it means to use or trust that sense"
(18). Meanwhile, in chapter 2, Jost seeks to use Frost's poetry to
steer a middle course between two positions regarding rhetoric:
"that of earlier romantics and moderns for whom rhetoric is
anachronistic, naïve, or pretentious for professional intellectual
purposes, and that of a specific kind of postmodernist for whom it
is rhetoric's sole cunning to destabilize, by intellectually
outwitting, all epistemological self-satisfactions across the
disciplines" (72). The rhetoric of stability continues in the
opening paragraph of chapter 5, where Jost writes: "For Ludwig
Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, all understanding stabilizes
itself in our 'acknowledgments,' 'agreements in judgments,' and
'mutual attunements' of so-called ordinary language and practice,
perhaps the most important of which are our conversations with
each other" (160). Similarly, in chapter 3 Jost argues that
"resisting skepticism in literature or literary theorizing and
criticism, by counting or recalling criteria of ordinary language
. . . is stabilized in our acknowledgments, in what Frost alludes
to as 'glad recognition of the long lost'" (111). Later in the
chapter, commenting on Frost's concern with the "stable
flexibility" of "the give-and-take that does in fact restrain our
ordinary lives" (117), the author discusses how the "rhetorical
action" of Frost's poetry points to his interest in "stable and
stabilizing" conceptions of taste and judgment, in
contradistinction to "nonrational," romantic conceptions of these
faculties or aptitudes (116). And in his explication of "Snow" in
chapter 7, Jost associates Frost's poem with Wittgenstein's turn
from explanation to description, "to directing our attention to
the deep conceptual patterns of linguistic surfaces in imagined
actions and scenes, stabilizing causal propositionalism in what we
know how to do and . . . already acknowledge" (221).
17. Jost is, to be sure, a highly effective rhetor, and passages like
the ones just quoted--by appealing to the relative, provisional
stability of interpretive criteria grounded in ordinary language
use--serve to situate ordinary language criticism in the broader
landscape of critical discourse. More specifically, by suggesting
that everyday experience in general and ordinary language in
particular exert a stabilizing influence in our ongoing efforts to
make sense of the world, Jost positions ordinary language
criticism between the Scylla of a relativistic, anything-goes
anti-foundationalism and the Charybdis of
anti-contextualism--i.e., variants of the (logocentric) view that
utterances and texts lend themselves to fixed, determinate
interpretations, irrespective of who's doing the interpreting,
when, and in what circumstances. The conventions and practices of
everyday discourse anchor interpretation, but in limited--locally
emergent--ways. With a shift in emphasis, however, ordinary
language philosophy can remind us of the limits as well as the
possibilities of everyday discourse in this respect. If discourse
conventions and practices constitute a ground for interpretation,
that ground is one capable of becoming, at a moment's notice, a
figure in its own right--i.e., a target of rather than a basis for
interpretive activity.
18. From a Wittgensteinian view, utterances mean what they do both
because of the form that they have and because of the way they are
geared on to particular types of activity, such as games, formal
debates, ritualized exchanges of insults, consultations among
coworkers faced with a job-related task, and so on.[7 <#foot7>] In
part, this grounding of words in activities channels and delimits
how much interpretation I have to do when my interlocutor says
something like /I'm not going to do that/. Rather than having to
search exhaustively through all the semantic spaces potentially
associated with that utterance to compute its meaning, I can rely
on quick-and-dirty heuristics to figure out what's being said,
factoring in whether the utterance is part of a game of pickup
basketball or a paraphrase of "Bartleby, the Scrivener."
19. But conversely, I may lack knowledge about or aptitude for the
activity in which the utterance plays a role; in this case, the
ineliminable contextual grounding of utterance meaning will defeat
my efforts at interpretation. Then, too, I may wish to create
unusual, norm-breaking or -bending pairings of activities with
utterances, hurling out oaths in the context of a formal academic
debate or using specialized technical vocabulary in a note written
on a greeting card.[8 <#foot8>] What is more, the link between
utterance form and utterance meaning is not only one-many (one and
the same locution can mean many different things, depending on
context) but also many-one (utterances having different surface
forms can mean the same thing in a given context: cf. /I'm not
going to do that/, /No way/, /Forget it/, /Never/, and /I prefer
not to/). Inextricably interlinked with successful or competent
language use, therefore, is the possibility of being wrong about
what someone means. The same activity-based criteria licensing
interpretations of utterance meanings can also cause me to
overgenerate inferences--as when I attribute different meanings to
utterances intended as synonymous--or else undergenerate
inferences--as when a mode of activity different from the default
type (e.g., an interpretation of "Bartleby, the Scrivener" written
under censorship) causes me to miss out on important nuances of
someone's words. Ordinary language does provide a ground for
interpretation, but that ground is shifting, ever-changing,
unstable. Just as the shifting of the earth both destroys and
creates, the unstable topography of a language produces variable
effects, from angry miscommunication to Frost's poetry. This is
Wittgenstein's legacy: a non-necessary connection between saying
and meaning--a probabilistic link between utterances and
inferences--giving rise to interpretations that may be good or bad
for some purposes, but not for others.
/ Department of English
Ohio State University
herman.145@osu.edu /
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Talk Back
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT (c) 2005 BY David Herman. READERS MAY USE PORTIONS OF
THIS WORK IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE FAIR USE PROVISIONS OF U.S.
COPYRIGHT LAW. IN ADDITION, SUBSCRIBERS AND MEMBERS OF SUBSCRIBED
INSTITUTIONS MAY USE THE ENTIRE WORK FOR ANY INTERNAL
NONCOMMERCIAL PURPOSE BUT, OTHER THAN ONE COPY SENT BY EMAIL,
PRINT OR FAX TO ONE PERSON AT ANOTHER LOCATION FOR THAT
INDIVIDUAL'S PERSONAL USE, DISTRIBUTION OF THIS ARTICLE OUTSIDE OF
A SUBSCRIBED INSTITUTION WITHOUT EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM
EITHER THE AUTHOR OR THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS IS
EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN.
THIS ARTICLE AND OTHER CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE ARE AVAILABLE FREE
OF CHARGE UNTIL RELEASE OF THE NEXT ISSUE. A TEXT-ONLY ARCHIVE
OF THE JOURNAL IS
ALSO AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE. FOR FULL HYPERTEXT ACCESS TO BACK
ISSUES, SEARCH UTILITIES, AND OTHER VALUABLE FEATURES, YOU OR YOUR
INSTITUTION MAY SUBSCRIBE TO PROJECT MUSE ,
THE ON-LINE JOURNALS PROJECT OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
PRESS.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
1 <#ref1>. This is not to deny that, in particular sentences, the
expression /plank/ displays certain, more or less stable logical
and linguistic properties that account for its syntactic behavior
and semantic profile across diverse kinds of utterances. For
example, the syntax of /plank/ is such that it cannot function
adverbially--except perhaps in very special (e.g., poetic)
contexts. I can say /The plank is slowly rotting/, but not /That
board rots plank/. Semantically speaking, planks and the sides of
ships stand in a certain kind of part-whole relationship with one
another--the relationship can be mapped as contained structure:
containing structure--such that /ceteris parabis/ (e.g., the plank
is not fabricated from a special kind of particle board itself
made out of tiny ship-shaped pieces of wood) some propositions
about planks vis-à-vis ships will be true, others false, and still
others nonsensical. Among the false propositions are /Planks can
be made of ships/; among the nonsensical, /I asked the shipwright
to put that ship at a different point on the plank's side/; among
the true, /Ships' sides can be made of planks/. Note, however,
that in describing the logico-semantic profile of propositions
about planks, I have had to sketch part of the real-world context
in which those propositions are used--disallowing the
"nonstandard" contexts (poetry with strange adverbs, special
particle board, etc.) mentioned above. The need for me to make
such qualifications lends support to arguments formulated under
the auspices of ordinary language philosophy.
2 <#ref2>. As Jost puts it, "things, people, beings, always
already 'count' for us not first as objects but as /going
concerns/: to perceive them as isolated objects (as in a
laboratory) takes effort and requires a determined diminution of
what is present from the beginning, namely the full range of our
interpretive understanding, including the linguistic structures
for 'seeing-something-as-something,' what Wittgenstein means by
'seeing-as'" (42).
3 <#ref3>. The author sketches a particularly porous boundary
between grammar and logic. Indeed, whereas Jost associates grammar
with part-whole relationships and logic with forms of
interconnection, one might argue the reverse: entailment
relations, for example, involve concepts contained within other
concepts (whereby "being red" entails "being colored" but not the
inverse), and grammar involves combinatory principles governing
connections among words, phrases, and clauses (/I attached some
planks/ is a grammatically legal combination whereas /I planks
attached some/ is not).
4 <#ref4>. A related issue concerns the rhetorical effects of
Jost's tendency to elide "ordinary language" with "the ordinary"
or "the everyday," as in the following passage from chapter 7: "As
argued throughout this book, Frost's mind and method are the first
to create an alternative low modernist lyric composed from
everyday conversational materials taken for granted by everyone
else. These materials and methods are steeped in the conventions
of the ordinary, in our form of life and its emerging and
disappearing common sense" (218). But ordinary language
philosophers were not, arguably, theorists of the everyday--even
though some of Wittgenstein's arguments have broad implications
for that theoretical enterprise. As discussed below (paragraph
15), ordinary language philosophy was initially a reaction against
ideal language philosophy (Rorty). In this context, theorists of
"ordinary language" disputed the view that a logically purified
metalanguage was necessary for the purposes of
logico-philosophical analysis--for example, to obviate ambiguous
expressions, and attendant paradoxes and antinomies (e.g., /Every
sentence that I write is a lie/), found in natural languages
(Carnap). Hence, in future work in ordinary language criticism,
Jost would do well to address more explicitly how theories of
ordinary language /à la/ Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell relate
to theories of the ordinary/everyday /à la/ de Certeau.
5 <#ref5>. Granted, elsewhere in the chapter Jost suggests a
non-equivalence between Frost's poetry and Heideggerian
phenomenology: "Frost himself in this poem is not, unlike
Heidegger, laboriously splitting metaphysical atoms, though he
does intuit profound issues in an insightful way. Although the
technical language and rigor of Heideggerian hermeneutics could
not be more alien to Frost, it may be that this hermeneutics
offers a contrary medium in which, paradoxically, 'West-Running
Brook' can best move" (195). The closing words of this statement,
however, imply a strong affinity to which my current line of
questioning still applies. By what criterion (in Wittgenstein's
sense of that term) does the ordinary language critic select a
given discourse as the one /best/ juxtaposed with the text whose
grounding in the everyday he or she wishes to use the other
discourse to examine?
6 <#ref6>. Richard Rorty sketches the broader history of the
dispute between practitioners of ideal language philosophy, such
as Carnap, and practitioners of ordinary language philosophy, such
as the later Wittgenstein.
7 <#ref7>. See Stephen C. Levinson for a Wittgenstein-inspired
account of how "activity types" of this sort provide heuristics
for utterance interpretation.
8 <#ref8>. In more complicated cases--for example, in a society
living under censorship--issuing certain kinds of
never-before-used utterances in the context of public activities
can be ideologically as well as linguistically creative. See
Fairclough and Wodak.
Works Cited
Addis, Mark. Wittgenstein: Making Sense of Other Minds. Aldershot:
Ashgate, 1999.
Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1962.
Baillie, James. Contemporary Analytic Philosophy. Upper Saddle
River: Prentice Hall, 1997.
Carnap, Rudolf. The Logical Syntax of Language. Trans. Amethe
Smeaton. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1937.
Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism,
Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979.
---. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and
Romanticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.
---. Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969.
Cohen, L. Jonathan. "Ordinary Language Philosophy." Concise
Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language. Ed. Peter V. Lamarque;
consulting editor R. E. Asher. Oxford: Pergamon, 1977. 25-27.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven
F. Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.
de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau,
Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
Fairclough, Norman, and Ruth Wodak. "Critical Discourse Analysis."
Discourse as Social Interaction. Ed. Teun A. van Dijk. London:
Sage, 1997. 258-84.
Freeman, Anthony. Consciousness: A Guide to the Debates. Santa
Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2003.
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and
Women's Development. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.
Harré, Rom. "The Discursive Turn in Social Psychology." The
Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Eds. Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah
Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. 688-706.
---. "Introduction: The Second Cognitive Revolution." American
Behavioral Scientist 36.1 (1992): 5-7.
Harré, Rom, and Grant Gillett. The Discursive Mind. London: Sage,
1994.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany:
State U of New York P, 1996.
Herman, David. "A la recherche du sens perdu." Poetics Today 23.2
(2002): 327-50.
Lentricchia, Frank. Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the
Landscapes of Self. Durham: Duke UP, 1975.
Levine, Joseph. "On Leaving Out What It's Like." The Nature of
Consciousness: Philosophical Debates. Eds. Ned Block, Owen
Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997. 543-55.
Levinson, Stephen C. "Activity Types and Language." Talk at Work.
Eds. Paul Drew and John Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.
66-100.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans.
Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
MacIntyre, Alisdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory.
London: Duckworth, 1981.
Nagel, Thomas. "What Is It Like To Be a Bat?" The Philosophical
Review 83.4 (1974): 435-50.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary
Discourse. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977.
Rorty, Richard. "Introduction: Metaphilosophical Difficulties of
Linguistic Philosophy." The Linguistic Turn. Ed. Richard Rorty.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Eds. G.E.M.
Anscombe and R. Rhees. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. 3rd edition.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1958.
LINKS: Non-Graphical Users See Top of Page
/Last Modified: Tuesday, 22-Nov-2005 06:54:19 EST/