nonsensical responses

First I'll try to say a bunch of things in response to your posts. Then, time permitting, I'll try to write a separate post about Wittgenstein. I mean god, I've been contributing to this blog for nearly half a year and I haven't talked about Wittgenstein yet. What's wrong with me?

First of all, I have to wonder to myself how you read books so fast. You're constantly complaining about how lazy you are and how little work you've done, and yet every week you're commenting on a new book you've read. It's a good month for me when I read a single book, and I don't really think I'm lazy, much as I castigate myself from time to time. In my case, I think there are two main reasons: first, I'm a slow reader, and especially with academic books, I read at a pace of something like five to ten pages an hour, so reading a full book in a week would be a full week's work, and I rarely manage a full week's work. And that's for the second reason, that I have a talent for taking on all sorts of extraneous commitments. I wouldn't really have it any other way, but it does add to the stress levels. Writes the guy on the bus back from London having spent the day sitting in on rehearsals for Tom's a-cold, which opens in a week and a half.

Now, to work roughly from oldest to youngest. Reading your last three posts I was reminded on a number of occasions of something I think you've remarked upon more than once, that we seem to be interested in many similar things even though we look at them through the lenses of rather different intellectual backgrounds. The language and nonsense stuff is a prime example, since it features significantly in my thesis too. Actually, it's maybe more of an anomalous case, since it's not just our interests that overlap here, but even our reading somewhat. I'm supposed to manage to get my head around Derrida at some point. Not sure I will, but I'm sure talking to you about this stuff can't be a bad start. So maybe I could begin by posing some clarificatory questions.

You talk about the rules of language being clearly not logical. I'm not entirely sure what this means, influenced as I am by Wittgenstein's claim that ordinary language is in perfect logical order. Do you simply mean that grammatical rules seem often to have exceptions, or do you mean something stronger than that? If you mean the weaker claim, I suspect that's a bit of a red herring (I'll get on to what I think is not the red herring shortly) because a language without grammatical exceptions isn't free of the sorts of ambiguities you seem to take as paradigmatic of illogicality. Esperanto, for instance, is a language without grammatical exceptions (I believe--I don't actually have more than a passing familiarity with constructed languages), and it seems like there are people who can communicate with it quite fluently, but it also seems (again, speaking out of ignorance) that speaking Esperanto doesn't radically alter the features of language that tempt us to call it an imperfect vehicle.

If you indeed mean a stronger claim that language of any kind--grammatical exceptions or not--is somehow an imperfect vehicle (you talk about language as a "flawed vehicle for thought"), I'm curious how you might spell that out. Flawed in comparison to what, for example? If the struggles we have with language aren't accidents of our language, but structural features of all possible languages, then can this count as an imperfection? Can we articulate what it is we're unable to do that our imperfect language somehow hinders us from doing?

I don't mean to deny that language often trips us up in various ways. I'm just questioning whether we can coherently talk about these snares as "illogicality."

I said I thought that grammatical exceptions were a red herring. What I don't think is a red herring--and something I believe is familiar to readers of Derrida as much as to readers of Wittgenstein or Cavell--is the fact that words can always be projected and used in new contexts, and no rules can lay out in advance how that projection can work, and if we operate with a sense that the boundaries of the concepts defined by our words are rigidly fixed in advance, we are likely to stumble on all sorts of confusions that make for a playground of nonsense. Lewis Carroll is one of the great masters of this genre. I'm thinking of the bit about "jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never jam today" as taking the word "today" to refer to the present day, whatever that day might be, fixed by the present moment rather than the moment of utterance. That's maybe not the best example, since there's more at work than just the notion that concepts need rigid boundaries, but I'm sure you know what I mean.

A few other things on other topics:

Regarding trans-humanism, you seem to share my sense that on one hand, this is obviously perverse, but on the other hand, there's something quite compelling about its logic. Again, more so for someone like me, a vegetarian and aspiring Buddhist, than you, with your punk sensibilities, but I'm glad you seem to share my sense of it. Again, I think of Nietzsche, this time in terms of his emphasis on instincts and his sense that unhealthy creatures come to distrust their instincts. Abolitionism seems to represent this notion perfectly: people who so distrust their own instincts that they can talk themselves into rejecting everything they are naturally. Though I was struck by your remark that you find enhanced intelligence less tempting than enhanced happiness. What thinking person hasn't wished for a little more sharpness of mind? Sure, godlike intelligence and happiness might render us other than human, but that's where the "trans" in "trans-humanism" comes from: from their point of view, if human nature as given to us doesn't sit well with our trans-human future, so much the worse for human nature.

I enjoyed the stuff on Flaubert and received ideas. When I was reading Bovary last summer there was frequent reference in the footnotes to the book, though I never quite knew what it was (having skipped the introduction to get right into the novel). It sounds like a delightful idea. It also reminded me of some stuff I've been reading about Heidegger and das Man. There's some debate about the extent to which das Man in Heidegger is meant to represent the bland conformity of adopting shared norms like driving on the same side of the road, etc., and to what extent it's meant to represent the pernicious conformism of thinking what everyone else thinks, etc. One suggestion is that the two easily bleed into one another, and I find a bit of that in your discussion of Flaubert. I've been working on a paper on Wittgenstein and Heidegger and precisely the question you raise with Flaubert about how we can break out of the habits of thought we've inherited without breaking out of the constitutive grounds for expressing thoughts coherently at all. You won't be surprised to hear that I think Wittgenstein is more successful in this respect than Heidegger. My next post might touch on this.

And lastly, I identify powerfully with what you say about complaints that there's nothing new to say being the complaints of people who can't think of anything new to say. I'd never have put it the way you put it, or even really thought it without your help, and I think it's inspired. Though it also reinforces my sense that I'm not really destined for the life of the scholar. I'm really not sure what there is to say that's new. Not because I don't believe it's possible, but because I feel like I'm able to think with people who inspire me but lousy at striking out on my own. I think my slavish devotion to Wittgenstein comes from the sense that I have nothing to say that could take me beyond what he's already said so well.