From Vancouver, many months late

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As usual, I've read and thought far less than I should have in the months since I've written, so I have far less to report on that I should.

I have, however, read Of Grammatology for the first time, and tomorrow I'll finish Henry Staten's mostly excellent book, Wittgenstein and Derrida, which essentially (and I think rightly) aims to identify something like a deconstructionist method at work in Wittgenstein's writings (he calls Wittgenstein unique among Derrida's predecessors in having developed "a consistently deconstructive standpoint").

I was reading Of Grammatology more just to get a sense of what's in it and get a feel for Derrida's style than to do a detailed and critical reading. The stuff that's most relevant to my thesis are some of the essays in Margins of Philosophy (especially "Signature Event Context," "The Supplement of Copula," and "White Mythology") and Limited Inc. But I figured I really should at some point read Derrida's big book. I still think I should just read "Plato's Pharmacy." I read the first twenty pages before other things took over, but it still strikes me as the most lucid thing of Derrida's that I've read.

Still, it was good fun, even at a skimming pace that didn't allow for much careful rumination. Derrida's a wonderful reader of texts (and the attention he gives to Rousseau reaffirms my sense that I really need to get to know Rousseau a lot better) and I'm often impressed by how convincing his readings are considering how strikingly original they are too. There's a lot to learn from his intense attention to neglected details. I think my other reading in recent weeks has been affected by it (more on that in a bit).

I might as well say a few words about why Derrida's relevant to my thesis, which will also tie into my wanting to pick up the thread of our now long-stale conversation about logic and language. The starting point is Derrida's reading of Austin in "Signature Event Context," which will help me develop a question about the appeal to ordinary language in philosophy, which is whether and how "ordinary language" is supposed to exclude other forms of language. One easy answer to that question is that they're contrasting it with "metaphysical" language, which the heroes of my thesis are trying to expose not as an alternative form of language, but as nonsense, a misfiring attempt to say something that in fact results in saying nothing. But, as Derrida points out, Austin also seems to want to exclude all sorts of other "fictional" discourse, from words spoken on a stage to jokes to recited poems. This all seems innocuous enough within the context of Austin's project, but again, it's part of what's impressive about Derrida, that he can pull on the innocuous side remark and make the whole edifice collapse. To Derrida, Austin's exclusionary gesture is an attempt to retain a totalizing control over the words we utter, to be able to say and mean exactly what we want to say and mean, without risk of infelicity. This is all the more interesting as a line of criticism, since it implies a kind of psychologism--locating meaning in the mind of the intending speaker--that Austin very deliberately criticizes. So if he's at fault here, he's very subtly so.

I could go on at great length about all this. One thing it does for me is to help me distinguish Austin from Wittgenstein around the concept of ordinary language as home. Both Austin and Wittgenstein register sin-inflected expressions of disgust at philosophical language as somehow corrupting us and drawing us away from our ordinary inhabitation of the world and of language. But Austin seems to believe that there's such a thing as a fully satisfactory inhabitation of the world and of language that his appeal to ordinary language is supposed to get us back to. It's this nostalgia for a home that never existed in the first place that I think Derrida is essentially attacking. Wittgenstein, by contrast, also uses this metaphor of the ordinary as home but, I argue, is also aware of the ordinary as fundamentally unstable, not as a place of rest, but as a place of recognition of the impossibility of a place of rest.

In this respect, he shares with Derrida a sense of dynamic play being always at work in the workings of language. This notion of play is what I take to be central to the argument of my thesis. I can only envy Derrida's ability to read texts: his genius consists in large part, I think, of being able to find just the detail that will show that the most totalizing texts are constantly at play despite themselves.

This all ties in only tangentially to some of the stuff you said about logic and language many moons ago. As you know, I think I'm mostly in sympathy with most of what you say, or at least the spirit in which you say it. But I still object to the way you conceive of thought as something we struggle to put into words, and that's often distorted or enhanced or diminished by the effort of being put into words. What I'd suggest--and I draw this largely from Wittgenstein--is that you're working with a conception of thought that doesn't seem to me to be fully coherent. At least, it seems like you're operating with a picture of thoughts as these definite things that exist somewhere in the head, and which then take on a particular form when squeezed out of the mouth. Sort of like feces sitting in the bowels, which then take on the shape of distinctive turds when they come out the anus (I thought you'd appreciate the comparison). I'm not sure we can coherently talk about thoughts without their being linguistic. Or at least, if you ask yourself where this idea comes from, that there are thoughts in the head, it's because we sometimes say things and then claim we'd been thinking about them before and couldn't find words for them, or talk about things being on the tips of our tongues, implying that the thought's there but the words haven't come yet. But these manners of speaking aren't descriptions of thoughts bouncing about in our brains like turds in our bowels. They're just ways of speaking about the ways we speak. Or, to quote from the master:

"The word is on the tip of my tongue." What is going on in my consciousness? That is not the point at all. Whatever did go on was not what was meant by that expression. It is of more interest what went on in my behaviour.—"The word is on the tip of my tongue" tells you: the word which belongs here has escaped me, but I hope to find it soon. For the rest the verbal expression does no more than certain wordless behaviour.
James, in writing of this subject, is really trying to say: "What a remarkable experience! The word is not there yet, and yet in a certain sense is there,—or something is there, which cannot grow into anything but this word."—But this is not experience at all. Interpreted as experience it does indeed look odd. As does intention, when it is interpreted as the accompaniment of action; or again, like minus one interpreted as a cardinal number.
The words "It's on the tip of my tongue" are no more the expression of an experience than "Now I know how to go on!"—We use them in certain situations, and they are surrounded by behaviour of a special kind, and also by some characteristic experiences. In particular they are frequently followed by finding the word. (Ask yourself: "What would it be like if human beings never found the word that was on the tip of their tongue?")

I'm very tired and running out of steam, so I'll just say a few last things about animals. The first is that I've been reading some interesting stuff, starting with Coeztee's The Lives of Animals, moving on to a short collection of essays called Philosophy and Animal Life, with contributions from Stanley Cavell and (most interesting among them) Cora Diamond that deal with Coetzee's book, and now a book by my supervisor called The Wounded Animal. I won't go on at length here, but will hopefully return to it all sometime soon. Part of what I find fascinating is that the discussion deals on one hand with our relations with animals, and on the other hand with the tension between philosophy and literature and the "difficulty of reality" they both confront. And I don't think the two are just coincidentally related: part of my interest in animals comes from the difficulties they throw up for our own sense of our place in the world and our attempts to make sense of it.

I'm also trying to write a companion piece to Pork. The ultimate plan is to have a trio of short plays called Three Little Pigs, which are Pork, Ham, and Bacon, respectively. One of the things I've been reading is Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Pigling Bland, which is fascinatingly full of contradictions, which Potter herself must have been at least partly conscious of creating (it's in noting these contradictions that I think my recent reading of Derrida has heightened my sensitivity to such things). We have these pigs on a farm who behave for all the world like normal pigs until it's decided that they're too much hassle and are sold off. Pigling Bland then becomes an anthropomorphic pig who has to dress up like a proper young man and go off on his own into the world as young men in such stories so often do. Except he has to go off to the market, and we all know why pigs go to market (there's a similar tension in "This little piggie went to market..." which is all the more odd for the fact that one of the piggies eats roast beef). He even carries a note permitting him to cross county lines, which one would need if one were meat, but not if one were a person. And the story continues along these lines, with Pigling Bland ultimately escaping from the clutches of his (never explicitly named) butchers to start a life of farming potatoes. A Bildungsroman where the animal grows up into humanity. All very strange stuff, especially for a children's story. Though I guess children's stories are always deeply weird.

The particularity of proper names

As for my own reading, I read two unrelated things this last week that seemed to share a fair bit in common. I'll see if I can flesh that out.

The first was a paper by Cora Diamond dealing with Wittgenstein's Lectures on Religious Belief. I find Diamond frustrating, because she's brilliant, insightful, and sometimes immaculately clear, but then sometimes seems to decide not to bother explaining what seems to me to be the crucial point. But that's neither here nor there.

In the paper, she talks (among other things) about a view she ascribes to Franz Rosenzweig, Kornelius Miskotte, Helmut Gollwitzer, and in a less academic way, Flannery O'Connor. This is a view opposed to the position that any mature thinker has outgrown an anthropomorphic conception of God, a position best exemplified by Norman Kemp Smith, who refers to God as "the Divine" in order to de-anthropomorphize divinity. These theologians that interest Diamond counter this position by insisting on the importance of God's having a name, and of His presence as not just an all-pervading divinity, but as being able to manifest itself in particular places at particular times in particular ways so that the Hebrews, for instance, could rightly talk about God's presence among their people as not just an instance of God's omnipresence.

This insistence that God have a name is closely tied to the particularity that proper names bestow: in calling my friend "Kevin," I associate him not just with a role or a set of qualities, but with his particular self, and if Kevin were to die, it would be no comfort if I were to befriend someone else with similar qualities because that someone else, no matter how similar to Kevin, wouldn't be the particular person that Kevin was.

One thing, Diamond claims, that the particularity of a name makes possible is that the named person can change us at the level of our concepts. She uses the example of George Eliot, who was famously ugly. If one got to know Eliot, saw her lively wit in conversation or read her books, one would come to see her as beautiful, and knowing this particular person as beautiful, despite her ostensibly ugly appearance, would have the effect of shifting our conception of beauty. Similarly, she claims, the idea that God has a name--has particularity--makes it so that God is not simply the word we associate with our concept of divinity, but that witnessing and contemplating God's actions--by considering the ways in which the Hebrew or Christian or whatever God manifests Himself to his people--actively shapes our conception of divinity. And, Rosenzweig and Miskotte claim, only by understanding God in terms of his actions can we understand what kind of responsiveness those actions call for in us.

The other thing I read, totally unrelated, and for unrelated reasons, was a short story by Peter Carey called "The Chance." It imagines a futuristic world in which a race of aliens called the Fastalogians have come to earth and mingled with us. Like the Americans before them, what they bring to the people that they come to dominate is superior technology, canny business acumen, and the ability to promise a better life. Their great product--or swindle--is called the Genetic Lottery, known colloquially as The Chance. For several thousand dollars, you can take a Chance, where your body and face are randomly changed, so that you may come out looking older or younger, prettier or uglier, but with most of your memories and the like intact.

The Chance has a devastating impact on the unnamed society our narrator lives in, though we're only given hints about just how it plays itself out. It's clear enough, though, that The Chance is like opium in China, becoming a universally addictive drug that becomes the most important thing in people's lives. People cease to take any interest in their present role, and are constantly saving for a Change that will thrust them into a new life. We get a sense of a crumbling city, where institutions are left to rot because everyone's too caught up in pursuing their next Chance and aren't connected to the present. (I'm doing a terrible job of relating this story).

Our narrator--a middle-aged man who's unable to raise the money for his next Chance because he spends all his meagre salary on booze to numb the pain of his downcast position--falls in with a beautiful young woman from a well-off family, who he can tell has never taken a Chance because of the comfort and ease with which she inhabits her body. Soon after they become lovers, he learns that she's a Hup, part of a revolutionary organization that wants to overthrow and kick out the Fastalogians, and that is disgusted with bourgeois ideals of beauty. Like senior members of the Hups, Carla wants to take a Chance as soon as she can so that she can make herself ugly and rebel against the societal standards that judge her beautiful. Our narrator is horrified at the thought, and we follow their relationship in the months and weeks leading up to her Chance, as he tries to persuade her to stay the way she is. I find the ending heartbreaking; I don't want to ruin it.

One of the things that the story captured quite well for me was this notion of particularity, this time coming not with a name but with a face and physiognomy. The cliché that beauty is only skin deep fails to appreciate just how much of our expressiveness is uniquely our own, and that cliché in a way does violence against our particularity in insisting that a different physiognomy could just as well express the same person. The Hup mentality, with a few alterations, could be the mentality of Norman Kemp Smith, the view that the essential thing--about people, about God, about life--lies in concepts, abstractions, universals. What I find interesting about Carey's story, as well as the theologians Diamond discusses, is the fierce insistence upon particularity, however superficial or superstitious it may seem.

And like Diamond's example of Eliot's particularity being able not just to instantiate a pre-conceived concept of beauty, but to effect a shift in that concept, what I find moving about the story is that the two main characters effect a shift in one another's concept of what love is, so that what's threatened by Carla's intention to take a Chance is the love that they've discovered by sharing in one another's particularity.

I think there's a lot more to be said about particularity, though I think I've typed enough for now, and I'm not sure what more I might say. One thing to remark upon in closing is a thought a professor articulated for me some years ago, that only language, through the use of proper names, opens up a world of particulars for us. Here he distinguishes between particularity and specificity. I can hone in on identifying Kevin with greater or lesser degrees of specificity by picking out various qualities that attach to him--American, student of French literature, frequently unshaven, etc.--and while sufficient specificity may pick him out uniquely, that uniqueness is merely contingent, as it relies on the fact that it just so happens that no one else shares just that set of properties. The particularity that proper names gives us allows for an entirely different way of picking out uniqueness.