Wittgenstein and deconstruction

I'm working right now at a thesis chapter that deals with Derrida and ordinary language philosophy. "Signature Event Context" offers a reading of J. L. Austin that's very flattering in its attention, but also quite critical. It spawned a nasty spat between Derrida and John Searle, which is unfortunately one of the rare moments in which continental and analytic philosophy talked to one another. My chapter discusses Derrida's criticisms of Austin and asks whether these criticisms can apply to the appeal to ordinary language more generally, and to Wittgenstein in particular. Some people (Stanley Cavell and Martin Stone) take Derridean deconstruction to be sharply at odds with what Wittgenstein is trying to do, while others (Simon Glendinning and Henry Staten) find deep parallels between Wittgenstein and Derrida. I'm not yet sure which side I'm on, and I'm not sure to what extent I need to pick sides: there can be deep affinities as well as important differences. To a large extent, my uncertainty comes from my uncertainty about Derrida. That is, I don't feel at all confident in my understanding of Derrida, so I'm not sure where I stand with him. I just read a paper by Martin Stone that I think gives a strong reading of Wittgenstein, but offers a Derrida I'm not sure I recognize. I thought you'd be a worthwhile person to run all of this by since you know Derrida far better than I do. And because you'll certainly be approaching what I say from a more Derridean angle: people like Cavell and Stone, and even Glendinning, are more steeped in the analytic tradition and Wittgenstein than they are in Derrida and continental philosophy, so I worry that they might be giving me a skewed perspective.

If I want to talk about Stone on Wittgenstein and Derrida, the place to start is probably with Wittgenstein's famous discussion of rules. Wittgenstein is one of the first philosophers to give sustained attention to the question of what rule following consists in. This is particularly striking given that rule following seems to be implicit in so much philosophy: a great deal of our thinking about ethics and rationality, for instance, seems to rely on the notion of following rules. For Wittgenstein, rules also feature prominently not only in our thinking about mathematics, but in our thinking about thinking more generally: what is it to understand a concept if not the understanding of the rules according to which that concept can be applied in future instances? (As you'll see, this isn't meant to be simply a rhetorical question.)

Wittgenstein closely associates rules with interpretation. One example of a rule that Wittgenstein discusses is a signpost. Supposing you see a sign that says "Vancouver" with an arrow like this "->". The standard way of reading that signpost would be to take it to tell us that Vancouver is on the road to the right. But why do we take the arrow "->" to signify "right"? Couldn't we just as well read it as pointing to the left? (At one point he asks why we couldn't just as well take a pointing arm to signify the direction indicated by following the outstretched finger up to the shoulder.) One answer that Wittgenstein's imagined interlocutor proposes is that when we see the arrow, we interpret it as pointing to the right. But Wittgenstein finds a regress in this kind of answer: couldn't the interpretation itself be open to interpretation? That is, whatever this interpretation consists in--whether it's a mental picture, a written instruction, a spoken or thought word--is just as open to alternative interpretations as the original arrow.

(I should pause here to note that this is one of the similarities between Wittgenstein and Derrida that strikes me as really interesting. Both are very interested in what Derrida might call "the materiality of the sign." That is, both of them are highly sensitive to our philosophical tendency to avoid difficulties by imagining certain abstract processes like interpretation or meaning to take place in some inexplicably spiritual and exact medium that's free of all the ambiguities of normal sign use. And both of them combat this tendency by insisting that we treat these abstract processes in just the way that we might treat written or spoken signs.)

If rules in general are subject to interpretation, and interpretation itself is subject to further interpretation, it would seem that any course of action could count as following a particular rule on some interpretation of that rule, and that there's no absolute authority that can determine which is the correct interpretation. One climax in Wittgenstein's discussion of rules comes at §201 of the Philosophical Investigations: "This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here." This passage, and the stuff around it, has been subjected to volumes upon volumes of scrutiny, and there's still wide disagreement about exactly what's going on here.

One very influential reading, most famously advanced by Saul Kripke, takes Wittgenstein to be offering us a "skeptical paradox" and also a "skeptical solution" to his skeptical paradox. The paradox is that rules would seem to require interpretations to fix their meanings, but since interpretations are equally open to this requirement, there's no absolutely correct interpretation of a rule. The "skeptical solution" is that rules (and rule-based practices, such as meaning, understanding, interpretation, and so on) don't have absolutely correct interpretations, but nor do they need them. What makes an interpretation correct is the agreement of a community on how to follow that rule. And this answer isn't a cop-out since communities are constitutive of rules. That is, there's no such thing as a rule if there isn't a community that agrees on how to follow that rule: "It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which a report was made, an order given or understood; and so on.—To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions)" (PI §199).

I think this reading is wrong, and wrong in a way that's important to my thesis, because I think it arises precisely from a failure to take Wittgenstein's appeal to ordinary language into account. The point, I think, is precisely that we don't make an interpretation every time we follow a rule. For instance, I don't actually interpret a signpost with an arrow as pointing to the right and not to the left. If we look at how we ordinarily use a word like "interpret," we don't apply it to any and every case of rule following. Rather, we apply it in cases where there's ambiguity or room for doubt. If the sign is badly scratched up so that I have trouble discerning which way the arrow's pointing, I might find myself interpreting the sign as signalling that I should go left or right. But in ordinary circumstances I don't do any interpreting.

This isn't meant to offer a solution of any kind to the "skeptical paradox," but rather to suggest that this paradox only arises if we misuse and metastasize the ordinary meaning of "interpret."

Stone offers something like this reading of Wittgenstein on rule following, but he also uses it as a way of contrasting Wittgenstein with Derrida. Derrida, he thinks, takes much the same position as Kripke, arguing that every application of a rule (use of a sign, meaningful expression) requires interpretation, noting that there is no endpoint to the chain of interpretations of interpretations, and arguing for an essentially skeptical position on the possibility of definite meaning.

Before I'd read Stone, I was inclined to suggest that Derrida and Wittgenstein actually converge on their understanding of rules and signs, but if Stone's reading of Derrida is correct, then I'll have to change my inclination. Stone has a fair amount of textual evidence to back up his reading, but it doesn't sound like the Derrida I think I've read. Let me lay out what I think is the right line to take on rules and signs, and it's the line I think Wittgenstein takes and I less confidently think Derrida takes. You can tell me (a) if you think it's the right way to read Derrida, and (b) if you think it's right.

I said before that I don't read Wittgenstein as embracing a skeptical position about meaning because he wouldn't grant that every act of rule following involves interpretation. One danger of saying that is that it can risk making Wittgenstein out to be some sort of conservative (both admirers and detractors have read him this way). On one hand, we all follow signposts in the same way because the question of how to interpret them simply cannot arise, and on the other hand, we might follow all sorts of more politically charged social institutions in the same way for similar reasons. But I don't think Wittgenstein is trying to draw some sort of line and say that we cannot interpret the sign differently, or that it's impossible to doubt certain rules. His point is rather that, for the most part, we do not, and I think part of what's important about his philosophy is precisely that he draws our attention to the fact that there's no foundational reason for us not to doubt rules, interpret them differently, and so on. At one point, he gives the famous example of the child who's taught the rule "add 2," and starts writing out "2, 4, 6, 8..." as his teacher expects, but then gets to 1000 and continues "1004, 1008, 1012..." No matter how much cajoling and prompting his teacher gives him, he simply cannot be brought to follow the rule as the teacher expects. Part of the point to this allegory, I take it, is that there's no absolutely compelling reason that the teacher can give that will make the student see what he means: as Kripke says, every rule is always open to alternative interpretations.

However, I don't take Kripke's moral from this allegory. I think what we're supposed to learn is that we're able to do things like follow rules because we share a certain sense of what rule following consists of with others (and what teaching is, what speaking and meaning are, and so on), and that the bedrock for these shared practices isn't some rational justification--and also isn't the shared practices of a community--but what Wittgenstein calls Übereinstimmung: we just happen to be attuned with others in particular ways. He draws out the fact of this attunement by pointing out the impossibility of reaching agreement with someone who happens not to be attuned with us. It's not that a community grounds agreement, but that attunement is a necessary condition for the possibility of there being a community in the first place.

So on this reading of Wittgenstein, it's not that every rule or meaningful utterance stands in need of interpretation, and the interpretation stands in need of further interpretation, and so on. It's rather that there's nothing that could definitively halt this regress of interpretation if it were to start. That's all I'd taken Derrida to be saying as well. I'd taken his deconstructive readings to be playful exercises that undermine the aspiration to ground the meaningfulness of signs in their reaching out unambiguously to intended objects. By showing the ways in which signs can be alternatively interpreted, he wants to interrupt a certain Platonistic or idealistic conception of the relation of signs to the world. But that doesn't mean he wants to replace that conception with one in which everything is always open to (and demanding) interpretation.

That was maybe not the most elegantly presented discussion. I hope it wasn't too long-winded or unclear. And I hope it was thorough enough that you have some sense of the debate I'm trying to position Derrida in.

From Vancouver, many months late

§§§§

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.