thought, language, and Austin

One of the downsides to my not writing more frequently is that when I actually do sit down to write I feel terribly out of date with everything. I mean, I feel like tell you that I've really enjoyed your thoughts on John Locke, but I worry you'll reply "John who?" while digging back through hazy memories of how you spent your summer.

But I will have three things to say. The first is to continue our conversation about poo and thoughts, which fortunately isn't linked to any particular readings we've been doing lately (though I'm curious whether your reading of Limited Inc has made my position clearer to you), so doesn't maybe feel the lag in time as much. The second is to respond to your post on Austin (though I fear that response will probably now be very much out of date). And the third is to say a few words about Derrida based on a second draft of the chapter I've been working on.

So, thought and language. I'm not quite sure what to say here. At least, I'm not sure what to say that isn't just a variant on things I've already said, so I worry that what I will have to say here won't move the conversation forward any. But here are some thoughts anyway.

It seems like your resistance to what I'm saying is at least in part motivated by the sense that I'm denying something important, that is, that I'm trying to deny that there's anything going on inside of us beyond the stuff that we can put into words. Would my position be any more palatable if I reaffirmed that I don't mean to be denying this, or anything for that matter? Rather, what I'm trying to do is to shift from looking at the mysterious things-inside-of-us to looking at the ways we talk, or struggle to talk, about them. And the reason I'm trying to do that is that I think talking about our inner life as consisting of things-inside-of-us on analogy to the way that we can talk about the world around us as consisting of things-outside-of-us is a bad analogy. On one hand, it gets my access to other people's minds wrong: it sets up a framework for other minds scepticism, where each person is a shell covering over an inner world about which we have only the indirect and unreliable testimony of their words and behaviour. One problem with this position is that it implies that there's some more direct and reliable testimony that we could access if only circumstances were otherwise. On the other hand, it gets my access to my own mind wrong: my mind doesn't consist of thoughts and moods and sensations floating about that I can point to in the way that I can point to bits of my body or bits of the world. You might say that my access to my own mind is too close to work on the sort of object-and-designation model that we use for talking about things in the outside world. When I talk about what's going on inside of me, I'm not describing inner facts, I'm expressing them. And that's why my descriptions of other people's inner states aren't some sort of second-best unreliable description: their own testimony isn't description at all.

I'm not denying that we have moods, or that they're sometimes difficult to express, but I am saying that when we do express moods, what we're doing is precisely expressing them, not describing them. It's not as if they're these cloudy regions of inner space that are difficult to find an accurate description for. It's rather that our vocabulary in many respects falls short of our desire to express how it is with us sometimes.

I should also add that moods are distinct from the sorts of thoughts we began by talking about in that they don't have propositional content. That is, I can have the thought-that such-and-such, but I don't have a mood-that anything; I simply have a mood. And one of my initial concerns was the notion that propositional thoughts are somehow able to sit in the head in non-verbal form before being given the clothing of language and sent out into the world. And part of my point there is simply that whatever ineffable something is going on inside of you, it can't be the thought-that such-and-such because if it had propositional content it would necessarily be linguistic.

I don't know if any of that helps or adds anything. I'm not feeling particularly eloquent. But hopefully it will at least keep the ball rolling. And maybe something I said will click in a way that's helpful. I think it would help if I could sit you down with the Philosophical Investigations and maybe The Claim of Reason. At least that would make you see the position I'm arguing from, even if it doesn't make you agree.

Incidentally, this all connects with Austin, so I might as well talk about him in the same post. Because one of the signal contributions of How To Do Things With Words, I would have said, is precisely that it undermines the model of communication on which language is simply a means of transmitting mental contents from one mind to another. If that were the case, "I promise" would be the description of an inward act, and you could break promises using Hippolytus' line (which Austin actually distorts by quoting out of context) about how "my tongue swore but my heart did not." Performative utterances, if nothing else, are a fine example of the fact that language isn't simply a matter of transmitting thoughts.

And then Derrida's criticism of Austin precisely takes the form of saying that Austin is still married to a conception of language that ties it closely to consciousness. I sort of half-buy Derrida's criticism. But at any rate, you can see how both Austin and Derrida share this sense that language isn't simply a matter of transmitting pre-existing thoughts. I don't know if they help you see why I want to resist that view.

As for the value of Austin more generally, well, I don't know if further study or discussion has changed your opinion of him or reaffirmed it. I think in part it helps to see Austin within his philosophical context, and in particular working at a time when logical positivism is in the ascendant and when A. J. Ayer is the big cheese at Oxford. This is a school of thought according to which utterances can be divided into scientific propositions that make assertions about the world and "non-cognitive" utterances expressing emotion or metaphysics or religious sentiment or whatever else, and that lack any real propositional content. So one of the things Austin's doing is complicating and undermining that picture. And that part of his project might be less evident and feel less pressing in a time when logical positivism isn't so prominent.

Though there's still a tendency often to assume that statements are descriptive. It's a very tempting assumption. And here I have to confess to some impatience with your remark that Austin's not saying anything you don't already know. Austin himself remarks in the very first paragraph that nothing he's going to say is particularly difficult or contentious, and the tone throughout is marked with the bemusement of someone who's not entirely sure why he's bothering to tell us all of this. This notion of saying nothing that isn't already obvious is characteristic not just of Wittgenstein as well, but also phenomenology. It's one of the similarities I remark on between Wittgenstein and Heidegger, for instance: in Being and Time, Heidegger claims to simply be describing what's before us, and that if we haven't noticed something like the distinction between Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit before, that's because it's so obvious that we often pass over it. Like Poe's Purloined Letter. So simply saying that Austin's saying things that are obvious isn't in itself a criticism. It's only a criticism if you want to say that he's saying things that are both obvious and unlikely to cause problems when we pass them over unnoticed. And I think he has some claim to make on that score.

And for my own part, I'm writing a thesis about this notion of appealing to ordinary language and I find Austin very interesting for methodological reasons. I think that aspect of his work, while on full display in How To Do Things With Words, has a more obvious critical edge in Sense and Sensibilia or "A Plea for Excuses." For whatever that's worth.

As for insults, I'm not sure I have much to add there. Except to suggest that the point of insulting people is, to borrow a phrase, to give them a tongue-lashing, that is to give them the verbal equivalent of a blow. And just as there are no conventional forms of beating people up (as there are with other physical actions, like handshakes or hailing taxis), there are no conventional forms for insulting them. "I insult you" simply wouldn't have the desired perlocutionary force. Part of Austin's interest in performative utterances is precisely that he thinks they're too often assimilated to locutionary or perlocutionary acts.

Of thinking, thoughts and poo-metaphors

I wasn't going to write again until tomorrow, but sometimes it is hard not to respond to challenges. The best I can do is to write as little and as quickly as possible until tomorrow, when I'll have more Locke to discuss.

Well, my last post, talking as it did of 'ideas' (one could have as easily said 'thoughts' ) in animals, though determined by Locke, will, no doubt, add fuel to the poo-metaphor discussion. The relationship between thinking in thought will be a long, drawn-out discussion throughout the fall at least, imagine. You seem to acknowledge that something happens in the mind that isn't necessarily consciousness speaking English, French or German, but to radically deny that we should use a word to describe this or refer to it in any way. I never imagined that 'thoughts' sat there as pre-formed concretions, but it is interesting to think of thought in terms of digestive metaphors... rumination, digesting information, data being processed like food, another way of transforming that which has been taken in from outside the body and transforming it into something useful, breaking it into its constitutive parts and making it part of us. Anyway, the point of me trying to switch from the noun 'thought' to the gerund 'thinking' was to indicate that I was not talking about a 'thing', but about this 'what goes on'. You talk about behaviorism, and I respect the desire not to project something into the heads of children and animals and then take your own projections as observable truth. Because something seems plausible (that an infant acts for the reasons I attribute to it or views the world as I imagine it might) has no necessary truth (and this is what Proust is talking about in condemning the formal logic of the philosophers as opposed to the necessary truths revealed by desire). I tried to get a course of my own design to teach for next summer and entitled the course 'savages, noble and otherwise', making it about a continuing fascination with the state of nature, particularly as a speculative access to our own Id, as an impossible attempt to separate what is innate in us from what is acquired (they chose to go with someone else's class on monsters instead). I bring this up only because I can't pretend that what goes on in my own mind is as alien to me as what goes on in the head of an infant or an animal. We all know what is meant when someone talks about the 'mood' or the 'atmosphere' of something, and clearly there are lots of different moods and atmospheres, beyond a couple of words like 'dark' or 'sinister', the specifics of mood haven't been pinned down. We can recognize and enjoy a mood, but it's extremely difficult to talk about it. Does the fact that this is a non-verbal experience mean it isn't worth analyzing our own experience of mood and attempting to explain it? Should it be treated as non-existent, and covered over prudishly like something that shouldn't be displayed in public? Is the general atmospheric feeling I get from Dostoyevsky as opposed to Kafka like a an excrement that should be released in a private place and buried or flushed away? Think how hard it is to explain your reaction to music, or the paucity of our vocabulary in talking about scents. Should dwelling on experiences of this sort not count as thinking? Or only so far as we specifically refer to it as "that indescribable odor I noticed when I walked past a certain place that seemed somehow familiar and whose origin I couldn't quite place"? Because in our thoughts, we don't constantly have to spell things out for ourselves like that, and it isn't language that we use if we start searching through our memories trying to find another context for that smell so as to be able to figure out what it is and why it is so familiar (and perhaps why the sense of recognition gives us pleasure - now that I seem to be slipping into Proust again).

Perhaps we can know of the world only what we can be accessed through our experience, and it makes no sense for metaphysics to speculate on God, essences, or anything purely transcendent. Perhaps we can no nothing of our own thought processes what we are actually conscious of, and speculating about an unconscious mind (other the observable biological autonomic system) is creating another internal transcendent space and opening the door to a new metaphysics of mist and air. But can we know nothing of our own experience only what has already been inscribed in language? We didn't create the world, we didn't create the conscious mind, but, though we have inherited language and it has largely shaped who we are, it IS something created by us and something we continue to create. Unlike platonic essences or the working of our unconscious, experiences we haven't yet given an adequate linguistic expression to are directly accessible to us and we can express them.

As to Derrida, I'm beginning to feel you read him as much as I do, and all I can say is I agree with you. I sometimes read other people's discussion of a Derrida I don't recognize who seems to want to destroy any possibility for rational discourse or meaning of any sort, and at times these descriptions seem bound to a wider reading of Derrida than I can lay claim to and to make use of quotes I don't remember from texts I have read. Nietzsche sometimes receives this treatment as well, though not to the same extent. It will be interesting to bring this up again when looking back over 'otobiographies: the ear of the other', which is largely about Nietzsche's reception, including his being co-opted by Nazi sympathizers. Hopefully we'll get around to both reading and writing enough by Derrida in the coming year to be able to with more justice figure out what portrayal of Derrida does him justice, whether he is a reasonable and attentive observer of necessary ambiguities and the role of language and metaphor in though or whether he is the nihilistic debunker of reason of any sort. I still think that his falling out with Foucault over Descartes, and the fact that he distrusts Foucault's fondness for madness as much as he does Rousseau's fondness for the state of nature points to someone who is deeply attached rational discourse - though his love for Mallarme and Blanchot might suggest someone who enjoys obfuscation as much as clarification.

Language and thought

Wow, lots of interesting stuff from you recently. There's actually something in my own reading that I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on, but first I should respond to some of what you said. Most pressingly, I suppose, I should answer for what I said about thoughts and poo.

First of all, you say you don't recognize yourself in my characterization of thoughts sitting in the head like poo in the bowels, there yet unformed, and then given shape as they leave the body. Maybe it was the provocative way I put it? What I meant is that you seem to have a model of the relationship between thought and language such that thought is something that exists in the head independently, and language is a tool for putting those thoughts across to others, and that this tool can shape or distort the original thought. At one point in the post I was responding to you describe language as a "vehicle for thought." If language is a vehicle for thought, that suggests that thought is a kind of substance, something that can be transmitted but that requires a medium in which to be transmitted. Later on, your write: "Thoughts have to be coded before they can be communicated, and when they are decoded by someone else, they never quite match what they started out as." Here the metaphor isn't a vehicle but a code. A code is something that can be transmitted between two people, but what the code encodes is a message that exists independently of the code. Unpacking the metaphor, you seem to think of thought as a something that isn't quite language but enough like language that it can be "encoded" in language. It's these sorts of things that made me associate you with my poo analogy.

Actually, I think the code metaphor is quite telling: a literal code is a language that is translated from another language. If we follow the metaphor out, thought itself must be a kind of language in order to be encoded. And if so, do we have any better model for the kind of language that thought is than language itself?

It occurs to me that I don't have to reach as far as Wittgenstein to object to this model of the relationship between language and thought. Isn't this really one of the main targets of Derrida's work in the 60's and 70's? In "Signature Event Context," Derrida tries to deconstruct the notion that communication consists essentially of transmitting encoded thoughts from one mind to another, and in particular that writing is simply an extension of this transmission that allows us to communicate with people who aren't present. You know Derrida better than I do, so I'll let you judge whether you think he'd find your characterization of language as "something that couldn't possibly cause any objection."

In your defense, you insist that we can't simply say that thought = language and condemn children and others who don't think to thoughtlessness. I don't think I want to say anything as crude as that. But I do want to say that our concept of thought is closely tied to our concept of language, so that we're only able to ascribe thoughts to infants and animals by virtue of giving words to those thoughts. I think it's unproblematic to say that the infant wants its mommy even if it can't yet cry "mama." The mistake, I think, comes in then reifying this "thought," and thinking that there's a something in the infant's head which is the thought-that-I-want-mommy, and which we're identifying when we say the infant wants its mommy. That leap--from saying the child wants its mommy to saying that there's a definite thought in the child's head to the effect that it wants its mommy--then leads us to suppose that when the child learns to speak and says "I want mommy," it then too has a thought in its head, only now it's able to put that thought into words.

What I'm saying when I question your characterization of language is that I question this leap from how we talk about thoughts to the ontology of thoughts. Ascribing thoughts to infants, animals, and even other talkative people, is simply a way of talking, a way of describing behaviour that we find useful and illuminating. But if you think about how we use this language of thought ascription--and especially how we first come to learn to use phrases like "he's thinking..."--you'll see that this language doesn't really consist of descriptions of inner states, but descriptions of behaviour. Which isn't to say I'm a behaviourist--I'm not saying that thought is behaviour--but just that we learn how to talk about people's mental lives by seeing how they behave, not by seeing into their souls.

This might also explain what I said about thoughts on the tips of tongues. I (and Wittgenstein) wasn't denying that we can often have that experience, and that often we then find the words we were looking for. The point, rather, is that that expression ("it's on the tip of my tongue") isn't a description of my consciousness, where I can as it were see the thought sitting there, but through a thick enough haze that I can't accurately find words for it. Rather, it's a way of expressing the fact that I don't quite have the words I want, but I hope to come up with them soon. As Wittgenstein suggests, if no one ever then came up with the words, we wouldn't have use for this expression.

So yes, I agree with you that thought and language aren't the same thing, and that it's perfectly legitimate to talk about thoughts I can't find words for or what have you. But I want to resist the further inference that these thoughts are things of a sort, mental things, or even mental processes as you suggest.

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.

logic and language

I don't want to talk much about language... I think the questions you brought up will be discussed at length over the summer when I'm talking about Locke, Condillac and co. Still, I feel like I can't not give a cursory response. When I spoke of Language as an imperfect vehicle for thought, I actually thought I was saying something that couldn't possibly cause any objection... I'm sure you think, as I do, that language enriches thought, gives us the ability to think more things and more complicated things. I'm sure you and I can agree that in articulating a thought we often change that thought for the better, making it clearer and more refined. I do not mean to suggest that there is or should be a better vehicle for thought, and I don't regret the absence of some ideal thought vessel. I suspect that you and me both have an unusually strong faith in what language can be made to express and joy in making it express things. What i meant is simply that language cannot communicate thought directly - the fact that you can have trouble putting a thought into words, the fact that there is no adequate vocabulary to express certain sensations or experiences, even the fact that things thought simultaneously and interconnected cannot be expressed simultaneously, all of this is what makes it possible for romantic thinkers like Rousseau to long for a pre-lapsarian language, a language before babel which would be perfectly transparent and instantly communicate thought as thought. The point is more or less what was written about the dictionary of received ideas - thoughts have to be made to conform to given vocabulary and syntactic structures, and this alters them (sometimes for the better). This gives pathways, patterns of thinking that can be a limitation or a barrier as well as an indispensable aid. Thoughts have to be coded before they can be communicated, and when they are decoded by someone else, they never quite match what they started out as (though, obviously, since communication is possible, they don't always end up recognizable, and the most ordinary, everyday thoughts are often perfectly communicable). 'Imperfect' can actually be a desirable trait, since what is 'perfect' is often what is complete, finished, closed. I always refer back to the Cartesian distinction between animal and man (not that I buy the animal end of it), where man is defined by his instinct being 'imperfect', in other words not dictating how man should act or react in given situations, thus necessitating evolving behavior. It is because man is 'imperfect' that he is capable of invention. In this sort of scheme, 'imperfection' is equivalent to having free will, and being 'perfect' means being determined once and for all... of course, part of the 'imperfection', which is opacity, derives from the ambiguity that even the most lucid stylist can't help but creating at points. By lucid stylist, I mean the ideal philosopher who wants language to be transparent. I suppose 'imperfection' is also 'literary' - the fact that the qualities of language that a literary writer delights in (the materiality of language, its capacity to mean multiple things at one and the same time) are present, if often unacknowledged, even when the philosopher writes. This is a fact that the continental philosophers embrace, and sometimes sort of obsess over.
As to language being illogical, I feel somewhat less able to back up that claim. I was partly talking about the arbitrary nature of signs and the fact that convention trumps logic in all languages... in the seventeenth century, the grammar of port-royal attempted to show that language was modeled on logic, and that we speak and think using the same structures. Chomsky thought of this grammar as being a forerunner of his own generative grammar. The argument largely breaks down - I'll give some reasons in another post. Esperanto as a language without history may be created to be perfectly rational, and may have no exceptions to its rules, but it will still be required to make arbitrary choices about what its rules are, what words will have to have multiple meanings or functions (no language can have such a broad vocabulary that it can avoid this), what meanings and functions will be grouped together, etc... Everything I say from this point on relating to this is said with huge reservations (and I can't exactly remember what Lecercle said or how he said it - I'm sure I was careless in expressing it in the original post you were questioning). Remember I gave Bergson's definition of humor as the mechanical grafted onto the living? Well, language has to adapt to a living world, and if it is treated as a rigid, inflexible structure that is not capable of adapting to a situation, absurdity will result. I understand that it isn't illogical to adapt to circumstances, but logic, like language, can be treated as an abstract set of formulas - real logic can be replaced by textbook logic, just as real language can be replaced by textbook language... Ionesco's play 'the bald soprano' is a good send up of books for foreigners learning English. So I suppose that in part the word 'illogical' would here not genuinely mean 'illogical' but rather 'irreducible to a set of formulae and necessarily relying on certain arbitrary decisions determined by convention'. The nonsense relying on the 'illogical' nature of language would be 1) delighting in the frustration of rigid formulas 2) pretending arbitrary decisions were not arbitrary and providing spurious justifications for them 3) playing with groupings in the form of homonyms and homophones and words with multiple functions. I could expand on this, but why would I bother? This isn't really my topic. It's just part of what I think was in the Lecrcle book (though god knows in trying to explain what I wrote when talking about Lecercle, I've almost certainly strayed very far from what he actually wrote.
What else? I haven't read Wittgenstein, and I won't have a chance to any time this year, though I hope to read a bit of him next year. Your interest in him makes him appealing, and he pops up very frequently in books and conferences. Raluca has been reading some stuff on Wittgenstein, because she is working on a poet who was influenced by him. I can't imagine how happy it would make me to get to teach a class on Dostoyevsky, but that will never happen. I'm going to try to get a class on 'savages' for next year, but that isn't likely, and even that isn't what I would most want to teach. There's no possibility for teaching the stuff I'd most like to. As far as what you were saying about what Wittgenstein does, all I can say is that it sounds appealing. Though, to return to the very beginning of this post... I don't know quite how to put this, and it has nothing to do with Wittgenstein and more to do with the idea of seeing things through a different lense, casting a different light on the world or whatever... and what you said about 'clearly this has to be nuanced, because if that were what he was trying to say why wouldn't he have just said it exactly like I just did' (or words to that effect). I actually get incredibly frustrated with things I can't put into words, and tend to love anything that gives straightforward lucid explanations that ring true. I love things that add to my own ability to put things into words. On the other hand, I do think art can be used to help explain and understand he world just like philosophy can, and I have trouble separating the two. Music is probably the most direct and sensual of the arts, the one I have the least intellectual reaction to and enjoy the most for its own sake - but even music is something I enjoy talking about and trying to explain, and when I try explaining it, I'm always talking about something more general than just music.