Along my drive, I listen to an episode of the “Why Theory” podcast treating Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Immersion in this and that.
I’d left off in my rereading of the book in the minutes before that day’s dawn at the philosopher’s 115th remark: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein 48).
For Wittgenstein, this picture is what: philosophy? His own earlier “picture theory of language,” as laid out in his Tractatus, where propositions are thought to mirror the very logic of reality itself? The podcast’s cohosts note the philosopher’s love of motion pictures. World as pictured on a windshield. World as pictured on a screen.
After the drive, a coworker eyes me with her coyote eyes and feeds me a forkful of locally foraged chicken of the woods.
Thinking of Wittgenstein’s conflict with Karl Popper, Caius recalls the discussion of “ground-clearing” in the latter’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. Holding some memory of this discussion before his mind’s eye, he finds himself juxtaposing it with a subsequent remark of Wittgenstein’s. “Where does our investigation get its importance from,” asks the philosopher, “since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand” (48).
Walter Benjamin ascribed similar power to film. “Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly,” wrote Benjamin in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” “Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling” (Illuminations, p. 236).
Both thinkers witnessed the cities of Europe destroyed by two world wars.
Caius imagines a post ahead on god games, language-games, and Scripture.
Trance-Scripts 