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Wittgenstein among the poets

1998; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mod.1998.0017

1080-6601

David Antin,

Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications

Wittgenstein Among the Poets David Antin Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary. Marjorie Perloff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pp. 285 + xvii. $27.95. In The Blue Book, Ludwig Wittgenstein, reflecting on the idea of personal identity, casually asks us to imagine a man whose memory on the odd days of his life consists only of his experiences of the odd days, while his memory on the even days consists only of his experiences of the even days, and asks if we have here one person or two. This is an interesting question, but to make sense of it we have to play out its narrative implications. Suppose this man dies on a Thursday in Paris. Both die, the odd person and the even, but which one owns the dying? Which one is run down by a taxi while crossing the place de la Bastille in the rain? To answer we have to ask: Was it an odd Thursday or an even Thursday? Which we can determine only by counting back to the day of his birth, by which we mean the day of his first birth, the odd day, or the birth of the odd person, or else from the day after his birth, or his second birth, by which we mean the birth of the even person. Both will certainly die on the same day but only one of them will have the dying as part of his life story, as only one of them can have the literal birthing. And if it is the same one—let’s say the odd one—the even one is deprived of two fundamental experiences that could shape his life—birth trauma and dying agony or entry into the light and release from the world, depending how you look at it. Wittgenstein goes on to propose that this dual or twinned personality might have alternating appearances. But the suggestion is hardly necessary, because it is a virtual certainty that they will look somewhat different. The even person, the younger sibling, will start with secondary experiences that the older could not encounter. He will always be a day late and perhaps blamed or pitied for it, and his stance in reaction to this blame or pity will surely mark his appearance. Of course, this might change. Nursery school might start on an even Monday, when the children learn to tie their shoelaces. Then on [End Page 149] Tuesday the odd person would seem to have forgotten how to tie the bow that the even person learned the day before. Or perhaps more significantly, on a cold day in January the odd person could wake up in some girl’s bed in Soho and wonder what her name is when she whispers to him in Farsi. Still, the belatedness of the younger brother should somehow determine his appearance as the second into the light. So it goes with nearly all of Wittgenstein’s questions and analyses from The Blue Book on. They set in motion a process of narrativization. This process, which is either carried out by Wittgenstein himself or by his audience, makes concrete sense of his figure of teaching as creating an electrical connection between a switch and a light bulb, though maybe a different sense than he imagined. It is the kind of connection or the kinds of connections his work has created as it has been mirrored, disassembled, and reassembled in the light of experimental modern and postmodern poetry that forms the subject of Marjorie Perloff’s book. Wittgenstein’s Ladder tracks these connections through an idiosyncratic subset of the avant-garde poetic family, over whose work Wittgenstein casts a brilliant and fitful light. The track has a number of surprises. It starts somewhere not far from Gertrude Stein, travels a short distance to Samuel Beckett, crosses the German-language border to Thomas Bernhardt and Ingeborg Bachmann, and then circles back to a sequence of Americans—Robert Creeley and the Language poets—and comes to a playfully inconclusive conclusion with the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth. Perloff points out that this tracking is not about “influence” (22); it is essentially an attempt to place...