Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary

by Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff, among our foremost critics of twentieth-century poetry, argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein provided writers with a radical new aesthetic, a key to recognizing the inescapable strangeness of ordinary language. Taking seriously Wittgenstein's remark that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry," Perloff begins by discussing Wittgenstein the "poet." What we learn is that the poetics of everyday life is anything but banal.

"This book has the lucidity and the intelligence we have come to expect from Marjorie Perloff.—Linda Munk, American Literature

"[Perloff] has brilliantly adapted Wittgenstein's conception of meaning and use to an analysis of contemporary language poetry."—Linda Voris, Boston Review

"Wittgenstein's Ladder offers significant insights into the current state of poetry, literature, and literary study. Perloff emphasizes the vitality of reading and thinking about poetry, and the absolute necessity of pushing against the boundaries that define and limit our worlds."—David Clippinger, Chicago Review

"Majorie Perloff has done more to illuminate our understanding of twentieth century poetic language than perhaps any other critic. . . . Entertaining, witty, and above all highly original."—Willard Bohn, Sub-Stance

Genres: Philosophy, Poetry, Nonfiction, Language, Literary Criticism, Criticism

305 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

You Tube has a film in seven parts by Derek Jarman about the life of Wittgenstein. It can be easily googled.

Charles Bernstein's book Content's Dream says on page 181: "In Wittgenstein's accounting, one is not left sealed off from the world with only 'markings' to 'decipher' but rather located in a world with meanings to respond to."

His greatest biography: Ray Monk's Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius."

Perloff's title comes from the Tractatus: 6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them--as steps--to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

The ladder can be compared to Yeats's "ancient winding stair" and Dante's purgatorial staircase. Moving "up" the ladder can be compared to Stein's "Beginning again and again". And Heraclitus, for one cannot climb the same ladder twice. So there is no vision, only revision.

Another book is Guy Davenport's The Geography of Imagination."

LW: "The world of happy is a happy world."

LW, Zettel: "Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information."

LW, Culture and Value: "Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry."

LW was once furious at Norman Malcolm for speaking of the British "national character." He wondered what the use of philosophy was if it didn't improve his thinking about questions about everyday life. But I wonder myself sometimes about LW's own thinking about life. His supernatural beliefs and questions about science seem to disregard any logical thinking. He said, "Philosophy gives no picture of reality."

LW, CV 42: "A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than to push it."

We ask ourselves the question: What is the "right" poetry game to be played today? How should it be reformulated?

Terry Eagleton wrote the novel Saints and Sinners in 1987 about LW and other characters, both real and fictional. Even Leopold Bloom appears.

Some poetry books written under the sign of LW: Charles Bernstein's The Sophist and Dark City, Allen Davies's Signage, Steve McAffery's Evoba: The Investigation Meditations 1976-78, Tom Mandel's Realism, Michael Palmer's Notes for Echo Lake, Joan Retallack's Circumstantial Evidence, Ron Silliman's The Age of Huts, Rosemarie Waldrop's Reproduction of Profiles and A Key into the Language of America, and Jan Zwicky's Wittgenstein's Elegies.

There are also plays and novels with a LW theme by Peter Handke, Ingeborg Bachemann, Thomas Bernhard, Bruce Duffy (The World as I Found It--1987), and David Markson (Wittgenstein's Mistress--1988).

Eagleton described LW: "He was an arresting combination of monk, mystic, and mechanic: a high European intellectual who yearned for Tolstoyan simplicitas, a philosophical giant with scant respect for philosophy, an irascible autocrat with a thirst for holiness" (WTE 7-8).

LW, T 5.6: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

Victor Shklovsky's famous doctrine of "making it strange" or "defamiliarization," with its emphasis on the "artistic" removal of the object from its usual surroundings so as to recharge its potency, the object itself being "unimportant."

LW, Lectures, Cambridge: "The fascination of philosophy lies in its paradox and mystery."

Ray Monk believes LW's being a soldier influenced the Tractatus. Otherwise, it would have been just about the nature of logic. Instead, we see remarks about life, soul, ethics that come from dealing with death and suffering.

A week after being decorated for bravery, LW wrote the following in his notebook:
What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
I know that this world exists.
That I am place in it like my eye in its visual field.
That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it.
That my life is the world.
That my will penetrates the world.
That my will is good or evil.
Therefore that good or evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world. . . .
The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. . . .
To pray is to think about the meaning of life.
I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will.
I am completely powerless.

LW, NBK 74: "To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning." And "To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter." And "Meaning does not lie in [the world] but outside it" (73).

LW, NBK 74: "A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in face of death."

LW, NBK 75: "Fear in face of death is the best sign of a false, i.e., a bad, life."

Therefore, happiness depends on your ability to accept your situation.

LW, NBK 74: "Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy."

LW, NBK 2 Sep 16: "What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world!"

LW, NBK 82: "What others in the world have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience of the world."

LW felt Russell's going to prison was "heroism in the wrong place."

LW, PO 165: "The choice of our words is so important, because only the exactly aimed thought can lead to the correct track. The car must be placed on the tracks precisely so, so that it can keep rolling correctly."

LW, CV 24: "If I say A has beautiful eyes someone may ask me: what do you find beautiful about his eyes, and perhaps I shall reply: the almond shape, the long eye-lashes, delicate lids. What do these eyes have in common with a Gothic church that I find beautiful too?"

LW, LC: "You might think Aesthetics is a science telling us what's beautiful--almost too ridiculous for words. I suppose it ought to include also what sort of coffee tastes good."

LW, PI: ". . . to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life."

LW, LCA 11: "In order to get clear about aesthetic words, you have to describe ways of living."

LW: "Solipsism could be refuted by the fact that the word 'I' does not have a central place in grammar, but is a word like any other."

Rimbaud: "I is someone else."

LW, CV 15: "The works of great masters are suns which rise and set around us. The time will come for every great work that is now in the descendant to rise again."

Samuel Beckett denied that the ladder image he used in Watt owed anything to Wittgenstein. He says it referred to a Welsh joke, but no one knows the joke. Perloff proposes the joke may be on Beckett's critics. He may be irritated at how they misconstrue both he and Ludwig.

Here is the author Tom Driver speaking to Beckett with Beckett's response:

I suggested one must let [the mess] in because it is the truth, but Beckett did not take to the word truth.

Beckett's response: "What is more true than anything else? To swim is true, and to sink is true. One is not more true than the other. One cannot speak anymore of being, one must speak only of the mess. When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast between being and existence, they may be right, I don't know, but their language is too philosophical for me I am not a philosopher. One can only speak of what is in front of him, and that now is simply the mess." (LG 219)

LW, PI 109: "We must do away with all explanation and description alone must take its place."

LW, CV 39e: "How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes!"

The Rumanian critic E. M. Cioran spoke of how LW wanted to enter a monastery. Cioran said he could imagine Beckett "a few centuries back, in a bare cell unsullied by any decoration, not even a crucifix."

Also in Watt, Beckett creates a dystopic Garden of Eden where killing, destruction, and torture exist. The character Sam speaks of feeding a baby rat to one of its relatives. And then he says: "It was on these occasions, we agreed,after an exchange of views, that we came nearest to God." (W153) Perloff compares this to Wittgenstein's "term for the mystery about which we cannot speak, about which we must be silent." As Beckett said to Tom Driver: "If there were only darkness, all would be clear. It is because there is not only darkness but also light that our situation becomes inexplicable" (LG 220). Or as LW said: "God does not reveal himself in the world" (T 6.432).

LW, CV 7: "The honourable thing to do is to put a lock on the door which will be noticed only by those who can open it, not by the rest."

Ingeborg Bachmann's short poem "In the Storm of Roses":

Wherever we turn i the storm of roses,
thorns illuminate the night. And the thunder
of a thousand leaves, once so quiet in the bushes,
is right at our heels.

Bachmann would later ask herself "why I so often had to adopt the voice of the masculine 'I'" (IBGI 99-100). It seems that authority of the masculine "I" was even used by a radical woman poet of the 1950s.

LW, T 5.631: "The thinking, conceptualizing subject; there is no such thing."

LW, T 5.6331: "The subject does not belong to the world but is a limit of the world."

Thomas Bernhard: "It's as if I would have to write something (propositions!) about myself, and that won't work. . . . The question is not: do I write about Wittgenstein for even a single moment without disturbing him (W.) or myself (B.). . . . Wittgenstein is a question that can't be answered. . . . so I don't write about Wittgenstein because I can't, but because I can't answer.

Here's an example of Bachmann's new poetic mode:

Hello. Hello?
It's me, who else?
Oh right, of course, excuse
How I? And you?
I don't know. This evening?
I can barely understand you
Barely? What? So you can
I can barely hear you, can you
What? Is anything?
No, nothing, later on you can
Of course, I'd better call later
I, I was supposed to go with friends
Of course, if you can't then
I didn't say that, only if you don't
In any case, let's talk later
OK, but around six, because
But that's too late for me
Yes, actually for me too, but
Today maybe it makes no sense
Has someone come in?
No, only now Fraulein Jellinek is
Oh, I see, you're no longer alone
But please later, please, definitely!
(MA 36)

LW, BB: "It is wrong to say that in philosophy we consider an ideal language is opposed to our ordinary one. For this makes it appear as though we could improve an ordinary language. But ordinary language is all right. Whenever we make up "ideal languages" it is not in order to replace our ordinary language by them: but just to remove some trouble caused in someone's mind by thinking that he has got hold of the exact use of a common word. That is also why our method is not merely to enumerate actual usages of words, but rather deliberately to invent new ones, some of them because of their absurd appearance."

Jean-Francois Lyotard represented the deconstructionist argument against Wittgenstein. But his ideas may have had a falling out compared to LW's.

LW, LECI 34: "We never arrive at fundamental propositions in the course of our investigation; we get to the boundary of language which stops us from asking further questions."

LW, T 6.42: "Propositions cannot express anything higher."

LW, T 5.5561: "Empirical reality is limited by the totality of objects. The boundary appears again in the totality of objects."

LW, T 6.41: "The sense of the world must lie outside the world. . . . If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being so."

LW, T 6.522: "There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical."

Charles Altieri: Mainstream poetry seems to be trapped in an oppressive circle of self-presence, the "cry of the heart" designed to convey some sort of unique personal essence.

Bakhtin labeled (somewhat scornfully) the language of lyric poetry as "priestly language" (DI 287). But it seems to be moving on to "extraliterary social dialects." Bakhtin once thought that was exclusively in prose. Now "ordinary" language is getting attention in poetry.

Andreas Huyssen: The "great divide" between high and low culture has given way. The idea of a "separate" language for poetry has become increasingly suspect. LW played a role in that.

LW, CV 24: "Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry." Would LW also have appreciated the converse: "Poetry ought really to be written only as a form of philosophy." Not sure about that one.

LW, Z 160: "Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information."

LW, Z 155: "A poet's words can pierce us." Or more literally: "The words of a poet can penetrate us through and through."

LW, PI 558: "What does it mean to say that the 'is' in 'The rose is red' has a different meaning from the 'is' in 'twice two is four'?"

Robert Creeley's favorite LW text: LW, Z 469: "Imagine someone saying: 'Man hopes.' How should this general phenomenon of natural history be described?--One might observe a child and wait until one day he manifests hope; and then one could say 'Today he hoped for the first time.' But surely that sounds queer! Although it would be quite natural to say: 'Today he said I hope for the first time.'"

LW, CV 10: "The limits of language is shown by its being impossible to describe the fact which corresponds to (is the translation of) a sentence, without simply repeating the sentence."

LW, LECI 16: "There are no gaps in grammar. Grammar is always complete."

LW probably paved the way for Oulipo and language poetry. But they would not have interested him. He believed thought that it was a waste of time to carry on poetic traditions of previous centuries.

LW, NS 70 499: "To say 'This combination of words makes no sense' excludes it from the sphere of language and thereby bounds the domain of language. But when one draws a boundary it may be for various reasons. . . . So if I draw a boundary line that is not yet to say what it is for." In other words, the poet can cross that boundary to create new poems.

See the work of Ron Silliman: his essay "The New Sentence" and poem "The Chinese Notebook" in The Age of Huts (1986). The latter has 223 aphorisms, including some that spoof LW's PI. For example from PI:

29. Mallard, drake--if the words change, does the bird change?
35. What now? What new? All these words turning in on themselves like the concentric layers of an onion.
60. Is it language that creates categories? As if each apple were a proposed definition of a certain term.
94. What makes me think that form exists?

Now here is from "The Chinese Notebook":

29. Ask the bird.
35. Unpeel the onion a layer at a time; at center, the still point.
60. Categories create categories; language gets used, again, again.
94. Having the thought that form exists, you have the fact that it does. This operation, seeming to prove itself, supports itself.

Another Silliman poem that is more Wittgensteinian is "Sunset Debris", which is a thirty-page text made up entirely of qustions. Silliman said to Tom Beckett: "Every sentence is supposed to remind the reader of her or his inability to respond." (DRS 45)

Rosemarie Waldrop's The Reproduction of Profiles is written in short prose paragraphs like PI. The overall structure is modeled on the Tractatus. Waldrop used LW's language "in a free, unsystematic way, sometimes quoting, sometimes letting them spark what they would, sometimes substituting different nouns within a phrase (e.g., his famous anti-metaphysical statement that 'the deepest questions are no questions at all' becomes 'You could prove to me that the deepest rivers are, in fact, no rivers at all')." She showed a thorough knowledge of all his writing.

Consider this great paragraph from "Feverish Propositions":

"You told me if something is not used it is meaningless, and took my temperature which I had thought to save for a more difficult day. In the mirror, every night, the same face, a bit more threadbare, a dress worn too long. The moon was out in the cold, along with the restless, dissatisfied wind that seemed to change the location of the sycamores. I expected reproaches because I had mentioned the word love, but you only accused me of stealing your pencil, and sadness disappeared with sense. You made a ceremony of holding your head in your hands because, you said, it could not be contained in itself." (RF 23)

Or this: "A woman opened her window and overlooked the difference between the sexes." (RP 49)

Or this: "This is where grammatical terror opens a distance between you and yourself in order to insert the mirror." (RP 73)

In Lyn Hejinian's The Cold of Poetry, she writes "The Composition of the Cell" which begins:

1.1 It is the writer's object to supply.
1.6 Rocks are emitted by sentences to the eye.
2.13 Circumstances rest between rocks.
2.14 The person of which I speak is between clocks.
3.1 Exploration takes extra words.
3.4 The words anticipate an immoderate time and place.
3.5 Reality circulates making objects appear as if they belong where they are.
4.2 Exactly!
5.8 The sky pours shape into intervals.
5.10 Those between seeing and believing.

Incredibly, the above comes from an earlier book she wrote called The Cell. The numbers refer back to the lines and numbers of the poems in that earlier book. That's a Wow for me.

Line 3.5 above reminds of LW's "In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen." (T 6.41)

LW, Notebooks 1914-1916: "Just don't pull the knot tight before being certain that you have got hold of the right end."

LW, PI 109: "The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known."

That's another key to writing poetry.

[Kitty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommend as an introductory text to poets, this will give a poststructural sensibility to understanding language, philosophy, thought. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on "Border Games" -- for in a way, games and language go hand in hand to determine our thinking. If we stop and think... we start to look at words differently, especially in this age of "commodification". What is the use of writing... of studying philosophy, if it doesn't improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life? Dana Gioia's "can poetry matter" is mentioned in the introduction -- connected to the "what does IT matter" -- so what is this "it"? What poetry game do we need to be playing? Interesting questions, with, of course, no answers, but good shadows to trace edges of what words suggest.
"Distrust of grammar is the first requisite of philosophizing" (Notes on Logic, 106) -- and so of course, you will read about Gertrude Stein and "Arthur a Grammar" (Are there grammars?) and be exposed to ways literature uses language and every day speech until it becomes clear that pondering the nuances of "is" that connects roses and red, of course is not the same as 2+2 is 4 and the weight of differences in givens begins to push the mind.

[Aljoša Toplak · Rating 4 out of 5]

A particular interpretation but it reads very very well

[Sean Quigley]

Marjorie Perloff is like the Wendy’s of poetry criticism. Pops up everywhere, sometimes seems better than the alternative, tastes pretty good actually, but when you’re done you can’t help but feel what you’ve just consumed was missing something important and maybe wasn’t totally healthy for you. Wittgenstein said “Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten,” so Perloff explains some Robert Creeley poems by flipping that around: “Poetry ought really to be written only as a form of philosophy.” Pretty good. Perloff’s consistent championing of contemporary avant-gardes has been great, but a lot of the time it seems like she does it backwards. The most annoying expression of this tendency here is her reading of Gertude Stein, where the observation that Stein is playing Wittgensteinian language games just gives way to an effort to pull out rhymes and stress-patterns from “Arthur a grammar.” Stein becomes just another modernist genius, with a more complicated method (there’s no place for meaninglessness in real poetry, right?). Perloff is a powerful critic and an entertaining writer but the eagerness to show how radical approaches to poetry are actually conventional is depressing. What’s the point? Still I learned a lot from this book and the idea of reading the Tractatus as a ‘war book’ and the Philosophical Investigations as poetry is cool. I like Wendy’s. It’s worth the price, but if you eat it all the time your stomach’s gonna hurt.

Chapter 6, “Toward a Wittgensteinian Poetics,” is amazing though, and makes the whole thing worth it. Perloff reads Language poetry through Wittgenstein and rescues a kind of subjectivity that the usual poststructuralist readings of it leave out. The argument goes like this. We have in Wittgenstein an anti-totalizing theory of language which anticipates in some ways the postmodernists' deconstruction of subjectivity. We are constructed by language, not the other way around (Wittgenstein and Lyotard agree). But for Wittgenstein, philosophy (and by extension poetry) can only be accomplished by probing the limits of language - there may be more out there (“ineffable”) that we can never speak of (it’s somehow outside - the “mystical”) - but all we can do is come up to the edge of it. So reading Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman through Wittgenstein (and it’s clear they read him, unlike Stein) allows us to find a real subjectivity inside the big scary empty voiceless world of Language poetry. What they are doing is defining the boundaries of their (linguistic) universe - “running against the walls of our cage.” But for each of them that cage has a different shape. Even if there is no “I” at the center subsuming everything else, we can find a subjectivity in the distinctive locations of their edge markers.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

An engaging, down-to-earth look at the connections between Wittgenstein's aphoristic philosophy and some of the 20th-century writers who've followed his lead up the "ladder of the ordinary." Perloff's at her best with close readings of difficult writers like Stein, Beckett, and Creeley, who flower into comprehensibility under her sharp attention and good sense.

Whether Wittgenstein would recognize his more allusive postmodern heirs is a tough question to answer. Where Wittgenstein himself struggled to keep his religious and hierarchical values in check through the discipline of ordinary language (concepts like beauty, God, and the self seemed to have some meaning for him, you just couldn't talk about them with language), our own easy acceptance of notions like a language game, the constructed self, and the fundamental indeterminacy of language seems to draw off some of the struggle (or modesty) that you sense in Wittgenstein's open, user-friendly illustrations.

Still, Perloff's is an interesting take on Wittgenstein and the poetic he unwittingly inspired. Well worth reading.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perloff is gold.

[Les Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you start by dipping into Perloff's readings of individual poets you might be disappointed. Not all readings feel right. But, she has successfully adapted Wittgenstein's conception of language games to give a fresh analysis of contemporary language poetry.

"What is the `right' poetry game to be played today?" she asks. Using Wittgenstein's "distrust of grammar" she presses her case for the demise of lyrical poetry and the growth of "ordinary language poetics".

The title of the book 'Wittgenstein's Ladder', seems to be is an allusion to Wittgenstein's climb from logic to metaphysics in his Tractatus Logicio-Philosophicus. Perhaps invoking the last sentence sentence of that book, "whereof one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence" where, having climbed up the ladder, he kicks the it away. This is why what appears to be a book on the logical foundations of language is said by its author to be a book on ethics! Somethings cannot be said, only shown. Is that what Perloff thinks is the role of the poet? To show through language the limits of language and show us what cannot be said? Perhaps.

The book is addressed to a general audience and so must introduce the reader to Wittgenstein and show how understanding his later philosophy provides strategies for reading poetry. The more you already know about Wittgenstein, the more disappointing you will find these accounts.

Perloff begins with a review of Wittgenstein's shift from the concerns and methods the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to his radically different concerns and methods in his later Philosophical Investigations. (One continuity is, perhaps, his emphasis on showing.) Perloff then traces his influence in the work of Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, and other post war writers. What makes them Wittgensteinian, according to Perloff, is "even as it deals with the most ordinary aspects of everyday life", the investigation is "necessity tentative, self-canceling and self-correcting". But, she seems to think that these investigations necessitates a reading practice of providing context. If so, that is a misreading of Wittgenstein. There is nothing in Wittgenstein's method that requires a reading practice of providing a context. The investigations are precisely using contexts to tease out the meanings and show misdirections that lead us to metaphysics. It will help the general reader if I reproduce here a review of the Philosophical Investigations I posted on Goodread:
------
The Tractatus Logico- Philosopicus is probably just about the best account of a wrong idea about how language functions. Wittgenstein's later work attacks the fundamental idea in TLP and replaces it with another that was also hugely influential, not least because it also represented a new attitude to doing philosophy.

We can read the TLP as though the question it answers is: "How does language get a grip on the world?" As though language was like ivy on a wall and we ask what is under the surface of leaves that we can not see? There MUST be something that holds the ivy together and up! In the case of ivy we can pull back the leaves and see root bearing stems. If we pull back the leaves of language what are the root bearing stems? Roughly, the answer in TLP is that when we pull back the leaves of language we find stems of logic and roots of 'logically proper names'. Logic runs through language holding it together and 'logically proper names' reach out to the world and get a grip. Thereby, that which is on the surface language gets meaning. Job done!

Wittgenstein's later philosophy said that this whole way of looking at language was wrong and the inappropriateness of that way of looking at it is what generates philosophical problems: it leads us to look for correlations between words and objects and the mental representations that are required to communicate. We have been misdirected. Just like misdirection in magic acts, once you're misdirected you get the magical effect. The misdirection in the TLP is in the 'MUST' of looking under language to find the HIDDEN FORMS. Wittgenstein's later philosophy said that there was nothing under language that was philosophy's concern. Instead of looking under language for hidden forms that you think must be there, look at what SURROUNDS actual language USE in particular contexts for particular purposes. Language does not get its meaning by names latching on to things; it gets meaning by our use of utterances instrumentally. Language is more like a bag of tools than an ivy plant. If you want to know the meaning of an hammer, watch how it is used. Similarly, with other tools. Watch how they are use. The fact that many of them have handles doesn't mean we use them do the the same work as we do with a hammer.

If we see language right we need to look at what work is being done when we make utterances - - and to do that we need to know what's going on around them. On this understanding of language our model of communication changes. We need to avoid seeing the MIND as representing the world (even when we are representing the world!). We do not have a mental theatre in which we project images of the word that underpin and give meaning and truth to our thoughts. Instead, we have certain abilities to use language in the practices of our communities. Language is unintelligible without the surrounds of that form of life.

Philosophy then becomes piecemeal and descriptive philosophical investigations that reveal the grammar of our practices and thereby detecting the misdirections that give rise to philosophical problems. Philosophy is more like therapy than proto science.

------

It is vital that in reading Wittgenstein we do not read his text as though it was an attempt at systematic exposition of anything. It is a method to reveal the grammar of our practices and thereby dispel an impulse to theorise. Perloff account seems too thin for her purpose. The quotations from Wittgenstein stand in real danger of banality. Wittgenstein's investigations shepherd us, through numerous simple observations around various themes. There are no single decisive observations. It is the cumulative effect of his observations that lead us to see the dissolution of philosophical problems yet 'leaving everything as it is' otherwise.

How, then, might one read experimental poetry?

Note: for some reason, I actually first posted this review on Amazon!

[Robert B · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perloff attempts to tie Wittgenstein’s philosophical thoughts to an understanding of writers from Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett to Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachman, Robert Creeley, Ron Silliman, and Rosmarie Waldrop. In some cases, she is successful – her reading of Beckett’s novel, “Watt,” is enlightening – but in many cases, she is less helpful and rather abstruse.

[Trisha · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was soooo enjoyable to read….again perloff treats her subjects and the poems with such a great deal of care…

also a really good introduction to wittgenstein for someone who is vaguely familiar with his philosophy but slightly hesitant to read him! (review coming of his borrowed philosophical investigations…..)

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

First piece of lit crit I've ever read for fun. I'd recommend it as a good introduction to Wittgenstein for English majors. Anyways, that was what I used it for, and I think I've got a bit of a handle on the guy and how he's used in literature. I'm not familiar with most of the other books she discussed either, so it was pretty much just a sit back and learn experience. It did get me wanting to read pretty much everything discussed, so that's something. Also I see myself going to Christmas parties and inappropriately repeating the aphorism that goes "Imagine someone saying: 'But I know how tall I am!' and laying his hand on top of his head to prove it."

[Stewart Neill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very complicated literary analysis.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perloff writes clearly but vibrantly and makes complex text approachable for beginners like myself.