How To Do Things With Wittgenstein

Abstract

How To Do Things With Wittgenstein Christopher C. Robinson (bio) Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (Verso, 2000) Robin Holt, Wittgenstein, Politics and Human Rights (N.Y. Routledge, 1997); Simon Glendinning, On Being With Others: Heidegger — Derrida — Wittgenstein (Routledge, 1998) Nigel Pleasants, Wittgenstein and the Idea of a Critical Social Theory: A Critique of Giddens, Habermas and Bhaskar (N.Y.: Routledge, 1999). Political theorists have been at a loss on what to do with Wittgenstein. For some, the way to work with Wittgenstein is indirectly through surrogate “Wittgensteinians” like Peter Winch or Thomas Kuhn. Those who wish a more direct route display a tendency, following Hanna Pitkin, to consider the “significance” of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for the enterprise of theorizing. Making the connection between Wittgenstein and political thought is a difficult one precisely because Wittgenstein did not talk about politics in any specific way, and his remarks regarding theory were anything but positive. One area where Wittgenstein and political theory could be said to overlap, noted Pitkin and others after her, is in the activity of reading. Political theorists read difficult texts, ponder the historical changes reflected in concepts such as politics, democracy, justice, and so on, while Wittgenstein describes words and contexts as tools that derive meaning from their place and use in sentences and social practices. Throughout the seventies and eighties, Wittgenstein was conceived mainly as offering a non-Derridean method for close readings of the canon. More recently, social and political theorists have been investigating Wittgenstein’s writings for conceptual strategies to deploy against the erasure of national and cultural differences by “globalization” (the neutral academic term of art that has supplanted “imperialism” with all its evil economic and cultural connotations) discourse, technologies, and policies. It was Wittgenstein who thought to use the line “I’ll teach you differences,” from “King Lear” as the motto for his Philosophical Investigations, and who castigated the ethnocentrism of James George Frasier’s claim in The Golden Bough that various “primitive” magical and religious views and practices are unscientific, insane, and therefore false. Those who partake in these perspectives and rituals, notes Frasier, have not benefited from the progress of Western science in demystifying reality. These are backward savages in Frasier’s view. What is revealed in Frasier’s account, argued Wittgenstein, however, is not a state of abject primitivity in need of educational reform and table manners, but rather Frasier’s cultural myopia and “how impossible it was for him to conceive of a life different from that of the England of his time.” Our task as philosophers, anthropologists, scientists, Wittgenstein said, is to describe practices different than our own, expanding our own imaginative and perceptual capacity only to recognize: “this is what human life is like.”[1] Description is a celebration of even those differences incommensurable with the sources of our identity (whomever we may be); it does not entail inquiry that reveals practices to be logically, structurally, or cognitively the same and reconcilable through generalization/homogenization (the goal of “infantile theory”). Because description occurs from close up, and is done with care, identity is revealed to be the source of difference. For Pitkin and others in the postbehavioral era, the problem of connecting Wittgenstein to political theory was directional: the task was conceived as one where something in his philosophical writings (family resemblances, forms of life, critical remarks pertaining to solipsism and private language) could be extrapolated and used to illuminate and latch onto an aspect of theorizing (interpretation, pluralism, communitarianism, anti-foundationalism). Isolated remarks from Wittgenstein’s works were employed merely to substantiate a claim or offer a catchy turn of phrase. But the direction has changed. From a range of schools and authors (critical legal studies, rhetoricians, democratic theory, liberal reconstructionism, identity theory, deconstructionism) political theorists are rethinking the dualisms — theory/practice, aesthetics/politics, mind/body, and agent/structure — at the core of the contemporary discourse and their identity. That is, these theorists have moved away from an ontological duoverse and toward an ecological recognition that the surface world before us is all we have. This recognition dissolves the conception of the world as composed of binary oppositions. More comprehensive readings of Wittgenstein are presented as monistic...