Look Who’s Talking

Abstract

In his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1976) developed the concept of the ‘language-game’, embedded in a distinct ‘form of life’, offering a model around which to organise this investigation into public speaking, as an activity central to the emerging modern metropolises of Berlin and Vienna in the early twentieth century. It suggests that the investigation proceed in two main, interrelated directions: analysis of the pragmatic rules that are operative in the game (who can speak to whom, and about what?), and an examination of the ‘form of life’ or situational context in which the language-game is embedded (how is public speaking organised?). What is more, since playing or performing a language-game produces a particular interpretation of the world, thinking about the nature of public speaking in this way will allow us to see how this activity wouldhave contributed to an understanding of urban life. Throughout this chapter, and indeed, in the book as a whole, public speaking is conceived as an activity as well as an event. This means that public speaking is a phenomenon whose temporal and spatial boundaries are entirely fluid, even though each individual event must, of necessity, be limited by both time and space, since each possesses ‘occasioned character mark[ing] it as the site whose engagement is punctuated temporally’ (Blum 2003: 171).