The Wittgensteinian Sublime

Abstract

In this paper I will discuss how certain literary impulses can be understood as departures from ordinary language, or as usages of outside language games?as these terms have been understood by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations and else where.1 This focus distinguishes my discussion from most applications of ideas literary studies. Recently, Marjorie Perloff in New Literary History has described how Wittgenstein's games have provided models for poetic composition,2 and concluded that, for him the 'ordinary' . . . turns out be, after all, capable of being seen as 'aesthetic' (921 ).3 It has also been common describe literature itself, or its various generic or formal subdivisions, as games: for instance, John Searle in The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse has argued that telling stories really is a separate game,4 with its own conventional rules and expectations. My purpose here is not argue that such approaches are wrong or useless. I simply want determine what sense can be made of an opposing one, that sees of outside games as a particularly literary gesture, with a recognizable role in literary and aesthetic history: this gesture is best identified as a species of sublime, and interest in it reveals much not only about how his thought can be used in literary criticism but also about tensions defining his own philosophical project. One writer who has made much of thoughts on violation of ordinary is Stanley Cavell, and it will be evident how much current discussion owes his work. Unlike most contemporary readers of Wittgenstein, Cavell insists on significance of difference between inside and outside lan guage games, from title essay of Must We Mean What We Say? throughout his subsequent career.5 Cavell has meditated upon Wittgen stein's imperative to bring words back from their metaphysical their everyday use (P/?116), and argued that everyday language, inside games, exercises a claim upon us that more sophis ticated, philosophical languages (including not only metaphysics but also skeptically rigorous critique6) can never fully obliterate: a fraught, sometimes confused term, ordinary is normative. This New Literary History, 1996, 27: 605-619