Incapacity Incapacity Wittgenstein, Anxiety, and Performance Behavior Spencer Golub northwestern university press evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2014 by Spencer Golub. Published 2014 by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Golub, Spencer, author. Incapacity : Wittgenstein, anxiety, and performance behavior / Spencer Golub. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8101-2992-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951. 2. Language and languages—Philosophy. 3. Performance—Philosophy. 4. Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. 5. Literature—Philosophy. I. Title. B3376.W564G655 2014 121.68—dc23 2014011601 Except where otherwise noted, this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 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For my mother We go towards the thing we mean. —Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §455 . only when one knows the story, does one know what the picture is for. —Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §663 Contents Acknowledgments xi List of Abbreviations of Works by Wittgenstein xiii Introduction Thoughts Thinking Themselves 3 Chapter 1 Tractatus Illogico-Philosophicus 15 Chapter 2 Wittgenstein’s Anatomy 35 Chapter 3 Catastrophists 59 Chapter 4 Doors of Misperception 89 Chapter 5 Rules of the Game 117 Chapter 6 Non-Sleeper Agents 147 Chapter 7 Masterminds 179 Chapter 8 The Idiot’s Anxiety at the Object’s Disappearance 207 Chapter 9 Homeless 233 Notes 249 Index 285 Acknowledgments I wish to thank the students in my graduate seminar “Wittgenstein, Writ- ing, and Performance” at Brown University and especially Ioana Jucan, who served as my research assistant for that course. My greatest thanks are owed to my wife Jeanie for whom nothing is impossible. xi Abbreviations of Works by Wittgenstein BB The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations, ed. Rush Rhees (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). CV Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). LC Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief. Compiled from notes taken by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees, and James Taylor, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). “LE” “A Lecture on Ethics,” in The Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 3–12. LFM Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge, 1939, ed. Cora Diamond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). LWI Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, ed. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt and Maximilian A. E. Aue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). LWII Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology: The Inner and the Outer, 1949–1951, vol. 2, ed. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt and Maximilian A. E. Aue (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 1994). LPP Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology: 1946–47, ed. P. Geach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). NB Notebooks 1914–1916, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). OC On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). PG Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. A. J. P. Kenny (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004). PI Philosophical Investigations, including Philosophy of Psychology—A Fragment xi (Philosophical Investigations, Part II), revised 4th edition, ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). xiii xiv List of Abbreviations PO Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951, ed. James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993). POP, xi Philosophy of Psychology—A Fragment xi (Philosophical Investigations, Part II), 4th ed. PR Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). RC Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schättle (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007). RFM Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, 2nd edition, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, R. Rhees, and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978). RPPI Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980). RPPII Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). TLP Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (New York: Routledge, 1999). Z Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970). Incapacity Introduction Thoughts Thinking Themselves Thought thinks itself thinking, imagination pictures extended figures for itself, and union is experienced in the inattention of an activity that feels itself acting, and acted upon, without thinking about it. —Jean-Luc Nancy When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. —from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates characterizes the thought process as being an internal dialogue resulting in choice: “[the mind] asks itself questions and answers them, saying yes or no. And when it reaches a conclusion (which may take quite a long time or may involve a sudden leap), stops being divided and starts to affirm something consistently, we call this its belief.”1 But what if there appears to the mind to be no choice other than to be compelled to make the same choice repeatedly? The mind’s willingness to accept “no choice” as fact where it may well be only appearance produces the performance behav- ior of incapacity, the stuff of personal legend and artistic ascription. Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000), whose protagonist Leonard Shelby suffers from short-term memory loss and has developed a system of (mis)remembering through body inscription, begins with a sequence that appears to reverse time toward its vanishing point—a crime scene photo whose image disappears the more the protagonist shakes it; the disappearance of said photo back into the Polaroid instant memory camera that snapped it; spilled blood flowing backwards on a tiled floor; the gun that shot the bloody corpse on the floor leaping back into the protagonist’s outstretched hand; the bullet shell casings from the gun stirring on the floor (as does the corpse) prior to leaping back into the muzzle of the gun. Although we don’t actually see it, for a moment we think we see Leonard jump back into the body of his baggy suit, into the embodied baggy-suit of remembering. The mind’s mental 3 4 Introduction circuitry intuits the mechanical strategy of telling Leonard’s story in reverse, a co-articulated incapacity that is ritualistic in the doing and non-ritualistic in the forgetting of it having been done. The body that jumps back into the baggy suit, though, is not Leonard’s so much as his ghosting of spectatorial desire not to know outside of protagonistic incapacity, not to remember that you cannot know you have short-term memory loss as Leonard does. This not-knowing enables the virtually impossible to become virtually possible, which is how film does its work and the mind does film. Incapacity, (the) film says, is the author of loss, and as such makes us believe not that we have no choice but that our choice is to have no choice. This book models such self-pathologizing performance behavior. Wittgen- stein says, “Introspection can never lead to a definition. It can only lead to a psychological statement about the introspector” (RPPI §212). This being said, this is also a book about self-delusion, beginning with the all-inclusive single word “mind” and the misleading, impossible image of the mental pic- ture.2 To theorize the mind and the mentalistic is, per force, to generalize and so to overstate, while at the same time to render opinion. Neither the mind nor the “I” stands still for modeling, but we model them nonetheless. We know in context, and context does not stand still either, entering instead into the flow of life. Thought is a mental object, the mental object is an image, a picture, and above all, a language, or more properly, as Wittgenstein argues, a language-game. Language-games configure “the whole mind” (itself a mis- nomer) as a kind of central toolbox. And yet Wittgenstein has no interest in thought-reduction. He is anti-essentialist, opposed to any unified theory and offers none in his work. “I’ll teach you differences,” Wittgenstein says.3 As often as not, he illustrates via a negative—what is not the case, what can- not be said, what thinking-mind-the “I” are not, what “I” cannot do, and more generally what cannot be done. Wittgenstein shows us landscape (“per- spicuous overview”), not location. In this, he is in tune with a certain vein in postmodern drama, the dialogic, self-interlocutory voice in his writing mak- ing the comparison to drama viable, useful, and evocative.