Signifying nothing

[altariel]

An article by Terry Eagleton on why artists are fascinated by Wittgenstein.

Because, so it turns out, I'm not and probably never really was interested in anything other than fiction, the only book by Terry Eagleton that I've read is a novel called Saints and Scholars, in which Wittgenstein, James Connolly, Leopold Bloom, and Nikolai Bakhtin (brother of the more famous Mikhail) somewhat fortuitously meet in an remote cottage on the west coast of Ireland in 1916, and proceed to pass the time of day. It's not the best novel I've ever read. I bought it in Boston and there is a card from the Brattle Book Shop which I stuck in one of the pages, to remind me of a bit I found interesting, and which I reproduce now for your reading pleasure:

"Nothing could grow in this stony soil; the West was empty, great tracts of rocky void. Meanwhile you talked, in the bars and pulpits and political meetings, at the race track and in bed and the back pews. Talk came out and drink went in, both dream machines, both devices for doing nothing century after century. Yet talk was a kind of action, unlike drink. Discourse was something you did: it could gather ten thousand armed men on the streets, unionize dockers, convert an aristocrat to a Fenian. The Irish had never fallen for the English myth that language was a second-hand reflection of reality. Laurence Sterne had exploded that fallacy in an orgy of laughter. For Swift and Burke and O'Connell rhetoric was as real as a rifle: it could clothe children and console the dying, banish typhoid and purify the coinage. Language was both sickness and cure, the last freedom left to a demoralized land."

Fantasy? Ah well it's better than nothing.

Comments

[communicator.livejournal.com]

I think the analytical philosophy that W was reacting against relies on a false theory of language, as a logical coding system for the transmission of information. Artists have a better instinctive understanding of what language is: a shared social co-operative activity, like a game. W, for whatever reason, perhaps genius, 'got' what language was about(IMHO) and built that into his philosophy.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

BTW That account of irish use of language reminds me of the much more gloomy metaphor for Irish art that Stephen Dedalus comes out with at the start of Ulysses: 'the cracked looking glass of a servant'. The freedom of the underclass to reflect.