The Wittgensteinian Sublime

In this paper I will discuss how certain literary impulses can be understood as departures from ordinary language, or as usages of language outside “language games”—as these terms have been understood by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations and elsewhere. ¹ This focus distinguishes my discussion from most applications of Wittgenstein’s ideas to literary studies. Recently, Marjorie Perloff in New Literary History has described how “Wittgenstein’s language games have provided models for poetic composition,” ² and concluded that, for him “the ‘ordinary’ . . . turns out to be, after all, capable of being seen as the ‘aesthetic’” (921). ³ It has also been common to describe literature itself, or its various generic or formal subdivisions, as language games: for instance, John Searle in “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse” has argued that “telling stories really is a separate language game,” ⁴ with its own conventional rules and expectations. My purpose here is not to argue that such approaches are wrong or useless. I simply want to determine what sense can be made of an opposing one, that sees the use of language outside language games as a particularly literary gesture, with a recognizable role in literary and aesthetic history: this gesture is best identified as a species of the sublime, and Wittgenstein’s interest in it reveals much not only about how his thought can be used in literary criticism but also about the tensions defining his own philosophical project.

One writer who has made much of Wittgenstein’s thoughts on the violation of ordinary language is Stanley Cavell, and it will be evident how much the current discussion owes to his work. Unlike most contemporary readers of Wittgenstein, Cavell insists on the significance of the difference between language inside and language outside language games, from the title essay of Must We Mean What We Say? throughout his subsequent career. ⁵ Cavell has meditated upon Wittgenstein’s imperative “to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (PI §116), and argued that everyday language, language inside language games, exercises a claim upon us that more sophisticated, philosophical languages (including not only metaphysics but also skeptically rigorous critique ⁶ ) can never fully obliterate: to use a fraught, sometimes confused term, ordinary language is normative. This contention tends to distinguish Cavell’s work sharply from various trends in postmodern literary critical debate: for instance, Stanley Fish has had an exchange with Cavell in which Fish disapproves of the “normativity” of ordinary language as posited by ordinary-language philosophers, and plumps for a less restrictive, rather blandly conventionalist understanding of meaning legitimated by the “interpretive communities” that mean it. ⁷ Poststructuralists in general have tended to embrace Wittgenstein’s concept of language games only insofar as it seems to legitimate all types of socially practicable usages of language, and not in any sense that restricts usage in any way. Henry Staten, author of Wittgenstein and Derrida and of an article and response in New Literary History’s special 1988 issue devoted to Wittgenstein and literary studies, prefers the notion that all imaginable linguistic practices are language games to one that characterizes certain philosophical or metaphysical adventures beyond ordinary language as somehow illegitimate, and he distances himself from elements in the Investigations that insist on the latter. Staten asks, for instance, “why not observe philosophical language-games with the same neutrality that we assume towards all other usages? ⁸ —a question reflecting his awareness that “philosophical language-games” is a kind of oxymoron in the discursive universe of the Investigations. For his part Jean-François Lyotard, in Just Gaming and The Postmodern Condition, has also used the term “language games” simply to designate the whole of linguistic practice, but adds the politically important restriction that certain powerful “language games”—for example, science or metaphysical ontology—cannot (in a uniquely Lyotardian proscriptive sense) be allowed hegemony over weaker, more localized ones. ⁹

This proscription nonetheless differs essentially from the sterner Wittgensteinian critique of metaphysics, which depends wholeheartedly on the idea that certain philosophical impulses (especially, for Cavell, philosophical skepticism) venture outside language games altogether. At such extreme moments, in the Investigations’ words, “language...