"They practice their trades in different worlds": Concepts in Poststructuralism and Ordinary Language Philosophy

The capacity for understanding is the same as the capacity for misunderstanding.

—Stanley Cavell

Introduction

I moved to the United States in August 1989. Before I had unpacked my boxes, Ralph Cohen invited me to give a talk at the brand new Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change. Quick off the mark, passionately interested in new people and new ideas, with an unmatched knowledge of what everybody in the world was working on, Ralph was the ideal director of the Center. But he was not alone: Libby Cohen's passion and enthusiasm were as vital to the Center's generous atmosphere as Ralph's intellectual open-mindedness. I am grateful to them for inviting me back so often. Their kindness and hospitality made me feel more at home in the United States.

My first talk at the Center was about feminism and the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, which Ralph published in New Literary History.¹ When the journal arrived in the mail, I discovered that my essay was placed right after Cora Diamond's "Knowing Tornadoes and Other Things," a discussion of the feminist claim that "women have distinctive modes of knowledge."² Her paper was a revelation: here was an immensely powerful way of thinking about questions that really mattered to me. Where did this voice, this style come from? From Ludwig Wittgenstein, it appeared: I clearly had much to learn.

In the early 1990s, I was already disenchanted with the increasingly predictable and dogmatic arguments generated by the newly hegemonic poststructuralist theory. My interest in Bourdieu and in the decidedly nonpoststructuralist Simone de Beauvoir was a symptom of that disenchantment.³ Yet neither Bourdieu nor Beauvoir were theorists of language; only Wittgenstein held out the promise of a serious alternative to the poststructuralist vision. I spent the rest of the 1990s immersing myself in the Wittgensteinian tradition, and trying to put it to use in feminist theory and in literary criticism.⁴ The present essay, written to mark the end of Ralph's editorship of New Literary History, can be read as an account of the intellectual journey inspired in part by his editorial vision.

In my early attempts to educate myself in Wittgensteinian thought, I came across the 1988 issue of New Literary History devoted to "Wittgenstein and Literary Theory" (vol. 19, no. 2). By devoting an issue to the relationship between deconstruction and Wittgenstein at such an early date, Ralph demonstrated his usual prescience, as well as his conviction that theory and philosophy are fundamental parts of literary scholarship. The issue focused on Jacques Derrida and Wittgenstein. In 1988, ordinary language philosophy was not yet a significant term, and the name Stanley Cavell was barely mentioned.⁵ Today, Cavell's towering importance must be acknowledged. As I use the term, "ordinary language philosophy" means the philosophical tradition after Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin as established and extended in Cavell's work.⁶ Poststructuralism is harder to define.⁷ I use the term about theories and philosophies that build on Ferdinand de Saussure's vision of language, alone or in combination with continental philosophy. Structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction are names for different strands of this post-Saussurean tradition. "Theory" or "French theory" are other names for the same phenomenon. Thinkers within each tradition are quite different from one another, yet not in ways that make it difficult to decide which tradition to place them in.

A generation ago poststructuralism was a firebrand stirring up the humanities. Today, most humanities scholars outside philosophy departments have been trained in some form of poststructuralism. The poststructuralist understanding of language, meaning, and interpretation has become the unspoken doxa of the humanities. It is no coincidence that almost all the books on Cavell that have appeared since 1989 have been written by philosophers and not by literary critics.⁸

This situation makes the concerns of ordinary language philosophy hard to grasp. Over the years I have found that attempts to discuss ordinary language philosophy often fail because my post-Saussurean interlocutors and I begin with startlingly different assumptions about fundamental...