Incapacity: Wittgenstein, Anxiety, and Performance Behavior by Spencer Golub (review)

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later writing ruminates obsessively on behavior as an external indicator of interior experience. He considers and reconsiders the conditions of its accurate or misleading communicative possibilities, and its learned, imitated, or invented character. In Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology he returns repeatedly to pain-behavior (schmerzbenehmen):

§308. Suppose we could learn what it is that people call a sensation, say a “pain,” and then someone taught us to express this sensation. What kind of connexion with the sensation would this activity need to have, for us to be able to call it the “expression” of the sensation?

(1980:62e)

As he insistently interrogates the problems of the disclosure of interiority, Wittgenstein offers dreamlike, theatrical, even inexplicable examples of imagined human interactions. For performance philosopher Spencer Golub, who substitutes the term “performance behavior” for pain-behavior, such examples, and such insistence, become a theatre and demonstration of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Endless circular self-interrogation — the precise form of Wittgenstein’s texts — defines this condition, a condition shared by Golub who confesses of Incapacity: “An OCD mind created this book” (10). He admits to “confounding and conflating the ordinary with the extraordinary” and to absenting “neuroscience from my thought experiment” (8). Instead he proposes the body as “an engine and artifact of causality” and clarifies his condition this way: “Obsessive-compulsives are always being told that they live too much in their minds, but they live too much in their bodies as well. Or more accurately, their minds live too much in their bodies and their bodies in their minds” (8). His condition and his intention so thoroughly inform one another that they become virtually indistinguishable, and he seems entirely at home in the vertiginous recursive potentiality of Cora Diamond’s phrase for the work of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, to show “understanding as, in its correct use, in agreement not with some external thing but with itself” (1995:29). Golub recognizes Wittgenstein’s texts as thoughts thinking themselves, anxious, insomniac, spun of the creative constraints of incapacity. He reframes Wittgenstein’s contested seriousness as issuing from the near-religious fervency of OCD’s relation to limits and rules, to the grammar of consistent behavior.

Golub’s self-interrogation attains its own fervency, becoming at times a machine for producing the most urgent questions: “At what point does the mental risk of performance behavior outweigh its real or quasi-artistic reward? [...] Is there an end to what William James referred to as ‘egological wonder sickness’ [...]?” (246). “Should we, as [Alfonso] Lingis proposes, give ourselves over to what he calls ‘an immensity without tasks’?” (243). Or does the challenge of picturing pain, as to bring us to “another level of empathy” (245), become the imperative of the fly-bottle of our human condition, or anyway the condition of being human, being human as a condition, adhering to a method that is “therapeutic not only because it consciously exposes the otherwise neurotically picture-making mind to the clarifying light of analysis, but because it does so in the light of philosophy’s obsessive questioning of the meaning of consciousness in the abstract” (245)? A work of tremendous scholarship and boundless compassion, Incapacity champions the need and reason to set one’s own rules even from within the vortex of compulsion to follow them, and attempts a diagram and specimen for such rule setting. At the same time it accounts for the transformations enacted on the topos of the everyday by persistent, debilitating doubt, by thinking through doubt’s incessant assault on belief. In a key distinction from the performative, Golub invests in the scriptive (description, script, scripture), or that mode and manner of writing that encourages the reader to act. He reiterates as an aspiration Wittgenstein’s two mandates of philosophy: “To perform its writing like poetry and to write its reader toward acting” (247).

Wittgenstein’s philosophy, thus understood as therapeutic, inspected modes of grammar, and Golub isolates Wittgenstein’s central question, posed...