Why begin a book on Wittgenstein with a chapter discussing Terry Eagleton's interpretation? Eagleton is not exactly a Wittgensteinian scholar; he is more a literary critic than a philosopher and his interests as an academic Marxist hardly qualify him as one who might approach Wittgenstein in sympathetic terms. The answer is bound up with the approach and style of this book; an emphasis on a literary, cultural and (auto)biographical reading of Wittgenstein's works, their intertextuality, the expression of the spirit of European (Viennese) modernism in the Tractatus, and the anticipation of certain 'postmodern' themes in his later works which, on the one hand, cast him in close philosophical proximity to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger and, on the other, project his writings into an interesting engagement with postructuralist thought. This chapter begins with a discussion of Terry Eagleton's script for the film by Derek Jarman, Wittgenstein. It examines Eagleton's thesis that Wittgenstein is the first philosophical modernist -- that the true coordinates for Wittgenstein's writings are Joyce, Picasso and Schˆnberg, rather than Frege, Russell and logical empiricism. In the second part of the chapter, we follow Eagleton (1982) in viewing Wittgenstein later works as displaying deep affinities with poststructuralist thought and with a body of thought that shaped poststructralism.

Colin MacCabe (1993: 1) in the Preface to Wittgenstein observing the changes that Derek Jarman and Ken Butler brought to the original Eagleton screenplay of Wittgenstein suggests: ‘Eagleton sees the substitution of a figure of English eccentricity for his European philosophical modernist’. Indeed, Wittgenstein as philosophical modernist -- perhaps the last (rather than the first) great European philosophical modernist -- is the major theme that runs through Eagleton’s ‘Introduction to Wittgenstein’. Eagleton (1993: 5) begins his introduction by drawing our attention to the impact that Wittgenstein has had upon contemporary artists. He asks ‘What is it about this man ... which so fascinates the artistic imagination?’ As he says: ‘Frege is a philosopher’s philosopher, Bertrand Russell every shopkeeper’s image of the sage, and Sartre the media’s idea of an intellectual; but Wittgenstein is the philosopher of poets and composers, playwrights and novelists, and snatches of his mighty Tractatus have even been set to music’. If Eagleton is unkind to Russell (and to shopkeepers), he is certainly correct about Wittgenstein --at least the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. In the period since Wittgenstein’s death at 62, on the 28 April 1951 --less than fifty years ago --there has been a burgeoning of artistic and fictional works about him or inspired by him, the Jarman-Eagleton film/script Wittgenstein being only one of the the latest contributions.

Indeed, soon after his death Wittgenstein became a fictional character in Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net (1957). This was followed by a stream of fictions and poetry written as Wittgensteiniana, to use Charles Bernstein’s (1990) word. Bernstein lists among his examples Bruce Duffy’s novel The World As I Found It and a range of poetic works: Alan Davies’s Signage, Steve McCaffery’s Evoba, Tom Mandel’s Realism, Ron Silliman’s ‘The Chinese Notebook’ in The Age of Huts, Keith Waldrop’s Water Marks, and Rosmarie Waldrop’s The Reproduction of Profiles. In relation to Bernstein’s list, Marjorie Perloff (1992: 193) remarks:

Perloff (1992, 1996) is, perhaps, too quick to proclaim a Wittgensteinian poetics or at least to proclaim it at the expense of other aspects of Wittgenstein’s work. In addition to the ‘works’ that Perloff cites, we could add musical works inspired by him or based upon his work (for example, Mary Luyten’s motet based upon the Tractatus), or readings of Wittgenstein’s ‘architecture’ (Wijdeveld, 1994). We might also add artists (in the sense of visual arts) per se. Joseph Kosuth curated an exhibition called ‘The Play of the Unsayable: Wittgenstein and the Art of the Twentieth-Century’, first shown in Vienna on the centenary of Wittgenstein’s birth (at the Wiener Secession, 13 September-29 October, 1989) and later, in an expanded version in Brussels (at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 17 December-28 January, 1990), and at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition ‘assembled’ the works of contemporary artists and photographers, noting ‘family resemblances’ or morphological similarities among them, using large chunks of text from Wittgenstein (along with exerpts of text from Derrida, Kristeva, Barthes, Foucault, Englemann and others) to frame the exhibition/installation and to raise afresh the a question concerning the collective concept of what we call art.

Wittgenstein’s significance and impact on contemporary visual arts is not restricted to the movement known as ‘Conceptual art’ as practiced by Kosuth; indeed, his work has been of considerable importance to the Art & Language group, centering around the British artists, Terry Atkinson (whose early writing drew upon a combination of Wittgenstein and Trotsky), David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell. Perloff’s Wittgensteinian poetics, insightful as it is, tends to obscure and minimise the other perspectives, aesthetic and otherwise, from which one can choose to view Wittgenstein’s works: Wittgenstein once said (in a tone of high seriousness) he would like to write a book of philosophy composed entirely of jokes.

Ray Monk (1990: xvii) begins his brilliant biography also by noting that ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein exerts a very special fascination that is not wholly explained by the enormous influence he has had on the development of philosophy this century’. He explains that there is a gulf ‘between those who study his work in isolation from his life and those who find his life fascinating but his work unintelligible’. What the many introductions to his work do not explain, Monk (1990: xviii) argues, is ‘what his work has to do with him --what the connections are between the spiritual and ethical preoccupations that dominate his life, and the seemingly remote philosophical questions that dominate his work’. His aim is to rectify this situation by ‘describing the life and work in one narrative’ and to show ‘the unity of his philosophical concerns with his emotional and spiritual life’ (ibid.). The narrative that Monk tells provides a kind of dramatisation of his philosophy, bringing it to life.

Certainly, as evidenced by the range of works cited, Eagleton’s opening assertion is not far off the mark: Wittgenstein has fascinated and excited the ‘artistic’ imagination in a way few philosophers have. Why? Eagleton acknowledges the personal mythology surrounding the man, even in his own lifetime, and the ‘fairy tale quality about his rags-to-riches career’ which tends to ‘lend itself easily to literary or dramatic representation’. But, he suggests, there is something more than the personal legend with its depth of anguish and self-reflection that accounts for Wittgenstein's ‘artistic’ significance. There is a clear set of connections which mark out the Tractatus as the exemplar, in the philosophical realm, of a modernist work of art which locates it squarely within the coordinates of cultural modernity.

Eagleton (1993: 5) comments:

The doctrine of showing and saying, as Wittgenstein says in the Preface to the Tractatus -- of drawing a limit to the expression of thought --is central to Eagleton’s reading of Wittgenstein as modernist. The ladder-like propositions of the Tractatus perform an impossible task of manifesting the structure of language and its relation to the structure of reality. The same modernist irony which characterises the self-undercutting and self-canceling gesture of the Tractatus, Eagleton maintains, is to be found in modernist art as a whole: the attempt to express the inexpressible. Wittgenstein says, ‘There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical’ (TLP, 6.522). The Tractatus repeats the modernist refrain typical of ‘the great experimental art of the early twentieth century’: the world is all that is the case, but its value and meaning lie elsewhere (‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists’, TLP, 6.44). The Tractatus as a modernist work displays the same obsessive self-reflection on its own form and medium that characterises modernism as a movement: ‘the Tractatus is the place where philosophy begins to bend back on itself and interrogate its own medium, which is of course language itself’ (Eagleton, 1993: 7).

Clement Greenberg defined modernism as the historical tendency of an art practice towards complete self-referential autonomy. He writes in the now famous essay on modernist painting:

A reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus in terms of Greenberg's definition seems to lend weight to Eagleton's thesis. The Tractatus is certainly about the limiting conditions of philosophy, of language and its power to represent the world. In this Kantian sense Wittgenstein is a philosophical modernist but coming after Kant he is not the first. Eagleton's claim is that Wittgenstein is the first philosophical modernist in the sense that he artistically demonstrates such limits. Wittgenstein does not simply "criticise the means of criticism", he shews his readers the central significance of such limits in the ladder-like propositions of the Tractatus. In this sense, then, he is considered by Eagleton to be the first philosophical modernist.

M. H. Abrams (1981) suggests that modernism involves a self-conscious and radical break with the traditional bases of Western culture and Western art and that the precursors of this break are artists and thinkers who questioned our cultural certainties, including, Western conceptions of the human self. Calinescu (1987: 3) also suggests that the term ‘modernism’ is ‘to convey an increasingly sharp sense of historical relativism. This relativism is in itself a form of criticism of tradition’. Tradition is illegitimate; it can no longer offer examples to imitate. Modernism is symbolic of that huge cultural shift from ‘a time-honoured aesthetics of permanence, based on a belief in an unchanging and transcendent ideal of beauty, to an aesthetics of transitoriness and immanence, whose central values are change and novelty’ (ibid.). The nature of modernism centers around the notion of the autonomy of art --the ‘idea that the core of modernism is the reflective examination of the nature of the artistic medium, with purity as an ideal’ (ibid.). Eagleton (1986: 139) himself expresses a similar thought this way:

There are clear echoes of this description of modernism in Wittgenstein’s self-conscious break with traditional philosophy and ways of ‘doing’ it. As he says in the Preface: ‘the truth of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems’. The Tractatus is like a temple, beautiful in its logical austerity, which shelters the 'non-sensical' and deep contradictions of philosophy and the 'truths' of language in relation to the world, at the same time as making room for ethics and asethetics, as falling outside the domain of fact-stating discourse.

Eagleton’s insights have their radical extension in the work of conceptual artists like Joseph Kosuth who utilises Wittgenstein to articulate ‘art after philosophy’. As an American experimental artist in the mid-1960s Kosuth was influential in establishing Conceptual Art. He cited the ‘ready-mades’ of Marcel Duchamp as constituting the dramatical shift from ‘appearance’ to ‘concept’ and, therefore, the beginning of modern art and he enounciated the formal principle that the work of art is a tautology, implying that artistic activities are self-verifying. For Kosuth the desire to understand cultural formation, and particular, art, in relation to language, is the basis to operationalise a Wittgensteinian insight:

Wittgenstein's Tractatus can be understood in terms of the aesthetic concept of modernity with its roots in romanticism and its rejection of bourgeois modernity based upon a confident belief in progress, science and technology. In this sense, Wittgenstein's doctrine of saying and showing is one of the central modernist devices to the resolution of thinking the unthought and expressing the inexpressible. Such a view coheres with the ultimate principle of aesthetic modernity: the attempt "to present the unpresentable", as Jean-FranÁois Lyotard (1984) argues, basing his argument on an analysis of the Kantian sublime (see also Lyotard, 1993).

Lyotard's view here is worthy of further consideration for he provides an interpretation of Wittgenstein later work in relation both to (post)modernism and to Nietzsche and the question of European nihilism. While we deal with these themes more fully in Chapters 2 and 5, it is important to foreshadow them briefly here also for they impinge upon Greenberg's definition and gives the question of modernism a different kind of Kantian twist. Lyotard sets up the discussion in terms of Habermas' assertion that if modernity has failed, it has done so by allowing culture as the totality of life to become splintered into narrow and separate specialities that are the province of experts. In other words, culture has become separated from the problems of existence. Only when aesthetic experience no longer issues in judgments of taste, when it is no longer part of the language game of aesthetic criticism but takes part in "cognitive processes and normative expectations", is there the prospect of a re-integration of culture. In short, Habermas looks to the arts to provide the basis for a unity of experience, bridging the gap between the cognitive, the ethical and the political. Yet Lyotard inquires as to the sort of unity Habermas has in mind:

Is the aim of the project of modernity the constitution of sociocultural unity within which all the elements of daily life and of thought take their places as in an organic whole? Or does the passage that has to be charted between heterogeneous language games -- those of cognition, of ethics, of politics -- belong to a different order from that? (Lyotard, 1984: 72-3). The first option, which Lyotard identifies with Hegel (and Habermas), does not challenge the notion of a dialectically totalizing experience; the second, he suggests, approximates Kant's Critique of Judgment, "but must be submitted ... to that severe reexamination which postmodernity imposes on the thought of the Enlightenment, on the idea of a unitary end of history and of the subject" (p. 73). Both Wittgenstein and Adorno, Lyotard argues, were the first to initiate this critique.

Lyotard uses the term 'delegitimation' to explain the result of the splintering of culture into different language games or discourses; there is no universal metalanguage that can knit together the diverse and proliferating discourses into one transparent language. Science plays it own game and is incapable of legitimating itself, let alone all other language games. This disintegration of culture and, above all, of the impossibility of legitimation of knowledge through a metalanguage, is what Lyotard considers Nietzsche's primary concern in his investigation of the question of European nihilism. As he argues, fin-de-si’cle Vienna was "weaned" on the pessimism accompanying this cultural disintegration. Artists and philosophers -- Musil, Kraus, Hofmannsthal, Loos, Schˆnberg, Broch, Wittgenstein and Mach -- "carried awareness of and theoretical and artistic responsibility for delegitimation as far as it could be taken" (p. 41). Wittgenstein's strength was that he did not succumb to the logical empiricism developed by the Vienna Circle but "oulined in his investigation of language games a kind of legitimation not based on performativity" (ibid.). Wittgenstein's later philosophy, then, is seen as providing a positive reponse to the question of European nihilism. There is no over-arching metalanguage or master narrative into which the competing claims of different discourses can be mediated and resolved; the 'linguistic turn' provides no meta-resolution. There is only language games, in the plural, each with their body of irreducible rules, and while there are 'family resemblances' -- a notion which smacks of genealogy -- these are purely contingent and cultural links. Legitimation can only spring from our own linguistic practices.

Lyotard (1984: 77) detects in the Kantian sublime an earlier modulation of Nietzschean perspectivism and "it is in the aesthetic of the sublime that modern art (including literature) finds its impetus and the logic of avant-gardes finds it maxims".

One of the central and most seductive ideas of aesthetic modernity -- as a current of thought countering the concept of modernity -- is the idea that something lies hidden from us. That which lies hidden from us yet guides our thought and behaviour. The various experiemental analytical methods developed by Freud, Nietzsche and Marx were expressions of this deep desire to uncover that which remains hidden in language, self, culture and economy. Wittgenstein's early thought is also an expression of this desire: to lay bare the limits of the sayable and thus, in romantic fashion, to protect and make room for ethics and asethetics. They belong to the realm of the unsayable. By plotting the limits of language, focusing upon the general form of the proposition, Wittgenstein could, thereby, provide an account of the logical structure governing language and its representive power of denotation. The world is made up of states of affairs which are logical pictures of facts embodied in propositions. Only such fact-stating propositions have sense, and complex propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. This doctrine and analytical method provides intellectual resources to the Vienna Circle. Moritz Schlick's formulation turns the doctrine into a method of verification for the meaning of sentences. Where for the Vienna Circle Schlick's manifesto "The meaning of a sentence is its method of verification" becomes a mantra for the final defeat of metaphysics and the legitimation of science, for Wittgenstein the doctrine, which later became "logical atomism", was a means to preserve the status of ethics and asethetics, not their demise: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence".

Wittgenstein's later thought is radically postmodern in the sense that it dispenses with this central and comforting trope of modernity. It no longer clings to the seductiveness of the idea that something remains hidden -- a crystalline, pure, logical essence -- which directs our thought, language and culture, and which can be revealed through a form of analysis. Instead, Wittgenstein embraces the thought that everything already lies in plain view before us; that there is no one method of analysis which reveals a hidden structure.

Eagleton has pursued Wittgenstein on other occasions. In terms of his own question of why Wittgenstein so fascinates the artist's imagination he writes a novel which seeks to bring Wittgenstein's ideas and class position out into the open by putting Wittgenstein in dialogue with three other characters. In the 'novel of ideas' Saints and Scholars (1987) Eagleton investigates in a literary form Wittgenstein's philosophy and temperament in relation to the political context of revolutionary Europe and a meeting with a number of not so improbable people. The year is 1916. Wittgenstein has left Cambridge for the solitude of the west coast of Ireland. He meets up with Nikolai Bakhtin, brother of the famous Marxist aesthetician, and they become travelling companions. Finally, together they run into both James Connolly, on the run and injured after the Easter Rising, and, Leopold Bloom. In this 'novel of ideas' the four main characters, holed up in a little cottage, begin to argue with each other over the radical possibilities facing Europe.

In the novel Eagleton describes Wittgenstein's quest for a kind of logical purity in the Tractatus with the city of Vienna:

Speaking of Wittgenstein's early conception of language, Eagleton describes the 'picture theory of meaning' and its logical relation to the structure of the world in terms of a counterpoint with Vienna.

The novel is somewhat static and even, lifeless, yet it serves for Eagleton as a kind of literary praxis for his criticism (embodying it, anchoring critical ideas in conversation and dialogue) and foreshadows the script he writes for the Jarman film. While Eagleton's novel is less successful than the script, it, nevertheless, captures quite well the moment of insight that motivates Wittgenstein to change the direction of his thinking:

Here the biographical interrupts the philosophical. It is a theme he returns to in "Introduction to Wittgenstein" making the connection between "looseness and ambiguity" of language and the invention of new forms of writing.

If the early work holds one kind of attraction for the artist, the later writings manifest another. For they belong to that heretical subcurrent of philosophy which works by joke, anecdote, aphorism, by the striking image or gnomic saying, distilling a whole complex argument in some earthy dictum or sudden epiphany. One thinks of the various jokers in the philosophical pack, from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Adorno and Derrida, those thinkers who could only say what they meant by inventing a whole new form of writing. The Tractatus may have the shimmering purity of an Imagist poem or Suprematist canvas; but the Investigations read more like an assemblage of ironic fables or fragments of a novel, deceptively lucid in their language but teasingly enigmatic in their thought (Eagleton, 1993: 8-9).

Eagleton is surely correct to mention Wittgenstein in the company of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Derrida. He likens Wittgenstein to the Freudian analyst engaged in the work of demystification to teach us to see differently through the adoption of a new style of thinking and of 'doing philosophy'. It is a style that makes uses of the variety of language which exists in our culture, which exploits all its various forms to shew us what lies on the surface in front of us, so to speak -- the familiar and the ordinary. Just as there cannot be a private language, so too there cannot be self so deep that it "eludes the reach-me-down categories of our social existence" (Eagleton, 1993: 10). Wittgenstein, in his later work, deconstructs the romantic myth of self as a unique and private essence, unified, and at once the source of our inspiration and genius -- a self which can be made transparent and accessible to ourselves through analysis. It is this bourgeois notion of "inwardness" and "inner experience" which buttresses Western ideology individualism and sanctions a view of society comprised only of individuals -- rational, autonomous, and self-interested.

Yet at this point Eagleton resists the temptation to construe Wittgenstein as philosophical postmodernist, instead casting him in terms of resemblance to "the great artistic modernists" (p. 11). It is, we think, more fruitful to see Wittgenstein in his later work as more radically postmodernist and, thus, closer to Nietzsche and French poststructuralism than to modernism (or, at least, in a critical tension with his early modernist self). As someone who displays close affinities to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger and the body of thought which shaped poststructuralism, Wittgenstein pits himself against a 'Hegelian' cultural modernity.

This is, perhaps not unsurprisingly, an interpretation Eagleton (1982) makes himself much earlier in his career. He writes that Wittgenstein considered using a quotation from King Lear as an epigraph for the Investigations -- "I'll teach you differences" -- and quotes from Rush Rhees' personal recollections that Wittgenstein made the suggestion at one time to a friend that while Hegel wanted to make things that looked different the same, he wanted to show how things that looked the same were different (Eagleton, 1982: 64). Starting from this observation Eagleton goes on to show the parallels between Wittgenstein and Derrida. For Eagleton,

Eagleton (1982: 65) is concerned that the British Wittgenstein -- the "Wittgenstein of Geach and Strawson" -- has lost its distinctively European timbre. He interprets Wittgenstein, like Derrida, as engaged in a process to unseat metaphysics and to replace it with the 'everyday'. The private sign is a metaphysical chimera, argues Eagleton, "an instance of that philosophy of phenonological self-presence" which is fractured by 'language-games' and by the recognition that difference and identity alike are effects of discourse. There is no metalanguage into which claims made in ordinary language can be transparently parsed. Above all philosophy is not a privileged language that can resolve first-order disputes. There is only language and concepts take their force from their location within practical forms of life: "what has to be accepted, the given, is -- so one could say -- forms of life" (PI: #226). Eagleton's purpose is, however, to make the comparison between a 'Nietzschean' Wittgenstein and Derrida, who leave "everything as it is" and a conception of 'language as carnival' that he attributes to Mikhail Bakhtin.

Eagleton's overall intention is to demonstrate the superiority of mainstream Marxist asethetics that admits a notion of ideology, provides strategies of de-reification and de-fetishization, and explains the historical conditions of metaphysics.

Our strategy here is not to debate the superiority of one tradition of asethetics over another, or even to assess Eagleton's argument, but rather to take up his suggestions of a reading that, first, places Wittgenstein in relation to modernism, providing an aesthetic reading of his work, and, second, to construe Wittgenstein in his later work as someone who has strong affinities both with a European counter-Enlightenment tradition in philosophy exemplified by Nietzsche and with the movement of poststructuralist thought. These are themes that we deal with in subsequent chapters.

1. One ‘passage’, for example, included the works of Gerhard Richter, Jeff Wall, Clegg and Gutman, Michael Zumpt, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Christopher Williams, Francis Picabia, Sarah Charlesworth, Günter Fërg, Christopher Williams. Another sequence begins with Peter Weibel’s Gem-ein-sam and includes Barbara Bloom’s pair of portraits from The Reign of Narcissism, Dan Graham’s video Yesterday/Today, which televises the viewer’s entry into the gallery space, Franz West’s Psyche, a mirrored vanity table, two Cindy Sherman self-protraits, Michelangelo Pistoletto’s pair of arched mirrors, La Tavole della Legge, Jan van Oost’s twin monumental mirrored coffins, Magritte’s Perspective (Le balcon de Manet II), and Marcel Broodthaers’ La Salon Noir, which has protrait mugs in an open coffin.

2. Monk (199o: xvii) notes that ‘there have been at least five television programmes made about him and countless memoirs of him written, often by people who knew him only very slighly’. There was a BBC film of interviews and other material about Wittgenstein made by Christopher Sykes Productions in 1988. The Derek Jarman film had its origin in 1990 when Tariq Ali was asked by the Commissioning Editor, Education, at Channel 4 to develop an idea for a series on Philosophy. Ali sugested a set of twelve one-hour dramas based on a set of philosophers from Ancient Greece to modern times and four scripts were commissioned (Socrates by Howard Brenton, Spinoza by Tariq Ali, Locke by David Edgar, and Wittgenstein by Terry Eagleon). As Jarman (1993: 65) comments: ‘I had thought of making a film of Ludwig some years ago. ‘Loony Ludwig in the Green Valleys of Silliness’. Then Tariq rang. We had a ten-day shoot for fifty minutes on TV. A week or so into pre-production, the BFI [British Film Institute] threw down a challenge. Some more cash for a seventy-two minute film’.

3. It is extraordinary that analytic philosophy rules out of court the question of philosophical style, of philosophical genres and, specifically, of the relevance of narrative and narratology to philosophy not only in the obvious sense of separating questions of form and content or life and works (and, therefore of auto/biography and philosophy), but also in terms of narrative as a form of philosophy --the fable, the parable, the homily are genres of philosophical discourse.

4. See Kosuth’s famous essay ‘Art After Philosophy’, first published in Studio International, 178 (195), October, 1969: 134-137; 916, November: 160-161; 917, December: 212-213.

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