SOME REMARKS ON LOGIC AND LANGUAGE

I have suggested (on this site) that in TLP, so far as language and logic taken together are concerned, we are dealing with something that can be seen in terms of the Lacanian ‘il n’y a pas de rapport…’: what leads Lacan to the assertion that there is no sexual relation can also be taken to support the assertion that there is no relationship between language and logic. There is no meta-language enabling us to grasp the two levels of language and logic from the same neutral standpoint. They are inextricably intertwined. If the structure of such a relationship, of such an ‘impossible’ relationship, one might say, is to be represented, it is imperative that we look at a form favoured by Lacan, that of the Moebius strip: first, we move from language to its logical form, its logical infrastructure; then, we have to confront the irreducible dimension of language at the heart of logic itself. We derive the logical form of the proposition by means of what is called in TLP an operation, only to find that what constitutes an operation returns us, by virtue of what Lacan determines as the logic of the ‘not-all’ (pas-tout), to the context of significant use, to the specific occasion of an actual utterance. The attempt to step outside language, in order to say what it is that constitutes meaning as such, results in nonsense.

In The Parallax View (pp.37-40), Zizek has some comments that bear on the matter. He raises the question of how Lacan’s binary signifier, S1-S2, manifests itself in the context of the symbolic order. ‘What the symbolic order precludes is the full harmonious presence of the couple of Master-Signifiers, S1-S2 as yin-yang, or any other two symmetrical “fundamental principles”. The fact that “there is no sexual relationship” means precisely that the secondary signifier (that of the Woman) is “primordially repressed,” and what we get in place of this repression, what fills in its gap, is the multitude of “returns of the repressed,” the series of “ordinary” signifiers’. Zizek illustrates this by reference to Woody Allen, but so far as TLP is concerned we can see how the general form of the proposition marks the place of S1, inasmuch as it functions as the quilting point of the ‘multitude’ of empirical propositions (T/F).

This is not a binary logic, divided between the polar couple Masculine/Feminine (or logic/language). The split is not between the One and the Other, it is inherent in the One itself: the split comes between the One and its empty place of inscription (a theme made explicit by Wittgenstein in his presentation of the ‘operation’). In what looks like a critical aside aimed at Badiou, Zizek insists that the multiple is not ‘the primordial ontological fact’—an assumption that underpins Badiou’s system as a whole. The ‘transcendental’ genesis of the multiple, he argues, resides in the lack of the binary signifier: ‘the multiple emerges as the series of attempts to fill in the gap of the missing binary signifier’. What we are dealing with here is the minimal difference between a signifier and its place of inscription, between one and zero.

On the one hand, we have S1 as the empty signifier, together with S2 as the signifying chain in its incompleteness. It is in order to fill in this incompleteness that S1 intervenes, as the quilting point. This is the ‘masculine’ side, in which a multitude is organised into a totality, into an All, through the exception, S1, which fills in its void. On the other hand, the binary signifier, the symmetric counterpart of S1, is ‘primordially repressed’. It is in order to supplement the void of this repression that the chain of S2 emerges. Here, as Zizek has it, ‘the original fact is the couple of S1 and the Void at the place of its counterpart, and the chain of S2 is secondary’. It is in these terms that we may understand the ‘feminine’ non-All. It is the logic operative here that accounts for the emergence of the inconsistent multitude characteristic of the non-All: the emergence of the multitude must be seen in relation to the void or lack of the binary signifier.

In his later work, Wittgenstein elaborates his notion of ‘grammar’, and it becomes clear—from the perspective opened by Lacan—that such an idea can be seen in relation to the non-All. Wittgenstein writes, in Philosophical Remarks, as follows:

If I could describe the point of grammatical conventions by saying they are made necessary by certain properties of the colours (say), then that would make the conventions superfluous, since in that case I would be able to say precisely that which the conventions exclude my saying. Conversely, if the conventions were necessary, i.e. if certain combinations of words had to be excluded as nonsensical, then for that very reason I cannot cite a property of colours that makes the convention necessary, since it would then be conceivable that the colours should not have this property, and I could only express that by violating the conventions. [PR 53]

I do not call a rule of representation a convention if it can be justified in propositions: propositions describing what is represented and showing that the representation is adequate. Grammatical conventions cannot be justified by describing what is represented. Any such description already presupposes the grammatical rules. That is to say, if anything is to count as nonsense in the grammar which is to be justified, then it cannot at the same time pass for sense in the grammar of the propositions that justify it (etc.). [PR 55]

Rules of grammar, which he also calls grammatical conventions, cannot be justified by appeal to the supposed fact that they enable us to represent reality correctly. If it makes sense to say that an object cannot be reddish-green all over, then it must also make sense to say that it can be reddish-green all over. But then the grammatical convention is superfluous. Further, if one supposes that the colour word conventions are necessary, one could not say what property it is that makes them necessary, for then it would be conceivable that the colours might not have this property, and one could only express this fact by violating the very convention one was trying to justify. In effect, one has to say that there is no such thing as reddish-green, which means that the phrase ‘reddish-green’ is nonsensical, i.e. we have no use for it in making intelligible statements about how the colours are. (Analogously, there is no such thing as a double fault in chess, which is just to say that in chess there is no use for the phrase ‘double-fault’.) The nature of propositions of very many kinds can be elucidated by reference to the grammar they exhibit, but any attempt to impose a limit on grammar as such results in nonsense. This is part of the significance of the notion of a language-game: by means of it, language is exhibited in all its inconsistent and contingent multiplicity, and this in turn means that there is no point from which it can be surveyed in its totality. Language use is without justification, and language is without essence—a statement that is itself nonsensical.

One consequence of this view of grammar may seem paradoxical: it is that language is non-normative. Grammar is non-normative (a remark that flies in the face of most commentary on Wittgenstein). This is, however, a position that has been argued for by Stanley Cavell, and others, such as Steven Affeldt, James Guetti and Rupert Read. To see grammar in terms of the non-All is to see meaning in terms of the future. In this connection, Zizek cites a phrase of Brian Rotman’s: meaning is something which is always ‘borrowed from the future’, relying on its ever-postponed fulfilment to come [The Parallax View, p.51]. As Cavell has put it, ‘Is the issue one of a leap [not of faith, but, let us say, of reason] from a ground that is implied or defined by the leap? Or is the leap from grounds as such, to escape the wish for such definition [as if reason itself were a kind of faith]?’ Steven Affeldt glosses this by saying: ‘The idea is that to speak intelligibly is to define the ground from which you speak, it is to articulate the position that you are assuming and from which you speak’. To cite Zizek again: ‘subjects cut the impasse of the endless probing into “do we all mean the same thing by ‘bird’?” by simply taking for granted, presupposing, acting as if they do mean the same thing. There is no language without this “leap of faith”’ [p.54]. Guetti and Read have examined in close detail the operation of an example very similar to this—the use of the word ‘waxwing’ [I have discussed this elsewhere on this site].

Wittgenstein remarks: ‘If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments’ [PI sec.242]. Affeldt glosses the force of this remark by saying that our intelligibility for one another depends continuously, from moment to moment, and in each act of speech, upon precisely our agreement in judgment. ‘It is not that our shared language is the ground of our intelligibility. Our language is the vehicle through which, or the medium within which, we continuously undertake to make ourselves intelligible to one another by projecting the ground that we individually, at a given moment, occupy.’ One might reposition Zizek in these terms by saying that, for him, it is the status of such an agreement in judgment that it is not normative, nor could it be. It cuts across ‘the debilitating deadlock of language, its ultimate lack of guarantee, by presenting what we should strive for as already accomplished’ [p.52]. Language is a system that lives on credit it can never pay off.

NOTES:
Steven Affeldt, “The Ground of Mutuality: Criteria, Judgment and Intelligibility in Stephen Mulhall and Stanley Cavell”, European Journal of Philosophy 6:1 (April 1998): 1-31.

Stanley Cavell, “The Division of Talent”, Critical Inquiry 11:4 (1985).

James Guetti and Rupert Read, "Acting from Rules", International Studies in Philosophy 28:2 (1996): 43-62.

FROM NAME TO ASPECT

The notion, shared by Blanchot, Bataille, Lacan and others drawing on the tradition of Hegel, that a conception of naming can provide a sound basis for the explanation of meaning in language is seriously flawed. The opening of Philosophical Investigations is aimed at precisely this question, and the implications of that opening are drawn out by G.E.M. Anscombe, in her essay ‘A Theory of Language?’, published in 1981 [see: I. Block, ed., Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), pp. 148-158]. Professor Anscombe is concerned here with Wittgenstein’s remarks in the first section, about naming, and with subsequent remarks in sections 2 and following that make use of a primitive language whereby builders call out to each other for materials, such as slabs and beams. She summarises the main purpose of these opening sections as being ‘to persuade us not to look at the connection between a word and its meaning either as set up or explained (a) by ostensive definition, or (b) by association, or (c) by mental pictures, or (d) by experiences characteristic of meaning one thing rather than another, or (e) by a general relation of reference or naming or naming or designation which has (logically) different kinds of objects as its terms in different cases’ [p. 154]. In order to see what Wittgenstein was fundamentally about here Anscombe believes that we must turn our attention to what he means by ‘grammar’. It has been frequently urged by commentators that what for Wittgenstein belongs to grammar differs in significant ways from what grammarians would see as their field. Anscombe argues, on the contrary, that the difference in opinion about what belongs to grammar ‘arises from belief in and practice of a “formal” science of grammar on the one hand, and a study of what a given use of words amounts to or achieves or tells us on the other’ [p. 156]. This latter idea sees grammar as an expression of the roles words play in our lives, of the place our diverse concepts, of pain, colour, truth, doubt, fear, naming, and so on, have within our forms of life. Whereas the first idea of grammar results in an account of how rules operate to determine patterns and structures of language, an account given in terms of a purely linguistic structure, the second works rather differently. For example, in the latter case, Anscombe argues, one might consider contrasts between say ‘For how long did you forget that?’ and ‘For how long did you reflect on that?’, or between intermissions of intention and intermissions of attention. There is, she makes clear, nothing odd about applying the word ‘grammatical’ to the observation of the different temporalities involved in these different cases. Another example, addressed by Wittgenstein, is the difference between the first-person avowal of pain and the ascription of pain to others. There is similarly nothing strange about describing as ‘grammatical’ the very significant differences involved here. As Anscombe points out, this is not the kind of observation that we expect from traditional grammarians, whose attention is turned elsewhere, to the structures of language considered essentially on their own terms and for their own sake.

The nature of Wittgenstein’s interest can be seen from the following passage, cited by Anscombe from Philosophical Investigations, section 240:

The agreement, the harmony, between language and reality consists in this: if I say falsely that something red, then, after all, it isn’t red. And if I want to explain ‘red’ to someone in the statement that this is not red I do it by pointing to something red.

What is of immediate significance here is that ‘The harmony between language and reality is found in the false statement no less than the true. This false statement says (of what is) something that it is not — but something nevertheless, which is. Here we can point to that which the thing is not’ [pp. 156-7]. This, for Anscombe, shows how close Wittgenstein is to Plato on this issue, a point she clinches by citing Sophist (262-3B):

A statement does not consist of names spoken in succession or verbs apart from names . . . it does not merely name something, but gets you somewhere by weaving together verbs with names . . . those that fit together make a statement . . . stating something of something (of you, say) . . . the false statement stating of you, as being, things which are different from the things that are of you, and so things which are not, but all the same things which do exist.

The matter comes to a focus by way of Wittgenstein’s remark: ‘if I say something falsely that something red, then all the same it isn’t red’. If I am able to change a false statement to a true one by negating it or by negating a negation this is ‘because of the distinction of the different kinds of words which fit together to make descriptions’ [p. 157]. It is not merely experience of the colour that determines the grammar of ‘red’, but its place in our lives with language. Anscombe cites Wittgenstein once more:

If you trained someone to emit a particular sound at the sight of something red, another at the sight of something yellow, and so on for other colours, still he would not yet be describing objects by their colours. Though he might be a help to us in giving an description. A description is a representation of a distribution in a space (in that of time, for instance).
If I let my gaze wander round a room and suddenly it lights on an object of a striking colour, and I say “Red!” — that is not a description. (Philosophical Investigations, II, ix)

For Anscombe, to say of the object that it was red, or to say that my visual field was not suffused with (or that it did contain) red, would be to give ‘a representation of a distribution in a space’. What we can say is that the act of conferring or citing of names has meaning only within our grammar as a whole.

This suggests that notion of naming found in Blanchot and others, that is, the idea of the power of the word, the name, to found language by an act of negation, of ‘murder’, requires to be significantly redescribed in the light of Wittgenstein’s thought, who in the examples cited uses negation (the negated or false statement) to show how it is that meaning may not intelligibly be thought to derive from names. Names act as names only in the context of a statement, description or other kind of utterance: only in the context of the language-game, of our life with language, as a whole, do names have their part to play. That is, names function as names only insofar as they have a place within our grammar. Because names are simply part of our grammar, they are not privileged over other parts of that grammar, and hence it makes no sense to see them as the unique foundation of it. The same holds for negation: since negation is an operation within our use of language, any attempt to found language on it would require the removal of negation from language as such, in order to establish it outside language, as the condition of its possibility. To do so would result in negation acquiring a meaning other than the one under consideration, so that ‘negation’ would undergo an alteration such that, if it meant anything at all, it would no longer mean what it formerly meant. This latter point will become fundamental to the case I will seek to present later, concerning the seeing of aspects. Wittgenstein has himself addressed this area of thought, and it is a concern that continues to engage him from his earliest thought, in the Tractatus, to his last reflections, gathered together in On Certainty.

In order to draw out the implications of Wittgenstein’s earlier approach to language for my larger argument, I will now turn to the Tractatus. It would seem that, in the Tractatus, there is a decisive statement of what it is for language to have meaning based on the correlation of name and object. In giving his picture theory of the proposition, he gives an explanation of how propositions have sense, i.e. are true or false, which invokes ontological categories. ‘The possibility of propositions is based on the principle that objects have signs as their representatives’ (4.0312). Or again: ‘One name stands for one thing, another for another thing, and they are combined with one another. In this way the whole group — like a tableau vivant — presents a state of affairs’ (4.0311). A proposition or picture is the fact that its elements are combined in a certain way. In a proposition that has been fully analysed the elements are names. Their meaning (Bedeutung) is identical with the objects they stand for (vertreten). The proposition says something because the elements that are combined within it are correlated with objects in the world. Part of the significance of this for what Wittgenstein is interested in dealing with in the Tractatus has to do with the determinacy of sense. He writes in 2.0211 and 2.0212: ‘If the world had no substance, then whether or not a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true. In that case we could not sketch any picture of the world (true or false)’. If in the analysis of a proposition we could not finally reach rock-bottom, that is, symbols whose meaning is determined by their immediate relation to reality, the analysis would be interminable. Meaning would under these conditions be indeterminable, unfixed. As Wittgenstein puts it in 3.23: ‘The requirement that simple signs be possible is the requirement that sense be determinate’. What this approach seems to be presupposing is, then, according to Brian McGuinness, ‘a magazine of objects which form, in one sense, the realm of Bedeutung’ [see: ‘The So-called Realism of the Tractatus’, in I. Block, ed., Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), pp. 61-62]. The objects being thus presupposed are described as being simple, in the sense that they cannot be further analysed. They belong to all possible worlds: they are, so to speak, the possibilities of the world. They form the substance of the world or the form of the world. McGuinness writes: ‘They are what is unalterable and persistent (bestehend), while the configuration of objects, the states of affairs, are what varies from one possible world to another. These configurations of objects, these states of affairs, give objects what material or external properties they have. Naturally, there is only one set of configurations that is actually realised, and this is what we call reality or the world. The internal properties of objects are their possibilities of combination with one another, and the possession of these properties is necessary, not a mere matter of fact’ [p. 62].

McGuinness then raises the question of what is meant by assuming a magazine of objects of this kind. It is not that something exists which might not have done: ‘All unrealised possibilities are simply dispositions of objects different from that which actually obtains’ [p. 62]. The objects themselves are, so to speak, prior to the possibilities within which they are disposed. This means that all questions of existence are questions about what dispositions of objects actually obtain. When Wittgenstein writes: ‘The world is a totality of facts, not of things’ (1.1), he is expressing this view. All existence is a matter of fact, a matter of what is in the world. This seems to result in an ontology. As McGuinness puts it, ‘the world or reality consists of facts, that is to say in the Bestehen (in one sense), the obtaining, of states of affairs. States of affairs themselves, on the other hand, are combinations of objects, which bestehen or exist (subsist) in another sense. Existence as normally spoken of is equivalent to the Bestehen in the first sense of a certain state of affairs’ [p. 62]. Now the attraction of these opening pages of the Tractatus seems to be that they derive certain metaphysical results on the basis of some simple and natural assumptions about propositions being true or false. Nonetheless, it is essential to see that Wittgenstein had no intention of building a system of metaphysics or ontology on logic or the nature of language. As with his later work, so here: he rejected the idea that there is something by which our grammar is determined, and he did not, at any juncture, attempt to infer features of the external world from that grammar. It may seem as though he argued that ‘propositions with sense are possible only because some more primitive operations are possible — notably the correlation of names with simple objects, and it may seem that he goes on to argue that these more primitive operations are possible only because the world possesses certain characteristics’ [pp. 62-63]. However, these are the kinds of idea to which Wittgenstein applies the term ‘nonsense’ (Unsinn).

So how are we to approach the ontological parts of the Tractatus? McGuinness cites 2.0121 as an example: ‘Logic deals with every possibility and all possibilities are its facts’. What we have here is a transferred and illegitimate use of the word ‘fact’, and one might say that the whole seeming enterprise of ontology in the Tractatus is a similarly illegitimate and transferred use of words like bestehen. In using language in this way, Wittgenstein is showing us the nature of language and its limits, and it is this that constitutes philosophy as a critique of language—it is the activity of making clear the limits of language, which are identical with the limits of thought. What philosophy is concerned with, then, cannot be said, stated directly, but it can be shown: ‘What philosophy tries to make clear is not sayable, but it is shown by ordinary propositions that can be true or false’ [p. 64]. Philosophy goes wrong when it tries to say what can only be shown. This indicates what the importance of logic is for this undertaking. Logical propositions say nothing but they do show something: they show ‘the formal – logical – properties of language and the world’ (6.12). Wittgenstein’s aim in the Tractatus is to bring out that ‘philosophy and logic have to do not with a special realm of objects but with the necessary features of language – that is to say of any language whatsoever. This happens most clearly in the case of logic. The propositions of logic, the tautologies, are by various devices shown to be inevitable offshoots or by-products of saying something true or false. As such they show us something about what it is to say something true or false’ [p. 64]. Tautologies and contradictions say nothing, being true or false in all circumstances, and as such are described by Wittgenstein as senseless (sinnlos), a condition he differentiates from the nonsensical (unsinnig) (4.461-4.4611). ‘They do not represent any possible situations’ the way propositions with sense (those of science, for instance) do (4.462). ‘Tautology and contradiction are the limiting cases—indeed the disintegration—of the combination of signs’ (4.466). They are not nonsense, however, for they are revelatory of the logical form that does allow intelligible propositions to picture possible situations in the world (4.611). Gordon Bearn has made the point clear: ‘“p or not-p” is a tautology that is clearly related to the law of the excluded middle [i.e. that any statement is either true or false], but it says nothing. Rather it is a condition of making sense at all that all sensible propositions say nothing when put into this schema. It is not the pure foundation of sense. It is the first glimpse of the opposite: senselessness. And that the opposite of sense is first glimpsed in this way makes manifest the limits of any world we might know or imagine, dream, or dread.’ [See: Gordon F.C. Bearn, Waking to Wonder: Wittgenstein’s Existential Investigations (Albany: SUNY, 1995), p. 58.]

Fundamental to this approach is Wittgenstein’s idea that, as McGuinness has it, ‘in order for there to be propositions that may be either true or false, but must be one of the two, there will have to be a possibility of expressing those propositions by means of signs which of themselves will serve to express a proposition independently of what is the case. A state of affairs cannot be designated independently of whether it exists or not unless signs can be used whose significance could be given and understood and determined without reference to the obtaining or non-obtaining of that state of affairs’ [McGuinness, ‘The So-called Realism of the Tractatus’, p. 64]. This means that, for Wittgenstein, as McGuinness reads him, it is possible to make statements knowing them to be either true or false whatever the state of the world is.

He therefore thought that we were committed to the possibility of those propositions being expressed in such a form that all the constituent signs used could function in that particular combination whatever the case in the world was. [McGuinness, p.65]

These signs (these supposedly possible signs, reached only by analysis) would therefore be ‘possible constituents in propositions or possible contributors to producing a true or false proposition, regardless of what was the case in the world’ [p. 65]. Here, then, we have reached what in Blanchot’s idiom might be called the impossible conditions of possibility, the impossible origin anterior to writing. Wittgenstein attempted to rephrase language in just such terms, using what he called the simple signs or names alone. These are names that could not lack a bearer, and, although no actual example can be given of such a name, McGuinness cites a hypothetic example from Hidé Ishiguro that suggests what Wittgenstein may have had in mind: ‘Let a be the centre of a circle . . .’. In the discussion that follows, the question of whether a exists cannot arise. The point, then, is to consider what it would be like for names of this sort to form the whole substructure of a language.

Every proposition we utter is either true or false, whatever the case may be in the world. This requires that every proposition be capable of analysis in just one form, irrespective of whether or not any such analysis has been reached. In Wittgenstein’s vision of things, at least as McGuinness presents it, ‘if we imagine the totality of all propositions, true and false, in their fully articulated, fully analysed form (a form that is possible in principle), then we know that every element in this articulation, every sign, every name, has meaning in the sense that it contributes to the truth-value (whatever it is) of any proposition in which it occurs’ [p. 69]. To understand these elements does not require any experience of what is the case, since the proposition is (by definition) fully analysed, and hence the objects exist independently of what is the case. In that case, how do we understand a proposition? To have in mind a structure conforming to that of a possible state of affairs is to understand the proposition. As McGuinness sums it up: ‘It will be seen at once that this amounts to saying that there is no proposition to be understood until there is an understanding of a proposition’ [p. 69]. Thus the question is: how do we understand a propositional sign?

We use the perceptible sign of a proposition (spoken or written, etc.) as a projection of a possible situation.
Thinking the sense of the proposition is the method of projection. (3.11)

For McGuinness, this means that ‘Thinking the sense into the proposition is nothing other than so using the words of the proposition that their logical behaviour is that of the desired proposition’ [p. 70]. He argues that for Wittgenstein the realm of reference is thus not some mysterious, infinitely extended magazine of things. There is already contained in language, as the Tractatus presents it, the possibility of all objects that are possible. Language is the site of its own (impossible) possibility. All logical forms are logically possible within language, within thought, or so McGuinness contends. ‘No separate investigation or exploration of ‘reality’ is conceivable’ [p. 70]. This leads him to insist that when the learner, the child, learns language he learns complete propositions or thoughts. He has to grasp these as a whole, and when he has done so he will have an understanding of the primitive signs contained within those propositions. The primitive element, the name, has its place in the proposition. ‘Only propositions have sense; only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have meaning’ (3.3). This remark follows another one (3.263), which prepares the way for it: ‘The meanings of primitive signs can be explained by means of elucidations. Elucidations are propositions that contain the primitive signs. So they can only be understood if the meanings of the signs are already known’. The point of this remark is made clear by Peter Winch: ‘one cannot learn the meanings of names separately from each other; to learn their meaning is to learn how they combine in sentences. In order to distinguish that, one has to be presented with sentences and learn to distinguish them from senseless strings of words. To have come to grasp the sense of a sentence is to have come to grasp the meanings of the names of which it is composed’ [Peter Winch, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 10]. Not only that, but grasping the sense of the one sentence also involves grasping the endless other combinations into which the name might enter: in other words, grasping something that comes only with the mastery of a whole calculus, a calculus it is one of the main concerns of the Tractatus to describe. (Logic exists only in its application. If there were no such thing as the application of logic there would be no such thing as logic. Another logic would be required to determine the correct application of the original logic.) Given this point of view, it becomes clear why McGuinness wants also to say that the processes of explaining the truth-conditions of a proposition and of determining the truth-value of a proposition cannot be broken down into any simpler operation than that of grasping the proposition or expressing the proposition. All these are operations possessed of the same degree of multiplicity or complexity. These considerations lead, finally, to the question as to what kind of object Wittgenstein’s simple objects are. The answer must be that they are not concrete objects at all, and that there is nothing intelligible to be said concerning their existence or non-existence. We can grasp only concatenations of objects, facts in the world. Hence, no example of such an object can, or could, logically speaking, be given.

Certainly our propositions in the last analysis are not about the workings of our own mind. What Wittgenstein is trying to convey is a point of view according to which what they are about is not in the world any more than it is in thought or in language. Objects are the form of all these realms, and our acquaintance with objects (our contact with them, to borrow a metaphor from Aristotle) is not an experience or knowledge of something over against which we stand. Thus it is not properly experience or knowledge at all. Objects are eti epekeina tes ousias (beyond being), and it is therefore misleading to regard Wittgenstein is a realist in respect of them. [McGuinness, ‘The So-called Realism of the Tractatus’, pp. 72-73]

The objects are beyond being and beyond non-being. The objects are outside of the world, and outside of the world there is nothing to be said. Bearn comes to the same conclusion:

So although the elementary propositions are introduced as pictures of simple objects, this is not something that—if we get the point of the Tractatus—we will find understandable, at all. . . . The book is metaphysical poison (nonsense/Unsinn) to end the explanatory metaphysical impulse. [Bearn, p.58]

The ‘metaphysical poison’ of which he speaks is that which Derrida has called the pharmakon, a drug that is both fatal and a cure. From this point of view, what Wittgenstein has brought to light is an object without object, a pure object where no object is and which no one could or ever will encounter. This strange quasi-object is what is to inaugurate language and to determine meaning, and yet it seems to resemble a fiction, something called up by the writing of the Tractatus and in the same gesture annulled, and it is to this impossible and undecidable object that the origin of meaning and language are to be referred.

There is a curious and uncanny logic at work here, one which it would seem to be a major purpose of the Tractatus to make clear: the things, the simple objects which the text appears to offer as the ultimate and originary foundations of sense, are in effect produced retroactively by the very process of symbolisation itself, by the process of making sense. The simple objects emerge only as a consequence of their loss. What the Tractatus brings us to see is that any attempt to conceive of the objects as having substantial being, or to think of them as ontologically prior to the states of affairs into which they enter, is to succumb to an illusion: the objects are a mirage of metaphysics, retroactively invoked by the propositions of the text, propositions which are nonsensical, and which are to be recognised as nonsensical. The significance of this for an understanding of language based on naming, or ostensive definition, has been made clear by McGuinness, in a second essay on the matter. As he argues, ‘TLP does not rest understanding of propositions on a process of ostensive definition. It does not suppose that the elementary propositions in which use is made of certain names are connected with reality by the correlation of those names with objects independently identifiable. This is because the notion of independent identification of objects in the TLP sense is an incoherent one. Only in a proposition does a name have meaning, so that there cannot be a pre-propositional act of giving meaning to a name by, for example, pointing to an object’ [McGuinness, ‘Language and Reality in the Tractatus’, Teoria 2 (1985): 136]. One can get at this another way, by saying that whereas in the ordinary world one can point to an object and give it a name this cannot be done for the objects of the Tractatus. To name an object requires the existence of that object as a matter of fact, but the objects of the Tractatus exist independently of what is the case in the world. As McGuinness points out, it is a crucial insistence of the book that the ‘experience’ necessary to understand language (the experience that there is a world) is very different from the experience of what there is in the world. ‘The former is not an experience of facts and confrontation with a concrete object is an experience of fact’ [‘Language and Reality’, 136]. What Wittgenstein is saying is thus to be seen as nonsensical. No meaning has been ascribed here to ‘object’ or to ‘experience’: language is, so to speak, outside or beyond itself, and to that extent beyond sense also.

This has the further consequence that, as McGuinness argues, mentalist accounts of meaning simply dissolve. We do not think sense into propositions by mentally associating the words (and so the elementary names that would occur if the proposition were to be fully analysed) with objects. To argue in this way is simply to return to notions of ostensive definition, but performed this time privately or internally. Wittgenstein makes the point explicitly in 3.11: Thinking the sense of a proposition is identical with the method of projection: ‘the use of the proposition is what gives meaning to its names, not some additional act of mental dubbing or intending’ [‘Language and Reality’, 137]. This is the point that the so-called picture theory of meaning is meant to elucidate. The picture-theory and the account of language associated with it is less a theory than an account of mental phenomena: no further mental power, the power of thinking, is required. One cannot explain what pictures are by introducing human agency. ‘Rather, you explain human agency by the notion of picturing. It is not man that makes pictures, so to speak, but pictures that make a man’ [‘Language and Reality’, 137]. Someone who learns a language is confronted by a whole language in use, a language consisting of propositional facts or pictures. Each one of these possesses a complexity, which, so the learner comes to understand, can have only one meaning, can only indicate or affirm one state of affairs. The point at issue here is clarified, McGuinness believes, by reference to one of Wittgenstein’s most subtle and important distinctions, that between showing and saying. According to 4.022, a proposition shows its sense, shows how things stand if it is true, and it says that they do so stand. The thought here is that the complexity or organisation of the proposition, once fully understood, shows what state of affairs is involved, what state of affairs either exists or does not exist: at the same time, a further function of sense must be understood within the proposition. In other words, sense here is to be understood as something like direction (a proposition is like an arrow, not a point): we have to understand what way the proposition is to be taken, in what direction it is aimed. Is it to say that p or that not-p? It must be determined which is the p that it states, and which is the not-p. Wittgenstein argues that, if we think only in terms of complexity or structure, p and not-p are equivalent. It is possible for p and not-p to say the same thing, so that what they each show is the same thing. For example, suppose a situation in which we communicate with one another by means of pictures. In that case, if we wish to say that the book is on the table, we hold up a picture of this state of affairs. But how do we communicate that the book is not on the table? We can hold up the same picture and then, say, turn it back to front. The picture and the same picture turned back to front have opposite senses, opposite directions, but which sense is which is given by the use of the proposition. If one has understood a proposition one has already discriminated all the facts necessary to understand its negation. McGuinness concludes from this that reference is a function of fact-stating, and not vice-versa. Reference is given retroactively, in the very act of formulation. The proposition itself shows us what fact it refers to (that is, what fact it states or misstates). There is no separate act of correlation between the language and reality: there is only the act of acquiring the language, i.e. of using pictures as they are used in the language. That facts are taken in such and such a way is thus something manifest within language. ‘The use of language shows that something is taken as a true elementary proposition, in that the other things that are then unhesitatingly said reflect its being so taken’ [‘Language and Reality’, 137]. For one thing, inferences are based on it.

But if this is so, facts drop out of the account. There are instead verification procedures, which correspond to the analysis of a proposition into elementary propositions, for which no examples can be given. This is to assert both the principle of bivalence, namely, that a proposition is either true or false, and that no grounds can be given for the principle. One might say that the principle and its lack of foundation are what is shown in the logical form of the proposition, a form which is both interior to the proposition (inasmuch as analysis leads back from the given proposition to the elementary propositions contained with in it and of which it is a truth function), and exterior to it (inasmuch as the proposition is connected to propositions outside or beyond it by similar relations of inference.) Every proposition contains, and is contained by, the whole of logical space, which is given immediately, in our grasping of the proposition. There is therefore an excess of syntax over semantics, in that logical form is always already beyond the proposition: the senseless, because tautological, propositions of logic do not coincide with the positions of sense, propositions that are either true or false, nor can the propositions of sense be reduced to, or expressed in terms of, the logical system. This is evident from the use Wittgenstein makes of the Sheffer stroke, and of recursion, in what he calls an operation, in order to show the general form of the proposition. At the time of writing the Tractatus, it had been shown that all the logical constants (negation, disjunction, implication, and so on) could be replaced by a single constant, the so-called Sheffer stroke, whereby p|q, for example, is equivalent to ‘neither p nor q’. Using this notation, one can eliminate all the constants, used in Principia Mathematica, for example, and bring them under a single form. Wittgenstein describes this at 5.1311: ‘When we infer q from p v q and ~p, the relation between the propositional forms of “p v q” and “~p” is masked, in this case, by our mode of signifying. But if instead of “p v q” we write, for example, “p|q.|.p|q” and instead of “~p”, “p|p” (p|q = neither p nor q) then the inner connection becomes obvious’. Further clarification is given by H.O. Mounce:

‘p v q’ and ‘~(~p.~q)’ can now be written in the form ‘p|q.|.p|q’. This means: neither, neither p nor q, nor, neither p nor q. It has to be written in this somewhat artificial way to preserve the neither . . . nor form. But all that is in fact happening is that one is ruling out the possibility of neither p nor q, which can be seen on reflection to be equivalent to asserting ‘p or q’ or ‘It is not the case that not p and not q’.

Since the logical constants can all be defined in terms of one another, there is one fundamental operation that underlies them all, an operation of iterated negation. It is the fundamental operation by which all propositions are produced out of elementary propositions and Wittgenstein calls it the general form of the proposition. To see exactly what Wittgenstein has in mind, we need to see more clearly just what he means by an operation:

5.2 The structures of propositions stand in internal relations to one another.
5.21 In order to give prominence to those internal relations we can adopt the following mode of expression: we can represent a proposition as a result of an operation that produces it out of other propositions (which are the bases of the operation).
5.22 An operation is the expression of a relation between the structure of its result and its bases.
5.23 The operation is what has to be done to the one proposition in order to make the other out of it.
5.24
As Mounce points out, an operation is performed on base proposition to produce a different proposition as a result. But what Wittgenstein has in mind is a particular model of the way this done. At 5.2521 he writes: ‘If an operation is applied repeatedly to its own results, I speak of successive applications of it (‘O’O’O’a’ is the result of three successive applications of the operation ‘O’ζ’ to ‘a’)’. And at 5.2523 he says ‘The concept of successive applications of an operation is equivalent to the concept “and so on”’. To apply O to a one gets Oa; repeat the operation, applying O to Oa, and one gets OOa; and so on. In other words, an operation, as it concerns Wittgenstein here, is a procedure that takes its own results as a base. An example is doubling: 2 doubled is 4; take the result and double again [H.O. Mounce, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 50]. The fundamental operation by which all propositions are generated from elementary propositions is an operation of this type. At proposition 6 and onwards, the general form of the proposition is represented in a way such that every proposition is to be seen as the result of successive applications to elementary propositions of an operation of negation (N). Any proposition whatever will be the result of the iterated application of this procedure. The negation in question is the operation of joint negation (neither . . . nor) represented by the Sheffer stroke. The successive applications of this operation of joint negation to the elementary propositions will produce all other propositions [Mounce, pp. 52-53]. As Mounce makes clear, this, then, is how the complex propositions of ordinary discourse are produced, and he gives as an example the way ‘p v q’ is produced from p, q, two elementary propositions. If we apply the operation of joint negation to p, q, we get N(p,q) – i.e. neither p nor q. Apply the operation that, and we get N(N(p,q)) – i.e. neither, neither p nor q, nor, neither p nor q, which is equivalent to ‘p v q’. Wittgenstein goes on to show how this same operation of joint negation can account, not only for the propositional calculus, but also the predicate calculus, the logic of generalisation, thereby opposing the accounts given of these matters by Frege and Russell, by proposing a logical operation that does not rely for its articulation on the use of metalanguage.

This brings us to an issue crucial to Wittgenstein’s enterprise in the Tractatus, the nature of the text of the Tractatus itself. As we have seen, the operation must always be able to be applied to its own result. The iterability of this application to its own result is the principle of recursion, by which succession is presupposed. This is what operates the series, as we have seen, the ‘And so on’. To say, therefore, that one proposition is first or elementary (primordial) is to presuppose the temporal series of propositions of which this proposition presents itself as first. The implications of this are spelt out by Vincent Descombes, writing, not of Wittgenstein, but Derrida:

[I]t must be said that the first is not the first unless there is a second to follow. Consequently, the second is not that which merely arrives, like a latecomer, after the first, but that which permits the first to be the first. The first cannot be the first unaided, by its own properties alone: the second, with all the power of its delay, must come to the assistance of the first. It is through the second that the first is the first. The ‘second time’ thus has priority of a kind over the ‘first time’: it is present from the first time onwards as the prerequisite of the first’s priority without itself being a more primitive ‘first time’, of course; it follows that the ‘first time’ is in reality the ‘third time’. [Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 145]

Derrida’s ‘non-concept’ of différance, based on the iterability of the trait, has certain features in common with Wittgenstein’s account of the repeated operation of joint negation. One such point of comparison can be seen to emerge here: Descombes’ account of the ‘logic’ of originary delay, an idea of fundamental significance at least for Derrida’s earlier thought, also provides a way of drawing out the consequences of a tenet central to the Tractatus, that only in a proposition does a name have meaning. As the Tractatus presents logical form, the ineluctable temporality internal to that form and so to language means that no sense can be given to the idea of a primordial relation between language and reality, between names and simple objects, which language may be thought to originate from. For reasons such as those Descombes lays out, and those we have already seen McGuinness demonstrate in some detail, it is nonsensical to think to look outside language in order to give for language or for the truth and falsity of propositions any account (any theory) that depends on describable features of the world. The temporality of discourse, on Wittgenstein’s showing, means that the propositions formulating the general form of passage from one proposition to another are themselves subject to that same operation of passage, as is clear not only from the general form of the proposition but also from the following series: ‘the world is the totality of facts’ (1.1), ‘a picture is a fact’ (2.141), and ‘logical pictures can depict the world’ (2.19). To think of language as somehow able to reach outside itself and so to ground sense in anything other than the movement of its own operations is nonsensical (unsinnig). Not only this, but to pose the question of the logical form of the proposition is, at the same time, to pose the question of the status and meaning of the very text, the Tractatus, whose propositions we are in the process of trying to comprehend.

What Wittgenstein shows in the Tractatus is that sense does not need to be validated by logical theory. The intelligibility of the proposition is rather the primary datum on which the logical theory grows, by analysis. The network of necessary relationships between meaningful propositions is also the logical framework of the world. There are no intermediaries between the proposition and the represented state of affairs. As Alberto Emiliani has argued, in a commentary on McGuinness’s two articles, this is the crucial insight of what might be called the immediacy of semantic agreement. [See: Alberto Emiliani, ‘What Nonsense Might Be: The Metaphysical Eye Opens’, Philosophical Investigations 26:3 (July 2003): 205-229]. Language is fundamentally intentional: the proposition reaches right up to reality. In order to be able to represent a state of affairs a proposition must have something in common with it and that something is form—that is, the possibility that their elements combine in just that way. To make the point again, we don’t start in the Tractatus from features that symbols must have in order to combine with one another in meaningful propositions: we start from the propositions and proceed to the properties of the constituents. ‘An object can only be designated qua part of a state of affairs; a symbol only has meaning qua part of a proposition’, a point Emiliani makes in order to emphasise that the meanings a symbol can be assigned in such and such a combinatorial context are necessary and show a logical feature of the world [216]. If ‘a is red’ and ‘b is green’ are meaningful, then so is the combination ‘a is green’ meaningful. According to this view of the Tractatus, the articulation exhibited by a proposition is not reducibility to simpler and independent elements (the simple objects); it resides in the interchangeability without loss of meaning of its parts or constituents with the part of constituents of other propositions [216]. It is the network of these relations of interchangeability that is given by the general form of the proposition, the recursive operation of the iterated neither . . . nor. As Emiliani makes clear, similar remarks apply to the form of the world: objects, as presented by the Tractatus, are not determinate entities that, in addition to their peculiar or individual features, also possess combinatorial possibility (perhaps engendered by their individual features). ‘They are instead interchangeable parts of possibilities states of affairs, and so, their possibilities of occurring in states of affairs constitute them as objects’ [216-7]. The form of world of the world thus exhibits a mirror image of the form of the proposition, of the context principle mentioned earlier. A proposition is internally related to a (possible) state of affairs; it is this relation that makes it into a determinate proposition and thought. The radical nature of this thought is made explicit by Emiliani: ‘the possibility of a state of affairs is the possibility that the elements of a proposition meaningfully combine with one another. The form of language and the form of reality do not merely “match”, but they are one and the same. It is the form of reality that is present in language, by being mirrored in it (4.121). Logical form is shared by language and the world (it is what they have “in common”: cf. 4.12, 2.18)’ [220]. Emiliani concludes that, for the Tractatus, pictorial form just is the possibility that things are related to one another in the same way as the elements of the picture. A picture contains the possibility of the situation that it represents and so it contains the form of the very situation that is represented.

The possibility that a combines with b is not different from the fact that the proposition ‘ab’ is meaningful; the meaning of the proposition is not some other fact of a special kind. As Emiliani points out, the root of the issue is that the nexus between a and b cannot itself be a third constituent of the state of affairs: ‘the nexus, the combination, can only be presented by means of a nexus of symbols: this is the kernel of the insight that a proposition is a picture. Proposition and state of affairs share their connective structure, and this is why their relation is internal’ [221]. The nexus between a and b is shown by the proposition ‘ab’ having a sense, by the way the symbols hold together into a whole. There is no other ‘fact’ to be described. Emiliani again: ‘The possibility of the nexus of things is given in the meaningfulness of the nexus of symbols: there is not anything else which the nexus of things is in addition to that which is given in the meaningfulness of the nexus of symbols’ [221]. At this juncture it becomes possible to clarify the role of nonsense in the workings of the text of the Tractatus. So far as the text is concerned, there is no such thing as nonsensical propositions that can be used to aim at ineffable qualities of reality or language. There are no sentences that are nonsense on account of the peculiarly illegitimate kind of thing they try, but fail, to say. That is, there are no metaphysical truths that though they may not be stated may nonetheless be shown. There is no such thing as ‘expressive nonsense’. From the point of view of their construction, according to the Tractatus, all nonsensical propositions are equivalent. One or more expressions have not been assigned any meaning in a certain context (or any context). Emiliani gives as an example ‘ this notion is yellow’. In this case, ‘x is yellow’ only has a sense when a material object is substituted for x. Here, then, no meaning has been assigned to ‘notion’. Nonsense is nonsense; there is nothing it says. And yet, as Emiliani insists, this is not quite the end of the matter. It is true that ‘this notion is yellow’ does not communicate the true nature of colour in some hidden or mysterious way. However, we recognise it as nonsensical only insofar as we have a commanding view of the way the words are actually used. If we don’t have such a view, it may be that the nonsense ‘proposition’ will lead us to see things aright, and so in its effects be significant. To recognise nonsense requires more than the withdrawal of the incriminated sentences. ‘Whether a nonsensical proposition is plain, trivial nonsense or significant nonsense depends on us, on what we see clearly and what we do not. What is qualified as significant or trivial is not so much the nonsensical proposition itself – this distinction is not based upon any properties that are intrinsic to it. Such a qualification instead applies to our appraisal of it’ [224-225].

The propositions of the Tractatus are more complex than the example just considered, and yet there are some features that they have in common. One can see what is involved by returning to the basic insight of the immediacy of semantic agreement. Emiliani formulates the issue as follows: ‘the meaningful proposition is internally related to a state of affairs: it directly agrees with it, as a mask fits a face and does not fit another. The fitting is a matter of form – in order to be able to fit a determinate state of affairs, the proposition must have a form in common with it’ [225]. However, it must be noted that this form is not a physical form. It has to do with the way constituents of propositions link with each other in a certain structure (like the links of chain) and with the meaningful recombination and interchange between such constituents. But at this point the notion of form becomes questionable. No property of a material object is being referred to. The use of ‘form’ is not even metaphorical, since metaphors can be paraphrased. The same consideration applies to other notions in the Tractatus: ‘nexus, ‘links in the chain’, object’, and so on. One might call this use of words false metaphor: words are being used in contexts where they have been given no meaning. One might also say, in the idiom of Philosophical Investigations II, xi, that ‘form’ and words like it are being used in a secondary sense. To say, for example, that the vowel ‘e’ is yellow, or that the world is unreal, is to use ‘yellow’ and ‘unreal’ in secondary senses. The use of words in this way is closely allied to seeing aspects, as when one says that one sees the cruelty in a person’s smile, or a triangle as a wedge or an arrow. Transferred into the new context, where no meaning has been assigned to them, they are used as expressions of how things strike us, of how they appear to us. Something of this kind is at work here, in the way the text of the Tractatus leads us on: as we move from one formulation to another, it eventually becomes clear that any formulation is misleading, since they all presuppose that there is some thing we are talking about. Both the propositions of the Tractatus and the formulations of commentaries on it use constituents to refer to form, whereas the basic point is that form is not a constituent at all, but a nexus, a way of connection into a meaningful whole. To treat the nexus as a constituent of a state of affairs is to misrecognise the fact that it is a connection between elements: it is not an element, or what Emiliani calls ‘a mythological object’. And yet this very use of the word ‘connection’ is also misplaced: ‘if you have understood me, you recognise my use of “connection”, “form”, “internal relation between proposition and state of affairs”, “possibility of combination” etc. as nonsensical’ [226]. To recognise the nonsensical use of words such as ‘form’ in this context, and to be shown, to see, the ineffable nature of logical form, of the logical connection into a whole, are not, in the end, separate acts. It is one of the ways a proposition may illuminate by being recognised as nonsensical. Part of what is being shown here derives from what was referred to above as the temporality of discourse, whereby the propositions formulating the general form of passage from one proposition to another are themselves subject to that same operation of passage. Logical form structures the very propositions which are trying to give its nature. When employed in this way, words like ‘form’ and ‘connection’ are nonsensical, though when used within a proposition or set of propositions to describe some feature of the world, they are fully intelligible. This means that, for Emiliani, there are no dubious assumptions being made about how nonsense may communicate ineffable truth: nonsense communicates nothing. Nonetheless, the showing is in fact accomplished, though not by describing something that is not describable but by recognising a proposition as genuinely nonsensical. As Emiliani has it, ‘the mythological object disappears when form shows itself – form shows itself when the mythological object disappears’ [226].

What we can say, then, is that the Tractatus itself, as a whole, offers itself to be recognised as an expression of the urge to metaphysics. In that recognition the metaphysical idea, the idea that a complete analysis of logical form is possible, and that logical form so understood determines the limits of the application of signs, fades away. And as it fades away, so too does the similarly metaphysical requirement that sense be determinate. Statements about simple objects are nonsensical in exactly the way that statements about logical form are nonsensical. In effect, the work of the Tractatus is to bring about a change of aspect, so that how we see the text itself, and how we seek to understand the way language operates, undergo alteration. At 5.5423, Wittgenstein presents a clear instance of aspect change in relation to the complex form of a proposition: ‘To perceive a complex means to perceive that its constituents are related to one another in such and such a way’. He then draws a comparison between the complex form of a proposition and the form of a schematic cube: when one looks at such a figure, the front face seems to change places with the back face, and front and back flip flop back and forth, each replacing the other. This shifting of aspect, like that of the famous duck-rabbit of Philosophical Investigations, points to what occurs in the structure of the text of the Tractatus itself as we, its readers, engage with it. Under one aspect, the text makes sense, so that it is perfectly intelligible to argue that in the body of the Tractatus Wittgenstein elaborates a critique of, amongst other things, Russell’s theory of types and logical objects. On the other hand, this critique, deriving from and so dependent on the notion that logical form is what determines the limit of the application of signs, is nonsensical. The text is thus many-layered, and operates in different modes at different levels, and part of what it requires of its readers is that they be alert to the shifts of level possible at any point. This, it should be said, avoids the obvious absurdity that every line of the Tractatus is simply nonsense. It is clear that the account of the truth tables, of succession and recursion, as well as of the Sheffer stroke, is wholly intelligible. However, these reflections do not justify the belief that it makes to imagine there could be such a thing as a perspective from which one can survey how language represents the world: whether one takes language ‘internally’, with respect to the form of the proposition, or ‘externally’, with respect to language ‘as a whole’, the possibility of either an ‘internal’ or ‘external’ point of view on how language represents states of affairs is unintelligible.

In 6.54, when Wittgenstein writes: ‘My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as [nonsense]’, it would seem that he is insisting that ‘thinking cannot be completely reduced to and be fully expressed by anything we are likely to be content to call a “logical system”. What is as a consequence nonsense is the assumption of logical analysis that all thinking, in order to be thought, must be captured by a propositional sign that on examination is found to be either sensical, senseless or nonsense’. [Rupert Read and Rob Deans, ‘“Nothing is Shown”: A “Resolute” Response to Mounce, Emiliani, Koethe and Vilhauer’, Philosophical Investigations 62:3 (July 2003): 254.] That is, the very distinction, between propositions that make sense, the senseless propositions of logic (the tautologies), and the nonsense propositions of the Tractatus, is itself a nonsensical distinction, based as it is on the desire to express thought in terms of the structures of a logical system (the general form of the proposition). What logical form shows is the impossibility of making fully explicit the nature of sense, of meaning. Always beyond itself, and always lacking the objects on which the determinacy of sense depends, the syntactical (the senseless) and the semantic (the sensical) cannot be brought into a one-to-one relation. The reader begins with the idea that a limit has to be established to thinking and to the expression of thought, and a distinction set up between sense and nonsense. It is here that the analysis of simple objects and logical form is addressed, but ‘[w]hat the reader is left with is the realisation that there is thinking going on as the propositions of the Tractatus are engaged with, but without thought in anything like the Fregean-Russellian sense. Logical analysis can neither fully capture nor fully specify just what it is to think. Thought and language cannot be “pinned-down” and the attempt to give a complete analysis breaks down; but not because it is impossible, for this suggests there is something here that cannot be done, but because the very idea of giving a complete analysis is unintelligible’ [Read and Deans: 258]. No sense can be given to the idea of a vantage-point from which we can survey language as a whole, or of getting beyond it and seeing it as it were laid out before us, open to inspection. This does not mean that there is no role for logical analysis, in showing how language is actually used, in inference or other forms of argument. It does mean that logical analysis cannot justify or found meaning: logic is derived from our use of words to say what we mean, and not the other way round. In 6.1203, Wittgenstein gives a procedure for producing a picture, a physical depiction or image, of a tautology (~(p.~p)). Given that a proposition with sense is a picture of a possible state of affairs, a tautology is a picture of nothing. A tautology has no truth conditions, since it is unconditionally true, and a contradiction is true under no conditions (4.461). Since all the propositions of logic are tautologies (6.126, 6.22), logic says nothing: it lacks sense. The tautology, then, is both a part of logic (e.g. p implies p) and logic as such. When Wittgenstein presents an image of a tautology, what he is giving is a representation of a representation of nothing. To make an image or picture of a certain tautology may, on the one hand, be merely a novel and clearer way of laying out the truth table for that tautology. But if, on the other hand, it is taken as an image of tautology as such, that is, of logic as such, of the sinnlos in itself, the image is nonsense. Removed from any context of use, it stands on its own, above logic and above sense. We are, so to speak, taken beyond the limits of the text into an image of language qua language, into a material depiction that in depicting the absence of depiction asserts its own material presence beyond the opposition between meaning and non-meaning. In representing its own failure to represent, the text produces a nonsensical image, the seeing of which is seeing the distinction between sense, the senseless and the nonsensical as itself nonsensical. The image of the doubling of the doubled brackets in 6.1203, the typographical reduplication within the text, effects a kind of folding back of the Tractatus on itself, in which the physical inscription of the writing interrupts and inhibits the distinction between meaning and non-meaning. When Wittgenstein insists (in 6.54) that whoever understands him will eventually recognise his propositions as nonsensical, the point is that the aspect of the text that will eventually force itself onto the reader will be that aspect which has already forced itself onto Wittgenstein himself, the text’s author. It is not man makes images, but rather images that make a man, and so with the text as a whole: it is the Tractatus that creates both its author and its reader. Wittgenstein and his reader stand on the hither side of the propositions that constitute it. The image the propositions create is that of a language spoken by no one.

In using words here like ‘text’ and ‘writing’ I have wished to evoke something of the idiom of Blanchot and Derrida. My purpose is not to assimilate ‘continental’ thought to that of Wittgenstein, or vice versa, but to suggest points of comparison. I have argued that, whereas Blanchot in particular bases his thought on a concept of naming that is untenable, in order to reach the impossible conditions that are the possibility of writing as such, Wittgenstein begins from the meaningful proposition. The Tractatus is thus not an attempt to establish how meaning is possible. Whereas Blanchot, and others in the tradition to which he belongs, use language in way that implies that there is a sense in talk about the impossibility of possibility, Wittgenstein’s approach would characterise such talk as nonsense. No meaning has been given to the words like ‘impossibility’ in the context in which Blanchot seeks to use them. Nonetheless, I want now to propose that, despite the unsatisfactory foundations of Blanchot’s thought, its final direction, towards an understanding of the language of literature, is pertinent to a reading of the Tractatus. When Wittgenstein writes, in the Tractatus (6.4311), that death is not an event in life, since we do not live to experience death, one cannot but be put in mind of Blanchot’s reflections on the impossibility of dying, a comparison that may be further reinforced by reference to Wittgenstein’s remark (also in 6.4311) that our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits. We are being taken by remarks of this order beyond the expressible, towards what Wittgenstein calls the mystical: ‘There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical’ (6.522). So far as the Tractatus is concerned, the notion of the mystical has its source in the discussion we have already looked at, that concerning simple objects: ‘Objects can only be named. Signs are their representatives. I can only speak about them: I cannot put them into words. Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are’ (3.221). Mysticism is motivated, in part, by the fact that if we are to understand anything we have to be related to objects, things. But, as Gordon Bearn indicates [Waking to Wonder, p. 60], objects are the unchanging structures of logical space: this means that, since whatever we experience could be otherwise (5.634), there can be no experience of objects, a conclusion reached also by McGuinness, from the different starting point of the meaningful proposition. How then are we to understand the givenness of objects, the givenness of the world? It is an experience not of HOW the world is but THAT it is, at all (6.44).

The ‘experience’ that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the case, but that something is: that, however, is not an experience.
Logic is prior to every experience—that something is so.
It is prior to the question ‘How?’, not prior to the question ‘What?’. (5.552)

Here again the language can be seen in the process of shifting its status, as the word ‘experience’ undergoes a self-cancelling alteration, from a primary to a secondary sense. Logic is before the how, not before the what. But how the world is, is what is the case. So the experience we need, as Bearn puts it, ‘if we are to understand logic is not an experience of what is the case, of what has happened in the world’ [p. 60].

To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole—a limited whole.
Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that that is mystical. (6.45)

Mystical wonder is not wonder at the way things are, but wonder at the bare existence of things, that they are—the what not the how. This returns us to the point I have emphasised before: when we understand logic we understand that it is senseless. Other than world there is nothing, and it is nothing that logic treats of. Bearn has said that, for Wittgenstein, understanding something is to understand that something against the background of logic, against the background of nothing. Bearn here compares Wittgenstein with Heidegger:

In July 1929, Heidegger had tried to understand the deepest form of anxiety in terms of his belief that ‘human existence can relate to things only if it holds itself out into the nothing’. In December of that year Wittgenstein said, ‘To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being and anxiety’. [Bearn, p. 61]

A comparison with Levinas and the notion of the il y a is also pertinent. This line of argument also brings something to the fore, the structure of the Tractatus itself. It exhibits exactly the torsion, the twisting turn, which is not exactly a circle but more like a Moebius strip, whereby what is anterior reappears in what succeeds. We move from an ‘experience’ of what is prior to the world, an experience that is not an experience, to an experience that is also not an experience, the experience of the ‘there is’ of things. Torn from our everyday existence, from the world of how things are, it is as though existence emerged from behind the world. I am no longer related to this or that possibility, but to existence itself, an experience that (according to the Tractatus, as well as to Levinas and Blanchot) is internally related to the experience of nothing. In coming face to face with the bare existence of things, that they exist at all, we come face to face with ‘no-thing’ at all: ‘There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical’ (6.522).

The encounter with the il y a is an encounter with horror, as when for the insomniac things take on the terrible and dreadful aspect of the ‘other night’. To experience the ‘there is’ is to experience the void or absence in which the things of the everyday world, the world of ‘how’ things are, dissolve and disappear. In a classic essay first published in 1991, Cora Diamond has brought out something similar in the way Wittgenstein’s understanding of the mystical (and of nonsense) relates to his discussion of ethics and treatment of the question of evil. A crucial matter for her is the manner of reading the Tractatus requires of us: ‘if I understand Wittgenstein in the way that he asks to be understood, then I read the sentences in question twice: first, entering (wittingly or not) into the nonsense that they are about ethics; secondly, entering into the nonsense of the book as argument to a conclusion that those remarks are not “about ethics”, for nothing is a “remark about ethics”. There are no “ethical propositions”, and sentences in question have no more to with “ethics” than “piggly wiggly tiggle”. If I understand Wittgenstein, I enter the nonsense of reading the book as ethics and of reading the book in such a way that it leads me to self-consciousness about the activity of such reading’ [Cora Diamond, ‘Ethics, Imagination and the Tractatus’, in Alice Crary and Rupert Read, eds., The New Wittgenstein (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 164]. The Tractatus requires a reading that at first takes us in, requiring us to take its propositions as making sense, as being about logic and so on, despite not being so. This is to take what Diamond calls the ‘austere view’ of nonsense, the view that all nonsense is just nonsense, that there is no such thing as articulating the meaning of a particular bit of nonsense, while at the same time acknowledging that there is such a thing as an imaginative activity of understanding someone who utters nonsense, of ‘letting oneself be taken in by the appearance of sense that some nonsense presents to us’ [Diamond, p. 165]. When I ascribe a belief or thought to someone, I must use an intelligible sentence of a language I understand. If I am to understand someone who utters nonsense, I have to participate imaginatively in what is said and see nonsense as sense. I become, as it were, the person who thinks he thinks it: ‘I treat that person’s nonsense in imagination as if I took it to be an intelligible sentence of a language I understand, something I find in myself the possibility of meaning’ [p. 165]. In other words, I am a participant in a change of aspect. Diamond’s point is similar to one I made above: when Wittgenstein says that whoever understands him will come to recognise his propositions as nonsensical, the point is that the aspect of the text that will eventually force itself onto the reader will be that aspect which has already forced itself onto Wittgenstein himself. Sense is seen as nonsense, nonsense as sense. This to see the Tractatus as uncanny.

There is a close connection in Wittgenstein’s thought, both in the earlier work and later, between logic and ethics. As we have seen above, logic is not for Wittgenstein a particular subject, with its own special truths, requiring some kind of scientific treatment, but something internal to all thought. Logic permeates our whole use of intelligible propositions in the course of our lives with language. Likewise, an ethical spirit, an attitude to the world and life, penetrates a whole way of living, and is manifest in how we talk and think. It is not the abstraction of a moral code, or a distinct set of rules. Ethics is a discourse turned towards everything there is or can be, the world as a whole. There is an important sense in which the ethical spirit for Wittgenstein involves an attitude towards the world ‘in terms of an acceptance of the independence of the world from one’s own will’ [Diamond, p. 154]. The ethical spirit, for him, Diamond believes, ‘is tied to living in acceptance of the fact that what happens, happens, that one’s willing this rather than that is merely another thing that happens and that one is in a sense “powerless” [p. 154]. It is in this connection that Wittgenstein speaks of two different attitudes to the world: the world of the happy man and the world of the unhappy man, though it is by no means clear how far these two attitudes can be kept separate. [Cf. Brian McGuinness, ‘The Mysticism of the Tractatus’, Philosophical Review 75 (1966): 316-317.] The happy man achieves a kind of piety in life, looking at the happenings of the world with clear eyes, whatever those happenings may be. Wittgenstein contrasts this with the state of mind of the suicide, for whom going on with life is made conditional on things being this way and not that. It is as though I were to reject the powerlessness fundamental to life, by willing to leave life if things do not go the way I want them. Diamond finds an example of such a refusal of powerlessness in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story, 'The Birthmark', the main character of which, Aylmer, is ‘unhappy’ in Wittgenstein’s sense; the world does not meet the conditions he lays down. This spirit is evident in his response to the birthmark on his beautiful wife, and is further seen in his destructiveness of her life, goodness and beauty. There is, then, an analogy between the idea of understanding someone who utters nonsense and someone, whether oneself or someone else, to whom one ascribes an evil will, in the sense that one would be willing to ascribe such a will to a figure like Aylmer. A further example occurs in Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer’s account of the Beltane Fire Festival in eighteenth century Scotland. Wittgenstein says he has a sense of something terrible and sinister about the ritual games enacted in the festival, but what the source of that sense of the terrible is remains unspecified. On the surface there is nothing terrible, and even if one knows that there is a distant connection with human sacrifice this still does not account for the sense of the terrible that lies at the heart of the practices here, something terrible in the human heart itself. There is thus a tie here between something evil in a person’s will or in what people do, and an understanding of the person in which one sees him or her as willing something, but one specifies what is willed in words that have no content. In ascribing an evil will to someone, as with understanding someone who is the grip of an illusion—believing that what one utters is sense when it is nonsense—one must engage in a similar act of imaginative participation, giving ‘content’ where there is no content to give. Neither logical illusion nor the case of evil will is understandable. When one engages with what a person says who is in the grip of logical illusion (such as the illusion of the general form of the proposition) one is not inside that person’s thought as one is when he makes sense, because there is no thought to understand, there is no ‘inside’.

You are not inside, because there is as it were no inside; you cannot remain outside, because outside all you can see is someone inclined to put together words, to come out with them in certain circumstances, to associate them with images, feelings and so on; from the outside, there is nothing to be seen that could be called his being in the grip of an illusion that so-and-so, as opposed to his being inclined to come out with certain word-constructions. There is, as I said, no inside. But what it is to understand a person who utters nonsense is to go as far as one can with the idea that there is. [Diamond, art. cit., p. 157]

Diamond finds what she has in mind well put by Wilhelm Grimm, when he speaks of the evil in the tales he and his brother edited, not as something very bad which one could get accustomed to, but as something terrible, black and wholly alien that cannot even be approached. In Rumpelstiltskin, the miller who brags about his daughter and endangers her, and the avaricious king who sets the girl an impossible task, and threatens to kill her if she does not accomplish it, are far from being decent folk. But what is bad about these two is not of the order of the evil of which Grimm speaks, and to which what is dark and sinister in the human heart is able to respond, evil as terrible and unapproachable as that of Rumpelstiltskin. Unapproachable evil would once have been called supernatural or demonic, beyond the world, transcending it and irreducible to the deliverances of psychology or natural law. Rumpelstiltskin’s strength derives from his name being unknown to humans, and just as his name is unknown so his mode of being is ungraspable, and because of this the very eagerness of his demand for the girl’s first child brings it with a sense of horror inseparable from what he embodies of the dark and unappeased, a horror confirmed and augmented by the appalling death he undergoes at the tale’s end. The Tractatus succeeds, just as surely as the tales of the Brothers Grimm, in placing us outside the world, beyond the expressible, beyond the true and the false, an achievement whose power and profundity are for Wittgenstein inseparable from ‘ethics’.

The horror arising from this kind of exile is everywhere to be found in cinema. George Bailey’s expulsion from the world in It’s a Wonderful Life is an example whose effect is particularly shocking, given the context established by the film’s ease and comic precision of the importance of the quotidian to the progress and meaning of George’s life. The sudden access of darkness evoked at the moment of his mother’s repudiation of any knowledge of him, a repudiation by which he becomes as though he were no one, devoid of both identity and place, ruptures the film’s surface, and suspends us, for a moment, before the world even as it renders its reality unapproachable. While George Bailey is gathered back into the world, the protagonist of Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, is a man whose evil excludes him from any relation to others except that of torture and sadism. Free of compassion or fellow feeling, driven by ambition and will to power, he seeks to mould the world to his own liking, by employing the theology of witchcraft and witch-hunting to place himself outside the world and subjugate it to his sovereignty. The ‘logic’ of ‘floating’, whereby witches are tested for guilt or innocence—if they drown they are innocent, if they float they are guilty—serves this purpose admirably. Whatever the result, death is the automatic consequence, and Hopkins’s judgement cannot be gainsaid. Hopkins’s sovereignty, dependent on a form of logical necessity over which he can have no control, is thus internally related to impotence, a fact made abundantly clear by the atrocious death he suffers, as the lover of the girl he has driven mad by torture quarters him and the witchfinder’s own excess devours both him and the man who dismembers him. In Day of Wrath Merete, the elderly mother of Absalon, an elderly priest, and the grandmother of Martin, is consumed with hatred for Anne, Absalon’s young wife, who is to fall in love with Martin, her stepson. The oppression and power of the church, represented by the keys that Merete carries with her wherever she goes, are finally turned against the girl, after Absalon’s death, when in a paroxysm of rage and loathing the old woman accuses her of witchcraft. It is easy to see in Anne a figure of life, of the natural expression of love and freedom, expelled from a world whose power and institutional terror base their legitimacy on the burning of witches. The film itself, however, does not permit this simple opposition: Merete is too powerful and impressive a figure to be reduced to what on that reading would be merely a representative role. Her hatred takes on a physical presence that goes beyond the demands of either narrative or psychology, and exceeds even the theological justifications that might be found for it. She is more than the world of the church and more than the world of love. She appears to serve a principle of expenditure and destruction that has no exact correlative in the film, and in relation to her Anne, who we might be initially inclined to think of as unambiguously sympathetic, takes on a demonic aspect. Dreyer films Anne, as she talks at night to Martin of her love, in a contrasting light that suggests the corruption and evil present in what she is doing, exactly as though we were being brought to see the relation between Anne and Martin as Merete would see it. Dreyer reveals here the cinema’s strange and unsettling relation to the power of the image, as Day of Wrath separates off from meaning only to re-inscribe itself in the anonymity of the text and choral rendition of the Dies Irae. The final image of the film is a cross not photographed but etched in white on a black ground, a cross with a sloping top to it reminiscent of the cross employed in the burning, under Absalon’s jurisdiction, of Marte, an old woman convicted of witchcraft, about halfway through the film. The cross, replete with the symbolism of Christianity, is at the same time an image of an image, an image of nothing.

The manifestation of which the Tractatus speaks, of what lies outside idealisation and the continued possibility of meaning, the manifestation of the ‘there is’, that things are, not how they are, is an irruption of otherness more radical than any that could be reached within language: ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ (7). Silence in this context is not only the negation of language seen as a totality from a place beyond language; it is also an interval or interruption that ruptures language and disturbs and displaces the self. Whatever one thinks such a feeling to be, it is, for Blanchot at least, even in its excess and affliction, affirmative. As the narrator of Madness of the Day puts it: ‘I saw that even on the worst days, when I thought I was utterly and completely miserable, I was nevertheless, and nearly all the time, extremely happy’ [Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Station Hill Press, 1981), p. 7]. The narrator adds that the discovery was not a pleasant one. The world of the ‘happy’ man and that of the ‘unhappy’ cannot be kept separate one from the other. The event to which the Tractatus, like the work of Blanchot, seeks to open us is an event of no fixity, no determination. Even though we never stop making sense, of dwelling in a world made up of everything that is the case and represented by propositions that are true or false, we are always already impotent before the fascination of what lies beyond world and sense. ‘It makes what is ungraspable inescapable; it never lets me cease reaching what I cannot attain’ [The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 31]. The fascination is that inherent in the condition of writing, a condition the Tractatus attains to and is recognised as having when we recognise the text as nonsense. In the act of such recognition we are precipitated into logical impossibility: ‘Just as the only necessity that exists is logical necessity, so too the only impossibility that exists is logical impossibility’ (6.375). We find ourselves in that place whose existence is ruled out by the logical structure of language, just as the simultaneous presence of two colours at the same place in the visual field is logically impossible, ruled out by the logical structure of colour (6.3751). For Blanchot, to enter this nowhere, which he calls the ‘essence of solitude’, is to surrender to the fascination of time’s absence. Time’s absence is not purely negative: it is ‘a time without negation, without decision, when here is nowhere as well, and each thing sinks into its image while the “I” that we are recognizes itself by sinking into the neutrality of a featureless third person’ [The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 30]. The time of time’s absence has no present, no presence. Having no present, it has neither past nor future. What has no present has never happened, not even for a first time, and yet it starts again, over and over, forever re-begun, without beginning, without end. Wittgenstein writes: ‘If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present’ (6.4311). An eternity lived in the present is a time that is neither eternity nor the present—a time that is not time, an impossible time, excluded by the logical structure of time and so existing only in impossibility. This is the time internal to art, where images reveal that they do not reveal, and we, seeing them, are driven by the passive compulsion that fascination is into intensified states of excitation, as when in the cinema we are seduced ‘by masochistically exacerbating erotic tension, in an orgy of unproductive expenditure’. [Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 57.] For this reason, horror films are revelatory of the nature of cinema in itself and of what constitutes our relations to it, especially insofar as we are complicit with the victimisation and driven quality of the monsters who inhabit them. Not driven by power but compelled by his vulnerability, Michael Myers is both child and rapacious killer, forced at the end into the position of accepting his own death at the hands of Dr Loomis, a death that can never come. The masochism, the impotence, evidenced in the spectacle of his ‘killing’ creates a space of excess, which is given in the film in repeated shots of the places where Michael has been but is no longer present, places which he yet inhabits (there where the film’s theme music, associated with his presence, puts him, there where he is not). Throughout Carpenter’s film, Michael has striven to repeat the move that constitutes his situation in the opening sequence, from being behind the image, behind the mask, to being seen full face, a move from first to third person. No sooner does he close in on the centre of the image, in what is the penultimate sequence, than Loomis ‘kills’ him, by expelling him from the screen. Michael becomes subsumed into an image, but an image of nothing and nowhere. He is no one.

THE BEYOND OF LANGUAGE

‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists’ (Tractatus, 6.44). Some of what Wittgenstein says about the mystical is very like what he says about the logical: to understand logic we need a certain ‘experience’ not of how things stand in the world, how things are, but of the existence of something:

The ‘experience’ that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is that state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not an experience.

Logic is prior to every experience—that something is so.
It is prior to the question ‘How?’, not prior to the question ‘What?’ (5.552)

It was central to Wittgenstein’s thought, both in the Tractatus and later, that logic exists only in its application. This is the point of the question raised in the next section, 5.5521: ‘if there would be a logic if there were no world, how then could there be a logic given that that there is a world?’. If there were such a thing as logic independent of its application (of the world) there would be no logic, since a further logic would be required to ensure the correct application of the first logic. Logic is prior to the world (how things are), to all that is the case. If what is the case might not have been, then what is logically prior to the world is logic itself: logic is concerned with possibilities, with what might have been or might not have been. The study of logic is the study of what is prior to fact, though logic itself is not composed of facts that are beyond or prior to the world. Logical form is the logical scaffolding, the logical background, of the world, concerned with the possibilities of combination of simple objects in what the Tractatus calls ‘states of affairs’. If whether one thing could combine with another in a state of affairs were a fact, this fact would in turn require the existence of a further state of affairs, a condition leading to an interminable regress. This is the point of 5.552 and 5.5521, with their insistence that logic is before the How, not before the What. How the world is is what is the case, so that what we need to experience, if we are to understand logic, is not what is the case, is not a situation in the world:

To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole—a limited whole.
Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical. (6.45)

The usual way of looking at things is to see objects from amongst them, but the mystical view, the view sub specie aeterni, is to see them from outside. The mystical wonder at the bare existence of things, at their being there, is the experience we need in order to understand logic.

What we understand when we understand logic is that it is senseless (sinnlos). The propositions of logic do not treat of what is the case, but of what might have been or might not have been the case; they represent in this way the scaffolding of the world. Hence logic is not a field in which we express what we want to say with the help of signs, but rather one in which signs that are absolutely necessary speak for themselves (6.124). Being tautologies, they have no subject matter, and so what they treat of is the nothing, which is all that lies outside the world, the world being what is the case. The senseless is thus the pre-condition of making sense at all, and what we know and understand of the world can therefore only be known and understood against the background of logic, of nothing. The simple objects, which were intended to ground sense in the names that meant those objects, are beyond being and non-being, rather as Plato describes the Good in the Timaeus. We cannot say what objects are because objects, understood in this way, are what allow us to say anything. Nothing makes sense unless in the last analysis—the last analysis as proposed by the Tractatus—it involves the names of objects; we cannot, therefore, say that this and this simple object are in the world, but not that and that. We cannot say what is not a possible state of affairs, what is not in logical space. The general form of the proposition, as given by the successive application of joint negation to elementary propositions, can give us all possible forms of elementary propositions and molecular propositions; it will not tell us what application these forms will have nor which will be the elementary propositions. This follows from the fact that we cannot experience what elementary propositions there are, since every experience must be the experience that some possibility is realised. This is the same point that emerged in the previous chapter; it is not possible to establish the foundations of sense. The attempt to do so must end in nonsense (Unsinn). This is why Wittgenstein refused to give a justification for logic in terms of the derivation of theorems from a basis of fundamental axioms; logical systems are not to be understood in these terms. The question of how logical propositions can be justified, of why we must obey them, cannot be answered; the question itself must be put to rest. Logical form is shown in the fact that some combinations of signs make sense, and others do not. In relation to this last point, ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ (7) would thus appear to be not only the last but also the fundamental proposition of the Tractatus.

The propositions of the Tractatus as a whole are at once elucidations and nonsense. The elucidations centre on the ‘say-show’ distinction, whereby the nature of logical form and its role in how we use propositions to say what we do is made clear. One result of this is that how sense is determined cannot in the end be said, and no complete analysis of propositions in terms of logical form can given. Just as the attempt to characterise the internal structures of language turns out to be unintelligible, that is, nonsensical, so the attempt to move beyond language, to the foundations of sense, the simple objects, also ends in nonsense. To understand the elucidations is to understand them as nonsense, while to understand that the text is nonsense is to understand the elucidations. The one is the other of the other. That is, the distinction between saying and showing, on which the whole analysis depends, means that the ineffability of nonsense and the effability of sense are both called into question. As Read and Deans have it, ‘What the reader is left with is the realisation that there is thinking going on as the propositions of the Tractatus are engaged with, but without thought in anything like the Fregean-Russellian sense. Logical analysis can neither fully capture nor fully specify just what it is to think. Thought and language cannot be “pinned down” and the attempt to give a complete analysis breaks down; but not because it is impossible, for this suggests that there is something here that cannot be done, but because the very notion of giving a complete analysis is unintelligible. There is nothing that amounts to anything in the notion of a vantage-point wherefrom we can survey thinking, where we can get beyond it and see it laid out neatly before us’ [‘“Nothing is Shown”’, Philosophical Investigations 26:3 (July 2003), 258].
Thinking is always ahead of us, always on the move, thwarting and escaping any attempt to circumscribe its boundaries. Any attempt to do so ends in nonsense. There is an interminable antagonism between the dimensions of the constative and the performative, inasmuch as what can be said is always exceeded by the saying of what is said, an excess shown in the iterated negations of logical form, which undo the primacy of propositional content by affirming and negating its terms in succession. The writing of the Tractatus is thus to be seen as a ceaselessly self-differing relation between what is said and what is shown. The writing, the event of the text, one might say, stands on neither side of this relation, and any attempt to characterise logic in terms of, say, the theory of types must sooner or later come to be recognised as unintelligible. Given that this so, the comment of Read and Deans, to the effect that there is thinking going on in the propositions of the Tractatus, though without thought in the Frege-Russellian sense, touches on something fundamental to Wittgenstein’s enterprise here, namely, the manner in which it compels a reversal of intentionality. The intention in question is that of the author, such that what one sees in the Tractatus is a process whereby the work changes from being a correlate of the author’s own intentional act to being instead the site of its own emerging exigencies. The shift in aspect is that indicated in 6.54: ‘My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them’. Logical form, as Wittgenstein presents it, does not, as it does in Russell, attempt to stand outside itself, and report on itself. It is not the account of an event; it is that event itself, at once imminent and the site where it will occur. It produces itself as its own object and is the process of that production. And yet even that seems not quite right: logical form is rather an endless dependence of the one on the other, a relation or process that can never be finished, that can never come to a point of final analysis. What is impossible here is not some task that might, were things different, be done, but the logically impossible. The idea of a final analysis is unintelligible. To see this is to see why it is that the Tractatus as a whole is unintelligible, and why, as the last proposition (7) has it: ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’. One implication of this must be that, while we cannot speak, the text may nonetheless affirm itself. The work may effect its being, not as the creation of an author, but through the writer: insofar as the Tracatus effects just this mode of coming to be its effecting it is the overcoming of the search for foundations that is also the overcoming of philosophy itself. The text exists free of author and of things, cancelling them both in the exigency of its coming-to-be. To see the Tractatus under this aspect is also to see, with James Guetti, that ‘an abstract scrutiny of non-functioning grammatical forms – of concepts disengaged from actual use – inevitably results metaphysical attitudes and assertions’ [James Guetti, ‘Idling Rules’, Philosophical Investigations 16:3 (July 1993),].

It is now possible to develop the argument further in relation to Wittgenstein’s later work, in order to clarify the nature of aspect seeing and to understand its pertinence to a grasp of Blanchot’s work. The crucial distinction here is that made in Philosophical Investigations between working concepts and idling ones, between language in use and language abstracted from its applications. So far as the early Wittgenstein is concerned, if we are to speak of ‘showing’, we must not allow ourselves the confusion of thinking that what can be shown can also be said (whether by indirection, gestures or raising language to a ‘higher level’). There is no such thing as an outside to the ‘limits’ of language from which language can be surveyed as a whole. In the ordinary use of language we hear what others say and find a sense in it. It is very rarely that we find what they say nonsensical, and even then not because what is said breaks grammatical rules. On this, the Tractatus is clear: ‘all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in prefect logical order’ (5.5563). The same point holds for Wittgenstein’s later thought as well: so far as our customary practices with language are concerned, when words are being used to say something, they are perfectly transparent and nothing at all is meant by them except in the actual situation of their employment in a sentence. Use and context are paramount. In Part I of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein contests the view that logical or grammatical forms are necessary, and necessarily prior, for us to be able to apply them. He does not accept that the rule must be there in advance of its application in order for us to perform what we call ‘applying the rule’. The gist of the matter is given by Guetti: ‘[Wittgenstein] shows again and again that the necessity of grammatical rules is neither a property of them before the fact of application nor an infallible determinant of the meaning of that application, but is constituted in our actively employing certain expressions or language games as rules’ [Guetti, art. cit., 190-191]. What this means, as Guetti sees it, is that if rules as singular collections of possible applications are ‘there in advance’ of any actual applications, ‘there’ only means in the language that we know. To use a word as a word is to use it to say something, to carry out a linguistic act, to make a move in the language-game. What we mean by rules, conventions, grammar, and so on, is already dependent on our existing practices. It is the use of words that teaches us their meaning. There is no independently existing meaning attaching to a word that in some way determines or lays down its use in advance. The rule is what is explained, not what does the explaining. Obeying a rule is a practice: giving reasons is not enough, for sooner or later my reasons will give out, and then I just act, without reasons. ‘“How am I to obey a rule?” – if this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following the rule the way I do. If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do”’ (Philosophical Investigations, §217).

One might put all this by saying, with Stanley Cavell, that the ground or rule from which one leaps, or steps, in speaking ‘is itself implied or defined by the leap’ [Quoted by Steven G. Affeldt, ‘The Grounds of Mutuality: Criteria, Judgment and Intelligibility in Stephen Mulhall and Stanley Cavell’, European Journal of Philosophy 6:1 (April 1998), 22. Mulhall replies in the same issue of the journal, pages 32-44]. For Cavell, as Steven Affeldt reminds us, it is not that in order to speak intelligibly I must locate myself on some given ground of the possibilities of sense. ‘To speak intelligibly is to define the ground from which you speak, it is to articulate the position that you are assuming and from which you speak’ [Affeldt, 22]. The significance of the argument is made clear by Wittgenstein:

I see that it is red—but how does that help me if I do not know what I have to say or how, in some way or other, to give expression to my knowledge? For sooner or later I must make the transition to expression. And at this transition all rules leave me in the lurch. For now they all really hang in the air. All good advice is no help to me, for in the end I must make a leap. I must say ‘That is red’ or act in some way, which amounts to the same thing. [Cited by James Guetti and Rupert Read, ‘Acting from Rules’, International Studies in Philosophy 28:2 (1996),46.]

My position or point in speaking, what it is I mean to say, and so the ground of my intelligibility, is neither carried by nor insured by any mediating structure. (This insight was already central to the Tractatus.) If I am to be understood by someone else, I must articulate what I mean to say; I must draw a connection between what I say and what concerns me. The normativity of what I say or how I act does not depend on some underling structure of rules or grammar: it is in what I say and do. It is there that my agreement and that of others in judgement and form of life is expressed. There is no previously agreed-upon structure the speakers of a language refer to, and yet the speakers of that language are, for the most part, from moment to moment agreed in their use of that language. This being so, the idea that context determines what is worth saying will not do: ‘our grasp of a context and of what someone is saying emerge together, wax and wane together’ [Affeldt, 19]. All that is required for us to find what someone says comprehensible and what he does intelligible is to find some reason for or point in what he is saying or doing. This is why Cavell insists that what is said is inseparable from the point of saying it: ‘We can understand what the words mean apart from understanding why you say them: but apart from understanding the point of your saying them we cannot understand what you mean’ [Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 206].To speak is to say what counts, what matters. In speaking I project before me and behind me the ground of my intelligibility:

In saying, asking, objecting, denying, accepting this now and in this tone of voice, I reveal how I am taking an exchange and the point I take it to have reached. My remarks reveal what I take to be the past of the exchange and project what I take to be its (or one possible) future. [Affeldt, 22-23.]

As this indicates, time cannot be excluded from discourse. There is a temporal shift, manifest in our actually doing something with words, in our actually using them to say something, whereby judgement, the application of a rule or definition, is anterior to the definition it is the application of. This applies not only to the application of a given rule, such as ‘+2’, discussed at length in Part I of Philosophical Investigations, but also sequential movements from utterance to utterance. As utterance gives way to utterance, the passage onward from one to the other reveals meaning to be constituted locally and dynamically within ‘an actual set of living circumstances such that the “use” of words often exceeds their “correct” and even their quite specifically defined senses’ [Rupert Read and James Guetti, ‘Meaningful Consequences’, The Philosophical Forum 30:4 (December 1999), 298].

‘It is only in the give and take of language, the relation between what one person says and what others say, that you see the kind of public character that different concepts in it have’ [Cora Diamond, ‘Rules: Looking in the Right Place’, in Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars, ed. D.Z. Phillips and Peter Winch (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), p. 24]. This remark of Cora Diamond’s points to the essentially dialogic character of the meaningful use of language, something essentially bound up with temporality. The way concepts matter in our lives and the difference that the meaningful use of them makes to how we go on may in a sense be discovered in how people subsequently respond to what they and others have said. However, the temporal aspect of language that Diamond brings out in relation to what occurs with one’s expressions can also be seen in relation to what occurs within them. It is this latter point that Read and Guetti develop in responding to Wittgenstein’s idea that the meaning of a word is its use ‘in the language’: ‘we take him to be pointing away both from standing grammatical considerations and from any merely pragmatic utility to which meaningful expressions might after the fact be put; and toward what actually happens to meaningful expressions in their dialogic and sequential development’ [Read and Guetti, 301]. What is in question here is a sense of meaningfulness, of ‘use’, which is immanent to language in action as it is interwoven with non-linguistic action and with the world. It may be easy to see the changes wrought by performative or imperative utterances, but in the case of descriptive statements what is effected may not be so obvious. So, in order to clarify this point, we need to see that, when Wittgenstein says that ‘What we call “descriptions” are instruments for particular purposes’ (Philosophical Investigations, §291), the emphasis falls on ‘for particular cases’ rather than ‘in particular cases’. ‘A meaningful description is one that has a capacity for a particular use; and this particular capacity must somehow have been achieved just in the development of the description itself’ [ibid., 302]. That is to say, it must have been achieved in the course of some linguistic sequence, a sequence that may most easily be envisaged as a dialogue. Read and Guetti give the following example: someone comes into a house after a walk, and says to a friend ‘The leaves have begun to change’. This remark would most probably count as an empirical statement, and it marks a difference, a difference from what one did or might have said earlier about the leaves. The friend may respond verbally, by saying something, or non-verbally, by looking out of the window, going for a walk, and so on. These responses could amount to a test of what has been said, a kind of check on the truth of the ‘empirical proposition’. What the responses also do is allow for further description. The first speaker could now add ‘The maples, especially on the high ground, are changing more than the oaks’. This could have been said from the outset, but he would have done so with less chance of being understood, at least without pause or surprise. The point here is that that the first empirical statement—‘the leaves have begun to change’—may come to function in relation to the expressions that follow it as a grammatical stipulation. Expressions can change their status from being descriptive and ‘referential’, to functioning retroactively as a grammatical background against which further testable observational statements may be made. As Read and Guetti have it: ‘Expressions that serve initially as descriptions of fact are transformed, evidently just by the onward sequencing of the discourses in which they occur, into presumptions that make the next description assertable; and each presumption amounts to a further determination of the grammatical rules of the sequence, a determination of the logical “range” appropriate for subsequent empirical expression, and hence a modification of the grammar of the entire discourse to that point’[ibid., 303]. This is a dynamic conception of grammar, such that the grammatical, or normative, status of expressions in a sequence is being generated as one goes along, so that a speaker’s responsive linguistic reaction towards a previous speaker is not determined or arbitrary, but interwoven, ‘interleaved, in a less or more seamless fashion’, whereby the status of expressions alters retroactively in time. This is to describe a dynamic of otherness internal to the active use of language, in which the iterability of identical sentences operates in such a way that these sentences come to play very different roles within the developing sequence of expression, a play of difference within language deriving from what Derrida would see (in Limited Inc., for example) as the repeated inscription and erasure of the trace. In effect, we speak the language we use only to the extent that we are spoken by it. This is one further reason for insisting that rules do not contain their application, that the relation of rule and application is not internal, and that, ‘whatever grammatical relations may be held to be in force at any time, an application of that grammar must consist in something other than those relations, something beyond or in addition to them, a further step’ (or leap) [Guetti and Rupert Read, ‘Acting from Rules’, International Studies in Philosophy 28:2 (1996), 46]. When Wittgenstein writes, in On Certainty, ‘the same proposition may get treated at one time as something to test by experience, at another as a rule of testing’, [On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), §98] this may be read as addressing changes, not only occurring across the historical development of a language, but also within ordinary, particular verbal sequences, where the sequential progression from ‘one time’ to ‘another’ produces of itself alterations in linguistic status between the empirical and the normative. What is at work here is a continual change in grammar, so that, when Wittgenstein insists that meaningful statements must make a ‘difference’, this ‘difference’ can be understood as a matter of ‘the development of our empirical assertions into local and timely presumptions that enable further assertion. The consequences that meaningful developments have—which no “process” could have because, be it as “dynamic” as one cares, still it cannot process” its own rules as language-in-action continually does—are in this sense well described as grammatical consequences’[Read and Guetti, ‘Meaningful Consequences’, 305]. The active application of rules thus differs profoundly from the idle contemplation of them: the presumption of a rule and expressly conceiving it are two logically exclusive things. Considered grammatically, Guetti and Read argue, in the sense of grammar just elaborated, a rule in action must be ‘invisible’, just by virtue of the fact that, to be taken as a rule, to be something we can act upon, it must be un-expressed and un-exposed. The very leap away from or beyond it renders it retroactively the rule we follow and at the same time inexpressible. It is in this sense that we may speak of the language of statement or representation as ‘invisible’: not because it is in some way ‘transparent’ to or mimetic of the world, but because grammar is transformed, in the act of stepping—or leaping—‘beyond’ it, to presumptive status.

This line of thought may seem far removed from cinema, but it is not so. For instance, Vertigo depends on just such a shift between the empirical and normative, inasmuch as Scottie’s initial understanding of the facts concerning Madeleine’s death takes on the presumptive force of a paradigm which is to structure his very experience in the second part of the film. (The name Madeleine can hardly fail to evoke that of Madeleine Usher, buried alive by her brother.) His attempt to recreate the lost Madeleine by means of the transformation of Judy is not a consequence of the effects on him of fetishism or the ‘male gaze’; it is an attempt to create a world whose norms derive from a retroactive presumption of the events, empirically given, in his earlier investigation of, and love for, Madeleine/Carlotta. When finally he realises that he has misunderstood these events, having been duped by Gavin Elster, with Judy’s assistance, his expulsion from the world he was trying to create is an expulsion into a kind of nowhere, as he confronts death—not his own, of course, but Judy’s. The famous final scene in the tower consists in part of Scottie’s rehearsal of how he was duped by Elster, who trained or directed Judy so as to trap him in the toils of his own fear, his vertigo. The last image, of Scottie looking down from the top of the bell-tower at Judy’s body below, is an image of empty transcendence, as we look down in turn on Scottie, below whom an abyss has opened, of a world that has fallen from him. In this same image, Hitchcock presents us with an image of cinema, an image of death. The death is Judy’s but it is also Scottie’s: he is beyond meaning and outside time, caught in the eternal present of the impossibility of dying. He is no-one, an effect only of the image, which now creates him. So at the end of Psycho, a similar image of death arises at the end, ‘of’ here being meant in both objective and subjective senses of the word. As Norman’s face is replaced by the superimposition of his mother’s head, her skull, we have an image of his death, of the final death of his personality and his possession by his mother. At the same time, we have an image of an image of death: it is the image itself which negates him, in the sequence of its transformation, as one image is placed upon another. At this point, there is a dissolve, as Marion’s car is pulled up towards us from the swamp, and the film closes on a shot of the trunk of her car, inside which her body lies, rotting. We have an image of resurrection reminiscent of that in which Blanchot evokes Lazarus in the tomb, not resurrected into the light, but evil and smelling bad, in order to evoke in that image the ‘beyond’ on to which writing gives. As such an image of what writing effects, Lazarus is neither dead nor alive, and Marion, too, may be taken as not only an image of what this particular film has made of her, but of film as such. Film is the realm of the living dead.

What a concept might be, and how we might grasp it, apart from its use, is, for the first part of the Philosophical Investigations, a secondary consideration. In Part II, however, Wittgenstein turns his attention to the question of how one might characterise and locate inactive concepts, that is, how we might grasp a concept apart from a use immanent to language in action, as it is interwoven with non-linguistic action and with the world, with our forms of life, to serve some purpose:

When I pronounce this word while reading with expression, it is completely filled with its meaning. – ‘How can this be, if meaning is the use of the word?’ (Philosophical Investigations, p. 215)

Wittgenstein goes on to say that the first use of the term ‘meaning’, in the sense in which a word may seem to be ‘filled with its meaning’, is ‘figurative’, or as he is later to put it, ‘meaning’ is here being used in a ‘secondary sense’. However, as Guetti indicates, he never anywhere suggests that calling this kind of apprehension ‘understanding’ is to employ a figurative or secondary expression; instead he says that is simply one of the uses that make up the concept of understanding (Philosophical Investigations, §532). At other times, the immediate awareness that a word is full of the meaning is described almost paradoxically, as a ‘seeming’ and ‘no such marvel’:

But if a sentence can strike me as like a painting in words, then it is no such marvel that a word uttered in isolation and without purpose can seem to carry a meaning in itself. (Philosophical Investigations, p. 215)

As Guetti notes, here ‘two of the very conditions that [Wittgenstein] so often suggests would disallow meaning – syntactic isolation and purposelessness – do not compromise the word’s seeming to carry meaning in itself’ [James Guetti, ‘Idling Rules’ Philosophical Investigations 16:3 (July 19930, 185]. It would seem clear, then, that meaningful verbal practices, the use of words to say something, is to be thought of very differently from language that seems, in itself and unexercised, to be ‘full of meaning’. In this latter case, words are inactive, or idling, and yet their suspended uses, which seem to fill them with possible meanings, give them a life, a life which is very different from that of words in actual employment. Words that take on this quality seem suspended, out of time, as though the temporal relation between definition and judgement, rule and application, had gone into reverse, or flipped over: now the definition does seem to contain its possible applications, and to have become anterior to its application. The comparison here is between words seen in this way and the seeing of figures with aspects, such as the ‘double cross’ and the triangle, or indeed the duck-rabbit. These simple figures may be taken as models for isolated words, inasmuch as a schematic figure like a triangle can appear limitless in the possibilities of interpretation it lays itself open to.

In Seven Types of Ambiguity, William Empson displays and discusses many words that seem ‘full of meaning’. Here is an example of the fifth type of ambiguity, which occurs when a writer is discovering his idea in the act of writing:

Our natures do pursue
Like Rats that ravyn downe their proper bane
A thirsty evil, and when we drinke we die.
(Measure for Measure, I, ii)

The first idea would seem to have been that lust was the poison, but the word ‘proper’, introduced, so Empson argues, as meaning ‘suitable for rats’, and baring with it the suggestion of ‘right and natural’, together with memories of poisons designed to keep rats from dying in the wainscot, ‘produced the grander and less usual image, in which eating the poison corresponds to the Fall of Man, and it is drinking water, a healthful and natural human function, which it is intolerable to avoid, and which brings death’ [William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 184]. ‘Proper bane’ becomes ambiguous, since it applies to nothing in particular, but lies between different things, rats and men, seemingly suspended between them. This is an example of the way language—or a phrase set in isolation—can, as it were, organise its own applications, while at the same time retaining its singularity. Guetti notes this particularly: ‘it is the combination of singular “form” and multiple aspects in such figures [as the triangle and double cross] and such words that we find so strange. And that aspects can only be worked out one at a time, even while we “know” of the others that are possible, may generate the feeling that the actual, sequential realizations of aspects are somehow insufficient when weighed against the figure that enables them. . . . The figure conceived apart from its meaningful employments, the word apart from its meaningful employments, is a mysterious thing; it presents a singularity that we can see together with a variable potential that we know but cannot see’ [Guetti, ‘Idling Rules’, 186-87]. This is unquestionably one of the sources of metaphysics, as we imagine a separation between the figure and its aspects, the word and its realisable meanings. It is precisely in this way that a word like ‘object’ operates in the Tractatus, as it draws us on to imagine what it might rally be, behind its possibilities of combination, behind or beyond being and non-being. The question concerning the Tractarian object can be put this way: ‘how can I see this [], of which I can see so many aspects, apart from these aspects?’ As this example should serve to remind us, we are here entering upon the field of nonsense, where words have been given no meaning. This leads on to Guetti’s general point, that ‘when a rule is so thoroughly suspended from its applications that any one of them may be imagined, and no choice among them more appropriate than any other, it is utterly idle. In its illimitable multiplicity it is . . . a blank, but an extremely potent sort of “blank” that seems fully to “contain” all of its possibilities, the “blank” of a blank check’ [ibid., 193]. This means that the practices, techniques and actions of meaningful language use become, when regarded grammatically, linguistic possibilities: so one cannot imagine a word apart from language, language apart from language. And because language cannot be imagined away, because it is always grammatically present to use, we can and do isolate it from actual use. There is, as I suggested earlier, a temporal reversal, in which what was anterior, the judgement, the application, precedes that which came after it, the definition, the rule. Language, we might say, takes on a presence in its own right, independent of application and use. The sample, it would seem, now is at once sample and application.

A concept (or sample) abstracted in that way may not be a rule at all. In its limitless interpretability it may have nothing to do with rules in their actual applications. As Guetti has it, it may not even be a ‘sign’, depending on how we interpret that word; but it is symbol, and indeed the best definition of a symbol may be as a ‘concept in isolation’, an idle concepts, surrounded by what Wittgenstein calls ‘lightly indicated’ possible meanings. Wittgenstein gives a compelling example of this notion of ‘symbol’ in Philosophical Investigations:

The machine as symbolizing its action: the action of a machine – I might say at first – seems to be there in it from the start. What does that mean? – if we know the machine, everything else, that is its movement, seems to be already completely determined.
We talk as if these parts could only move in this way, as if they could not do anything else. How is this – do we forget the possibilities of their bending, breaking off, melting, and so on? Yes; in many cases we don’t think of that at all. . . .
But when we reflect that the machine could also have moved differently it may look as if the way it moves must be contained in the machine-as-symbol far more determinately than in the actual machine. As if it were not enough for the movements in question to be empirically determined in advance, but they had to be really – in a mysterious sense – already present. And it is quite true: the movement of the machine-as-symbol is predetermined in a different sense from that in which the movement of any given actual machine is predetermined.
When does one have the thought: the possible movements of a machine are already there in some mysterious way? – Well, when one is doing philosophy. . . . What is this possibility of movement? It is not the movement, but it does not seem to be the mere physical conditions for moving either. . . . The possibility of movement is, rather, supposed to be like a shadow of the movement itself. But do you know of such a shadow? (Philosophical Investigations, §§193-194)

In one sense of ‘know’, the one considered in Part I of the Philosophical Investigations, we do not know any such ‘shadow’ at all. The possibility of movement cannot be observed as the movement can (and, as we saw above, rules are invisible, in the actual use of language). But in another sense—as the consideration of aspects and figures shows us—we know of this shadow as we know of language. ‘The machine-as-symbol is the grammatical conception of the machine, the idling “image” that is as separate from the machine at work as rules in their grammatical condition are separate from their functioning applications. So long as we are thinking of rules at work, their possibilities are perhaps not even so much as “shadows”. But these possibilities spring to life, and over-shadow both the work and what we could understand from it, when rules are idling’ [Guetti, ‘Idling Rules’, 194-95]. What we have here, perhaps, is ‘a powerful illusion of singular presence, with an elusive multiplicity that yields no singular representation’ [Ibid., 197].

Seen from this perspective, Blanchot’s fundamental insights into the nature of writing the ‘mystery’ of literature are, in effect, versions of what Wittgenstein gives a condensed account of in terms of the ‘symbol’. This holds particularly for Blanchot’s notion of the work and the work’s undoing or un-working: when the possibilities of words spring to life, they over-shadow the work they compose, and open it to what lies beyond it. Idling rules, such as are exposed in poetry, lead beyond what is said, or meant, into regions constituted by singularity and the fascination it attracts. This is ‘the step not beyond’, into the exile of the ‘neuter’, of alterity and the ‘other night’. Blanchot captures the particularity of his vision in some remarks on the fragment, where he insists on the fragment as what expresses itself in a language which does not recognise it:

Fragmentary: meaning neither the fragment, part of a whole, nor the fragmentary in itself. The aphorism, the proverb, maxim, citation, thoughts, themes—verbal cells in being further removed than the infinitely continuous discourse whose content ‘is its own continuity’, continuity that is assured of itself only in giving itself as circular and, by this turn, submitting itself to the preliminary of a return whose law is outside, which outside is outside the law. [Ibid., 197]

The fragment is language that does not recognise itself as language, and ‘whose law is outside, which outside is outside the law’. It seems clear that Blanchot’s thought on writing may more satisfactorily be understood in these terms than in those deriving from a questionable account of naming, based on a concept of the word as ‘murderer’ of the thing. For Wittgenstein, the quest for some foundation of language, in naming, ostensive definition or other procedure, is unintelligible. ‘Propositions do not follow from one another as such; they simply are what they are. We can only prepare language for its [use]; we can only describe it as long as we do not regard it as language. The rules prepare for the game which may afterwards be used as language’ [Wittgenstein’s Lectures, 1930-1932, ed. Desmond Lee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 57. Cited by James Guetti and Rupert Read, ‘Acting from Rules’, International Studies in Philosophy 28:2 (1996), 53. Guetti and Read substitute ‘use’ for ‘usage’ in their citation from Lee’s transcription of Wittgenstein’s lecture.]. In other words, ‘language’ cannot be considered to be language until it is used. Whatever grammatical considerations there may be anterior to their employment, whatever rules we take to be in place prior to their application, we do not so much as regard these as language until they are used. It is only in their active employment that names have a role to play in language; it makes no sense to think of them as founding, or as prior to, that role. The notion of the fragment, however, does derive from the abstract or isolated scrutiny of non-functioning grammatical forms, of concepts disengaged from actual use. Clearly, the actual use of words must occur first, before we can ‘experience’ the meaning of a word. We have to learn the use of the word ‘apex’ before we can use it to express our seeing an aspect of say, a triangle, as an apex. ‘More generally, we must master the techniques of language before we can experience several techniques as the “static” aspects of a given object’ [Guetti, ‘Idling Rules, 189]. ‘Clearly the words “Now I am seeing this as the apex”’ of the triangle ‘cannot mean anything to a learner who has only just met the concepts of apex, base, and so on’; ‘it is only if someone can do, has learnt, is master of such-and-such, that it makes sense to say he has had this experience’; ‘we talk, we utter words, and only later get a picture of their life’ (Philosophical Investigations, pp. 208-209). [Cited by Guetti, ‘Idling Rules’, 189-190.] The retroactive temporality, or deferred action, of language that Wittgenstein points to in the last quote is complex: on the one hand, it is as though language were, in the seeing of aspects at any rate, constitutive of experience (‘it is only if someone . . . is master of such-and-such, that it makes sense to say he has had this experience’), while, on the other, it is only later that we step back from this into the realm of grammatical possibility. There is a temptation to say that, in stepping back, it is as though we stepping back into a realm of possibility (or impossibility) from which all kinds of grammatical forms may be realised. It is as though we were privy to come kind of ‘beyond of possibility’ (or ‘impossibility’, in Blanchot’s idiom), which governs and, so to speak, is the source of the possibilities attaching to an isolated word.

That this approach is not unjust to Blanchot’s vision of language, as revealed by writing, can be seen from his discussion of the récit, where we find a view of language and literature indebted profoundly to the poetry of Mallarmé (a view that in many respects is similar to that of Derrida). One respect in which Mallarmé is crucial to him is that his texts break free from the constraints of representation. ‘The essential nature of language, rather than being harnessed to mimetic or cognitive ends, was set free to effect itself in its own textual space. Once representation is eschewed, the order of the text need no longer submit to the sequentiality of time’ [Timothy Clark, Derrida, Heidegger and Blanchot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 82]. It is this notion of time that is central to the récit: to enter the space of literature, its own textual space, requires a break with the supposed linearity of quotidian time (certainly the linearity of narrative, as ‘traditionally’ conceived) and with notions of beginning, middle and end. The same goes for space: the récit is the creation of something that could never have had a physical existence. Poetry, for Mallarmé and Blanchot, says nothing beyond itself. Timothy Clark summarises the position:

The word no longer refers to an object in the concrete world; its reference survives only for its evocative qualities and the contribution the word makes by its semantic resonance and formal properties. The word is inscribed in an open context where it plays or, in a loose sense, rhymes in many directions at once. [Clark, op. cit., p. 82.]

This is to describe the perception of concepts that are inactive, idling, whose suspended uses seem to fill them with possibilities of a life very different from that achieved by signs in actual use. The Mallarméan conception of poetry, espoused by Blanchot, aims to create that space, the space of literature, in which words and concepts are isolated in their singularity. The effect is to pass beyond language, the language of actual use, into an elsewhere, where meaning is suspended. A récit, as Blanchot defines it, concerns a single event, that may seem, on the surface at least, to conform to the conventional narrative pattern. However, the event in question is usually ‘marvellous, in the sense of approaching an experience that takes consciousness and language to their limits, an encounter, according to Clark, ‘either sexual or traumatic, which is too immediate to be mediated by language and thus remains heterogeneous to the very narratives it sets in motion’ [Clark, op. cit., p. 85]. Examples from Kafka abound, such as ‘Metamorphosis’, ‘The Hunter Gracchus’ or The Castle. The temporal structure is comparable to that of a topological figure such as the Moebius strip, in which the relating of the récit and the events related, genesis and result, seem endless to merge with one another and yet equally endlessly fail to do so. This endless, asymptotic turning is a movement towards a ‘neutral’ point that is opened up by the language it renders possible. The idea is to incorporate into the text an impossible point of origin, which is always already yet to come, whereby language, cut off from its meaningful employment, is set to achieve a mysterious potential:

The relation of the récit and its event involves a transformation of language akin to that described by Heidegger in terms of a ‘step back’ from representationalist language. The domain into which the step directs itself does not . . . pre-exist that very movement; it is no more than the transformation wrought in the language that performs the step. [Clark, op. cit., p. 86.]

For Blanchot, the movement of narration (récit) is towards a point that has no prior existence apart from this movement, and yet the narration cannot begin until it has reached this point, the point the narration itself is to open up: ‘it is only the narration, and the unpredictable movement of the narration which provide the space where this point becomes real, powerful and appealing’ [Blanchot, The Siren’s Song, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. 62]. The power of this view, and it is powerful, arises in part from taking what are grammatical possibilities for perceptible properties of language that might be described as though they were facts.

It is as though one could isolate a space prior to narration, which is both the ‘impossible’ source of it and the magnetic point whose power enables the narration to happen. (Such a structure has already been seen in the Tractatus, in the general form of the proposition, as that is shown in recursive iteration of joint negation.) To find a compelling example of this same topology in English poetry I will look to a poem by Donald Davie, who as a critic has done as much as Blanchot himself to clarify the nature of symbolist writing, in essays on Mallarmé, Eliot and Pasternak.

Look here! What a wheaten
Half-loaf, halfway to bread,
A cornfield is, that is eaten
Away, and harvested.

How like a loaf, where the knife
Has cut and come again,
Jagged where the farmer’s wife
Has served the farmer’s men,

That steep field is, where the reaping
Has only just begun
On a wedge-shaped front, and the creeping
Steel edges glint in the sun.

See the cheese-like shape it is taking,
The sliced-off walls of the wheat
And the cheese-mite reapers making
Inroads there, in the heat?

It is Brueghel or Samuel Palmer,
Some painter, coming between
My eye and the truth of a farmer,
So massively sculpts the scene.

The sickles of poets dazzle
These eyes that were filmed from birth;
And the miller comes with an easel
To grind the fruits of earth.

[Donald Davie, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), p. 147.]

This poem, ‘The Hill Field’, published in 1964 in a collected entitled Events and Wisdoms, refers to other writing, in this case to eighteenth century landscape poetry and Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’, as well as to Robert Duncan’s ‘The Opening of the Field’ (1960), a poem which addresses explicitly the then new aesthetic of composition by field, or projective verse, developed during the 1950s by the American modernists associated with Black Mountain College, under the aegis of Charles Olson. The poem also manages to place, in a complex balancing act, Pasternak in relation to Hardy: ‘The Hill Field’ shares with other poems Davie wrote during the same period a complex modernist aesthetic based on that of earlier and contemporary masters, but as it were transposed into what looks like the minor key of a poet who was, according to Davie, unlike Eliot and the other major modernists in that he failed to transform or displace ‘quantifiable reality or the reality of common sense’ [Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 62]. The poem in the texture of its writing refers to itself, as the singular act of composition that it is, but in referring to itself, it must inevitably, as we have just seen, refer us to other writing, and by so doing refer again, not only to intertextual reference in general, but also to the singularity of this act of referral in itself. Because of the uncertainty of context these interrelationships of reference create, an uncertainty concerning who is saying what to whom, the poem’s tone—its explicit ‘address’ to the reader—cannot be taken simply as the expression of an originating authorial voice. This is clear at the very start, where the imperative, ‘Look here’, serves to confirm the identity of this text (or, at any rate, of this phrase) rather than this author, by moving outside or beyond itself, in order to point to itself from the position of an other, the reader who is addressed by words that apparently refer only to the event of the poem itself—the event of the poem’s depicting what is depicted by it. ‘Look here’ is not only an imperative but also an expostulation, but an expostulation uttered by no one.

An image of a field is what the poem is in the process of constructing, and part of what the image is an image of is the process whereby it is being constructed. In effect, what the poem shows is itself as it emerges from, or is engendered by, the process of being said. The hill field is the space of literature, and the poem makes, in Blanchot’s words, ‘what is ungraspable inescapable; it never lets me cease reaching what I cannot attain’ [Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 31]. The poem exhibits the topology of turning syntax characteristic of the récit. One of Davie’s major contributions as a critic was to elaborate on this kind of symbolist configuration in essays on Eliot, Pound, Mallarmé and Pasternak, some of which were written prior to or during the composition of the poetry of this collection. In ‘The Hill Field’, symbolist techniques are present, and signalled as such. ‘Wheaten’ is reduced to ‘eaten’ as the ‘half-loaf’ of the field set up by the poem is reduced by the removal, or harvesting, of the letters ‘wh‘. In stanza three, ‘the wedge-shaped front’ is there on the page, shown in the shape constructed by the way the words ‘and creeping’ in line 3 protrude beyond the second and fourth lines. The apostrophe ‘how’, beginning at line 5, is only revealed to be an apostrophe, rather than an interrogative, by the end of line 12. The opening ‘See’ of line 13 looks like another apostrophe (in the eighteenth century manner), but by the end of line 16 it is seen in retrospect to be a question. The palpability of the words is further emphasised by sound: ‘ee’ provides a kind of basic pattern, through which other vowels intertwine in a series of complex variations. Like Mallarmé and Eliot, Davie evokes linearity so as to undercut it and in order to do so he accords new significance to the layout of the stanzas, the spacing between them, the organisation of line-ends, the placing of punctuation, and so on.

The poem demonstrates a mode of self-alienation that separates it from itself, so that it doubles back on itself, opening a gap within its structure across which reference can operate. In this sense, ‘The Hill Field’ may be said to refer to itself referring to itself, an effect signalled and realised by the temporal displacement at the opening, whereby the cornfield is presented as already the loaf it has not yet become, a loaf baked before the harvest is gathered in. It is a violation of temporal linearity that various metaphors of rupture and incision arise from, carried by words like ‘knife’, ‘cut’, ‘cheese-mites’ and the ‘sickles’ (inevitably evoking ‘versicles’) that occur throughout the text. By means of a folding or turning back of time on itself, something that occurs only in the order of writing, the récit, the end is enabled to precede the beginning, and the beginning to come after the end. The device results in an undoing of linear order such that there remains to the reader only one movement or trajectory of time, a movement in which the passage of the poem counts for more than any point of rest. This substitution for received syntactic relationships of an intransitive mode that refuses any obvious decipherment to its images results in a flight or negation in which images and metaphors succeed each other in such a way as to prevent them being read as picturing states of affairs. The poem achieves an inertia, which may be described as the work’s starting point, ‘the point anterior to all starting points, from which nothing ever begins, the empty profundity of being’s inertia, that region without issue and without reserve, in which the work through the artist, becomes the concern, the endless search for its origin’ [Blanchot, op. cit., p. 44].

Most poems, or the best,
Describe their own birth, and this
Is what they are – a space
Cleared to walk around in.
('Ars Poetica')

[Davie, Collected Poems, p. 336.]

The ramifications of this reach very far. A word that has special privilege in Davie’s earlier poetry is ‘edge’, and there are others related to it, like ‘knife’, cut’, ‘sculpture’, ‘stone’ and words and names associated with art more generally. ‘Edge’ seems to have the same role here as ‘blanc’ in Mallarmé, whose writing, like Davie’s, is a writing of spacing—in the sense that it foregrounds spatio-temporal differing—in which words like ‘blanc’ and ‘éspace’, or in Davie’s case, ‘edge’, ‘cut’, ‘sickles’ and similar variations, refer to the very whiteness of separation, the spaces, cuts or divisions that make possible the series of which they are themselves members. The edge thus understood is what gives to the poem both the possibility and the impossibility of meaning, inasmuch as it is part of and beyond the series of which it is the progenitor. Just as ‘The Hill Field’ is as title of the poem above the text and yet is the poem, is part of the text to which it is ostensibly external, so the names of the artists, Brueghel and Samuel Palmer, constitute similar traits of undecidability, or, as Derrida would have it, supplementarity: they mark what makes the poem possible and what stands outside, or transcends, that possibility, inasmuch as they mark what conditions it, ‘coming between/My eye and the truth of a farmer’. The final stanza takes the image of the eye further: in the phrase acknowledging that the poet’s eyes were ‘filmed from birth’, the preposition engenders multiple possibilities which are repeated in the double genitive in the last line, ‘fruits of earth’, a second doubling which calls forth yet further multiplicities in relation to ‘earth’, a word already resonant with implication and connotation. The poem is an impossible experience of a desire to see, a desire which can never be fulfilled. The vision of the poet, irreplaceable in its singularity, and yet filmed from birth (the cinematic pun is unavoidable) and so ineluctably alien to itself, is precisely what, in its irreplaceable singularity, the poem shows to be replaceable, a point driven home by the fact that ‘Breughel or Samuel Palmer,/Some painter’ substitutes for the poet, a substitution in turn replaced by one who ‘massively sculpts’. The ‘sickles’ of poets and the miller’s ‘easel’ complete the list of artistic forms and names of artists displacing the uniqueness of the poet’s act, names and forms evoked and effectively constructed in the formal configuration that is the expression of that very act. Breaking with the logic of circularity and exchange, signalled by the first words of the first stanza: ‘Look here!’, the poem effects a complex suspension of grammar beyond or behind the application of that grammar, in that way opening upon a condition anterior to both subject and object, and so anterior to writing itself.

The temporality of Vertigo is so organised that the viewer is exposed to what must appear an impossible state of affairs. At the end of the film, in the final shot, as Scottie looks down from a tower painted and superimposed onto an original image at the body of Judy on the tiles below, we confront a repetition. Madeleine has already died in just this way, at just this spot, the Madeleine who from Scottie’s point of view at that time was the woman he had fallen in love with. The result of this death was his own death, as in the dreams of his madness (again a special effect created in the post-production process) he fell into her grave, uniting with her in death. This first ‘death’ he outlives, as Judy outlives it also: her death, her second death, thus places Scottie in the position of the impossible. He must now outlive his own death, a death he can never attain and which he has always already stepped beyond by virtue of the film’s suspension of him above her body. He will never be other than the image in which the film holds him, and it is in the realm of the image, not the concept, not meaning, that the film concludes—a conclusion, it must be said, that is no conclusion. Vertigo effects an encounter with imaginary space as the being of cinema: in accordance with Blanchot’s account of literature, we can call this cinematic spacing. Blanchot’s account of Proust’s consciousness is especially pertinent to the movement of spacing that affirms itself here:

the metamorphosis of time into an imaginary space (the space peculiar to images) and an ever-changing absence uncluttered by events, unobstructed by presences, an incessantly reborn vacuum: that remoteness and distance which are the space and origin of metamorphosis: the place where psychology is redundant because here there is no psyche, where that which is inner becomes outer, becomes image. [The Sirens’ Song, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 68-69. Cited by Clark, op. cit., p. 89.]

Scottie does not die as a result of an event within the narrative; he does not plunge off the ‘tower’ to join Judy in death. His death is a death he lives through, and he lives through it in the image. In other words, his death is a death of the image, and the dread it induces is not dread in the face of death, Judy’s death, for instance, or his own, but dread in the face of existence itself, dread at being riveted to existence, dread induced by the impossibility of dying. For Scottie, there is no exit and no escape, only the irremissibility of an existence he is unable to leave. This sense of the role of the image works though the film. For example, the necklace which Scottie recognises as having belonged to Madeleine is actually one that belonged to Carlotta Valdez, the ‘sad, mad Carlotta’, whose picture hangs in the San Francisco Art Gallery, and on whose neck the jewel is clearly marked as the object of Scottie’s gaze, as he follows Madeleine Elster (Judy) around the city. Seeing this necklace—‘the souvenir of a murder’—around Judy’s neck as the two of them prepare to go out to Ernie’s, to what is intended to be a lovers’ dinner, Scottie realises what Gavin Elster had planned and how he was the lynch-pin of the plan, because Elster made him into the dupe of a woman Elster had transformed into an image of an absent, and now dead, wife. The act of recognition is given in a series of ever-closer shots of the necklace, isolating it in the mirror as Judy, unawares, looks at herself wearing it. The shots of the necklace are followed by a cut away to the picture of Carlotta, which focuses on her neck. The necklace reveals itself as revelatory of the truth only insofar as it resembles itself, is its own image. In the same way, Judy becomes the image of herself, as she emerges from the bathroom, as the image of Madeleine, finally recreated in realisation of Scottie’s paradigm. We see her come through the door as an image, ghostly, inexpressive, and invested with a pervasive green light, an uncanny presence troubling the security of the distinction between presence and absence. Theirs is a relation of proximity and distance, both spatial and temporal, the horizons of which are captured in the 360 degree tracking shot around the two of them, as they embrace, the room changing into the stables at the church and back again, and in the music, evoking the passionate embrace on the beach, after the visit to the sequoia: it is a relation whose transformations are thus undergone as transformations of cinema. Thus, while Vertigo undoubtedly follows linear form in its unfolding, the shifts in time between what is before and what comes after, and the insistence of the use of repetition, make of it an instance of skewed temporality. In the image of vertiginous depth that opens beneath the protagonist at the beginning, only to return to him, transformed as he is transformed, at the film’s end, one may see that ‘limit experience’ in which the very narrative it sets in motion is transgressed.

To see Psycho is to surrender to the fascination of time’s absence. ‘The time of time’s absence has no present, no presence. . . . The irremediable character of what has no present, of what is not even there as having been once there, says: it never happened, never for a first time, and yet it starts over, again, again, infinitely. It is without end, without beginning. It is without a future’ [Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 30]. The surrender is retroactive. As the film ends, and Norman is possessed by his mother, we see that the essential interest of the film has been, not with Marion or the search by her lover and her sister for her killer, but with the relation between Mrs Bates and her son—a point, it may be said, that fascinates the sequels. As Derrida has noted in considering Romeo and Juliet, it is in the nature of true love that the lovers outlive each other. Such is certainly the case here: Norman and his mother outlive each other. Norman outlives the mother he has done for with strychnine, but she also outlives him; she annihilates him as he sits staring at the camera, and as he dies into her, her voice speaking for him, her dead face appears in triumph, superimposed on his. This is in fact simply a manifestation of a state of affairs that was already in place: as Dr Richmond, the psychiatrist, puts it, Norman was never wholly Norman, but he was sometimes all mother. This is a time that is always and forever past, so that the relation between mother and son exists in an empty, dead time, which is nonetheless a real time in which death is present; indeed, we see it become present, as Marion’s car, bearing her rotting cadaver, is withdrawn from the swamp—a resurrection of the dead. Norman, in solitude, wrapped in a blanket, is not alone, for he is not there, and nor is his mother; no one is there, and the possibility of personal relation has long since dissolved, transformed into what is neither real nor unreal. Earlier in the film, Norman insists that ‘This place is my home. . . . this place happens to be my only world. . . . My mother and I were more than happy’. As the last sentence implies, Norman’s world is not the world of reality, but something more compelling, more disturbing, more absolute, than that, something closer to what Blanchot has called ‘the indeterminate milieu of fascination’. We get a first intimation of what this might mean when we watch Norman stare through the peephole at Marion undressing for the shower. Contrary to many readings of the film, not to mention the remake, I would wish to contend that this is not the occasion of a voyeuristic thrill, for us or for him, and to that extent it does not exemplify the male gaze of spectatorship. The issue here is not one of psychology, of fetishism and voyeurism, but of fascination, a realm of experience ‘where objects sink away when they depart from their sense, when they collapse into their image’ [Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 32]. As Norman stares at Marion, his gaze coagulates into light, and he does not see what he sees. He is, as Dr Richmond has it, ‘touched’ by her. Marion touches him in an immediate proximity; what he sees seizes and draws him close, even though it leaves him absolutely at a distance, a nearness and distance whose contradictory energies are resolved only insofar as he can ‘become’ mother. When Norman insists that he had a very happy childhood, we may believe him: childhood is the moment of fascination, is itself fascinated:

This gold age [childhood] seems bathed in a light which is splendid because unrevealed. But it is only that this light is foreign to revelation, has nothing to reveal, is pure reflection, a ray which is still only the gleam of an image. Perhaps the force of the maternal figure receives its intensity from the very force of fascination, and one might say then, that if the mother exerts this fascinating attraction it is because, appearing when the child lives altogether in fascination’s gaze, she concentrates in herself all the powers of enchantment. It is because the child is fascinated that the mother is fascinating, and that is also why all the impressions of early childhood have a kind of fixity which comes from fascination. [Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 33].

Norman’s condition of fascination is evident in his bedroom, which Leila visits, finding there the broken-eared rabbit, the wind-up gramophone with the 78 disc of the Eroica Symphony, and the book, whose pages we never see. The usual assumption is that the pages are covered with pornographic pictures, but one might just as plausibly think of them as schematic figures, like the duck-rabbit, triangles and cubes, or maps or other images out of childhood. What threatens this golden age must be excised, cut off, whether it be the young girls whom Norman is ‘touched’ by or Mrs Bates and her lover, whose ‘touch’ Mother has had to endure. Mrs Bates is not Mother: Mother is the figure of fascination, who concentrates in herself all the powers of enchantment, and it is this figure who returns eternally, in the time of the absence of time, and whom Norman loves, even as he hates her.

Psycho, like Vertigo, is an exploration of love, or rather the transformations of love, in the course of which the moving picture is itself transformed, into an image, suspended, beyond relation, whereby Norman, Mother and Marion, an unholy trinity each person of which is dead in his or her own way, and alive in his or her own way too, are given up to our fascinated contemplation. There is a pattern of doubling and repetition across the two films that serves to connect them both to the uncanny and the death drive. Judy doubles as Madeline who doubles as Carlotta; Norman is doubled by Mother and Mother by Norman; the plot divides in both films, in Vertigo at what Scottie takes to be Madeleine’s death, followed by own ‘death’, and then again as Judy reveals all in voice-over when Scottie has found her the second time, and in Psycho at Marion’s death in the shower. Not only is there doubling and repetition at the level of narrative structure, but the films present patterns of repetition in imagery and in narrative event. This is especially marked in Psycho at the occurrence of the dead face, the face of the cadaver. After Marion’s murder in the shower the camera closes in on the plug-hole where Marion’s blood is flowing away; it then pulls back from a similar black point, which turns out to be the pupil of her dead eye. As the camera moves back from her dead face, the film induces an uncertainty: are we seeing Janet Leigh remaining remarkably still, or are we looking at a photograph of the actress? A drip of water runs down her face, thus seeming to confirm the matter—we are watching an event in real time played out before the camera. But are we? The face of the dead woman seems unnaturally still, despite the movement of the water drop, and the status of the image remains as it was before, uncertain. [Laura Mulvey has discussed this issue in her essay ‘Death Drives: Hitchcock’s Psycho’, Film Studies: an international review 2 (Spring 2000), 5-14. She also raises the issue of the Freudian uncanny and the death drive in relation to the film.] There is no way of deciding whether the face we are seeing is dead (a photograph) or alive (an actress in front of the camera). This image of the dead face and its shifting status returns in the face of Mother, as Leila disturbs her in the cellar, and she turns, on what is clearly a motorised chair, to face Leila and the camera, her eyes alight and vitalised by the illumination generated by the swinging of the light bulb Leila has struck in her instinctive reaction of terror. Here the role of the cinema is made even more obvious: the face is animated by the on and off movement of the light source, and by the screeching violins, its life an effect of the editing of the visual and sound tracks. The effect in both these cases is uncanny: the certainties on which we base our discriminations between appearance and reality are made to tremble, are solicited (as Derrida would have it), as each occasion removes itself from the world of intelligible reality and plunges us into an impossible arena, of life in death, and death in life. Repetition is essential to the removal from the world of quotidian reality: as with language, where, as Wittgenstein points out in Philosophical Investigations II, xi, a word repeated often enough changes its aspect, becoming a nonsensical sound or written image without meaning. Repetition effects an intrusion of what lies beyond the order of significant discourse: language, transformed into something empty and opaque, becomes as it were an opening, onto what is there when the world is there no longer and onto what is there before the world is. Freud saw this as the realm of the death drive, Blanchot the field of the neuter, the formless presence of an absence, where one is brought, an impersonal and anonymous no one, to the ‘experience’ of the impossibility of dying.

It may be that one of the most exact embodiments of this state of affairs is to be found in the zombies of George Romero. This, at least, is the view of Steven Shaviro, who sees in these figures a ‘weird attractiveness. . . a perverse, insidious fascination that undermines our nominal involvement with the films’ active protagonists’ [Shaviro, op. cit., p. 96]. The uncanny power of Romero’s films, for Shaviro, lies in the fact that the relations of contiguity, attraction and imitation, that hold intradiegetically between the zombies and their victims, are the same processes as those that serve to bind viewers to the events on screen. The power of the ‘living dead’ trilogy, he considers, is inseparable from ‘an overwhelming affective ambivalence’, achieved in part by going beyond the conventional mechanisms of identification and spectatorial engagement with character and situation. Something odd seems to happen to perception, inasmuch as it itself becomes infected, being ‘transformed into a kind of magical, contagious contact’ [Shaviro, op. cit., p. 96]. What this means in effect is that the films tend to break up the onward movement of the narrative in a way that emphasises at once our inability to identify with the zombies and our being seduced by them, our being drawn into proximity with them. They represent what Georges Bataille has called an ‘inexplicable acuity of horror’, and for him ‘extreme seductiveness is probably at the border of terror’. The reason for the power and fascination of the zombie figures lies perhaps most critically in the curious passivity inflecting their movements, as they approach the house in Night of the Living Dead, for example, or in the opening sequence of Day of the Dead, as they emerge from the side streets and doorways of the infested townscape in Florida, in both cases moaning and pressing inexorably towards the camera. Shaviro notes the way in which ‘Living action is subverted by the passivity of waiting for death; indecision debilitates the self-conscious assertion of the will’. These moments of slowed down perception recur throughout the films and what make them what they are. As I watch the zombies approach, ‘I am uncannily solicited and invested by the vision of something that I endlessly anticipate, but that I cannot yet see’ [Shaviro, op.cit., 98]. The night of the living dead is what Blanchot would call the night of insomnia, where the viewer is caught, as are the protagonists (consider, for example, Mrs Cooper’s death, as she abandons herself to the hands of her daughter, newly risen from the dead), in a paralysed lucidity, which is that of the ‘other night’, that night from which there is no escape, no exit, and where everything has become image. The living dead are neither dead not alive; they are images, from which death and life have withdrawn, leaving nothing but the resemblance of resembling, the resemblance of no one. At the end of Day of the Dead the zombies are left wandering the corridors and caves of the military installation, holding dominion over all, and yet unable to escape the underground bunker or to die. The film begins with Sarah’s dream, in which she is filling in a calendar without dates or months; as she does so, zombie hands push through the wall and grab her around the throat, pulling her tight against the wall. In the very final shots of the film, when she is sitting on the beach of an idyllic looking island, she is filling in the same calendar. There is the obvious implication, at least at first sight of the calendar, that this is a second dream, and that the zombies are about to reappear. What is clear is that the time of the film is one that doubles back on itself, where what comes after is anterior to what comes before: just as the zombies exist in a time that is the absence of time, so, like the main protagonist, does the viewer. This is the time of the dream, and the time of the zombies, a time which expels us from the world into an outside where night holds sway.