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.

ON THE QUESTION OF THE HORROR FILM

The temptation to seek for a systematic explanation of how it is that horror films affect their viewers seems irresistible. Not only does Psycho, for example, combine to enduring effect the visceral destruction of the human body with a comedy of errors, it also succeeds in producing a sense of enigma such that the film may be found endlessly elusive and yet almost within reach. The paradoxical condition that is Norman’s self—Norman is the son of a mother he has both destroyed and become, a self created anew out of an origin he has himself engendered—seems to embody the dynamics of artistic creation as such. It is as though Hitchcock had found in him a figure through whom he could elaborate a dialectics of conflict which so shapes time that we can live—can participate in—the passage of the film’s elapsing, its duration, with unusual attention to the elaborate interweaving of its end and its beginning. Earl Wasserman has noted how, since the end of the eighteenth century, ‘the poet has been required to conceive his own structure of order, his own more-than-linguistic syntax, and so to engage that structure that the poetic act is creative both of a cosmic system and of the poems made possible by that system’ [Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), p.172]. On this view, poetry is addressed to the construction of the syntax that makes it possible, a process seen at its extreme in Mallarmé and T.S. Eliot. One might say that, whatever else may appear to engage the poem’s interest, its fundamental concern is with its own processes of coming into being. The crucial analogy is, of course, with music, a condition to which Psycho unquestionably aspires, an aspiration emphatically reinforced by Herrmann’s score. In other words, Psycho invites over-determination. Both its openness to a complex of literary traditions, and the obvious invitation posed by its title, encourage the search for some more abstract and unifying act of interpretation within which the film may be comprehended. However, such an act of interpretation is incorporated within the film itself, only to be dismissed in the moment of our encounter with the reality of what Mrs Bates actually is—an impossible being, whose mode of existence is that, not of a human psychology, but of cinema. It is as though Hitchcock were reminding us that the meaning of what takes place in Psycho is inherent within the totality of the film, and is not separable from it. It is the film itself which is constitutive of the myth that gives rise to it, and not an externally given system or a set of explanatory paradigms.

Given this order of subtlety, it is hardly surprising that Psycho should have drawn so forcibly to it writers whose conceptual structures were built on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The complex of attraction and repulsion embodied in Norman can be mapped onto the dialectic arising out of the nightmare’s expression of incestuous desire. Similarly, Norman’s mode of being, that of the ‘ne-uter’, his being neither woman ‘nor man’, can be re-described in terms of the objet petit a and the algorithms of fantasy, or the function of lack engendering desire. Norman, one might say, is differánce incarnate. Or, in another idiom, he just is the divided subject. A recent example of the assimilation of Psycho to psychoanalysis is Laura Mulvey’s attempt to locate it in relation to the death drive. She speaks of how the film moves towards death, as it ‘reaches towards stillness and then towards the dead: Mother’s skull appears superimposed briefly on Norman’s features and they merge’ [“Death Drives: Hitchcock’s Psycho”, Film Studies 2 (Spring 2002): 8]. There is, according to Mulvey, a homology connecting terms like ‘stillness’, ‘death’ and ‘ending’, as applied to cinematic narrative, which takes the cinema back to its own secret stillness and the death inherent within it. She would seem to be saying that the achievement of Psycho is to have made this ‘homology’ explicit, inasmuch as it has found for it what Eliot called ‘an objective correlative’—the Bates’ mansion, reverberating with archaic and gothic echoes of the House of Usher and other unheimlich dwellings of the Romantic imagination. However, if one responds in this way to the aesthetic achievement of the film, the claims of the psychoanalytic reading to explain that achievement dissolve. This emerges in relation to the Freudian account of the uncanny. Here, the persuasiveness of the notion, as Freud describes it, derives, not from Freud’s account of incest or the theory of castration, but from the power invested in the tearing out of eyes and sexual ambivalence by the achievement of Hoffmann’s story, ‘The Sandman’. If conviction does result from Freud’s analysis, it arises out of the effective and compelling realisation of the horror of the Sandman in the story itself, a power Freud appropriates as evidence for his explanation of it. In other words, it is Hoffmann’s story which constitutes the imaginative potency of the notion of the uncanny, and so the meaning of its psychic reality, not the Freudian exegesis. So with Mulvey’s essay: the theoretical body of her reading is parasitic on the film, and it is Psycho itself that gives life and illumination to her concepts. It would seem, then, that so far as aesthetic appreciation is concerned, psychoanalytic explanation cannot give us what we are looking for—what we need. This is not only a matter of reductionism, or of confusing a causal explanation with giving reasons for responding as one does. The point is that only for someone who has responded to the aesthetic life of the work do psychoanalytic explanations of that life have pertinence. Psychoanalytic readings presuppose what it is they seek to explain, and they do so by projecting their methods of explanation onto the objects they address. Just as Freud projects onto ‘The Sandman’ a reading whose plausibility the story has already established, a manoeuvre he achieves by re-describing the actions of the Sandman as those of the ‘castrating father’, so Mulvey projects onto Psycho a dynamic that is already internal to the film’s organisation—a drive towards death. The result is not in any sense an explanation of the film, but an attempt to construct what might be called an immanent experience of it. The idiom of psychoanalysis is deployed in a ‘creative’ recounting of the film that seems intended to suggest an empathic fusion between the director’s consciousness and that of the critic.

*

An approach I find exemplary for a clarification of what is involved in the critical appreciation of art is Wittgenstein’s response to the account in The Golden Bough of the Beltane fire festivals in eighteenth century Scotland. His comments come in the latter part of his Remarks on Frazer’s 'Golden Bough', and were probably written around 1948. The Remarks were not intended for publication, and they should not be read as though they made up a systematically revised body of work. Nonetheless, they are of great interest, especially for their treatment of a theme that is also crucial to Frazer, that of religion’s deep roots in human nature.

The pagan Celtic year was divided into two periods, with the new year celebrated at the beginning of November, at the festival of Samhain, or Hallowe’en. The second festival took place six months later, on May Day, or Beltane. They signal changes in the weather, Samhain preceding winter and Beltane the return of summer. Frazer was interested in the Beltane festivals in Scotland, particularly the lighting of huge fires, which took place on this day. He cites a description given by John Ramsey, laird of Ochtertyre, near Crieff, the patron of Burns and friend of Sir Walter Scott:

Towards the close of the entertainment, the person who officiated as master of the feast produced a large cake baked with eggs and scalloped round the edge, called am bonnach beal-tine—i.e. the Beltane cake. It was divided into a number of pieces, and distributed in great form to the company. There was one particular piece which whoever got was called cailleach beal-tine—i.e., the Beltane carline, a term of great reproach. Upon his being known, part of the company laid hold of him and made a show of putting him into the fire; but the majority interposing, he was rescued. And in some places they laid him flat on the ground, making as if they would quarter him. Afterwards, he was pelted with egg-shells, and retained the odious appellation during the whole year. And while the feast was fresh in people’s memory, they affected to speak of the cailleach beal-tine as dead. [J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 618]

Frazer sees the festivals as rituals of purification: the fires, he believes, were thought to burn up and destroy all malign influences, the chief evil being that of witches:

Again and again we are told that the fires are intended to burn up or repel the witches; and the intention is sometimes graphically expressed by the burning of an effigy of a witch in the fire. [Frazer, op. cit., p. 648]

Thus the pretence of throwing someone into the fire, or the burning of an effigy, are traces of something darker. As Brian Clack puts it, ‘previously human beings thought to be witches, or else representing evil forces, were really burned in the flames’ [Wittgenstein, Frazer and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 139]. For Frazer, what remained of the Beltane festival in the eighteenth century was a survival of an earlier practice of sacrificing human beings regarded as witches in the fires.

Wittgenstein does not dismiss Frazer’s views, nor does he dismiss the worth of historical enquiry. As he says: ‘It is now clear that what gives this practice depth is its connection with the burning of a man’ [Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis and Cambrdige: Hackett, 1993), p. 143]. Were it the custom at some festival for men to ride one another, we might see nothing in this but a harmless game reminding us of men riding horses. But if we were to be told that in the past it had been the custom to use slaves in this way, we should then see in the harmless practice of our own times something deeper and more sinister. In other words, historical investigation may reveal sinister antecedents for what survive as apparently simple and homely customs. These antecedents may in turn colour our sense of the customs and make them appear darker and more sinister in the present. However, while this is so, it is nonetheless the case that, as Brian Clack points out, ‘what is crucial for Wittgenstein is that no historical research is required to show that the Beltane festival is sinister’ [Clack, op. cit., p. 142]. For Wittgenstein, what is at stake is the impression made by one specific festival—the Beltane festival—and beyond that impression no further justification for seeing it as sinister is required:

The question is: does the sinister, as we may call it, attach to the practice of the Beltane Fire Festival in itself, as it was carried out one hundred years ago, or is the Festival sinister only if the hypothesis of its origin turns out to be true? I believe it is clearly the inner nature of the modern practice which seems sinister to us, and the familiar facts of human sacrifice only indicate the lines along which we should view the practice. [Philosophical Occasions, pp, 143-145]

The Beltane Festival is a practice exhibiting what Frank Cioffi has called ‘a physiognomy of terror’ [Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer (Cambrdige: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 87], and its meaning is revealed through that same physiognomy. Its ‘inner nature’ is such that the festival simply strikes us as having to do with human sacrifice, whether or not it actually originated there. Clack remarks: ‘the Highland custom strikes us as being like human sacrifice, and it is this which imbues it with its sinister atmosphere’ [Clack, p. cit., p. 144]. The aspect under which we see it just is that of human sacrifice. And this of itself impresses us, because what I see impresses me directly, without the intervention of a hypothesis: ‘If I see someone being killed,—is what makes an impression on me simply what I see, or is it only the hypothesis that here a man is being killed?’ [Philosophical Occasions, p. 149]

Wittgenstein compares the enactment of the festival with a play, since the Beltane festivities have something in common with a piece of theatre. Yet, despite the similarities, the events of the festivals are infused with a mood or state of mind that differs from that of a theatrical performance. Even were the festival performed in the manner of a play, we would still want to ask: what is the meaning of this performance? And irrespective of any interpretation we might give of it, our unease would not be wholly assuaged. The impact of the Beltane festival is not expressible solely in terms of an aesthetic appreciation. There remains inherent in the proceedings a strange meaninglessness (Sinnlosigkeit)—a queer pointlessness. The festival seems to embody an excess or expenditure that eludes conceptual grasp, and to this extent it strikes us as being in some way uncanny (unheimlich) or weird. Cioffi seems to have this in mind when he speaks of how the festival brings about an ‘eruption of the demonic into the quotidian’ (Cioffi, op. cit., p. 92). Clack elucidates Cioffi’s point by reference to two facets of the Beltane rite: the use of a cake to select a victim, and the carnival atmosphere that pervades the event. Wittgenstein finds the manner of drawing lots especially chilling:

The fact that the lots are drawn by the use of a cake is particularly horrible (almost like betrayal by a kiss), and that it strikes us this way is again of fundamental importance for the investigation of such practices. [Philosophical Occasions p. 147]

Something that has homely and convivial characteristics is being used in a new and threatening context. It is not surprising that the familiar takes on a sinister aspect. Similarly, as Clack suggests, ‘the uneasy balance between violence and merriment’ is also what ‘impresses us here, and it comes to the fore in certain accounts of actual human sacrifice’ [Clack, op. cit., p. 146]. He notes, in this connection, accounts of the gaiety of the crowds attending the sacrifice of human beings in Mesopotamia and Mexico, a point reinforced by Wittgenstein:

The concept of a ‘festivity’. We connect it with merrymaking; in another age it may have been connected with fear and dread. [Clack, op. cit., p.147. Cited from Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 78]

Beyond these two points, there is a further aspect of the Highland festivals, having to do with the nature of those who participate in them. To get a sense of the horror of human sacrifice, one has to recognise the kind of creatures human beings are. Wittgenstein asserts that ‘what I see in these stories is nevertheless acquired through the evidence, including such evidence as does not appear to be directly connected with them,—through the thoughts of man and his past, through all the strange things I see, and have seen and heard about, in myself and others’ [Philosophical Occasions, p. 151]. The rites of Beltane are not isolated or idiosyncratic actions of a remote group of people in a distant age. Those who performed them reveal tendencies within ourselves, and their propensities are ones we also share. Clack compares Wittgenstein’s perception here with that found in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novel in which two men of high civilisation, Marlow and Kurtz, experience the awakening of brutal and forgotten instincts.

To give a more general characterisation of Wittgenstein’s discussion of Frazer and the fire festivals, one might say that what he is considering is the seeing or dawning of aspects. At one point, Frazer describes how the participants in the Beltane festival divide a cake into as many portions as there are people present. One of these portions is daubed in black, and all the bits of cake are placed in a bonnet. Everyone, now blindfold, draws out a portion, and whoever draws out the black piece is the devoted person, to be sacrificed to Baal. Wittgenstein remarks of this account that there is ‘something here that looks like the last vestige of drawing lots. And, through this aspect, it suddenly gains depth’ [Philosophical Occasions, p. 145]. Again, after comparing the drawing of lots to betrayal by a kiss, he says:

When I see such a practice, or hear of it, it is like seeing a man speaking harshly to someone else over a trivial matter, and noticing from his tone of voice and facial expression that this man can on occasion be terrible. The impression I receive here can be very deep and extraordinarily serious. [Philosophical Occasions, p. 147]

Rush Rhees has noted a connection between remarks of this kind and Wittgenstein’s discussion of aspects in Philosophical Investigations II, xi, where he speaks of ways in which ‘thought’ and ‘seeing’ run together, ‘not as components of a complex have to be thought of together, but as concepts may “run together”, and what we should mean by “seeing” is also what we should mean by “thinking” here’ [Rush Rhees, “Wittgenstein on Language and Ritual”, in Wittgenstein and his Times, ed. Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), pp. 101-102]. The further significance of Wittgenstein’s position on aspect dawning has been drawn out by Avner Baz:

The most important thing about the aspect is that there is a sense in which it isn’t really there and a sense in which it is very much there; a sense in which to speak about ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ with respect to it is to miss its point and yet another sense in which in seeing it and in giving it expression you are truer to the object than if you stick to objective terms – the terms, that is, of what Wittgenstein calls ‘the language-game of reporting’, or ‘the language-game of information’. [Avner Baz, “What’s the point of seeing aspects?”, Philosophical Investigations 23:2 (April 2000): 106]

The seeing involved in aspect seeing is not seeing in general, but seeing (the emphasis is one Wittgenstein employs throughout his discussion). The ordinary sense of ‘seeing’ goes hand in hand with ‘knowing’ and is to be distinguished from aspect seeing. This is clear from the fact that aspects do not teach us anything about the external world, if ‘teaching about the external world’ is understood on the model of giving objective information. To see an aspect is not see a property of an object, and so the expression of a change of aspect (as in what is perhaps an over-worked example, from duck to rabbit or back again), while it may have the form of a report of a new perception, is not quite such a report. As Baz indicates, Wittgenstein also says that the criterion for what you see, when ‘seeing’ in the sense of seeing aspects is involved, is your representation of what is seen. Thus, when Wittgenstein tells us that he sees a resemblance between the drawing of lots by using pieces of cake and a harsh manner of speech he could be lying, but he could not be mistaken. In this respect, then, the expression of the seeing of an aspect is not a report on objective fact: it is an Äusserung, an avowal.

As Baz notes, there are connections with the Kantian account of aesthetic judgement, and, more specifically, with Cavell’s reworking of that account: ‘Aspects, like beauty, hang somewhere between the object and the subject, and that position is constituted by the expectation, the demand, from our partner to see what we see, in spite of the fact that we have no way of making him realize that he should’ [Baz, art. cit.: 107. The reference to Cavell is: Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy”, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1969), p. 89, footnote]. Though the expression we give to the seeing or dawning of aspects may look like giving a report, it is not used for that purpose. Rather, its aim is the seeking of intimacy. This is not the intimacy in which one reveals something about one’s heart or inner feelings; in giving expression to the seeing of aspects we seek intimacy with someone else by trying to reveal, to bring out, something about the object [Baz, art. cit.: 108]. When we say ‘It’s running!’ in front of a painting of a running horse we are not doing so in order to inform other people: it is a reaction in which people are in touch with one another. It is intimacy in this sense that characterises the predominant tone of Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer, many of which are cast in the form of avowals. The idea of intimacy hangs together with two further points, both of which have relevance to Wittgenstein’s discussion. The first is that aspects are subject to the will. The second is that an aspect is something that strikes us. Dependency on the will means that it makes sense to say: ‘Now see the figure like this’. In real life situations, it makes sense for me to ask you to see, or at least try to see, the resemblance between two faces that has struck me, and it makes sense for Wittgenstein to ask his readers to see the resemblance between the drawing of lots and a manner of speaking. Thus, if there is an air of paradox attaching to the dawning of an aspect, it derives from the fact that the aspect ‘appears over there, in the object, and yet we know we must have had something to do with that appearance’ [Baz, art. cit.: 110]. We know that what has so radically changed, now that we have seen or been struck by the aspect, has in another sense not changed at all. It is as though we were bringing a concept to bear on the object, which is why, as Baz points out, ‘the aspect cannot be our (or the) usual, obvious way of seeing the object, but rather has to be new to us’ [Baz, art. cit.: 111]. The aspect is not obviously there, as a property might be, but neither have we placed it there by a pure act of the imagination. Baz writes:

It is this peculiarity of the aspect – its being something that fits the object, and at the same time something that we bring to the object; its being a way of seeing something anew while remaining faithful to it – that gives expressing it its point in ordinary contexts. [Baz, art. cit.: 111]

It is precisely this dynamic that Wittgenstein respects in his account how he stands towards the fire festivals. His consideration of them is subtly balanced, between the ‘inner nature’ or physiognomy of the rites themselves, and the character of the people who celebrated them. It is for this reason that the festivals can only be understood in a certain spirit, one which we impute to those who performed them from an experience in ourselves.

*

The pertinence of the discussion thus far to the manner of our response to horror cinema may, I think, be established by reference to the work of Jean Louis Schefer. Schefer writes:

It’s true that we – all of us – go to the cinema to see simulations that are terrible to one degree or another, and we don’t go to partake of a dream. Rather for a share of terror, for a share of the unknown, things like that. . . . . Which is to say that, at bottom, the cinema is an abattoir. People go to the abattoir, not to see images coming one after the other. Something else happens inside them: a structure that is otherwise acquired, otherwise possible, painful in other ways, and which is perhaps tied inside us to the necessity of producing meaning and language. [The Enigmatic Body, ed. and trans. Paul Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 120]

Cinema appears, for Schefer, to be less an art-form than a kind of public spectacle of death and deformation—an abattoir, or perhaps a freak-show, or even an execution. An instance of his approach is his discussion of Tod Browning’s Freaks. It is a film that puts before us the tantrums, pain and anger of dwarfs, their emotions expressed in high pitched voices, and reduced, as Schefer puts it, to tiny clenched fists and minuscule tears. And because of the reduction in scale of the persons who suffer, there is invoked in us a sense of revulsion. Our bodies are not like theirs, and the pain of their unrequited love ‘is for us nothing more than the fate of painfully small dolls’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 121]. This he condemns as frightening—the worst kind of butchery. In the cruelty of our sarcasm, we look down on them, and it seems that there is no way for the small protagonist, a being in the process of discovering the world’s bitterness, to escape his fate, when he can’t even reach the door handle. The meaning of the scene dawns on us only later, ‘in the wake of the emotional instability of such tiny bodies. It arrives when we begin to ask, “Why is our hell so small?’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 121].

These comments read like a gloss on a remark Schefer makes elsewhere: ‘The image can only be seen by way of what it lacks’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 120], in which he seems to be giving voice to an idea not unlike Wittgenstein’s, concerning what it is to be struck by an image. For Wittgenstein, there is a kind of double movement, whereby we bring a concept to what we see, so that seeing an aspect might be likened to an echo of a thought in sight or a palpable reverberation of such a thought. And so it is in the case of Freaks, where, according to Schefer, we come to see the film later, as though our thought were echoing from it back towards us. In a subtle and intricate passage, Schefer develops this idea, suggesting that there is a mystery attaching to the meaning we add to an image, which is linked to something we can never be sure about: what we are adding to the image may simply be ‘ourselves’. There is meaning in what in what’s projected, a meaning that is not simply an extension of ourselves, and yet we recognise ourselves in it. Schefer wants to say that words like ‘guilty’, ‘criminal’ and ‘sin’ attach themselves to our involvement in this spectacle:

Crime isn’t the act of extortion in the world. It designates a man tied by signs to the limits of his universe, and this man, guilty even before infringing any laws, is guilty because he reveals himself as a subject in this universe, and because within him there is the consciousness of this world without freedom to which he himself is the link. [The Enigmatic Body, p. 130]

The guilt here is that of an ‘original sin’, arising from the primordial separation that makes meaning possible: guilt is inherent in the very fact of signification. It is this truth that the monsters and freaks of cinema embody. They exist frequently as impossible figures outside conventional meaning who return us to what Schefer calls ‘the interior body’, the enigmatic uniqueness of the individual existence of each one of us that is essentially paradoxical, a grounding of our being outside the law in what is ungraspable. It is this, the being of my being, that the freaks Schefer discusses make me aware of. Dudley Andrew has argued that Schefer ‘lodges the dialectic at the very heart of this primary fact of viewing: at the cinema we are both ourselves and the representation built for us’ [Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 189]. We are, so to speak, subject to the representation and yet at the same time have dominion over it. Hence, the viewing experience is, as Schefer presents it, an interminable repetition of the dawning of aspects, inasmuch as it involves a developing interplay between the confined and the excessive, the doxical and the paradoxical. It is to explore this that he turns to concrete instances, in the manner of the later Barthes, eschewing the systematic structures of explanation to be found in Metz and other film theorists of a similar psychoanalytic persuasion. Again like Barthes, he is prepared to give himself over to the fascination of the image, a memorable example of which is the section entitled The Sausage, another consideration of a moment from Freaks.

A white man, in medium shot, on the right of the frame, stands casually, addressing a black man lying on a table. His right hand is extended, having just placed a cigarette in the black man’s mouth. The figure on the table lacks arms and legs, and is dressed in a white woollen sweater, with a darker woollen strip like a cummerbund around his waist. The sausage man has just lit the cigarette, using only his mouth to strike a match from a box placed on a small plinth in front of him. Schefer asks: ‘Is this still a man, or a monster? Is it a man other than in the face, where he can seem indifferently sublime or horrible?’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 123] Then something strikes him. The figure, reduced to a single swaddled member, suddenly evokes the idea of the Husserlian reduction, or bracketing, of phenomena, that allows us to get at essences. This avowal is then developed further, into a series of more disquieting questions. ‘What does such a sausage do, not about his desires or about sleeping, but what does he do with his excrement?’ [The Enigmatic Body, p. 123] Do we not feel our own arms stuck to our sides as his are? Could it be that we too are that larva, without arms or legs? Could it be that maybe what we see here in this primordial form is a being that is also profoundly ours? Perhaps the cigarette stuck in his mouth is meant to prevent him speaking to that part of ourselves that is indeed that. Did this man ever know the pangs of love? It may be, says Schefer, that a monster is nothing other than a perpetual suffering of love, and its animal lament.

This account of The Sausage corresponds very precisely to Dudley Andrew’s description of how Schefer’s writing ‘answers to the call expressed by the text in the aspirations and gutturals of its voice. To utter an expression is more than to designate a meaning; it is to respond to a situation with a certain cry’ [Concepts in Film Theory, p. 190]. There is evident in Schefer’s avowals an expressive and unhesitating response which is inseparable from being struck by an aspect of something, and it is equally clear that his basic response is one of horror. According to the tradition within which Schefer situates himself, a tradition deriving from Hegel, and whose literary exemplars include Mallarmé, Valéry and Ponge, the act of writing is inseparable from death—the death of things as things. The act of naming, of substituting a word for a thing or sensation, delivers things to us, but only at the cost of subordinating them to concepts and so depriving them of their being. To write is therefore to murder, and every poem is—as T.S. Eliot has it—an epitaph. Maurice Blanchot has made the position clear:

For me to be able to say, “This woman” I must somehow take her flesh and blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost its being─the very fact that it does not exist. [Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Station Hill, 1981), p. 2]

Tzvetan Todorov takes a similar view. He argues that literature cannot be simply a tracing or image of reality, of what is not itself. Words do not have their life in relation to the things to which they refer; for writing to be possible it must be born out of the death of what it is speaking about. And yet this death makes writing impossible, since there is no longer anything for writing to engage with.

Literature can become possible only insofar as it makes itself impossible. Either what we say is actually here, in which case there is no room for literature; or else there is room for literature, in which case there is no longer anything to say. [The Fantastic, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 175]

The conclusion is inescapable: for writing to be literature it must be literature, and, at the same time and in the same sense, not literature. It seems obvious enough that a statement of this kind amounts to a violation of the law of non-contradiction, that is, that a proposition and its negation cannot both be true. Todorov would thus seem to have committed himself to a genuine contradiction, saying of the same thing that it exists and does not exist. It is, however, a contradiction that is more apparent than real. The position derives from an identification of a Kantian concern for the possibility of meaning with the ‘transcendence’ of meaning, with that which is taken to lie beyond meaning. It is an identification—or slippage—that serves to locate the possibility of meaning in its impossibility, and the resulting equivocation, while important for Todorov’s critical endeavour concerning the modern fantastic, is no less fundamental to Blanchot, especially in relation to his exploration of romantic, symbolist and post-symbolist poetry, a poetry he encounters crucially in the work of Hölderlin, Mallarmé and Rilke. What contradiction amounts to here is the proposal that within the actual practice of specific poets a set of conflicting assertions is put into play, and the resulting self-conscious juxtaposition of different perspectives on what is represented calls the status of literature into question. Hence, the modern fantastic does not induce hesitation concerning what it represents; it stands in a hesitant relation to itself. It is an art based on equivocation and ambivalence, and like the poetry of symbolism it attends above all to the process of its own coming into being. In this sense, it may be said to articulate its own impossibility. As Rosemary Jackson has noted, the fantastic understood in this way is based on a split between things that have no names (It, The Thing, and so on) and empty signs, which are devoid of meaning (names such as Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu’ or ‘Nyarlathotep’, or Poe’s ‘bobok’), and whose only reality derives from their own palpability as words [Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy:The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 38-40]. Jackson quotes Sartre, who considers the modern fantastic, as exemplified by Blanchot’s Kafka-like récit, Aminadab, to be a language of non-signifying signs, which lead nowhere. They are means without ends, which appear full and yet are capable of achieving only a terrible emptiness. In Sartre's words:

The law of the fantastic condemns it to encounter instruments only. These instruments are not…meant to serve men, but rather to manifest unremittingly an evasive, preposterous finality. This accounts for the labyrinth of corridors, doors and staircases that lead to nothing, the innumerable signs that line the road and that mean nothing. In the ‘topsy-turvy’ world, the means is isolated and is posed for its own sake. [[Jackson, op. cit., p. 41. Cited from Situations 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 130]

As with the Beltane Fire Festivals, we experience a mode of uncanny meaninglessness, an experience part of whose horror lies in its lack of purpose.

*

I will seek to bring the themes of this essay together by reference to two films, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Carl-Theodor Dreyer’s masterpiece of 1943, Day of Wrath. Hooper’s film contains in its last reel a scene of extraordinary ferocity and madness, in which Sally Hardesty, the one person left alive after the depredations of Leatherface, is subjected to a horrifying ordeal by the crazed family whose captive she is. The living members of the family would seem made up of a grandfather and three grandsons, the old man having worked in his younger days killing cattle in the slaughterhouses of Texas. The grandsons urge him on to repeat his exploits by killing Sally in the same fashion, by hitting her on the head so hard that she drops dead. The old man is too feeble, however, and the hammer falls nervelessly from his withered hand, clattering into a tin bucket, above which Sally is held by the brothers. Her screams are piercing and interminable, driven as she is to unmitigated dementia by fear and horror. The power of the scene derives in part from its combination of the domestic—the brothers are sitting down to a dinner of meat cooked by Leatherface, who takes on the role of mother—and utter derangement. It is quite possible see the film against the background of the Western, and to contrast the heroics of Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking with the abject degeneration of Leatherface. [Compare Horror, ed. Phil Hardy (London: Aurum Press, 1985), p. 298.] One might also contrast the themes of wilderness and civilisation, in order to suggest how the degeneracy of the family involves a confusion of that opposition. Degenerate descendants of the pioneers though they may be, they also represent the values of business (the older brother complains bitterly about the power of big government and the burdens of taxation) which have destroyed the wilderness the pioneers opened up. Nonetheless, the film reaches beyond these possibilities of interpretation and meaning, into a weird carnival of human destruction. The scene is protracted beyond the needs of the narrative, until the exuberance and jubilation of the family and the monotonous screaming of the girl combine to create an effect of suspension. The film seems to fold back on itself, as its kinetic energy slows down in response to the repeated actions of the family and the unvarying agony of the girl. An uncanny meaninglessness attaches to what takes place, and the viewer is brought—as in Schefer’s tableau of the abattoir—not to see images following one after the other, in narrative order, but to share in the unknown, and to sense something of what exists there. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre creates a parodic vision of tribal transgression, in which, for the duration of the festivities, the forbidden becomes the norm and the appeasement of the divine urge to ruin and destroy becomes the ground of action. The sublimity of so outrageous a pretension is acknowledged in the film’s final image, as Leatherface swings his chainsaw in great sweeping arcs above his head in salutation to the rising sun.

Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, made during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, is set in 1623. Witchcraft and the burning of witches are central to it, an issue that ultimately focuses on the figure of Anne. She is the young wife of an elderly priest, Absalon, living in his house with him and his mother, Merete. The first part of the film lays out the indictment for witchcraft of an old woman, Herlofs Marte, and her subsequent capture, trial by torture and burning. Absalon plays a crucial role in this, authorising the indictment, overseeing her trial and signing her death warrant. Following the old woman’s death, the second section of the film centres on the love between Anne and Martin, Absalon’s son, concluding with Absalon’s death. In the final sequence of the film, Anne, Martin, Merete and the elders of the church are gathered around Absalon’s coffin. It is here that Anne is accused of the murder of her husband by witchcraft, and the bewitchment of Martin. The accuser is Merete, the priest’s mother. On hearing the denunciation, Martin abandons Anne, moving around his father’s coffin to stand alongside his grandmother. Anne herself has been a figure of ambivalence throughout the film: there has been a consistent hesitation in the manner of her presentation, and we are never certain as to whether or not she is possessed of demonic powers. In effect, the film offers in Anne a clear focus for what Todorov defines as the classic dynamic of the fantastic—we hesitate between a natural explanation for her actions and a supernatural one. This same hesitation continues now, as she confesses to the crime, a confession that must send her to the stake. The motivation for the confession remains unclear and Dreyer does nothing to establish it more certainly. At the very end, Anne raises her eyes from her dead husband, lying before her, and looks off-screen, an act David Bordwell reads as follows: ‘The look, at nothing, breaking once and for all from the gazes of the social and natural worlds, defines her entry into a new realm’ [The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley: University of califormia Press, 1981), p. 139]. Bordwell takes this view to be supported by the film’s transition at this point to the Dies Irae scroll, which intervenes finally to break off the narrative in a moment of abrupt intervention, as the words of the scroll move up the screen, accompanied by images and music. Bordwell contends that the image supplementing the first verse, showing souls being transported to heaven, and that supplementing the second verse, of men and women kneeling at the foot of the cross, is an implicit act of absolution. Anne is absolved in this way of whatever she has done, and the film’s hesitations about her motives are negated by fiat [The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer, p. 140]. However, the final image of the film is of the black cross superimposed over the scroll. The cross remains after the scroll has left the screen, placed on a white ground (in a manner reminiscent of the ending of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest). As we watch this final image, two diagonal pieces appear at its top, pointing downward, a witch emblem, evoking the cross present at the immolation of Herlofs Marte. The cross signals to us that Anne has similarly been burnt alive in the name of the cross. The question of absolution remains as uncertain as the question of Anne’s spiritual powers, and the juxtaposition of these images in no way resolves it.

Day of Wrath points in exactly the same direction as do the descriptions of the Beltane Fire Festivals. What is deep and sinister in Dreyer’s film arises from the eruption of the demonic into a world that is recognisable in its stability or order, while in the people themselves there is something that induces an impression of terror and sense of dread. The awfulness of the solemnity with which the torture of an old woman is conducted, the fact that when she is burnt her immolation is accompanied by a choir of young boys, the grave hypocrisy of Absalon’s piety, the implacable hatred visible in Merete’s face whenever she sees or speaks to Anne, the failure of Martin to support the woman whom he has assured of his love when confronted by Merete’s denunciation—these confirm one’s sense of how human beings are, ‘of what I have seen and heard about, in myself and others’. The meaninglessness of what we see, and the lack of redemptive significance in it, return us to the darkness within ourselves. In other words, Day of Wrath betrays itself to its own undoing. The film is split from itself, in a movement of double negation that turns it towards the outside, the exterior, beyond language and concept, where there is no intimacy, no place to rest. The work says the nothing that is the condition of its simultaneous possibility and impossibility. And this nothing is made palpable in the final image of the cross. Here, too, we may be struck by the pertinence of Freud’s discussion of the uncanny: das Unheimliche, in art as in life, is the occurrence of a consciousness that is attenuated, incapable of mastery over its own negativity. Like the narrator of Poe’s 'The Premature Burial' or the protagonist of Dreyer’s Vampyr, it is as though in certain horror films we were solicited by images from which we cannot escape, and which condemn us to the ultimate horror—that of the impossibility of dying.

CLINT EASTWOOD: AVATAR OF THE UNDEAD

Clint Eastwood has entered into the pantheon of great American directors, a director of Westerns and thrillers, though not only of them. The reputation for Westerns derives, of course, from his collaboration with Sergio Leone, for thrillers from his work with Don Siegel. Eastwood also has a reputation that is well established in the university. A significant number of books on him have emerged over the last few years, considering variously his role as a Hollywood author, his place in the history of the Western and the significance for gender and identity politics of the image of masculinity evident in his films. There is, however, another aspect to his work which, to my knowledge at least, has not been much commented on, and that is the importance to certain of his films of a motif more usually to be found in the cinema of horror. The motif I am referring to has to do with the un-dead, those who are between death and life, who are neither living nor dead: vampires, zombies, the resuscitated. There is an interval beyond or outside the normal world, the world of ‘reality’. It is an interval between life and death, in which the living are not the living, and the dead not the dead. This interval is an imaginative in-between, a space constitutive of the fictional worlds of many of the greatest works of horror, whether in literature or film. I want to say, not that Eastwood is making a surreptitious kind of horror film, unrecognised by his devotees, but that to see certain of his films in relation to this kind of interval is to bring out something of great pertinence to them.

What I have in mind is borne out by one of his more schematic films, High Plains Drifter (1973). The opening of the film is a very long shot of mountains and desert, both shimmering in a heat haze. A figure appears out of the wavering and uncertain outlines of the haze, until a man in a dark hat and a long brown duster becomes clearly visible, riding towards the camera. This figure, played by Eastwood, is that of The Stranger, and as he enters the small lakeside town of Lago the camera remains with him.

There follows in the next ten to fifteen minutes a true carnival of violence, in which he guns down three of the town’s thugs, and rapes a woman who dares to challenge him and his methods. Following this, it gradually becomes clear during the next half-hour or so of the film that the stranger was once marshall of Lago and that he was bull-whipped to death by three killers, led by the brutal and sadistic Stacey Bridges (Geoffrey Lewis). The killing took place on the orders of the town council, who wished to hide the fact that their gold-mining operation was sited illegally on government land, a fact the marshall, Joe Duncan, was ready to report to the authorities.

After the killing, the council had the killers arrested and confined to the State Penitentiary. The stranger’s return coincides with the killers’ release from prison. They have vowed to take their revenge on the good people of Lago. The council members hire the stranger to defend the town, which he agrees to do. The result is a total upsetting of the town’s civic, financial and legal structure. In the outcome, having had the town painted red and its name altered from Lago to ‘Hell’, the stranger appears to abandon the place and its inhabitants to the mercies of the vengeful killers who are about to descend upon it. Ultimately, the stranger does indeed kill the three men who killed him, and as he kills Stacey the killer looks at him in bewilderment: ‘who are you?’, he asks, a refrain taken over from the Leone Westerns. The stranger leaves the town, his name now inscribed by his one friend, Mordecai, on his tombstone. He rides off into the haze from which he came. The stranger’s identity has been established, and yet the means by which this has come about call into question the very notion of identity.

It is here that a comparison with the horror film is pertinent. The stranger has returned from the dead. Although he is not a vampire, he shares with the vampire one fundamental characteristic: he is one of the un-dead, an impossible figure, whom none of the townspeople recognise, and yet he walks among them and they knew him well during his life. The stranger is beyond death, in that he has risen again, and he is at the same time not yet dead, in that his ultimate death will come only after his name has been written on his tombstone. He is, one might say, between two deaths. He is in the world, but not of it. He is obedient to a law which is not that of the world, and despite the dangers he confronts he cannot be destroyed by those who want his death. Indeed, he is referred to at various times by one or other of the townsfolk as a devil or a demon, a point of view he himself seems to reinforce by re-naming the town Hell.

In effect, Eastwood has created here an inverted world, a ‘topsy-turvy’ world, in which the ethical devolves not upon the living, but the dead—despite the violence, and violation, that attends the actions of the dead. The conventions of the Western are retained, but at the same time they are curiously distorted. It is as though the film were addressing not so much the appearance of the Western, but an idea of it. The film incites the viewer to ask what is beyond. It leads us not to ‘see’, but to ‘look’. The effect of showing us something, an image of the West, of American greed and capital, that is so clearly marked as unreal, is to bring home to us that the world in which we think we are at home, the world of the Western as traditionally understood, is itself no less unreal. The reality we take for granted is itself already an inverted image, and in this world also we have no home.

I said earlier that High Plains Drifter is a schematic film. By this I mean that in it Eastwood shifts our way of looking at the Western as such, and by so doing tries to re-envisage the myths that underpin it, the myths of American expansion, individualism and the unquestioned benefits of the creation of wealth. What becomes visible as a result of this is an ideology that is itself in the service of death. The horror of America, its exploitations and exterminations, not to mention genocide and slavery, is seen to be internal to the action, as though it were an unspoken assumption of the film’s fictional world. The procedures of High Plains Drifter are revisited in Pale Rider (1985). The pale rider is Death, the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, and he is summoned up in answer to the prayer of a young girl, Megan, one of a group of traditional panhandling gold-miners whose family and livelihoods are threatened by the new corporate capitalism and industrialised mining methods of the LaHood Corporation, run and owned by the ruthless Coy LaHood (Richard Dysart). The film refers explicitly to High Plains Drifter, both by way of its central character, a stranger who is already dead, a figure known only as The Preacher (played by Eastwood), and with respect to elements of the plot-line, which reprise those of the earlier film. Not only that, but the theme or motif of the man who is already dead is here doubled. At one point, The Preacher strips down to take a bath, and we see him from the back. A number of scars left by bullets are visible, and it is obvious that the bullets must have passed through his heart and lungs. The significance of this emerges during the final shoot-out between The Preacher and the brutal Marshall, Stockburn (an admirable performance by John Russell), and his deputies, who LaHood has sent for. At the climax of the gunfight, Stockburn sees that the man who is approaching him is a man whom he has previously killed, and who has now returned for him. The Preacher shoots Stockburn in precisely the same places on the body as he himself was shot by Stockburn. A shot of Stockburn from behind as the bullets pass through him puts great emphasis on this. Stockburn sinks to his knees in his final agony, and looking directly up at The Preacher, who is standing over him, gasps out in amazement and wonder: ‘You!’ Without replying, The Preacher finishes him off with a bullet between the eyes, in the manner prescribed for zombies in Night of the Living Dead. By dying at the hands of a man whom he has already killed, Stockburn can be seen, in retrospect, to have been himself already dead from the time of that first killing. Like the father in the dream recounted by one of Freud’s patients, he was dead, but he did not know it. It is part of the excellence of John Russell’s performance that he able to intimate the extent to which Stockburn is subject to impending death without being conscious of what is awaiting him. Stockburn’s every gesture, the heaviness in his tone of voice, the very movement of his eyes, are all expressive of a mortification that seems in the throes of congealing around him.

This pattern is repeated in Unforgiven (1992). Although William Munney (Eastwood) is not physically dead, at the start of the film he is morally dead to his former life, of whiskey, gun-fighting and killing. He is re-born into his former condition, at the end, when he confronts and annihilates the sheriff of the town of Big Whiskey, Little Bill (Gene Hackman). The conclusion of Unforgiven is shot in a mode that differs markedly from the rest of the film. The darkness, the emphasis on rain and shadow, and the sepia tone given to the image, all suggest a shift in register, from the narrative of the earlier part to a kind of suspension or stasis in which dying and the moment of death are fore-grounded. The film is ambiguous and complex, and much of its subtlety derives from how it makes present the problematic and uncertain nature of its fictional world. The "unforgiven" of Unforgiven is one who is neither forgiven nor not forgiven. He is, he has his being, in the meanwhile, the interval. He is a man missing from his presence, just as he is missing from his place. To invoke Blanchot, one might say that the man with no name is a man whose name is a name for the nameless, one to whom is attached the murmur of the il y a, the place without place.

In these three Westerns at least, Clint Eastwood has achieved an art that comes to us from outside, that engages with the very ground of representation itself.