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March 13, 2005
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 8
art 1
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Part 8
Illusory Limits
Styles: Isn't there a desired sense of finding the limit? Finding what is precisely the limit of a technology?
Richard: Yes, this is one of the great illusions under which we all labor, that somehow all things are in process, and not just in process, but also in progress, so that at some point there is a culmiination. We imagine that at some point, the universe will, as it were, click into place.
The last star will be discovered; the last physical law will be known; the last...well, you make your own list. This obviously has to be an illusion. Why do I say it obviously has to be an illusion? Well, I think I would go back to Wittgenstein, who I think was here before us earlier.
I think at one point Wittgenstein speculates on whether or not language itself is finite, and of course concludes very easily--he didn't speculate very long--that language is not finite for the following reason. If language were finite, then there is some presumable ultimate utterance.
You and I could perhaps discover it today, and then having made the ultimate utterance, that would be an end of language and everything would be repetition thereafter. However, once the ultimate utterance is discovered, then we can make an utterance about it, which then becomes the post-ultimate utterance, so that there can be no end to language anymore than there can be an end to numbers.
And since technology essentially is language, concretized in certain ways, the same has to be true of it. The ultimate reach of our technology, whatever it is, will simply suggest more reaches. The real problem of being a human being, it may be the thing that vexes us and disorders us so much--we know that we have limits, but we have no way of knowing what those limits are.
I can remember when I was a kid, no one had yet run the four-minute mile, and everybody was looking forward to the four-minute mile. And now, I guess somebody did, and we said, "OK, great," but we did not say, "No, that's it, right there." And now someone has run faster. Now, can this go on forever? Obviously not.
Will somebody run the mile in zero? No, this is not going to happen. Somewhere there is, and we imagine this, somewhere we imagine a boundary, like the speed of sound or some such thing. But we recognize that even to imagine that boundary is absurd. That would require us to say that somewhere there is a natural law which says, "Human beings can move only so fast," so we are clearly limited, but we have no boundaries.
Styles: Wittgenstein says that what we can say we should be able to say clearly, but he also says, "What we can't say?
Richard: "?we shouldn't say at all?
Styles: "?we have to pass over in silence."
Richard: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muߠman schweigen? schweigen? excellent word.
I'm troubled by that. I'm a big admirer of Wittgenstein because I'm an admirer of smart people, and he is certainly a smart person. But it seems to me, in fact, that most of what we say is what we cannot say. What he meant by that, I'm inclined to suspect, was a kind of very logical positivist sort of thing.
That is to say that certain of our utterances have no meaning, not that they are true or false, but they have no meaning, and when the poet tells us "Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth, this is all you know and all you need to know," we say, "Bull, come on I need to know quite a lot more than that."
Nevertheless, we do say that truth is beauty and that beauty is truth, and we do mean something by it, but we really cannot say it, as we cannot say it in the sense that we can say this be of all in bodies--and I think Wittgenstein wanted to remind us--"Don't shoot off your mouth and be silly." But I think that he was wrong.
It is the business of language to be silly in that respect; it is to make that world about which we really nicht sprechen. There is "no speaking of it," and I think that Wittgenstein's influence, largely because of that very sentence, has in some ways been very baleful.
It has indeed undergirded the notion that literacy is the matter of writing a letter of application for a job. This is essentially to say the same thing, and it also has led to a kind of disintegration of our sensitivity to metaphor.
I wrote recently a sardonic article about somebody and his influence on somebody else, and in the course of it, I used a metaphor. I talked about a meeting in the main street of a small town in the West, where somebody faces down the angry rabble. And furthermore, says that his friend, Pete the Persuader, has just passed into town and maybe they had better talk to him.
Now Pete the Persuader was a little metaphor in this story for this person whom I was quoting. Somebody knew the man, the original, and sent him a copy of the article, and he wrote back saying, "Well, of course I can't be held responsible for what some zany Superintendent of Schools in Tulsa thinks my words mean; however, the future is coming and we can't hide our heads in the sand."
He did say that, but at the end of his letter, he reached the summation of his defense. He said, "Furthermore, I've never been in Tulsa in my life." Now I ask myself, what kind of man is this? How is this man thinking? Does he imagine that I imagined that he was in Tulsa with a six gun on his hip? What on earth is going on here?
Well I know what's going on. The man happens to be what's called a futurist, and he's terribly interested in an imagined society where there is no literacy but still where people are very knowledgeable because they will punch up computers in some way or another. And I think he has immersed himself in the kind of non-metaphoric language that is very popular among us. This is nothing new; it has always been around; it's always been possible.
You remember that Dr. Johnson, who was frightened by the coming of the Romantics--he was frightened by a lot of things, I guess--objected that their language was prosaic and ordinary and that if poetry continued in their tradition, it would end up sounding that way.
And he invented a little example of what poetry would be like in the future because of the romantic poets, and his little quatrain is easy to remember:
I put my hat upon my head, And walked into the Strand, And there I met another man, Whose hat was in his hand.
And that's the entire poem. Now Johnson was wrong about the future of poetry, poetry didn't become that and never will become that, but a lot of language has, in fact, become that.
Styles: Our prose has become that.
Richard: Our prose has become that and there is this very pedestrian literalness in our prose and even our understanding. I have students who cannot?cannot sometimes make any sense of a metaphor.
I had a marvelous example in a class recently on the King James translation of the Bible. Somebody had read, they all had read the Book of Ecclesiastes; didn't find much in it; seemed to be saying all the same thing all the time. They couldn't really distinguish where the text was any different from anywhere else.
I said, "You noticed that the heart of the fool was in the House of Mirth." "Oh, yeah, yeah." "Well, what's that about?" "The same thing, you know; it's in favor of good; it's against evil." And I asked a very simple question, "Now, what exactly is the House of Mirth?"
Complete silence in class. "Is it a house?" Baffled silence continues. Finally he said, "Well, probably not." Probably not. Get that. Probably not. Well this engendered quite a long discussion and finally someone suggested, "It's not really a house at all. It's just a way of talking about something else, and the heart isn't a heart at all either."
And it took a whole class to get at the metaphor, a very simple metaphor. They don't think that way and they haven't been taught that way. They have been taught, What is reading? Reading is that process which leads to comprehension score, and they didn't think that was a fair question because it wouldn't appear on a comprehension test.
Styles: Perhaps they would have even more difficulty understanding what Heidegger means by language being our House of Being.
Richard: Oh yes. This would not be because the word being, you see, is entirely a metaphor, and it has no meaning whatsoever for them. They understand about living. They know they're alive; they're pretty sure of that; but if one would ask them to distinguish between their living and their being, I don't know where they would go.
Styles: Would they go to language?
Richard: Well, no, they wouldn't. They would go to silence. Isn't that interesting? I never thought of it that way, but that's where my class went in the face of the House of Mirth?Silence.
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End of Interview
Note: I compared the text of the first five parts to the audio supplied to me and made a number of significant changes--additions of text not in the transcript, altered punctuation and emphasis to clarify meaning. You may want to reread these.
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Posted by witnit at March 13, 2005 12:15 PM
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