Wittgenstein's pictures

A___ always wanted a picture of Wittgenstein on her wall. Not that she’d read much of his writings. But that craggy face seemed to incarnate, to be the concentrated expression of everything ‘philosophical’. Philosophy was about terrible solitude, asceticism, a certain otherworldyness. All these were present in his features. That wide stare could cut through layers of error, was coldly unconcerned with everyday preoccupations, and could search into the soul of things. Its true, Wittgenstein’s head is seductively iconic, but it’s a quick misleading seduction, allowing familiar preconceptions a sensible anchorage.

Wittgenstein himself is both fond and chary of pictures.

‘The human body is the best picture of the human soul’. Interpreted one way, is not this the very image of error? Doesn’t Adorno slate the occultists for their impoverished notion of the soul as no more than a kind of opaque, insubstantial body? Allow me to quote those more knowledgeable than myself:

The ‘ghost’ of a person, for example, is merely a second body – hazy, translucent, perhaps lacking a usual relation to space and substance but a kind of body nonetheless. Thus, for the spiritualist the so-called ‘beyond’ – the impossible ‘beyond’ which subtends space and time – is little more than the ‘here and now’ with its weight and volume subtracted .

Instead of grasping the radical difference of the soul, and its indifference to some of the calibrations and customary idioms of the physical world, we fall for a familiar, easy-to-grasp image. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, ‘pictures hold us captive’. The pictures W. had in mind were those embedded in our grammar, in the forms of our language generally. We are repeatedly seduced by these images. But this ‘seduction’ is also more personal to W:

I took some apples out of a paper bag where they had been lying for a long time; I had to cut off and throw away half of many of them. Afterwards as I was copying out a sentence of mine the second half of which was bad, I at once saw it as a half-rotten apple. And that’s how it always is with me. Everything that comes my way becomes for me a picture of what I am thinking about.

There are losses both ways: The apples are turned into a mere cipher; thought is freighted with a sensuous content it does not need. Clearly it's with a certain unhappiness and frustration that W. says this, as if his thought is being seduced by images, pictures. Pictures are where the flagging arduous effort of pure mind comes to rest, a little oasis of seeming clarity; but instead of resting before pursuing the concept onto airless and colourless regions, its merely rests content.

This is perhaps a not unfamiliar philosophical tale. We are libidinally bound to images, at a pre-cognitive level, and this attachment, this fastening, interferes with conceptual activity. The image is a lure. Its prettiness and symmetry offer themselves to us, lewdly. We eschew the chaste abstractions of conceptual argument, and our thought is diverted into the Imaginary.

And yet, of course, Wittgenstein makes constant and illuminating use of pictures. Sometimes, this is for what I’d call mere pedagogical utility, as when, in getting a child to add up, the teacher shows pictures of sweets not bare numbers. Once understanding is reached, the sensible illustration can be ditched. Here the picture is just a glove for a concept already known. When W. says, for example, ‘“Raisins may be the best part of a cake; but a bag of raisins is not better than a cake,” we’re dealing with something like this.

But is there a thinking in pictures that is neither a lure nor a mere illustration. Surely there is, and it is something found in, amongst others, Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin. One intuition of mine about this ‘picture-thinking’ is that pictures are ‘place-holders’ for concepts. W. talks about ‘pains at the birth of a new concept’. You have the sense in reading W.’s notes of this ‘movement towards’ the ‘new concept’ – a kind of dull, repetitive striving. It’s like some formless energy in search of tinder. And the tinder it finds is the picture. The picture crystallises the striving of thought. It’s not the concept itself, but can be slowly unpacked, unfolded into conceptual terms later. The Figurative holds the place open for the conceptual. The image locks the incipient thought into sensible form – an image – before the thought escapes the thinker. The image is a snare trap.
Figuration is prefiguration.

Here is Benjamin again: ‘Rot’ is like a butterfly alighting upon each shade of the colour red. The image of the butterfly alighting on different flowers is somehow the semblance of  a concept we cannot yet name. All this is rather Hegelian, or pseudo-Hegelian. It assumes that thought strives towards purely conceptual articulation and that sensible/ aesthetic representations can only be incomplete, cognitively deficient forms of such higher understanding.

To return to Benjamin’s image of the butterfly, we repeat the basic question: Could what Benjamin says here have been expressed in ‘conventional’ conceptual terms, a series of propositions recognisable to an academic philosopher? What would be lost or gained in such an operation? Does this picture simply mark a failure to attain conceptual clarity?

Surely this ‘failure’ is precisely the (philosophical) point. The meaning of the image can be arrived at only through the detour and delay of unpacking. We unpack it like this: The butterfly draws from each flower, cross-pollinates, touches without violence and so on. The butterfly does not exhaust what it alights on. The butterfly is little more than a means of contact, a conduit of the ‘attraction’ between flowers. Benjamin gives us a picture of a primary tact between word and thing. In other words, the image asks to be unravelled in its manifold implications, and this unravelling releases a number of possible thoughts, ‘approaches’.

A couple of points: In unpacking the image we are not simply referred to what is thought about, we participate in the activity of thought. We retrace or re-enact the movement of the thinking subject. There is no illusion of an object that is simply present. The butterfly – word ‘attraction’ (it is precisely not an ‘equivalence’): does this not imply, if we draw on our knowledge of Walter Benjamin’s other work, a sense of a world knit together by resemblances, and does not this knitting together repose in turn upon a philosophical position or insight? This position, in nuce, is that ‘the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived’. A form of thinking must be developed that does justice to this insight.

On the one hand this is a kind of throwback: to that pre-modern ‘episteme’ wherein resemblance is the category that brings the varied particulars of the world into endless montages of attraction. The world was a storehouse of figures, where the shape of a plant leaf unlocked a thousand analogies; in the structure of a crystal the secrets of the macrocosm were writ small. Benjamin does not want to ‘revert’ to this pre-modern cognition, but sees in it reserves which have not simply been spent or refuted by history.

He (and surely Adorno also) see in it a method of thought which does not only insert things into pre-fabricated categories, which respects difference even as it aspires to unity. This paradoxical thinking perceives only flashes of correspondence between things. This flash does not posit an identity but reveals an ‘aspect’ or interval. And so whereas the pseudo-Hegelian idea was that thought must renounce the sensible in remaining true to its inherent abstraction, here it is only by renouncing conceptual abstraction that thought remains true to its object.

The above, which is itself rather too archly full of pictures, are only scratchings at the surface of questions raised by the work of Walter Benjamin, who has been a curiously mooted presence over at Charlotte Street. Reading recently, once more, Jean Selz’s essay on Benjamin here, I’m reminded that in many many ways he remains the thinker closest to my heart.