language, thought, & (of course) wittgenstein

Thanks very much to Gary Norris and Nick Piombino for their comments and links to my comments and links regarding Gary's elaboration of Nick's koan-like "the final thought of thought / is freedom from thought." I'm greatly looking forward to Gary's response -- especially to see how he's going to bring Zaum poetry to bear on the discussion -- and I should probably let him speak before I make further comments, but I want to set down couple of notes before I forget them (or run out of time, which eventually amounts the same thing . . .)

-- One thing I love about Nick's remarks (and the word "remark" certainly doesn't do the contents of Nick's postings justice) is that, to me at least, they provide enough logical rigor and conceptual specificity to invite (welcome) the reader into an unexpectedly open space of co-creation. For example, "the final thought of thought / is freedom from thought" unfolds with an unmistakable logical necessity. How could the final thought of thought not be freedom from thought? It's as if Nick's remark had been lying dormant at the intersection of the very concepts of thought and freedom and finality all along. And yet, as Gary's elaboration beautifully demonstrates, once "inside" the remark, each instance of the word "thought" becomes a kind of prism refracting the others' light. It's up the reader, now, to arrange those prisms in a fixed order informed by her or his own poetic or philosophical sensibilities -- or to let them continue whirling about.

-- Gary cites Wittgenstein's Tractatus as separating thought and language. Oh dear, I should read up -- it's been over a year since I last opened the Tractatus, and I don't recall either an explicit or implicit assertion to this effect. As for the later Wittgenstein, I would tentatively claim that the arguments against the possibility of a private language -- i.e., Wittgenstein's "proofs" that it doesn't make sense to say things like "only I know how red appears to me" -- make a thought/language distinction untenable, at least inasmuch as the distinction is based on the model of a subjective in-itself which uses language as a tool to express/represent its thoughts. As for the Tractatus, I recall that I received a similar impression from the assertions that (to paraphrase) "the subject is not to be found within the world, but is rather a limit of the world" and "the limits of my language are the limits of my world". But then, the fact that I encountered the later Wittgenstein before reading the Tractatus may have significantly colored my reading of the latter.