Brett Bourbon

Thinking with Words: A Literary Groundwork provides a unique foundational introduction to the depths and glories of literature and its study. It is a book about why literature matters, and why it always will. Readers will explore the roots of literature and art in the interplay between life and language, actions and events, and culture and texts. This is not a book about theories, but a book about our complex engagement with language and literature, from which theories, interpretations, and insight arise. As a ground work, confusions are dissolved, and analytical tools for thinking are developed and honed. Readers will discover that their ways of talking about literature can powerfully contribute to their ways of talking about life. The book re-situates literary studies within fundamental arguments about language, knowledge, and ethics. Thinking with Words is essential reading for anyone interested in not just literature but in art, culture, and language.

Jane Austen and the powers of description. Disciplines of description -- Reading ignorance into sense -- Elizabeth Bennet, the Socrates of descriptive reason -- Frank and impertinent: paradiastolic descriptions -- An excursus on Richard Rorty and Lady Catherine -- Fanny's garden thoughts -- Reasoning by description -- Coda: "Part hawk, part man" -- The apprehension of power and life. The cook and the count: a psychological anthropology of tyranny -- Is power coercive? -- A parable of action and event -- The afflictions of life: Montale's poetic description of flux -- What is a life? -- A concluding postscript.

In my dissertation I explore how literary art can function as a kind of cognitive philosophy. I begin with the proposition that Artificial Intelligence programs, and the game worlds they spawn, attempt to articulate an aesthetic with ontological force, poems to blow our heads off. This possibility or promise frames my examination of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, and my own description of a hypothetical machine I have designed that generates a fictional future within which it figures itself. I analyze Finnegans Wake as a philosophical text, and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations as describing an aesthetic. Both texts do not articulate a theory of meaning, but model meaning within what Wittgenstein called our "forms of life," our attunement within our language, culture, history, psychology, biology, and so on. How is it possible for human beings to inhabit this 'our' at all? How can I use an 'our' as mine? In writing towards and at the limits of language, I am trying to speak an 'our' as our species-being, and it this speaking enact the particularity of meaning instantiated through my particular involvement in language. Both Investigations and the Wake explore the limits of what it means to be human by examining how linguistic meaning works through the interactions between sense and nonsense. I analyze how the shifting between language games, between sense and nonsense described and enacted within Finnegans Wake and Philosophical Investigations articulates a multivalent temporal sense. I investigate the ways in which the limits between sense and nonsense construct a grammar of temporality that is simultaneously a literary aesthetic and a theory of mind. Time becomes a grammatical effect. The theoretical machine I have designed pressures the interpretative limit between the animate and the inanimate and between sense and nonsense toward the ontological limits described by causal languages. My dissertation is an attempt to describe the ways in which such grammars determine what counts as human.

The academic dominance of cultural studies and the increasing interest and significance of cultural conflict in our world has encouraged various theories of culture, the most pervasive being theories of transculture and hybrid cultural forms and entities. In this guest column, Bourbon argues that all such trans theories are fundamentally flawed and distort the very idea of culture. His essay analyzes the concept of transobjects and transcultures, looking both at the assumptions supporting such objects and ideas and at their explanatory uses. This discussion leads to one on the relationship between texts and contexts. Most cultural theories, and all transcultural theories, confuse the relationship between texts and contexts, specifically misusing the idea of the conditions of possibility, while relying on various forms of personification. Bourbon both criticizes these ideas and also offers a more modest idea of culture, along with specific suggestions on how to study and understand what we call “products of culture,” including fictions and ourselves.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wittgenstein’s PrefaceBrett BourbonIn his preface to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein admits his failure to make his book anything more than an interrelated collection of remarks: "After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into... a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks." The fragmented character of Investigations is matched by its other formal oddities and difficulties: its metaphors, its cryptic evocative obscurity about some things and its linguistic precision about others, its dramatization of philosophical positions in stories, in hypothetical worlds, and in the role of the interlocutor(s). Our initial and continual problem in reading Investigations is to understand the reason for its form, and to justify this form relative to its philosophical concerns and methods. I will argue that the justification of the form of Investigations comes down to a single question: how do we take up Wittgenstein's example—in thinking and in confusion—without mimicking him?IThe justification pursued in the preface bears affinities with theological justification, defined as our becoming righteous relative to God, as Calvin characterizes it, "an acceptation, whereby God receiving us into [End Page 428] favour, taketh us for righteous" (Institutes III. xi. §2).1 Righteousness as a mark of acceptation, the very tone of "righteousness" and God's power of acceptation, have no direct counterparts in Wittgenstein's philosophy. Philosophical justification does not have a doctrinal foundation that would establish any particular content nor any special relation between the pursuit of that justification (through philosophy) and its fulfillment, even hypothetically, in some possible acknowledgment of righteousness. The seriousness betrayed by Investigations need for justification, however, is expressed in the moral fervor of Wittgenstein's philosophizing. It is also his philosophical goal to encourage a kind of acceptation that the ground of our involvement in the world, in what constrains and confuses us, is no more than how we live and what we are: "Instead of the unanalyzsable, specific, indefinable; the fact that we act in such-and-such ways, e.g. punish certain actions, establish the state of affairs thus and so, give orders, render accounts, describe colours, take an interest in other's feelings. What has to be accepted, the given—it might be said—are facts of living" (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, §630; c.f. PI, p. 226d).2 The translators comment in a footnote that a variant for "facts of living" in Wittgenstein's manuscript is "forms of life." What has to be accepted are forms of life.The form of Investigations is justified as part of a discovery, with or without a supporting theology, of how to move ourselves toward some greater form of perfection (although not to reach it). The Protestant cast of this justification, in Wittgenstein's case, is just (and I wouldn't want to extend it further) that while this justification is achieved by virtue of our effort, it is not effort towards the world, but towards our intransigent will, and that the grace that might enable our work is less a gift, than a condition within which we can struggle.3 Thus, "what has to be overcome," in philosophy, "is not the difficulty of the understanding but of the will" (CV, p.17).4 Philosophy for Wittgenstein is a form of self-education. One works on the will in order to see differently: but the will is neither a thing nor a faculty. Working on the will is not a psychological project of self-reform, but a reconstitution of our attitude toward what we take as necessary. We can describe such attitudes with the vocabulary of the passions by which express or curb our will: devotion, derision, hope, fear, confidence, indignation, pride, repentance, emulation, gratitude, consternation, daring, timidity, and so on. And thus "philosophy is a work on the will" is kind of maxim to help us remember a kind of attitude, purpose, and justification.I will derive an agnostic notion of justification from its Protestant [End Page 429] theological form, retaining its moral force and claim on our person, but without psychologizing it, with minimal doctrinal content, and without God. This is...

A poem is not particular in the way a painting is particular. A copy of a poem is still the poem, while a copy of a painting is not the painting. But a poem is still particular, since it seems to be constituted by a specific set of words in a specific order such that to alter that order or any of those words is to make a new poem. Marianne Moore begins her poem “An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish” in the following way: She might have revised this and replaced “perpendicularity” with “verticality.” This says the same thing, but it is not the same poem. The particularity of a poem, relative to the words that make it up, constitutes a...