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.A reader appreciates the aesthetic intention behind a poem of infinite variation while at the same time recognizing the poet’s achievement in practical (or indeed, logical) terms as a non-event.In similar fashion we can understand Wittgenstein’s anxiety as a desire to make his thought processes wholly transparent to the reader as well as himself, and simultaneous reluctance to abandon the principle of spatial and temporal sequence as a determinant of meaning.Or simply a shrug of the shoulders that thoughts linked in different orders give rise willy-nilly to different compound concepts.Whichever it may be, from the amount of attention he devotes to the topic of succession it is clear that Wittgenstein recognizes an important distinction between organic thoughts that are complete in themselves (numbered, and by implication instantaneous) and groups of thoughts arranged in an order after the fact to make statements of a hybrid logic that all the same cannot be said to correspond to a single train of thought, but only to the appearance of continuous thought.The same paradox of meaning by juxtaposition is addressed by Whitehead in philosophy, in the movies by Eisenstein (the pseudologic of montage of unrelated images), and in music by Cage, Boulez (for example the quip “Messiaen does not compose—he juxtaposes”) and Stockhausen (Momente).The art of transitioning from single thoughts to groups of thoughts is also seen in Stockhausen’s compositional evolution from “points” to “groups.”Ultimately Wittgenstein exposes a tension between the capacity of words to embody concepts, and the capacity of grammar to legitimize their connection.There is also a political dimension, since in disputing the exactness of words (and its inversion, facing up to the possibility that words are invariably inexact) Wittgenstein is emphasizing that the reader has the freedom, hence obligation, to interpret words in a sense that may be rationally justified.Words in this sense correspond to state-sanctioned directives.What such a view implies is the real possibility of words being deliberately used by the state to mislead, and of a situation where the reader is not allowed the freedom to object or refuse.Later in life Wittgenstein abandoned the impasse of a commitment to absolute truth in number relations in the Mozartean sense, to follow Goethe in turning instead to a species of transactional holism grounded in the naivety that truth and beauty are in the eye of the beholder.In one sense the move was pragmatic, in accepting that language is not a self­contained system but a medium founded on agreement entailing at the same time that mutual acceptance of a proposition as meaningful did not amount to proof of its truth in an absolute sense.In another sense his change of mind acknowledges that instruments of thought in general make sense in relation to their situation in time and space, in the same way as mathematical logic makes sense in relation to the stock market.The later Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations influenced the music of John Cage, and is of particular relevance to music developments in the information age.There we can discover the makings of a rationale for an aesthetic of musical relations between events otherwise emptied of intention, but harmonized in time, place, acoustic, and observation.That chance compositions are neither independently verifiable nor objects of conventional beauty in a Mozartean (or even a Schoenbergian) sense does not alter their significance but through negation increases their potential to reveal the truths of a particular situation, or at least draw attention to them in their nakedness.It is the aesthetic of the moment of truth.A moment of truth is realizing that when Wordsworth speaks of a dreamlike epiphany of floating “as a cloud” and suddenly being aware of a host of nodding daffodils, what the vision is really about is of being led to the scaffold in a daze, and becoming aware in the numbness of terror of a sea of cheering faces joyfully awaiting the moment of execution.What is your moment of truth and what is mine in a given situation may not be the same, and the drawback of holistic visions is that while they can be shared they cannot truly be known.At least with Mozart there remains a score, and notes, and the possibility of repetition, and a host of detail on which it is possible to agree, even if none of it is absolutely verifiable.Notes1.G.P.Baker and P.M.S.Hacker, An Analytical Commentary on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.Vol.1.Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980, xiv–xv.2.Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature: Tarner lectures delivered in Trinity College November 1919.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926, 120.7 La guerre du destinIgor Stravinsky said words are the instruments of thought.For Gertrude Stein, words are clearly physical and the act of writing the excretion of thought though she did not say so in those words.Like many American writers of her generation, she was fascinated by the process and enjoyed and used the act of writing as a means of inquiry into the mind’s digestion.The result is personal, intimate and occasionally revelatory.In order to read her I have composed a paraphrase of Gertrude Stein’s lecture “Composition as Explanation” dating from 1926.A paraphrase is not what Gertrude Stein said but my own reading of what her words may have intended.The original lecture is lightened by occasional flashes of Gerard Manley Hopkins.It can also be read as a convincing manifesto of American minimalism in music.Putting it all together—There is no particular distinction in the order of words making a narrative other than what the reader intends in reading.To compose is to put together [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]