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Right in Front of Our Eyes: Aspect-Perception, Ethics and the Utopian Imagination in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations

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Modernism, Ethics and the Political Imagination

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Abstract

This chapter explores Wittgenstein’s concern with seeing and vision by focusing specifically upon four questions. First, how do we account for the emphasis which Wittgenstein places upon vision (especially in the later writings), and what does this reveal about his relation to some of the ‘ocularcentric’ traditions of twentieth-century philosophical and aesthetic discourse? Second, to what extent can Wittgenstein’s interest in seeing – and more specifically what he terms ‘seeing-as’ or ‘the “dawning” of an aspect’ (PI II, 166ff) – be understood as having an ethical point? Third, how might the ethical dimension of the Investigations be connected with the work’s modernist sensibility and, in particular, with its efforts to bring us to see the everyday or ordinary otherwise? And fourth, what are the potential political implications of Wittgenstein’s notion of aspect-perception? In order to approach these questions, it will first be necessary to open ourselves up to the general complexities of Wittgenstein’s engagement with the visual. For as he remarks in Part II, section xi of the Investigations: ‘We find certain things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough’ (PI II, 181).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Hans Jonas, ‘The Nobility of Sight’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14: 4 (June, 1954): 507–519 (507).

  2. 2.

    Ibid.

  3. 3.

    Ibid., 508–509.

  4. 4.

    Ibid., 514.

  5. 5.

    Ibid., 517–518.

  6. 6.

    Ibid., 519.

  7. 7.

    Ibid.

  8. 8.

    Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1971), p. 111 (emphasis added).

  9. 9.

    Ibid.

  10. 10.

    See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Disintegration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 9ff; Martin Jay, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Publishing, 1988), pp. 3–23.

  11. 11.

    Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), p. 115ff. The other essential phenomena that Heidegger lists are: the growth of technology; art’s moving into the purview of aesthetics; the fact that human activity is conceived and consummated as culture; and the loss of the gods. Heidegger writes, however: ‘We shall limit [ourselves] to the phenomenon mentioned first, to science [Wissenschaft]’ (ibid., pp. 116–117). Importantly, however, Wissenschaft, as Michael Inwood points out, ‘is applied more widely than “science”. Any systematic study of a field is a Wissenschaft. History, theology, classical philology, art-history are all Wissenschaften.’ Michael Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 191.

  12. 12.

    Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, p. 127.

  13. 13.

    Ibid., pp. 127, 130.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., p. 131.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., pp. 128, 129, 132.

  16. 16.

    Ibid., p. 134.

  17. 17.

    Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New York: Doubleday, 1961), p. 52. Heidegger’s thoughts on the relation between vision and modernity are echoed by David Michael Levin. According to Levin, in the modern epoch vision ‘is virtually consumed by the will to power as a will to master and dominate’. This impulse to fix and control what is seen, results, however, in a nihilistic destruction of the visual sense itself: ‘instead of clear and distinct perception, blurring and confusion; instead of fulfilment, the eyes lose their sight […] vision […] become[s] a stare’. David Michael Levin, ‘Existentialism at the End of Modernity: Questioning the I’s Eye’, Philosophy Today 34:1 (1990): 80–95 (88); David Michael Levin, The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 69.

  18. 18.

    Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), pp. 216/172. On ‘the essence of wonder’, see Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, trans. Richard Rojcewicz & André Schuwer (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 143–149.

  19. 19.

    Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 216 & 172.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., pp. 213/169.

  21. 21.

    There is, however, a strongly anti-modern impulse running through Heidegger’s texts, as the following brief examples demonstrate. ‘Th[e] circularity of consumption for the sake of consumption is the sole procedure which distinctively characterizes the history of a world which has become an unworld.’ Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 107. ‘Hourly and daily they [the Schwarzwald peasants] are chained to radio and television. Week after week the movies carry them off into uncommon, but often merely common, realms of imagination, and give the illusion of a world that is no world […] All that with which modern techniques of communication stimulate, assail, and drive man – all that is already much closer to man today than his fields around his farmstead, closer than the sky over the earth, closer than the change from night to day, closer that the conventions and customs of his village, than the tradition of his native world.’ Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking (A Translation of ‘Gelassenheit’), trans. John M. Anderson & E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 48. Despite such remarks, it needs to be stressed that Heidegger’s Kulturkritik transcends any mere call for ‘a modern renaissance of the ancients’. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, p. 158.

  22. 22.

    Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, pp. 54 & 61. However, as Bret W. Davis points out, Heidegger’s ‘explicit anticipations of a “releasement” from the will’ are problematic, not least because ‘certain residues of the will remain in his thought until the end’. Bret W. Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), pp. xxiii–xxiv.

  23. 23.

    Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p. 54.

  24. 24.

    Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, p. 28ff.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., p. 17. Heidegger calls this kind of ordering ‘standing-reserve’ [Bestand] (Ibid., pp. 17ff, 20ff). He gives as an example of such ordering, an aeroplane that stands on a runway. The plane, he writes, is not an object with significance in itself; rather, ‘[r]evealed, it stands on the taxi-strip only as standing-reserve, inasmuch as it is ordered to ensure the possibility of transportation’ (Ibid., p. 17). In this realm of ‘orderability’, everything is judged solely in terms of its readiness for use.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., p. 33.

  27. 27.

    Ibid., pp. 19, 28, 32. Here, however, we should be highly critical of Heidegger’s account of technology: not only does it rule out any transformation of our political and economic forms of life as the ground for a new understanding of technology’s social purpose, it also mythologizes technology’s essence, in the sense that technological development is not seen to be contingent upon a specific set of productive and social relations, but rather determined by what Gillian Rose calls an ‘unknowable law’. See Gillian Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-structuralism and Law (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 83.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., pp. 28, 34. Here it is important to note that, for Heidegger, even if we look into the danger and see the growth of the saving power, ‘we are not yet saved’ (Ibid., p. 33) (emphasis added). What promises a re-awakening of truth and an unveiling of Being is the work of art: our ‘decisive confrontation with [technology] must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art’ (Ibid., p. 35).

  29. 29.

    Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), p. 27.

  30. 30.

    This concern with the importance, not to mention the difficulty, of seeing what is in plain sight brings Wittgenstein into close proximity with a number of other thinkers. In his essay ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’, Freud describes psychoanalysis as attempting to reveal ‘secret and concealed things’, but suggests that these things are themselves already on the surface – the waste matter (der Abhub) of our observations, Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997 ), p. 134. Fifteen years after the publication of Philosophical Investigations, in an interview with Bernard Bonnefoy, Michel Foucault points out that his philosophy aims not at ‘trying to reveal things that have been deeply buried, hidden, forgotten for centuries or millennia, nor of discovering, behind what’s been said by others, the secret they wished to hide’. Instead, his philosophical project is, he remarks, ‘simply trying to make apparent what is very immediately present and at the same time invisible [ … ] To grasp that invisibility, that invisible of the too visible, that distancing of what is too close, that unknown familiarity’, Michel Foucault, Speech Begins After Death, trans. Robert Bononno (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2013 ), pp. 70–71.

  31. 31.

    Jay, Downcast Eyes, pp. 3, 37, 80ff; Martin Jay, ‘The Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism,’ Poetics Today 9:2 (1988): 307–326.

  32. 32.

    It should be noted that whilst I speak mostly of the ‘everyday’, the terms ‘everyday’ and ‘ordinary’ are used interchangeably throughout Wittgenstein’s later work. I thus make no conceptual distinction between them in this essay.

  33. 33.

    Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, 2nd edition, ed. G. H. von Wright & G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), p. 80 (hereafter NB followed by a page number). Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, German text with an English translation en regard by C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 2000), 5.633 (hereafter TLP followed by a proposition number). The first reference to the ‘visual field’ in the Notebooks appears almost two years earlier (see NB p. 3). The discussion of ‘picturing’ and ‘representing’, famously developed in the Tractatus, begins at NB, p. 7ff.

  34. 34.

    Cf. TLP, 5.634.

  35. 35.

    Further remarks on seeing, which relate to those already noted, can be found in NB, pp. 77 & 86.

  36. 36.

    ‘The proposition communicates to us a state of affairs, therefore it must be essentially connected with the state of affairs. And the connection is, in fact, that it is its logical picture. The proposition only asserts something, in so far as it is a picture’ (TLP, 4.03).

  37. 37.

    As this proposition continues: ‘That which mirrors itself in language, language cannot represent. That which expresses itself in language, we cannot express by language. The propositions show the logical form of reality. They exhibit it.’ Logical form, then, cannot be stated or described in language but can only be shown (TLP, 4.1212). According to a large number of Wittgenstein interpreters, these remarks are key to Wittgenstein’s articulation of a doctrine of ‘showing’ in the early work. See, for example, David Pears, The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); G. E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’sTractatus’ (London: Hutchinson, 1963); P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997).

  38. 38.

    On the significance of 6.54 to an understanding of the book as a whole, see Ben Ware, Dialectic of the Ladder; Ben Ware ‘Ethics’, in Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism ed. Anat Matar (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

  39. 39.

    The first clause of the last sentence of proposition 6.54 reads: ‘Er muß diese Sätze überwinden.’ Warren Goldfarb suggests translating this clause as: ‘He must overcome these propositions’ (i.e. the propositions of the Tractatus). See Warren Goldfarb, ‘Das Überwinden: Anti-Metaphysical Readings of the Tractatus,’ in Beyond theTractatusWars: The New Wittgenstein Debate, ed. Rupert Read and Matthew A. Lavery (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 19. This translation is, I think, preferable to those provided by Pears and McGuinness (‘He must transcend these propositions…’) and C. K. Ogden (‘He must surmount these propositions…’) in the sense that it emphasizes that throwing away the ladder is an activity – one which involves nothing less than an ethical struggle with our own philosophical temptations.

  40. 40.

    Added emphasis. Cf PI, §144: ‘I have changed his way of looking at things.’

  41. 41.

    Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, revised edition ed. G. H von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 25. Hereafter CV followed by a page number.

  42. 42.

    Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Big Typescript,’ in PO, p. 195.

  43. 43.

    Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Big Typescript’ in PO, p. 197.

  44. 44.

    Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Notes for Lectures on “Private Experience” and “Sense Data”’ in Philosophical Occasions, p. 272. In what follows, due to space constraints, I focus only on the linguistic dimensions of this phenomenon. Much more, however, can be said on the relation between staring, language and solipsism. As the cited remark reads in full: ‘The phenomenon of staring is linked to solipsism.’ For an interesting exploration of this connection, see Louis Sass, The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).

  45. 45.

    Wittgenstein, ‘The Big Typescript’, in Philosophical Occasions, pp. 185–187. Cf. CV, p. 22.

  46. 46.

    Wittgenstein, ‘The Big Typescript’ in Philosophical Occasions, p. 185.

  47. 47.

    The urge ‘to penetrate phenomena’ (PI, §90) is clearly connected with a scientific view of the world: one which is preoccupied with essences and explanations. Such a view is criticized by Wittgenstein throughout his later work. See, for example, Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, 2nd edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), p. 18 (hereafter BB followed by a page number); PI, §109.

  48. 48.

    Emphasis added.

  49. 49.

    The term ‘use’, in these two remarks from the Investigations, is of particular significance. For, as Wittgenstein reminds us throughout the later work: if one wants to know how a word functions, then ‘one has to look at its use’ – within the multiplicity of different ‘language games’ (PI, §7) – ‘and learn from that’ (PI, §340). (Cf. PI, §49, PI II, 187.) Importantly, however, this is not to ascribe to Wittgenstein a use-theory of meaning: the so-called ‘context-principle’, we might argue, does not attempt to tell us how we must understand meaning in all cases; rather, it serves only as a reminder of how to look – a warning against the dangers of seeking meaning in the psychological realm. For further remarks on the meaning of ‘meaning’, see also Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), §§1–20 (hereafter Z followed by a section number).

  50. 50.

    Stanley Cavell, ‘The Wittgensteinian Event,’ in Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 199. The process of ‘leading words back’ is, of course, no small task – it is part of what Wittgenstein describes as our ‘struggle with language’ (CV, 13). However, on Cavell’s account, such a struggle might well be without end, given what he describes as our ‘craving for the metaphysical […] the essential and implacable restlessness of the human’ (Cavell, ‘The Wittgensteinian Event’, p. 195).

  51. 51.

    Emphasis added.

  52. 52.

    As Wittgenstein writes: ‘I think I have never invented a line of thinking but that it was always provided for me by someone else & I have done no more than passionately take it up for my work of clarification. […] I believe that what is essential is for the activity of clarification to be carried out with COURAGE’ (CV, 16). For recent attempts to connect philosophical clarity with the ethical dimensions of Wittgenstein’s later work, see Genia Schönbaumsfeld, A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Oskari Kuusela, The Struggle Against Dogmatism: Wittgenstein and the Concept of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

  53. 53.

    Freidrich Waismann, ‘How I see Philosophy’, in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer (New York: The Free Press, 1959), pp. 374–375. For a discussion of Waismann’s essay, see Gordon Baker, ‘A Vision of Philosophy’, in Wittgenstein’s Method: Neglected Aspects, ed. Katherine Morris (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 179–204. As Judith Genova points out, Waismann’s essay launches a ‘barely concealed attack on Wittgenstein’ and yet, seemingly without knowing it, succeeds in almost exactly identifying the latter’s goal in the Investigations. See Judith Genova, Wittgenstein: A Way of Seeing (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 1.

  54. 54.

    Stephen Affeldt, ‘Seeing Aspects and the “Therapeutic” Reading of Wittgenstein’, in Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, ed. William Day and Victor Krebs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 271.

  55. 55.

    See Charles Altieri, ‘Cavell and Wittgenstein on Morality’, in Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Scepticism, ed. Richard Eldridge and Bernard Rhie (London: Continuum, 2011), p. 76.

  56. 56.

    Affeldt, ‘Seeing Aspects’, p. 273.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., p. 274.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., p. 288.

  59. 59.

    According to Rush Rhees, Wittgenstein did speak ‘of “die Natur” in a man, or of the various natures of different people’; however, this appears to have been Wittgenstein’s way of speaking generally about ‘character’ in the context of thinking about the possibility of lying to oneself or ‘living a life that is a lie’. See Rush Rhees, ‘Postscript’, in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 187. For Wittgenstein, ‘character’ is historical through and through, as he makes clear in the following remark from 1950: ‘There is nothing outrageous in saying that a man’s character may be influenced by the world outside him […] we know from experience, men change with circumstances’, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. P. Winch (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984 ) p. 84.

  60. 60.

    Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1932–1935, ed. Alice Ambrose (New York: Prometheus Books, 1979), p. 98.

  61. 61.

    On Wittgenstein’s engagement with questions of modernity and culture, see Ben Ware, ‘Wittgenstein, Modernity and the Critique of Modernism’, Textual Practice 27: 2 (2013):187–205.

  62. 62.

    Stanley Cavell uses the term ‘soul-blindness’ to describe the inability to see human beings as human beings. See Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 378.

  63. 63.

    Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 93–94.

  64. 64.

    Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998), § 317 (hereafter RPP followed by a section number).

  65. 65.

    Added emphasis.

  66. 66.

    Avner Baz, ‘Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty’, in The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, ed. Marie McGinn and Oskari Kuusela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 697.

  67. 67.

    Ibid., p. 698.

  68. 68.

    Stephen Mulhall, ‘The Work of Wittgenstein’s Words’, in Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, p. 252. For Mulhall’s comprehensive account of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects, see Stephen Mulhall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (London: Routledge, 1990). For another early account of Wittgenstein and seeing-aspects, see Paul Johnston’s Wittgenstein: Rethinking the Inner (London: Routledge, 1993).

  69. 69.

    Rush Rhees remarks: ‘Wittgenstein used to say to me “Go the bloody hard way” […] I remember this more often, perhaps, than any other remark of his.’ See Rush Rhees, ‘The Study of Philosophy’, in Without Answers (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 169. For more on what Wittgenstein intended by this phrase, see James Conant, ‘On Going the Bloody Hard Way in Philosophy’, in The Possibilities of Sense, ed. John Whittaker (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 85–129.

  70. 70.

    The only remark in Philosophical Investigations in which the subject of ethics is explicitly discussed is PI, §77.

  71. 71.

    Here one might recall Wittgenstein’s famous letter to Ludwig von Ficker in which he states that the point of the Tractatus ‘is an ethical one’, but that this is not explicitly stated in the book; rather, it is delimited ‘from the inside’, by the book itself. Letter: Ludwig Wittgenstein to Ludwig von Ficker, cited by G. H. von Wright, ‘Historical Introduction: The Origin of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus’, in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Prototractatus, ed. B. F. McGuinness, T. Nyberg, & G. H. von Wright, trans. D. F. Pears & B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 14 & 16, n. 2.

  72. 72.

    Gordon Baker, ‘Philosophical Investigations §122: Neglected Aspects’, in Wittgenstein’s Method: Neglected Aspects, ed. Katherine Morris (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 46.

  73. 73.

    Ibid.

  74. 74.

    Ibid., p. 41.

  75. 75.

    Ibid.

  76. 76.

    Ibid., p. 44.

  77. 77.

    For a more detailed account of what Wittgenstein means by experiencing the meaning of a word, see Lawrence Goldstein, ‘What Does “Experiencing Meaning” Mean?’ in The Third Wittgenstein, ed. Danièle Moyal-Sharrock (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 107–123. (I should point out, however, that I find Goldstein’s critical comments on Julia Kristeva’s style, which he puts forward in the conclusion of this essay, entirely superficial. When Goldstein speaks of Kristeva’s writing as ‘typically murky, pretentious, gobbledygook’ (p. 120), one gets the sense that what is being carried out is less a rigorous assessment of Kristeva’s style and more an ideological attack on critical theory per se.) Wittgenstein’s notion of meaning-blindness is, as has been widely noted, related to William James’s notion of mental-blindness. See William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 59.

  78. 78.

    Added emphasis.

  79. 79.

    Cf. PI II, p. 179 (‘Ask yourself “For how long am I struck by a thing?” – For how long do I find it new?’).

  80. 80.

    Ezra Pound, Make It New (London: Faber & Faber, 1934). See also Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1972), p. 265.

  81. 81.

    As Wittgenstein writes in the notes now assembled as Remarks on Colour: ‘our concepts […] stand in the middle of [our lives].’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), §302.

  82. 82.

    Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism – Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,’ in One-Way Street (London and New York: Verso, 1997), p. 227.

  83. 83.

    Translation modified.

  84. 84.

    Translation modified.

  85. 85.

    I do, however, defend Wittgenstein against the charges of outright philosophical conservatism and explore some connections with the thought of Raymond Williams, in Ben Ware, ‘Williams and Wittgenstein: Language, Politics and Structure of Feeling’, Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism 9 (2011): 41–57.

  86. 86.

    Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1984 edition), p. 53.

  87. 87.

    Fredric Jameson, ‘Utopia as Replication’, in Valences of the Dialectic, p. 434 (added emphasis).

  88. 88.

    Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (1984 edition), p. 3.

  89. 89.

    Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1932–1935, p. 97.

  90. 90.

    Fredric Jameson, ‘Utopia as Replication’, in Valences of the Dialectic, p. 434.

  91. 91.

    One thinks here of Margaret Thatcher’s motto ‘There is no alternative’; and Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation of ‘the end of history’ in his The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). For a dialectical reading, which interprets Thatcher and other free-market triumphalists as espousing their own form of utopianism, see David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. 176–177.

  92. 92.

    Theodor Adorno & Ernst Bloch, ‘Something’s Missing: A Discussion Between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing’, in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes & Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 4.

  93. 93.

    Ibid.

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Ware, B. (2017). Right in Front of Our Eyes: Aspect-Perception, Ethics and the Utopian Imagination in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. In: Modernism, Ethics and the Political Imagination . Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55503-8_2

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