Reconstruction 5.2 (Spring 2005)

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Notes on Wittgenstein’s Method, the Practice of Cultural History, and Early Film Theory / Markus Rheindorf

Abstract: Markus Rheindorf’s contribution offers some reflections on the critical potential of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “uebersichtliche Darstellung” or “concise presentation”, his self-consciously employed method of philosophical writing in the 1930ies, and explores its theoretical and methodological potential for the practice of cultural history. In so doing, it articulates a substantial critique of conventional disciplinary historiography, taking as its case in point the history of (early) film theory. Rheindorf then takes up the suggestions gained from juxtaposing Wittengstein’s method with conventional accounts of the history of early film theory and suggests concrete ways in which these might be put to practical use in the form of a cultural history of film theory.

<1> This paper offers some reflections on the critical potential of Wittgenstein’s method of philosophical writing in the 1930s and explores its practical use for the project of a cultural history of film theory. This project, it should be pointed out, is my current “work in progress” at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (Vienna, Austria) and focuses primarily on the period between the early 1920s and late 1960s.

<2> The general aim of my current work is to rehistoricize the history of early film theory by means of several case studies. In the conventional disciplinary history of film theory – which, since the structural turn in the late 60s and early 70s has maintained a somewhat conservative understanding of its status as a science – this early phase is primarily viewed as a period of sometimes perceptive, yet irredeemably impressionistic and unsystematic dilettantism. In contrast, I am writing a cultural history of film theory, which is to say I am interested in the specific ways in which the discursive formation of early film theory was enabled and constrained by its cultural context at specific historical junctures. In methodological terms, contextual constraints and enabling conditions are explored by means of tracing the central term “film language” through its many uses and conceptual changes in early film theory.

<3> Of the factors that were decisive in setting the limits of my work, two merit brief discussion in the present context. For one, the early 1920s are considered as marking the beginning of early film theory because the socio-cultural context of these years, especially in parts of Europe and in the U.S., provided conditions which enabled a discourse about film that predominantly took the form of criticism to begin with, but gradually underwent a process of differentiation and increasing theorization. Secondly, of the developments in the late 1960s which mark the end of the period I am interested in, the most important is the formation and institutionalization of filmolinguistics, as initiated by Christian Metz (1974a, 1974b), in the early ‘70s. At least as important as the actual work of Metz and his associates, however, is the singular importance it is ascribed in the conventional disciplinary historiography of film theory (cf. Elsaesser & Poppe 1994).

<4> It is no coincidence that the theoretical developments of the late 1960s and early 1970s, so frequently seen as a caesura, correspond directly with the effort to determine, once and for all, whether the notoriously ambiguous metaphor of the “language of film” has any scientific basis – and to do away with its metaphorical use, replacing it with properly linguistic, that is, structuralist terminology (Metz 1974a). The close correspondence between the theoretical importance of Metz’s project, the historical significance attributed to it in disciplinary history, and the centrality of the term “film language” in his work forms the basis for my decision to focus my research on the term’s many meanings and uses in early film theory.

<5> Because of the emphasis that Metz and other semiologists with and after him placed on the supposed likeness between film and language – which, in calling it into question, they placed more at the centre of interest than ever before – the conventional history of film theory has since perpetuated the idea that there had previously been no serious attempts to theorize the relationship between film and language (see, for instance, Andrew 1976). This impression is further reinforced by the often reproduced dichotomy of “realism” versus “formalism”, which divides early film theory into (i.e. assigns each position in it to) one of the two camps and remains silent on attempts, proliferating on both sides of the retroactively drawn borders, to relate film and language to each other conceptually.

<6> The resulting blind spot in the history of film theory lies at the centre of my approach not only because it has been neglected; a cultural history of early film theory is less interested in a corrective rewriting of the history of film theory than in revealing the specific ways in which the notion of “film language” – before its structuralist re-conceptualization – is always highly overdetermined in both cultural and ideological terms. In fact, the notion of “film language” – closely linked to corresponding concepts of the role of language in film – could be articulated within radically different theoretical positions in early film theory; hence the seemingly neutral term’s remarkable suitability for a number of cultural and ideological projects.

<7> The malleability of the term is perhaps best demonstrated by discussing several positions which Siegfried Kracauer, one of the most prolific early film theorists, occupied in the course of the period under consideration. During the earliest phase of Kracauer’s writing in the 20s and early 30s, when his utopian hope for the ability of film to change society was confronted with the increasingly disillusioning political reality of the Weimar Republic, he wrote of film as language in the sense of an “Esperanto of the eye” (Kracauer 1931). This universal language, which he saw approximated if not realized in the mature silent films of Chaplin, would have been able to facilitate an understanding between the peoples of Europe and prevented a return of the horrors of the Great War.

<8> Towards the end of the 40s, Kracauer, who had barely managed to escape (first to France and then to the United States), but had, like so many other Jewish émigrés, lost his family to the concentration camps, had radically changed his conception of “film language” in the context of a theory that regarded film primarily as a mass medium. At this time, Kracauer was working on his first major book on film, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Kracauer 1947), which had been commissioned by the U.S. government as a history of German film. The book was conceived and written as part of a large-scale pathologization of the “German national character” – or the “national unconscious”, as Kracauer called it in this book – that involved many of the intellectuals that had found their way to the United States. Like so many of them, Kracauer became involved in what, in reality, was less an attempt to understand the enemy better, than an effort to prove what had been determined in advance: that there was – that there had to be – something specific about what defined “being German” that could explain the rise of Hitler, even make it appear as an inevitable consequence of that elusive essence of “German-ness”. In this search, however, what mattered were essentials, not variables, in the German experience of the 1920s and 30s. In Kracauer’s writing, film was now conceptualized as a language insofar as this allowed him to read the films of the Weimar Republic as the visually expressive language of the collective unconscious of the German people – a language which spelled in large letters the failure of film in preventing, or at least in opposing, the rise of National Socialism.

<9> Only in the course of the ‘50s, when working on his long-planned and ambitious project of a coherent theory of film, did Kracauer come to define the “language of film” as the technical properties of the medium. Both the concept and its redefined reference could thus effectively be written out of his theory, as he defined film’s “technical” (formalist) properties as secondary to its “basic” (realist) properties and possibilities. The surviving draft versions of the book finally published in 1960 as Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality testify to the fact that Kracauer’s rewriting of his theory so that it excluded film’s “technical” aspect (i.e. editing and montage) paralleled the contemporary debates about the “un-American masses” under the spell of McCarthyism. By 1960, Kracauer had effectively aligned “film language” as the technical properties of the medium with an essential pair of negatives: the formalist tendency manifested by the high-cultured theatre films he had always abhorred and the Russian (read that Communist) practice of the montage principle. He read both as manifestations of an ideological contamination and manipulation of the raw material of “physical reality” faithfully captured by the film camera and blamed the very possibility of these “perversions” on the unchecked use of “film language” (Kracauer 1960).

<10> At the time of writing, my work is focused on the critical and theoretical writings of Kracauer, Eisenstein, Arnheim, Balázs, and Munsterberg. Among these early film theorists, Kracauer’s position makes an excellent case in point for my argument: nowhere else in early film theory does one find a body of work equally torn by inner contradictions, subject to change over the years, or misrepresented in disciplinary history. Kracauer’s writing is thus also representative of another aspect of early film theory that begs to be re-historicized and re-contextualized: its political and ideological implication in its socio-cultural context.

<11> One of the specific effects of the Metzian project in the 1970s was the establishment of a scientific self-understanding in film-theory that was closely modelled on the structuralist paradigm. In keeping with this paradigm and explicitly evoking de Saussure’s distinction of “lange” and “parole”, Metz had banished, if only temporarily, from the sphere of film theory the phenomena he subsumed under the heading of “cinema” (rather than “film”). He thus removed from the field of film studies the social and cultural dimension of film, leaving only the abstract text. Although interest in the social and ideological dimensions of film again found its way into film theory by way of the transdisciplinary interventions of such movements as feminist, queer, and postcolonial theory, the strict division between film and cinema demanded by Metz has remained largely uncontested. What has since remained buried, in a sense, are early film theory’s dedicated approaches to film as an a priori social phenomenon, as always already implicated in its context. With this understanding of film frequently came a self-understanding of the critic as a critic of society (rather than of aesthetics) and a marked ambivalence towards the popular and the masses. Needless to say, early film theory’s utopian conceptions of film’s role in society – whether as the perfect instrument of propaganda or as a mirror of social reality – were incompatible with the scientific demeanor of Metzian filmolinguistics. Subjectivity was seen as having been replaced by objectivity, prescription with description, and political dedication with scientific detachment.

Why Wittgenstein?

<12> The reason I want to discuss Wittgenstein in the context of a cultural history of early film theory is that his essayistic method – he referred to his works as “Versuche”, experiments in the widest sense of the word – can be employed to the advantage of the field of cultural history. It was in the context of a cultural history of the “Versuch” that Birgit Griesecke suggested that Wittgenstein’s method would be productive if articulated as an intermediary between the “two cultures” of C.P. Snow’s famous dictum of the war between arts and sciences (cf. Snow 1993).

<13> The opposition between different cultures of knowledge, crystallized in Snow’s formulation, is organized around and by the question of what it means to be “scientific”, i.e. what constitutes properly scientific procedures/practices and properly scientific texts. While the former, i.e. procedural aspect is strictly regulated especially in the natural sciences, the latter, i.e. textual or discursive aspect receives more significance in the arts and humanities [1]. In the Anglo-American context, in which the very term “scientific” is closely aligned with the natural sciences, this binary opposition excludes from the properly scientific not only “soft” disciplines on the one hand, but also non-Western traditions of knowledge and representation on the other hand. In the context of the German-speaking world, in which Wittgenstein wrote and in which Griesecke’s intervention has to be located, the situation is similar yet different. It is similar, because the status of “Wissenschaftlichkeit” is conventionally reserved for the natural sciences in public discourse – and with it prestige, funding, etc. – whereas the humanities are often cast as a sort of intellectual luxury and derided as “Orchideenfaecher”. At the same time, it is also different, because “Geisteswissenschaften”, the German term for the humanities, marks an equivalent conceptual position in discourse vis-à-vis the natural sciences or “Naturwissenschaften”. Both are “Wissenschaften”, and thus both lay claim to the field of the scientific as “Kulturen des Wissens”, i.e. cultures of knowledge.

<14> Perhaps more than any other disciplinary formation, cultural history – especially in the predominant form of the many projects of a cultural history of knowledge/science – has been struggling to overcome the epistemological-ethnological rupture between arts and sciences, between Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften. In the course of her articles on Wittgenstein and the uses of the fictional (Griesecke 2001a & 2001b), Birgit Griesecke has argued that it is cultural history’s role in the “war” between the two cultures of knowledge that makes Wittgenstein’s method attractive for the practice of cultural history. My primary concern here is whether one can infer from its usefulness for cultural history in general an equal suitability for a cultural history of early film theory.

<15> In the case of this particular project, several problems arise that need to be considered in due course. For the time being, let me merely point our that questions of what it constitutes a properly scientific discourse play an important part in the early history of film theory – especially as it has been written since the early 1970s, a time when its transformation into an institutional discipline accelerated significantly. Insofar as the discourse of disciplinary historiography accompanying this historical transition in many respects resembles the discourse associated with the (synchronic) rupture between arts and sciences, one is justified in exploring in some detail the potential usefulness of Wittgenstein’s method for a cultural history of early film theory.

The practice of cultural history and the experience of alterity

<16> Judging from the recent proliferation of publications in the field of cultural history, it would seem that cultural histories of knowledge/science have indeed begun to establish a space of interaction, a neutral ground where the “war” between different scientific cultures is not in effect. But does this interaction really enable them to meet and engage in an exchange on equal terms?

<17> No doubt, a field such as cultural history, in which numerous distinct disciplines interact beyond their traditional boundaries, is a highly contested space. A close look at the relative positions occupied by the arts and sciences (or, more precisely, the humanities and the natural sciences) in the practice of cultural history raises the question whether the real differences between the two cultures do not divide this space, which might seem neutral and integrative at first. Indeed, a likely point of rupture lies in the fact that “cultural history”, with its epistemological and methodological origins in the humanities, takes as its object of study the “sciences”, usually understood as the “hard”, data-generating natural sciences.

<18> The very term “cultural history of knowledge and science” indicates an alterity between the fields of the cultural (as well as historiography) and the scientific as a socially privileged form of knowledge. In practice, the one subjects the other to its own regimes of truth, thereby always already constituting it as its other. In this sense, then, the experience of alterity is a constitutive element of cultural historiography. But is this of any more significance nthan the seemingly unavoidable moment of alterity between subject and object in any form of cultural analysis, or, for that matter, any form of knowledge whatsoever? For one, acknowledging the prominence of alterity illuminates the often strong ethnographic strain of cultural history. For another, the fact that subject and object in this case are at the same time also combatants in a cultural war certainly reinforces and complicates the experience of alterity in cultural historiography.

<19> Important as the experience of alterity may be to the practice cultural history, it does not, by itself, justify a reduction of the work of cultural history to a particular kind of ethnography. It does suggest, however, that we make sure it is part of the work of cultural history to read other forms of knowledge (and associated practices) not in terms of the already familiar and accessible (and by doing so make them recognizable as contemporary theory in its preliminary stages), but instead allow it to remain an uneasy fit, a productive if irreducible other. In doing so, cultural history is able to actualize the other’s potential to disturb or upset taken-for-granted disciplinary certainties – not least among them traditional notions of what it means to do “scientific” work.

<20> At this point, we need to take note of a crucial difference between the project within which Griesecke has articulated Wittgenstein’s method and my work in progress. While the cultural history of the “Versuch” proposed by Griesecke (2004) focuses on the rupture between arts and sciences (or the construction thereof) and thus extends the limits of most cultural histories of knowledge, my project realizes a more decisive break with the ruling paradigm of cultural history by taking as its object one of the arts rather than one of the sciences. The alterity it encounters is therefore bound to be different from that described by Griesecke: it is historical rather than paradigmatic. As the project is perhaps not immediately recognizable as different from the more common disciplinary historiography, it must also place more emphasis on differentiating itself from it. In the following, I will discuss potential correspondences between Wittgenstein’s method and cultural history primarily in their difference from disciplinary historiography, against whose simplified and decontextualized accounts of early film theory my intervention is directed.

Wittgenstein’s method

<21> Before proceeding with my articulation of Wittgenstein’s method with my work in progress, I am going to spend a moment clarifying its methodological status, focusing on two questions: (1) Is Wittgenstein’s method to be classified as a “Versuch”, rather than as an essay? (2) Provided this is the case, is its experimental form adequate for the project of a cultural history of early film theory?

<22> In response to the first question, I argue that one is justified in abiding by the label “Versuch” for Wittgenstein’s method insofar as it can be located between the two scientific cultures while also being equally at home in both fields: the sciences have their laboratory experiments, whereas the arts sometimes call their essayistic works “Versuche”. In particular in the German-speaking world, the two cultures of knowledge both lay claim to the term. With Wittgenstein, one has the opportunity to articulate the “Versuch” as a semantic and methodological link or intermediary between experiment(alism) and essay(ism) (cf. Griesecke 2004). To be sure, most critics – in the German-speaking context no less than in the Anglo-American context – have long warned against such a move. In the 1960s, for instance, Bruno Berger included a note of warning in his history of the essay. In his view, to displace the term “experiment” from its position in the field of the natural sciences and align it with the essay will inevitably provoke serious misunderstandings and confusion (Berger, 1964: 22f & 116). Some 30 years later, Christian Schaerf arrives at almost the same conclusion in his historical study of the essay: the conceptual similarities suggested by the use of one and the same term in both cultures can lead only to confusion (Schärf, 1999: 13). Even more to the point, Schaerf argues against translating essay as “Versuch” (or vice-versa) and thus reaffirms the unique and problematic status of the “Versuch” in the German humanities.

<24> The specific threat posed by the “Versuch”, conceptually as well as practically, is that it “confuses” the clear opposition between the two cultures. But this is at the same time the source of its attraction, of the productivity that Griesecke identifies in her essays on Wittgenstein’s method. It should be noted again that a similar kind of confusion or lack of clear boundaries characterizes the discursive formation of early film theory, although it concerns the boundaries between different spheres: rather than those between “hard” and “soft” science, it is the borders between criticism (closely associated with essayism) and proper theory, whether aesthetic or material (associated with academic, institutionalized writing).

<25> This brings me to the second question, which now needs to be posed again in a more specific form: Having established its status as a “Versuch”, what can we learn about early film theory as “Versuch” by means of Wittgenstein’s method? Following Griesecke’s example, it should be possible to exploit the already mentioned conceptual analogy between Wittgenstein’s method and early film theory. Doing so, one might learn (to appreciate) the specific ways in which individual positions in early film theory refuse the norms of aesthetic theory. In this respect, Béla Balázs’ Der sichtbare Mensch (Balázs 1924) comes to mind, resembling as it does Wittgenstein’s later texts. Like Wittgenstein, Balázs refuses conventional generic norms; also like Wittgenstein, he employs fictional cases in order to test the limits of his conception of film.

Against conventional disciplinary historiography

<26> In articulating Wittgenstein’s method with my work in progress, this seems the right place to elaborate on why I place such confidence in cultural history as opposed to disciplinary historiography. For one, I recognize in the practice of the former the potential of creating an alternative to a mere history of progress, to replace the teleological perspective of conventional disciplinary historiography with the perspectives of microhistory, micropolitics, and contextualism. Needless to say, the later writings of Wittgenstein are not the only place and probably not even the most likely one to look for these perspectives. Foucault’s theory of discourse, Deleuzean rhizomatics, and Grossberg’s theory of articulation all come to mind in this respect. Yet, for the sake of my argument, I am taking both Griesecke’s intervention and Wittgenstein’s position seriously, and engage with them on their own terrain.

<27> Secondly, the practice of cultural history enables a break from conventional disciplinary historiography’s denial of a productive alterity. This denial depends on a two-fold strategy: it must either (1) keep the other of its own past in a sort of historical reservation, never allowing it to extend into the horizon of its contemporary self-understanding or (2) appropriate it as a prefiguration of contemporary positions. More often than not, these two complementary strategies are accomplished despite and because of the recognition that what does not easily fall into place with contemporary practice and/or theory might very well upset current criteria and concepts. In the safe terms of conventional disciplinary historiography, however, it is more likely that said criteria and concepts will simply be used to label and categorize historical forms of knowledge. Probably the most illustrative example of such categorization in film theory’s disciplinary historiography is its division of practically all of early film theory into the binary opposition of “formalism” versus “realism” (cf. Andrew 1976).

<28> Simplistic though they may be, such categorizations are by no means arbitrary (they are grounded), but neither are they necessary. In the final analysis, however, it is not the questionable accuracy of its differentiations, but the fact of categorization itself that characterizes disciplinary historiography. For an alternative experience of alterity to be realized in the practice of cultural history, it is necessary to combine attention to both detail and context, while simultaneously allowing the encounter with historical forms of knowledge to provide a positive experience of alterity. Unlike conventional disciplinary historiography, such a practice embraces the critical potential of an estrangement of/from familiar forms and cultures of knowledge.

<29> This is precisely where, as Birgit Griesecke has suggested, Wittgenstein’s method and philosophy may become useful for the project of cultural history [2]. To be precise: what I have been referring to as “Wittgenstein’s method” all along is his practice of “grammatical examination” or “concise presentation/description”. Though the two terms are used by Wittgenstein in different contexts and by way of emphasizing different aspects of his method, both refer to more or less the same practice. As terms, however, they are not particularly adequate: While “concise presentation/description” obscures the work of analysis, the term “grammatical examination”, though more prestigious than the former, hides the productive and painstaking work of presentation/description. It should also be noted that the adjective “grammatical”, in case of the former term, indicates neither a description of linguistic syntax nor regulative norms of language use, but the recognition of things in their interconnectedness and difference [3].

<30> Said method was developed by Wittgenstein in the early 1930s, at the time he turned from the logical atomism of his Tractatus and began to see philosophical problems from what he referred to as an ethnological point of view, seeing language as a practice embedded in specific ways of life and social interaction. The ethnographical work which most directly inspired Wittgenstein’s method, albeit as a clearly negative example, was James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Frazer, so Wittgenstein’s critique, did not even deserve the material he had at his disposal, because he had failed to do justice to its strangeness, its otherness. At least partly in response to what he perceived as Frazer’s failures, Wittgenstein developed his own method and it was in this context that he came to define “Darstellung” (presentation/description) in direct opposition to “Erklaerung” (explanation) [4]. This fundamental opposition defines his later method and practice of philosophy as one that does not subject every cultural phenomenon it encounters to a teleological interpretation, but instead acknowledges and welcomes difference.

<31> In Wittgenstein’s terms, the term “Darstellung” does not refer to the duplication or paraphrasing of already existing discourses and/or materials; rather, it indicates the exposition of cases in their “grammatical” coherence, i.e. in their syntagmatic rather than paradigmatic relationship. Hence the importance he places on finding what he calls “Zwischenglieder” (“connecting links” or “interconnecting points” in a sequence or chain of cases) [5]. From an epistemological point of view, such a program of analysis raises the question of whether Wittgenstein conceived of these links as already existing “out there” in the real world or as constructed in the analytical process. Indeed, Wittgenstein seems to have knowingly forestalled a clear answer to this question, oscillating as he does between the terms “finden” and “erfinden”, the finding and inventing of linkages.

<32> In order to gain an understanding of the interrelationships between existing cases, so Wittgenstein, it may often be necessary to introduce fabricated cases (and thus explore also paradigmatic relationships). Wittgenstein is aware that the method of fabrication allows the critic to establish analogies between cases which frequently have very little to do with each other and that, in most cases, it is impossible to determine the exact point in time at which an analogy begins to lead the critic astray [6]. All the same, as Witttgenstein’s later writings demonstrate time and again, he was convinced that the potential gains of his method ultimately outweigh the risks of fabrication.

<33> Accepting for the time being the hazards of knowingly fictionalizing the object of study, the playful yet precise fabrication of cases for the sake of testing the limits of a particular semantic field and its pragmatic possibilities becomes a strength rather than a weakness of Wittgenstein’s method. Needless to say, the use of fabricated cases places Wittgenstein’s “uebersichtliche Darstellung” outside the established conventions of scientific procedure (in terms of both arts and sciences) and reinforces its intermediary position between the “two cultures of knowledge”. In this respect, it would be tempting to explore further the procedural similarities between the later Wittgenstein’s method and the practice of deconstruction; for present purposes, however, it will suffice to explore the differences between their intended effects or aims.

<34> Unlike the theoretically interminable deferral of deconstruction, Wittgenstein’s method has a clearly defined aim: the scope of its practical and philosophical usefulness lies in solving the “grammatical ambiguity” of our language usage (or else its lack of clarity, what Wittgenstein refers to as its “Unklarheit”) [7]. But for this grievance to be “solved” or “clarified” (in a grammatical or philosophical sense), it must first be seen, made visible through the work of presentation/description in order to be then recognized in its full scope. Although Wittgenstein’s “grammatical ambiguity” remains a somewhat elusive concept, he makes quite clear that what our grammar lacks above all is clarity. In his own words, it is “Uebersicht” which is lacking [8]. This is of course exactly what his method of “uebersichtliche Darstellung” is supposed to provide in compensation.

<35> Thus, while Wittgenstein’s method itself is descriptive in nature, it is the means to an end which is at least partly prescriptive: the adjustment and correction of language use. It is in this context that Wittgenstein elaborates on the negative consequences of “grammatical ambiguity”, arguing that the lack of clarity leads people to pose inadequate questions, in everyday life as much as in philosophy and science [9]. Extrapolating from the examples given by Wittgenstein, one can surmise that within the framework of my work in progress, the question “What is film language?” would be inadequate in these terms; so would the question “What do early film theorists mean when they invoke the term film language?”. Both questions aim at essential meanings, whether they locate it on the epistemological or the discursive plane. For the time being, it remains to be seen whether Wittgenstein’s approach can lead to more adequate questions for a cultural history of early film theory. For now, we can say that it would lead to a clarification of the grammatical ambiguity or confusion surrounding the term “film language”, but would locate the confusion not so much in the discourse of early film theory as in conventional disciplinary historiography.

<36> As to the specific means of clarification, Wittgenstein argues that simply (re)tracing structures of meaning in a given semantic field and/or establishing binding rules for the use of specific words will not do. Rather, what is needed is a precise description of the transitions between the manifold uses of specific terms as well as of the tensions between them. This is what Wittgenstein aims at when he writes that to provide a “uebersichtliche Darstellung” involves arranging the material in such a way as to make visible both “family resemblances” and “differences” [10].

Applying Wittgenstein’s method

<37> To provide an outline of how Wittgenstein’s approach might be employed within the stated limits of my project and to gain some idea of what a “concise resentation/description” of the discourse of early film theory would look like, one can begin by differentiating the process of investigation and presentation in the sense of Wittgenstein’s “Untersuchung” and “Darstellung” [11].

<38> The first step of any grammatical examination always consists of deliberately allowing for the multiplicity of meanings of a given term, accepting even the most irritating and seemingly sloppy usage. However, allowing for the ambiguity of a term already implies an understanding of its conceptual multiplicity on the critic’s part. In the case of a cultural history of early film theory, distinguishing between a number of distinct meanings for the term “film language” (including derivates like “the language of film”), such as the notions of an “Esperanto of the eye”, of a preslapsarian and pre-linguistic form of communication, or of a language of the collective unconscious of a nation or a people, can help select a limited number of “cases” to be described from the available material.

<39> The second step is to pose and answer, as comprehensibly as possible, the question of how to describe the actual context of situation in which the term in question is used. At this point in the process, considering uses of the term in contexts not familiar to us (some of which may be fabricated) can prove particularly revealing. If articulated with the contextualism of cultural historiography, this step of the process would also entail establishing connections between specific uses of the term “film language” and its contexts, be they theoretical (i.e. conceptual), discursive, cultural, economic, etc. Clearly, in articulating this method with a project of cultural history, Wittgenstein’s somewhat undertheorized notion of context would need to be problematized and supplemented with a more adequate theory of context.

<40> The third and perhaps most significant step in Wittgenstein’s method is the finding of “interconnecting links”, so that the cases included in the study of the usage of a given term are not left in isolation. This step, in drawing lines connecting individual cases in terms of specific criteria of the term’s usage, transforms the description/presentation from a random juxtaposition or kaleidoscopic arrangement into a “grammatical” exploration [12]. These lines will, one can safely assume, not always align with accepted categories, but instead reveal “family resemblances”, subtle transitions and tensions in places where one did not expect to find them. For instance, the familiar opposition between “formalism” and “realism” or, rather, between the formalist and the realist camp in the conventional history of early film theory is easily dismantled by focusing on the usage of the term “film language” in theories of both “camps”.

<41> The fourth and final step of Wittgenstein’s procedure consists of a hypothetical testing of which cases, whether real or fictional, one would still or would no longer accept as “film language”. This step makes transparent the criteria by which the term is used and which define the conceptual frame of possible uses of the term. However, in its clear aim of inclusion/exclusion, this step also introduces a strong normative element into the process of description/presentation which conflicts with the descriptive framework of cultural historiography. In terms of my work in progress, the interventionist moment of cultural history is directed against the conservative practice of disciplinary history, rather than trying to restructure the primary semantic field studied, i.e. the discourse of early film theory.

Conclusion

<42> By way of conclusion, let me briefly summarize the main advantages and disadvantages of Wittgenstein’s method and discuss these in the context of a cultural history of early film theory. To begin with, its position as an intermediary between the “two cultures”, as identified by Griesecke, is no longer an asset if considered in the context of a cultural history focusing neither on science nor on the rupture between arts and sciences, since the alterity to be negotiated in it is of a different order. Rather than between arts and sciences, the oppositions constructed by film theory’s conventional disciplinary historiography in differentiating what I call “early film theory” (and which has variously been labeled “naïve” or “impressionistic”) from film theory proper are between theory and criticism, between institutionalized, “objective” academic theory and essayistic, politically outspoken partisanship. While an number of critics have proposed various “phase” models of the development of film theory, the above mentioned distinction, introduced by Metz and marked by his work (Metz 1974a & 1974b), has remained the most persistent to date.

<43> If, however, the articulation of Wittgenstein’s method as an intermediary between arts and sciences is no longer appropriate to this particular project, then we need to ask ourselves if it can perhaps be articulated differently, in a way that is more appropriate and useful in the present context. My answer, preliminary as it must be, would be a guarded “yes”. Wittgenstein’s “uebersichtliche Darstellung” seems to share several of the characteristics of early film theory which sit uneasily with a traditional understanding of scientific procedure and may thus be able to rearticulate the alterity organizing conventional histories of film theory. Like early film theory, Wittgenstein’s method is an attempt to do justice to the messiness of life and ends up being somewhat “messy” itself; also like early film theory, it neither has nor represents an explicit, consistent theoretical framework and hesitates on the borders between description and prescription.

<44> Another substantial advantage of Wittgenstein’s approach is its acknowledgement of the positivity of alterity. In Wittgenstein’s terms, alterity can be negotiated productively by foregrounding different meaning aspects of a term, as they are actualized in specific contexts: “where I am certain, the other is uncertain … others have terms that cut right through our terms” [13]. Recognizing the potential of adopting another perspective by means of an understanding of the differential usage of language seems to be more of a fundamental attitude, however, than an integral aspect of Wittgenstein’s methodology. As such, it can be productive in the field of cultural history, especially in the context of my work in progress, focusing as it does on the meaningful multiplicity of a term.

<45> Equally, insofar as Wittgenstein emphasizes the potential of new categories and terms to “break the spell of the ones we have become used to” [14], his approach brings to my work in progress a prospect of “overcoming” the simplifying categories of conventional disciplinary historiography. Step two of Wittgenstein’s “Darstellung” seems well suited to this task inasmuch as it avoids the search for an essential meaning of “film language” and foregrounds the description of the term as located in specific contexts, the tensions and family resemblances between its different meanings, as well as the more or less smooth transitions between them. Incidentally, focusing on the uses of the term “film language” within film theory and thereby excluding other areas such as the discourse of filmmakers and screenwriters is consistent with Wittgenstein’s call for a focus on a single “Sprachspiel”.

<46> One aspect of Wittgenstein’s method that has proven problematic is his understanding of contextual analysis. While he is aware that a given term is embedded in larger practices or “Sprachspiele” [15] and that these in turn change over time as they are themselves embedded in the “flow of life” [16], he does not in any way theorize text-context relations. Compared with the contextualism of, say, Lawrence Grossberg’s articulation of British cultural studies, Wittgenstein’s method seems dangerously ahistorical and discourse-centered [17]. Any articulation of his method with a project of cultural history would therefore have to find a way of supplementing its practice with an adequate theory of context, i.e. the social and/or the cultural.

<47> A problem of a more practical nature is to be found in terms of textual (re)presentation: Wittgenstein’s method is anything but simple to present. It requires that the cases/materials be arranged and interwoven in such a way as to retain their epistemological significance, especially in discussing the correspondences between cases, despite the plenitude of one’s material. The description of these cases must be neither too long – which would distance them from each other – nor too brief – which would most likely sacrifice context and detail. The challenge it presents is therefore that of finding a middle way between singular descriptions and arranging these cases without concealing the fragmentary and open quality of this description as an always temporary and reversible sequence or order. Needless to say, such attempts at presentation are always highly contestable, if only because it is always possible to come up with an endless list of what has been excluded.

<48> Since the texts that would result from Wittgenstein’s method would permanently produce breaks and ruptures, it is perhaps unavoidable that one should also ask how such a text can ever reach a conclusion. Since Wittgenstein in his works was always struggling to achieve this kind of text and left no instructions for representing his method, there exists no ready-made genre, no default type of text that can serve as a model. Faced with the task of actually writing a “uebersichtliche Darstellung”, rather than merely writing about it, I thus find myself exploring other methodologies, such as discourse analysis and cultural studies. I take with me many of the ideas and principles that Wittgenstein integrated into his method, as well as the procedural aspect of his method, hoping that they will prove to be productive in the context of my work.

Notes

[1] For recent research in the field of academic literacies, see for instance Arnold et al (2001), Bazerman (1988), and Berkenkotter & Huckin (1995). [^]

[2] Cf. Griesecke (2001a: 54ff) and Griesecke (2001b: 123-146). [^]

[3] The metaphorical use of the adjective “grammatical”, employed by Wittgenstein to suggest the “syntactic” interrelationship of terms and entities in discourse, could be analyzed productively in the context of Hans Blumenberg’s history of metaphors establishing what he calls the readability of the world (cf. Blumenberg 1983). [^]

[4] While a translation of “Darstellung” as either “description” or “presentation” does not seem accurate, the more closely corresponding “exposition” lacks a related verb that would correspond to Wittgenstein’s use of “darstellen”. I am therefore translating the term as “presentation/description” and using either “present” or “describe” to translate the process-related verb “darstellen”. [^]

[5] Cf. Wittgenstein, BF: 37. [^]

[6] Cf. Wittgenstein, BlB: 53. [^]

[7] Cf. Wittgenstein, BT: 276. [^]

[8] Cf. Wittgenstein, PU: 282. [^]

[9] Cf. Wittgenstein, BT: 281. In BlB: 52 Wittgenstein argues that it is impossible to determine the “real” or essential meaning of any word or term because meaning is always socially constructed. [^]

[10] Cf. Wittgenstein BF: 37; BT:281; PU:122. [^]

[11] The following sequence of steps draws on Griesecke’s essay on the “Versuch” (Griesecke 2004) and a presentation given by her in the spring of 2004 at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna. [^]

[12] The striking parallel between Wittgenstein’s insistence of drawing lines and Deleuze’s notion of rhizomatic linkages is both terminological and conceptual, but remains to be explored. [^]

[13] Cf. Wittgenstein, Z: 373, 374, 379. [^]

[14] Cf. Wittgenstein, BlB: 46. [^]

[15] Cf. Wittgenstein, Z: 391. [^]

[16] Cf. Wittgenstein, LS: 913. [^]

[17] In connection with Wittgenstein’s understanding of context, it should be pointed out that his notion of “embedding” also refers to the way in which people are implicated in their cultural context. Insofar as the grammatical ambiguities he seeks to redress are part of this context, he speaks of his aim as “freeing” people deeply embedded in grammatical confusions by “tearing” them from the manifold connections in which they are “trapped”. In order to do this, one has to re-organize, as it were, their whole language (cf. Wittgenstein, BT: 285). [^]

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