DR2 Open Peer Review

Reading Wittgenstein Between the Texts

DR2 Turin Group

June 3, 2019

This post is the fourth of a series of contributions to the DR2 Conference. Comments are welcome! (How to comment) Marco santoro1, massimo airoldi2 & Emanuela riviera3 1 University of Bologna; 2 University of EM, Lyon; 3 Independent Researcher    ABSTRACT: Sharing the “historicist challenge to analytic philosophy” (Glock 2006) we attempt a “distant reading” of the (mainly) philosophical literature on and about Ludwig Wittgenstein. We start with a descriptive profile of the temporal structure of LW’s work. Then we focus on the literature (i.e. scholarship) on LW as we have been able to represent it through an analysis of bibliographic data drawn from the Philosopher’s Index, an electronic bibliographic database especially devoted to philosophy as a discipline. This is the central section of our paper, and the longer one, in which we attempt to describe and to map with the help of more sophisticated statistical tools Wittgenstein scholarship in its properties and changing forms. We look at the social profile and relations of the authors who contributes to the establishment of LW as a central reference in the current intellectual landscape as well as the network and dynamics of topics to which LW has been associated.  We end by proposing a set of possible explanatory frameworks (not really explanations, but research directions for elaborating explanations) for our results. With our paper we would add a “social dimension” to the aforementioned historicist challenge, making a case for an historical-sociological approach to (analytic) philosophy, along the lines of Bourdieu (1988) on Heidegger, Lamont (1992) on Derrida, Gross (2006) on Rorty, and Collins (1999) on the whole philosophical tradition.   My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written (L. Wittgenstein)   In this paper we will attempt a “distant reading”[1] of the (mainly) philosophical literature on and about Ludwig Wittgenstein (LW).  We are not doing research on Wittgenstein’s work as such but on people doing research on him. This is one first sense according to which we understand the meaning of ‘distance’ in our ‘distant reading.’ The second sense is that we are not studying those people through a close reading of their texts, but through a reconstruction of the aggregate properties of their works and of themselves as authors. Indeed, it is a sociology of philosophical work addressed from the vantage point of its output, a bibliography, what we are attempting here[2]. The choice of LW as the main reference of our research has two reasons. First, he is  “considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century” (Stanford Philosophical Encyclopedia) or at least “one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy -IEP)[3]. At least two major traditions of philosophical research have elected him as a central reference point, i.e. logic positivism and later analytic philosophy (see e.g. Gellner 1958; Hacker 1996; Tripodi 2015), not to mention more specialized fields as the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of mind. A focus on him has therefore an intrinsic interest even if it would make a case less generalizable than other, less influential and more “typical” philosophers (if such a figure ever exists). Second, as social scientists we have a special interest in Wittgenstein as possibly the most “sociologically relevant” of contemporary philosophers, or at least the philosopher whose work has exerted the stronger impact on the social sciences – sociology as well as anthropology (Winch 1959; Saran 1965; Giddens 1976; Porpora 1983; Bloor 1997; Das 1998; Pleasants 2002; Rawls 2008) and to a lesser extent even political science (Pitkin 1972). Currently, LW is still a major influence over at least three influential research streams in social theory, namely the sociology of scientific knowledge, ethnomethodology, and practice theory (e.g. Bloor 1973, 1983; Phillips 1977; Coulter 1979; Lynch 1992, 1993; Schusterman 1998; Schatzki et al 2001; Stern 2002; Kusch 2004; Bernasconi-Kohn 2007; Sharrock, Hughes, and Anderson 2013). Indeed, LW’s influence in a growing number of fields outside philosophy is what observers (including historians of contemporary philosophy) suggest[4] and it is what our research aims to assess empirically. There is indeed a third reason for our choice of LW: the richness and complexity of his publishing and editing history (Kenny 2005; Erbacher 2015), which makes “Wittgenstein” a strategic case study for a research on cultural production and postmortem consecration – two major topics in the contemporary sociology of cultural life (see for instance Heinich 1990; Santoro 2010; Fine 2012). Indeed, this third reason crisscrosses profitably with the first, when considering that Wittgenstein’s stardom in the philosophical field has grown along with the posthumous publications of his (many) unpublished writings, and that LW’s place in contemporary analytic philosophy has considerably declined in the last decades – or at least this is what the now standard tale tells us (Hacker 1996; Tripodi 2009). We have organized our paper in three virtual sections. First, we describe the temporal structure of LW’s work: to have a literature on Wittgenstein you need to have Wittgenstein’s literature, so it seems necessary to have at least some knowledge of the latter. Second, we focus on the literature (i.e. scholarship) on LW as we have been able to represent it through an analysis of bibliographic data drawn from the Philosopher’s Index, an electronic bibliographic database especially devoted to philosophy as a discipline. This is the central section of our paper, and the longer one, in which we attempt to describe and to map with the help of a few sophisticated statistical tools Wittgensteinian scholarship in its properties and changing forms. Third, we set forth a series of provisional explanations for our results, also considering the research on Wittgenstein beyond and besides the philosophical field, looking for trends and patterns of circulation of his ideas across different research areas and disciplinary fields, mapping what we would call, following Bourdieu (2002), the ‘international field of Wittgensteinism’.[5]. In particular, we advance four hypothesis, mutually compatible and reinforcing, two referring to exogenous and two to endogenous explanations in the sociology of cultural life (Kaufman 2004), which we suggest could be used to make sense of the results of our distant reading.   1. The structure of LW’s work and the philosophical field. Far from being a strange one, the question “What is a work by Wittgenstein?“ (Schulte 2006)  is not only appropriate: it is almost inevitable in a research as ours. The literature on LW is chronologically intermeshed with Wittgenstein’s philosophical work as it was made available to readers and authors, in a relation that is circular: research on LW – secondary literature as it is called – has been part and parcel with the same work for which LW is acknowledged as author.  As Wittgenstein published barely 25,000 words of philosophical writing during his lifetime— including a book (i.e. the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), a caustic book review, and a very short conference paper he never read—the texts or writings that he left unpublished have played an unusually large role in the reception of his work – comparable probably in 20th century to Husserl and Gramsci only. According to public estimates, the posthumous publications, almost all of them based on materials collected in his Nachlass, contain well over a million words. As the Nachlass as a whole contains approximately three million words (i.e. over 20,000 pages of manuscripts and typescripts), one might estimate that roughly a third of Wittgenstein’s writing is in print. However, as much of the material that was not edited for publication consists of early versions, rearrangements, and other source material for the previously published material, one could argue that considerably less than two thirds of his Nachlass has still to see the light of day in one form or another. Fig. 1 – The temporal structure of LW’s work Legenda: new edition/translation only in English Fig. 2. A cumulative work, in published books (1922-2015)   The publishing history of LW is however less linear than it may appear from these figures.  Consider the following. As Wittgenstein never copyedited any of these papers for publication, each of the posthumous books and papers called for substantial editorial decisions about their content, and how to present it; b) three persons (G.E.M. Ascombe, R. Rhees and G.H. von Wright) have been charged by the same LW of these publications after LW’s death, and they had to negotiate among themselves and other actors (e.g. publishing houses, other people owning materials etc.) exactly what to publish and in which order and form; c) very soon other people entered in the business, more or less accepted by the literary heirs, who made what was possible to them to keep control over the publication plans; d) new materials (manuscripts, letters, lessons’ transcriptions) have come to light, or to the market; e) manuscripts and typescripts had usually to be translated from their original German, and this asked for a preliminary interpretation and opened the door to “manipulation”, also in a positive sense; f) new collective actors entered the game time after time, as departments (e.g. Cornell’s Dept. of Philosophy who owned a copy of all the materials, Bergen’s Dept. who bought these copies in order to digitalize it, etc.); g) editing conventions as well as publishing technologies have been changing, asking for new editions and new solutions. Consequently, almost all of the twentieth-century publications from the Nachlass were extensively edited, often with little or no indication of the relationship between the source texts and the published material (at least till what Erbacher calls the “later rounds of editing Wittgenstein’s Nachlass”), opening the door to debate about not only the content of LW’s ideas but also their form, composition and structure. Briefly, the Work was far from being fixed, established, crystallized, and not only its contents but also its forms and its boundaries have been themselves a stake in the politico-intellectual game through which Wittgenstein as both an Author and a Person has been known (i.e. read, commented, criticised, contradicted, supported, refined, developed, interpreted, canonized etc.) in the almost seven decades after his death.[6] In a sense, LW’s work – once published – has fostered if not generated what LW has tried to fight if not solve all his life: “philosophical problems”. To be sure, this generation started in 1922 (the year of publication of the Tractatus) but has literally exploded only after 1953 (the year of the posthumous publication of the Untersuchungen/Investigations, that is the first of his post-mortem books and for many still his masterpiece). As we will show, LW work has spurred a whole “industry” inside the philosophical discipline, an industry made of people, articles, books, journals, conferences, associations, academic positions, fellowships, and so on. Our research focuses on this industry – that we would conceptualize, following Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory, as a field of cultural production (or better: as a subfield located at the intersection of other fields, including the field of philosophy as an academic discipline): The space of literary or artistic position-takings, i.e. the structured set of the manifestations of the social agents involved in the field — literary or artistic works, of course, but also political acts or pronouncements, manifestos or polemics, etc. — is inseparable from the space of literary or artistic positions defined by possession of a determinate quantity of specific capital (recognition) and, at the same time, by occupation of a determinate position in the structure of the distribution of this specific capital. The literary or artistic field is a field of forces, but it is also a field of struggles tending to transform or conserve this field of forces. It follows from this, for example, that a position-taking changes, even when the position remains identical, whenever there is change in the universe of options that are simultaneously offered for producers and consumers to choose from.  The meaning of a work (artistic, literary, philosophical, etc.) changes automatically with each change in the field within which it is situated for the spectator or reader (Bourdieu 1993, p. 30). Fundamental to Bourdieu’s view is that we cannot understand any work […]

Tags: Sociology, Wittgenstein
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