Poetry and Ordinary Language: Introduction to the Special Issue

Poetry is a creation of ordinary words put to extraordinary use. How do we understand poetry’s power to defamiliarize ordinary language and render it anew, as well as the world it is entangled with? Does the philosophy of ordinary language (Wittgenstein) or ordinary language philosophy (Austin), in so far as these are different, have anything to contribute to our understanding of this question1 [1]? Furthermore, could poetry itself be understood as a philosophy of ordinary language—hence, a philosophy of what philosophers call the ordinary lifeworld?

Such questions are motivated by the appearance in recent decades of a series of books that attempt to straddle the two sides of what Plato referred to as “an ancient quarrel between [poetry] and philosophy” [2]. These works are, in order of publication, Stanley Cavell’s In Quest of the Ordinary (1988), Marjorie Perloff’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996), and Toril Moi’s Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin and Cavell (2017). A common feature of all three volumes is an invocation of the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein—arguably the most influential and, we might say, the most artistic philosopher of the twentieth century2 [3]—as making available a space referred to as “the ordinary” in which the question of the relation of poetry and philosophy can be most fruitfully explored. Moreover, we might add, these writers explore the ordinary by way of exploring the significance and conditions of ordinary language.

Of particular interest for this Special Issue of the journal is Wittgenstein’s remark:

Ich glaube meine Stellung zur Philosophie dadurch zusammengefaßt zu haben, indem ich sagte: Philosophie dürtfe man eigentlich nur dichten. Daraus muß sich, sicht scheint mir, ergeben, wie weit mein Denken der Gegenwart, Zukunft, oder der Vergangeneheit angehört. Denn ich habe mich damit auch als einen bekannt, der micht ganz kann was er zu können wünscht.

I believe to have summed up my attitude towards philosophy in that I said: one should really only create philosophy poetically. That, it seems to me, should reveal the extent to which my thinking belongs to the present, the future or the past. For with that I have also revealed myself as someone who can’t quite do what he would like to be able to do3.

[4]

The crucial sentence is “Philosophie dürtfe man eigentlich nur dichten”. How should we interpret that in context? Majorie Perloff, a native German speaker, writes,

Wittgenstein’s proposition, as I have noted elsewhere (Perloff 2004, 53 n. 12) is all but untranslatable, because there is no precise English equivalent of the German verb dichten—a verb that means to create poetry but also, in the wider sense, to produce something fictional, as in Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, where fiction is opposed to truth. My own earlier translation: “Philosophy ought really to be written as a form of poetry” (Perloff 1996, xviii and passim) is not quite accurate, since there is no reference to form of writing here. Peter Winch, whose first edition of CV [Culture and Value] renders Wittgenstein’s sentence as ‘Philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition,’ revises it for the 1998 edition to read ‘Really one should write philosophy only as one writes a poem.’ The word “poem” is misleading—Wittgenstein did not, after all, write poems—and perhaps the most accurate translation is David Schalkwyk’s: ‘Philosophy should be written only as one would write poetry’ (2004, p. 56). Or, to be even more colloquial, one can follow David Antin’s ‘One should really only do philosophy as poetry’ (1998, p. 161)4.”

[5]

Even after taking into account this sensitivity to the matter of translation, we are left with the following question: How is philosophy to be written poetically5? One suggestion is that philosophy, as Wittgenstein practices it, can aspire to a form of poetry—say, in its the use of assertoric language for non-assertoric (non-informational, non-factual) purposes. Another intriguing possibility is that poetry can be a form of philosophy, where philosophy is, following Wittgenstein, a non-doctrinal activity of recovering a sense of disorientation in the realm of meaning and meaning making in language. Both poetic philosophy and philosophical poetry will be explored in this Special Issue.

In his interpretation of Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell elaborates on what Wittgenstein calls “the everyday” (or, for Cavell, “the ordinary”) as ordinary language understood in terms of the everyday criteria we unselfconsciously use to apply concepts to the world in linguistic practice [6,7]. Wittgenstein distinguishes language that is doing “work”—that is, language that is used within “language-games”—from language that is “on holiday” [7]. However, the philosophical attempt to understand the work that language does and its conditions faces significant obstacles. He remarks:

A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words.—Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity

[7]

We are not at all prepared for the task of describing the use of the word e.g., “to think”

[8]

Two ideas of ordinary language are present here: (1) that we are unaware of how ordinary language operates—we have no rulebook of correct use or catalogue of our criteria for concepts of “objects”. We might add that what native speakers have it is more a kind of know-how than theoretical knowledge of language; and (2) ordinary language is not something stable and fixed, but a complex flux of the creative use we make of ordinary words in specific contexts in second-personal space, i.e., the space of person-to-person communication. In language, we are all improvising our lives together.

In Wittgenstein’s view, philosophy attempts to explain language from a God’s-eye-view (or, more prosaically, from the armchair) when it should rest content to describe it—where what he means is not to describe idiosyncratic psychological effects of language, but its “logic”. What is in question is the informal logic of language, which is not a matter of rules or conventions, but something whose shifting significances we keeping track of in our practices of using it. Poetry’s creations in ordinary words call attention to their imaginative power and to the worldly background against which making meaning in language is possible—the taken-for-granted, the obvious, a sense of the way things normally happen or do not happen. Even if it invokes magic, myth, and fantasy, poetry maintains its grip on reality [9].

In this Special Issue exploring the relationship between poetry and ordinary (hence, extraordinary) language, we have invited philosophers from diverse backgrounds, as well as poets who are also philosophers of poetry. Each approaches the question of the relation of poetry to ordinary language in a unique way. What poetry is and what ordinary language is—as well as what the ordinary world presupposed and pictured in ordinary language is—are all in question in these papers. Since I want to let each contributor speak for themselves, I will only provide the barest sketch of their contribution here.

Justin Clemens (University of Melbourne) gives a close reading of a few lines of John Milton’s Lycidas concerning poetry and the ordinary. Sophie Grace Chappell (Open University) writes on the Oedipus Complex and the way in which Oedipus is resistant to the extraordinary in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. Chappell also includes her new English translation of four of Horace’s Odes, which are an attempt to conduct philosophy in poetry. Max Deutscher (Macquarie University) composes a response to Paul Celan on speeches about poetry. Julian Lamb (University of Wollongong) applies the ordinary language philosopher J. L. Austin’s notion of performative utterance to a passage from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. David Macarthur (University of Sydney) discusses poetry as a form of anti-sceptical philosophy, giving a close reading of Czeslaw Milosz’s Realism in which “realism” is understood as an attitude to the ordinary in contrast to, and contesting, “realism” as a metaphysical or epistemological doctrine. Paul Magee’s (University of Canberra) paper compares innovation in ordinary language with innovation in poetry and poetry criticism. David Musgrave (University of Newcastle) explores the difference between what is said and what is shown in the poetry of W. H. Auden and Kenneth Goldsmith, pursuing the latter’s practice with a “found poem” in a versification of G. E. Moore’s “proof” of an external world in the face of scepticism. Finally, Lucy Van (University of Melbourne) writes about the beginning of a poem in a meditation on quotation and the questions about the originality, difference, tradition, context, and improvisation it gives rise to.