Jimmy Campbell - Half-Baked (Out of Print)

Matt Sweeney April 15, 2024

Imagine a guy from Liverpool about the same age as the Beatles just cooler and more talented writing songs from an intensely bummed-out point of view and recording them raw and tuff. Terrifying album cover.

A note: I’m not a record collector or an expert - if hard copies of these records are now being made it’s my oversight. As far as I know they are out of print, and shouldn’t be.

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Matt Sweeney is a record producer and the host of the popular music series “Guitar Moves”. He is a member of The Hard Quartet (debut album out Fall of 2024). Rick Rubin reached out to Matt Sweeney in 2005 after hearing his guitar work and composing on the “Superwolf” album, and featured his playing on albums by Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond, Adele and many others. Follow Matt Sweeney via Instagram.

Suffering is Optional

The Nine of Swords (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Cruelty, the Nine of Swords
Number: 9
Astrology: Mars in Gemini
Qabalah: Yesod of Vau ו

Chris Gabriel April 13, 2024

The Nine of Swords is elemental air brought down to nearly its lowest form. This is a card of violence and regret. When it comes up in a reading, beware of your own and others unconscious outbursts, and the regrets that inevitably follow.

In Thoth, we find nine rusty, chipped, well used swords still dripping with blood. There is the rusty brown of Mars and the orangey red of Gemini. This card is explicit about the violent action of which we only see the regret in Rider. One is reminded of the image of Slayer’s “Raining Blood” or the mythical Lance of Longinus, which has continuously dripped blood since it first pierced Christ’s side. As Mars in Gemini, this is again, violent action mixed with indecision.

In Rider, we see clearly the character of regret. A man is weeping late at night, his bed bears a murderous relief, and his blanket is embroidered with astrological symbols, the weight of fate itself. Above his bed, he awakes to a field of nine swords. He is one who has used violence and has great regret. 

In Marseille, we see eight arched swords and a central ninth sword; we must use Qabalah to grasp the esoteric significance of this mundane image. As a nine, this card is of Yesod, the Foundation, and as a Sword, it is of Vau, the Prince..

Thus we have the Foundation of the Prince. 

A dark image indeed! The Foundation of the Prince is Cruelty. His very nature being secondary, his drive is always toward ascent, not to his own goals, but simply to the position of his Father, the King. A goal which can be achieved only through intellectual, machiavellian schemes built upon a base violence.

It brings me very clearly to a brilliant line from the Diaries of Anaïs Nin: I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.

It is image of both Claudius and Hamlet in this card, the regret of Claudius’ fratricide, and the indecision of Hamlet’s revenge. Both our actions and thoughts can be profoundly violent and cruel, and as we see in these cards, we remain filled with regret long after these terrible things take place.

We can also look at the image of swords dangling over one's head and be brought to Damocles, whose desire to be King puts him on the throne, and above the throne, a sword hanging by a hair, which could fall at any moment.

This card calls us to reflect on our desires and their ultimate consequences. Often when wronged, we want revenge, but can you live with the result?The Prince wants to be King, but can he live with himself if he murders his father?

When we are dealt this card, we should prepare for an outburst, or the consequences of past actions. Our actions must be perfectly aligned and just. Regret must be accepted and understood to be overcome.

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, CARDS

Questlove Playlist

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Questlove has been the drummer and co-frontman for the original all-live, all-the-time Grammy Award-winning hip-hop group The Roots since 1987. Questlove is also a music history professor, a best-selling author and the Academy Award-winning director of the 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.

Film

Gesticulate Wildly

Isabelle Bucklow April 11, 2024

For time immemorial we’ve been gesturing: toward something over there, to each other, that something tastes good, that we are in pain, in love and sometimes for no (conscious) reason at all. We might gesture alongside language, but gesture is not necessarily a substitute for language. Gestures articulate states of mind or sensations that cannot be encased by language. Gestures can fill gaps left by language or create a gap which they then fill, or overfill. Gestures represent and relay information aesthetically, symbolically; others see them and recognise them as meaningful. Those meanings, however, are not fixed. They are hinged on cultural, economic, environmental and psychological variables. But before going further, hell, how do we even distinguish a gesture from other movements we make with our bodies? This question leads to others regarding voluntary and involuntary actions, inculcation, the very notion of freedom itself! 

Le Centre de l’Amour (ca. 1687), Peter Rollos

Because we’ve always been gesturing, we’ve also always been thinking about gesture. Aristotle disparaged gestures as crude tools used by orators to manipulate their audience. Cicero’s De Oratore asserted that ‘every emotion of the mind has from nature its own peculiar look, tone, and gesture’.¹ Around 95 AD Quintilian set out a foundational system for gesture, called Institutes of Oratory, suggesting that shrugs, nods, pointing, furrows, pursing and flares (expressed by shoulders, head, hand, eyebrows, lips and nostrils respectively) might ‘be a language common to all’.² 

By the 18th century, everything had been thrown into great doubt; we weren’t simply recording what gestures the great orators were making, but asking more fundamentally what is gesture, and why do we gesture? With the dawn of industrialisation, the metaphysical why turned into a technical how. How do new environments create new gestures? The production line was a shining example of how gesture can be broken down into goal-oriented parts, then standardised and forced to repeat indefinitely. Gestures can be mistaken for machines. Machines can also malfunction.

In one of the most frequently quoted essays on gesture – titled Notes on Gesture (1992) no less – Giorgio Agamben claimed: ‘By the end of the nineteenth century, the Western bourgeoisie had definitely lost its gestures.’³ 

In Agamben’s account, gesture isn’t lost definitely and entirely into the ether, it remains embodied, we just lost control of it. He begins with an example of measure and mastery, introducing Gilles de la Tourette’s 1886 treatise on ‘gait’, the first ‘strictly scientific analysis’ of human movement.⁴ With a forensic eye, prophetic of unflinching machine vision, Tourette detailed the weight distributions, stride lengths and joint rotations involved in walking. The year before, Tourette had published Study on a Nervous Condition characterised by lack of Motor Coordination accompanied by Echolalia and Coprolalia (what we now call ‘Tourette’s syndrome’). Unlike the dependable pedestrian gait, these gestures were arrhythmic and proliferating. 

In his patients, Tourette observed muscle spasms and tics without recognisable intent or interpretable justification. For Agamben, these incomplete and partial gestures evidenced ‘a generalised catastrophe [of the sphere of gesture].’⁵ Then, in the second half of the 20th century, reports of gestural glitches ceased. Perhaps, Agamben suggested, they had become the norm. This hypothesis could well be supported by Charlie Chaplin’s jittery skits and the modern hops and convulsions of dancer Isadora Duncan. And so, to Agamben’s next pronouncement: ‘In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures tries at once to reclaim what it has lost and to record its loss.’⁶

Contemporary artist Martine Syms’ video piece, Notes on Gesture (2015), took its title from Agamben's 1992 essay. It was first shown in ‘Vertical Elevated Oblique’, an exhibition whose title referenced earlier texts on gesture, like John Bulwer’s Chirologia: Or the Natural Language of the Hand and Chironomia: Or the Art of Manual Rhetoric (1644). Bulwer’s illustrated compendium set out a ‘universal’ vocabulary of gestures (the ‘universal’ was, for Bulmer, the Anglo-Saxon white male). Syms’ work creates an alternate inventory, interrogating black identity, media representation and the hand’s ‘natural’ language. Syms says that through ‘modernity, migration to cities and away from our kin, family, familiar networks, we lost our movement or embodiment and we put it into cinema.’⁷ Body, gesture and video are innately linked, and innately political.  

In the film, Syms’ collaborator Diamond Stingily reacts to title cards (WHEN DEY GOT YOU FUCKED) and makes hand gestures accompanied by phrases (‘Real talk,’ ‘Check yourself,’ ‘Point blank, period’). Through stutters and loops (reminiscent of Vines) these sounds and gestures glitch between authentic and dramatic. Syms has said the work was inspired by a riff on the joke “Everybody wanna be a black woman but nobody wanna be a black woman,” referencing the media appropriation of black culture (of which gestures are integral) that drains politics and ethics from the aesthetics of blackness. Further, Syms has written, ‘mass media allows for narratives – and subsequently, ideologies and typologies – to be industrialised.’⁸ Syms’ looping bitesize gestures anticipated the structure and style of TikTok and Instagram reels. If, in the 19th century, we lost our gestures and put them into cinema, then TikTok seems to cannibalise gestures at the same rate it produces and transmits them – an algorithmic factory of gestures consumed by users and fed back into the loop.

In 2021, during the pandemic, a medical report was published about an overwhelming global increase in tics in children and young people. Many of the patients had watched TikTok videos of young people with Tourette’s syndrome and adopted their gestures and utterances. A New York Times article published last year reported TikTok videos labelled #Tourettes have been viewed 7.7 billion times. These TikTok tics not only demonstrate that gesture is innately quotable, but also how that quotability can be hosted, networked and monetised.

Liz Magic Laser is a performance and video artist whose 2023 work, Convulsive States – an investigative report-cum-hallucination – explores the history of spasmodic gestural expressions of mental distress. Laser considers these gestures as both a symptom of trauma and its possible antidote. The artist visited Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, where Tourette's mentor Dr Jean-Martin Charcot studied the phenomena of hysteria (now called ‘psychogenic nonepileptic seizure’) by unconventional means: performance lectures and photography. His methods have been criticised for being exploitative and theatrical, something Laser finds dismissive. Laser notes, ‘at a time when underclass women were incarcerated and ignored, Charcot offered patients an opportunity to express their trauma, vocally and physically, which was probably healing for some and damaging for others…Charcot put them on stage and facilitated their erotic display of rage. Was it good or bad? Yes, both.’⁹ 

In her film, Laser also highlights the TikTok tic phenomenon. TikTok is a much bigger, more visible stage to display and work through existential changes. It is also a stage where performer and audience aren't separate and distinct, but merged (into what art historian Isobel Harbsion calls ‘the prosumer’).¹⁰ Gestures are not so much lost and reclaimed/recorded here, but trapped in an infinite, insatiable economy of exchange. Multimodal AI tools (like Open AI’s new text-to-video model, Sora, released in February), will alter and amplify this exchange by contributing ever more ‘realistic’ AI generated bodies into the short-form video landscape; their morphing synthetic gestures ripe for virality, but trained on what ‘universal’?

TikTok and Sora are experiments that ‘innovate first, regulate later’. Over two decades since the launch of social media, concrete causal patterns between a teen mental health crisis and social media use are becoming increasingly apparent (leading to a federal lawsuit against meta raised in late 2023).¹¹ We do not yet know all the virtualities inherent in TikTok and short-form social media, let alone spatial computing; TikTok is now available on the Apple Vision Pro (a virtual and augmented reality headset), and according to one tech news platform, ‘ready to eat up your gestures.’¹² 

Since the release of Apple Vision Pro, there have been numerous videos shared online of wearers on the subway, crossing roads, making bizarre pinches and swipes through the air. Currently only a select few can afford the hardware, and when spotted in the wild their gesticulations appear absurd and anti-social. It seems we are in another crisis of gesture. As media theorist Vilém Flusser wrote, in my favourite collection of essays on gesture, ‘whenever gestures appear that have never been seen before, we have a key to decoding a new form of existence.’¹³ And so, in attending to the gestures of today, as well as those of the past, these signs – or symptoms – might inch us closer to decoding the strange phenomena of living and all that entails.

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¹ Cicero, De Oratore [Book III], ed. A.S.Wilkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902), 215
² Quintilian, “Institutio Oratoria” in The Loeb Classical Library [Edition Vol. IV] (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1920)
³ Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2000) 50
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Ibid., 52
⁷ Martine Syms quoted in Hannah Ongley “Martine Syms illuminates a space between secular and sacred at Prada Mode Los Angeles”, Document Journal, February 22, 2022
⁸ Martine Syms quoted in Colby Chamberlain “Review: Martine Syms, Bridget Donahue” Artforum
⁹ Liz Magic Laser quoted in Wendy Vogel “Liz Magic Laser on hysterical crisis and alternative healing” Artforum, October 5, 2023
¹⁰  See Isobel Harbison, Performing Image (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2019) 
¹¹ Kari Paul “Meta sued by 33 states over claims youth mental health endangered by Instagram” The Guardian, October 24, 2023
¹² Rowan Davies, “TikTok is now on Apple Vision Pro, ready to take over your view and eat up your gestures” techradar, February 16, 2024
¹³ Vilém Flusser, Gestures, trans. by Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014)

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Isabelle Bucklow is a London-based writer, researcher and editor. She is the co-founding editor of motor dance journal. 

Laird Hamilton

Film

How To Call Yves Klein - A Pataphysical Sèance

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Photo by Hal Schulman

Derek DelGaudio, April 9, 2024

To combat the bulimia with which these times stain the symbolic world*, follow the steps below: 

1. Find a quiet space. Acquire the latitude and longitude of that location and measure its distance to The Void† . Now, convert that number of miles to inches, reducing it to a length you can hold.

2. Fashion a line that length from strips of torn canvas‡ , dyed blue with the anointed pigment § , all tied together by knots. Lay this line in your space for others to find at their seat.

3. You will also need a special variation of the Monotone-Silence Symphony**, specifically crafted to contact Klein††. Find it here for your convenience.

4. Play the tune‡‡ and hold the line.

5. Close your eyes. Become a silent and static witness to the messages you receive §§. DO NOT LET GO OF THE LINE.

Photo by Hal Schulman

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*The crisis of the Symbolic World was first identified by the retired fortuneteller who can be found sitting at Le Bergamote, located at 169 9th Ave, New York City, NY.

†The Void is located at 48°47'13.3" N 2°17'32.3"E.

‡Buy raw cotton canvas from the garment district and tear it into long strips, each roughly two inches wide. Tie them together with knots, making one long cord. Measure and trim as needed.

§Go to Kremer Pigments located at 247 W 29th St, New York, NY 10001. Tell them you need enough International Klein Blue pigment to dye the distance between yourself and The Void.

**Variation on Monotone-Silence by Bon Iver x Derek DelGaudio © 2024. To truly be felt, the numinous requires a physical manifestation. We recommend pressing this piece on vinyl.

††Born in the nice part of Nice, in 1928, Yves Klein, the Judoka/Artist/Mystic, began drawing with milk from his baby bottle and went on to own the Sky. He established the Void in 1957 and later made headlines by leaping into it on November 27th, 1960.

‡‡In human time this piece lasts 40 minutes. In the void, it is eternal. We recommend playing it for at least one eternity.

§§ These are the messages from Klein.

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Derek DelGaudio is a writer, director, and magician. DelGaudio created the award-winning theater show and film, In & Of Itself. He wrote the acclaimed book, AMORALMAN, served as the artist-in-residence for Walt Disney Imagineering, and co-founded the performance art collective A.Bandit. He is currently an Affiliate Scholar at Georgetown University and co-conspirator at Deceptive Practices, a creative firm known for designing illusions and providing "Arcane Knowledge on a Need-to-Know Basis.”

Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

Notes on Experimental Jetset Vol. 2

The Ten of Disks (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Wealth, the Ten of Disks
Number: 10
Astrology: Earth, Mercury in Virgo
Qabalah: Malkuth of He ה

Chris Gabriel April 6, 2024

The Ten of Disks is an earthly card, at the end of its fall from Heaven. Unlike Air and Fire, Earth is happier on the ground than up in the Heavens. When this card comes up in a reading, one thinks of a great investment or a great home. This card is about something stable, but not stagnant.

Mercury is domiciled in Virgo, a sign that it rules. Thus Mercury, God of money, is intelligently utilizing the wealth accumulated over the past 9 cards. Mercury is in fact the root of words like “Merchant” or “Commerce”

This is a card of accumulated resources, and their correct usage.

In Thoth, we are given an image of ten coins in the form of the Tree of Life. Each bears a Mercurial sign with Mercury atop and Virgo below.  All about these ten golden coins are the purples of royalty. 

In Rider, we see the Pentacles forming the Tree of Life, as in Thoth. Behind this superimposed tree, we see a beautiful scene. It is a kingdom at peace: lovers talking, a child playing with two dogs, and an old man sitting. Rather than the literal wealth depicted in Thoth, this is the wealth of security -all are well dressed and even pets can be fed. A far cry from the Five of Pentacles earlier in this suit. 

In Marseille, we see a more mundane layout of the ten coins, more like the fives that appear on a pair of dice. Through Qabalah, we can understand this card as Malkuth, The Kingdom, at the very bottom of the tree of life, which corresponds to planetary Earth. Being a disk, it is of He ה, the Princess and as the final letter of the Tetragrammaton, represents elemental Earth. Thus the kingdom the card refers to is the Kingdom of the Princess.

In some ways, this is the final card in the deck. It is here we reach the end of a long descent down the Tree of Life, through the paths along it, and through the Tetragrammaton. This is a joyous ending. As opposed to the great rises and falls, joys and sorrows of the deck, here we find a very solid, very comfortable, material reality. At last, everything is in its place.

When we think of the Fall to Earth, we often think of fiery Satan, displeased with his crash landing, but our Earthy Princess is very happy here. This is the perfection of our world. 

In the Bible, I’m brought to Revelation 21, when the Apocalypse has ceased, and God does away with how things were, and all are united. Yet even this sort of ending is not forever, this is the wisdom of the Aeon, that there are no ends, only ceaseless transformation, and so this happy earth is bound to change to some new form so soon as the deck is shuffled.

We can look to William Blake to help see the relation of the lofty Heavens of Kether with this most earthen Malkuth: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”

This is the nature of the Ten of Disks, the lovely productions of time.

When dealt this card, we are asked to look upon our journey, what we have all been on: a long, colorful, rainbow path (ס) and here at last is the pot of gold (מַלְכוּת) !

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, CARDS

Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

Film

A Story of Three Bones

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Vestal Malone April 4, 2024

In a sacred moment, 3 friends begin an epic journey. Manifesting from the primordial ooze, they float together. Their innate destiny is a collaborative effort of strength, support and love. They protect and nurture the pulse of their own existence and grow into being.

Mandible, Sacrum and Sphenoid. Three bones together with the heart and the nervous system are the start and core of our physical being. More than 200 bones join the team as the body grows in a glorious journey to last a lifetime.

Mandible, the jaw bone, takes its duty seriously. It protects the heart with honor and has the strength and courage to do it well. When you try to avoid feeling a heartache, the jaw clenches and the tail tightens in an attempt to stop the 'flow 'of emotions. A newborn baby's lip quivers before the audible cry releases the tension. Adults tend to “keep a stiff upper lip” and not express their fear, anger or sadness. The heart does not forget how the mandible protected it, the two are connected from utero and for the rest of their lives together. Mandible has help in its task from Sacrum, the pelvis, and his little buddy Coccyx, the tailbone. They exist in a synchronistic dance and sway, the three together are the physical guardians encasing the developing heart, and then the emotional guardians as they grow solid and emerge into gravity. The sacrum looks after the cerebral spinal fluid, the flow of this nectar controlling our physical health and emotional well being. As our tail wags, it pumps this life juice up the spine to bathe our brain with nutrients. Remaining in lockdown in response to the travesties  of life leads to physical duress. A relaxed body is truly a relaxed mind. Muscle tension and physical injury stop Sacrum from wagging, impeding the flow of our perfect divinely designed system. 

Sphenoid, the bone of all bones, is fragile and shy. The keeper of the pituitary gland and the nervous system, it takes the brunt of our existence. Without the pulse of life moving through our body, all systems stagnate, especially little Sphenoid. Its shape resembles a butterfly, with bony wings just as delicate. It lives just behind the eyes and in front of our gray matter, hovering and swaying in harmony with the sacrum like a hammock to distribute “food” for the brain and body. Sacrum handles the cerebral spinal fluid while the Sphenoid handles the self regulating chemicals produced in house. It is a pharmacy with a remedy for each challenge, and a nutritionist chef to serve the perfect meals for growth and vitality. If Sphenoid can't dance and sway, the party's over.

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“They exist in a synchronistic dance and sway, the three together are the physical guardians encasing the developing heart, and then the emotional guardians as they grow solid and emerge into gravity.”

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After her University education (BA in English Literature and philosophy, minor in music),  Vestal Malone followed the call to study her hobbies of yoga and therapeutic touch a the Pacific School of Healing Arts and continued in the Master's program of Transformational Bodywork  with her mentors, Fred and Cheryl Mitouer, and assisting with their teaching. She went on to teach her own Therapeutic Touch workshops in Japan,  hatha yoga in America, and study Cranial Sacral Therapy with Hugh Milne and John Upledger. She has had the honor of doing bodywork with professional athletes, laymen and nobility for over 25 years. Vestal is a mom, a backyard organic gardener, and sings soprano in her church choir on a little island in the middle Pacific ocean. She hails from Colorado and Wyoming and migrates every summer to her family ranch to ground in the dust of her roots.

Chris Dixon

Film

Playing Games with Ludwig Wittgenstein

Nicko Mroczkowski April 2nd, 2024

What is the meaning of a word? When we talk about what words mean, we usually imagine something like a dictionary, which pairs up words with the things they stand for. So, somewhere in our heads, we’ve stored the sound corresponding to the word ‘apple’, and this entry is linked with our idea of the sweet fruit of certain trees. We are English speakers to the extent that we have a large repository of knowledge of this type, a dictionary in our minds that pairs sound to meaning.

According to the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, this picture of the way language works is an illusion that has a sinister hold on us. It forms the basis of most theories in linguistics, it governs the way we navigate the law, it has come to define the architecture of AI language models, as well as our approaches to understanding literature, our common sense thinking about language itself, and how we learn and use it. Perhaps we don’t notice, then, that it rests on a principle of constant deciphering, or translation: it treats words as strings of code that must be translated into the concepts that we’re bringing to the listener’s attention. Just as a novice French learner will read une pomme and connect this with the English word ‘apple’, so will they hear the word ‘apple’ in their native language and ‘translate’ it into the image or concept of an apple. 

The problem, as Wittgenstein points out, is that this ‘translation’ doesn’t actually seem to occur in real time; this notion is not faithful to the genuine experience of using language. If I’m at the shop, and I ask the attendant for three red apples, do they first count up to three, retrieve the colour red in their minds, and call up an image of an apple? Surely not – they just grab the things! Maybe, you could say, these processes do occur, but so quickly, due to training and habit, that it is imperceptible. Suppose, then, that I ask the attendant to work faster – do they think up an abstract representation of speed, and communicate it to their body? And should they, unimpressed with this request, utter a single expletive – how should I translate it? What ‘concepts’ do swear words used in this way, or other expressions like ‘ouch’, correspond to? In a living context, believing that meaning is all about translation leads to some absurd consequences.

In fact, in this regard, living contexts tend to be stranger than we initially realise. When among very close friends, we use words and names in ways that might be unintelligible to other listeners, even though we’re still using plain English. Our shared history, memories, and inside jokes imbue our conversations with meanings that go far beyond the dictionary definitions of the words we’re using. Or, to take a more famous case: if I were to ask you, reader, what colour Wednesday is, you would most likely have an answer that we could discuss, and agree or disagree upon. Where, in the normal concept of ‘Wednesday’, is there anything to do with its colour? Is there a separate mental dictionary for cases like this?

The fact is, when it comes to language, context is everything; it accounts for much more than whatever could be written down in a dictionary. This is the core of Wittgenstein’s argument. Language, he observes, is like a box of tools, each with different uses that can be adapted to any purpose. There is no one theme that unites each of these things as tools – the hammer is for striking, the tape for measuring, the nails for fastening – except that they are there, at the ready, in the same place. If it has a use, it could find its way in there, and there is no principle that determines what belongs. In just the same way, there is no general theory of language or what we can do with it.

Le Centre de l’Amour (ca. 1687), Peter Rollos

Instead, we can speak of what Wittgenstein calls ‘language-games’: distinct but loosely defined activities that make use of the spoken or written word. Requesting and retrieving items at a shop is one example. Wittgenstein himself offers some other notable ones – telling a joke, reporting an event, asking, thanking – but really, there are as many language-games as there are things that human beings do with each other. This is the point: language is not separate from action, but belongs to it, and develops alongside it. ‘In the beginning was the deed,’ writes Wittgenstein, citing Goethe’s Faust; in other words, human activity exists before language, which forms just a part of it. We don’t speak first and act after.

Our modern scientific disposition, it seems, has made us believe that the main function of language is to sit outside the world, describe it, and state facts – to communicate knowledge. But this is just one of the things we do with it, and we don’t even do it that often. We do so many other things with each other; we eat, love, play, build, teach, inspire. These are real grounds of language. Wittgenstein calls them ‘forms of life’; what he means by this, in an intentionally loose way, is whatever a community of language-users does as part of its way of living. Forms of life are the smaller elements that make up a way of life; for example, a fishing community has customs and practices relating to different ways of catching fish, cleaning and preparing them, building and maintaining boats, trading, et cetera, each with their corresponding language-games. These things are ultimately cultural. So asking about the language of a community is like asking about its cuisine – what’s available, and what do they do with it?

When we think about the meaning of a word, then, this is the real question – what do we do with it? After all, recalling our shop attendant from earlier, just having a mental picture of three red apples is not enough to do their job; they need to know where the apples are, what to do with them, and how much to charge. If they stand there thinking about apples, they haven’t understood me; translation is not enough for meaning. And meaning counts for more than the ability to translate – it goes the other way, too. Learning what a word means is also learning about the form of life it belongs to. If I tell you that ‘deglazing’ means using liquid to dissolve the caramelised bits left over from frying something in a pan, I haven’t just told you the name of a technique – I’ve also taught you how to do a little bit of cooking, and how to follow a recipe that calls for it.

Like his predecessor Kant, Wittgenstein sought to shift our philosophical priorities away from the single-minded pursuit of total knowledge, towards an appreciation of the humble beauty of everyday life and thinking. He recognised that a perfect theory of language would get us no closer to illuminating the other mysteries of human experience; each of these things is ‘just there, like our lives’. The point is to live. 

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Nicko Mroczkowski

Tyler Cowen Playlist

Tyler Cowen April 1, 2024

These are pieces originally composed for one instrument, but now played on another instrument. Some of them you could call “transcriptions.” Some you could call confirmatory, others rebellions or perhaps even admissions of defeat.

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Tyler Cowen is Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. With colleague Alex Tabarrok, Cowen is coauthor of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and cofounder of the online educational platform Marginal Revolution University.

Japanese Gardens