Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism by Aaron Jaffe;Michael F. Miller;Rodrigo Martini;

Author:Aaron Jaffe;Michael F. Miller;Rodrigo Martini;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501348440
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Figure 18.1 Drawn after still life by Pieter Claesz. Source: Kate Brideau.

Wittgenstein’s House

Do not be troubled by the fact that languages (2) and (8) consist only of orders. If you want to say that this shows them to be incomplete, ask yourself whether our language is complete;—whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses and streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.6

In his Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein gives language a material form, that of a city that is built up as need be and in which people live. In this metaphor, language is presented as something that performs a function, something that is useful not just in logic but in everyday life. In this account the language of logic would likely be a suburb of the ancient city, though in Wittgenstein’s earlier work logic was central. In his Tractatus Philosophicus it is through a proper examination of the logic of language that the limits of the expression of thought could be discovered.7 He argues that the facts we picture to ourselves share with reality the same logical structure. And going further, he argues, that anything that contradicts logic cannot be represented in language.

In the Tractatus, logical thought reigns, while in Philosophical Investigations it is use that defines language. And between these two works, Wittgenstein designed a house for his sister. The design was influenced by Adolf Loos, who famously declared ornamentation to be criminal.8 As such, the house is stark, geometric, disciplined, and free of ornamentation. It perhaps looks like the Tractatus—one carefully constructed logical proposition upon another. And yet, this house was not a logical exercise but a space in which people were to live, a space that would be used.

Writing on “Wittgenstein’s Architecture,” Flusser creates a metaphor that takes after Wittgenstein’s own metaphor of language as a city. In this case, though, a landscape is made of philosophical and literary works. It includes the snow-covered mountains of Homer’s texts and of the Bible; the calm lake of Aristotelian texts; and the housing blocks and factories of Modernist thought. Dominating Flusser’s scene are two buildings: in the old city center is the Cathedral of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summae; and alone, off in the suburbs, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.9

The Cathedral is described from the outside as a towering structure with stained glass windows. It sits surrounded by the rooftops of Baroque thought and points our attention to heaven. It is the embodiment of Aquinas’s view (after Aristotle) of God as a static mover—a mover of things that is itself not moved. The Tractatus, on the other hand, is a small house that looks like scaffolding.

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