I don’t think it’s an accident that Wittgenstein and Cavell both grew up in intensely musical environments. Brahms frequented the Wittgenstein household, and his brother Paul was the dedicatee of Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (because he had lost his right arm in the First World War); Cavell’s mother was also intensely musical, and he studied composition at Juilliard before switching to philosophy at UCLA. Playing the piano is reading and not-reading at once. As Asad puts it:
When a practiced pianist plays, thoughtfully and with feeling, a piece of music she has mastered without having to read the score, one can say that signs have dissolved into her hands. To say that is not to imply that the activity is meaningless but that it is the result of practice that has eventuated in an ability to act in a particular way. (404)
Sometimes, when I play piano, my thoughts drift. This is not to say that my playing is mechanical, as if I could separate my body’s machine-like movements from my higher faculty of thinking. As Asad says, it is quite the opposite: my habit of playing allows me to inhabit a form of life and so take grammatical rules to be perfectly ordinary. It is as if I am a native speaker who has mastered that language’s grammar without knowing what rules I am in fact following.
In this opening passage we see the two questions that I think preoccupy Asad in his turn to Wittgenstein. First: what to do with signs and symbols, or how to make sense of culture after Geertz. Second: what to do with the category of “religion,” or how to make sense of religious practice after genealogy (in Foucault’s sense). We can find resources to address these queries in Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein had as his primary object of inquiry meaning, i.e. representation/signification/ostension; he carried out his inquiry through grammatical investigations of e.g. pain, language-games, and rule-following. Asad is a significant anthropologist of religion, and specifically of “formations of the secular” like pain and agency; but I see an overarching concern in his work for rethinking meaning, representation, and agency. In my view, where they meet is in that they both locate agency in use (of, e.g., descriptions or pain) rather than in representation.
One way into these questions might be to look again at “practice.” I don’t usually think of practicing the piano as something like the religious practices anthropologists sometimes claim to study. But they bear deep similarities, after all: children are forced to practice piano and to practice making the sign of the cross in church — both ways of enforcing discipline, of shaping habit, of learning to follow rules. In other words, practice is a central way of inculcating a form of life. One might think there is something of value in “unmasking” the origin of these practices — for instance, in pointing to the role of religion in reinforcing power dynamics, rather than being a “true” expression of “faith.” In Foucault’s terms, this would be a genealogy. In Wittgenstein’s, it is a rather different matter. As Asad puts it:
My point is simply that he [Wittgenstein] not only helps us see that looking for meanings underneath signs (whether in the form of writing, voice, or gesture) is mistaken because meanings are embodied in practice. He also makes us aware that to the extent that a form of life has been mastered through practice—once the practice becomes part of the everyday, of an ordinary form of life—explicit signs may become unnecessary. (404)
To show that a given practice is part of an ordinary form of life is exactly that: ordinary. Saying that, e.g., “religion” is a category that must be located within the history of Christianity isn’t to radically unsettle a theory of the world, but rather to show how the meaning of “religion” is constituted by its everyday use.
Thus, for Wittgenstein (in Asad’s words), “religious practice isn’t necessarily based on a theory about the world; it is first and foremost a way of being” (405). Wittgenstein’s critique of Frazer was that he illegitimately confused these two interpretations of religion. As Asad puts it, Wittgenstein “finds particularly objectionable Frazer’s extension of judgments of truth or falsity, of sense or nonsense, from propositions where such judgments are appropriate to situations where they are not” (405). Asad astutely notes that this parallels, in a way, Malinowski’s own proposition that myths are not “childish accounts of the past but narratives that functioned as justifications of social claims and institutions in the present” (405). But Asad also cautions us not to conflate this reorientation with Wittgenstein’s turn from meaning to use: “the latter doesn’t simply argue that meaning is necessarily determined by use (thus generalizing Malinowski’s interpretation of the meaning of myth), but that the multiple ways in which language is used—by sender and by receiver—require us to investigate the complex relationships of discourse to life through the idea of ‘grammar’” (406). It is worth thinking in just what way Wittgenstein differs from Malinowski, that is in what way the “complex relationships of discourse to life” are not reducible to “culture.” I would propose that this gap hinges on our understanding of “use” not primarily as a noun but as a verb: we use descriptions as instruments, not because we are justified in doing so but because we have a right (PI §289, §291).
Note again that this is not using descriptions for the purpose of, say, advancing critique (as Horkheimer thinks “traditional theory” can be put to critical uses). Instead, Asad says: “If language is rooted in ways of being and doing, description is not merely necessary to critique; it may be critique” (409). Then, we might think the prime example of critique is the re-description of a form of life “in another way than the one generally familiar to us” (410), with the purpose of changing behavior. In other words, “criticism is an activity rooted in and directed at what binds people to their forms of life, not simply an expression of ‘rational argument’” (410).
To begin again, in a different key: I do not think it is an accident that my feelings when I heard Grigory Sokolov play in the Concertgebouw in June were religious. Once again, my thoughts drifted away, but not quite to be replaced with feeling. To play the piano well, Asad tells us, is to play with both thought and feeling. Thus Augustine, in his Confessions, is both the literary writer of great feeling and the Neoplatonic philosopher of great thought. Showing that one is reducible to the other brings us nowhere — and is untrue, besides. Augustine did not give up his philosophy when he became a Christian, even if its trappings fell away; a great pianist does not give up caring about scores when they master a piece of music (quite the opposite; the great interpreters of Bach will often make their own editions from his manuscripts). Signs do not dissolve into thin air. Rather, they “dissolve into hands.” Representation is redirected to embodied agency, our “ability to act in a particular way” (404).
Bibliography
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2003.
———. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
———. “Thinking about Religion through Wittgenstein.” Critical Times 3, no. 3 (December 1, 2020): 403–42. https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-8662304
Cavell, Stanley. Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York: Free Press, 1990.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968.