R. M. Berry

Wittgenstein and Modernism

Walter Jost has undertaken the ambitious task of explaining and exemplifying the critical practice of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, especially as this practice has been interpreted by Stanley Cavell. This highly original and, for some of us, fruitful way of doing criticism has been dubbed by Jost and his associate Ken Dauber “ordinary language criticism,” a felicitous coinage that gave the title to Dauber and Jost’s edited collection of essays, Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein (2003). Jost’s new book serves as a kind of theoretical elaboration of the practice exemplified in the earlier volume. For Jost, ordinary language criticism is a distinctively rhetorical investigation, where rhetoric forms a “middle term” between philosophy and literature. Exactly what this middle term signifies is at times unclear, partly because Jost is at such pains to repudiate any narrow, formalistic, or logical model of rhetoric. In Jost’s account rhetoric is “an intellectual method of thinking” (62), one that emphasizes the investigation of the particulars of a given case and their organization in accord with familiar topics or commonplaces (14-15). These organizing topics (an example of which, for Jost, is the modernist-postmodern theme of “crisis” [73-77]) determine the significance of the particulars, forming them into narratives so that we can tell what is happening. Jost is not unaware of the political inequalities of different topics. At any historical moment some commonplaces or topoi will acquire naturalness and achieve dominance over others, organizing the particulars of nearly every case in accord with hegemonic intellectual fashions and material