1

The “revolution” described in Moi's Revolution of the Ordinary is both triumphant and failed; it is finished and ongoing and also, as I've suggested above, belated; and the book is therefore both defiant and melancholy. What do we make of a revolution that so many of us seem to have missed, that could already have turned our conception of language and meaning on its head—if only any of us had paid any attention, if only we could understand? Eliot might have wondered the same thing as her passionate defense of historical language fell on deaf ears and Boole's binary algebra rapidly transformed the academic field of the philosophy of language. Where Ferdinand de Saussure plays the villain in Moi's history—he's the flawed thinker we all follow, more or less unconsciously, when we might have been following the more brilliant Wittgenstein—Boole and his followers occupy a similar role as we look back to Eliot's defense of the ordinary and the concrete, their victory obscuring the vibrant possibilities of paths not taken in the philosophy of language. Or, to be more accurate, paths not taken until Wittgenstein called our attention back to the ordinary as an object of philosophical inquiry; it's difficult, in the end, to imagine that we ever forgot about ordinary language between Eliot's essay in 1856 and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations in 1953. Ordinariness simply migrated elsewhere, was analyzed and debated under a different rubric: it became, perhaps, a literary object rather than a philosophical one.

The “ordinary” of Moi's title, the object or perhaps agent of revolution, points us to a carefully circumscribed field, then, of twentieth-century ordinary-language philosophy, as represented primarily by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell; and Moi draws the language of revolution from Austin and Cavell themselves, who, as she points out, use the word regularly to describe the field-changing impact of Wittgenstein's work. But as Moi goes on to lament, we as literary theorists and critics may have missed the revolution, because “ordinary language philosophy's refusal to conform to traditional philosophy's understanding of concepts and theory” has led us to misunderstand its aims as we “project” our own sense of what philosophy should do (develop a theory) onto what ordinary-language philosophy tries to do (refuse the generalities of theory in favor of a commitment to concrete examples) (10). At least part of Moi's goal in this book, then, is to explain to an audience of literary critics some of the central insights of ordinary-language philosophy, to help us see the revolution that we missed when we got drafted into the theory wars instead.

As I've already pointed out, Moi understands this process of explanation and reeducation as, simultaneously, a process of therapy. In this she follows Wittgenstein since, as she puts it in accounting for Wittgenstein's goal of finding a “clear view” of the ordinary, “Philosophy—his kind of philosophy—should be a therapy for (our own) confusion. Like psychoanalytic therapy it should loosen our mental shackles and make us freer in our responses to the world” (51). The structure of Moi's book, understood through this therapeutic lens, is ingenious, as it begins with the cure (ordinary-language philosophy), seducing us with the dazzling kind of reorientation it offers us, a turn toward a clarity about linguistic meaning that Moi knows we as literary critics lack, or even actively resist, before offering us the diagnosis in Moi's analysis of our unconscious “post-Saussurean” commitments.

In the first of the book's three parts, Moi sets herself the task of teaching us Wittgenstein's most important insights about language, and the challenge of a review essay such as this one is that I cannot do the work here of re-explaining what Moi herself explains with such patience, intelligence, and lucidity. I won't therefore offer a comprehensive summary of Moi's entire argument. For our present purposes, I prefer to zero in on the subject of the book's first chapter, which I take to be the most important and most revolutionary of Wittgenstein's ideas for Moi and for the literary critics who make up her audience: that when it comes to our speaking and writing, or in other words our everyday uses of language, “there is no meaning ‘behind’ the use … , there is only meaning in use” (29). This insight is both eminently clear and deeply challenging, since, as Moi will go on to elaborate, we are trained to understand language as being bipartite, split in some way, whether between signifier and signified, surface and depth, or the use and the meaning that grounds the use. The groundlessness of our practices of language—what Wittgenstein famously calls our various “language games”—is what makes this idea so difficult to take on. As Moi puts it, “Use is not a ground. Use is a practice grounded on nothing. Use is simply what we do. Nothing—no essences, no built-in referential power—obliges us to continue using language as we do now” (29). Precisely because “Use is open-ended, in constant transformation, always responding to new circumstances,” Wittgenstein's model requires an absolute refusal of generalizing theories of meaning, and in this sense he offers us “a radical alternative to theory” (47, 1). All we can do, all we must do, is look to examples of language in use, talk them out together, and measure them against what J. L. Austin would describe as a kind of innate sense, a conviction about “what we should say when, and so why and what we should mean by it.”Footnote ⁷

Chapter 2, “Our Lives in Language,” takes up several more Wittgensteinian concepts: language-games, grammar, and forms of life, and then chapters 3 and 4 turn all these concepts to the field of critical theory, first in a chapter that compares Wittgenstein's ideas about meaning to those of Jacques Derrida, and then in a chapter that mounts a rigorous critique of intersectionality theory, insisting that the search for a generalizing theory of intersecting oppressions turns our attention away from the kinds of concrete cases to which ordinary-language philosophy would ask us to attend. In part 2 of the book, composed of three chapters, Moi convinces us of our deep indebtedness to Saussure's theory of language, with its arbitrary relation between signifier and signified. Our inheritance of this idea about the instability of meaning has instilled in us, Moi goes onto argue, “the post-Saussurean assumption that language itself, just by being language, is always hiding something; that words, sentences, utterances themselves always wear masks; that there is always something else beneath or behind our words, a shadow of meanings covered up by the words themselves” (178).

Finally, part 3 turns to debates over literary interpretation, from surface reading to postcritique, and then to Moi's argument that as literary critics we tend to “mistake political and existential investments for methods” (179). “In the encounter with the literary text,” she continues, “the only ‘method’ that imposes itself is the willingness to look and see, to pay maximal attention to the words on the page, to the point that we feel compelled to ask ‘Why this?’” (179–80). With “attention” as her keyword, Moi then goes on in the final two chapters of the book to argue for reading as a practice of acknowledgment, in Stanley Cavell's specialized sense, and also a practice of exercising the “just and loving gaze” that Moi finds theorized by Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil. These ideas, taken together, ask us to let go of the skeptical view according to which we can never know another person's mind, which leads literary theory to its prohibition on considerations of authorial intention. As Moi explains, “To ask ‘Why this?’—for example why the author wants this word here, in this specific position in the line, is not to ask about ‘something anterior’ to the poem,” such as the author's supposedly inscrutable, unavailable psychology; rather, “It is to ask about what's there, on full display, in the poem… . Nothing is hidden” (203). This is surface reading without the metaphor of surface and depth that Moi has already revealed as part of our post-Saussurean inheritance. The choice between visible surface and hidden depth is replaced here by a sense that there is no such thing as a “depth” to language at all: there is only meaning in use, and to understand texts as the “expressions and actions” of an author, as Moi asks us to do, is simply to insist that aesthetic language is no exception, that as Moi puts it, “Aesthetic experience is ordinary experience” (205, 218).

The major limitation of Moi's project is that as a polemic for a renewed literary criticism, it reserves its closest readings for texts of philosophy and theory, almost never engaging in a literary analysis that would serve as a sustained example of what close reading guided by ordinary-language philosophy would look like. When Moi does turn to a small selection of literary examples, from Arthur Conan Doyle to Iris Murdoch, she draws from them examples of fictional characters practicing the kinds of attentiveness she would like us to bring to bear upon literary texts. Why, in fact, do we need Wittgenstein's theory as a kind of guide for our attention to ordinary language when so many writers of literature already theorize the ordinary in such complex ways?

In Moi's account, there is a kind of distance between philosophy (as a template for how we should think about meaning) and literature (as the set of complex linguistic objects to which we literary critics happen to apply the insights of philosophy). This distance, I argue, might be closed by a more thorough historicizing of Wittgenstein's ideas, and indeed a willingness to understand Wittgenstein's own writing as uniquely literary, available for a multiplicity of interpretations. As Moi herself says, “different readings reveal different readers’ different ways of acknowledging the text,” and therefore “reading requires us to discover our own position in relation to the work” (209). And yet in her relation to Wittgenstein, Moi can be surprisingly rigid, opposed to the possibility that his writing could be acknowledged differently. When she reads a particularly challenging claim of Wittgenstein's, for example, that “Philosophy must not interfere in any way with the actual use of language,” she begins from a position of interpretive openness: “One way of reading [this sentence] is to say that he is exhorting philosophers not to do something that in any case can't be done” (156). But if this is one way of reading the claim, there might be others, and Moi quickly moves to close off this possibility, to insist that her reading of Wittgenstein has accessed an irrefutable truth: “This is in fact Wittgenstein's view.” What kind of a fact is Moi presenting to us here, and what kind of evidence aside from her own conviction allows her to insist upon its factuality? Her reading is persuasive. I agree with it. And yet moments like this, frequent in Moi's reading of Wittgenstein, seem to me an unfortunate denial, what Russell might call a tactless denial, of Wittgenstein's own literariness, a reduction of a difficult and vibrant work of art such as Philosophical Investigations to a set of easily accessed “views.”

2

I turn now from Moi's book, with its periodization of 1953 to the present, to a group of literary critics who cover a longer period, from the Romantic era to the present, but all of them invested in the mid-twentieth century. We Victorianists have become quite interested in this moment as a kind of vector through which to follow the continuities between the Victorian period and the present, perhaps because it bypasses the modernists, who have so often insisted on disowning their Victorian inheritance in ways that slightly later writers do not. Wittgenstein includes a cryptic citation of John Henry Newman in his posthumously published On Certainty; in Playing and Reality, D. W. Winnicott treats a patient who recites snippets from Gerard Manley Hopkins and Christina Rossetti. These are small, almost incidental resonances, but they point to the possibility of a fuller picture. As we've seen, Russell compares the work of British psychoanalysis to the work of Victorian essayists. Alicia Christoff, in her brilliant recent essay on Tess of the d'Urbervilles, argues that “Hardy's notion of relational solitude”—the idea that even in our most intense solitude we are “attended to and populated by others”—“anticipates the concerns of D. W. Winnicott and other psychoanalytic thinkers in the British object-relations tradition who are concerned with the ways we take other people into our psyches and how these internal representations shape and structure us.”Footnote ⁸

Beyond this work with psychoanalysis, we also find Victorianists interested in drawing connections between our historical field and the field of mid-twentieth-century philosophy of language that interests Moi. I include my own Bad Logic: Reasoning about Desire in the Victorian Novel in this category, and also Jami Bartlett's Object Lessons: The Novel as a Theory of Reference, which links such realist novelists as W. M. Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Meredith to philosophers of language like Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, Iris Murdoch, and Gareth Evans in order to argue for the ways in which the realist novel participates in a long history of thinking about the problem of reference in language. Similarly, Rachel Ablow, in Victorian Pain, takes a long historical view in order to show how an attention to Victorian writers (Mill, Martineau, Brontë, Darwin, and Hardy) can complicate our understanding of a chestnut of ordinary-language philosophy: Wittgenstein's and Cavell's persistent interest in how we express pain and how we acknowledge the unknowable pain of others. In chapters on John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Hardy, Ablow analyzes “ways of thinking about pain in the nineteenth century that go well beyond the epistemological model so often taken for granted today,” and best exemplified by Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, with its focus on the fundamental unknowability of the pain of the other.

Scarry is to Ablow what Saussure is to Moi: in this case, the thinker so identified with the problem of pain and language in our critical unconscious that we are no longer able to imagine alternative models. In all the recent work I've surveyed here, there is something of the mode of Victorian narrative that Andrew Miller calls “the optative, that retrospective assessment of the lives one has not lived.”Footnote ⁹ The optative is a source of grief or regret only for the individual who can live just one life; criticism, a collective endeavor, has many histories, some realized and some waiting to be realized, many paths from then to now, which pass through various different in-betweens imagined as crucial turning points, or revolutions, as Miller has also pointed out in a recent essay on presentism in Victorian studies: “We continually identify or produce continuities between the past and the present,” he argues, and so “we are habitually, perhaps inevitably, presentist. If this is right,” he continues, “then our task would not be to forge continuities with the past (for we already do that) but … to more fully acknowledge and better conceptualize those continuities.”Footnote ¹⁰

Both Christoff and Russell, to take two examples, make arguments on behalf of their period-busting comparisons by insisting that they do not simply apply the insights of psychoanalysis to Victorian writing as a theoretical template but rather aim to narrate the kinds of complex, fully conceptualized historical continuities that Miller describes. Christoff argues for a “bidirectional exchange of ideas between the Victorian novel and post-Freudian psychoanalysis,” by which Hardy's novel not only anticipates Winnicott's theory but also preemptively critiques it, and also for “a longue durée of thinking about character and psychology” that doesn't necessarily follow our rubrics of periodization. Period-busting is also necessary to acknowledging the role of the literary in such histories. Whereas Moi's narrative of revolution offers limited space for the literary, Christoff expands the historical frame in order to show that “the novel plays a prominent role” in what we might normally think of as purely theoretical fields of inquiry.Footnote ¹¹ Russell performs a similar kind of comparison in his introduction, when he argues that “the theory of transitional and middle spaces, and their relationship to creativity and mental health, is one direction of travel for tact after the nineteenth century. The middle group put a tactful, essayistic sensibility … to therapeutic use” (11). We see how a nineteenth-century commitment to tactful handling of the world might move in various post-nineteenth-century directions. One path, as Russell shows, leads to Milner. Another might lead to Wittgenstein and to Moi's therapeutic uses of his writing.

But the place where Russell's work diverges from Moi's, in its different mid-twentieth-century point of focus, allows us to see how Moi's sense of Wittgenstein's absolute uniqueness might lead her book into a kind of tunnel vision. Cut off from the histories of thinking about ordinary language that precede Wittgenstein, she also becomes cut off from the other fields investigating the ordinary at the same time as Wittgenstein. If Moi looks to Wittgenstein as a model because she wants to get us beyond the “craving for generality” that characterizes so much of our post-Saussurean literary theory, Russell wants to show how a set of Victorian writers used the essay form to similar ends, as they pursued “a particular, tactful style of thought and approach to new encounters, which is unknowingly provisional, virtual, and experimental” (9). Russell offers this literary history of tact as a story of a different kind of resistance to generality or abstraction, and he aims to honor this style of concrete thinking in his own work: “because this book is about the art of the encounter,” he says at the outset, “what it has to offer must come in the showing… . A book about the tact of the literary essay can offer no systematic theory in advance, to be dutifully filled in” (1). Moi, it seems, would approve.

Unlike Moi, Russell is not interested in performing therapy upon his reader himself. In his chapter on Matthew Arnold, for example, he offers a reading of Arnold's famous claim that the goal of criticism is “to see the object as it really is”: “This much misunderstood phrase does not call for scientific objectivity,” he argues, “but insists on an encounter—between critic and object, or between people—that is not structured in advance by what Arnold called the ‘machinery’ of predetermined ends… . Seeing the object as it really is insists on anyone's capacity for the appreciation of their own experience, and on the rigors of handling that might encourage this capacity” (61). We might find in Arnold, in other words, an anticipation of Moi's refusal of “method” in favor of practices of simple attentiveness. It might be that we need Wittgenstein, too, in order to justify such a reading practice fully—and I agree with Moi that we do. But Russell's reading of Arnold here shows us that Wittgenstein's insights about our embeddedness in the ordinary are not quite as revolutionary as we might have thought. “This effort of ‘seeing the object as in itself it really is’ is not an epistemological claim,” Russell goes on to argue, “but a kind of framing; a making space—of a middle space that might allow for a tactful relation to an object” (70). Where Moi reads a sentence of Wittgenstein and claims to reveal to us once and for all the fact of its meaning, Russell elaborates a history of tactfulness in which writers aimed to leave space for a multiplicity of encounters between reader and text.

Even as Arnold seems to claim a kind of absolute truth, the object as it really is, Russell persuasively argues that his aim is not knowledge but rather a certain way of seeing. Interestingly, this is exactly what Moi finds compelling about Wittgenstein's refusal of generality in favor of an attention to concrete examples: “All Wittgenstein leaves us with,” once we've given up abstract theories, she writes, “is a certain spirit or attitude in which to go about our investigations. Here the word ‘spirit’ stands in opposition to ‘approach,’ or ‘method,’ or ‘theory,’ for ordinary language philosophy proposes no such thing. By ‘spirit’ I mean something like the unmistakable tone, or aura, or atmosphere that characterizes ordinary language philosophy” (1–2). Russell might call such a tone or aura or atmosphere “tactfulness.”

He might also call such a tone “commitment,” as he does in his reading of John Stuart Mill, where he claims that Mill's early essays “offer examples, not so much of propositions about the world, as of possible forms of commitment to it” (57). Propositions have meanings that are true or false, and it seems we must commit to the ones that are true—but the essayistic space of tact is an open one in which we might find a polyamorous rather than a monogamous system of commitment to the world's many possibilities. Theodor Adorno (another mid-twentieth-century thinker to add to our list!), in his own essay on the literature of “commitment,” thinks of literature in similar terms, as having the capacity to deform the ordinary even if it can't fully disrupt it: “The writer deals with meanings,” he allows, “but not only with them. If no word which enters a literary work ever wholly frees itself from its meaning in ordinary speech, so no literary work, not even the traditional novel, leaves these meanings unaltered, as they were outside it. Even an ordinary ‘was,’ in a report of something that was not, acquires a new formal quality from the fact that it was not so.”Footnote ¹² Ablow makes a similar claim about the “moments of crisis” in which pain becomes a problem for the literary text: “What emerges at the moments of crisis I examine,” she writes, “is a reconfiguration of the boundaries between persons and things—a reconfiguration that is often signaled by the eruption of insistently ‘literary’ or noninstrumental language. This is not to say that pain ‘destroys’ language; only that it rearranges common protocols, often becoming lyrical, poetic, or rhapsodic in ways that clearly call attention to themselves as literary.”Footnote ¹³ Adorno, Russell, Ablow, and Jaffe all seek ways to account for literature as a space of “reconfiguration” in which the ordinary is made vivid and for a moment comes to seem contingent, the object of critique, or of rhapsodic elevation, or of shifting commitments, or of fantasy. The longer Victorian history of tact that Russell traces helps us see why this idea might be important, even to a thinker such as Wittgenstein who urges against fantasies of total escape from the ordinary. Rather than detachment and escape, we find in this longer history useful models of tactful handling, tentative commitment, and momentary reconfiguration—a more complex kind of picture.

Toril Moi's Revolution of the Ordinary may at first seem out of place in the pages of a journal called Victorian Literature and Culture. There is barely a whiff of the Victorian in its pages. And while I've attempted to mount a critique of this historical nearsightedness, I have also wanted to insist that Moi's book, intelligent and searching and persuasive in its call for new kinds of reading and new ways of talking about reading, provides a frame with which to think about the field of Victorian studies and our growing interest in the mid-twentieth century as a source of objects of comparison beyond our field. As we become more and more committed to locating the resonances of Victorian literature beyond 1901, Moi's argument can reveal to us our own period in negative—absent from her pages just as Wittgenstein or Winnicott or Milner long were from our pages. Where Moi seems to fall short, some vibrant and compelling recent work in our field might step in to fill the gap.