Show & Tell

My object is a book. The most common and classical object related to standard publishing but that still rules the world and is part of my main interests along with music. What I love in books is not the material object itself, even if the book has an ideal and practical form as almost a perfect design that I appreciate particularly. But my interest in books is related to their content, to the story they tell, as literature. Even a scientific or philosophical book, can still be a piece of literature. Under this passion of mine for literature, a more ontological passion is hidden, that more than a passion I feel it like a necessity that constantly pushes me, even if I'm not conscious about it. This daemon is language. I see language as the main expression of our cognitive limits but, as a form of art, in literature, language acquires a meaning outside of its material representation that mirrores our life, divided between an apparently closed material world and an apparently open spiritual world, the world of our minds.

The book I have here is not just an object but it contains a labyrinth of language that acquires a meaning overtaking its material form. This book is 'The Philosophical Investigations’ by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein is a philosopher involved in logic and language who wrote two books that represent two phases of his thought and almost two opposite visions of life. His first book is called 'Tractatus logico-philosophicus' (I've made a project with it that you can check on my website), in which he attempted to explain the universe as a logical system that already contains in itself all the possibilities of its expression. By doing this Wittgenstein must use language, and according to his idea, it mirrored the universe in the moment that it acquired a meaning, and that meaning is the logical consequence of the explanation of itself and so of the universe. This book is very complicated and obscure and hides a dogmatic vision of the world and language as perfect logical diamonds. I really love logic and science and this book represents exactly how I love to analyse the world around me almost as a logical machine starting from the historical beginning and developing all the possibilities to make the whole.

But Wittgenstein wrote another book, the one I have here and that I've not read yet, but which I will start reading today. In this book he changes his mind and finds out that language is not so logical but is almost a game, when we talk and we communicate, we are playing a linguistic game in which who doesn't know the rules can't play the game. This leads to the absurdity of language and its loss of meaning, and this means the absurdity of the universe itself (that, by the way, still exists). What I enjoy as much as science and logic is art, and with art, the contradictions that we can find in the world around us, in language, and in the dualism between life and death. With them I like to play games as a way of understanding the world by experimenting without an utilitaristic end but by enjoying a kind of uselessness that reveals an acknowledgment of the possibilities of being in the world.

These two ways of seeing, the scientific, logical one, and the artistic and absurd one can be seen as contradictories, but here I find a third way that is my own practice as an attempt to put them together and create a science of art, (a logic of the absurd), or viceversa.