So I'm trying to organize this doctoral program. I begin at Union in November and part of the process is actually designing a program. My program, is in Visual Culture Studies. It is helpful to look at existing programs for ideas, but there are only a handful in Visual Culture and while they have been helpful, I am pretty much on my own. The experience of doing the research to do the research has been a little like opening up a Matrushka doll. Eash time I investigate a new pathway, it takes me off in a new, totally unexpected direction. I seemed to be being pulled down this philosophy path, finding that in order to understand the Visual Culture theorists, I need to understand more basic philosophy and cultural theory. My good friend Mitchell, the philosopher, has been most helpful, in this regard. Before dinner and a movie with Mitchell and Ora, we talked Wittgenstein. I won't bore you now with the dreadful history I have had with reading any philosophy at all, more on that later, but it isn't a pretty picture. Mitchell says, read Philosophical Investigations. It is really wonderful. I am leery of course. His wonderful, has sometimes proven to be my nightmare, but I dutifully head off to the library at Simmons and pick up the book...
First of all, this edition is both in German and English. Like the prayerbooks at shul, (except German and not Hebrew), on the left is the German and on the right is the English translation. Even tho I know not a spec of German, (except whatever cross-over there is from Yiddish) I think this is way cool. I thumb to the short preface and begin to read. Ludwig says, "...thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks. After several unsuccesful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks:.." So he's saying that if he tried to direct his thoughts one way or another so that they fit neatly together, they " would soon be crippled." So what does he do? He just leaves them. He BLOGS. Part 1 is 693 numbered blog entries and Part 2, fifteen short essays. I have read only the first entry, and won't get to really give the book my attention until after I finish desiging the whole program but I am tickled and exited and I think, ooh this is so cool, written in 1953, Wittgenstein invents the blog and I think all these bloggers out there will certainly want to know this and discuss this and so just for kicks I google " Wittgenstein" + "Blog" and I think I am so smart until the search engine returns 29, 000 some odd sites ranging from Philosophical Investigations a web site by Christopher Robinson & Joseph Duemer who read each numbered entry and comment on them to a blog called Wittgenstein in Italian, Il weblog di Wittgenstein.it é ospitato, where Luca Sofri assures us that this blog has nothing to do with Wittgenstein. The good news is there are loads of resourses, including this list of books by or about Wittgenstein, assembled by a young blogger. So while I am not the cutting edge blogger I had hoped to be, I am bolstered by the virtual company I may keep, and by the notion that some of our greates thinkers have random thoughts that just don't come together in a nice neat package.