What baffled Wittgenstein was his inability to define “games,”
a simple concept, easily understood, but which defies the impulse of the
dictionary. I have no interest in defining games. But I am very interested in
his bafflement. There’s nothing special about a word that cannot be defined.
What would be interesting would be a word that can be defined. What’s
fascinating is the fact that anyone ever thought up the concept of dictionary,
which is the legacy of Platonism, which got everything backwards. How much of
history and philosophy and just thinking has been confused by the idea that meaning
is something that words have rather than something, as every poet knows, that
we use words to produce: always in time, at a moment in history. The moment
stretches and changes through memory and writing (which is any form of
recording) forward (Shakespeare would have said “backward”) into time. But
meaning only ever exists at a moment, the moment of saying, the moment of
hearing (writing/reading). We want to be as precise as possible, but not based
on the meaning of the word, based rather on the history of the use of the word—the
contexts in which it has been used to create meaning. The presupposition that
meaning exists always already “out there,” and that our job is to find it,
inscribe it, and pass it on is a metaphor less accurate and less useful than
the metaphor deployed here, that words are used to inscribe meanings available
but never yet accessed in language, by novel combinations of words. What is “out
there” is the pressure of “being” at this moment on the writer (thankfully, me)
to reassemble the words to settle for now the image whose formulation is
functional, which makes our present make better sense. Since words like “game”
(and all other words, those that obviously defy definition—poetry and history
and love and nation and person and on and on—and those that we think do not) mean
only in moments, then all uses are stipulative. And so in a moment of use “game”
have have all the precision of the number “2”’ and “2” all the vagueness of the
concept “nice.” And what’s surprising is that it is surprising.
