THE ABACKGROUND@ IN WITTGENSTEIN AND OTHERS

 

APerhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning@ (C&V, p.16).

 

What is the structure of expectations and relations appropriate to Wittgenstein's world, appropriate to 'seeing' our current forms of life? What is the reality he claims lies before us, open to view? Well, whatever it is, it is not something intrinsically hidden from us, but something at work everywhere in the daily 'bustle' (1980, II, nos.625, 626) of life around us, such that:

 

"Not what one man is doing now, but the whole hurly-burly, is the background against which we see an action, and it determines our judgment, our concepts, and our reactions" (1980, II, no.629).

 

GARFINKEL (1967): AWhat kinds of expectancies make up a >seen but unnoticed= background of common understandings@ (p.44).

 

AIn accounting for the stable features of everyday activities sociologists commonly select familiar settings such as familial households or work places and ask for the variables that contribute to their stable features. Jast as commonly, one set of considerations are unexamined: the socially standardized and standardizing, Aseen but unnoticed,@ expected, background features of everyday scenes. The member of society uses background expectancies as a scheme of interpretation... Demonstrably he is responsive to this background, while at the same time he is at a loss to tell us specifically of what the expectancies consist. When we ask him about them he has little or nothing to say@ (pp.36-37).

 

ADespite the interest in social affects that prevails in the social sciences, and despite the extensive concern that clinical psychiatry pays them , surprisingly little has been written on the socially structured conditions for their production. The role that a background of common understandings plays in their production, control, and recognition is, however, almost terra incognita. This lack of attention from experimental investigators is all the more remarkable if one considers that it is precisely this relationship that persons are concerned with in their common sense portrays of how to conduct one=s daily affairs so as to solicit enthusiasm and friendliness or avoid anxiety, guilt, shame, or boredom@ (p.49).

 

SEARLE (1981- Ch 5: The Background): Searle discusses what is involved in a man >intending= to become President of the United States. He illustrates that it involves understanding a whole, inexhaustible network of implications. He continues: AI believe that anyone who tries seriously to follow out the threads in the Network will eventually reach a bedrock of mental capacities that do not themselves consist in Intentional states (representations), but nonetheless form the preconditions for the functioning of Intentional states. The Background is "preintentional" in the sense that though not a form or forms of Intentionality, it is nonetheless a precondition or set of pre­conditions of Intentionality@ (p.143)

 

AThe Background is a set of nonrepresentational mental capacities that enable all representing to take place. Intentional states only have the conditions of satisfaction that they do, and thus only are the states that they are, against a Background of abilities that are not themselves Intentional states. In order that I can now have the Intentional states that I do I must have certain kinds of know-how: I must know how things are and I must know how to do things, but the kinds of "know-how" in question are not, in these cases, forms of "knowing that" (p.143).

 

AThere is a real difficulty in finding ordinary language terms to describe the Background: one speaks vaguely of Apractices,@ Acapacities,@ and Astances@ or one speaks suggestively but misleadingly of Aassumptions@ and Apresuppositions.@ These latter terms must be literally wrong, because they imply the appearance of representation... The fact that we have no natural vocabulary for discussing the phenomena in question and the fact that we lapse back into an Intentionalistic vocabulary ought to arouse our interest... There is simply no first-order vocabulary for the Background, because the Background is as invisible to Intentionality as the eye which sees is invisible to itself@ (pp.156-157).

 

FOUCAULT (The Order of Things - 1970): AWhat I would like to do, however, is to reveal a positive unconscious of knowledge: a level that eludes the consciousness of the scientist and yet is part of scientific discourse, instead of disputing its validity and seeking to diminish its scientific nature... unknown to themselves, the naturalists, economists, and grammarians employed the same rules to define the objects proper to their own study, to form their concepts, to build their theories. It is these rules of formation, which were never formulated in their own right, but are to be found only in widely differing theories, concepts, and objects of study, that I have tried to reveal, by isolating, as their specific locus, a level that I have called, somewhat arbitrarily perhaps, archaeological@ (p.xi).

 

AOrder is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression@ (p.xx).

 

"The human sciences, when dealing with what is representation (in either conscious or unconscious form), find themselves treating as their object what is in fact their condition of possibility... They proceed from that which is given to representation to that which renders representation possible, but which is still representation... On the horizon of any human science, there is the project of bringing man's consciousness back to its real conditions, of restoring it to the contents and forms that brought it into being, and elude us within in it..." (p.364).

 

Taylor (1980): AOur pre-understanding of things is the knowledge (sense) we have of things prior to any formulation of how to deal with them. This know-how can be the basis of formulations, either statements about the objects, or recipes for how to deal with them to certain ends. But this pre-understanding can never be exhaustively expressed in any list, however, long, of such formulations. Rather, there is a dependence in the other direction: the formulations are intelligible to us because we share the background pre-understanding.

We read a recipe, for instance, telling us how to bake a cake. The recipe consists of a number of injunctions to action: take two pounds of butter, churn well, etc., which injunctions we can follow because we know how to carry out these actions. This presupposed know-how is what is not formulated and, in certain case, seems to be almost incapable of formulation@ (Taylor, 1980, p.28).

 

Raymond Williams on AStructures of Feeling@ (1971 - Marxism and Literature):  AIn most description and analysis, culture and society are expressed in an habitual past tense. The strongest barrier to the recognition of human cultural activity is this immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products... relationships, institutions and formations in which we are still actively involved are converted, by this procedural mode, into formed wholes rather than forming and formative processes@ (p.128).

 

APractical consciousness is almost always different from official consciousness... For practical consciousness is what is actually being lived, and not only what is thought is being lived. Yet the actual alternative to the received and produced fixed forms is not silence: not the absence, the unconscious, which bourgeois culture has mythicized. It is a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange@ (p.131).

 

AIf the social is always past, in the sense that it is always formed, we have indeed to find new terms for the undeniable experience of the present: not only the temporal present, the realization of this and this instant, but the specificity of the present being, the inalienably physical, within which we may discern and acknowledge institutions, formations, positions, but not always as fixed products, defining products@ (p.128, my emphases).

 

Structures of feeling: AIt is that we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations.. We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity@ (p.132).

 

AIt is a structured formation which, because it is at the very edge of semantic availability, has many characteristics of a pre-formation, until specific articulations - new semantic figures - are discovered in material practice: often, as it happens, in relatively isolated ways, which are only later seen to compose a significant (often in fact minority) generation: this often, in turn, the generation that substantially connects to its successor@ (p.134).

 

 

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