The grammar of the whirlpool

How the concepts of Benjamin, Spinoza and Wittgenstein were reified, and why the form of a whirlpool is the dynamic grammar assumes at an instant.

A concept is an operation. It does something: it separates what was joined, joins what was separated, blocks a movement that used to be made without thinking. Whoever learns the operation receives a tool. Whoever learns only the name receives a token.

And tokens pile up. They combine with other tokens, produce whole sentences of dense appearance, circulate in conferences and on book jackets, and do nothing. It is the fate of almost all critical vocabulary.

What happened to Benjamin

Few thinkers have been so thoroughly plundered.

Aura. In the essay on technical reproducibility, aura is a precise and strange definition: the unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be. It is a concept about the cult relation to the object — about the unrepeatable here and now of a thing, and about what technical reproduction does to that. In current use it becomes a synonym for prestige, atmosphere, charm. A film is said to have aura, a place is said to have aura, and the word comes to mean whatever any compliment would mean. Benjamin wrote about the disappearance of the aura; the market turned it into a selling adjective.

Flâneur. In Benjamin, reading Baudelaire, the flâneur is a sombre figure: the man who botanises on the asphalt, whose gaze is the gaze of the commodity looking for a buyer, and who dissolves into the crowd that fascinates him. It is a diagnosis of capitalism, not praise of a style. He became the charming stroller of the travel guides, well-dressed idleness, a quality one attributes to oneself.

The angel of history. He is a figure inside an argument about progress: the storm blowing from paradise, which is called progress, drives backwards into the future an angel who would like to stay and put the pieces together. Without the argument, what is left is a poster.

To brush history against the grain. It was an indication of method and a warning about whose the cultural inheritance is. It became a password, and serves today to announce any reading that wishes to be thought dissident.

And the dialectical image, which is the concept most needed here, became an erudite name for any impressive rapprochement between two epochs — exactly what it is not.

The mechanism, which is always the same

Note what those falls have in common, because it is neither accident nor lazy reading.

In every case, reification restores a division that the concept had undone. It takes what organised the appearance and turns it into an object hidden behind it.

Aura was a relation — a way of appearing, and therefore something given in the appearing itself. Reified, it becomes an invisible quality the object would have inside it, and of which one might have more or less. What was the way of appearing becomes something behind what appears.

The dialectical image was a configuration legible in an instant. Reified, it becomes resemblance — and resemblance calls for explanation, and explanation calls for a structure underneath to produce it. And so one returns, by the back door, to the deep cause the concept existed to dispense with.

It is the same movement examined in another essay on this site, the one on the shadow of principles: a proposition that loses the register in which it was working and goes on demanding obedience in the register below. Only now what falls is not a metaphysical principle. It is the tool that served to dismantle it.

Spinoza, the same

Conatus is, in the Ethics, the striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being — and Spinoza adds that this striving is nothing other than the actual essence of the thing itself. It is not an appetite, not an instinct, not somebody's will. It is the way a thing is what it is, while it is.

Reified, it becomes an interior force. It becomes drive, motor, will to power, survival instinct. It acquires a subject who wants and an object wanted, which is precisely what Spinoza had eliminated. And then it serves for everything: explaining markets, wars, marriages.

Deus sive Natura was a rigorous identity with devastating consequences: nothing outside, no plan, no purpose, no judgement. It becomes weekend spirituality — nature as the sacred, the divine in all things, a vague reverence Spinoza would have examined with the coldness with which he examined miracles.

And there is the formula that became popular, nobody knows what a body can do, turned into a self-help poster. It was an observation about our ignorance of bodily capacities, made in order to attack the sovereignty of consciousness over the body. It became encouragement.

Wittgenstein, the same

Language games is perhaps the gravest case, because the reification inverts the sense. Wittgenstein uses the expression to remind us that speaking is one activity among others, made of varied practices that have no common essence — and he does so in order to dissolve the search for that essence. Current usage extracted from it that everything is a language game, meaning that nothing is serious, that everything is convention, that truth is internal to each game. This is a general metaphysical thesis — precisely the kind of thing he spent his life trying to undo. A therapeutic method became doctrinaire relativism.

Forms of life became a culturalist token, a synonym for culture or for community.

And whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent became now mysticism, now an order to shut up — when the Tractatus says it from a very precise place, and about what shows itself without being able to be said.

Why precisely these three

Here is the question the coincidence raises, and it must be answered with care, because the easy answer is wrong.

The easy answer would be: the three refuse the ground and keep the appearance. It is false, and it impoverishes each of them by half. What the three refuse is not the ground — it is the division between ground and appearance.

The difference is decisive. There is a ground, and it does work. Only it is not behind: it is what organises the appearance, and organises it within the appearance itself.

In Wittgenstein, that ground is grammar. It is not hidden beneath what we say; it shows itself in the way we say it, and it is grammar that decides what makes sense. It is not a layer under language: it is language in its working.

In Benjamin, it is the Idea. In the preface to the book on baroque drama he writes that ideas are to phenomena as constellations are to stars: they do not contain them, do not produce them, are not behind them — they group them. The constellation is not one more thing in the sky; it is the arrangement in which those stars become legible. It is ground as configuration, not as substrate.

In Spinoza, it is the actuosa essentia, the essence as activity. Essence is not a dormant core beneath the effects: it is activity, it is the very acting of the thing. God's power is his own essence — there is not the thing and then what it does.

In all three, therefore, the ground is the form of organisation of what appears — and not a second world beneath the first. To remove it is not to purify thought: it is to destroy it. Without a bed there is no whirlpool; without grammar there is no sense; without the Idea no phenomenon is saved; without the actuosa essentia there is no thing.

And Spinoza had already given this distinction its proper name, which is worth using because it is exact. A transitive cause stands outside what it causes: it acts on the effect from another place, and remains separate from it. An immanent cause remains in the effect: it acts in it, and not upon it. God, he writes, is the immanent cause of all things, and not the transitive cause.

And one must be exact about what is being refused, because it is not the transitive cause as such. It is kept, and it works, inside the internal systems of totalities. A telegram arrives and a colonel departs: a transitive cause, exterior to its effect, perfectly legitimate, and it is with these that historical research occupies itself. What is refused is the transitive cause as a totality — that is, when the term occupying the place of the cause is a whole. It is the formula Benjamin had already written in 1918: no totality can be a cause or an effect, and no cause and no effect can be a totality. A whole is not outside what composes it, and therefore cannot act upon it from another place.

Whoever fails to make that distinction commits one of two symmetrical errors. Either he puts a totality in the place of the cause, and falls into the deep cause. Or, to avoid it, he refuses the ground entirely — and in doing so eliminates immanence along with it, which is what the hasty formulation loses. What remains is loose phenomena with nothing to organise them, and this is called rigour. It is not rigour: it is the half left over after the wrong half was thrown away.

And from here a final precision follows, and it is the one that matters most. In each of them the ground works as a limit — the limit of what can be, of what can be said, of what can be understood.

In Spinoza it is the limit of what can exist: Deus sive Natura, and nothing outside.

In Wittgenstein it is the limit of what can be said: grammar marks the frontier of sense, and what crosses it is not false but senseless.

In Benjamin it is the limit of what can be understood, and that limit is time. It is what stands in the seventeenth thesis: the historian does not gather the past as it was; he blasts a configuration out of the homogeneous course, and understanding occurs only in that wrenching. Outside the instant in which the constellation forms, there is nothing to understand.

To be, to say, to understand — each in his own niche, and in all three the same gesture: the ground is the limit, not the cellar.

And that is precisely why their concepts are the easiest to ruin. Reification cuts out the ground and puts it behind. It makes grammar an underlying convention, the Idea a deep structure, conatus a hidden force, aura an essence of the object. In each case what was a limit becomes a cellar, and what organised becomes what produces.

The fall is not accidental. It is the mark of the concept itself, reflected in the mirror.

What Wittgenstein calls grammar

The piece that joins everything is still missing, and it is the one that gives this essay its title.

Grammar, for Wittgenstein, is not the grammar of school lessons. It is the set of rules that determine what makes sense to say — and which, for that reason, are neither true nor false. That nobody can have my pain is not a discovery about pains: it is a rule about how we use the word. That red is not heavier than blue is not a fact about colours. He wrote that essence is expressed in grammar: what a thing is, for us, shows itself in the way we speak of it.

Grammar does not answer to the world. It is not corrected by observation. And above all it has no foundation — it does not rest on anything deeper, just as the Origin does not rest on a cause.

But it changes. And here Wittgenstein uses an image that is already in another essay on this site: propositions that were once empirical harden and begin to work as the bed along which thought runs; and the bed, with time, also shifts. There is no sharp separation between the water and the bed: what is a channel today was current, and what runs today may harden tomorrow.

The thesis

Benjamin describes the Origin as a whirlpool in the river of becoming. Wittgenstein describes grammar as a riverbed, which channels thought and which also moves. They are two fluvial images, made for different problems, by men who were not working together.

Placed side by side, they say one thing: the form of a whirlpool is the dynamic that grammar assumes at a given instant.

And note that this holds only with what was established before. A whirlpool does not form in the water alone nor in the bed alone. It forms in the meeting of the two — where what runs strikes what is sedimented. Whoever removes the ground, in his haste to refuse depth, is left with loose water: and loose water makes no form at all. This is why the refusal of the division is not an academic subtlety. Without a bed, the whirlpool never happens.

That is why it has a recognisable form without a substance of its own, and why it holds while the matter passes through it. A historical Origin is that: the drawing that appears when what a society does strikes what it no longer knows that it thinks.

This explains the persistence without recourse to any cause. It is not necessary for 1889 to push 2026. It is enough that the bed stay where it is. As long as the grammar holds — as long as it goes on making sense to call the abandonment of a state to those who devastated it a pacification, to call the militias patriots, and to treat a word given as a formality — the whirlpool forms again in the same coordinates, with different water.

And it also explains what can be done. Against a deep cause there is nothing to do but wait for it to change. Against a riverbed there is: it can be shown. That is what Wittgenstein wanted, in saying that a picture held us captive because it lay in our language; and it is what Benjamin wanted, in making the dialectical image an instrument and not an ornament.

And that is why the names come afterwards

What remains of this, as a rule of work, is simple.

A concept resists reification only if it is presented together with the operation it performs. One shows the thing; then one gives the name. In that way the name stays bound to the work, and whoever repeats it without the work will notice that he is holding a token.

Conceived the other way — the name before the thing — the concept detaches itself from what it does, and from then on can be repeated, combined and multiplied without anything being thought. That is how a critical vocabulary turns into a password. And it is the fate of almost all of them.