2.105
When we experience good imagination and good art, we do so with one foot in our world. This doesn’t mean we’re the centre around which different ideas revolve. Nor is our world some thing or medium within which we’re stuck; the world is a kind of relationality prior and subsequent to any particular relation. The world is always open, essentially exposed to other worlds. The tatters of various worlds interlace for brief intervals now and then before being released each to each. This is decentring.
When an utterance or gesture is made—and before then, when a way of being is being—it’s already outside its own context, inside multiple others: every gesture is instantly sited/cited within various contexts within which it occurs. This isn’t incidental, for gestures are intentionally made for others in different contexts, which can never be controlled. Gestures are also perceivable by other others, not the intendent recipient. Communication is never certain or guaranteed. And this isn’t because gestures must leave their source and enter a space of uncertainty; rather, uncertainty is constitutive of them, and the ‘source’ is never the absolute origin nor transparent/certain: a gesture pre-emptively leaps across the gap between things, necessarily, and is already responding to them. There’s no private language.[1]
The sense of a gesture is how it means within a given context; it cannot mean (nor be) without one. Gestures traverse two contexts. And since gestures always have the other built into them, so to speak, the context for a gesture is always also a context in-between entities: its ‘source’ is the ever-changing in-between. This means one cannot fully control or anticipate one’s own gestures, for they always enter innumerable in-betweens, and are never fully predictable even within the intended in-between. – When a gesture is made, it has this structure of loss built into it. – Every gesture is a promise.
It’s therefore entirely necessary that we fail insofar as we dream of purity.
[1] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §243–315, p. 95–111, but, in particular, see §243, p. 95; §256, p. 98; §269, p. 101.