Sue Rainsford - A Different Air: Fragments on Wittgenstein

A Different Air: Fragments on Wittgenstein Sue Rainsford

A text in response to: The Proposition of Objects, Mick O’Hara 1

Mick O’Hara, Propositions 1 - 7, brass, 2021

A Different Air: Fragments on Wittgenstein Sue Rainsford

A text in response to: The Proposition of Objects, Mick O’Hara Roscommon Arts Centre 10th August – 10th September 2021

Sue Rainsford

A Different Air: Fragments on Wittgenstein

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‘Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for

In 1906 a seventeen year old boy is at the Technische

several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later

Hochschule in Charlottenberg studying mechanical

paint the storm.

engineering. His studies entail a ‘thorough intellectual grasp

Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to

of theoretical physics, especially Newtonian mechanics

paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the

[and] a proper understanding of mathematics in ‘its relation

storm.

to physics’.’2 He develops an interest in aeronautical

One’s language is often imprecise in that manner, I have

engineering, and in 1908 he becomes a research student

discovered.’

at Manchester University. It is spring, and he wants to design

1

and fly his own plane.

He does not know that when he leaves Manchester for Cambridge he will teach there for 17 years, and that before he leaves he will say to a man named Bertrand Russell ‘...I shall become an aeronaut but if not I shall become a philosopher...’3 He does not know that Russell, having told him to write some lines on a philosophical subject, will read them and say ‘No, you must not become an aeronaut.’4 He does not know the world will go to war not once but twice before he dies.

1

Markson, David. Wittgenstein’s mistress. Dalkey Archive Press, 1995.

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2 Lemco, Ian. “Wittgenstein’s Aeronautical Investigation.” Notes and Records of

the Royal Society of London, vol. 61, no. 1, 2007, pp. 39–51.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid 7

Sue Rainsford

A Different Air: Fragments on Wittgenstein

He does not know that he will write a slim volume full of

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sentences that stitch lines between objects and symbols and 2.1 We picture facts to ourselves.5

the words that connote them.

He does not know that three of his four brothers will die by suicide, or that he himself will die three days after his 62nd birthday.

No; he knows none of this. He is studying the behavior of kites in the upper atmosphere, experimenting at a meteorological observation site in Derbyshire. He is building wind tunnels and testing engines on disused railroad tracks.

He is designing an engine high in power and light in weight.

He is patenting a design for multiple blade propellers with tip jets, though it will be years before a blade sufficient to support his design is created.

To design an engine: to fit a hub with inlet valves.

To imagine a shape into being by way of hypothetical nuts and bolts.

To cast an object with words.

5 8

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Routledge, 2013.

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Sue Rainsford

A Different Air: Fragments on Wittgenstein

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Drawings of the young man’s engine still exist, and they tell

The young man has a friend who tells us he felt

us that, had it even been built, it would have had tubular

misunderstood in the present and ‘doubted he would be

arms fitted with an airscrew propeller blade.

better understood in the future’, and that ‘he felt as though he was writing for people who would think in a different way,

It tells us the air and gas admitted at the hub would have

breathe a different air of life, from that of present-day men.’6

been forced along the arms to the combustion chamber and, once inside, compressed by the centrifugal force.

It tells us the force exerted by the revolving arms would

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‘Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.’7

eventually lead to ignition.

What it does not tell us: the shaping power of the word

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ignition.

In fact, it tells us nothing about the relation of any linguistic term to the model’s material, plastic form.

To speak a proposition into the void: to feed gas and air into a cylinder which keeps air churning, churning, churning.

That is yet to come. Only after it becomes possible for steel laminates to be pressed as separate halves and then welded together will the marks he makes on paper chase the process by which words become symbols and synecdoches for other words.

6 Hallett, Garth (1977). A Companion to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Cornell University Press. p. 66.

7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Routledge, 2013.

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Sue Rainsford

A Different Air: Fragments on Wittgenstein

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What is the logic inherent between the fact of ignition and

A proposition’s clauses: a pair of blades carving up the air in

this printed word?

order to gain another sliver of traction. In order to gain height

This word, here: ignition.

and yet more height and more height still. These words, this sentence which is a valve, which is a bolt—it is moving

In the space of these eight letters pressed together there is

skyward.

synchronised burst after synchronised burst. Ad infinitum.

It is climbing to cruise, now.

2.1511 That is how a picture is attached to reality; it reaches

Now, it is cruising.

right out to it.

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What do you read in its shifting shadows? What do you learn *

about flight while standing in the dark shapes it throws to the ground?

A word is a stone and it is falling into water.

There is no future in which this dropping stone will cease to

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repercuss.

The door to that room is closed.

Sea air has contributed to that deterioration. 9

8 Markson, David. Wittgenstein’s mistress. Dalkey Archive Press, 1995.

9 Ibid.

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A Different Air: Fragments on Wittgenstein

About Roscommon Arts Centre's Visual Art Writer In Residence Visual Art Writer’s Sue Rainsford and Joanne Laws are the Roscommon Arts Centre’s Visual Art Writer’s in Residence for 2021. During this time, Joanne & Sue are invited to write critical texts on selected exhibitions and projects happening across the county. The intention of this residency is to allow writers to experiment with their writing style and explore new ways of disseminating their work. Their writings will be available at Roscommon Arts Centre and online as they are published.

Sue Rainsford is a fiction and arts writer. Her practice is concerned with hybrid, lyric and embodied texts, explicit fusions of critical and corporeal inquiry, as well as with questions of transcription and otherness. She is a recipient of the VAI/DCC Art Writing Award, the Arts Council Literature Bursary Award and a MacDowell Fellowship. Her debut novel Follow Me To Ground received the Kate O’Brien Award and and was long-listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Award. Her second novel, Redder Days, was released in March 2021.

Mick O’Hara is an artist and lecturer in Fine Art and Visual Culture at Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin). He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and his recent artwork focuses on the inherent materiality of objects and their relationship to language. He has published work on subjects such as the philosophy of technology, the aesthetics of the post-digital, and the aesthetics of football. His current research examines the role of computational thinking in contemporary digital technology.

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Sue Rainsford

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