Silent (Wittgenstein), 2006
vinyl and pencil on wall
size determined by installation

On Silent (Wittgenstein)
by Eugene Binder
(originally published in Cole, Knight, Pomara, Eugene Binder Gallery, 2006)

Nicholas Knight’s current installation uses a quotation from Ludwig Wittgenstein with which the Austrian philosopher summarized his own work. Initiating the visual course set by the quotation, Knight breaks it down into its grammatical subtext with the spare, almost scientific line used to diagram sentences. This is the most recent in a series of installations and smaller-scale collages which use well-known and more obscure quotations to examine, among other things, the structure of language.

Knight uses the conventions of diagramming to arrest the linear progression of words normally experienced on the printed page, substituting for it a broader visual field open to multiple sequential orderings. Though one might have expected that assigning words to primary, secondary and even tertiary paths based on their grammatical roles, i.e. parts of speech, would clarify their meaning, in fact such schematization blocks immediate access to the quotation, introducing doubt regarding the arrangement of its words, its grammatical structure, and its meaning. This strategy is subtly plied by Knight to engage the viewer in a participatory relationship. The viewer attempts to reconstruct the quote through experimentation with various combinations of word order, reassembling the verbal fragments in a process which can result equally in radically altered “meanings” and nonsensical phrases.

Arriving at the original quotation becomes secondary as the out-of-synch words dissolve into components of a larger composition. Having gone their separate ways, the words no longer possess the power they do when in sentences. The visual takes priority over the verbal as the words of the quotation are encountered not as units of meaning but as fractured components of a composition, two-dimensional shapes whose arrangement is governed by the rules of grammar and angular grids of diagramming. This effect actually illuminates what occurs naturally when we are confronted with an unfamiliar language, as Knight’s use of both English and original German versions of the quote emphasizes. English speakers who do not speak German will automatically see the German words more as visual elements than units of meaning. Similarly, German speakers who do not speak English, rare as they may be, will automatically see the English words more as visual elements than units of meaning.

Language is a notoriously limited vehicle for thought, its attempts to mirror reality often seeming to fall short. As Wittgenstein says, “About that of which one cannot speak, one must remain silent.” Where this happens, non-verbal forms of expression such as music or visual art customarily take over. But we ought not dismiss language so quickly. Because it has a visual component, it can show things it cannot say. Knight’s work, with its linguistic and visual aspects, dwells in this region.

Silent (Wittgenstein): Translations Composite, 2006
ink and pencil on paper

The drawing above is a composite diagram of all the available English translations of Wittgenstein's original German sentence. After diagramming the German version, I compared its structure with the various structures used in the translations. From these, I selected an English version to combine with the German.