Abstract

In my dissertation I explore how literary art can function as a kind of cognitive philosophy. I begin with the proposition that Artificial Intelligence programs, and the game worlds they spawn, attempt to articulate an aesthetic with ontological force, poems to blow our heads off. This possibility or promise frames my examination of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, and my own description of a hypothetical machine I have designed that generates a fictional future within which it figures itself. I analyze Finnegans Wake as a philosophical text, and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations as describing an aesthetic. Both texts do not articulate a theory of meaning, but model meaning within what Wittgenstein called our "forms of life," our attunement within our language, culture, history, psychology, biology, and so on. How is it possible for human beings to inhabit this 'our' at all? How can I use an 'our' as mine? In writing towards and at the limits of language, I am trying to speak an 'our' as our species-being, and it this speaking enact the particularity of meaning instantiated through my particular involvement in language. Both Investigations and the Wake explore the limits of what it means to be human by examining how linguistic meaning works through the interactions between sense and nonsense. I analyze how the shifting between language games, between sense and nonsense described and enacted within Finnegans Wake and Philosophical Investigations articulates a multivalent temporal sense. I investigate the ways in which the limits between sense and nonsense construct a grammar of temporality that is simultaneously a literary aesthetic and a theory of mind. Time becomes a grammatical effect. The theoretical machine I have designed pressures the interpretative limit between the animate and the inanimate and between sense and nonsense toward the ontological limits described by causal languages. My dissertation is an attempt to describe the ways in which such grammars determine what counts as human