[In the following review, Middleton gives a favorable assessment of Wittgenstein's Ladder.]

For the past twenty five years, one influential movement in American poetry has been practising a linguistic acsesis which has stripped poetry of voice, metre, poetic diction, and theme, completing an earlier avant-garde mission to clear away all vestiges of specialized literary languages. Its usual targets are described as “the formalized first-person mode we call lyric poetry” (and its claim to be what Marjorie Perloff calls “the expression or externalisation of inner feeling,”) and naive realism, but Language Writing has arguably another more elusive target too. Perloff's highly readable new book [Wittgenstein's Ladder] identifies a current in modern writing which runs from Gertrude Stein to poets as diverse as Robert Creeley, Ron Silliman, Rosemarie Waldrop, and Lyn Hejinian, opposing the idea that poetry is a means of improving language by making it more precise, “as though a word, an accuracy were a pincer,” as Charles Olson puts it, “for taking hold of the smallest details of the world.” For many writers, this aspiration of linguistic fidelity misses both the pragmatic, communicative possibilities of language, and what the critic Daniel Cotton has called the distressing but “ultimately familiar condition of anomia” or semantic murkiness of the “avant-garde of our everyday chatter.” Perloff identifies the literary history of this belief that language is a condition to be investigated, by tracing affinities between the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the literary strategies of Stein, Samuel Beckett, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernard, and contemporary poetry. She shows that Wittgenstein's anti-systematic practice of reflexive attention to the ordinary use of language as a means of clarifying complex philosophical problems, which often makes its philosophical arguments by extended play with utterances and their imagined contexts, is a semantic resource in a diverse range of modern texts. Some writers like Beckett and Stein seem to have developed their own methods independently, while others like Bernhard or Waldrop self-consciously play and break the rules of Wittgenstein's language-games. Perloff can play these games too, and the book offers brilliant close readings of texts that at first sight seem enmeshed in banality, in order to show that they can be described as resolute investigations into the signifying implications of the small words that sustain the mesh of everyday life. The lines “If I wanted / to know myself, / I’d look at you,” from Robert Creeley's Away, are meaningful because of the contexts which they imply to an attentive reader.

Perloff ends her book with a review of an exhibition and resulting book by Joseph Kosuth, inspired by texts of Wittgenstein. In an accompanying essay, “The Play of the Unsayable: A Preface and Ten Romans on Art and Wittgenstein,” Kosuth claims that the discourses of contemporary art are limiting because of the “institutionalized paths meaning itself is permitted to take,” which prevent them recognizing many of the means used to generate significance in art works. A similar criticism can be made of contemporary literary criticism's encounters with recent innovative American writing. What is needed, as Kosuth points out, is the recognition that “the description of art—which art itself manifests—consists of a dynamic cluster of uses, shifting from work to work, of elements taken from the very fabric of culture—no different from those which construct reality day to day.” Perloff argues an analogous case for writing. Its reflexive use of everyday phrases makes possible quite subtle meditations on forms of thought and life.

If both Kosuth and Perloff sound as much pragmatist as Wittgensteinian, this is probably no accident, given the apparent revival of pragmatism in America today. The American philosopher, Hilary Putnam, has recently claimed that “Wittgenstein's reflections … parallel a certain strain in pragmatism.” Perloff's fascinating study points in the direction of more investigation of the interdependence of the ethics of poetically specialized language use, and to the lasting impact of pragmatism on American intellectual life, which has consistently given its enthusiastic imports a characteristically pragmatist turn.