Language Games in Conversation: The Ordinary as a Site of Criticism

Wittgenstein and Cavell show that the ordinary is not reducible to social conventions but is rooted in the vertical dimension of forms of life, revealed in the most common and apparently manifest gestures and expressions. Cavell’s reading of Fred Astaire’s dance in Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon offers a vivid example: against a political backdrop, the routine discloses a future that may be barred yet emerges as an internal possibility. Inheriting and criticizing culture here occur in the motions and expressions of the body, revealed as a space where acknowledgment and transformation are possible, even if only as a momentary achievement. Such criticism arises from within, responding to what is missed or concealed in shared life and seeking untaken possibilities embedded in it.