A wryly comic performance about our desire for clarity
Europe is sliding into the darkest period in its history. Fake news is blinding the masses. Smooth rhetoric, the language of propaganda, is slipping through the filters of critical correction. Big words are feeding the growing envy everywhere. Welcome to Vienna in 1923.
Against the backdrop of anti-democratic disruption – the Nazis made their first violent seizure of power that year – a group of logicians, philosophers and scientists tried to resist the madness. The Vienna Circle, as they called themselves, wanted to reduce language to its essence, to rid it of ambiguity, false logic and demagogic abuse. Because words are not innocent. They can incite exclusion, blindness and terror. Language can destroy.
Wittgenstein 2. It's Not Due to Language is a wryly comical performance about our desire for clarity. In 2020, writer and director Bo Tarenskeen decided to make an eleven-part theatre series about the logician and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and his influence on the world. The first part, about his farewell to philosophy, premiered in 2021.