At first, Wittgenstein's work struck me as beautiful visually. Because my college philosophy teacher had warned me about the difficulty of his work, I expected the problem of reading Wittgenstein to be one of density in the prose akin to the problem of reading a late dialogue of Plato or one of Kant's critiques. The spare, even hygienic, quality of Wittgenstein's remarks was therefore something of a surprise. But I soon found accuracy in my teacher's admonishment. Reading Wittgenstein as an author with coherent narrative or immediately comprehensible messages or points was, for a novice, all but impossible. Still I managed to read through much of Part One of the Philosophical Investigations well enough to at least intuit the importance of the work.

This first exposure to Wittgenstein came in the second semester of graduate school in a course on Contemporary Sociological Theory where we read Garfinkel's Studies in Ethnomethodology. Garfinkel cited Wittgenstein's descriptions of language-games as a way of accounting for the variety of meanings a word or action could take as a person seeks to cope artfully with the challenges of everyday life. Wittgenstein's work was far less important to Garfinkel's project than that of Husserl or Alfred Schutz, but there was just enough talk of language-games to inspire my interest. What attracted me to Wittgenstein was the initial contrast I could draw between the irreducible but superficial plurality of language-games that called to mind a mosaic, and the unified, but deep, life-world of the phenomenologist. Later this contrast led to suspicion and then criticism of the unified or synoptic political visions of theorists in the epic tradition.