Stanley Cavell and the Arts

Philosophy and Popular Culture

Rex Butler

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350008526
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350008533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

In the late 1990s, Rosalind Krauss, one of the principal theorists of post-modernism in the arts, began using the term "post-medium" in her work. It was a nod to the American "ordinary language" philosopher Stanley Cavell, who had been thinking through a concept of medium in art for 30 years.

Today with the decline of post-modernism, Stanley Cavell has emerged as one of the most important figures for thinking again about the visual arts, film and theatre. Stanley Cavell and the Arts looks at Cavell's extensive writings on a wide variety of artforms and at a number of writers (Michael Fried, William Rothman) influenced by his work. Over a 50-year career, Cavell wrote about visual art, photography, classical music, Shakespeare, the plays of Samuel Beckett and perhaps most notably Hollywood cinema.

Stanley Cavell and the Arts offers an overview of Cavell's writings on the arts, situating them within his wider philosophical practice, analysing in detail his treatment of particular art forms and looking at the work of those he has deeply shaped.

1 Language

Philosophy came hard to Cavell. It is undoubtedly tempting – consistent with what we might think of as the content of his thought – to imagine that philosophy threw his life into chaos, questioned his deepest beliefs and forced him to change the course of his existence. But it did not quite happen like that. Cavell had already decided to switch from the study of music to the study of philosophy before his crisis in confidence, before his personal awakening, before he knew he had anything philosophically to say. He writes in his late-period autobiography Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (2010) of his gradual realization that the continued study of music was not for him and the decision to enrol instead first as a postgraduate at UCLA and then as a doctoral candidate at Harvard. It is an account written many years after the original decision and in light of its obvious success – after all, who would want to publish a ‘philosophical’ reflection upon the decision to become a philosopher by anyone who was not a successful philosopher? It was a ‘crisis’ that was obviously resolved for the better and perhaps – a slightly more complicated point – was not even a ‘crisis’ until it was resolved, until Cavell was able to write of it from the position of the successful philosopher he subsequently became. Cavell’s mother, as he tells us in Little Did I Know, was a frustrated concert-level pianist who never got to fulfil her dreams, so Cavell’s original studying of music was obviously in some sense a redemption of her, a belated realization of her unsatisfied ambitions. Equally, then, his decision to end it and instead to study philosophy – and, of course, Cavell is not unaware of this – must be understood as something of a breaking of the connection with his mother, a self-birth and taking of his destiny into his own hands. As Cavell writes in the entry dated ‘April 10, 2004’ of Little Did I Know:

Yet this laborious path to nowhere had, I laboriously come to understand, been essential to me. Music had my whole life been so essentially a part of my days, of what in them I knew was valuable to me, was mine to do, that to forego it proved to be as mysterious a process of disentanglement as it was to have been awarded it and have nurtured it, eliciting a process of undoing I will come to understand in connection with the work of mourning. (LD, 225)

In fact, Cavell’s real birth as a philosopher would have to wait until he had been enrolled for some four years doing his doctorate when he undertook a semester of study with the English ‘ordinary language’ philosopher J. L. Austin, who was at Harvard delivering the William James Lectures in 1955. It was this class, which soon shrunk down to just a core of interested students, that was Cavell’s true coming-into-being as a philosopher. It was this encounter with the later-to-be recognized leading exponent of Oxford School philosophy, which undoubtedly existed only in watered-down and academicized versions even in American Ivy League universities, that was his proper philosophical initiation. Cavell more or less immediately abandoned the thesis he was writing on the concept of action in Spinoza and Kant and proposed instead another on the question of how we ‘know’ the world. It was to be many years before Cavell completed this thesis, and many more before a substantial portion of it was published as his fourth book, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, in 1979. It was an encounter that several decades later Cavell still spoke about with unfeigned excitement as that revelatory moment when, despite being overwhelmed and not knowing how to respond, he realized that his decision to switch to philosophy was the right one and that he had something to say. And, as he also later makes clear, with regard to his teacher Austin, it was not merely the specific content of what he had to say that was important but the actual example of the philosopher and the proper relationship between a philosopher and his audience that he represented. As Cavell writes in the essay ‘Notes after Austin’ (1987):

Working in Austin’s class was the time for me in philosophy when the common rigours of exercise acquired the seriousness and playfulness – the continuous mutuality – that I had counted on in musical performance.¹

But for all of the gratitude Cavell later recounted in encountering Austin, the immediate effect on the young and not-yet philosophically formed Cavell would have been deeply disorienting. Austin by this time in his short-lived career had already published or delivered his ground-breaking early papers ‘Are There A Priori Concepts’ (1939), ‘The Meaning of a Word’ (1940) and ‘Other Minds’ (1946), and was working on the material that would go into his famous paper ‘A Plea for Excuses’ (1956–7) and the lectures that would make up his posthumously published How to Do Things with Words (1962). During this period more generally, he was further developing his theory of so-called performatives: statements that by the very saying of them in particular situations make themselves real. The by-now well-known examples of performatives as recounted in Austin’s ‘Performative Utterances’ (1956) include such occasions as an officially designated celebrant announcing that a couple is legally married or someone launching a ship in a ceremony staged for that purpose. These would be opposed to such everyday and commonly used expressions as ‘John is running’ or ‘the cat is on the mat’. The contrast Austin is seeking to draw here is between performatives and what he calls ‘constatives’, which are statements that merely describe a pre-existing reality rather than bringing a new one about. The former, in his words, ‘do something’, while the latter ‘say something’.² However, by the time Austin was teaching Cavell in America, he was attempting to make more subtle the previously sharp distinction he had drawn between ‘performative’ and ‘constative’, proposing instead the tripartite classification ‘illocutionary’, ‘locutionary’ and ‘perlocutionary’, corresponding broadly to ‘performative’, ‘constative’ and something in between. For the realization Austin was slowly coming to as he worked through his founding insight is that all statements had something of the performative about them and not just those framed by certain conventionally recognized social institutions. And afterwards, in the revised version of the lectures that make up How to Do Things with Words, Austin can be seen trying and in many ways failing to make this other, more inclusive classification work, finally admitting that no convincing distinction between declarative and descriptive statements, which is essentially the basis of his intellectual project, is ultimately able to be made.

However, the other, unexpected and even countervailing aspect of this is that these concerns were delivered in Austin’s celebrated low-key, informal, non-thesis-driven style. His classroom manner was famously conversational, open-ended and non-philosophical or at least non-technical in language, as though Austin himself had not reached any conclusion or as though any conclusion was provisional and open to revision or even as though reaching a conclusion was not the point. This was precisely Austin’s ‘ordinary language’ philosophical style, in which philosophers are meant to use ‘clean tools’,³ examples taken from everyday life and resist tempting metaphysical abstractions that would take us away from any shared lived reality. (In many ways, the conventions and experiences of everyday life are understood to be that against which the abstractions of philosophy are to be tested.) It is this apparently humble, undemonstrative, circumlocutious style that is described in the following adulatory, almost transferential terms by the eminent Oxford philosopher Rom Harré, who also, like Cavell, was once one of Austin’s students: ‘He would wander in carrying the three volumes of C.S. Peirce’s collected works, he’d put them down on the table, he’d flip the page over and he’d look at it, and an expression of astonishment would come over his face. He’d read out a bit and then we’d all get to work on it.’⁴ And all of this is to point to another aspect of Austin’s project – as seen in the mid-career papers ‘Truth’ (1950) and ‘How to Talk – Some Simple Ways’ (1952–3) – which is the awareness of the difficulty and potential failure of communication, the way our beliefs and intentions are constantly in danger of being misunderstood or misapplied, even by ourselves. Although we always do mean or intend things in relation to others, and even though as Austin suggests language has the power to make reality over in its image, this can always go wrong; and thus the experience of ‘ordinary life’ that Austin wants to remain true to is also the story of how we do manage to communicate something to the other, despite the fact that we can never be sure that the other has understood us or, indeed, the other can never be sure whether they have understood what we have been trying to say.

But standing behind Austin, as Cavell already knew or was soon to discover, was the formidable figure of the great Austrian linguistic, moral and aesthetic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who after completing an Engineering degree in Berlin went on to study philosophy and mathematics with the English logician Bertrand Russell at Cambridge before the First World War. Wittgenstein was an early prodigy and became one of the most celebrated and charismatic philosophical figures of his time. His doctoral thesis, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921, largely coming out of notes written in the trenches of the First World War while fighting for Austria, brought the work of the Vienna Circle (Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath and Friedrich Waismann) across to England, where it would soon lead to a School of Logical Positivism. And when Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929 to study and teach, his dramatic and charismatic style influenced a whole subsequent generation of English philosophers (to name just a few, Norman Malcolm, Peter Geach and G. E. M. Anscombe). Austin – who in fact studied Classics at Oxford – came to the question of the formal workings of language independently of Wittgenstein’s own investigation of how language operates and the circumstances in which we make meaning. But it was Wittgenstein who in many ways laid the foundations for Austin’s ‘realist’ approach to philosophy with his non-technical vocabulary and examples imagining how everyday individuals respond to things (even though the examples themselves sometimes verge on the surreal). It was also Wittgenstein who was the first to suggest that it was not a matter of philosophy offering solutions or pointing to some transcendental truth, but that it was inseparable from the same human world that it analysed. (In fact, Austin, for all of his allegiance to a similar ‘ordinary language’ approach and its anti-metaphysical premises, eventually grew frustrated at its unpreparedness to offer solutions or argument that philosophy should not offer solutions.) For Wittgenstein, language was not above life but part of it; and evidence of a successful communication – and here is where Austin with his theory of performatives does find a place – lies not in knowing what the other says, but rather in being able to respond or behave appropriately on its basis.

Nevertheless, when Cavell did discover Wittgenstein through Austin, it was not a matter of somehow passing through him or the philosophical problems he raised to become himself. For Cavell, Wittgenstein, in an even more radical way than Austin, poses the deep and abiding problem of how humans communicate without the guarantees of metaphysical truth or certainty, without timeless and universally applicable criteria allowing us to judge the correct use of words. It is what Wittgenstein calls ‘empirical cloudiness or uncertainty’ or ‘erfahrungsmässige Trübe oder Unsicherheit’ (PI, §97) in Philosophical Investigations (1953); and it is meant to evoke the ongoing and irresolvable problem of ever entirely knowing what either we or the other exactly mean when we communicate with each other, the fact that there is always a residual doubt or uncertainty that we have properly communicated our intention to the other or understood what they have been trying to say to us. For his part, Austin, for all of his attention to the ambiguities and infelicities of ordinary human language, ultimately wants to get rid of the occurrence of what he calls ‘dangerous nonsense phrases’ in a belief that human communication can finally be made clear.⁵ However, the powerful lesson of Wittgenstein for Cavell is his acknowledgement that it is not ultimately a matter of simply removing or resolving these ambiguities or limitations of language, but that it is precisely through this imperfect language itself that we must attempt to resolve them. In other words, like all serious intellectual systems, Wittgenstein is not so much putting forward any kind of a solution to the problem he identifies as proposing that the problem is its own solution, which is also to suggest that that the problem will never entirely be resolved. And this has been Cavell’s fundamental insight into Wittgenstein, from the early essays ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’ (1962), through the chapter ‘Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of Language’ in The Claim of Reason and up to the later ‘The Wittgensteinian Event’. It is this insight, again in a manner typical of philosophy, that at once makes Cavell Cavell and means that there is no outside to Wittgenstein, that Cavell can merely repeat Wittgenstein.

Let us elaborate in a little more detail, however, on what Cavell finds productive in Wittgenstein and how his readings of him produce what is distinctive about his own philosophy. In other words, we should ask – although these two cannot be separated – what Cavell takes from Wittgenstein and in what ways Cavell goes beyond Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein, of course, like the whole generation of early twentieth-century philosophers by whom he was taught and with whom he studied, inherited a series of problems from the slightly earlier generation of Viennese logical positivists, who wanted to think how language referred to things. Perhaps for the first time, or at least with renewed emphasis, language was no longer invisible but a kind of conceptual medium between us and the world. How language relates to things, and how we understand ourselves and others through it, even in the most common or ordinary of situations, is no longer to be taken for granted but something newly unfamiliar to be reflected upon. Were there rules that determined, whether explicitly or in an unspoken way, how words related to objects? Was it necessary to be able to point to or otherwise ostensibly indicate the thing being spoken of for it to constitute a proper reference? What then of the status of a reference whose qualities were not necessarily contained within the referent? The aim of the logical positivists was to produce a true science of language based on empirical evidence, just like a proper science. There are certain logically valid uses of language that are true or produce truth and others – religion, metaphysics, most philosophical systems – that are merely the ‘expression of feelings or desires’.⁶ And Wittgenstein’s work is at once a continuation of this, and indeed an inspiration to later practitioners of the School, and goes beyond or even against it. For, as we will see, if Wittgenstein’s work is a kind of empiricism, it is nevertheless an empiricism – and dare we call this the ‘English’ aspect of his later work? – that emphasizes the anomalies and exceptions of everyday experience, that evidences a certain distrust or scepticism towards any universally applicable rules.

But perhaps to begin here with a historical summary of the thinking of the relationship of words to things, undoubtedly the most powerful and long-running conception of how words apply to things, which the Vienna Circle inherited, is the so-called Augustinian theory of language, following fourth-century Roman Christian theologian St Augustine. This classical theory, with its links to the Bible and religiously sanctioned higher authority – hence the irony of its being named after a mere earthly being – is based on the idea that each object is simply nominated in an original fiat that establishes forever afterwards what it and other similar objects will be called. Thus, to take an example from Philosophical Investigations drawing on Augustine’s Confessions, an apple is called ‘apple’ because it correlates with the word and is the object for which the word stands in (PI, §1). It is an act of nomination whose origins are outside of human hands and beyond human reasoning, but obviously requires a certain God-like authority somewhere above, which remembers the correct nomenclature if ever called upon to adjudicate competing claims. And it appears that the worldly uses to which language is put are equally outside of history, insofar as there is no sense that anything has been lost or not yet been nominated, that any new object or situation might arise in the future that would require a name that has not yet been given. Everything has already been already named and named forever more. Indeed, insofar as we do not yet have new names for them, it is possible that there are in fact no new objects or situations. There is obviously something of a closed circle here between names and the things that need to be named. This is how feminist literary scholar Toril Moi outlines this Augustinian conception of language in Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin and Cavell (2007) as a prelude to discussing Wittgenstein’s own conception of how language works (and in her account she is concerned to emphasize the continuing pressure this Augustinian conception exerts on all subsequent theories of language):

Someone in the grip of the Augustinian picture of language may, for example, think that the word gets connected with the meaning when we point at the object and say ‘apples!’ or otherwise present it in some explicit way, for example, saying ‘this is an apple!’⁷

The next and seemingly more plausible explanation of how language works...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Language
• 2 Modernism
• 3 Theatre
• 4 The World Viewed
• 5 Comedies of remarriage and melodramas of the unknown woman
• 6 William Rothman
• 7 Michael Fried and modernism
• 8 Michael Fried and photography
• 9 Perfectionism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright