Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding

Garry L. Hagberg

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319974651
• eBook ISBN: 9783319974668
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

This book investigates the scope and significance of Stanley Cavell's lifelong and lasting contribution to aesthetic understanding. Focusing on various strands of the rich body of Cavell's philosophical work, the authors explore connections between his wide-ranging writings on literature, music, film, opera, autobiography, Wittgenstein, and Austin to contemporary currents in aesthetic thinking. Most centrally, the writings brought together here from an international team of senior, mid-career, and emerging scholars, explore the illuminating power of Cavell's work for our deeper and richer comprehension of the intricate relations between aesthetic and ethical understanding. The chapters show what aesthetic understanding consists of, how such understanding might be articulated in the tradition of Cavell following Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and why this mode of human understanding is particularly important. At a time of quickening interest in Cavell and the tradition of which he is acentral part and present-day leading exponent, this book offers insight into the deepest contributions of a major American philosopher and the profound role that aesthetic experience can play in the humane understanding of persons, society, and culture.

Part IUnderstanding Persons Through Film

© The Author(s) 2018

Garry L. Hagberg (ed.)Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic UnderstandingPhilosophers in Depthhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97466-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. I Want to Know More About You: On Knowing and Acknowledging in Chinatown

Francey Russell¹

(1)

Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Francey Russell

End Abstract

Throughout his writings Stanley Cavell brings our attention to the difference between knowing and acknowledging, and has urges philosophers to recognize that the skeptical, epistemic problem of other minds might actually be part of an effort to avoid the ordinary, ethical difficulties of acknowledgment. What makes the latter so challenging to understand is Cavell’s suggestion that acknowledgment cannot be elucidated via definition or conceptual analysis; instead, we can come to appreciate what acknowledgment means by learning to recognize instances of its success and cases of its failure, both in life and in art.

An exemplary case study of the problems of knowing and acknowledging would involve an exploration of both the temptation to treat another human being as an object to be known—figured out and laid bare—and an effort to grapple with the human need to acknowledge and be acknowledged. Such a case study would illustrate how the effort to know a person can obscure the ethical underpinnings, and how concrete opportunities for acknowledgment can be missed or seen too late, illustrating not only the difficulty of recognizing the need for acknowledgment generally speaking, but the difficulty of realizing that this gesture or this comment or this silence constituted an expression of that need. It would have to show, as Cavell repeatedly emphasizes, the costs of knowing and acknowledging, a cost that Cavell sees philosophy as tending to forget. My proposal in this chapter is that we can find such an exemplary case study in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown¹ and in the genre of film noir more generally. The genre and this instance afford us a kind of aesthetic understanding which, since acknowledgment is the issue, also constitutes a kind of self-understanding.

* * *

A descendent or perversion of the detective genre (see Durgnat 1998), film noir takes as part of its basic thematic motivation the problem or pursuit of knowledge (see “Towards a Definition of Film Noir” in Borde and Chaumeton 2002). The hero, or anti-hero, is usually in the business of knowing and discovering—for example, a private eye (the majority of noirs, including The Big Sleep , Out of the Past , and Kiss Me Deadly), a police officer (Touch of Evil), a journalist ( Ace in the Hole ), and so on—and the plot hinges on his being plunged into a disorientated state of not knowing. Unlike Sherlock Holmes whose neutrality and isolation² allow him to solve mysteries brought to him by and of concern to others, the noir hero is himself implicated in the mystery he is meant to solve; the pursuit of knowledge becomes a matter of not just professional but personal significance, the success or failure of which has consequences for who he takes himself to be and the world he takes himself to inhabit.

Noir presents a world in which our confidence in human knowledge and knowing is tested under the pressure of certain difficult “realities”;³ not only the reality of human corruptibility and the implications of war (noir is often understood as a uniquely “post-war” phenomenon), but even more intimately and philosophically, noir grapples with the reality of human separateness, the difficulty of knowing an other, and the possibility that in the realm of human relationships knowing, conceived as a matter of gathering information (the detective’s or PI’s modus operandi), will neither suffice nor satisfy. Following Cavell, we might say that the dissatisfactions of knowledge would be supplemented by acknowledgment, but that such human responsiveness to one another is rarely achieved in the world of noir—which is to say that noir evidences acknowledgment and the need for it primarily through its failure.

The archetypal characters of noir are representatives of human knowing, types recognizable for their particular epistemic postures. The decent detective, as one example, is a knowledge seeker whose moral uprightness is expressed in his commitment to discovering the truth (The Big Heat, Laura ); in cases where the detective is corrupt, his corruption or moral failure lies not just in his violent crimes but in his efforts to distort or conceal some truth ( L.A. Confidential ). One’s relationship with truth and knowledge, then, has implications for one’s ethical orientation and capacities. The private eye is presented as especially morally ambiguous precisely because his business consists in selling the truth, making a profit off of knowledge, and in so doing disrespecting our faith that truth and knowledge rest rightly outside the realm of capital (The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown).⁴

With respect to the general plots of noirs, even after truth has been revealed or a case has been cracked, the morally unstable universe that we are left to live in is a world in which we no longer believe that truth is tethered to the good. In noir, the revelation of truth, when and if it comes, rarely provides redemption; we might say that in this world truth has lost its appeal or efficacy, or that we have been shaken from our fantasy of its power. Even in instances where a relatively good or upstanding character finally ascends to a position of power (The Big Heat, L.A. Confidential ), or love wins out (Gilda), the question we are left with is whether moral principles or a love of truth are still meaningful or efficacious (rather than naïve, wilfully blind, risky, or impotent) in the world of film noir.

Finally, of the highly general claims we can make of the genre, the standard economy of imagery in noir involves a play of space and light that creates an atmosphere of inescapable duplicity and disorientation: dark back alleys, noisy clubs, claustrophobic interiors, blinding police lights, shadows dissecting faces, photographs and mirrors, repetitions and doublings. The city becomes a prison, safe and dangerous spaces become indistinguishable, and the human form—primarily the face—is darkened or obscured, compromising our familiarity and confidence as its disfigurement, whether by shadow or more literally, through violent action, intimates a fearsome unknowability.⁵

Of course, critics like Paul Schrader and Raymond Durgnat have suggested that film noir is best conceived not as a genre at all but as a tone that a film can take, a tone that dominated a certain period in the history of American filmmaking and that finds its most apt expression in dark imagery and dark plots. As Schrader (2003) writes, “since film noir is defined by tone rather than genre, it is almost impossible to argue one critic’s descriptive definition against another’s. How many noir elements does it take to make a film noir noir?” (230). That is, since any list of marks or features common to noirs would be ultimately arbitrary, the task of grouping these films under a commonly defined genre becomes impossible.

In fact, Schrader’s approach to noir is not out of step with Cavell’s reworked conception of genre. Cavell suggests that we should imagine a genre not as a set of elements common to a class, but more like “a medium in the visual arts, or a ‘form’ in music” (1984, 28). He writes:

the idea is that the members of a genre share the inheritance of certain conditions, procedures and subjects and goals of composition…each member of such a genre represents a study of these conditions, something I think of as bearing the responsibility of the inheritance (ibid.)

For both Schrader and Cavell, then, “film noir” should identify a sustained study of tone, cinematic procedure, goals of composition, and—perhaps against Schrader—the exercise of certain critical questions concerning the reach and limits of human knowledge and morality. Film noir offers, we might say, not the repetition of a fixed set of plots but a distinctive way of posing certain questions or, as Schrader puts it, a tone of inquiry.

Both Cavell’s and Schrader’s approaches attend closely to the fact of generic or tonal development, the fact that the tenor or pitch of noir changes over time, responding both to internal and external conditions, engaging in a kind of cinematic self-reflection that transforms the very thing it seeks to make reflectively explicit. This is not to suggest that what was once noir, imagined as something complete or determinate, eventually becomes something else. Rather, noir would always represent one tone in concert with others, never fully extricable from the full and diverse expression of which it is a part. Thus any transformation in noir is not peripheral or external to the genre but instead newly constitutes that very genre or tone.

One distinctive variation on noir, of which we can regard Chinatown (1975) as an instance, puts a specific emphasis on what can and cannot (or should not) be known, suggesting that the cinema’s obsession with turning its gaze on every intimacy or perversity of human life results not in ever more knowledge, but in its undoing. In staging an almost Oedipal quest to know at any cost, these films unfold the implications of a perversity or secrecy at the heart of individuals or society; the perverse core of the family, for instance, or the corruption that animates authority. The suggestion, delivered in tone or style as much as plotting, is that the desire to know is too often a desire to know too much, a desire as excessive and perverse as the secret to be revealed. Thus this variant takes noir’s abiding concern with the dark and hidden side of the human—and with the audience’s desire to encounter it—and renders it horrifically explicit. This is a kind of uncanny noir, a noir concerned with the desire to bring to light, or to screen, what ought to remain hidden. Examples of uncanny noir include, for instance, Welles’ The Trial , Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, Hitchcock’s Vertigo , Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, Fincher’s Se7en, and Polanski’s Chinatown.

In Chinatown the impulse to know that finds expression in so much of noir meets its resounding, terrifying, and ultimately tragic limits. The conceptual and ethical need for acknowledgment, as Cavell articulates it, is felt just at the place where the capacity for knowledge is outstripped in the face of another person , and the need for a form of relating other than knowing becomes pronounced. What would it mean for Jake to know Evelyn, and how is this different than knowing what she knows? What would be gained by learning her secret? The film suggests that, in fact, very little is gained by this new knowledge. Instead something is lost: the possibility for something like acknowledgment.

* * *

Chinatown, I want to suggest, really involves two films, two ways of seeing or two worlds. The preoccupation with or privileging of the first film drives the plot, head-on and violently, into ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Understanding Persons Through Film
• Part II. Shakespeare, Opera, and Philosophical Interpretation
• Part III. Aesthetic Understanding and Moral Life
• Part IV. Reading Fiction and Literary Understanding
• Back Matter