Stanley Cavell and the Arts: Philosophy and Popular Culture 1350008524, 9781350008526

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STANLEY CAVELL AND THE ARTS

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Lars von Trier’s Women, ed. Rex Butler and David Denny Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘What is Philosophy?’, Rex Butler Stanley Cavell and Film, Catherine Wheatley The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema, ed. David LaRocca American Philosophy, Erin McKenna and Scott L. Pratt

STANLEY CAVELL AND THE ARTS Philosophy and popular culture

Rex Butler

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Rex Butler, 2021 Rex Butler has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image: Relevo espacial, c.1960 (painted wood) by Hélio Oiticica (© The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Foundation / Bridgeman Images) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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With thanks to David Macarthur and Catherine Wheatley

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CONTENTS

List of abbreviations  viii

Introduction  1 1 Language 11 2 Modernism 31 3 Theatre 51 4 The World Viewed  69 5 Comedies of remarriage and melodramas of the unknown woman  87 6 William Rothman  107 7 Michael Fried and modernism  127 8 Michael Fried and photography  147 9 Perfectionism 167 Conclusion  187 Notes  197 Index  212

ABBREVIATIONS

The following abbreviations are used in this book: AC

Michael Fried, After Caravaggio, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2016

AL

Michael Fried, Another Light: Jacques-Louis David to Thomas Demand, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2014

AO

Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998

AT

Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980

BB

Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, Harper, New York, 1965

CHU

Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, Open Court, La Sale, Illinois, 1990

CL

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Hill & Wang, New York, 1980

CR

Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, Oxford University Press, New York, 1979

CREAL

Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism, University of Chicago, Chicago, 1992

CT

Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996

CW

Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2004

DA

Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2005

DFC

William Rothman, Documentary Film Classics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012

DK

Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003

HO

Michael Fried, Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2011

IQ

Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1988

LD

Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2010

MC

Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2010

MG

William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1982.

MM

Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism: or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998

MW?

Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976

MWK?

William Rothman, Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Columbia University Press, New York, 2014

NYU

Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989

OC

Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, Blackwell, Oxford, 1974

PHILP

Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida, Wiley-Blackwell, London, 1995

Abbreviations

ix

PH

Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1981

PI

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, WileyBlackwell, London, 2009

PP

Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1994

TE

Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, 2003

TOS

Stanley Cavell, Themes out of School: Effects and Causes, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1984

WP

Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008

WV

Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1979

x

A  bbreviations

INTRODUCTION

American philosopher of the ‘ordinary’ Stanley Cavell is well known for his interest in the arts. It might be said to be what distinguishes him from other philosophers of his generation and has led to him being more widely read than them. It is an interest that could be said to have kept the kind of language-based philosophy he practises alive altogether, bringing it often against its own inclinations into contact with such other disciplines as art history, musicology, film studies and theatre studies. Indeed, finishing this book in 2019, at a time of the questioning of ‘theory’, or at least the particular ‘French’ variant of it that entered the Anglosphere from the late 1970s on, it is almost commensurately Cavell’s own reputation that has risen. It is Cavell and those close to him who are increasingly being seen as an alternative to artistic postmodernism with its exhausted emphasis on sceptical ‘deconstruction’ and cultural studies with its apparent stepping back from all beliefs, as though in both cases it was the simple ‘critique’ of values that was necessary. It is these tendencies more generally that might even be said to have led to – or at least partially explain – that disastrous collapse of liberal democratic coalition-building that allowed the election of Donald Trump, with public space splintering into smaller and smaller sexual, racial and cultural identities, whose ‘intersectionality’ would be no substitute for a genuinely popular politics. Indeed, if we were looking for an example from the zeitgeist, there might almost be in the recent rise to prominence of Cavell something of George W. Bush’s infamous declaration that after 9/11 we are living in an age of the end of irony. Of course, all of this might be considered too crude and simplistic, but it is possible to see the signs of what we are speaking of all around us. Cavell’s reputation is undoubtedly rising in both academic and public realms, and appears to correspond to a certain tiredness with postmodernism. We are even tempted to see something of a counterpart to this in the enormous popularity of the Slovenian cultural critic Slavoj

Žižek, who likewise criticizes postmodern ‘relativism’ in seeking to put forward ‘positive’ political beliefs against the ‘flabby poeticism’ of deconstruction and the ‘bad faith’ of cultural studies.1 And it is notable that, as part of his own personal preferences when dealing with art, Žižek is an unabashed fan, if not directly of Cavell, at least those who have been influenced by him, such as the philosopher Robert Pippin and film theorist William Rothman.2 Conversely, he has been scathing towards that great project of postmodernism in art history, October magazine, once saying of it: ‘When you ask the editors of October to what the title refers, they will half-confidentially signal that it is, of course, that October – in this way, one can indulge in the jargonistic analyses of modern art, with the hidden assurance that one is somehow retaining the link with the radical revolutionary past.’3 In fact, if we look at one of the editors of October, the renowned art historian Rosalind Krauss, we can see that even she has gradually been losing her tolerance for and patience towards the intellectual school she helped found. In an essay on the wellknown ‘politically correct’ Whitney Biennial of 1993, she is critical of the formal quality of a number of the works despite their affirmative political message: ‘The work is seen to have a meaning that one  can succinctly name and then use that name to pass from the object to a register of “important ideas”.’4 And some time later, Krauss unexpectedly asserts in the huge October anthology Art Since 1900 that an art without a ‘medium’ is ‘kitsch’.5 In wishing now to remedy this, she has sought to theorize in an explicitly Cavellian way – this is how she would think the notion of medium without being seen to repeat her great intellectual rival, the art historian Michael Fried – the notion of a ‘post-medium’ art in a series of influential books and essays.6 In film theory too, perhaps already led in this regard by two seminal volumes by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, originally published in the 1980s, The Movement-Image (1983) and The Time-Image (1985), which explicitly rejected the then-dominant ‘cine-semiotics’, there has been a strengthened interest in Cavell’s already popular two books on Hollywood cinema, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981) and Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1996), and just as importantly a new attention to his largely overlooked early book on the cinematic and photographic image, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971). Cavell’s complex understanding there of how cinema and photography relate to the world has been picked up, along with a contemporary revival of the 2

STANLEY CAVELL AND THE ARTS

pioneering mid-century French film theorist André Bazin, to go towards the new academic discipline of ‘film-philosophy’, which more than anything else wants to show how films ‘think’. The early Cavell student Rothman has then expanded on Cavell’s analyses in a study of English director Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (1984), a history of documentary cinema, Documentary Film Classics (1997), and more recently a re-reading of Hitchcock’s cinema (and his own earlier book on Hitchcock), Must We Kill the Thing We Love?: Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock (2014). And today whole issues of academic journals are devoted both to Cavell’s general writings on film and more specifically to the question of the ontology of the photographic image in his work; and an entire book has been written by Rothman and fellow film scholar Marian Keane, seeking to explicate the issues raised by The World Viewed, Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film (2000). None of this is to mention the growing influence of Cavell on music studies, with such essays as ‘Music Discomposed’ (1967) and ‘A Matter of Meaning It’ (1967) being used to question the claims of avant-garde music throughout the twentieth century.7 Even in the field of theatre and Shakespeare studies – arguably less likely because of their duration to follow the latest intellectual trends – there has been a slow but nonetheless gaining in momentum pick-up and reception of Cavell’s ideas. In the earliest of Cavell’s books, the collection Must We Mean what We Say? (1969), there are essays on Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, ‘Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame’, and Shakespeare’s King Lear, ‘The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear’. It was undoubtedly something of a shock to the first readers of the book that someone who was institutionally a philosopher had so much to say about and through a play by Shakespeare; and it is perhaps this essay that at once first signalled the particular idiosyncrasy of Cavell and brought wider public attention to his work. Indeed, encouraged by the early reception of his essay on Lear, Cavell over the years wrote a series of essays on other Shakespearean tragedies, which were subsequently collected, along with a reprint of ‘The Avoidance of Love’, in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (1987). Nevertheless, within Shakespeare studies circles themselves, it has to be admitted, Cavell’s ideas were not immediately accepted. The first responses to Must We Mean? by theatre academics, when noting the essay on Lear at all, were largely negative, resenting the intrusion of philosophy into INTRODUCTION

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a realm properly considered aesthetic.8 But then, Cavell’s conception of Shakespeare’s dramas as in some way playing out the problem of scepticism gradually took off. By this time, Cavell’s wider philosophical arguments had become better known, so that the whole of his work could be applied to theatre in general. An example of this is Helene Keyssar’s ‘The Strategy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’ (1975), which takes up English playwright Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in terms of Cavell’s notion of ‘acknowledgement’9; and today Cavell remains an abiding influence in Shakespeare studies, where he is often cast as an intellectual antidote to Stephen Greenblatt’s equally influential doctrine of ‘historicism’, the notion that all truths and values are entirely historically located and cannot be grasped outside of the original conditions that produced them.10 All of this, as we have described it, has been the prevailing understanding of Cavell’s work, situating it as either a negative reaction to the unrealizable and unverifiable ambitions of postmodernism, its naïve utopianism and inflexible political orthodoxies, or a corrective to the relativism of postmodernism, its refusal to put forward positive values that could serve as the basis of a future society. And there is undoubtedly a certain tone of triumphalism amongst Cavell’s supporters, a barely concealed jubilation at the artistic and political failure of postmodernism. Indeed, a number of them – like Fried and Rothman – can even appear conservative in their seemingly unreconstructed American-centric modernism, their lack of political pieties and emphasis on great white male artists. In that first reading, Cavell is understood as not holding to any particular position in an exemplary model of philosophy as ‘modest’ and ‘unassertive’ (PP, 117). His work with its acknowledgement of scepticism, its emphasis on the formation of community through ongoing discourse, its holding to a political doctrine of gradualist perfectionism, is interpreted not as anything positive, but more as a response to prior historical and philosophical failures. It is admired not for anything it actually puts forward but for its method of testing and bringing down to earth all prevailing social and political theories. In this regard, it can appear to be a new ‘realist’ philosophy for our ‘post-ideological’ times, and it is not infrequently characterized in these terms. Here, for example, is editor Andrew Norris’s ‘Introduction’ to a collection of essays on Cavell’s political beliefs, The Claim to Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy (2006), which suggests that Cavell’s importance as a philosopher lies in 4

STANLEY CAVELL AND THE ARTS

the fact that he does not propose any globalizing or totalizing perspective onto the world: ‘Representing my community is not to speak in a voice other than my own, but to speak in that voice for us – speech that invites your correction, and hence your assistance, and hence speech that hails you as being one with me.’11 But conversely there is the other common reading of Cavell, which sees him as seeking to overcome the scepticism and lack of belief of postmodernism, in wanting to reintroduce shared communal values, even if they prove insufficient. Here, for example, is Espen Dahl, author of Stanley Cavell, Religion and Continental Philosophy (2014), which again is directed against postmodernism, but this time one that would deny any objective truth or agreed-upon values in a kind of endless self-questioning: ‘Such a break [with tradition] must be understood dialectically. . . . The alternative, Cavell contends, is to yield to the present at the cost of the past – a routine undertaking by what Cavell calls the “modernisms” or “the cult of the new”, central to what he conceives of as aesthetic post-modernism.’12 However, this is not what we argue here at all. And the fact that the postmodernism to which Cavell is seen to be opposed to is made up of two contradictory qualities testifies to the ideological nature of the proposition. On the one hand, that is, against those readings of Cavell as opposed to the totalizing quality of postmodernism, we claim that his philosophy is not at all a merely modest, corrective, unassertive undertaking. In fact, like all authentic philosophical systems, but in a way that admittedly goes against most understandings of his work, we suggest that Cavell’s philosophical thought produces a totalizing gesture of its own. It proposes a certain ‘originary’ scepticism that is neither partial nor gradual or even fundamentally empirical, and after which nothing is the same. It states the underlying conditions of the possibility of meaning, bringing about an entirely new explanation of the world. And, after it, there is no going back to the way things were before. We can henceforth argue only in the terms that Cavell himself has given us (and any socalled return to the ‘ordinary’ must be understood in this manner). And, equally, against any idea that Cavell seeks simply to defeat or overcome this scepticism (which again is associated with postmodernism, although we would more properly identify it with modernism), this is not his intention at all. On the contrary, as with all proper philosophical systems, Cavell’s inaugural gesture is fundamentally aporetic. If scepticism cannot be asserted, insofar as this would be self-contradictory, we also cannot argue against scepticism, insofar as this would be merely to return us once INTRODUCTION

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more to it, bring about the very scepticism we would oppose. Scepticism and its other are not to be separated, but are as it were the world and its condition, which revolve around each other in a circle that constitutes the very time and space of Cavell’s philosophy. And all of this is why, after the notion of scepticism has been hypothesized, there is no outside to it or this outside is possible only because of it. In this sense, we would say that Cavell’s work is neither simply sceptical nor anti-sceptical. Indeed, like the postmodernism it is often held up against – but this only to point to that post-Kantian inheritance they both share – Cavell rather puts forward an argument that is not so much either empirically verifiable or refutable as irrefutable and undemonstrable. Scepticism as the ‘transcendental’ condition of the world is at once ungraspable and unthinkable and inseparable from the things it makes possible. Now, all of this is undoubtedly an unconventional – indeed, even an antithetical – reading of Cavell. However, we seek to detail it in what follows through a close and responsive analysis of his relationship to several different artforms. We suggest both that it is his encounter with art that allows him to formulate his philosophical position and – insofar as his conception of philosophy is not finally empirical – that his position is applied to art. (This would be precisely that back-and-forth between the transcendental and what it allows that we argue constitutes postmodernism.) In our first chapter, we outline Cavell’s background in the linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. We begin by observing that the true creativity of Cavell lies in the way he takes up Wittgenstein’s solution to the classic philosophical problem of how words apply to things to open up a necessary uncertainty – a kind of distance between us and the world and us and other people – through which the possibility of meaning occurs. This is Cavell’s brilliant invention of ‘scepticism’, which is as much a making visible of what was already present in a number of prominent precursors as a new thinking of the conditions under which the world appears to us. Then in chapter two we look at Cavell’s location of this moment of scepticism at the origins of Western modernity with the philosophy of Descartes, the science of Galileo and the plays (particularly the tragedies) of Shakespeare. In one way, this is a specific historicization of the problem, but in another way – consistent with what we have just been saying about the prescriptive and doubling power of thought – it is a kind of fiction. In a sense, nothing explains the rise of scepticism as a properly philosophical creation, and its historical contextualization arises only as an effect of it. 6

STANLEY CAVELL AND THE ARTS

In subsequent chapters, we seek to trace these broader philosophical ideas out through a number of particular artistic ‘examples’ elaborated by Cavell and others close to him or influenced by his work. These are the chapters that strictly make up the subject of Cavell and the arts, as opposed to those more broadly on Cavell’s philosophy, although we cannot strictly separate the two. In our third chapter, we take up the first of our ‘case studies’: Cavell’s treatment of theatre in such essays as ‘Ending the Waiting Game’ and ‘The Avoidance of Love’. We ask what the specific form of scepticism or unknowing is in Beckett’s Endgame and Shakespeare’s Lear, and how each play attempts to grapple with it. This is to be seen in the different relationship the actors have to each other and the audience in each respective dramatic form and how this might be explained by each occupying a different moment of artistic modernity. In our fourth chapter, in another ‘methodological’ reflection as in chapters one and two, we look at the more ‘philosophical’ treatment of the cinematic and photographic image in Cavell’s The World Viewed. It is in this book that Cavell first systematically lays out the differences between theatre, film and painting that are to underpin both his own subsequent analyses of the various artforms and those that come after him. Then in our fifth chapter, we take up Cavell’s two books on Hollywood cinema: Pursuits of Happiness, which is a study of a series of romantic comedies featuring unusually not a couple getting together for the first time but a couple getting back together after breaking up; and Contesting Tears, in which Cavell produces a new understanding of the at-the-time only recently rediscovered genre of female melodrama. Cavell, in using these two genres to argue aspects of his wider philosophy, sees them as in many ways opposed, with the comedies evidencing the ‘overcoming’ of scepticism and the melodramas a certain ‘succumbing’ to it, but we attempt to think here the commonality or even reciprocity between them. We then follow with a number of chapters on writers on various artforms inspired by and working alongside Cavell. In our sixth chapter, we look at the two previously mentioned books by film scholar William Rothman, Alfred Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze and Documentary Film Classics. In The Murderous Gaze, Rothman traces a shift in Hitchcock’s oeuvre from the ‘theatrical’ to the ‘cinematic’, largely in terms of the differing relation the characters have to the camera and the spectator has to the characters. In Documentary Film Classics, Rothman surprisingly makes a similar argument to his book on Hitchcock, suggesting that INTRODUCTION

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through the course of documentary film – crossing the line usually drawn between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ – we can discern a passage from the ‘theatrical’ to the ‘cinematic’. In both cases, Rothman’s argument takes off from the assumption that cinema is modernist and therefore necessarily grapples with the problem of scepticism in the form of the challenging of its conventions. Then, in the following two chapters, we take up the work of the prominent art-historical Cavellian (although the influence in this case goes two ways) Michael Fried. In our seventh chapter, we treat Fried’s art criticism and history, which begins with the American art of the 1960s and goes back at least to the French art of the 1730s. Fried writes there a very detailed account showing how modern art is defined by its relationship to scepticism, which for him – allowing us some connection with Rothman on Hitchcock – goes by the name of ‘theatricality’. And after completing a long series of art-historical books moving from the mid-eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century, Fried writes Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008), which is both an attempt to think through those issues he raised with regard to painting in a new medium and a return to the art of his own time, seeking to show how those issues of theatre and scepticism he found in eighteenthcentury French art are still relevant to the art of today. In our ninth chapter, in a final pulling back from the specifics of the various treatments of art, we look at Cavell’s broader moral and political programme of perfectionism. Perfectionism is a doctrine Cavell takes over from the nineteenth-century American essayists and philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, for whom it is in Cavell’s words a question of ‘the self ’s coming to itself, or to its next self ’ (CHU, xxxiii). And this is the way it can appear even for Cavell himself: as a gradualist, incremental, always incomplete model for a democracy in the making, which acknowledges human imperfection and the necessity always to work through worldly limitations and misunderstandings. But we suggest here – consistent with our other arguments about Cavell – that perfectionism in his work is to be understood not so much as a series of gradual steps towards an always receding goal, taking place in a fallen everyday, but a series of re-imaginings of what is from somewhere ‘outside’ of it. That is to say, we might understand the history of philosophy itself, the course of the development of thought, as a sequence of ‘perfectionist’ statings of the conditions of possibility of the system before, what is excluded from it to allow it to be formulated. As Cavell writes in his essay, ‘The Wittgensteinian Event’ (2006), devoted precisely 8

STANLEY CAVELL AND THE ARTS

to one of these ‘doubling’ figures in the history of philosophy: ‘The history of philosophy is quite continuously a history of discontinuities.’13 We can understand this as an approach towards some goal, a progression towards some ultimate truth or insight; but we can also understand it as circular, ending up where we started each time. This is why Cavell’s Emerson is more Nietzschean than Hegelian. And we explore all of this in relation to Rothman’s book on Hitchcock, Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Finally, in our conclusion, we repeat again our initial characterization of Cavell, following on from our previous chapter, not as a modest, unassertive, untheoretical philosopher of small gains and a chastened democratic space, but – as all proper philosophers – the deviser of a totalizing and thereafter irrefutable hypothesis that accounts for everything. But it is our assertion, admittedly itself aporetic or self-dividing, that it is only in this way that we can properly think the limitations of our knowledge of the world.

INTRODUCTION

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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

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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 groundbreaking 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

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conversational, open-ended and non-philosophical or at least nontechnical 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 14

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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. L ANGUAGE

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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 twentiethcentury 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 16

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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 L ANGUAGE

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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 is the one Wittgenstein inherits. It is precisely that ‘analytical’ approach of the Viennese Logical Positivists, which Wittgenstein first encountered in Vienna with Gottlob Frege and then later at Cambridge with Russell and G. E. Moore. It begins with the insight that language is not an arbitrary and fundamentally unjustifiable decree that forever nominates its objects regardless of their actual qualities, so that there is no obvious or even apparent match between them, but one in which the name is somehow motivated by and responds to what it names. That is, names, as well as coming from something in the object, also point to something in the object. In this sense, it is fundamentally an ostensive conception of naming, insofar as the name indicates something in the object, draws out some quality in it, which is what gives it its name. Thus, names group or divide up objects in the world. They introduce distinctions or classifications on the basis of which objects manifest those qualities, and allow us to nominate further or future examples of those same objects. And this would apply even if we made a next step and understood objects as made up not of a single quality, but of a group or bundle of qualities. What would now be indicated by the name would be not so much a particular object as the particular set of qualities that make up that object. (And new names would be necessary for hitherto unseen dispositions of these qualities.) Take, for example, Russell’s account of how a rose is made up of a series of different characteristics, all of which must be possessed for something to be called a rose. As Russell writes in ‘The Problem of Universals’ (1946): Take such a statement as ‘this rose is red’. . . . The word ‘rose’ indicates a bundle of qualities, such as are given in the dictionary under the appropriate heading. The word ‘red’ indicates a quality which is present in some roses and not in others.8 18

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This is the fundamentally ‘analytic’ nature of naming and of the philosophy of language thereby instituted on its basis. As opposed to that first Augustinian model, in which it is a matter of one simple quality that is named forever, here the object is a particular bundle of qualities that can be broken down, measured and evaluated. Words group these qualities together in different proportions, almost like the basic atomic elements are combined to form the compounded substances that make up the physical world. So that we might group roses together in a certain way under the classification ‘rose’, but it is also possible to group them together another way not necessarily with other roses under the classification ‘red’. It is this analytic conception of language that Wittgenstein inherited when he began studying philosophy, both from Russell and the Vienna School. But it is its assumptions – unquestionable in their way – that he starts to interrogate, at first in the informal Blue and Brown Books (1933–35) and then in Philosophical Investigations, all published only after his death. He begins in the Brown Book by setting out the ostensive case for the word ‘slab [Platte]’. He asks whether there is any quality or set of qualities that all slabs have in common, so that we could determine from the possession of these qualities whether the object before us is a slab. Or to put this in more practical terms, we might point out a number of different slabs to someone, say an apprentice on a building site, and they should be able on the basis of the qualities embodied in them to pick up further examples of slabs, at which point we would say that they have properly understood the meaning of the word slab. This is Wittgenstein in the Brown Book: ‘[Language’s] function is the communication between a builder A and his man B. B has to reach A building stones. There are cubes, bricks, slabs, beams, columns. The language consists of the words “cube,” “brick,” “slab,” “column.” A calls out one of these words, upon which B brings a stone of a certain shape’ (BB, §1). But another, arguably more challenging, example – both because it is less rooted in any tangible object we could point to and because there is a wider spread of possible objects or qualities that are encompassed by it – Wittgenstein considers is the word ‘game [spiel]’. Here the question raised is whether all things and activities called games have one quality or even set of qualities in common that would allow someone on their basis to identify further examples of games. This is Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations: ‘Don’t say “They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’,” but look and see whether there is something in common L ANGUAGE

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to all. For if you look at them, you won’t see something that is common to all’. (PI, §66) Of course, Wittgenstein’s real point – even as early as the Tractatus, where he is still largely working within the ‘analytical’ framework – is that there is no single quality or set of qualities by which we can identify these or any other objects. There is no fully enumerable series of characteristics by which we can specify even so ordinary and taken-for-granted (under us as it were) an object as a slab so that someone could infallibly indicate another slab. In Wittgenstein’s concluding words from the long thought experiment he conducts in the Brown Book: ‘We can say: The expression “B can continue the series” is used under different circumstances to make different distinctions’ (BB, §64). And the same goes even more so for the more abstract and less necessarily material notion of a game. Here, Wittgenstein explicitly admits that there is no single definition that covers all the various objects and activities that are referred to by the word ‘game’. There are not only the more obvious physical examples of games, such as tennis and cricket, but also the more abstract and conceptual versions of games, such as chess and bridge (PI, §66). And this is not even to count all of the other, let us say ‘idiomatic’, ways in which the word ‘game’ is used in everyday language, which draw upon what we recognize as certain ‘game-like’ qualities, but appear to have little or nothing in common with actual games or even with each other: noughts-and-crosses, singing and dancing, a child throwing a ball against a wall and catching it (PI, § 66), certain abstract uses of language (PI, §81) and even yelling and stamping feet (PI, §200). And in Philosophical Investigations, and in fact throughout his work, Wittgenstein gives many examples of such ‘secondary’ uses of words that apparently draw upon a ‘primary’ bank or reservoir of shared or assumed-to-be-known qualities (PI II, §276), but that can take us into surprising and hitherto unthought territory, for example, the words ‘afraid’ (PI II, §§72–85) or ‘open’ and ‘closed’ (BB, §32).9 Indeed, this unearthing of effectively ‘uncommon’ or ungeneralizable uses of everyday words is paradoxically the very argumentative method of ‘ordinary language’ philosophy. Wittgenstein’s initial ‘solution’ to this problem, first developed in the Blue Book, was his celebrated idea of ‘family resemblance [Familienähnlichkeit]’. It is the notion that there is no single quality or even set of qualities that characterizes all of the examples of objects that share the same name, but rather a mobile and shifting set of qualities. That is to say, across all the varieties of the ‘same’ object there is no single 20

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quality or even set of qualities that all must have, but some selection from a wider set that each particular instance draws upon. It is the possession of a certain number of this wider set that allows something to count as an example of the object in question. So that, again, two such examples will not necessarily share all of their qualities but only a certain number of these qualities. Here is Wittgenstein setting out one of his first formulations of the idea with regard to ‘games’ in the Blue Book: ‘We are inclined to think there must be something in common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general term “game” to the various games; whereas games form a family the members of which have family likenesses’ (BB, 17). And, indeed, Wittgenstein’s elegant solution has taken on a particular contemporary resonance, as a number of commentators have noted, insofar as it can seem to predict the contemporary political doctrine of ‘intersectionality’: the idea that, in the constantly evolving particularity of personal identity, in order to build, say, a potential political feminist coalition, it is not necessary that all women are understood to be the same, possessing some single uniform identity that speaks for all and is the single defining characteristic every woman shares. Rather, ‘woman’ is a kind of intersection or patchwork of other smaller identities made up of many other elements (sexual, racial, religious, economic etc.), in which it is not principally or even predominantly as women that the various members identify, but a whole series of other markers or identities, which can themselves be broken down into smaller and smaller or at least different categories (i.e., just as there is no universal quality that makes up all women, so there is no single shared quality that makes up ‘white’ or ‘black’ women, and this goes down to the individual members of a class).10 But as Wittgenstein soon began to realize – and it is that that prompts the shift from the Blue Book to Philosophical Investigations – what this theory of ‘family resemblance’ or ‘intersectionality’ implies is that, pushed far enough, two examples of the same word potentially have nothing in common. That is, if there are certainly overlapping instances of objects that share a number of qualities so that none is detached from all of the others, at opposite ends of this spectrum as it were it is nevertheless possible to have two instances of the same word that share nothing between them. This is the situation Wittgenstein starts from in Philosophical Investigations, saying, for example, of the word ‘game’: ‘Look at board games, with their various affinities. Now pass to card games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but L ANGUAGE

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many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost’ (PI, § 66). Again, what this is to suggest is not only that the definition of a word is not some underlying core or essence, as in the Augustinian definition, but that it is not even a bundle or cluster of different qualities that each object must possess in order to retain the common name. Rather, taken to its limit, what the ‘family resemblance’ notion of language implies is that all the possible uses of the same word or concept have nothing in common, that they do not ultimately come together under one overarching shared category.11 Or to put the same problem in time not space – diachronically and not synchronically, as it were – it is to imagine that in the historically shifting uses of the same word it is possible that over time uses in the present bear no relation to their original references, that there is no underlying truth or memory that contemporary uses have to remain faithful to in order to be understood. Indeed, we might even suppose – to follow a number of subsequent Wittgenstein commentators, including Cavell – that the most productive uses of a word, that is, the most productive words, are those whose various accepted uses cover the most disparate range of objects, do not have anything in common. Again, we have only to look for evidence of this to the use of the word ‘woman’ in intersectional politics, which is intended to allow us to see the difference and potential lack of commonality between the various ‘women’ grouped under this head, which then enables us to think such other things as race, class, sexual orientation, the comparative situations of various cultures and nations. It is at this point – and this is the whole question of the ‘late’ or ‘later’ Wittgenstein and how it differs from what came before – that Wittgenstein shifts his attention from logically defining the meaning of words to the kinds of behaviour words produce. This is the whole seemingly mystical and today still controversial theme of Wittgenstein apparently advocating a ‘giving up’ of philosophy or at least a limit after which ‘explanations’ are neither possible nor seemingly relevant. These statements have taken on a kind of talismatic appeal, as though Wittgenstein is pointing to some other realm from the human altogether where meaning would be attained, alternately read as a mystical insight that cannot be put into words or a nihilistic self-negation of the activity of philosophy itself. The oft-cited evidence for such arguments are such sentences from the Blue Book as ‘Philosophy really is “purely descriptive”’ (BB, 18) and from Philosophical Investigations as ‘Explanations come 22

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to an end somewhere’ (PI, §1). But, in fact, it is just at this point that Wittgenstein turns towards the ‘everyday’, in effect inaugurating what will become known as ‘ordinary language’ philosophy. For it is in Philosophical Investigations that Wittgenstein first explicitly emphasizes the importance of what he will call ‘agreement [Übereinstimmung]’ (PI, §241–2) in the understanding of the meaning of a word. By this he means not simply that the meaning of a word is to be found in its surrounding context or that this context tells us what is the correct or proper use of a word, which merely opens up again the potentially unrelatable differences in the various uses of a word. And it would imply a kind of circularity between word and context, which troubles many treatments of this question.12 On the contrary, what Wittgenstein means by ‘agreement’ is the fact that, for a new or different meaning of a word to count, it must be understood by another, or another must think they understand it. That is, against that previous model of a kind of singular, idiosyncratic proposing of a new meaning to a word, what Wittgenstein emphasizes is that this meaning – even a new, previously unheard of meaning – is not a meaning until it has been shared with another. In this sense, we might say that the different meanings of a word that potentially have nothing in common would not themselves be possible unless at some point they are the same, that is, unless a particular use can be repeated. This is Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations explaining how it is this shared meaning that is the paradoxical condition for that endlessly differentiating production of new meanings that he previously observed: ‘So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?’ What is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life. (PI, §138) It is for this reason that some commentators, undoubtedly writing from the commendable motive of providing the later Wittgenstein with a philosophical pedigree, want to suggest that Wittgenstein’s final conception of language is not entirely irreconcilable with a sort of Kantian ‘transcendentality’: that what appears to be necessary for the transmission of meaning is a certain unchanging ‘core’ of meaning that can never entirely be grasped but is somehow shared between speakers.13 This is to an extent true; but how Wittgenstein differs from Kant is that it is not so much that this inner core is unthinkable as that any statement L ANGUAGE

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of it differs and it exists only in this always different form. But this is also to say that it differs from any endlessly dispersing intersectionality in that we do think we are repeating what was said before, so that there is no nothing in common but always communication within a certain context. Against any Kantian transcendentality, then, meaning exists from the beginning only in transmission, as it were between two. So that, to express it in its full paradoxicality, this ‘something in common’ to the various uses of a word would always turn into a nothing in common; and this ‘nothing in common’ would only be possible, would only take place, because of a certain assumed something in common. In a way – and we will come back to this in a moment – each successive attempt at communication is an attempt to make up for this misunderstanding, to find out whether the two parties to the conversation are speaking of the same thing; but every attempt to do so produces only another misunderstanding, another difference between them. Nevertheless, this itself, the very failure of the act of communication, is possible only because of a certain something in common. In a sense, that is, there is a distinction between the act of communication – the fact that we speak and listen as though we understand each other – and the content of the communication, which can never definitively be settled or agreed upon, insofar as every attempt to say what is said produces something different. We might take here the well-known example of seeing another person in pain, as originally discussed in the Blue Book and then returned to in Part II of Philosophical Investigations. The question Wittgenstein famously puts there is how can we know that another is in pain? It prompts reflection, in Wittgenstein’s initial treatment of it, upon what the proper verbal expression of pain would be. Does the other mean by pain what we understand by pain? Can the word ‘pain’ be mutually satisfactorily defined between us so that we can know what the other is saying to us? Might our definitions be so far apart that we are able to say, despite what they might feel, that the other is not in pain, that they are in effect faking their pain? This is Wittgenstein in the Blue Book: ‘Our wavering between logical and physical impossibility makes us make such statements as this: “If what I feel is always my pain only, what can the supposition mean that someone else has pain?”’ (BB, 56–7). But by the time of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein has found a ‘solution’ to this problem or rather no longer speaks of it as a problem. For what he proposes is that in such situations in which someone claims to be in pain we do not sit back deliberating on what they mean by pain and whether we agree with 24

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it, but rather we act upon or to use Wittgenstein’s specific diction we ‘presuppose [voraussetzen]’ their pain. As Wittgenstein writes in Part II of Philosophical Investigations: ‘A doctor asks: “How is he feeling?” The nurse says: “He is groaning.” But need there be any question, for the two of them, whether the groaning is really genuine, is really the expression of anything? But then they make a tacit presupposition. Then playing our language-game always rests on a tacit presupposition’ (PI II, §§30–1). Now, this ‘presupposition’ can appear a simple ‘humanitarian’ decision, an act of everyday practicality cutting short the potentially endless nature of philosophical speculation, as though ‘ordinary language’ philosophy means simply this. However, acting in this situation is both a commentary on and an effect of the fact that the potential difference in meaning between the two parties is possible only because of a certain agreement between them. Acting in these circumstances is a kind of remarking of this difference, an agreement to disagree, from somewhere outside, as though there is a need to bring our deliberations to an end in order that decisive action can be taken.14 But it is also merely another move within an ongoing argument over the meaning of the word ‘pain’ without resolving it. Indeed, it would be something like this ‘cutting short’ brought about by action that would allow the seeming deferment of decisive determination, insofar as the ongoing mutual elaboration of the possible meaning of pain can take place only on the condition of someone actually getting up and helping the other who claims they are in pain. To be clear, getting up to help someone in pain is like having a conversation with them, or to put it in a more surprising form having a conversation with someone is like helping someone in pain. It is not necessarily to say that we agree with their definition or to admit that we have exactly the same understanding of the word. It is rather – and this is the wit of Wittgenstein’s example, in which we have to help them, acknowledge their declaration of pain in order to continue the conversation – to suggest that we wish to continue the conversation between the two of us over its meaning. To get up and help another person is not necessarily to say that we agree with their definition of pain – and, of course, insofar as the other is in pain, what would this agreement look or sound like? – but rather that we recognize something about what they are saying about it. And getting up to help is like continuing the conversation, allowing that we do indeed have something in common. In other words, we acknowledge the other, recognize something in L ANGUAGE

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their use of the word pain, not by somehow signalling or concluding an agreement, but by doing something, by continuing the conversation. This is the subtle distinction made in Wittgenstein’s conception of language use between ‘rules [Regeln]’ and ‘criteria [Kriterien]’. Rules, we might say, are at stake in those ostensive understandings of language, in which some quality or group of qualities allows a word to be applied to a thing, which leads to the difficulty, as we have seen, that in some circumstances there are no consistent rules as to how to apply the word or these rules appear to run out. Criteria, on the other hand, seek to present no such clearcut directions as to how to apply words, but set out the conditions – let us say the ‘context’ – in which these rules can be applied. That is, they do not offer rules for definitionally resolving meaning, but indicators for whether it will be possible to resolve meaning at all. Again, criteria are not the actual resolution of meaning of a word, but the conditions of possibility for resolving the meaning of a word, that agreement or something in common that allows the disagreement or potential nothing in common of rules themselves. This is Cavell’s commentator Stephen Mulhall in Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (1994): Both criteria and standards are means by which a group judges or evaluates an object’s membership in some special status; but criteria determine whether an object is of the right general kind, whether it is a candidate for this status in the first place, whereas standards discriminate the degree to which candidates satisfy those criteria.15 As Mulhall makes clear, criteria do not seek to decide the final meaning of words, or even determine in advance the particular situations in which they can be spoken. Rather, they are an agreement as to how the truth might be arrived at and to continue to search for it. That is to say, the words uttered – and this is the distinction between rules and criteria, how criteria are a ‘solution’ to the problem of rules lacking meta-rules – are at once an attempt to resolve the meaning of words and an implicit agreement as to how this attempt might proceed. In other words, when we respond to another we are not merely agreeing with their use of language but agreeing as to how we might produce agreement in language. As Mulhall continues after that passage above: ‘The agreement about which Wittgenstein is talking (his term is Übereinstimmung) is agreement in something rather than agreement to something.’16 But this is also to say that, insofar as there is no final truth of a word and it is not even a matter 26

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of truth – because there is no final stopping of the changing meaning of a word and any attempt to sum up all of the other meanings (which in effect is what each use is) itself produces only another meaning – something of a doubt always remains, a certain distance or unknownness between the two speaking. And it is at this point that we might introduce Cavell into the conversation, insofar as the reading we have been presenting of Wittgenstein and how we can see in him a move beyond the classically regarded ‘family resemblance’ theory of language is very much his. In other words, it is Cavell who arguably first sees in the later Wittgenstein the outlines of an ‘ordinary language’ theory of communication, in which it is a matter not simply of the definition of a word but of the surrounding context or life practice in which it is used. This suggestion is to be found in Cavell’s ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’ (1962), which is not only an assertion of the power of the later Wittgenstein against the reigning ‘logical positivist’ consensus at the time that it was the early Wittgenstein that was significant, but emphasizes the importance of the ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ in this later Wittgenstein. This is Cavell speaking of the way that the proof that we understand the meaning of a word lies not in somehow grasping some static or ostensive definition, but in using it in a context other than the one in which it was originally given, another context because we cannot repeat the same one: We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into new contexts. Nothing ensures that this projection will take place, just as nothing ensures that we will make and understand the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of humour and of significance. (MW?, 52) However, to give all this the twist Cavell does in ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’, we would say that this sense of the second replying to the first, the joining together of the two speech acts despite their differences, is the very setting of context or criteria in which meaning can be determined. It is precisely not a matter of waiting for the right context or objectively evaluating whether the word is being used correctly – the traditional ‘philosophical’ methods of resolving these questions – but rather the response or conversation that is itself already the appropriate context for evaluation, the decision that the word L ANGUAGE

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has been used the ‘right’ way. In other words, there is not any conscious or explicitly declared decision about context and meaning. Rather, the decision to continue speaking is already sufficient agreement as to the meaning of a word to allow the question to be asked and its meaning to be debated. It is henceforth only within this discussion that we can think the decision to continue and whether we properly understand each other. Indeed, the content of the discussion is always a disagreement over the meaning of a word and the fact or form of the disagreement always an agreement. It is this that would be the inaugural insight of The Claim of Reason. The striking argument Cavell makes there is not the usual one of reason somehow setting the conditions of possibility in advance, as though experience would have to fit these in order to be possible, but rather – and this is for him to propose a certain re-reading of Kant – an assertion of the priority of experience, the fact that the interrogation of meaning is possible only after the initial taking up of dialogue with either others or the world. As Cavell writes there: ‘The “agreement” we act upon Wittgenstein calls “agreement in judgement” (§242), and he speaks of our ability to use language as depending upon agreement in “forms of life” (§241). But forms of life, he says, are exactly what have to be “accepted”; they are “given”’ (CR, 30). In fact, we could not even say that there is an offer of dialogue – that is, something like the declaration of pain – until after the other has responded. This is the meaning for Cavell of ‘acknowledgement’, and why acknowledgement is not – or not yet – positive knowledge. Acknowledgement is just that responding to the other without being sure what they mean, the attempt to use a word in a new way without being sure the other will understand us. And it is only within the bounds of this acknowledgement that the questioning of meaning is possible, that we can even ask whether acknowledgment has occurred. Indeed, this very questioning of meaning, of acknowledgement, is only possible we retrospectively realize because of a prior acknowledgement, is itself this very acknowledgement. In fact, in proposing this reading of Wittgenstein, which sees him involved in a kind of permanent remarking of doubt, Cavell goes against his immediate mentor Austin. Austin, for his part, as we have said, was of the opinion that philosophy was always in the business of correcting the mistakes made in ordinary speech, as though this could definitively be done. As Cavell writes in ‘Austin at Criticism’ (1965): ‘Too obviously, Austin is continuously concerned to draw distinctions, and the finer the merrier’ (MW?, 102). However, what Austin misses, according to 28

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Cavell, is that seen from a Wittgensteinian perspective ordinary language is already its own self-correction. Or even, we might say, if ordinary language makes mistakes, it is also its own correction – and this is conversation, why we continue to speak to each other. Conversation does not have to be directly about the meaning of words to correct itself, as Austin imagines, for the very fact that a conversation is taking place is itself evidence of this correction. As Cavell writes in The Claim of Reason about the way we already find in Wittgenstein the solution Austin was looking for: ‘In learning language [for Wittgenstein], you do not merely learn the pronunciation of sounds, and their grammatical orders, but the “forms of life” which make those sounds the words that they are’ (CR, 177–8). But perhaps the irony here is that Cavell cannot recognize the same argument in others. In a series of essays taking up the famous Austin-Derrida debate, as mediated through the American linguistic philosopher John Searle, Cavell for his part accuses deconstructionism of a simple deferral or impossibility of meaning, in blatant disregard of the fact that we do actually converse and make sense in everyday life. This is Cavell in Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (1995): ‘Derrida is objecting to [in Austin] what he was already in flight from, the spectre of the ordinary’ (PhilP, 74). And we can see why Cavell is concerned with such an oversight, given that it is just this ‘flight’ that he sees Wittgenstein arguing against. But, in fact, if he read Derrida closely, he would realize that Derrida’s argument is very much like his own: deconstruction is not at all the simple deferral of meaning that would render meaning impossible, but rather contends that it is the deferral or impossibility of meaning that makes meaning possible. Or, put otherwise, that it is only within meaning and presence that we are able to think their deferral or impossibility or even that meaning and presence exist only in the thinking of their impossibility.17

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2 MODERNISM

Cavell takes over Wittgenstein’s philosophical system from the beginning of his career. After all, the title of his important early essay, ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’, is first of all a declaration of its availability to him. But why, we might ask, is Wittgenstein’s philosophy available to Cavell? The answer Cavell would give is that he – or at least the time in which he lives – is also available to Wittgenstein. And this is the decisive insight of Cavell, the special emphasis and even urgency he brings to his reading of Wittgenstein: that Wittgenstein is the philosopher of our time. It is Wittgenstein who best captures the world in which we live, which of course is that of modernity. And this is to say – and this is a complicated question, as we will see – that Cavell historicises Wittgenstein’s philosophy, sees it as coming out of and speaking to a particular time.1 What Wittgenstein offers – and this is to go against many if not all readings of his work – is not a general or abstract philosophical position, but a historical analysis of the world around him. This again is another aspect of that ‘worldly’ or ‘ordinary’ aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, so often overlooked by his interpreters: that it is about a locatable time and place, the everyday world in which we live and think. Although it is easy to overlook, it is not just any or every world that Wittgenstein talks about in his philosophy, but our world, recognizable to all of us. And this is certainly one of the overlooked threads, and overlooked originalities, of Cavell’s interpretation of Wittgenstein: it is not that Wittgenstein offers an empirical diagnosis of our times like a sociologist, but he does nevertheless propose a problematic that is specific to and defines the epoch in which we live. We might, for example, go back to the Wittgensteinian notion of how language refers to things and allows us to communicate with one another. It begins, as we saw, with the failure or inadequacy of the Augustinian conception of language, in which words refer unilaterally to things and this

relationship never changes. It is as though the number of different objects in the world remains fixed so that the same words remain applicable (or, in a circular fashion, because the same words refer to different objects, the number of these objects remains fixed). Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘family resemblance’ arises in response to the idea that the variety of things referred to by the same word can change, that the names of things do not irrevocably determine what is referred to. This has the result that, over time, it is possible that the same word refers to things that do not all have something in common. What is thereby broken is not only the logical chain of resemblance in objects, but the linear continuity of time. This concludes, as we have seen, with Wittgenstein’s discussion of the words ‘slab’ and ‘game’, where he suggests it is possible that there is no overall resemblance between the objects referred to, but merely momentary clusters of similarity: ‘The strength of the thread [of a concept] resides not in the fact that some one fibre runs through the whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres’ (PI, §67). And the same thing can be seen in Wittgenstein’s discussion of someone in pain, where likewise it is always possible that we misunderstand what the other means by pain or that they are not actually in pain: ‘I can only believe that someone else is in pain, but I know it if I am’ (PI, §303). In other words, what Wittgenstein seeks to evoke is the permanent possibility that words do not definitively confirm the identity of the object or the other person’s state of mind. There is always a kind of ‘doubt [Zweifel]’ (PI, §303) or ‘uncertainty [Ungewissheit]’ (PI, §247) that prevents us from ever being sure, insofar as we can know only through the medium of language. This is Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations, summarizing the problematic that has driven his work since the Tractatus: As for the feeling of certainty: I sometimes say to myself, ‘I am sure it’s . . . o’clock’, and in a more or less confident tone of voice, and so on. If you ask me the reason for this certainty, I have none. (PI, §607) As we have seen, Wittgenstein very much constructs Philosophical Investigations as a ‘solution’ to this abiding uncertainty of language. The solution lies in the very action of speaking to another, which is already, without even undertaking it explicitly, the attempt to settle the meaning of words by putting them into new contexts to see whether they fit. But this ‘uncertainty’ and its overcoming have largely been seen to be a property of language itself, as though it were a question of 32

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ontology. It is merely that at a particular historical moment through a process of self-reflection Wittgenstein came upon it. It is part of what constitutes the insular, inward-looking, ironically unworldly tone of so much post-Wittgensteinian philosophy, which very much understands Wittgenstein in this detached, isolated and pseudo-scientific way (for all of its emphasis on worldly actions and the ordinary). Take, for instance, Avrum Stroll’s summary in Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty, which sets out this reading of Wittgenstein, before enlisting him into a form of ‘foundationalism’: ‘The foundations of the language game stand outside of and yet support the language game.  .  .  .  For Wittgenstein, absolute presuppositions remain invariant under all historical transformations’.2 However, on the contrary, we would want to assert that anything like this is not an eternal truth about language, but a contingent fact, an event that happens at a certain time in human history. So that it is entirely possible – Wittgenstein does not rule this out – that the Augustinian conception of language was once true but is no longer. Or, at least, if language has always had the character Wittgenstein now imputes to it, it is only in our time that this has been able to be discovered. Wittgenstein already by the time of the Blue Book is not entirely sure which is the case or at least he does not choose between them; but he does open up the possibility there that the results he sets out were not always the case, that just as it was not always true in the past so it will not necessarily be true in the future. It simply holds now at the time he is writing. This is him contending in the Blue Book: One sometimes has described it by saying that no philosophical problem can be solved until all philosophical problems are solved, which means that as long as they aren’t all solved every new difficulty renders all previous results questionable. . . . It is [rather] that every new problem which arises may put in question the position which our previous results are to occupy in the final picture. (BB, 4) It is just this aspect of Wittgenstein that Cavell goes on to generalize or even universalize in his work. It is that structure of necessary doubt or scepticism that results from the fact that we are never entirely able to stand outside of language to render final judgement upon it, so that it is only through or even as the practice of language that we can construct an image of the truth it offers. It is Cavell who draws this out of Wittgenstein and universalizes it, so that this doubt becomes the M ODERNISM

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condition of possibility of ‘truth’, or put otherwise it is what allows its own overcoming. It is this that Cavell takes as the fundamental ‘method’ of Wittgenstein, a kind of strange doubling of what is. Henceforth, what is cannot be arrived at directly, but only as the overcoming of a previous doubt. And, of course, in this Cavell is as it were doubling Wittgenstein, providing a totalizing reading of him. But paradoxically he does this to assert an incompleteness in Wittgenstein, both the fact that this doubt will never definitively be overcome and that it arises as an event or occurrence that can never entirely be explained. Wittgenstein’s positing of doubt, we might say, is an effect of modernity. Or, better, it both is modernity, the very break of modernity, in that prescription or performative that characterizes any authentic philosophy, and arises as the effect of a ‘prior’ modernity that would causally explain it. To put this another way, that doubt Cavell speaks of at once comes into being like a thunderclap, so that any actual modernity arises as its effect, insofar as like a big bang it produces historical time and space (and, as we will see, even what notionally comes before it), and is itself an effect of historical modernity, must be explained as a result of that upending of conventions, including those of language, that modernity brings about. In other words, as part of that splitting it introduces into the world, including into itself, this doubling hypothesis of scepticism that Cavell sees Wittgenstein inventing must also be understood as explaining itself. To say all this more slowly, it is undoubtedly true that Cavell sees the connection between the philosophical problematic of doubt and cultural or civilizational modernity as fundamentally at stake in Wittgenstein. It is implicit – beyond the explicit argument of any of the individual essays – in the collection Must We Mean What We Say?, where Cavell mixes pieces on Wittgenstein and Austin (‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’, ‘Austin at Criticism’) with meditations on the wider social and cultural effects of modernism (‘A Matter of Meaning It’, ‘Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy’) and more detailed treatments of specific modernist artforms (‘Music Discomposed’, ‘Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame’). Indeed, as Cavell’s work goes on, he increasingly seeks to offer a general history of modernity, pointing to a similar problematic of doubt or scepticism that occurs across the arts, science and philosophy. Putting together indications from a wide variety of his writings, we are able to see Cavell pointing to such figures as Descartes and his hyperbolic doubt, and also to the empiricism of Bacon, the liberalism of Locke, the heliocentrism of Galileo and the tragedies 34

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(especially King Lear) of Shakespeare. In all of these, we find the problem of doubt or scepticism that Cavell takes as his central concern, but which in this spread of disciplines or expressions of human culture – and this is why, we suggest, the inclusion of the scientists Bacon and Galileo is particularly important – is not the specifically Wittgensteinian question of language but a more general doubt about the ‘knowability’ of the world. Ultimately, as Cavell’s career goes on, Wittgenstein’s analyses, although this is the way Cavell originally came to them, become not the initiatory example of scepticism, but merely another of its historical incidents. Again, however, if we actually look at the dates when these supposedly ‘modernist’ outbreaks occur, we can see that it is not a straightforward historical chronology that Cavell is constructing. Taking the various occurrences Cavell cites in chronological order, we have Shakespeare’s Lear in 1606, Bacon’s Novum Organum in 1620, Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning Two World Systems in 1632, Descartes’ Meditations in 1641, Locke’s Two Treatises on Government in 1689 and ultimately Wittgenstein’s ‘ordinary language’ philosophy in the mid-twentieth century. And, indeed, this moment of ‘breakthrough’ modernity occurring some time in the seventeenth century is not the same as that musical and artistic ‘modernity’ whose specific problems Cavell discusses in the essays ‘Music Discomposed’ and ‘A Matter of Meaning It’. As well – and this is a complex point we will come back to later – in a more detailed historical schema, Cavell would be seen to interpose something like Romanticism, which can be defined as the attempt to come to terms with, even sublate or dissipate, the original modernist breakthrough, between the two. All of this is to say, as we have suggested before, that that moment of modernist doubt Cavell speaks of is not simply a historical phenomenon, but opens up chronological history itself. Modernity, as much as anything else, is history, the coming into being of history. And each of the cultural examples Cavell adduces at once introduces this historicity and is about or allegorizes this historicity. Or to put it another way, the cultural and philosophical examples Cavell points to are at once the effects of this modernity and allow him to speak about modernity, as though within themselves they at the same time introduce a doubt and are its ‘overcoming’. To offer a more detailed account of how this operates, allow us to take up one of the examples Cavell points to of that modernity he is speaking of. In fact, with the exception of Shakespeare, there is no truly detailed analysis of the various instances he takes as emblematic of modernity. M ODERNISM

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Nevertheless, drawing on the parts ‘Skepticism and the Existence of the World’ and ‘Skepticism and the Problem of Others’ of The Claim of Reason, we might attempt to elaborate how Cavell sees this sceptical problematic played out in Descartes’ Meditations. Of course, famously in the Meditations Descartes speculates on the existence of what he calls a ‘malin génie’ or ‘evil demon’ who systematically sets out to deceive him, with the result that all he takes for real is possibly an illusion. The external world might be a deception, and even those things he takes as a safeguard against this deception, which he believes resist it or allow him to measure it, may also be a deception. As he says of the very wax candle by which he writes his words: ‘I put the wax by the fire, and look: the residual taste is eliminated, the smell goes away, the colour changes, the shape is lost.’3 But then, in a famous inversion or peripeteia, Descartes realizes that it is in his ability to imagine his doubt that lies the possibility of saving himself from this illusion. If ultimately he appeals to the existence of God as what cannot be denied even by the evil demon, we might also say that God is seen in the figure of the fallen Descartes, takes the earthly form of his very ability to formulate this doubt to himself. This is the celebrated climax of the Meditations, where Descartes admits, in an act of astonishing hubris, that it is not merely God who comes to save him but that it is he who actually becomes God, insofar as he is able to formulate and reflect upon his own earthly doubt: ‘Since I am a thinking being and have within me some idea of God, it must be admitted that what caused me is itself a thinking being and possessing the idea of all the perfections I attribute to God.’4 And this is undoubtedly why it is called a ‘hyperbolic’ doubt: because it goes too far, claims to be a total principle, when it is just at this point that a certain limit to it is discovered, a point beyond which it cannot go, something that cannot be doubted, which is that point from which it is formulated and made conscious to Descartes himself. It is this Cartesian example – in a little remarked-upon connection – that Wittgenstein can be seen to be drawing on when he writes in his also posthumously published On Certainty: ‘If you tried to doubt everything, you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting requires certainty’ (OC, §115). However, the real lesson that Wittgenstein draws from Descartes is that it is not necessary to solve or even perhaps directly confront our doubts, but that the willingness to keep on discussing them is enough. It is the very ‘judgement [urteil]’ (OC, §128) of doubt or the carrying on despite and through doubt that is enough. That is to say, the ‘overcoming’ of doubt lies just as much in the 36

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saying as the said. All of this is undoubtedly in Wittgenstein; but it is also a connection that Cavell makes in his own discussion of Descartes, who is necessarily read through Wittgenstein. This is Cavell in ‘Skepticism and the Problem of Others’: ‘Descartes’ insistence on [the proof of his existence], I mean his proof of it, just depends on declaring it; anyway asserting it, anyway silently’ (CR, 462). But also – and this is the true principle Cavell draws from Descartes, or is able to make Descartes represent through his reading of Wittgenstein – it is therefore not a matter of definitively defeating or doing away with doubt or scepticism. Rather – and it is this that marks him out from the majority of Descartes’ interpreters – what Cavell sees Descartes formulating in his Cogito is a kind of living with or accommodation to scepticism. This is Cavell again in ‘Skepticism and the Existence of the World’: ‘The philosopher concedes this [doubt] when he says that “for practical purposes” it is all right to say we see objects, that we are certain of some matters of fact’ (CR, 165). Indeed, for Cavell there are two other consequences of Descartes’ thought experiment. The first is that, beyond merely tolerating doubt or scepticism, it is only through and because of them that we can know the world. Descartes never observes the world and its ceaselessly metamorphosing reality more acutely than when he believes he is being deceived. And, second, there is the unexpected coincidence between radically sceptical and radically anti-sceptical readings of the world. As Cavell continually emphasizes throughout his work, it is exactly the anti-sceptical desire to know the world without any remaining doubt that would leave us in an entirely sceptical position, insofar as reason can know itself only through doubt.5 However, there is perhaps one more twist on all of this, which is not so well recognized, arising out of Cavell’s insistence on the necessity of doubt. The usual reading of Descartes’ Meditations, of course, is that it is an episode of unwanted and unexpected doubt that assails Descartes, leading to a profound crisis in reason, which is only eventually resolved by Descartes’ subsequent realization that his very ability to think this doubt is in some way its overcoming. It is an episode of ‘inextricable darkness’,6 in the dramatic structure of the Meditations, that is able to be narrated only in retrospect, after it is over. That is, while the specific events of dreaming and hallucination that Descartes is describing are taking place – ‘How often, asleep at night, am I convinced of just such familiar events, that I am in my dressing gown sitting by the fire, when in fact I am lying undressed in bed’7 – he is in no position to narrate his fate, even to himself, let alone resolve it. And yet, if it is arguable M ODERNISM

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that reason arises only after a prior episode of madness, it is equally arguable that this madness exists only within a narrative of reason, as a retrospective effect of its ‘overcoming’. It is not that Descartes discovers, after a period in which he is lost or overwhelmed by madness, a way of overcoming it by turning it against itself. Rather this madness does not exist while it is being experienced, but only as the retrospective effect of a reason that invents it. This is the argument of Derrida in his well-known essay ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, which is a response to Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: that for all of Foucault’s belief that he can somehow speak for madness against its subsequent repression, in fact Foucault’s project is part of this repression. He is able to speak of madness only from the point of view of a certain ‘rationality’.8 Indeed, the very madness that Foucault suggests precedes and makes possible reason through its repression is itself only visible from (and perhaps only exists because of) the ‘subsequent’ history of civilization. What is the status of doubt, then, if it is merely a retrospective effect within a system of reason? We say that it is a condition of possibility of reason, that which reason thinks in order to become aware of itself, in order to become reason. And altogether – this we suggest is the very power of philosophy for Cavell – doubt is a kind of pure doubling of things. Through a radical hypothesis that things are not what they appear to be, we have the birth both of doubt and the reason that ‘overcomes’ it out of nothing. Philosophy, therefore, is not any kind of an empirical intervention, or indeed in any way a locatable event, but the fact that what is now has to be explained for an entirely different reason. That is, Cavell’s philosophy is the very modernism it speaks of. It introduces a radical break into what is, which is also not so much a break within as the very birth of things. In a sense, there is nothing before Cavell’s philosophy, which is also to say there is nothing before modernism. But then each philosophical system also obsessively seeks to think what comes before it or what is outside of it. And here we have the complex relationship between that doubt within the system of philosophy and that indifference before the system of philosophy. For, as we have seen, part of the power of philosophy is that, insofar as it thinks that ‘indifference’ that comes before it, it does so only to turn it into a doubt that is possible because of it. And equally, when modernism thinks what comes before it, it can think it only as a pre-modernism or a refusal of modernism. This is the whole theme in Cavell of the ordinary as ‘uncanny’: precisely the inability of any philosophy, including Cavell’s, to think what comes 38

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before it or outside of it, and yet philosophy coming about only through this thinking.9 But let us put this back one last time into Wittgenstein’s conception of the relationship of words to things. The usual understanding of Wittgenstein’s ‘ordinary language’ response to the problem of words no longer directly referring to things or the same word referring to things that have nothing in common is that he does not attempt to offer a solution, but rather the two parties speaking to each other, beyond anything actually said, indicates a desire to negotiate meaning. This is certainly the overall interpretation of Wittgenstein’s ‘ordinary language’ practice put forward in ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’. However, along the lines of what we have been saying, another interpretation of what occurs in conversation is also possible: that it is a matter not of the two parties slowly arriving at an agreement to come, but of them realizing that, in order to be speaking to each other at all, some kind of an arrangement has already been reached and it is just a question of trying to identify what this is. This is certainly the meaning we take from Cavell’s statement also in ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’, this time slightly against Wittgenstein: ‘What Wittgenstein says is that “the expression, the result, of our being convinced is that we accept a rule.” [But] we no more decide to accept a rule in this sense than we decide to be convinced’ (MW?, 53).10 And again we might make a connection with Cavell’s theorization of modernism, but this time not of its wider cultural and historical origins but its effects or appearances within specific arts. For in Cavell’s theorizing of artistic modernism we have the same paradoxical interplay of nothing in common and something in common. Just as in Cavell’s post-Wittgensteinian understanding of how to test the meaning of a word by using it in a new context, we have with the end of tradition the work of art unable to be made the same way as before. This has the result that in the overall history of an artform, it is possible that its various members might appear to have nothing in common. But this only because of each successive artwork’s attempt to say what it has in common with the others. Or even, in that reversal we have just spoken of, we have the realization that this nothing in common is only the retrospective effect of a something in common, that it is only because of a certain something in common that we are able to observe the differences between the various embodiments of a particular artform. Of course, the usual notion of a modernist avant-garde is that it is a moment of radical negativity, of the tearing down of existing artistic M ODERNISM

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conventions, either in response to a society whose own values are failing or in rejection of a society in which it no longer believes. The art thus leaves spectators in a state of shock, confusion and bewilderment, without any alternative to hold on to. In fact, the aim of modern art is not to propose positive values, but to refuse all values in a utopic social revolution without limits. We have something of this attitude in an essay by the prominent social art historian T. J. Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’ (1982), written in response to perhaps the most influential theorist of modernism, at least in the visual arts, Clement Greenberg. The essay is in many ways a preview of Clark’s book on the great nineteenth-century French Realist painter Edouard Manet, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1985), in which he argues that Manet responds to the ‘shifting uncertainty’ of the then rapidly modernizing Paris with the ‘shifting uncertainty’ of his own paintings.11 This is Clark in ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’: ‘Art presents itself as a work of interminable and absolute decomposition, a work which is always pushing the medium to its limits, its ending.’12 But it is this position that is rejected by Michael Fried in his ‘How Modernism Works: A Response to T.J. Clark’ (1982), in which he argues that modern art is not merely negative but also positive, that if it does away with old or outmoded conventions it does so only in the name of new ones that maintain an original ‘conviction’ in changed times. As Fried writes: ‘Unintelligibility in Manet, far from being a value in its own right as mere negation of meaning, is in the service of aims and aspirations that have in view a new and profound and, for want of a better word, positive conception of the enterprise of painting. ’13 And undoubtedly the other prevalent understanding of modernism, this time put by Greenberg himself, is that the aim of each modernist artform is to find its distinctive medium or essence. It is the idea that every artform – painting, sculpture, music, theatre, even photography and film – is driven by the search for that distinguishing quality or property that characterizes it and no other. This is Greenberg in his essay ‘Modernist Painting’ (1961): ‘Each art, as it turned out, had to perform this demonstration on its own account. What had to be exhibited was not only that which was unique and irreducible in art in general, but also that which was unique and irreducible in each particular art.’14 But again this is an idea rejected by Fried, who argues it is a matter not of any kind of reducible medium or essence, which would be found at the end of some teleological progression, but of ruling ‘conventions’ that are not innate to each artform but arise in response 40

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to particular historical pressures and are never definitively fixed. This is Fried once more in ‘How Modernism Works’: What the modernist painter can be said to discover in his work – what can be said to be revealed to him in it – is not the irreducible essence of all painting, but rather that which, at the present moment of painting’s history, is capable of convincing him that it stands comparison with the painting of both the modernist and pre-modernist past whose quality seems to him beyond question.15 In his rejection both of the modernist work of art as negative and of modernism as the search for an underlying medium or essence, Fried resembles Cavell here. The two had come to know each other well while Fried was studying Art history at Harvard and Cavell was teaching philosophy there, and each has frequently cited the other’s work over the years. Without wishing to attribute priority to either one, we might just take as Cavell’s most explicit statement on the conditions of art in modernity the long ‘Excursus’ in The World Viewed, which addresses the situation of post-War American painting: ‘Nothing but our acceptance of an instance determines whether the series is worth realising, or how far it is worth going on generating its instances’ (WV, 116). What do we find there? Like Fried, for Cavell modern art is evidently not a matter of mere ‘negation’. Rather – and here something analogous to the shift from the Augustinian conception of language – it is a moment when there is no longer tradition, in which each new work of art was unquestioningly like the others and had the same underlying ‘referent’, which in an obvious sense might be its subject matter but equally might be other works of art. After it, this relationship is no longer unquestioned or able to be taken for granted, but has to be brought about each time by the work of art itself. Each new work of art in any given medium – and here of course the comparison to Wittgenstein’s notion of conversation – has to try to work out its relationship with other similar works, in order to understand what tradition it is now part of. Indeed, as we spoke a moment ago of how indifference is converted into doubt, we might say that not only does each successive work of art in modernism in effect remake tradition, but tradition, the consciousness of tradition, does not exist until after modernism. Pre-modernist works of art are simply in tradition, if we can say this, unaware of it, whereas modernist works are in tradition to the very extent it is in dispute, what is already lost and attempted to M ODERNISM

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be recovered. Tradition only exists, and this of course is the doubling hypothesis of scepticism, as the attempt to make up for its own prior breaking or passing away. And, equally, each new work of modernist art is henceforth unable to be seen as just being made but must always be understood as seeking to determine its relationship to previous works of art, wanting to be like them, maintain the same ‘conviction’ as them; and, exactly because of the modernist problem of scepticism, this is able to be done only by breaking with them, redefining what this tradition is, what it is that all previous works it recognizes have in common. But to go to the second of those points raised, if we say that works of art in modernism are situated in a medium, which is simply that ‘tradition’ that allows them to have meaning for us, this medium is not to be understood as any kind of material or technique. To speak of a work of art as a painting, a sculpture, a piece of music, a photograph or a film, is not ultimately to identify some underlying truth or essence that could finally be attained but more something like the rules or conventions for determining meaning that are continually rewritten by every significant addition to its history. The work of art does need its medium – this is the challenge Fried is faced with when he is confronted by Minimal Art, which is no longer either painting or sculpture and therefore offers no terms by which it can be judged, no indication of how or on what basis we are to look for meaning in it – but there are no restrictions in advance on what makes up this medium. Minimal Art, which lies between media, might not count as art, but this does not rule out in advance something that we currently consider a photograph one day through changing conventions counting as a painting. The real point is not that each medium must remain recognizably the same, but that the work of art must always have a particular medium, some principle of evaluation and recognizability, some sense of the rules and conventions by which it is to be understood and that give us the feeling it can be understood. Medium in this regard is the intuition that the work is about something, is seeking to say something or intend something, even if we do not currently know what it is. Of course, the analogy here once more is to the way that in Wittgenstein ordinary conversation is also about the meaning of the words used, which is the promise that in speaking the two parties are also desiring to make themselves clear, explain themselves to each other, even if what they are saying is not currently comprehensible. But, again, medium in this sense is not something that could ever be definitively realized or attained, because every statement of it is potentially different. 42

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Indeed, as Cavell says of our use of a word – and this again is a sign of our modernity – medium can only be said to be properly grasped insofar as it is used differently. Medium, like words in relation to their speaker, is what takes the work of art away from itself and indicates that it is always in relation to other works, that it is nothing else but this relation and can be understood only through this relation. But how can all of this be put in more practical detail? How does this become a working method for modern art, and how does it differ in this regard from pre-modern, traditional art? The modern artist, for Cavell, is confronted by a dilemma, neither part of which is possible without the other. On the one hand, because tradition is over and it is not possible to repeat the same work of art as before and have it mean the same thing, each work in a modernist tradition, each work in the same medium, is different from what comes before. This is the problem of doubt or scepticism in modernism because we are always confronted by the possible loss of meaning, the inability to say what we mean in the way we knew before. And yet at the same time we are somehow able to think this doubt, to take this inability to say the same thing into account. The aim of modern art is to speak as before, exactly so that it can say and make us understand new things, how things are different. How does it do so? This is in effect Cavell’s solution: each new work of modernist art is undoubtedly different from what came before, but on the basis of this difference seeks to make its medium or tradition over in its image. That is to say – and here the analogy with Wittgenstein’s conception of family resemblance, and the particular twist Cavell gives to it – each successive work of modernist art through its making seeks to construct, draw out the quality that all previous works in the same medium had in common. It might appear at first different from anything that came before it, to break with accepted tradition, but this only to propose another, ‘wider’ tradition that includes both it and all that comes before. That is, it may disregard what was previously seen to be essential to make a work of art successful, but this only to suggest that other works hitherto outside the medium or tradition have already had this other quality or that this different quality is now the proper way to understand tradition. (And different overlooked works and different overlooked qualities are the same thing here.) The crucial point is that the work cannot mean in its difference unless it also makes us realize that other works share this difference or this difference is another way of seeing the same works as before. And this samenessin-difference is what Cavell means by medium. The medium or tradition M ODERNISM

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will continue not insofar as new artworks continue to be made like those that come before – they simply cannot – but only insofar as artists can continue to propose other unremarked-upon qualities that their work and all previous works that count have in common. In other words, it will continue only insofar as the tradition is open to be re-read by a later work that proposes in effect some new hitherto unsuspected quality that both it and all of the works in this new tradition have in common. This is Cavell offering his own version of this complex notion in ‘Excursus’: ‘Each [new] instance of the medium is an absolute realisation of it; each totally eclipses the others’ (WV, 115). And we can find all of this in the very detail of modernist works of art, the particular form of compositionality its various parts manifest. Cavell in ‘A Matter of Meaning It’, undoubtedly following Fried’s example, writes about the British sculptor Anthony Caro, whose work does not appear to follow the traditional techniques of sculpture, in which it is merely a matter of following a series of pre-existing rules and conventions, but rather is something in which its various parts continually remark each other, and the whole only ‘clicks together’ at the last moment like a game of pickup-sticks: ‘A Caro may be open and discontinuous, one of its parts not an outgrowth from another, or even joined or connected with another, so much at it is juxtaposed to it, or an inflection from it’ (MW?, 217). But perhaps the most notable, or at least considered, example in Cavell is music. (As we say, before studying philosophy, Cavell undertook composition at the Juillard School, and as a young man played in a series of jazz bands, where a kind of ‘improvisation’ was the métier or medium.) Interestingly, enough – and against the usual clichés about the perfect work of art being one in which we wouldn’t touch a thing – Cavell argues that in ‘pre-modern’ classical music many aspects can be changed without affecting the music. (In fact, we know that many canonical classical works, for example Mozart’s Third Violin Concerto or Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, are effectively incomplete and allow the performer to improvise or fill in the gaps in the score.) This is Cavell in ‘Excursus’: ‘For all of our claims of “inevitability” in the working out of masterpieces, we know that, say, a given fugue might have worked out differently, not merely in the sense that others might have been written on the subject, but that this one might have been different’ (WV, 115). However, somewhat surprisingly, Cavell insists that in ‘modern’ classical music every element is essential and we must listen to it in its essential ‘rightness’ or ‘intendedness’. As he writes in ‘Music Discomposed’: ‘And 44

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to know its point is to know the answer to a series of questions: “Why is it as it is?” It bears explanation, not perhaps the way tides and depressions do, but the way remarks and actions do’ (MW?, 225). In fact, to draw the contrast more sharply, we would say that in ‘programmatic’ premodern music the specific notes can be replaced by others, whereas in ‘unprogrammed’ modern music there is no predetermining harmonic structure and the music is in some ways improvised and every note must be – or must be understood to be – the right one. In the former, the listener can effectively think of something else, with the music aiming to transport us elsewhere (daydreams, imaginings, other places or times), whereas in the latter it is a matter of a pure ‘presentness’ (MW?, 353) in which performer and listener are held together in the same moment: That faithfulness now to the art of music is not expressed by an effort, as it may be put, to find modes or organisations based on the sound itself, but to disclose what it is about sounds in succession which at any time has allowed them to be heard as presentness. (MW?, 352–3) Again, how is this so? Because we say that, insofar as modern classical music operates without the traditional rules of composition that produce logical variations upon themes, in which we can to a large degree expect the next note or groups of notes by knowing the rules, each note has at once to be different or unexpected and retrospectively to reveal the logic of what comes before. In effect, each piece plays out on a smaller scale within itself the same testing of the medium that occurs on a larger scale from work to work. The completed work has a kind of wholeness, a holding of disparate elements together within a wider logic or unity; but this is only a momentary stopping of the process, which is opened up again when another work comes along, continuing the conversation as it were, taking its elements and putting at least some of them together on another basis, as though the previous composition lacked that element that profoundly held its various parts together. Both the individual works and the succession of works within a particular medium or artform are a continual series of additions that will carry on as long as the medium or artform is alive, that is, until nothing more can be added. But to be more exact – and to add the final level of complexity to all of this – it is not as though the first work or the first moment of the work actually lacks anything. As Cavell will say, for example, of the series of screwball comedies that makes up the ‘comedies of remarriage’, it is all already there M ODERNISM

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from the beginning, the first film in the sequence (PH, 27–8). In a way, each moment of an authentic work of art is complete, lacks nothing, just as a conversation is possible only because of a certain agreement. It is just that subsequent moments in the history of an artform reveal that what was originally said needs to be explained for another reason, that the original meaning was not the only one or indeed the most complete one. In effect, we have a series of doublings, not merely a series of different or additional ways, but a series of different reasons for the meaning of what we have. All of this is necessary to understand before addressing the other aspect of a modernist work that Cavell makes clear: our sense of its intendedness. In the essay that in part answers the question Must We Mean What We Say?, ‘A Matter of Meaning It’, Cavell suggests that the work of art is necessarily intended. However, this intendedness is not a matter of it actually being intended by its maker, as though its meaning somehow exists intact inside their head and it is merely a matter of asking them. (This is shocking both to those who follow the misunderstood postmodern cliché of ‘the author is dead’ and those traditionalists who believe that the author, like God, lies somehow behind the meaning of their work.) Rather, as Cavell puts it in a still-unexpected hypothetical instance, it is possible to put to Italian film-maker Federico Fellini a plausible interpretation of one of his films and have Fellini retrospectively acknowledge it or, even more strikingly, if he fails to do so, it can be said he should have: ‘In fact, my conviction of the relevance [of the story of Philomel to La Strada] is so strong that, if I asked Fellini, I would not so much be looking for confirmation of my view as inquiring whether he had recognised this fact about his work’ (MW?, 230). At this point, we can see the equivalence Cavell is drawing between one work of art responding to another and the act of interpretation. For what the interpreter is doing when they respond to a work of art, beyond its original maker or at least in the absence of the original maker’s conscious intention, is proposing another version of it, adding something to it that in retrospect is already there. Again, the paradox – and this is the paradox of modern art – is that the interpreter does not want to think that they are unfaithful in adding anything to the original work, interpreting it in a way the original maker did not intend. (This is, indeed, why they ask them for confirmation, even when they think they are saying something different.) In fact, they think they are merely repeating what is already there; but it is just this that produces a difference. However, it is a difference that exists only insofar 46

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as it can be seen to be repeating what comes before it – this is the effect of another coming along afterwards and seeing how it is a continuation of the original, as seen from the point of view of another difference. And this is precisely the situation of the original maker in Cavell’s Fellini anecdote, asked to validate his interpreter’s reading. If Cavell can speak of his interpretation as what Fellini must have ‘unconsciously’ thought or known, this ‘unconscious’ is simply the retrospective commonality that all of these different interpretations can be seen to be speaking of. To bring the two halves of Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? together, we might say that Cavell sees Wittgenstein’s ‘ordinary language’ philosophy as profoundly modernist. It is not merely in the sense that in both there is a shared doubt or scepticism, the possibility that just as words no longer mean what they have always meant so the prevailing artistic conventions no longer apply or convince. It is because henceforth both conversation and art are no longer merely what is said or their content but also their saying or the ongoing attempt to determine the meaning of their words and conventions. This truly is the modernism of both ordinary language philosophy and modern art: the sudden and inexplicable shift of register whereby both conversation and art are in some way about themselves, about what makes them possible. It is the sudden invention of a doubt or uncertainty and hence its overcoming out of nothing. It is literally a doubling of what is, after which what is only stands in for itself. Indeed, to conclude this chapter allow us to take a beautiful example of all of this from one of the films Cavell treats in Pursuits of Happiness, the aptly titled It Happened One Night (1934), which is chronologically the first of the ‘comedies of remarriage’ he considers there.16 The plot of It Happened involves the jaded newspaper reporter Peter Warne, played by Clark Gable, who encounters the naïve Ellie Andrews, played by Claudette Colbert, while she is running away from a marriage organized by her domineering father. After realizing the scoop he has on his hands – he hears on the news the story of a wealthy socialite being pursued by detectives hired by her father – Peter decides not to bring her back immediately for the much-needed reward but to keep her in hiding so that he can hold out promised exclusives to the newspaper that had previously fired him. Of course, the drama of the film is how the ill-matched couple – worldly lower-class Peter and unworldly upper-class Ellie – at first clash and have very little in common, but then gradually put their differences aside and fall in love. But this is like any other conventional romantic comedy, so where would be Cavell’s distinctive M ODERNISM

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angle? How is he able to assert that what is at stake here is not merely marriage but what he calls a remarriage? And, what is implied in the difference? The crucial scene in the film occurs when Peter and Ellie are still on the road with Ellie’s father’s detectives after them. After a series of long bus rides, they have checked into a humble roadside hotel under an assumed name and pretend as though they are married in order to disguise themselves. By this stage they are still bickering, although we can sense their growing mutual attraction. In fact, they are arguing when Peter realizes that the owner of the hotel is outside their cabin with two other men who are obviously Ellie’s father’s detectives. Peter suddenly rushes over and messes up Ellie’s hair to her consternation and starts talking to her in a rural hillbilly accent. After her initial confusion and without Peter being able to say anything in explanation, picking up Peter’s cue as the three men enter the room, Ellie too starts talking like a hick, continuing their previous argument but now in a theatrical, self-conscious and self-reflexive way. As they shout at each other back and forth, the hotel owner appears ashamed that he has interrupted these strangers’ privacy, and not wanting to get involved even the two detectives quickly exit after a cursory look around the cabin. As soon as they have left, Peter congratulates Ellie on her picking up on his invitation so effortlessly; and this is truly the beginning of his love for her, his still slightly patronizing recognition that she is able to shed her upper-class manners and speak on his own everyday level: PETER: Say, you were pretty good. Jumping in like that. Got a brain, haven’t you? ELLIE: You weren’t so bad yourself. PETER: We could start a two-person stock company. If things got tough we could play some small town auditorium. We’ll call this one The Great Deception. ELLIE: Next week East Lynne. PETER: The Three Musketeers. (Strikes a pose.) I’d make a great D’Artagnan. ELLIE: How about Cinderella, a real hot love story? Here with Peter’s change of tone what is opened up between them is a new convention or let us even say convention as such. It is a kind of game between them, in which words take on a different meaning or at least the 48

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meaning of what is being said is not clear. (In fact, Ellie for just a moment says ‘What?’ in response to Peter messing up her hair.) But this is not even the case until Ellie recognizes what Peter is doing, that he is not simply saying what he appears to be. We have, in other words, an abrupt change of state in which what is being said is also about the very saying of it. But no one can step back outside of the game and demand definitive clarification; and the only way of determining whether you understand what the other means is to speak to them, continuing the discussion. Each successive turn of the conversation is another attempt to reflect on the meaning of what has been said before and the criteria that have allowed it to take place. What happens in that cabin is a certain advent of modernity. It happens suddenly, inexplicably, its explanation part of what it speaks about. Put simply, it happens one night, in the dark, while we are unaware, and we only realize too late, in the light of day, once it has already happened. Like love.

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3 THEATRE

Theatre, particularly the plays of Shakespeare, is one of the principal artforms through which Cavell develops his ideas. In his first collection, Must We Mean What We Say?, Cavell includes two essays on theatre, ‘Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame’ and ‘The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear’. The latter is the last and by far the longest essay in the book, and it serves as something of a summary of all of its previous themes. And some eighteen years later, Cavell was to publish the collection Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (1987), which included both new and reprinted essays, and in which he insists, ‘The misunderstanding of my attitude that most concerned me was to take my project as the application of some philosophically independent problematic of scepticism to a fragmentary parade of Shakespeare texts’ (DK, 1). Indeed, Shakespeare is one of Cavell’s chief figures of cultural scepticism, mentioned in the same breath as Descartes, Bacon and Galileo, and the single figure amongst all of them with whom he most textually engages, the one he reads most closely to tell us what it is. In other words – and here the complex question of the relationship between philosophy and art in Cavell – it is Shakespeare upon whom Cavell draws for much of his vocabulary and characterization of scepticism. Shakespeare’s plays not only dramatize in their plots the theme of scepticism and its overcoming, but are themselves a kind of ‘philosophical’ reflection upon this, offer themselves a profound way of thinking through scepticism and what our relationship to it might be. And this concerns not just the actual events or themes of Shakespeare’s plays, but the theatrical situation in which we witness them. Here, of course, is raised the question of the medium of theatre in which Shakespeare works, the suddenly sceptical relationship of the spectator to what is before them in modernity, which in some ways is the very subject of Shakespeare’s dramas (again, the complex question

of self-reflexivity and modernity, the way that what is at stake in the various modernist artforms is not any attempt to deduce a final purity or truth of the medium, but rather the ongoing struggle to keep the medium convincing, a problem that – as extraordinary as this seems today – faced even Shakespeare). Shakespeare maintains such a large and ongoing presence in Cavell’s work, a resource in relation to which he develops so many of his ideas, comparable perhaps only to Wittgenstein, that certain commentators refer to him as altogether Shakespearean (while others can speak of Cavell making Shakespeare Cavellian). Here, for example, is Gerald L. Bruns in ‘Stanley Cavell’s Shakespeare’: ‘Some sense of Cavell’s thinking can be got from the speculation that there is an internal coherence between René Descartes’ doubt and Othello’s.’1 And this is Cavell himself in the ‘Introduction’ to Disowning Knowledge, admitting the unique resource that Shakespeare constitutes for his work: ‘I insist that Shakespeare could not have been who he is – the burden of the name of the greatest writer in the language – unless his writing is engaging in the depths of the philosophical preoccupations of his culture’ (DK, 2). And, as we say, it is Shakespeare’s plays that can be seen to introduce, at least as early as any other social, cultural or historical moment, the problematic of scepticism. Shakespeare’s plays, that is, are distinctly modern in that they break with the prior theatrical mode that Cavell associates with the Greek playwrights Sophocles and Euripides. In Ancient Greek drama, much as for Cavell in pre-modern classical music, the events we see on stage are destined to turn out the way they eventually do. And this is to say that not only are the characters and the world they inhabit fixed and possess no free will, but the plot itself is fixed and possesses no free will. In this sense, there are any number of different ways the play could have started and gone along before reaching the same conclusion. Any particular moment of the play that seemed to involve a turning point, in which the course of events appeared to hang in suspense, could have travelled in any direction and still ended up in a similar place. It is, of course, the whole theme of destiny or moira in Ancient Greek drama, the way that the conclusion of the action is stated in advance by the chorus as a stand-in for the Gods. And, as a result, we as spectators do not actually have to follow the plot of the play closely, we might say individually or moment to moment, having to decide for ourselves what is relevant or important, what we should pay attention to or how we would react in a similar situation. On the contrary, the course of events has already been 52

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determined, so that what comes between beginning and end is strangely unnecessary. By contrast, in Shakespeare’s plays – even and perhaps especially in his tragedies – nothing is certain, everything is still up in the air, and what happens depends on us. The paradox, of course, is that the play has already been written and its ending exists in advance; and yet we watch it as though nothing has been decided, with its future depending on actions now freely undertaken in the present. And the audience therefore look on, as they listen to modern classical music, with absolute attention, because for all of the fact that the future is open, undetermined, with the eventual outcome not certain or predictable in advance, events also have to turn out exactly as they do. Everything hangs in the balance at every moment. Characters must make decisions based on what they know or what they believe the best they can. They must seek to take into account the meaning of what has previously happened to the greatest extent possible. But they – and this is of course a parallel to the modern artist in their relation to tradition, or rather to the fact that that there is no longer an obvious tradition – are attempting to think through their actions in a present that is also an interpretation of what they understand of the past. So that, against any sense of the present being merely an effect of the past as in classical tragedy, with the whole play existing not so much in the present as in past and future, in Shakespeare the action is continuously in the present, with even the past continuously updated in its light. The whole play takes place (again and again) at every moment as a result of what is decisively new in Shakespeare’s plays: the freedom (and responsibility) of humans to make themselves who they are. Or this, at least, is the potential against which Shakespeare’s plays are written, the freedom of this new modern moment. But, as Cavell emphasizes – and this is the necessary other side of modernism – this freedom and potential to act can also easily be lost. We are not endlessly able to remain in the present open to all possibilities. The characters in their self-becoming are not perpetually available and apparent either to us or themselves. This, of course, is the perennial challenge and difficulty of modernism: that if on the one hand the usual ways of being, in which our destinies are determined in advance by God, is now over, on the other hand there are no rules and therefore no certainty as to how we should understand each other or make sense of the world. The authentic way of living has to be found once more, and sometimes – indeed, most of the time – we fail to do so. We lose our connectedness both to others T HEATRE

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and to the world around us. So that, even if we do succeed, this is only against the ever-present possibility that we will fail to, and still fail to even when we think we succeed. This is undoubtedly the new sense of a particularly human tragedy Shakespeare gives expression to, as opposed to the impersonal tragedy of the Gods of Ancient Greek drama. However, there is another possible understanding of the relationship between modernism and tragedy in Shakespeare, or at least in Cavell’s reading of him; and that is that in modernism we do not end in tragedy as the failure to maintain an opening to the present, but begin with tragedy, with the inherent condition that we are already out of the present, unable to recognize either others or the world in a state Cavell calls scepticism. That is to say, after modernism, acts of communication do not unfortunately result in scepticism, but are already from the beginning attempts to overcome scepticism. Tragedy is not the condition into which we fall, but the condition out of which we proceed. And from this perspective – we will see something similar, if arguably reversed, in Cavell’s treatment of Hollywood film – Shakespeare’s final comedies after the great tragedies take on a meaning not as the mere avoidance of the ‘seriousness’ of tragedy but as the attempt to overcome or negotiate the problems of scepticism first raised by the tragedies. In fact, Cavell’s writing on Shakespeare deals almost entirely with the tragedies: King Lear in Must We Mean?, Hamlet and Othello in The Claim of Reason and Macbeth and Coriolanus in Disowning Knowledge. And this is to raise the question of whether comedy, insofar as it might be considered the ‘defeat’ or ‘overcoming’ of scepticism, actually exists. To push a distinction that is obviously not literally true in the usual classification of Shakespeare’s plays, we might have moments of ‘comedy’ within the tragedies, moments when there is a certain other relationship to scepticism, but not comedy as such, insofar as this might be understood as opposed to and separable from tragedy. Or comedy might be understood as a certain conclusion to tragedy, indeed as pointing towards the very inseparability of comedy and tragedy, as opposed to tragedy, which seeks always to separate them. Comedy might correspond to what Cavell speaks of in the title of his book as ‘disowning knowledge’, the recognition that in our relation to the word it is not merely a matter of knowledge. And, of course, as we have previously suggested, this characterizes comedy (as in that scene from It Happened One Night we discussed Chapter 2) with its other mode of communication between people, when it is a matter not of specific meaning but rather of remarking 54

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(in order to make up for) the lack of specific meaning. And the laughter in comedy is the acknowledgement of not quite understanding the other (but agreeing to keep on working at it). We laugh, as Freud reminds us, because we do not know what the other means, although we know it is meaningful, or we sense that the other wants to tell us something, although we do not know exactly what.2 Laughter, we might say, is that moment before meaning, which is also paradoxically that moment after meaning, when we realize that we did not previously understand. And it is absolutely something like this that is at stake in the relation between comedy and tragedy. King Lear as discussed in ‘Avoiding Love’ is Cavell’s principal consideration of the connection between tragedy and modernity; but before that essay in Must We Mean? Cavell includes ‘Knowing and Acknowledging’, which in many ways is a preparation for it. ‘Knowing and Acknowledging’ is a relatively technical philosophy paper taking up the question of scepticism and its apparent defeat through knowledge. In it he addresses the arguments of Norman Malcolm and John W. Cook that scepticism can be defeated, that in the case of, say, pain we can effectively know the pain of another. But, as we have seen in Chapter 2, for Cavell it is ultimately not a matter of knowing the pain of another. Even in cases where we do actually feel the pain of another – as in the famous so-called Corsican Brothers case put forward by Malcolm, in which one brother physiologically shared the pain of the other, even when they were separated and he was not aware of his suffering – it is not enough. This is both because this literally shared experience is not at stake in knowing, which for Cavell always requires a certain ‘independence’ (MW?, 253) from the object in question, and because it is not fundamentally a case of knowledge with regard to something like somebody else’s pain. Rather, as we have seen, it is a matter of ‘acknowledgement’: not abstractly knowing of another’s pain but actually doing something on the basis of that knowledge. As Cavell writes, ‘One could say: Acknowledgement goes beyond knowledge. (Goes beyond not, so to speak, in the order of knowledge, but in its requirement that I do something or reveal something on the basis of that knowledge.)’ (MW?, 257). But what does this actually mean? We have previously spoken of the way that in ordinary language it is no longer possible not only to summarize the meaning of but even to use a word except from a point of difference. Not only is the proof that we know the meaning of a word the fact that we can use it in a different context, but we can only ever use it in a different context. However, at the T HEATRE

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same time we believe we are using the word in the same way as before and in a way are using the word in the same way as before, otherwise nothing would be communicated. And acknowledgement, we might say, is this inextricability of the same and different or knowledge and scepticism. That is, if on the one hand knowing cannot be total, cannot entirely do away with scepticism, without turning into scepticism again, so scepticism cannot be total, cannot be known, without something like a knowledge outside of it, from where it can be remarked. King Lear is a middle period Shakespeare tragedy, written in 1605, after the early comedies Midsummer’s Night Dream and Much Ado about Nothing, between the great tragedies Hamlet and Macbeth, and before the late comedies The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. The play traces the extraordinary descent of Lear, who at the start of the action is the king of Britain, seeking to divide his kingdom between his three daughters upon stepping down from the throne, but by the beginning of Act III is wandering the nearby heath in a state of madness, accompanied by only his Fool and his loyal courtier Kent. All of this before his celebrated redemption, beginning in Act IV, in which Lear (betrayed and hunted now by his daughters Goneril and Regan), who has lost his reason, his kingdom, at least two of his three daughters and the trust and respect of virtually everybody who believed in him, is finally able to recognize the love of his youngest daughter Cordelia, whom he had previously snubbed and overlooked in favour of her two older sisters in the chilling first Act of the play. And this theme of ‘blindness’ is famously and ghoulishly literalized in the third Act, when the nobleman Gloucester, whom we have previously seen similarly not recognize his son Edgar, actually has his eyes plucked out by the vicious and vengeful Regan and her husband Cornwall for apparently knowing of an impending French invasion and plotting for Lear’s return to the throne. And Gloucester too, after initially not recognizing his son, has his own redemptive moment in which he reconciles with him, belatedly realizing like Lear that he has been blind in believing the lies of his scheming stepson Edmund. Cavell’s essay on Lear, originally written for the Humanities course at Harvard in 1966 and 1967, of course enters an extremely long and rich history of Shakespeare criticism, which is virtually synonymous with literary criticism itself in the English language. There have been several waves of interpretation, from the Romantic emphasis on character by such eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early twenty-century century critics as Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt and A. C. Bradley through to the 56

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antithetical emphasis on the actual words of the text in the absence of any consideration of their staging in the post-war New Criticism, as exemplified by such critics as William Empson, S. L. Bethel and G. Wilson Knight. Cavell, for his part, insists that he is doing something different from both of these broad tendencies, although it is a complex and intriguing question as to how he is not like those earlier character studies. As Cavell writes in ‘Avoiding Love’: ‘My purpose here is not to urge that in reading Shakespeare’s plays one put words back into the characters speaking them, and replace characters from our possession back into their words. The point is rather to learn something about what prevents these commendable activities from taking place’ (MW?, 270). (Later, when Cavell comes to put together the essays of Disowning Knowledge, he will further distinguish himself from the then-prevailing ‘new historicism’, as exemplified by such critics as Stephen Greenblatt, although again it would be an instructive and illuminating exercise to think why he is not like that.3) However, more than this, Cavell’s real point in alluding to previous readings of the play is to indicate what has been missed by all of them. Of course, this can easily be read as the typical one-upmanship engaged in by ambitious critics, triumphantly calling out the failures of those who have come before. And there is undoubtedly something of this unavoidable vanity on the part of Cavell, for which he has in turn been called out.4 But there is more at stake than this, for Cavell’s ultimate contention is that critics have sought, whether deliberately or unconsciously, not to know what is obvious about Lear. They have overlooked or more exactly refused to take into account what is there to be seen. And it is this – this is, indeed, part of the obviousness that the critics have not recognized – that the play is actually about: the refusal or unwillingness of a number of its characters to acknowledge what is clearly there before them. In other words, the critics perform themselves the themes of the play, if only they could recognize it, precisely in their not seeing themselves perform the themes of the play. But what is it about Lear that these critics have missed? And that – here is where Cavell would differ from the usual academic point-scoring – Cavell admits that he himself had previously missed. (And this is like other occasions in his work, for example, his reading of Stella Dallas and Vertigo, where Cavell will also accuse himself of missing at least at first the obvious – and, importantly, these films are not entirely different in subject matter from Lear.5) Cavell begins his own reading of Lear with the famous and hard-to-play scene from the beginning, in which T HEATRE

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the aging Lear, the king of Britain, requests a pledge of loyalty from his three daughters on the occasion of his stepping down and giving away different proportions of his kingdom according to who most pleases him. Two of them, Goneril and Regan, who will later prove themselves to be treacherous, offer what we recognize and what we think Lear will surely recognize as empty and obviously insincere assurances that merely follow conventional rhetoric. Says Goneril: ‘Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter.’ Says Regan, echoing Goneril: ‘I am made of that selfsame metal as my sister,/ And prize me at her worth.’ By contrast, the youngest daughter, Cordelia, until now Lear’s favourite and who will later prove to be heroically loyal to and forgiving of her father when it is all too late, refuses to provide any such platitudes. She declines, we can conclude, both because she is unwilling to participate in such an evidently fictitious social game and because she is disappointed as the ritual goes on in her father for his insistence that she continue with it in the face of her evident disapproval, when this standing outside of convention (if their characters have remained consistent) was what had previously endeared her to him. ‘Nothing, my lord’, she says simply at first. And then, in response to her father’s increasingly strident demands, ‘Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/ My heart into my mouth’. Before finally offering only ‘Good my lord? You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I/Return those duties back as are right fit,’ in what we come to see as her miscalculated refusal to explain herself properly, or alternatively her realization that there is no point in explaining her refusal, her recognition of his refusal to recognize her difference from him in his retreat to his preordained kingly status and its unchanging rules for who must be acknowledged, even in the process of his giving it away. (In truth, however, her behaviour is explicitly based on the fact that he is able to recognize her; and, throughout the play, she never loses her belief that he can if he wants recognize her, and eventually she is proved right.) For Cordelia’s refusal, she is banished, forcing her to leave for France with her fiancé, the king of France, with Goneril and Regan equally dividing up the kingdom, thus setting in motion the calamitous events of the rest of the play. Soon after, Lear, now stripped of his status and court, is rejected first by Goneril and then by Regan, forcing him to realize belatedly that they have been in a conspiracy against him from the beginning. He rushes out onto the heath in a fit of rage, denouncing his daughters (but not yet his own blindness in trusting them). Meanwhile this series of events is paralleled by the story of the elderly nobleman 58

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Gloucester, who has been tricked by his own scheming illegitimate son Edmund into believing that his legitimate and trustworthy son Edgar is conspiring to kill him. Gloucester at first disinherits Edgar and then banishes him, forcing him to flee to same heath Lear wanders, disguising himself as a crazy man. But Gloucester is then betrayed by Edmund, and after his eyes are plucked out he too is expelled onto the same heath. On the heath the now-blind Gloucester meets Edgar without recognizing him (and without Edgar identifying himself to this father) and asks him to lead him over a cliff in punishment for what he has done, but Edgar refuses to do so. Back in their various castles, Regan and Goneril conspire against each other over the affections of Edmund, with Regan wanting to marry him after her husband Cornwall is stabbed by a servant for torturing Gloucester and Goneril no longer loving her husband Albany, after he protests against the sisters’ treatment of their father. But Cordelia is at the same time leading the French forces in an invasion of England, and the sisters, Albany and Edmund reluctantly join forces to fight her. The loyal nobleman Kent leads the still mad but now regretful Lear towards Cordelia, but after the French are defeated Lear and Cordelia are captured, and despite Albany’s pleas Edmund and the two sisters hand Cordelia over to be executed. In a cascading series of events, Albany exposes Edmund as a traitor, Regan is poisoned by her jealous sister and Edgar reappears and kills Edmund in a duel. Albany confronts his wife with her treachery and she flees before committing suicide, and Gloucester dies of shame after recognizing that his true son Edgar is still alive and is the one who saved him when he wanted to die. Edmund through a deathbed confession tries to save Cordelia, but it is too late. Cordelia is hanged, and Lear too dies of shame for allowing all this to happen. In the final scene, Edgar after being asked by Albany assumes the throne of England, marking an end to this tragic series of occurrences. For Cavell, the key to understanding the play revolves around the recognition of and the refusal to recognize others. (And, again, to think how original this insight is and how it has failed to be noted by the play’s innumerable commentators, we would begin by observing that it is obviously different from the now dominant text-based analyses because it is a matter of the actual characters in the play; but equally it is different from the older character-based analyses because the question is raised of whether we and the other characters in the play even recognize these characters, what it is to recognize a character.) Thus, we have most notably Lear’s inability or refusal – and Cavell’s point is that these are henceforth T HEATRE

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the same thing – to recognize Cordelia and her authentic love for him. We also have, echoing this, Gloucester’s inability or refusal to recognize the truthfulness of his legitimate son Edgar. But also, then out on the heath we have the inability or even refusal of the now-blind Gloucester again to recognize his own son disguised as a madman, and conversely the wellknown and puzzling scene in which Edgar refuses to identify himself to his now-blind father, even while he saves him by only pretending to lead him off a cliff. Finally, in another register, if we can after Cavell turn every inability to recognize into a refusal, we have the refusal of Regan to perceive that she is being betrayed by Goneril and equally that of Goneril to perceive that she is being betrayed by Regan. And, following these, there are a whole series of similar belated recognitions of the inability or refusal to recognize: Albany of the treachery of his wife and brotherin-law, Gloucester of his illegitimate son Edmund, and most famously, of course, Lear of his two other daughters Goneril and Regan, both of whom in various ways it could be said that he does not recognize. But what is at stake in properly recognizing or acknowledging another? What does it mean in Lear, and perhaps beyond? And what could it mean to suggest that Lear and other characters at certain points refuse to recognize, and why would they do this? To answer these questions, let us begin with the crucial scene of Lear refusing to recognize Cordelia in the ceremony in which he is dividing his kingdom up amongst his daughters. Cordelia certainly does not offer the usual signs of love and respect for her father. It is not through anything she actually says that we sense her love. However, despite this, or through it – and here again the question of what in ‘ordinary language’ exceeds language, of how acknowledgement is not simply a matter of knowledge – it is open to Lear (and we in the audience can also recognize this) to see that it is Cordelia who is the most truly loyal and loving of the three daughters.6 But, of course, to do that Lear would have to reveal or expose something of himself to Cordelia. He would have to reach out to her to accept her vow of love exactly because it is not put in an orthodox, traditionally expressed style – which can now strike us as empty and forced – but in a form that can appear at first unshaped and inarticulate. In other words, Cordelia’s is not a vow of love until after it has been accepted and perhaps not indisputably so even then. And this in part because Lear’s own proper response to Cordelia’s vow might not itself be entirely orthodox or definitive. Rather, the two of them would have to continue to work together to decide what their relationship is, and perhaps even was, in an improvisation in an ongoing 60

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present. But all of this is what is at stake in Lear choosing to step down from the throne and give away his kingdom, and even in Cordelia’s initial ‘no’ to her father’s still conventional demands for her fealty. It is, if we can generalize, the end not merely of a particular kingship but of kingship in general. It would be to open up a new possibility in the relationship between Lear and his daughters and a king and his subjects. It would be one characterized by an ongoing, ceaselessly negotiated ‘equality’ between a ruler and those who acknowledge and are acknowledged by them. It would be, indeed, something like a modern democracy. But, of course, the tragedy of Lear is that Lear refuses this possibility, declines to acknowledge Cordelia. He does this because he needs to act like a king or even a conventional father and not an equal in relation to her. He requires her loyalty in words that are clear and declarative to other people and not merely to feel it for himself. And this failure or refusal – and, again, the fact that these are the same is the very mark that acknowledgement is at stake for Cavell – is both the tragedy of the play and the mark of its modernity.7 Or, to put this more accurately, the modernity of the play is not simply that the failure of acknowledgment ends in tragedy, but that it is a matter of provisionally acknowledging and not definitively knowing another. That is to say, the relationship between humans, even between a king and his subjects – or this is what is in the process of changing in the play – is no longer able to be taken for granted or proceed by fixed rules that are known unchangeably in advance, but has to be negotiated and can always go wrong (and, indeed, it is very hard to separate going right from going wrong, or at least no conclusion as to the status of the relationship is separable from the relationship itself). Henceforth, all human relationships are characterized by a prior separation or difference (another word for this might even be ‘equality’) that has to be overcome – a ‘scepticism’ not in the sense of the literal failure to know but the ongoing problem of definitively knowing. This is why, if it is impossible to bring the process of the overcoming of scepticism to a halt, it is also the case that it has already started; and this is why every failure to acknowledge the other is also a refusal to. And, as Cavell makes clear, it is this ‘failure’ of acknowledgement that marks Shakespeare’s other tragedies as well: failure not just because we can never definitively and without doubt know, but also because we cannot not attempt to know, insofar as acknowledgement means that we cannot remain indifferent either to others or to the world. We have Othello and his need to confirm the fidelity of his wife in Othello. We have Hamlet and T HEATRE

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his drive to revenge his father against his mother and uncle in Hamlet. We have Leontes and his demand to find out the paternity of his child in The Winter’s Tale. We have Macbeth and his wife’s murder of Duncan, the king of Scotland, to make the witches’ prediction come true in Macbeth. For our part, we in the audience watch Lear as though everything has not yet been decided, as though Lear could properly acknowledge Cordelia, as though the ending had not yet been written. This again is the modernity of Shakespeare’s theatre: the fact that the characters are free and our relationship to the play is one of presentness, in which every moment arrives new, fresh, unexpected, undetermined by the past. Or, if actions in the present are a consequence of the past, they also reshape this past, allow us to think what of the past is still relevant, still carries weight, in light of the present. But, of course, part of the tragedy of the play is that this possibility is lost: Lear is not able to become a new man in response to changed circumstances, indeed, to recognize that there are new circumstances (his stepping down from the throne, Cordelia’s new way of greeting him) until it is too late. But we and the play itself can acknowledge this presentness, or at least the loss of this presentness – and this again is another meaning of Cavell insisting that he can see the play differently from others, that each new moment makes possible a different play. We in the audience are able to see that the characters are in a situation in which they must continue to make decisions, in which all is to be determined, even if they cannot. Put simply, we can acknowledge them, even if they cannot acknowledge each other. And this is the complex question of our relationship to the play on stage in modernism, indicated for Cavell by the fact that we do inhabit the same time as the play, even though we cannot intervene in it or cross the footlights and confront the characters with the options they have foregone, the acknowledgements they have failed to make. It is not thus a matter of a simple identification with the characters, as often spoken of (and, again, this would be Cavell’s difference from the usual character-based analyses of the play). They are different from us. They do things that we – and perhaps even they – cannot predict or know in advance. Rather, we acknowledge them in their difference from us. We are able to see what they have lost, moments when they should have acted differently.8 In this sense, the stage is a perfect figure for that difference between the actor and audience that allows this kind of acknowledgment in difference. As Cavell will put it in a much-discussed passage:

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Theatre does not expect us simply to stop theatricalising; it knows that we can theatricalise its conditions as we can theatricalise any others. But in giving us a place within which our hiddenness and silence and separation are accounted for, it gives us a chance to stop. (MW?, 333–4) Modern theatre, and modern culture more generally, is subject to this failure to occupy the present and properly to acknowledge, and thereby falls into scepticism – and it may even be a failure that is ultimately unavoidable. But for all of theatre like Shakespeare’s taking up this failure as its subject, and for all that the set-up of theatre makes it impossible that the spectator and actor can be present to each other – they can be at the same time, but not in the same space; the actors can be visible to the audience, but not (generally) the audience to the actors – theatre cannot take this as inevitable, cannot be about this, as though it could be stated as a general law in advance. For this, in Cavell’s language, is merely to ‘theatricalise’, to take a particular historical moment of theatre (we might almost say its inauthenticity) as natural, as inevitable, when in fact the real aim of theatre for Cavell is ‘to defeat theatre’ (MW?, 160). And it is this we should bear in mind when we consider the other of Cavell’s important essays on theatre in Must We Mean?, ‘Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame’. If Shakespeare’s tragedies inaugurate theatrical modernism, Beckett’s two masterpieces, Waiting for Godot (1949) and Endgame (1957), might be said to come at modernism’s end. If in Shakespeare it is always a question, as with Lear’s relation to Cordelia, of acknowledging what goes beyond the literal meaning of language, of something in language that surpasses description, in Beckett we might say there is an abrupt ‘literality’ of language, a radical refusal of poetic or non-literal meaning, indeed, something close to a refusal of meaning altogether. The effect each character aims at as closely as possible is straightforward declarative speech with nothing behind it. This is part of the shock of Beckett’s new brand of theatre, as in this exchange towards the middle of the play, cited by Cavell: Hamm: The alarm, is it working? Clov: Why wouldn’t it be working? Hamm: Because it’s worked too much. Clov: But it’s hardly worked at all. Hamm (angrily): Then because it’s worked too little. (MW?, 153)

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Through this attempt at literality, we might say that Beckett is trying to defeat scepticism, to know for certain the meaning of what is being said. In this sense, although Beckett’s plays appear to be full of aimless banter or ‘ordinary speech’, we might suggest that his aim is the doing away with or at least framing of ordinary speech. For, in his case, there is no relationship formed between his characters by their saying. There is only the said. And it is in this regard that Cavell will speak about Beckett’s ambition to bring an ‘end’ to things, in that as opposed to ordinary speech there is not in Beckett anything left unsaid; it is not a matter of remarking an understanding or even misunderstanding in order to correct it in the future. Rather, in a typical Beckett dialogue, each line is the last, the punchline to a joke; and anything that comes after bears no relationship to it, but is merely another line, another beginning and end. This is how Cavell characterizes the distinctive nature of Beckett’s writing: ‘This is what rationality has brought us to. The strategy of literalisation is: you say only what your words say’ (MW?, 126). And from this point of view – and here we return to ‘Knowing and Acknowledging’ – we might say that, for all the conventionally understood scepticism of Beckett’s work, in fact his project is thoroughly anti-sceptical. It attempts – and here perhaps its connection to Lear – to bring the necessity of acknowledgement to an end and to know things and others completely. And this is not unrelated to Beckett’s project self-reflexively to expose and do away with the conventions of theatre: to as it were break the illusion or even ‘theatricality’ of theatre, so that the audience is under no illusion as to what they are seeing and even the actors and audience can confront each other across the footlights, breaking the barrier that separates them. It is that Beckett – this perhaps more in a Greenbergian modernist sense – wants to make the conditions of theatre, or let us say the medium of theatre, his subject, as though this could finally be attained. And this would be the whole Hamlet theme of putting a play of a play on stage, as indicated by the character Hamm’s name, except that in Beckett’s case it is not so much a play within a larger whole as the whole play that is this play within a play. But then, as we have seen Cavell saying in ‘Knowing and Acknowledging’ – and the question is whether this is deliberate or inadvertent on Beckett’s part – this radical anti-sceptical attempt at knowing fails and opens up a certain doubt or scepticism again (MW?, 258). The language the characters use, for all of its simplicity and directness, is unable to become simply literal: there is always a certain ‘poetic’ excess, something left 64

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unsaid that needs to be taken up by another character. Beckett is unable to bring things to a halt. Indeed, the very title of Beckett’s play suggests that it takes place after the end, and that indeed – and we will come back to this in a moment – things only properly begin after this end. Cavell at one point in his essay says that ‘Beckett’s couples have discovered the final plot: that there is no plot’ (MW?, 132), but of course this can always be reversed to say that the absence of plot is the very basis of plot. Or to go back to our more general point following Descartes in our last chapter, we would suggest that, just as scepticism can be known only from a position of certainty, so this anti-sceptical literality must be spoken from somewhere outside of it. It is just in this manner that each line leads to the next in Beckett’s play: not simply as a series of unrelated statements but rather as each attempting to remark from somewhere else the meaning of what has come before, like the explanation of the punchline of a joke that is itself a joke. But, of course, it is just in this remarking of what has come before, this necessity to confirm a prior agreement from somewhere outside of it, that marks ordinary speech itself according to Cavell. And it is all of this that is implied by the previously cited passage from ‘The Avoidance of Love’, in which Cavell speaks of a certain space outside of theatre from which the ‘theatrical’ effect is able to be remarked. Here it is not simply a matter of a space outside of direct contact with the actors that allows us to acknowledge them, but also that any such confrontation, in which the audience literally disappears into the action, could itself be known only from somewhere outside of it.9 It is again what Cavell means when he speaks of ‘theatre defeating theatre’ with regard to both King Lear and Endgame: not simply that the literal situation of theatricality is able to be seen only from somewhere outside of it, but that it is this outside situation that allows this literality, brings about the very theatre that needs to be defeated. However, to conclude here, we might say that the two plays, Lear and Endgame, are for Cavell’s purposes in a dialogue with each other, come from opposite directions to the same sceptical problem. In Lear, we might say, at the origin of if not before modernism, the requirement of acknowledgement has not yet begun. This, of course, would be one way to understand Lear’s refusal to acknowledge Cordelia at the beginning of the play: that the possibility is not yet available in Lear’s society, that Lear’s England is not yet modernist. By contrast, in whatever post-apocalyptic world that makes up Endgame, the requirement of acknowledgement is over, no longer possible. The play attempts and in some way succeeds T HEATRE

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in doing away with it in order to return us to the literal. And the problematic of scepticism and by extension Cavellian modernism itself always has something about it of both the deferred and the already complete. It is what Cavell himself invokes in his essay on Endgame by speaking of Beckett’s ‘Pas encore’, which means at once ‘not yet’ and ‘not again’ (MW?, 147). But what in fact is at stake in this strange and uncanny temporality? In one way – and this goes for the whole of the sudden advent of modernism – the problematic of acknowledgement is aporetic, impossible to explain as any kind of logical unwinding. For we would say that Lear does not have to acknowledge Cordelia – it would not as such be a refusal of acknowledgement – until he felt he was acknowledged by her. And, of course, we could say equally of Cordelia that she would not have to acknowledge Lear – as opposed to paying courtly obeisance to him – until she felt acknowledged by him. In this sense, the explanation of acknowledgement is circular and we cannot say how it begins. There is always as it were a missing cause. And this is particularly the case in the theatrical set-up where, as we know, we look on at characters on a stage, who in an obvious sense cannot see us in order to acknowledge us. And yet, as we also know, and this is precisely why acknowledgement is like modernism, despite all of this acknowledgement is suddenly the case. It is immediately no longer possible to be unable to acknowledge, but rather is always a matter of refusing to acknowledge. After the hypothesis of acknowledgement, there is no possible indifference: the very lack or absence of acknowledgement can be understood only as its refusal. Acknowledgement, like modernism, doubles the world, in the sense that what is now stands in for it, is possible only because of it. But it is for just this reason that, if there is no beginning to acknowledgement, there is also no end, which is also to say that we cannot exactly say what acknowledgement is or whether we have properly acknowledged. And we see this in Beckett. For what is demonstrated there is that we are unable to know acknowledgement, unable to draw a limit around it, which is what Endgame attempts to do with its Hamletlike theatre-within-theatre apparatus in order to literalize or ‘disillusion’ theatre. However, the consequence of Beckett’s action – and again the question of whether this is deliberate or inadvertent, or whether we could ever separate these two – is, if we would thereby be after scepticism, do away with that distance between people that defines the theatrical situation, this gesture of knowing or literalizing acknowledgement does not bring theatre to a stop. For by that recursive law we looked at before, 66

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every acknowledgement opens up the necessity for another or more acknowledgement. No sooner would we acknowledge than we must ask from where that acknowledgement has been seen and who responded to it. If acknowledgement cannot ever start because there needs to be another before it, it also cannot stop because there needs to be another after it. It is an economy that Cavell identifies in Lear with the Fool, who ‘in riddling Lear with the truth of his condition increases the very cause of that condition’ (MW?, 287). And it is the economy as well of Endgame, where it is a matter neither of anti-scepticism nor scepticism, knowing nor the impossibility of knowing. Rather, it is the case that at the same time as we know there is something else that goes beyond knowledge. Similarly, it is a question neither of the end nor endlessness, but at the same time as the end there is what comes after it to allow it to be thought. It is ultimately this that Cavell means by theatre defeating theatre, which as we have seen can be understood to be the project common to both Lear and Endgame. Theatre is the situation of us looking on at actors, acknowledging them without them being able to acknowledge us. It is in this regard that we might speak of a certain knowledge of acknowledgement, the idea that we can choose when to acknowledge and having done so bring it to an end. But at the same time – and again that idea of theatre as an empty ‘place’ is not opposed to this but in fact makes it possible – what theatre is able to make clear is that we cannot simply know what acknowledgement is, cannot choose whether or not to do so and thereby bring it to an end. On the contrary, we would say that, just as we cannot start acknowledgement, we also cannot bring it to an end. Indeed, the very impossibility of saying whether we have properly acknowledged is inseparable from the fact that there is no outside to it and we are always doing it. Or, as Cavell puts it the end of ‘Ending the Waiting Game’, ‘we hang between’ (MW?, 162).

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4 THE WORLD VIEWED

‘And to deal plainly,/ I fear I am not in my perfect mind./ Methinks I should know you and this man./ Yet I am doubtful’, says Lear to Cordelia and Kent towards the end of the fourth Act of King Lear when he realizes he has been wrong in his estimation of his youngest daughter. In fact, she was offering him true love and respect throughout. She was opening herself up to him for him to understand. But he did not recognize this, preferring the hypocritical and duplicitous responses of his two other daughters, who will later betray him. By this stage of the play, Lear has lost his kingdom, his court, his noblemen and until recently his sanity; and he and Cordelia will soon be prisoners of Goneril, Regan and Edmund, who plan to execute Cordelia. Cordelia, over the toolate protests of the suddenly repentant Edmund, will be hanged; and Lear soon after will die of grief, uttering these further words of selfrealization as he holds her body in his arms: ‘I might have saved her; now she’s gone for ever./ Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little. Ha./ What is’t thou say’st? Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle and low.’ It is a matter of what Cavell calls acknowledgement in ‘The Avoidance of Love’, in which ‘we are differently implicated . . . somehow participating in the proceedings, almost as if dreaming it  .  .  .  and yet participating, as in a funeral or marriage or inauguration, confirming something’ (MW?, 326). It is a necessarily reciprocal action, in which, in order to acknowledge the other, we have to let the other acknowledge us. It is not a matter of making the other the same as us, a narcissistic reflection of ourselves. It is not a question of forming any kind of fixed union, which is only ever somebody’s particular projection that can be guaranteed from somewhere outside of it. Rather, it is an acceptance of the other in their very difference and separateness from us. The other is like me in their difference from me, as I am like them in my difference from them. It is to raise, as we have previously suggested, the issue of how we relate to each

other in modernity, when the traditional organic bonds in which we are simply the same or different have dissolved and the problem arises of how we stand in relation to each other. For our part, we in the audience look on at Lear’s slow journey towards redemption. At every moment of the play – this is the new ‘presentness’ of the modern work of art and the distinctly human and not god-like experience it represents – we follow the action, confronting ourselves without any foreknowledge the difficult situation of the characters. Do we recognize Cordelia’s sincerity in her response to Lear at the beginning of the play? Do we recognize it at the time or only later? Do we recognize Lear’s failure to recognize Cordelia? Again, do we recognize it at the time or only later? Do we indeed see that this question of mutual recognition is the key to the wider events of the play, not only with regard to Lear and Cordelia but also Gloucester and Edgar? This is once more why Cavell asks half-way through his essay why so many who have written on Lear have missed this thematic in all of its obviousness.1 It is to raise the question, as with Lear himself, of why they have not observed the drama, what has stopped them following events on stage, what they have not wanted to show of themselves so that they might properly acknowledge the other. It is not a matter of simply identifying with the characters, in the sense that we become them, lose ourselves in them and are unable to separate ourselves from them. Instead, we follow them, reflect upon them, think about the meaning of their actions as they undertake them. We do not know the characters and they do not know us – not least because they are fictional with no empirical existence beyond the events on stage – but we do nevertheless put ourselves in their position for a moment and ask what we would do in similar circumstances. What we are asked to do while experiencing the play is not in any way to become Lear or even definitively to judge him as though we knew him or indeed ourselves, but to open ourselves up to him and his situation, again not in terms of any direct identification with him and thus any character-based assessment of the play, but as much as anything to take into account the limits to our ability to know and judge him along with the necessity to do something in response to the events of the play. This is the distinctively modern aspect of our relationship to the characters in Lear and theatre generally thereafter. We are separated from them, and yet come together through the recognition of this separation. It is a separation – not quite the same as that between the various characters – that is brought about physically by the setting back 70

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of the actors from the audience by a stage, which cannot be crossed as part of the fundamental conventions of theatre. It is just this separation of the actors from the audience, which opens up the possibility of overcoming this distance, that we might say that Lear and Shakespearean tragedy more generally both embody and are about, as opposed to the previous model of Greek tragedy, in which actor and audience are simply visible to each other. This is Cavell in ‘The Avoidance of Love’ on the way that theatre – modern theatre – at once imposes this distance and seeks its overcoming: ‘The point of tragedy in a theatre is exactly relief from the necessity [to reveal ourselves to the characters], a respite within which to prepare for this necessity, to clean out the pity and terror which stand in the way of acknowledgement outside’ (MW?, 333). And – this is to tell us that it is not merely a physical reality that is at stake here – Cavell will go on to insist on this distance even in those more avant-garde dramas that actually attempt to do away with the difference between actor and audience by, say, illuminating the audience and making each visible to the other. The distinction between actor and audience, the stage and the world, remains. It is this that again proves it is not a matter of knowing the characters in the sense of being physically present to them, but of acknowledging them in and through their difference from us. In the apparently conventional, psychologically charged, dramas of Henrik Ibsen, which are in part a reflection upon the increasingly dramatic and theatrical character of everyday life, the way people more and more live their lives as though on a stage, it is nevertheless still there: ‘There is the continuous sense, in an Ibsen text, of what is sometimes called dramatic irony, a character’s saying something whose meaning is fundamental to the issues of the drama but is unglimpsed by the character who says it’ (CW, 263). Then, in the more experimental dramas of Brecht, the possibility of a politics in which actions have real effect can be spoken only from a sceptical position in which the actor and their role, the stage and the world, are separate. And equally in Beckett the attempt to bring together the actor and their role, the stage and the world, in order to defeat scepticism leads only to another scepticism. Cavell’s point here – often lost in talk of simply ‘defeating scepticism’ – is that the distance between the actor and audience is hard-earned and not to be taken for granted. The complex argument he makes is that, if modernism introduces this gap, this is not merely a debility or something to be got rid of, but neither is it something simply default or automatic T HE WORLD VIEWED

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that cannot be overcome. Rather, it is what allows the very possibility of theatre today. It is what enables acknowledgement in theatre and perhaps even in life. In other words – and this is the always doublesided or even aporetic aspect of scepticism – if on the one hand it is a matter of overcoming the distance between the actor and the audience, on the other it is a matter not of overcoming it, but instead maintaining it, because it is only through this distance that we can overcome it. This overcoming therefore is only partial, which is to say that it is a matter not of knowing but of acknowledging. Although this logical circularity is not directly addressed but only indirectly alluded to by Cavell, he is certainly explicit about this limit with regard to theatre. It is there that he insists that the overcoming of this distance or barrier between actor and audience is not literal – ‘A theatre whose house lights were left on might dramatise the equally significant fact that we are also inaudible to them, and immovable (that is, at a fixed distance from them)’ (MW?, 322) – or more subtly both that we can neither literalize this limit or distance between actor and audience nor do away with it entirely in making the action on the stage actual. These, as we have said, are the alternatives explored by Brecht and Beckett; and Cavell’s point is that, if in Brecht we might separate the actor and their role only from a position that puts them together again (Brecht’s non-sceptical real-life politics), in Beckett we might bring the actor and their role together only from a position in which they are once again separated (Beckett’s newly sceptical dramas). This is the situation for theatre, but what about those other arts Cavell discusses in his work (painting, photography, film)? How to think the problem of ‘acknowledgement’ at stake in them, insofar as they are artforms if not always created then at least now experienced in a time of modernism? It is a question raised in Cavell’s Must We Mean?, where he treats theatre, music and painting, but it is canvassed in greatest detail in the book that follows that. The World Viewed (1971) is undoubtedly an unexpected book, both within Cavell’s own oeuvre and within the wider philosophical, and perhaps even professional, context in which he was working. For undoubtedly as a not-so-young philosophy lecturer, having only recently obtained tenure, he might have been expected, after the disparate and for a long time under-appreciated essays of Must We Mean?, to produce a complex, philosophically ambitious book based on his thesis. But Cavell’s dissertation was slow in being rewritten for publication, and this did not happen until The Claim of Reason appeared in 1979. In the meantime, Cavell was to put out two other books, the first 72

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of which was The World Viewed. It is a relatively slim volume that seeks to do something almost unprecedented at the time, and that is write a philosophy of cinema that does not merely apply pre-existing concepts to film (although that had barely been done), but generate philosophical concepts out of the very experience of watching films, a true filmphilosophy. The book is loosely, almost improvisationally constructed, with a series of seemingly unrelated chapters that address such diverse topics as the use of colour in film, the Hollywood star, silent cinema, the relevance of the nineteenth-century French poet and Salon critic Charles Baudelaire to film criticism and even a long ‘Excursus’ on post-war American painting. But running as a subterranean thread throughout the whole is a meditation on whether film is a proper art, due to its strictly technical photographic basis. Does it constitute an authentic artistic ‘medium’, and what would be implied by this? Has it passed through a moment of modernist doubt and loss of conviction like other artforms, for all of its comparative historical newness and what we might call its ‘automatic’ rendering of mages?2 Certainly, Cavell does not see any defining ‘essence’ of cinema, as opposed to a critic like Greenberg with regard to painting. He does not even exclusively define cinema in terms of some unique capacity of the photographic medium to record reality in an indexical, unmediated way, as did an earlier generation of film theorists such as the German pre-war art historian Erwin Panofsky and the French post-war film critic André Bazin. In other words, he disputes or at least qualifies the idea of a film or photograph merely being ‘reality’, and that what we look at when we watch a film or look at a photograph is simply the external world. As he writes early on in The World Viewed: ‘“Photographs present us with things themselves” sounds, and ought to sound, fake or paradoxical. Obviously a photograph of an earthquake, or of Garbo, is not an earthquake happening (fortunately), or Garbo in the flesh (unfortunately)’ (WV, 17). However, it also needs to be emphasized, it is not a matter for Cavell of that subsequent attitude of film writers from the late 1960s trained in semiotics, who simply refused any relationship of the photograph or film to reality, insofar as this would be mediated by the sign and any sense of reality would be an ideological illusion. (This argument would be put forward first by a generation of French critics coming out of the journal Cahiers du cinéma, such as Christian Metz Jean-Pierre Oudart and Jean-Luc Comolli, and later by a generation of English critics around the journal Screen, such as Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen and Stephen T HE WORLD VIEWED

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Heath. This position was not widely known at the time Cavell wrote The World Viewed, but can be read back into the implied context of the book. It is more strongly hinted at in the long Appendix, ‘More of The World Viewed’, that Cavell adds to the 1979 edition of the book, although this critical and scholarly discussion of film is nevertheless not the ultimate context of The World Viewed.) Rather, for Cavell the photographic or cinematic image is not directly reality because of our necessary stance or relationship towards it, in which we look on to it from the outside knowing that we are not part of it and that it is no longer present. As Cavell writes: ‘The reality is a photograph is present to me while I am not present to it; and a world I know, and see, but to which I am nevertheless not present is a world past’ (WV, 24). As a result, the cinematic image is not exactly reality, but what Cavell calls a ‘projection’ (WV, 24) of reality. In fact, as he admits, it is relatively difficult to characterize, for all of its seeming familiarity, both the relationship of the cinematic image to reality and our relationship to the cinematic image. If the cinematic image is not actually reality, it equally obviously does bear a special and historically new relationship to it, one that it is tempting to call not not reality. What, of course, is new about it – and here Cavell does follow that earlier generation of writers who emphasized the ‘realist’ nature of film – is that the photographic image that makes up film is recorded not by humans but by machine. It is inscribed not by hand but automatically, in the apparent absence of any human creator. The photographer or film-maker simply opens the camera lens and lets the external world imprint itself on a lightreceptive material. And for all of the possibility of artistic intervention – the photographer’s choice of angle, the film-maker’s editing of the film – Cavell does make this automatic aspect or activity foundational if not definitive in any consideration of the two artforms. It is what technically constitutes them. And it is what distinguishes them from every other already-existing artform. Before or beyond any artistic choice, there is something of an opening up in them to the contingency or unexpectedness of reality, which is simply too much or too sudden to edit or control. Again, this is not any specific moment or aesthetic within the respective artforms – although it has been claimed by a number and was argued for by those early ‘realist’ critics of cinema – but necessarily part of every photograph or film, something that even the most tightly controlled or edited is unable entirely to do away with. This is Cavell in The World Viewed: ‘The material basis of the media of the movies (as 74

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paint on a flat, delimited support is the material basis of the media of painting) is a succession of automatic world projections’ (WV, 72). It is undoubtedly part of the modernity of these artforms – although we are not quite using that word in Cavell’s sense – that technology plays such a large part in their creation. And, if we believe that the aim of art is somehow to capture or reflect the real, then undoubtedly photography and film are able to do this in a manner never available before. Cavell does not agree with this as any kind of an explanation or justification of art, as though there were a certain projection or teleology towards a more faithful depiction of reality, but it has obviously been used to justify the movement away from realism and towards abstraction in twentiethcentury painting. Nevertheless, he will go on to draw a contrast between painting and film in terms that not only explain what painting is doing in the wake of film, but also retrospectively explain what was always at stake in at least modernist painting and how it differs in principle from photography and film, even during its realist moments. In a complex and much commented-upon passage from the chapter ‘Sights and Sounds’, Cavell makes a distinction between photography and painting in the following terms: ‘To maintain conviction in our connection with reality, to maintain our presentness, painting accepts the recession of the world. Photography maintains the presentness of the world by accepting our absence from it’ (WV, 23). By this, Cavell might be said to mean that in modernist painting it is a matter of having to move back from the world or rather having the world move back. Painting is no longer the simple depiction of the world, sharing the same time and space as it, but is to be achieved only by introducing a certain distance between it and its spectator. This it does not by pushing the spectator back, for they still remain there before the painting, but by itself retreating before them (this is perhaps the real meaning of abstraction). By contrast, with film it is as though the spectator is already distanced from what they are looking at. They do not have to come forward to acknowledge it or have it pushed back, for this distance is unbridgeably there from the beginning. In other words, to draw out the contrast with theatre and painting, the uncanny aspect of the photographic or cinematic image is that it is as though we necessarily look out at what we see there. This might be seen to bear some relationship to the idea – much developed in the decade of the 1970s in film studies after The World Viewed – that we directly identify with the gaze of the camera, which presents the world to us. Here again would be a certain realist or automatic aspect of the photographic T HE WORLD VIEWED

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image, insofar as we seem to have an unmediated relationship to it or identify with it as though it were simply the look of one of the characters in the film. (And perhaps, indeed, this is not so far from those ‘character’based analyses of Shakespeare that Cavell speaks of in ‘The Avoidance of Love’.) Except that – and here is Cavell’s difference from those ideological analyses – we do not directly identify with the gaze of the camera or that of any other character. Rather, in Cavell’s exact phrasing, we ‘do not so much look at the world as look out at it, from behind the self ’ (WV, 102). That is, it is not some assumed gaze that we look through and have to make ours, but – and here we fulfil a certain fantasy of philosophical scepticism – it is as though we look out from behind our own gaze. It is not as though we see the cinema screen as reality, but more as a kind of screen onto reality. That is, if the cinema screen allows us access to reality, it also comes between us and it. This is the meaning of Cavell speaking of the way that in cinema ‘a screen is a barrier. It screens me from the world it holds – that is, it makes me invisible’ (WV, 24). And this is to say again, looking at a photograph or watching a film, we do not have to ‘come forward’ to expose ourselves or to acknowledge what we see. Unlike theatre, and unlike painting, there is always the screen before us. We are separated not only in space but also in time from what we view – in this latter regard, beyond anything in theatre – but perhaps even more importantly we are separated by the screen itself, by the very object that we watch that at once is there and not there in front of us. All of this is to suggest that the very physical or material constitution of cinema requires the absence of the spectator from what is shown on the screen. And in this it is different from theatre, for if in modern theatre the spectator is likewise in darkness, in a separate space from the actors, and even if they attempt physically to cross this space or somehow to expose it or illuminate it and fail, it is nevertheless possible that this is not materially essential to theatre but only a convention. It is certainly not true of pre-modern Greek theatre and it is not necessarily true that it will always be the case. Cavell in his essay on Beckett and in his mentions of Brecht certainly does not rule out the possibility that in the future actor and spectator might truly inhabit the same space and the result still count as theatre.3 But by contrast, the exclusion of the spectator or their positioning behind the photograph or the screen blocking them from reality appears part of the machinery of photography and cinema themselves. It is not merely that, unlike theatre, we can identify the actual advent of photography and cinema so that we can say it has always been 76

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this way, but that the mechanism that makes these two artforms possible necessarily places the spectator outside of the image. It is again what Cavell means by speaking of the ‘automaticity’ of the photographic image: it refers not only to the way the actual making of the images is taken out of our hands and given to the apparatus, but also to the necessary taking away of the spectator from what they see that follows from this. This is Cavell again in the chapter ‘Audience, Actor and Star’: ‘Movies allow the audience to be mechanically absent. The fact that I am invisible and inaudible to the actors, and fixed in position, no longer needs accounting for; it is not part of a convention that I have to comply with’ (WV, 25– 6). And all of this puts pressure on Cavell’s ruling notion of medium as a convention rather than any kind of essence, for if photographic and cinematic technology is so determinative is it truly possible to imagine any photography and cinema in the future that does not share the same qualities as that in the present? What necessity is there that they would need to articulate new conventions when the extraordinary verisimilitude of the medium, its capacity mechanically to reproduce the real, already ‘convinces’ us so entirely?4 It is for this reason that in much of The World Viewed, and certainly for many readings of it, it is not a matter of those questions of scepticism and acknowledgement that we spoke of with regard to theatre. For we are able to argue that the situation of film is simply ‘sceptical’, in that at once it is not a proper proof of reality that photography offers and it is not a matter of the spectator having to acknowledge this reality and the characters within it. That is, insofar as the spectator can only see reality as mediated by the camera or projector, it is only an ‘illusion’ of reality; and, insofar as this is not mistaken for reality but always separated from it, it is never possible for the spectator to come before it in order to judge it or be judged by it. This is Cavell in the chapter ‘Exhibition and Self-reference’ of The World Viewed: ‘Media based upon the succession of automatic world projections do not have to establish presentness to and of the world: the world is there. They do not have to deny or confront their audience: they are screened. And they do not have to defeat or declare the artist’s presence: the object was always out of his hands’ (WV, 118). Indeed – and perhaps at times Cavell even mistakes his own position – it would not even properly be a question of scepticism in photography and film here, insofar as, if it is not a question of doubting, it is also not a question of overcoming doubt. As opposed to any problematic of scepticism and its overcoming by acknowledgement, we have the automatic granting of a T HE WORLD VIEWED

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kind of reality, while also an irreversible taking away or impossibility of reality. This is Cavell in ‘More of The World Viewed’, allowing the point that it is not a matter of scepticism or acknowledgement in photography and cinema: ‘Film is a moving image of scepticism: not only is there a reasonable possibility, it is a fact that here our normal senses are satisfied of reality while reality does not exist – even, alarmingly, because it does not exist, because viewing it is all it takes’ (WV, 188–9). And it is in the light of such arguments that we might go back to those earlier debates as to whether photography and cinema are even art at all. That is to say, if in them the spectator is automatically and irreversibly removed from what they look at so that it cannot be a matter of overcoming this, then they cannot be art in the proper sense, which is to say a modern sense. However, we might suggest that, although this attitude is discernible at times in Cavell, it is little admitted, insofar as it would make him appear a traditional, old-fashioned philosopher applying haughty and wrongminded standards to photography and film. (The conservative British philosopher Roger Scruton and his refusal to consider photography art comes to mind here.5) However, Cavell does not – at least exclusively – take up the question of cinema in this spirit, and this is demonstrated by the fact that he appears to forget or at least overlook his own argument at times, speaking of photography and cinema in properly sceptical terms, which is to make them at once art and modern. We might see an example of this in an early chapter in The World Viewed, in which Cavell speaks of the ‘Audience, Actor and Star’. After setting out the argument for the automatic exclusion of the spectator behind the screen, the way they merely look out upon a world that is irreversibly detached from them, Cavell then takes up the early cinematic figure of the ‘star’, which was one of the unexpected and unprecedented phenomena of early cinema, and which we are tempted to say was a necessary accompaniment to it (although this would be already to ‘allegorize’ cinema, to have it reflect upon its own conditions, which according to at least certain moments of Cavell’s argument would not be necessary or even possible). What is a star of the order of Charlie Chaplin or Greta Garbo? What is it that they represent or embody? Watching a star in film is to be reminded of our unbridgeable distance from them. They belong to a universe of which we will never be part, from which we are by definition excluded. It is to speak of the cinema screen as a barrier that separates us from what we are looking at and the fact that the star does not need our acknowledgement but lives in a self-centred 78

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universe made up of (if anyone else inhabits it) only of other stars. Put simply, stars are not like us and not even imaginable in their difference from us. Hence their extraordinary inner glow, which is not even strictly speaking narcissistic because they are not aware of others looking at them. Indeed, in their unknowability and ineffability stars are themselves a kind of screen upon which we look. This is Cavell on the movie star as opposed to the actor in the theatre: ‘The screen performer is essentially not an actor at all: he is the subject of study, and a study not his own. On a screen the study is projected; on a stage the actor is the projector’ (WV, 28). But then, in what represents seemingly a next step in cinema (although, admittedly, we are straightening out Cavell’s analysis here), stars are replaced by ‘types’, which equally go along with the rise of ‘cycles’ or ‘genres’, as cinema begins to organize itself into a commercial, massproduced medium made so that its audience knows what to expect in advance. The cinematic ‘type’ is not a star, who by definition is unique and unreproducible, but a generality that is able to be fulfilled by a number of different actors or actresses. And this type is meant to be recognized by the audience, indeed, is played out for the audience. The type – and the list Cavell provides suggests this – is always close to self-conscious parody, a kind of winking nod to the audience’s gaze, let us say a certain ‘theatricality’. Here is Cavell on the cinematic ‘type’: ‘Types are exactly what will carry the forms movies have relied upon. These media created new types, or combinations and ironic reversals of types; but there they were, and stayed’ (WV, 33). Then in successive chapters, Cavell will go on to elaborate a number of particular types in cinema. They include, amongst others, the ‘military man’, as seen in such films as Paths of Glory and Mutiny on the Bounty, the ‘woman’, as seen in such films as Intermezzo and Double Indemnity, and the ‘dandy’, as seen in such films as The Thin Man and To Have and Have Not. He then crucially, and to the surprise of most of his commentators, goes on to speak of all of this in relation to Baudelaire and his notion that ‘nothing less than everything is new in a new period’ (WV, 42). Baudelaire, of course, is best known in this context for his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. The connection is made mostly with regard to painting or the fine arts, but here it is crucial and telling with regard to film. It is in that essay that Baudelaire speaks of a series of modern ‘types’ – and Cavell draws on these – but undoubtedly more important is the relationship Baudelaire draws between these types and modernity. Cavell is telling us that cinema is becoming modern with the advent of the ‘type’ in films, in T HE WORLD VIEWED

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fact, a modern art. It is at this point – perhaps inexplicably, or at least contradictorily, given his previous argument about automatism – that the question of scepticism and its overcoming enters cinema, which we might even paraphrase, now that the artforms are effectively comparable, as a problem of ‘theatricality’. (Of course, as we have seen, this is a problematic from Cavell’s own essays on theatre; but it also comes from Fried, who in 1967 had written the decisive ‘Art and Objecthood’, where he takes up the notion to set out the possibility of visual art defeating ‘theatricality’. If in ‘Art and Objecthood’ Fried can be seen to take up theatricality to say that the cinema is not involved in questions of art, Cavell in The World Viewed can be seen to be using it to suggest that cinema is an art, an art involved in problems of scepticism in the proper sense.6) But what exactly is involved in this ‘new’ scepticism that overtakes photography and film and that the rise of the cinematic ‘type’ is a symptom of? Cavell speaks towards the end of The World Viewed – and it is important to keep in mind how against the automatic set up of photography and cinema he otherwise characterizes them in terms of this is – of the way that the fundamental problem of the photographic apparatus is the self-consciousness of the subject being shot, the fact that they are aware of the camera and change their behaviour in relation to it. The subject can be seen to be posing for the camera, taking its look into account, seeing themselves through the gaze of the other upon them. The previous claim of the photographic image to capture the real – even though we are separated or set back from it – is thereby challenged. What is revealed is that there is no real, no external world before the camera. We have only, in an echo of such famous sceptical narratives as Descartes’ Meditations and Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, a purely subjective look out onto the world, or rather to invert this (it comes to the same thing) the world comporting itself for our gaze. It is for this reason, suggests Cavell, that the photographer yells ‘Watch the birdie!’ and clicks their fingers before taking a photo. It is for the subjects to forget for a moment that they are being photographed, to drop their pose in a moment of startlement: ‘One may object that the command is given not to achieve the unnaturalness of theatre but precisely to give the impression of the natural’ (WV, 90). It is the great difficulty, as we say, of how the new ‘type’ of the military man, the woman, the dandy – but more generally all of those identifiable types or characters as previously seen in theatre – can be anything more than a parody in the new style 80

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of movie, with the audience laughing at their own superiority and self-knowingness, not excluded from the screen but an indissociable part of it: ‘Instead of confirming our conviction by a gesture of selfawareness whose self-confidence inspires conviction, the gesture may attempt to distract us from our lack of conviction; instead of laughing at himself with a well-deserved appreciation of self, an author may wish to steal our laughter in order to cover his embarrassment’ (WV, 124). And in all of this, as Cavell well knows, there is something of that famous thought experiment conducted by Wittgenstein in Culture and Value, in which he seeks to imagine an ordinary person going about their daily business apparently unaware of being looked at,7 and the question arises – after we become aware of them, looking on from a hidden distance – can we imagine them as unaware of our look, or must any indifference now be seen as feigned, put on, a kind of pose: ‘The world’s presence to me is no longer assured by my mechanical absence from it, for the screen no longer naturally holds a coherent world from which I am absent’ (WV, 130). Indeed, Cavell generalizes his analysis – and at moments he can even sound like someone like Jean Baudrillard – to suggest that the whole world, even without an actual camera pointing at it, behaves as though already filmed. The entire world is ‘theatrical’, arrays itself selfconsciously for our gaze. This is undoubtedly the meaning of Cavell’s slightly unexpected treatment of pornography in The World Viewed. In pornographic film, suggests Cavell, the idea is to have the spectator cross over the screen separating them from what they see and have them imaginatively participate in the sexual acts depicted. It seeks to transgress the boundary that defines or constitutes the photographic image (and, of course, in another way, pornography relies on the verisimilitude, the unmediatedness, of the photographic image) that Cavell has previously claimed cannot be crossed. But pornography in some sense does allow us to cross this limit, and needless to say pornographic acts – and in this regard they are ultimately no different from those theatrical ‘types’ of mainstream cinema – are staged for the gaze of the camera, utterly faked and self-conscious for all of their apparent ‘reality’. This is Cavell in the chapter ‘The World as a Whole: Colour’ on Jean-Luc Godard’s depiction of the naked Brigitte Bardot in the film Contempt: ‘Godard perceives here not merely our taste for mild pornography, but that our taste and convictions in love have become pornographised, which above all means publicised, externalised – letting society tell us what T HE WORLD VIEWED

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to love, and needing it to tell us whether we do’ (WV, 95). And Cavell’s more general point is that the world itself – this is again what we might mean by its modernity – has effectively gone pornographic. It already constitutes itself as a spectacle, positioning itself for the camera. This is the subject of a number of the late chapters in Cavell’s book, ‘Exhibition and Self-Reference’ and ‘The Camera’s Implication’, in which he discusses such modern phenomena as self-reflexive movies, which draw attention to their screening and exhibition through such things as the freeze-frame and slow-motion and putting of the camera itself (of course, not the actual one shooting the film) on-screen. However, given what we might call the prescriptive power of Cavell’s own text in making reality resemble it, we must also look at the logic of what Cavell says internally, what is really at stake in his diagnosis of the world as ‘theatrical’, as effectively posed for the camera. Importantly, the chapters in The World Viewed on the world after cinema follow the ‘Excursus’ on American post-war painting, in which Cavell, with or after Fried, most explicitly takes up the notion of ‘theatricality’. Theatre for Fried – and for Cavell too here – is that previous ‘sceptical’ situation in which the spectator is automatically separated from what they look at by the screen, but involves them being brought into the scene at which they look, whose action is staged for them. But, of course, the obvious question is raised of why this is not that ‘acknowledgement’ that Cavell has previously argued for in King Lear, in which the characters reveal themselves to the spectator, and the spectator in turn reveals themselves to the characters? And the answer lies in Cavell’s words from ‘The Avoidance of Love’ that the spectator in theatre must achieve this acknowledgement precisely through their distance and separation. Acknowledgement is not the direct confrontation with the other, the making of them the same or confronting them face-to-face, but affirms their similarity in difference. It is at once the taking into account of this difference and the overcoming of this difference, one possible only because of the other. These are Cavell’s words again regarding the proper location of the spectator in theatre, which can also be seen to apply to the spectator in cinema: ‘In giving us a place within which our hiddenness and silence and separation are accounted for, it gives us a chance to stop.’ And this once more – this is the paradox that makes up all modern artforms, including cinema in Cavell’s new conception of it – is why Cavell will speak with regard to both Shakespeare and Beckett of ‘theatre defeating theatre’, which is a

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matter not merely of theatre getting rid of theatre, but as we have seen of theatre living on or indeed coming about for the first time after the attempt to end it, as that distance remaining after or brought about by the attempt to get rid of it. Theatre, even in Shakespeare, is the attempt to get rid of theatre through acknowledgement, thus producing theatre, given that there is always more to acknowledge and acknowledgement is possible only because of a certain distance. It is all of this that we see in Cavell’s conception of cinema as a modern artform. Cavell’s point, both internally with the replacement of stars by types and genres and externally as a result of the new image-conscious world, is that the ‘automatic’ distancing of cinema can no longer be taken for granted, but has to be achieved or attained. And it is in term of this distance that the overcoming of this distance through acknowledgement is also now for the first time possible. But this may even be reversed, and we could say that it is the overcoming of this distance through acknowledgement that gives rise to the proper sense of this distance and the way it cannot or better should not be overcome in order to maintain conviction in the image. It is only at this point that cinema becomes modern and properly an artform. It is when it involves questions of conviction and a history or tradition that has to be maintained through successive attempts to rethink or reinvigorate the medium, which we now see is also the only way to involve cinema in the problem of scepticism and its overcoming. And it is ‘individuality’, both of the actor on the screen and of the filmic example, that comes after types and genres and is modern cinema’s response to scepticism. The ‘individuality’ we see in films, in some way like the characters in modern drama, is something to which the proper relationship is one of acknowledgement, with which we can be convinced but equally also unconvinced, when it retreats again into the theatricality of type. This is what Cavell says of ‘individuality’ as the defining figure of a properly modern cinema, after the ‘star’ of premodern cinema and the ‘type’ of an inevitably sceptical cinema: ‘What makes someone a type is not his similarity with other members of that type but his striking separateness from other people. . . . [But] occasionally the humanity behind the role would manifest itself; and the result was a revelation not of a human individuality, but of an entire realm of humanity becoming visible’ (WV, 33). So that we might say that modern cinema will revolve around the struggle or better dialectic between type and individuality, which is to say scepticism and its overcoming.

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This is the truly fascinating – and methodologically important – aspect of The World Viewed. It involves the historically unconventional – and, as some commentators continue to argue, philosophically impossible – moment of the advent of scepticism in cinema.8 Historically unconventional because not only does it come some three centuries after Shakespeare’s tragedies, but Cavell’s arguments also do not correspond with the orthodox chronologies of the medium. For, as we see, Cavell argues that this scepticism occurs at some point within this history and not simply with the beginning of cinema itself. There is thus something of an unlocatable divide within the unwinding of cinema, separating a time before scepticism from a time after. But then complicating this is how after the initial hypothesis of scepticism we can then go back and see all of cinema as necessarily involved in it. It is what happens when at some particular, if finally unidentifiable, point in the history of cinema cinema becomes modern, but then after this modernism has always been the case. As Cavell writes towards the end of ‘More of The World Viewed’: ‘In the meantime, I am prepared to modify my claims about film’s modernism by saying either that movies from the beginning have had to achieve their power by deliberate investigation of the powers of their medium; or else movies from their beginning existed in two states, one modern, one traditional’ (WV, 219). All of this again is what we have previously spoken of as the doubling logic of scepticism, where after it any outside to it can only be conceived in terms of it. This is, of course, Wittgenstein’s conclusion when coming upon an ordinary person undertaking everyday activities apparently unaware of being looked at; but it is as well the contradiction of the photograph today, when after the possibility of the photographer calling out ‘Watch the birdie!’ we can only understand any apparent indifference to the camera to be feigned, an effect of art. This is also the conclusion Roland Barthes arrives at in his Camera Lucida, where the ‘punctum’, the ‘what-has-been’ that comes before the photograph, that which is outside of the ‘theatricality’ of the studium, is possible only after or within the photograph. It is the photograph, in other words, that creates the effect of what comes before it. With the result that, if on the one hand Barthes speaks of the punctum as ‘what-has-been’, it must also be understood as a certain ‘what-willhave-been’, with what appears before the photograph coming about only after the photograph (CL, 55).9 To conclude, we might suggest that there are three statuses of film in The World Viewed: the pre-sceptical, the sceptical and the overcoming of 84

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the sceptical, each of which both makes the others possible and is made possible by them.10 Scepticism and anti-scepticism are obviously in a kind of circularity, and what is before or outside of scepticism is at once what scepticism seeks to make over into the dialectic of scepticism and its overcoming and is visible only from the point of view of scepticism. Or we might put it simply as film is ‘at once historical and ontological’ (WV, 105). It is everything Cavell means when he says in The World Viewed, following his argument in ‘The Avoidance of Love’ that there is no outside of acknowledgement, insofar as non-acknowledgement is only the failure of acknowledgement: ‘[Film’s outsidedness to its world is] what movies have to acknowledge, what it is that would not exist unless admitted by them, what it is that the movies can no longer safely assume, but must declare, in order not to risk denying’ (WV, 146). But here also, as a result of the fact that we are never outside of acknowledgement, the impossibility of deciding whether we have properly begun to acknowledge or have yet acknowledged. In other words, acknowledgement is at the same time impossible to begin and impossible to end: Beckett’s ‘Pas encore’. And this is to say that – this is the logic or structure of The World Viewed and why there is a permanently unresolved dispute amongst its critics as to its final meaning – scepticism, the hypothesis of scepticism, draws a line between things, dividing them into a before and an after, but we can never exactly say where it takes place. Or even – and this is why scepticism forms a kind of ‘transcendental condition of possibility’ – it draws a line between things and themselves, including it and itself. It is why, after the hypothesis of scepticism in the cinema, automatism must be understood in the modernist sense as something that must be achieved, attempted to be brought about. And yet this new automatism now gives rise to a pre-modern automatism that is precisely automatic, a pre-sceptical ‘indifference’. As Cavell says in the chapter ‘Automatism’: ‘What gives significance to features of this physical basis are artistic discoveries of form and genre and types and techniques, which I have begun calling automatisms’ (WV, 105). Where might any of this be seen in a film? It is another scene from It Happened One Night, the celebrated moment from the end when Peter and Elli are celebrating their nuptials by going back to the motor inn where they originally pretended to be married. Earlier in the film, when they were staying in the motor inn, there was a dazzling erotic sequence when, with them both sharing the same room, the chivalrous Peter (also obeying the restrictive Hays Code at the time) hung a blanket between T HE WORLD VIEWED

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them so that Elli could change for the night. It marks the moment when Peter first starts speaking properly to Elli, while she removes her clothing, her body occasionally bumping against the dark barrier between them, finally hanging one discarded stocking over the top so that Peter might see. The blanket’s blankness arouses Peter’s imagination, driving him to imagine what is over the other side, and its anonymity allows the usually masculine and superior Peter to reveal himself to Elli in a manner he never would otherwise: ‘I’m the whippoorwill that cries in the night. I’m the soft morning breeze that caresses your lovely face.’ Of course, this blanket is widely understood – and Cavell himself writes of it this way – as a metaphor for the cinema screen itself. It is its blankness and the distance it imposes between the two of them that allows Peter to confess himself and Elli to indicate she is interested. But the complex question the film raises is what happens after that wonderful moment on their wedding night when Peter, continuing a previous joke between them, plays ‘Let the Walls of Jericho Fall’ on his toy trumpet and takes down the blanket separating them? What will happen without this mediating distance between them when they can see each other clearly, in daylight as it were? Will the acknowledgement necessary for a successful marriage still be possible, or is marriage conceivable only as a pre-marriage or a remarriage, the ongoing performance of or negotiation over a hypothetical marriage, as we saw in that first moment in the motor inn? And what is all of this to say about our relationship to the characters in a film and film more generally? Can we too only properly see a film through the screen that separates us? The film ends at the moment the blanket comes down with the screen going blank, and it is impossible to decide whether this is the end of film itself or a declaration of that screen that makes it possible to continue.

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5 COMEDIES OF REMARRIAGE AND MELODRAMAS OF THE UNKNOWN WOMAN

It was Cavell’s fifth book, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981), that finally brought him widespread acclaim and attention. It carried his work beyond the exclusive world of academic philosophy and out into the general public. After a number of early positive reviews in the mainstream press, the book became a relative bestseller, eventually going through numerous reprintings.1 It was one of those academic, particularly philosophical, texts that ordinary people from time to time decide would be good for them to at least start reading. And unlike the at-once-conventional and esoteric The World Viewed, which treats such apparently well-known topics as movies stars, colour film and watching a movie on a screen with other people and renders them unfamiliar, Pursuits of Happiness takes up long-running philosophical ideas about marriage and personal freedom and seeks to make them accessible by explaining them through films. Moreover, Cavell addresses in his discussion – unlike the then-prevailing Anglophone taste for European arthouse cinema – a number of the most popular and best-loved films of all time: the Hollywood screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, featuring such immortal stars as Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Clark Gable and Barbara Stanwyck. And, matching this romantic and comedic subject matter, Cavell writes in an informal, conversational, almost avuncular style, mentioning in passing his love of and nostalgia for these films of his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, which he acknowledges helped shape his aesthetic and

philosophical sensibility and unhesitatingly refers to at several points as ‘major works of thought’ (PH, 8). There is a self-conscious ‘democratic social bond’ (PH, 193) behind the book, with a Harvard Philosophy Professor ecumenically sharing his appetite for and knowledge of the great popular artform that not just Hollywood but America itself could be said to have given the world. These movies are in a particular sense American, and make all those who watch them American too. Of course, by the time Cavell comes to write on these films, others had already seen the merits and glories in them too. Most notably, there was an earlier generation of French film critics and soon-to-be directors, such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, gathered around the journal Cahiers du cinéma in the late 1950s, and in America such reviewers as Pauline Kael in The New Yorker and Andrew Sarris in The Village Voice. But the famous insight of Cavell’s book – and this takes us back to the question of the overlooking of the thematic of acknowledgement in King Lear – is that there is a whole subset or subgenre of these Hollywood romantic comedies that is concerned not just with a couple falling in love and getting together for the first time, but a couple who, having split up or even having got divorced, get back together or remarried. The idea at first sight appears preposterous or an unworldly philosopher’s implausible conceit that has no relevance or is merely the ‘reading in’ of high-flown notions into otherwise innocent films. However, Cavell then attempts to demonstrate his insight – it is not quite a matter of proving it – through the intricate analysis of a long series of films: The Lady Eve (1941), It Happened One Night (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1940), The Philadelphia Story (1934), His Girl Friday (1940), Adam’s Rib (1949) and The Awful Truth (1937). It is a list, as we say, of some of the most watched, acclaimed (Oscar-winning and Oscar-nominated) and even critically elaborated films of all time; but, astonishingly, the feature that Cavell discerns that ties them all together and constitutes, if not the overall genre of the Hollywood romantic comedy, at least an important feature within a number of them had never been noticed before. But what enables Cavell to observe this hitherto unremarked-upon thematic? And what is its meaning for Cavell? What is at stake in these films, and how do they relate to the wider or perhaps adjacent genre of romantic comedy from which they arguably derive? Along with the related question of why do the comedies of remarriage arise when they do? And why at a certain point does it seem impossible to keep on making them? In fact, for Cavell, the comedies of remarriage are before all else 88

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a brilliant and profound expression of the problematic of scepticism brought about by modernity. For, as we say, instead of the straightforward and to an extent unquestioned matter of a couple getting together in the classic romantic genre, what we have here is their getting back together after a previous break or split. They are able to re-unite only through overcoming a prior doubt or uncertainty, not only about the particular person with whom they were once partnered but about the institution of marriage altogether. They are no longer operating under the illusion or false hope of romantic love. They are no longer innocents going in with their eyes closed. They have already been chastened by experience and have to learn how to love again, or more accurately have to learn how to love properly, to learn what love authentically is. And, indeed – this is Cavell’s real point, although it is not spoken of explicitly in his book, or at great length, which can give it a still slightly romantic or at least celebratory feel, as though what he is pointing to is an exception to the usual order of things – all marriages are a kind of remarriage. Or, to put it in the form of a paradox, we no longer get married for the first time but from the beginning get remarried. We have to get remarried before getting married. We can get married only if we are first remarried. Remarriage is the very condition of possibility for marriage. So that – and this is Cavell’s unspoken argument about the adjacency of genres that we will see later in terms of the relationship of the melodramas to the comedies – far from the comedies of remarriage constituting any kind of exception or special case within the wider genre of romantic comedies, it is these romantic comedies that are in effect the consequence of these remarriage comedies. That is, it is the ‘mainstream’ romantic comedies that are an exception to the remarriage comedies. In the end, Cavell suggests, these comedies of remarriage – and here another example of his utterly unself-conscious putting together of high and low cultures – can be seen to come out of such Shakespeare comedies as The Winter’s Tale. The Winter’s Tale is a story in which King Leontes finally reconciles with his wife Hermione, whom he had falsely accused of infidelity, after the giving away of their daughter and the death of their son. But perhaps the more important aspect of The Winter’s Tale in terms of its comparison to the comedies of remarriage is its position within Shakespeare’s oeuvre. The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s socalled late comedies, by which scholars mean to distinguish it from such earlier and better-known comedies as As You Like It and Much Ado about Nothing.2 The early comedies are what we might compare to the straight C OMEDIES OF REMARRIAGE AND MELODRAMAS

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Hollywood romantic comedies, insofar as in them youthful couples like Rosalind and Orlando and Beatrice and Benedick get together full of hope and expectation, while in the later comedies such figures as Posthumus and Imogen in Cymbeline and Leontes and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale get back together again having been cautioned by experience. And it is notable that these later comedies come after the great sequence of mid-to-late period tragedies like Hamlet, Othello and King Lear, and must be understood as a response or reaction to them. In a way, that is, these late comedies represent a certain taking into account of the disappointments of the tragedies, but also an overcoming of them. This is Cavell in his ‘Introduction’ to Pursuits of Happiness on the way that these later comedies in Shakespeare operate as something of a precursor to the comedies of remarriage: ‘I find a precedent for the structure of remarriage in Shakespearean romance, and certainly in The Winter’s Tale. This was one of the earliest and, while encouraging, most puzzling discoveries I made as I became involved in thoughts about the set of films in question here’ (PH, 19). (But, as we will see, the possibility of these comedies coming after the scepticism of the tragedies also poses problems for Cavell, insofar as he by contrast posits the melodramas of the unknown woman, in which there is a failure to overcome scepticism, as coming after the comedies of remarriage.) However, as well as a cultural Cavell also posits a sociological explanation for the rise of these Hollywood comedies of remarriage. First of all, technically these dialogue-driven films, which feature so prominently couples talking reciprocally to each other in a real, sometimes improvised present, would be possible only with the advent of synchronized sound. Indeed, the first film, at least chronologically, in the sequence Cavell traces, It Happened One Night, if not the first ‘sound’ film (that title usually goes to Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, made several years earlier), is famously said to be the film whose popular success convinced the moguls that sound film was commercially viable. Then the films are said to correspond to a period in the growing social and economic equality of women, with more and more women in the Depression when these films began to be made becoming the main breadwinners of their families, and during the Second World War at the end of the genre women worked in factories and other vital industries while the men were away fighting. Allied with all of this, Cavell observes that the films feature a generation of female stars (Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday) 90

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who were no longer in the first flush of their youth, and as in the adjoining genre of romantic comedies seen first in terms of their physical beauty and sexual desirability, but assured, self-possessed and entirely able to hold their own against their well-known male co-stars (Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve, James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story, Cary Grant in His Girl Friday), and on occasions even cast as their physical, spiritual and intellectual superior. (To recall two celebrated moments from these films: Rosalind Russell, dressed in a square-shouldered suit that emphasizes her physical capability, tackles a deceitful newspaper editor who attempts to run away in His Girl Friday; and Katharine Hepburn, who stands taller than the relatively diminutive and considerably older Spencer Tracey, slaps him back harder when he attempts to slap her while giving her a massage in Adam’s Rib.) The couples in these films, except importantly in Cavell’s chronologically first and last examples, are approximately and unusually for Hollywood the same age. The implication is that second or renewed love, as opposed to first, with all of the blindness it entails, actually brings a couple closer together, at least in age and life-experience. Part of the meaning of these films, as we will see, is that each half of the couple in them is able to see the other clearly without the blinkers either of romantic love or sexual attraction. Although they still largely play out the story of a man ‘instructing’ (PH, 91) a woman, the woman must nevertheless be able to be instructed and the man must learn or instruct himself while doing so. Nevertheless, at the same time we would also insist that the problem of scepticism is not to be explained historically. It neither arises out of any social condition nor is resolved as any historical progress. Rather, as we have said, it is a doubling, the positing of a new transcendental condition for things, in that what is is henceforth able to be explained only for another reason. It is as though it is now possible to communicate with another only across a certain distance. As though marriage – even for the first time – is possible only as the negation of a prior divorce or separation. It is a shift in register beautifully caught by that moment in It Happened One Night when Peter’s argument with Ellie is not a disagreement, but a kind of game, as though somehow about or remarking itself. It is an agreement possible only across a difference that is also another way of agreeing. So that, after it, nothing is any longer strictly meaningless. Even indifference, the lack of meaning, can be understood as merely feigned, another form of meaning. Again, there is a necessary indirectness, a not immediately knowing or speaking for the other – as Peter does not have time to stop C OMEDIES OF REMARRIAGE AND MELODRAMAS

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and explain to Ellie what he is doing, but offers only a change of tone of voice, ushering in a new convention – but this also means that everything potentially signifies, that everything is an attempt to communicate. All of this is also Cavell’s point about the mutuality of acknowledgement: that Peter cannot be understood as changing his voice until Ellie recognizes it. And something like this is the real difference between the comedies of remarriage and the later melodramas. In the comedies, there still remain the two aporetic sides of scepticism – acknowledgement and nonacknowledgement – with always something of an ‘exception’ from which to remark them. In the melodramas, there is no such aporia, but rather either a simple exception, as with Lear, or the lack of any such exception from which either certainty or doubt could be remarked. And thus in the melodramas we see the collapse – through either its apparent defeat or its universalization – of the whole problematic of scepticism. We no longer have a true scepticism, in some ways consistent with Cavell’s diagnosis of both ‘automatism’ and ‘theatricality’ in The World Viewed. However, to slow all this down and make it clearer, let us look in more detail at the first and chronologically the last of the films Cavell analyses in Pursuits of Happiness: The Lady Eve and Adam’s Rib. Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve, along with Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), is often considered the greatest, or at least the most perfectly constructed, of all the Hollywood comedies. It concerns a conwoman Jean Harrington (played by Barbara Stanwyck) who, along with her father ‘Colonel’ Harrington (played by the great character actor Charles Coburn), fleeces well-to-do bachelors on luxury cruises by marrying them and then offering to divorce them for a large settlement when they realize who she truly is. Enter the naïve, unworldly Charles Pike (played by Henry Fonda), who comes on board after searching for snakes in the Amazon jungle. Jean immediately sets out to seduce him – easy enough, if she can tolerate his terrible romantic poetry and love-struck declarations of affection – and upon disembarking he tells his rightly disbelieving father that they are to be married. Of course, Jean’s and her father’s scheme has succeeded, and soon after the wedding the ‘Colonel’ rings Charles’ father, offering for a substantial sum to spare the family the embarrassment of revealing that their son was gullible enough to marry a conwoman and his father inattentive enough to let it happen. The money is handed over, with Jean and her father gloating and Charles chastened and vowing never to fall in love again (and his father never to allow his credulous son near such women again). But as Jean rejoins her father on the boat 92

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for another of her serial marriages, her dissatisfaction with the rootless, disbelieving life she is leading grows. Indeed, she admits to herself, for all of his innocence and romantic illusions, indeed, because of them, she actually liked her ex-husband. And now, against her father’s wishes, she sets out to seduce Charles again, not as herself obviously – his father, if not Charles himself, would never allow that – but as the English noblewoman Lady Eve Sidwich, about whom she once spoke in her previous guise. In a hilarious series of set pieces, Jean implausibly passes herself off as Lady Eve using a phony cut-glass English accent both to Charles and Charles’ family, convincing seemingly everyone except Charles’ loyal manservant Mugsy, who rightly suspects that something is up. But Jean is ultimately successful in her desires, with Charles using the same romantic lines on her again, except that this time Jean is sincerely moved by them. In the concluding scene of the film, she and Charles begin their honeymoon by entering the same cabin on the same boat that they celebrated their first honeymoon in, with Charles seemingly unaware of the repetition, Jean not caring about it and only Mugsy remarking in the celebrated last line of the film as the doors close behind him, ‘I swear it is the same dame!’ But the film is less obvious and its ending more ambiguous than at first appears. For, despite Jean’s evident worldly superiority, the way she can seemingly wrap Charles around her little finger by casting her feminine spell over him – and this seemingly to go against the mutuality and reciprocal recognition that is part of the comedies of remarriage – as their relationship goes on the second time she is (and we are) increasingly struck by the possibility that Charles knows that she is Jean but does not care, or at least does not care to let her know. In other words, she does not hold an advantage over him by withholding something from him (as she arguably did the first time, and in the usual reading of the film the second time), but he is now withholding something from her. However, she for her part likes and even respects him for this. In fact, for all of her yearning for him after the first round is over, she would not actually want to marry him unless he could triumph over her like this (and maybe she only goes back to him in the first place because she suspects that not only can he appreciate what she has done to him, but has the potential to return the favour). Watching the film again, we can see her taking – necessarily unspoken, perhaps even unadmitted – pleasure in what appears to her now as his put-on naïveté. Indeed, she complains to her father at several points in the film, during both the first and the second courtships, that ‘no one could be as stupid as this!’, but it is the sign of a C OMEDIES OF REMARRIAGE AND MELODRAMAS

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kind of grudging respect that by the end she is saying it in a way that she knows is literally true. (And, affirming Cavell’s understanding that in the comedies of remarriage the man in effect becomes the woman’s father, this second time Jean could even be said to be keeping her knowledge from her father, who would either not believe her or urge her to break off the relationship, fearing that Charles now suspects their plot and will turn them in.) Charles for his part also does not tell her what he knows, both to take a subtle form of revenge on her – much better actually to marry Jean than merely call her out and have her arrested – and because he admires her even more for her presumption that she is able to fool him a second time like this and for the obvious fact that she must love him to go through all of this again (although, of course, at the same time he necessarily risks the possibility that she will once more divorce him and ask his father for money). It is only Mugsy – exemplifying Hegel’s famous dictum about servants being servants not because they are less intelligent than their master but because they are more intelligent – who feels the need to state the facts as they so evidently are. In all of this we have a wonderful example of what Cavell calls acknowledgement and the sudden entry of scepticism into the world. Absolutely like Peter and Ellie at the motor inn in It Happened, at once everything now speaks and there arises something unspoken. The second time round, Jean’s and Charles’ words are not merely what they appear to be about, but also about their relationship, or more precisely are an attempt to delineate the rules that allow them to speak. Henceforth, everything they say has the potential not to say what needs to be said, but also to stand in for the love that dare not speak its name. Just as Charles’ woodenness, ineloquence and rhetorical second-handedness is given a life and meaning by what it does not say, so his indifference and lack of noticing what Jean is up to is perhaps feigned, an act to avoid the obvious ‘theatricality’ of speaking too well of his feelings. What he says or does becomes eloquent in its very lack of eloquence, just as his apparent indifference and lack of responsiveness to her is not simple but something that has to be consciously attained. Indeed, we will see something like this paradox in Fried’s reading of eighteenth-century painting in Absorption and Theatricality and contemporary photography in Why Photography Matters. It is also like that paradox Cavell sets out in The World Viewed, in which the ‘truthfulness’ of language is possible but only because something – the ‘subject’ – is excluded from it (WV, 127). And it is just this simultaneous distance and its overcoming that we might 94

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speak of as the overcoming of scepticism, or simply as scepticism, which just is its own overcoming. Cavell indirectly speaks of this – appropriately perhaps, insofar as he does not want to repeat the indelicacy of Charles’ servant – in Pursuits of Happiness when he makes an extraordinary connection between these boisterous, sensuous and embodied comedies and the Kantian notion of ‘purposefulness without purpose’ (PH, 89), which would be the suspension of these ‘real-world’ qualities in a work of art. Invoking a ‘reflexiveness’ in which what the characters say is as much as anything about their saying of it, he writes of Bringing Up Baby: Bringing Up Baby presents the purest example of a relationship in which a pair do next to nothing throughout our knowledge of them; what they do is something like play games: you could almost say they merely have fun together. (PH, 88–9) We find another instance of this – although, subject to the pressure of the history of the genre, evidence too of the increasing difficulty of overcoming scepticism – in the chronologically last of the films Cavell looks at in Pursuits of Happiness, George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib. The film concerns two well-to-do married lawyers, Adam and Amanda Bonner, who take opposite sides of a case in which a cuckolded and oppressed lower-class woman has attempted to shoot her unfaithful husband. Amanda, who is on the woman’s side, convincingly defeats Adam in court, despite the evident guilt of the woman; and this sets off a long chain of events in which Adam’s resentment and jealousy of his wife’s obvious or at least rhetorical superiority, plus the insult to his literalist conception of the law her victory represents, leads to them deciding to get a divorce. (Indeed, at one point, Adam even replays the defendant wife’s actions and holds a liquorice gun to Amanda to see whether she is so sanguine when the same kind of threat is used against her. She, of course, is not; but we in the audience, even taking into account those ‘pre-feminist’ times, sense the inappropriateness of his actions and that his attempted analogy goes against his conception of the law and not Amanda’s. The two situations simply cannot be compared, especially with the sexes reversed.) The legal process leading to their separation is only halted when they have to sell their jointly held country house and they come upon a home movie in which Adam plays a vaudeville villain with a comb held underneath his nose in order to make a moustache and together they realize he has a certain playful or ‘theatrical’ edge, a willingness rhetorically to exaggerate C OMEDIES OF REMARRIAGE AND MELODRAMAS

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like Amanda did in court. In again a famous last line, the conventionally masculine Adam, played by the equally straight-looking Spencer Tracey, camps it up and in a hat borrowed from Amanda speaks in a coquettish tone the words usually understood to acknowledge the unbridgeable difference between the two sexes, ‘Vive le différence!’ And it is just this giving up of the ‘universality’ of the law that Adam once defended and held against Amanda that we are to understand saves his marriage at the last moment. Here we find perhaps both a similarity to and a difference from Lady Eve, raising complex questions of what Cavell calls the ‘inheritance’ (PH, 28) of genre, and what a modernist medium or tradition, even if only of comedies of remarriage, might look like. Certainly, if it is the break up and then getting back together of a couple that is the template for these films, there is here undoubtedly a much more profound break-up and tentative getting back together than in Lady Eve. (We have an even more extreme version of this in the very last of the comedies Cavell considers in Pursuits of Happiness, The Awful Truth, where again for much of the film and even after its conclusion we cannot imagine how the couple will ever reunite.) All of this is not unrelated to the terms on which Adam and Amanda reconcile. Adam’s final admission of ‘Vive le différence!’ in exactly that way we have been speaking of is not the direct overcoming but rather the remarking of the difference or misunderstanding between the two. And this is indicated in the films Cavell discusses – this is their essentially comedic aspect – by the act of laughter, which as Freud says indicates a certain distance onto what is being laughed at.3 We always laugh at something, even though we do not know exactly what it is. Thus, at the end of Adam’s Rib when Adam and Amanda laugh together, Adam is laughing at his own previous literalness in understanding the law, while Amanda is laughing at her own disrespect for it. They do not entirely disavow what they believe, but admit a certain self-contradiction into it, the fact that its very saying goes against it. But what happens, the film also asks in its darker moments, when we cannot laugh at this distance or misunderstanding, when there is no clear exception? At this point, comedy turns into tragedy, scepticism is unable to be overcome, not simply because we give up on overcoming it, but because we believe we are so easily able to overcome it. Indeed, thanks in part to the popular success of Cavell’s book, it is often asked whether it is still possible to make comedies of remarriage today. Of course, in an obvious sense, Cavell’s answer would have to 96

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be no. His point is that, by the time of Adam’s Rib, it is already difficult to produce comedy’s signature overturning of scepticism, and after it – hence the end of the genre it marks – it becomes impossible. The genre of the comedy of remarriage becomes, in his words, ‘expressively saturated’ (PH, 30). But, on the other hand, in Cavell’s non-essentialist and non-teleological conception of medium, it is always hypothetically possible to produce more examples of any particular genre, as long as it can ‘work out its internal consequences in further instances’ (PH, 28). In the Introduction to Pursuits of Happiness, he allows – and some of these involve children, which would demonstrate that the absence of children was never an essential feature of the genre – Alan Pakula’s Starting Over (1979), Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman (1978) and Robert Benton’s Kramer vs Kramer (1979). More recently, others have proposed Glenn Ficarra’s Crazy, Stupid Love (2011), Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and even Doug Liman’s Brad Pitt- and Angelina Jolie-starring remake of Hitchcock’s original Mr and Mrs Smith (2005), which Cavell acknowledges could have been included in his original selection.4 There are also a number of older films that critics have put forward, which Cavell has not – Ernst Lubitsch’s That Uncertain Feeling (1941) and George Stevens’ Woman of the Year (1942) – and it is arguable that more literate or at least philosophically ambitious directors have consciously attempted to make contemporary comedies of remarriage, mistakenly thinking that they are licensed to do so by some sort of pedigree from Cavell and not realizing that, on the contrary, his work contends against this possibility. Often mentioned candidates here include Carl Reiner’s That Old Feeling (1997) and the Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty (2003). All of this is to treat Cavell’s work as simply illustrative, typological or predictive, rather than that ‘conjunction’ (PH, 10) between philosophy and film – their mutual acknowledgement – that is truly at stake. In fact, some fifteen years after Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell published his ‘derivation’ (CT, 5) of or even ‘deviation’ (CT, 11) from that book, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1996). It was a relatively long delay in following up what was a considerable scholarly and popular success when the obvious temptation would have been to write a sequel immediately (and the possibility of a book on female melodrama is already hinted at in Pursuits of Happiness). And this delay perhaps tells us something about the intellectual difficulty of the second book and the changed cultural circumstances in which it C OMEDIES OF REMARRIAGE AND MELODRAMAS

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came to be written. The intervening decade of the 1980s between Pursuits of Happiness in 1981 and Contesting Tears in 1996 was undoubtedly one of a powerful cultural feminism in the American academy. Following on from his intuition concerning women’s melodrama as the next stage in the exploration of scepticism in Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell over the ensuing decade before the publication of Contesting Tears had already written versions of virtually all of the chapters there: ‘Psychoanalysis and Cinema: On the Melodrama of the Unknown Woman’ in 1987, ‘Naughty Orators: Negation of Voice in Gaslight’ in 1988, ‘Ugly Duckling, Funny Butterfly: Bette Davis and Now, Voyager’ in 1990 and ‘Stella’s Taste’ in 1991. In a manner that we will elaborate in more detail in a moment, these melodramas concern not so much a mutual or reciprocal relationship between a man and a woman, but the absence of any such relationship, the inability or unwillingness of men (and sometimes of other women) to recognize the women at their centre. These are the ‘unknown women’ of Cavell’s subtitle. And, again, as with the screwball comedies, Cavell is seeking within this then-largely unrecognized and only recently critically re-evaluated genre – melodramas or women’s B-Pictures – a motif or possibility that had not previously been noticed: that a number of them feature as their plot the question of the recognition or rather non-recognition of a woman. Of course, then, exactly as with his reading of Lear, Cavell is at once remarking upon a critical overlooking of what is obvious in these films and claiming himself to be the one to recognize this when others have been unable or unwilling to. And, needless to say, at the time he wrote this, or at least soon after, his claim – that he, a man, had finally paid attention to what a prior generation of predominantly female critics, who had revived these films from a new feminist perspective, had failed to – appeared immodest and more than a little chauvinist. Perhaps the first prominent feminist critic to respond to Cavell’s claims was Karen Hanson, who in ‘Being Doubted, Being Assured’, published in the Bucknell Review in 1989, claims Cavell overlooks, as with Descartes, a passive or bodily, as opposed to an active or mental, proof of the self. As she writes of Cavell’s treatment of Greta Garbo in the films: ‘The notation of [Garbo’s] “visible absence” directs attention to our line of sight, so that her appearance, our seeing her projection, is a proof to and for us. . . . Shouldn’t a passive equivalent of this action guarantee to the passive object her own existence, assure Garbo herself?’5 And this was followed by Tania Modleski, who first in a letter published in Critical Inquiry in 1990 and then in Feminism without Women: Culture 98

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and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’ Age in 1991 accuses Cavell of claiming to speak for the otherwise seen-to-be-mute women characters and by implication their female critics in exactly the same silencing we see in the films themselves: ‘In Cavell, female subjectivity and the feminine itself are assimilated to the “feminine” mind of a male philosopher – and we might note that the “faceless mothering” of the mind is an especially apt term given Cavell’s use of the text Stella Dallas, the archetypal story of a mother’s self-effacing sacrifice of her child for the child’s own social advancement.’6 And even before the collection and expansion of the essays that make up Contesting Tears, Cavell had responded to Modleski in the same issue of Critical Inquiry in which she printed her letter, and he reprises many of the same points in the ‘Introduction’ to the book. In both, Cavell emphasizes that first of all he is sympathetic to the overall feminist project and that in many ways he is already doing what such writers as Modleski and Teresa de Lauretis would want him to do. He is extremely conscious, he emphasizes, that he not simply speak for the women in the films he looks at, but rather seeks to ‘recognise’ (CT, 37) them, allowing them to speak to him: ‘I trust that the reader will verify, in my text on the film, that my “use” of the archetypal story in Stella Dallas is to demonstrate the overturning of the received story of selfeffacing sacrifice, to reveal it instead as a story of self-liberation and selfempowering, epitomized precisely as the claiming of a face’ (CT, 36). Of course, this is a subtle distinction, easy to overlook when it is the male Cavell who speaks for these women apparently speaking to him, who speaks of his acknowledging women (whom others, including women, have not previously acknowledged and whom, we could even say, must be understood as allowing him to acknowledge them). In all of this, of course, we find a challenging real-world test case of Cavell’s notion of acknowledgement, and perhaps even in the misunderstandings – which are often mutual, despite Keane and Rothman’s vigorous defence of Cavell7 – there is the ironic and unacknowledged playing out of the problematic of scepticism and lack of acknowledgement that is the subject of Contesting Tears. In some ways, Cavell and his critics are even saying the same thing to each other, but are unable or unwilling to admit it. We have a scepticism here not because they are saying different or incommensurable things have, but – and here we would want to say this is as the simple defeat of scepticism returns us once again to scepticism – because they are saying the same thing. What neither party seems willing to do – and this is acknowledgement – is agree to agree. C OMEDIES OF REMARRIAGE AND MELODRAMAS

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So Contesting Tears took some time to come out, despite Cavell having completed virtually all of the material and knowing what he wanted to say well beforehand. It is as though he was both already experiencing a wave of resistance to his work and predicting in advance the reception his book would receive. Contesting Tears is certainly a darker, less joyous, more difficult book than Pursuits of Happiness, discussing fewer films – only four: Gaslight (1944), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Now Voyager (1942) and Stella Dallas (1937) – as though there were less of an empirical case to be made, with longer chapters and written in a diffuse, digressive and at times even pre-emptively self-justifying style. However, let us look in some detail at two of Cavell’s treatments in order to pay proper attention to the specifics of his analysis and to begin to think more accurately the difference of these films from the comedies of remarriage. The first film Cavell takes up in the book, although not chronologically the first, is George Cukor’s Gaslight,8 an intimate, almost chamber drama featuring a famously intense performance by Ingrid Bergman as the driven-mad wife Paula Alquist, the dashing French actor Charles Boyer as her villainous husband Gregory Anton and the countervailingly bland Joseph Cotton, still fresh from his roles in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), as the detective Brian Cameron who rescues her. The plot revolves around Gregory falsely marrying Paula, still in trauma from the murder of her famous opera-singing aunt some fifteen years ago, in order to get at the jewels apparently hidden in the house she bequested her, and that he believes Paula, whether consciously or not, knows the location of. (It was in fact Gregory who had originally killed the aunt for her jewels, and an incriminating letter from him to her will find its way into his bedroom desk.) In order to get Paula to confess, or at least to break down her resistance to telling him, Gregory attempts to drive her mad or doubt her own sanity by arranging for a series of objects to disappear and moving her possessions around, and there are mysterious noises and changes in the gaslight that illuminates the house’s cluttered and claustrophobic interior as a result of his searches in the attic for the jewels that also disturb her. And in all of this Gregory’s plan appears to succeed. Paula begins increasingly to suspect herself; and when she asks her husband, who is there apparently experiencing the same strange events himself, for reassurance and to confirm her suspicions, he deliberately gives her false and misleading answers. Only a detective, who was once an admirer of Paula’s aunt and now finds himself attracted to Paula, takes seriously 100

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her situation and comes to tell her his suspicions about her husband. After forcing open Gregory’s desk, they come upon the letter he had once written to Paula’s aunt, and Cameron now begin to think that it was Gregory who had killed her. In the final, scarifying scene of the film, after Cameron leaves, Gregory returns to Paula having finally found her aunt’s jewels and demands to know who has been in his desk. With her beautiful, soulful eyes now looking uncertainly at her husband, Paula again appears to come under his spell, as she once more loses her sense of reality in suggesting that a man had just come to the house; and their maid, when summoned by Gregory, confirms the fact, against Paula’s assertion, that there has been no one. Here are the climactic, emotionally devastating lines: Gregory (to Paula): Did you open my desk? Paul: I didn’t open it. It was he. He opened it. Gregory: What are you talking about? Who is he? Paula: A man who came to see me while you were out. Gregory: Who let him in? (He rings the bell, summoning the maid.) Elizabeth: Yes, sir? Gregory: Who was the man who came to see your mistress while I was out? Elizabeth: What man, sir? Paula: But, Elizabeth, you saw him. You opened the front door to him yourself. Elizabeth: No, ma’am. I saw no one at all. Paula: But he was there. I know it, I know it. Gregory (to Elizabeth): You see how it is, Elizabeth? Elizabeth (meaningfully): I see it. Paula: I couldn’t have dreamt it. Did I dream? Did I really? Gregory: Yes, Paula, you did. You dream all day long. Of course, as any number of commentators on the film have noted and Cavell emphasizes in his account, what Paula is going through here is like a dramatization of that ‘hyperbolic doubt’ that Descartes writes about in his Meditations: a doubt about the physical reality of the world, a doubt as to whether she is properly comprehending what other people are saying to her. Indeed, in her case, there truly is a malin génie manipulating things in order that she loses her grip on reality. What exactly is being dramatized here in the most drastic fashion is that state of scepticism that, in Cavell’s C OMEDIES OF REMARRIAGE AND MELODRAMAS

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words, is a ‘voicelessness’ (CT, 66) or ‘negation of conversation’ (CT, 47), insofar as throughout the film Paula’s cries for help – to her husband, her maid and it seems until the end of the film when he reveals himself to her Cameron – are unheard. She cannot make what she is going through clear to any of them. Except that, at the height of Paula’s apparent dismay and dissociation, we see a certain holding back, a certain self-possession. Although she cannot be sure that Cameron has returned after leaving, she appears to be deliberately leading Gregory on, until he incriminates himself with his asking about the desk and his intention to have her confined, given when he feels she is incapable of hearing it or doing anything about it. It is only at this point when Gregory has said what he does that Paula snaps out of it, throwing herself into the arms of Cameron, who suddenly appears out of the shadows to tell Gregory that he has heard everything. In other words, Paula absolutely plays out the logic of Descartes’ Cogito. There is a point in the middle of her madness when she realizes that she can think or perform it. She as it were stands outside of it, looking on at herself. And, of course, this is the paradox or self-contradiction of Cavell’s analysis. For what does it mean to suggest that these films witness a fall into scepticism? In what sense can they strictly be opposed to the comedies of remarriage? Bergman’s Paula is an ‘unknown’ woman, with legitimate fears concerning her husband disbelieving her and no one listening to her. But can she even be this without someone recognizing her, be it Cameron (or Elizabeth) or Cavell? Is this state of madness even possible without some point outside of it from where it could be remarked? (This is the insight Derrida offers in his famous critique of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, spoken of by Cavell in the chapter on Gaslight, without quite arriving at this conclusion.) Revealingly, at that most extreme point of Paula’s apparent self-alienation and loss of herself, she gives herself away, as so many of the other heroines of the ‘unknown women’ melodramas do. We suddenly recognize her, acknowledge her, comprehend what she is doing. She is telling us something – not to intervene until Gregory confesses – and the great question of the film is whether Cameron grasps this or his behaviour is merely an act of serendipity or police proceduralism? Whether he believes he simply rescued Paula without understanding that she orchestrated everything, including Gregory’s confession and her rescue by him? Is Cameron worthy of her – is Cavell? are we? – in acknowledging her acknowledgement of him? In other words, are we able to turn her non-acknowledgement of 102

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him and even his of her into a form of acknowledgement? And would this not be to transform the melodrama of Gaslight into something else, with the apparent failure of acknowledgement as its very sign? To conclude here, let us take an even more challenging case of all of this, of whether the scepticism of melodrama needs an exception in order to be constituted as melodrama. It is King Vidor’s Stella Dallas, with its star turn as Stella from Barbara Stanwyck, whom we have previously seen in The Lady Eve and several years before in her other great role in Double Indemnity as the femme fatale who induces her lover to murder her husband for the insurance before setting him up so that she can keep it all. Stella Dallas is notable for one of the great mother–daughter relationships in cinema, which is one of the features of the melodramas that allows Cavell to argue that they systematically invert the comedies, in which children cannot feature. The film is the story of working-class Stella, who falling under the influence of Hollywood movies dreams of a better life. This she attains by marrying the manager of the factory at which her father and brother work, who has himself just broken off an engagement with a woman of his own class. But the engaging and quick-witted Stella soon tires of her stolid, respectable husband and their marriage comes to an end, leaving Stella with only her beloved daughter Laurel. Her husband one day runs into his ex-fiancée, now Mrs Morrison, who is widowed, and – we cannot tell whether this is deliberate on her part or not – thanks to Stella’s own behaviour when they meet again he finds it acceptable to re-establish his relationship with her. Meanwhile – and against her own chastening experience – Stella tries to find a suitable match for Laurel. But Laurel, a sensitive and caring young woman, is reluctant to leave her lonely and dependent mother. Stella’s solution to this, analogous to the way she made her husband leave her, is to dress gaudily at a holiday resort they are staying at so that Laurel is embarrassed and prepared to break with her. Indeed, during one of her occasional visits to see her father, it is one of Mrs Morrison’s own children and her father’s new stepson that she falls in love with. The film ends with an extraordinary scene of the marriage of Stella’s daughter to Mrs Morrison’s son inside Mrs Morrison’s house. Stella has been invited, but does not go, although Mrs Morrison, perhaps sensing Stella’s presence standing outside with the rest of the crowd, orders that the windows be thrown open so that people might see. In the final shot of the film, we see Stella looking on from a distance at the wedding of Laurel, who represents perhaps her last attachment to public respectability and the one for whom she sacrificed her own life. C OMEDIES OF REMARRIAGE AND MELODRAMAS

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However, instead of dismay and tears at the fact that she is leaving her daughter forever, an extraordinary smile crosses Stella’s face as she walks off-screen, bathed in an inexplicable light, never to be seen again. Of course, for a long time, Stella’s behaviour was seen as typical of the masochistic melodramatic woman’s. The film seemingly authorizes a kind of feminine abjection and self-sacrifice. Stella either consciously or unconsciously gives up first her own life and then her relationship to Laurel, precisely so that her daughter can have the same middleclass respectability that proved so disappointing for her. Thus, the first feminist recuperation of these women’s B-films was at once to analyse their apparent appeal to women and the masculinist ideology that lay hidden in them.9 However, Cavell – going against this reading, and thus at first sight proposing an anti-feminist interpretation, seemingly to authorize Stella’s masochistic behaviour – discerns something else. Stella is not lost at the end, cut off from all social visibility and accreditation and unrecognized for who she is. Indeed, it is those readings that understand her as merely passive or unconscious of her actions that do not truly acknowledge her. In fact, we might suggest, the events of the film take place exactly as a result of Stella’s free will and conscious manipulation. She is not the pawn of unavoidable circumstances, but their author. She does not involuntarily behave badly when her estranged husband comes to visit, hoping for some reconciliation, but deliberately so in order that he might repudiate her. In this, she perhaps admits her part in their separation and the unjustifiability of her dreams of middleclass life. And, more decisively, Stella is not simply unknowingly garish or expressing her extravagant taste in clothes when she dresses as she does in the resort with Laurel watching. Instead, it is part of a deliberate strategy on her part to drive her daughter away, so that she can live her dream of a happy marriage with a respectable partner, even though it did not work out for her.10 In all of this, it is a matter of acknowledging Stella and who she really is, something no one in the film (her husband, her various boyfriends, even her own daughter) seems capable of, except arguably Mrs Morrison when she orders that the windows of her house be thrown over so that the crowd outside can watch. As Cavell writes in Contesting Tears: My thought is that the pressure of this interpretation [of Stella as selfsacrificing] is excessive, too insistent, that there is massive evidence in the film that Stella knows exactly what the effect is there [at the hotel], 104

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that her spectacle is part of her strategy for separating Laurel from her, not the catastrophe of misunderstanding that causes her afterward to form her strategy. (CT, 201) Here again, as with Gaslight, Cavell suggests a certain resourcefulness or holding back: Stella’s calm and self-possessed manipulation of all those who recognize her, including generations of cinema goers. Except, we might say, Cavell and Mrs Morrison, who both recognize Stella as behind all of the events of the film. In this sense, Stella functions as that exception that makes possible the symbolic order, and in this sense plays the role of the primal father, who cannot be spoken of but for whom everything stands in. Or, more precisely, he is always being spoken of, but always under another name. We at once are always speaking of the primal father even when not speaking of him; and even when we do speak of the primal father we miss him, insofar as he is always what is excluded to allow us to speak of him. And is this not the economy of Cavell’s comedy and its overcoming of scepticism? Perhaps this is why Stella ends the film with a smile on her face and why certain moments of the film – now that we are able to recognize her in her unrecognizability – can strike us as comedic. There might indeed be something to those critiques of Cavell that accuse him of overlooking the feminine in these films. But where is this ‘feminine’ to be found in Stella Dallas? At one point in his chapter on Max Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman, Cavell cites two wellknown essays by Jacques Lacan, ‘God and the Jouissance of Woman’ and ‘A Love Letter’, but merely suggests that they would be useful for further elaboration of his argument without doing so himself (CT, 101–2). However, a number of years later, the Lacanian social critic Joan Copjec did extend Cavell’s analysis of the film in her essay ‘The Invention of Crying and the Antitheatricality of the Act’. She begins there by agreeing with Cavell when he says that Stella is not passive; but she then goes on to disagree with him by insisting that she is also not active, hysterically standing behind or outside of events in order to manipulate them: ‘If the hysteric’s response to the world’s unfoundedness is a comprehensible solution, it is not the best one. While exposing this unfoundedness, it makes itself impotent, for it leads to scepticism regarding what we expect from a flawed society or to a naïve voluntarism about our possibility of escaping from it.’11 Instead, drawing on Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, she proposes another reading of the film. To put it too briefly, it would be to argue that Stella’s strategy is not one of sacrifice and exception, whose C OMEDIES OF REMARRIAGE AND MELODRAMAS

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aim is ultimately to be recognized, but what we might call a sacrifice of sacrifice, a certain giving up of the exception so that it is not a matter of having to recognize or acknowledge Stella. That is to say – and this is almost unthinkable – Stella’s walking off-screen at the end of the film is her walking away from the entire symbolic economy in which her actions and ingenuity would be recognized. We would henceforth be unable to recognize her, even in her apparent unrecognizability to others. It is not a matter, as with the economy of scepticism, of a distance that is possible only because of its overcoming, of the circularity between knowing and unknowing, madness and its remarking. It is a moment somehow ‘before’ or ‘outside’ of this. But the question remains: could this be thought as anything but an exception to the exception?12

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6 WILLIAM ROTHMAN

There is another perfect example of the melodrama of the unknown woman not discussed by Cavell in Contesting Tears: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Cavell briefly mentions the film in The World Viewed, but it is really an ex-student of Cavell who has written about it best in a Cavellian way: the film theorist and historian William Rothman. Rothman, in fact, along with fellow film scholar Marian Keane, once wrote an entire book on The World Viewed, Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film (2000), which if anything in its more orthodox argumentative procedure is more rigorous and searching than the original. As well, some six years earlier Rothman offered a vigorous ‘defence’ of Cavell against his critics in ‘Cavell’s Philosophy and What Film Studies Calls “Theory”: Must the Field of Film Studies Speak in One Voice?’ (1994). And in this chapter, as a way of elaborating the consequences of Cavell’s work for cinema studies, we look in detail at two of Rothman’s books: Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (1982), a study of Hitchcock’s films from The Lodger (1927) to Psycho (1960); and Documentary Film Classics (1997), a survey of documentary cinema from Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) to D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1967). But before we do that, we might examine Rothman’s reading of Vertigo, carried on in a number of essays across several decades, from ‘Vertigo: The Unknown Woman in Hitchcock’ (1987) to ‘Scottie’s Dream, Judy’s Plan, Madeleine’s Revenge’ (2013). In particular, Rothman’s reading – in the second essay more than the first – concerns that episode towards the end of the film when the character Scottie (played by James Stewart) has rediscovered Madeleine (Kim Novak) in the form of Judy, an ordinary shopgirl, who improbably allows herself to be made over into the image of the woman he has lost. It is an extraordinary moment with Judy, after first contemplating running away from Scottie, because she fears that he will discover her involvement

in the murder of Madeleine by her husband Gavin Elster, deciding to stay, because she realizes she now has strong feelings about him. With her transformation to Madeleine now complete, the couple make love in her hotel room – thankfully, not shown but indicated only by a black screen for a few seconds – and Scottie sits back in his chair contentedly while Judy fixes herself in a mirror before they go out for dinner. ‘Oh, help me with this, will you?’ she asks Scottie, holding out her necklace for him to attach around her neck. It is, of course, Madeleine’s jewelled necklace, presumably given to her by Elster as some kind of payoff; and, standing in front of the mirror, Scottie puts together the entire sequence of events, Judy’s complicity in them and the way he has been used, in his words, as a ‘made-to-order witness’. Cancelling their planned dinner, Scottie drives Judy back to the bell tower at the San Juan Batista Mission – where Elster killed the original Madeline – dragging her up to the top while telling her what he now knows. Judy then plunges to her death just before they reconcile, thus replicating the fate of the original Madeleine, and it is perhaps only at this point that Scottie realizes what he has lost. It is an emotionally charged climax to one of the most discussed and critically contested films of all time. Rothman in his first essay attempts to think Vertigo broadly along the lines of Cavell’s ‘melodramas of the unknown woman’: ‘At the end of Vertigo, Scottie, like the Louis Jourdan figure at the end of Letter from an Unknown Woman, awakens to the realisation that he has failed to acknowledge the woman he loves.’1 (Fascinatingly, as we have seen, Cavell for his part never quite elaborates the film in these terms, even after inventing the genre.) But it is really only with Rothman’s second essay that what is properly at stake in the notion of the ‘unknown woman’ becomes clear. In ‘Scottie’s Dream’, Rothman proposes a radical new reading of Vertigo, in effect claiming that no one yet has properly seen the film, and no one yet has properly acknowledged Madeleine. For what he suggests – much as Cavell with Stella in Stella Dallas – is that Judy’s decision to let Scottie fasten her necklace is not accidental, but deliberate. She wants Scottie to know of her involvement in the crime before they have any relationship, so that he understands both the truth of what happened to him and that she is not a mere shopgirl he can manipulate but a talented actress who can perfectly impersonate Madeleine. And she wants to tell Scottie not directly, but as a compliment to him to allow him to draw the conclusion himself. However, Scottie, as typical of the men in these melodramas, does not want to acknowledge Judy as who she is, not only because it would tell 108

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him that he has been played by her all along, but because it puts his own desire to turn her into Madeleine alongside that of Elster. He is not prepared to be shown by Judy – and, of course, what is now implied is that the obviously intelligent Judy realizes before it plays out in reality her eventual fate, but allows it to happen because it is the price she must pay for her mistake, her foolish optimism in believing that Scottie was the kind of man who would understand what she had done, that he was in any way a fitting match for her (and perhaps belatedly also realizing that the diabolical Elster, whom she likely left after the crime, was her true partner). However, reflects Rothman, the same thing could equally be said of him and the millions of others who have seen the film without realizing this. He too – and on this point we go back to Lear – was unable to acknowledge Judy, was blind in not seeing her as a perfect instance of the ‘unknown woman’. (Ironically, before this latest epiphany, he had already identified a number of other women in films as examples of this.) As Rothman writes in ‘Scottie’s Dream’ in a kind of scholarly mea culpa: ‘And yet long after I had the nerve to think the thought, I continued to resist thinking that the woman in Vertigo knew herself better than I knew her – and better than I knew myself. Like Scottie, I loved this woman and wished to go on loving her. I did not wish to think that I was her made-to-order witness’ (MWK?, 157). It is as though Judy as the ‘unknown woman’ was truly unknown before she was recognized or acknowledged by Rothman, but the fact that she eventually was tells us something important about the logic of unknownness and scepticism. For, again, the real point here would be that ‘unknownness’ – a remarked unknownness – is not at all the other side of acknowledgement, what acknowledgement has to overcome, but only itself another form of acknowledgement. Perhaps, as we saw with Gaslight and Stella Dallas, at least in Cavell’s reading of them, the fact is that unknownness, like scepticism, exists only in retrospect, in the aporia between scepticism and its overcoming, melodrama and comedy, in which neither is possible without the other. For, indeed, there is something irredeemably comic about Rothman’s proposal here (and Judy does hand over her jewels with a certain smile). It would be not only, as he admits, because it is so far-fetched and hypothetical, but because, if we were to follow what he is saying to its end, we would have something almost like the relationship between Peter and Ellie in It Happened, in which everything they say takes on another meaning because of one thing that cannot be spoken of. In other words, in the world of sceptical W ILLIAM ROTHMAN

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melodrama, nothing is unrecognized, nothing is unknown, nothing is unacknowledged. As soon as it is posited as unknown, it takes on significance. A single exception allows everything else to be spoken of. The only condition is that we cannot directly speak of the other; but we are always able to read their indifference as meaningful, as precisely not to speak of something, and therefore to see ourselves as the one uniquely meant to understand. Suddenly we have a circularity in which the known and unknown, doubt and its overcoming, bring each other about in that doubling modernism introduces into the world. Rothman had earlier written a whole book on Hitchcock, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, which treated a long span of Hitchcock’s career through the in-depth analysis of just five films: The Lodger, Murder! (1930), The 39 Steps (1935), Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Psycho. The book indeed sets something of a benchmark – and in this regard is quite different from the method of Cavell – in the forensic, frame-byframe detail of its analyses. It is tempting to suggest that there is little or no ‘philosophical’ consequence to Rothman’s survey, but merely a dry, technical filmic découpage. However, the overall arc of Rothman’s breakdown is immensely revealing in ways both that he intends and that go beyond his stated objectives. In The Murderous Gaze, Rothman brilliantly tests Cavell’s arguments about film and its mode of spectatorial address found in The World Viewed and his two volumes on Hollywood cinema. In fact – although Rothman is respectful enough not to draw attention to this – it could even be said he challenges Cavell’s reading of late-period Hollywood in The World Viewed, seeing in Psycho almost the exact opposite of what Cavell suggests there.2 And then, even more intriguingly, in an unexpected or counterintuitive connection that is little if at all commented upon, Rothman makes effectively the same argument about documentary in Documentary Film Classics. That is, he sees the same passage from what we might call ‘theatre’ to ‘cinema’ played out in both the movement of Hitchcock’s career and across the history of documentary from the 1920s to 1960s. In this, we see something similar to Cavell’s argument concerning the progression of the medium in modernism, but in not quite the same terms as Cavell or following the same chronology. For, if for Cavell the movement from pre-war comedies to wartime melodramas to post-war Neo-Hollywood corresponds to a ‘loss of conviction’ (WV, 131) or fall into scepticism, for Rothman by contrast it corresponds to a struggle against scepticism, towards an increased recognition or acknowledgement. 110

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Although Rothman narrates The Murderous Gaze chronologically, as in our treatments of Pursuits of Happiness and Contesting Tears we do not treat its examples in strictly the same order as Rothman himself. That is to say, if Murder! predates The 39 Steps, here in our understanding of the films it comes after. It is Murder!, or rather a particular moment in it, that allows or better motivates the turn from the ‘theatrical’ to the ‘cinematic’.3 It is Murder! that comes after The 39 Steps as a move away from the theatrical, even though in an obvious sense it is more theatrical than it, insofar as it is set almost entirely inside the world of theatre. At the beginning of The 39 Steps, we are introduced to Richard Hannay, played by then matinée idol Robert Donat, as we enter a crowded London music hall where a so-called Mr Memory is performing his act on stage. The crowd asks Mr Memory questions, and Mr Memory with his prodigious recall answers, although of course most of his act consists of light-hearted and occasionally ribald banter with the rowdy, often drunk, workingclass audience. (‘How old is Mae West?’ ‘I know, sir, but I never tell a lady’s age.’) Through various misadventures, Hannay is accused of the murder of a female foreign agent, who urgently approaches him after Mr Memory’s performance, saying she needs to hide from a mysterious spy network called ‘The 39 Steps’, who plan to smuggle the plans for a new airplane engine out of England. She is seemingly murdered by one of them at Hannay’s flat overnight; and, realizing that the police would never believe that he did not do it, Hannay goes on the run, with only this single clue to help clear his name. Along the way, he meets a young woman, Pamela, who at first also does not believe that he is innocent of the crime he is accused of. But in the final scene of the film, with Pamela now convinced Hannay is innocent, their search leads them back to the music hall where it all began, now realizing that Mr Memory has been forced to memorize the stolen instructions by the foreign agents, and is due soon to pass on what he knows. When Mr Memory gets up on stage, Hannay yells out a question about ‘The 39 Steps’, and Mr Memory is instinctively, involuntarily unable to stop himself, and begins to recite to the bemused audience what he knows about the organization. One of the foreign spies waiting in the wings shoots Mr Memory before he can give too much away and is arrested, with the police now grateful to the same Hannay they had previously accused of murder. In the final shot of the film, Pamela puts her hand in Hannay’s, in a sense placing herself back into the handcuffs that once attached her to him when they were arrested and that she had previously slipped out of. W ILLIAM ROTHMAN

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The film, like the earlier Murder!, is set at least in part in a theatre: the loud, boisterous, interactive music hall at the beginning and end. It is where Mr Memory, whom we might otherwise think of as a strange, idiot savant-like figure, in fact shows himself, as he would have to be, aware of the crowd and capable of interacting with it. (And we will see the second time around the intense, automatist pressure the theatrical situation exerts, as though there were certain lines to be recalled or actions to be followed, as we will also see in Murder!) Theatre is, of course, the place where cinema is said to have started, if we believe that early films are nothing more than recorded plays, and from which Hitchcock is said to have drawn the principles of his yet-to-be-invented thriller genre. However, the film is also ‘theatrical’ in the more particular sense in which both Cavell and Rothman use the word: that there is no ‘invisible’ wall separating actor and spectator, but the actor is thoroughly aware of being looked at and plays on our gaze. In other words, the gaze of the spectator is very much part of the film, helping bring about the action. The whole film in effect has the interactivity of the music hall. We can see this consciousness of the audience a contrario in the opening shot of the film when the at-the-time well-known romantic star Donat enters unseen with his back towards the camera and trenchcoat collar pulled up. Instead of being merely unknown, he is tantalizingly mysterious, deliberately holding himself back from the audience, who already know from the credits that he is in the film. (Immediately before The 39 Steps, Donat had become famous for a role similar to the character he plays here.) Later Hitchcock will brilliantly allegorize the power of the camera’s – and director’s – gaze by having Hannay sit next to and pretend to kiss Pamela in order to fool the railway guards, who are looking for a single man loose on the train. Later still, Hannay will assume the identity of a local politician speaking at a town hall meeting in order to mislead his pursuers. Finally, in the last shot of the film, after Hannay’s allegations of a secret order behind appearances are proved correct and Pamela’s trust in him is shown to be justified, the two lovers hold hands in front of the prone body of Mr Memory, with Hannay’s handcuffs the emblem of a certain symbolic gaze that at once comes between him and Pamela and allows them to get together (or, as we have seen earlier on the train, it is only in order to fool or transgress this gaze that they desire at all). All of this is the ‘theatrical’ of Rothman, which is that mode of filmmaking that explicitly admits the presence of an audience looking on and whose gaze it tries to take into account, not only as a subject within but as 112

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the very driving force of the film itself. The model for the movie audience is, in fact, the crowd who interact with Mr Memory at the music hall, who see themselves represented on stage. In other words, we see our own standins in the film. We see ourselves as we watch the film. Of course, we are using ‘theatrical’ here in a special sense, insofar as in Cavell’s conception of theatre it is not a matter of the audience actually crossing the footlights and occupying the stage. This is Rothman on this aspect of The 39 Steps: ‘I have been calling Hannay’s acting “improvisation” to register that he acts freely and yet is at every moment framed. What is unprecedented is Hannay’s unselfconscious acceptance of this condition, the other face of Robert Donat’s graceful acceptance of being filmed’ (MG, 167). And, indeed – and here the complex connection to the comedies of remarriage – there is inevitably a comic aspect to these early Hitchcocks. They are comic, we might say, in that there is an attempt to stand outside of the relationship between the spectator and the film, as though Hitchcock, as was undoubtedly the case, wanted to take into account how the spectator would see the film, predict in advance how they would react to what they were looking at. It is again the complex position of laughter, which as we have said is an attempt to stand outside of our usual relationship to things, to look on at ourselves and our relationship to the world. But what also is the difference between this theatricality and the comedies of remarriage? It is that it believes that it can entirely overcome the distance between the actor and the audience. Laughter in the comedies of remarriage is a way of remarking the difference between the characters and the characters and the audience without necessarily overcoming it. But here in the ‘theatrical’ set up of Hitchcock’s cinema, it is as though this distance can definitively be done away with and we would no longer be subject to it. It is again Rothman’s argument that Hitchcock presides over his films like a god, looking on at the relations between the actors and the actors and the audience with an all-seeing gaze. However, there is a moment in The 39 Steps that goes against the assumption that we can know in advance how things will turn out, occupy the position of omniscient seer in turning life into a form of theatre. It is to be found in the fact that, for all of Hannay’s powers of detection and Pamela’s belief in them, it is something else that actually produces the solution to the mystery in forcing events to their conclusion. It is that final moment of the film when Mr Memory is on stage and Hannay yells from the audience the question, ‘What are the 39 Steps?’ It is at this point that Mr Memory, despite knowing that his foreign handlers are in W ILLIAM ROTHMAN

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the theatre about to take him out of the country and despite knowing the consequences of telling anybody about what he knows, pauses for a moment, looks despairingly about and, realizing he is on stage and cannot not answer the question, begins to recite hesitatingly what he knows, ‘The 39 Steps is an organisation of spies . . . ’ , before a shot rings out of the darkness, killing him. It is here a matter, as Cavell puts it, of ‘theatre defeating theatre’: it is only something like this particular capacity of theatre that can overcome the generalized theatricality of everyday life. It is only on stage that we can go beyond the consciousness of others’ looks upon us, that we can regain a kind of authenticity, automaticity and unself-consciousness. (And, needless to say, Mr Memory’s behaviour here is a beautiful metaphor for the ‘automaticity’ of film after a certain scepticism.) Theatre enters life or produces a certain effect upon life, but not in any deliberate, controllable or predictable way where we would simply cross the barrier separating them. (As we have seen before, there is the complex question of whether Brecht and Beckett still represent this ambition for theatre in their opposed ways.) Rather, it would not be any kind of a doing away with the distinction between theatre and life, but a certain redoubling of life by theatre. It would be something like the ability of theatre to produce the effect of life, so that the life outside of theatre could be produced only by a certain theatrical effect, a reflection of theatre upon theatre. It is, in fact, in Hitchcock’s Murder! that we see the first instance of this logic in his work and hence the first move beyond the ‘theatrical’. The plot concerns the celebrated actor and playwright Sir John Menier, who serves on a jury that convicts a young actress, Diana Baring, of a murder Sir John is convinced she did not commit. Sir John, for all of his oratorical powers, fails to persuade his fellow jury members, but after the young woman is convicted he vows to clear her name and find the real killer. As his investigations proceed, his suspicions fall upon the androgynous actor and circus performer Handell Fane, who is part of the same troupe as the woman and her supposed victim. But the murder has obviously already been investigated by the police without success, so Sir John has to find another way. He decides to write a play based on the murder, The Inner History of the Baring Case, and then calls Fane in to audition for the part of the murderer. Fane, of course, is unable to resist the opportunity, and there follows an extraordinary scene in which Sir John and Fane rehearse the moment in which the murderer plots his crime, looked on by the stage manager Markham. As the two exchange lines from the play, 114

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Fane, although knowing Sir John’s intentions, and after insisting hesitantly that he is unable to read his lines with conviction, then begins to suggest how Sir John might better write the scene, based on his thoughts of how the crime was carried out: SIR JOHN (as Fane walks towards the window of Sir John’s room):  How did you know his entrance was through the front window? This was how I made his entrance. Good, Mr Fane. You’ve forgotten your script. FANE: The script? SIR JOHN: Now where are we? Yes. ‘Friends? I can tell you things . . .’ FANE: Wouldn’t it be better if I were to pick up the poker from the back fireplace before I made my entrance into the room? SIR JOHN: Excellent idea. I’ll put that in. Thank you. And, immediately following this scene, in what must be understood as a displaced confession of guilt, Fane hangs himself from his trapeze in the circus in front of a horrified crowd, although thankfully his now suspended body is never shown on-screen. Of course, as Sir John well knows, his strategy here is based on that most famous example of a play-within-a-play designed to entrap a murderer: the ‘mousetrap’ in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which Prince Hamlet has performed in front of his uncle Claudius, the King of Denmark. It is a play based on the murder of Hamlet’s father, whom Hamlet suspects his uncle of poisoning so that he can become king. The result is to unleash a series of deadly events that Hamlet neither foresees nor in all likelihood wanted. We watch as Claudius looks on at The Murder of Gonzago, in which an anonymous poisoner murders a king before seducing his wife, growing more and more agitated before standing up and demanding ‘Give me some light. Away!’, and unleashing a bloody round of reprisals that will eventually lead to the deaths both of Hamlet’s mother and Hamlet himself, precisely confirming in this all of Hamlet’s original suspicions. And, indeed, this inner play does not merely echo prior events – that is, confirm the guilt for a crime that has already been committed – but intervenes in events themselves, retrospectively changing the past out of which it comes. It is just those murders his uncle commits or authorizes after the play that make us realize his original guilt in poisoning his brother. It is what Hamlet melancholily reflects upon late in the play in the following terms: ‘I had my father’s signet in my purse,/Which was the W ILLIAM ROTHMAN

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model of the Danish seal;/Folded the writ up in the form of th ’ other . . .  Their defeat/Does by their own insinuation grow.’ And Cavell in his essay on Hamlet in Disowning Knowledge speaks of the particular mode of ‘acknowledgement’ at stake in this play-within-the-play: the fact that, if the putting of real-life events on a stage is a ‘remarking’ of them, this is not merely to distance the spectator, but to reveal that they are inextricably part of them: ‘The experience of meaning (like the drawing of a circle around a circle) is discontinuous; each step is a form of life. Shakespeare’s drama, like Freud’s, proposes our coming to know what we cannot just not know; like philosophy’ (DK, 191). However, as a way of throwing light on both Rothman’s interpretation of Murder! and Cavell’s of Hamlet, we might turn to a remarkable treatment of Shakespeare’s play by Lacanian social theorist Alenka Zupančič in The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. By ‘shortest shadow’ Zupančič means to evoke the Nietzschean idea that at midday when the sun is at its highest it is not that there is no shadow, but only that the shadow is invisible. The implication is that the brightest, most illuminated, most taken-for-granted everyday world exists not in itself but only insofar as it stands in for something else, although this something else can only be seen through what stands in for it. There is only light, but this only because of shadow. (Indeed, we would want to say the same about any authentic philosophy: that with Cavell, for example, conviction is possible only because of the overcoming of scepticism as its ‘shortest shadow’. The hypothesis of scepticism doubles the world, turning it into a certain double negative, as in that passage above on what ‘cannot not be known’.) And Zupančič wants to suggest that the ‘mousetrap’ in Hamlet doubles the world in the same way. The play-within-the-play brings about not any kind of endless metonymic recursion without end – a play within a play within a play . . . – nor even a simple reflection upon reality from somewhere outside of it.4 Zupančič rejects, like Cavell, any kind of continuous limit or boundary between the play and the playwithin-the-play. Rather, the play-within-the-play introduces a gap in reality, producing a ‘connection’5 between levels, so that reality is now internally split or divided from itself. The play-within-a-play is like the hypothesis of a shadow at midday, opening up a break in the world just as it is. The very completeness of the world, the fact that there is no outside to it, is possible only because of a certain space within it. The world henceforth stands in for itself, so that what it stands in for – this is why it is not a simple transcendental condition – is not to be seen outside of it. 116

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In the mirroring of the world by a play, the world ultimately becomes its own mirror without the necessity for any play. This is Zupančič on that ‘mousetrap’ common both to Shakespeare and Nietzsche’s philosophy: The (re)doubling we are dealing with is above all a co-positing of the two, and our place as spectators is more on the edge of these two plays than simply in an external, all-embracing position. One could, in fact, say that the ‘mousetrap’ in Hamlet is structured like a Nietzschean midday, where the beyond takes its place, and assumes its form, in the figure of the middle.6 Rothman’s point – although only implied and not stated overtly – is that Hitchcock’s later films come after the split introduced by the ‘mousetrap’ of Murder! They take place in the register no longer of the ‘theatrical’ but the ‘cinematic’. Of course, this is Rothman’s ultimately Cavellian argument that it is only at a certain point that Hitchcock discovers the ‘medium’ of film and his work thereby becomes ‘modern’. He breaks with the ‘theatrical’ methods he and other early directors came out of and begins to explore the forms, techniques and motivations specific to cinema (without drawing on anything like a physical ‘essence’ of the medium or implying any kind of irreversible historical teleology). And in order to specify further this difference between the ‘theatrical’ and ‘cinematic’ in Hitchcock’s oeuvre, we might look in some detail at the last film Rothman addresses in his book, which serves as something of a summary of all that comes before: the infamous and almost inaugural horror film Psycho. In fact, for Cavell, writing in The World Viewed, Psycho is an example of a vulgarized ‘Neo-Hollywood’ he rejects, speaking of the film as typical of a ‘new theatricalising of images’ (WV, 131). But, indeed, although he was not to know it, by the time of the second edition of the book in 1979 Hitchcock’s film, after a long period of not being screened and critical neglect, was about to become immensely influential on a new cycle of ‘Neo-Hollywood’ horror films: the Halloween, Friday the 13th and Evil Dead originals and sequels, and even beyond that up to the present as a forerunner of the influence of television upon cinema. (Psycho was indebted to Hitchcock’s successful television series of around the same time, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, with its retro black-and-white film stock, cheap sets and pared-down and non-star cast, which complicates Rothman’s claiming of it as distinctively cinematic.) W ILLIAM ROTHMAN

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But Rothman is right: Psycho forms an absolute contrast to The 39 Steps. As opposed to Hannay’s constant playing to an imagined audience, whether it be other people or the camera, Norman in Psycho is entirely unaware of how he strikes others. We only have to think of the chilling scene in the Bates Motel after Marion Crane has checked in and Norman invites her to share milk and sandwiches with him. Marion is a woman who is always being flirted with, who is aware of the gaze of men upon her and conversely of men judging how they are seen by her – we only have to think of the vulgar Southern businessman who spills his cash out on the table before her at the office in which she works at the beginning of the film. However, as Marion sits in the airless, claustrophobic parlour she is at first relieved and then disconcerted by the fact that Norman appears completely unaware of her, or at least uninterested in how he strikes her. He makes no sexual pass at her in his otherwise empty hotel; he is not aware of her growing lack of interest in what he is saying; and he makes an unwanted confession to her of his state of mind without noticing whether she is really listening to him. And this unawareness of others is beautifully figured by Hitchcock in a series of shots that are the emphatic opposite of the way Hannay is filmed: not at all as mysterious, deliberately withholding himself from (i.e., playing upon) the gaze of the camera, but as in the scenes of him standing behind his desk answering the detective Arbogast’s questions with the camera right underneath his chin, showing him in immense and distorting close-up. Or we might think of the haunting last shot of the film, which holds unflinchingly on Norman for a long time, looking right into his unblinking eyes in the brightly lit room in which he is now confined. Of course, the obvious comparison here is to the ‘melodramas of the unknown woman’. As in those films, there is no obvious interplay with the camera, no mutual recognition with the other characters, but instead a kind of enigma or unavailability of the character to both the camera and the spectator. Indeed, we might even want to think Psycho as going beyond the logic of melodrama. For, if in those films there is a final recognition of the women in them, even if only by the analyst and only after repeated viewings, here there simply is not. If there is a certain exception in them, there is none to be found in Psycho. If the women in melodrama are able to be read as neurotic – and, of course, there is a long psychoanalytic tradition connecting neurosis and the feminine – Norman is properly psychotic and to that extent masculine (although paradoxically in Copjec’s treatment he would actually be closer to the feminine). There is no knowing him; he needs 118

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no recognition; there is no question of the overcoming of scepticism and therefore no scepticism. Hence we can understand the reasons for Cavell’s own disdain for and dismissal of the film. Except that Rothman, in what must be understood as a redemptive gesture, indeed of the kind we see in Cavell’s recovery of the women in melodramas, believes that he can see something recognizable and intended to be recognized in Norman. He can find a Hitchcock who wants to be acknowledged in his vengeful and murderous singularity. In this sense, Hitchcock and the Norman who stands in for him are no longer psychotic but again merely neurotic. And they are once more therefore unable to live up to that true ‘feminine’ logic outlined by Copjec. Perhaps even finally, that ‘cinematic’ Rothman gestures towards lapses into the theatrical. Here are almost the last words from the ‘Postscript’ to The Murderous Gaze, in which Rothman proposes that he uniquely is able to recognize or acknowledge Hitchcock: Clearly, in the readings that make up this book, I cast myself as the figure who steps forward to answer Hitchcock’s call for acknowledgment. Perhaps it is foolish or arrogant or crazy for me to play such a role. . . .  If Hitchcock’s authorship is a call for acknowledgement, it is equally an experience of dread, and avoidance, of acknowledgement. (MG, 346, 347) Intriguingly – although the connection is rarely if ever made – the same movement from the ‘theatrical’ to the ‘cinematic’ is traced by Rothman in his book on documentary cinema, Documentary Film Classics. And this is to tell us, insofar as we could not think of a more unexpected or even far-fetched connection than that between Hitchcock and documentary, that both books are fundamentally about the medium of film, which is to say the relationship of the spectator to the projected image. Documentary Film Classics, like The Murderous Gaze – but this is much more unusual in studies of documentary cinema – is a close, detailed, at times frameby-frame analysis of individual films. However, we would want to suggest that what Rothman is offering is not so much a stylistic as a logical analysis. He is addressing the issue of how documentaries – and this is their purported, often-stated rationale – stay convincing in their claim to be capturing the real. Of course, this has been a question often put in the history of documentary cinema, including by film-makers themselves, but Rothman considers it in specifically Cavellian terms. After perhaps an initial period in which the spectator was ‘automatically’ removed from W ILLIAM ROTHMAN

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what they saw – in which strictly speaking it is not a matter of either scepticism or its overcoming – documentary cinema becomes caught up in concerns regarding what we have called the ‘theatrical’. Just as we saw with Hitchcock and later Hollywood cinema in general, documentary is arguably no longer simply a matter of ‘letting the world exhibit itself ’ (WV, 146), insofar as the presence of the camera affects what is being recorded and the world already, even without the presence of any actual camera, understands itself as though a documentary film. Rothman in Documentary Film Classics seeks to take up the question of how at the end of the theatrical a certain principle of the cinematic might be discovered (or, what is the same thing, how is it only through the distancing of the spectator from the events on the screen that any ‘acknowledgement’ of them would be possible). He attempts to provide an answer of sorts through a study of six exemplary films: Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1921), Luis Buñuel’s Land without Bread (1932), Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955), Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961), Richard Leacock and Joyce Chopra’s A Happy Mother’s Day (1963) and D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1967). This sequence can be seen to trace a recognizable arc from the first pioneering, let us say ‘innocent’, period of documentary with Nanook of the North, through the rejection of the idea that documentary can be in an unmediated relationship with its subject matter in Land without Bread and Night and Fog, to a return to cinema-verité or direct cinema in Chronicle of a Summer, A Happy Mother’s Day and Don’t Look Back, in which the film-maker once again attempts to remove themselves from what is shown. However, Rothman rewrites this history outside of the usual terms or chronologies of documentary. In fact, each distinct period he identifies – and this is the problem of ‘modernism’ in any artistic form – is an attempt to maintain conviction in the medium after the previous ‘solution’ increasingly appears untenable. The history of documentary is a series of attempts to prevent or overcome the fall into the scepticism of the period before. Indeed, even the first film Rothman considers, Nanook of the North, already raises the problem of scepticism. Nanook is often understood as the inaugural documentary, in which the American film-maker Flaherty journeys to the then almost inaccessible Canadian archipelago to film the Inuk man Nanook and his family going about such everyday activities as building an igloo, hunting a walrus and playing with huskies. Of course, these apparently ‘ordinary’ activities were recorded in the days when there was no widespread radio, television 120

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or photography in newspapers, and such cinema features took on an air of exotic, almost interplanetary, adventure. Audiences were astonished to be seeing fellow citizens of the earth whose life-worlds they could never have guessed at. Flaherty’s film is not infrequently described in terms of the romantic idea of ‘first contact’ with a ‘primitive’ people, as though they represented a kind of civilizational pre-history, as though not only were modern cinema audiences seeing Nanook for the first time, but Nanook himself was barely used to being seen at all (and certainly not by a camera). To this extent, we might even understand Nanook as corresponding to that early ‘automatist’ period of cinema Cavell sets out in The World Viewed, in which the spectator is ‘absent’ (WV, 23) from the world and is rendered ‘invisible’ (WV, 24) by the screen. Except that, as has subsequently been revealed and as is obvious from any watching of the film, Nanook is far from innocent of Western civilization and Flaherty is not following a subject who is unaware of being filmed. In fact, Flaherty and Nanook established a close rapport both before and during the shoot. Many of the actions of the film, not only Nanook’s wife and family facing the camera and waving but cutting a window in the igloo and harpooning the walrus, were not contingent or merely good fortune on Flaherty’s part, but deliberately staged for the camera. The frequently made claim of Nanook as looking upon a world that is not aware of being looked at is simply not true. (And the question of how for so long viewers were able to ignore the obvious evidence of the film before admitting this is, as we have seen elsewhere, a question worth asking.) There is always a direct or indirect taking into account of the camera; there is always an obvious theatricality, an inability to know the world outside of human presence. Henceforth, we might say, we cannot but think that every action is staged for us; and therefore our gaze upon the scene – of course, the only way we can know of it – affects what is being seen. That Wittgenstein experiment of looking on at someone as though they were unaware of being looked at is now impossible: we can never imagine them unaware of being observed. As Rothman writes of the way that this ‘theatricalization’ of the world prevents us from seeing it as it really is: ‘Nanook’s relationship to the camera, the camera’s relationship to him, is part of his reality, part of the camera’s reality, part of the reality being filmed, part of the reality on film, part of the reality of the film’ (DFC, 3). And Rothman subsequently treats a number of films that explicitly take into account the impossibility of what we take to be the ‘documentary’ project, of any special power W ILLIAM ROTHMAN

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of the camera to capture reality in an unmediated way. The first is Land without Bread, which tells the story of a terrible famine in the Las Hurdes region of Spain in 1932 with an objective voice-over stating the facts. Then there is Night and Fog, which evokes the unthinkable event of the Nazi Holocaust through a depiction of the now-abandoned concentration camps of Auchwitz and Majdanek in a poetic voice-over. And, finally, in a very different mood there is Chronicle of a Summer, which surveys a number of French people from different social classes and backgrounds, asking whether they are happy. All of these films in various ways – although it might appear sacrilegious to say this – correspond to that ‘theatrical’ Cavell sets out in The World Viewed and Rothman points to as the first moment of Hitchcock’s cinema. In Land without Bread, the meaning and consequence of what we are looking at would not be adequately understood without an explanatory voice-over. In Night and Fog, the poetic soundtrack seeks to make the unthinkable event of the Holocaust thinkable. In Chronicle of a Summer, as revealed in a later sequence in the film, the various subjects Morin and Rouch interview are self-consciously playing themselves, as are the film-makers themselves when they appear on-screen. This scepticism is ineradicable from documentary film for Rothman, part of its very modernity. But there is also the sense that, more than this, these documentaries are no longer confidant in their ability to overcome or otherwise come to terms with this scepticism, to allow the world to exhibit itself without the film-maker helping it do so. As Rothman writes of the cinema-verité of Morin and Rouch, in which they consciously try to provoke the events they witness: ‘It may appear that Rouch has given the world up, given up on the world, and that “shared anthropology” is his excuse . . . a justification that deep down he knows is false, to mask a lack of courage’ (DFC, 108). However, in the last two films Rothman takes up in his book, there is something different, or at least a twist on Morin and Rouch’s formula. Both A Happy Mother’s Day and Don’t Look Back are important examples of the so-called direct cinema. Direct cinema – and here there is something of a contrast with the cinema-verité of Morin and Rouche – is the deliberate attempt to overcome the scepticism of the immediately preceding period by no longer having the film-maker come between the subject and the spectator. It is not simply that first ‘innocent’ moment of Nanook, which – at least in its usual understanding – is premodern and pre-sceptical and thus in a way always lost or impossible, but precisely an attempt to overcome a prior scepticism. It is ‘direct’ not as 122

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such, but only as the overcoming of a prevailing ‘indirectness’. We see this with A Happy Mother’s Day, where Chopra and Leacock ended up reediting their film to remove any false narrative imposed by the producers. But the film we want to concentrate on here is Don’t Look Back, which tells the story of Bob Dylan’s first 1965 tour of England. Pennebaker was seemingly given open access to Dylan, with scenes not only of him performing on stage, but the press conference when he first arrives in England, his relationship with Joan Baez, his meetings with fans and a scene when he invites some fans and fellow musicians back to his hotel room and they end up wrecking it to Dylan’s annoyance. Now all of this might appear to be a situation of absolute theatricality and self-consciousness before the camera, for all of Pennebaker’s apparent (and in a sense ostentatious, insofar as it embodies a conscious rejection of the immediately preceding period of documentary) removal of himself from the film. He certainly asks no questions, gives no direction; and the film is composed of long uninterrupted takes with an often-distorted soundtrack and momentarily out-of-focus shots. But throughout we see a consummately composed Dylan comport himself for the camera, manipulate his audience both onstage and off-, and in his apparent indifference and nonchalance offering evidence of an extraordinary, indeed almost pathologically, narcissistic awareness of the gaze upon him and attempt to take it into account, exactly as Hannay did by pulling his collar up and turning away from the camera at the beginning of The 39 Steps. However – this is the bet or risk Pennebaker runs – it is not against but through this theatricality, through this attempt to take the gaze of the camera into account and play on it, that Dylan reveals his real self. Don’t Look Back in its hall-of-mirrors extension of Dylan’s publicity machine is just like the ‘mousetrap’ in Hamlet, and why the film is not a simple return to the ‘innocent’ direct cinema of Nanook but also not like the conscious self-reflexiveness of Chronicle. A comparison might indeed be made to such contemporary ‘documentary’ TV shows as Big Brother. In a first, let us say theatrical, or to use a psychoanalytic vocabulary Imaginary, moment the invariably young, attractive and social-media savvy contestants, who are used to being looked at, preen and respond positively to all of the attention, both from their fellow contestants and the virtual television audience. But then in a second and still theatrical, in psychoanalyse Symbolic, moment, with the introduction of stakes into the contest and housemates being voted out of the Big Brother house each week, the contestants start to hide things from each other, stand back from W ILLIAM ROTHMAN

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the interplay between their fellow housemates and try to take into account how they are seen by others and make themselves more appealing to the outside audience. And even when they confess in the Big Brother Room, they do not straightforwardly tell the truth but perform it for the Other, seeking to occupy the position of its gaze and reflecting upon how they appear to it. But, finally, breaking with the theatrical and passing to what Rothman calls the ‘cinematic’, or what we might call the Real, as anyone who actually watches the show knows, the contestants neither directly reveal themselves nor are able to hide themselves, but it is through their attempt to play on the gaze of the other contestants and the TV audience that they reveal themselves and on the basis of which we cast our votes.7 We see the same thing with Dylan in Don’t Look Back. On one level, against any claims for a ‘direct’ cinema, he is such a mediated phenomenon that no documentary could ever capture the truth about him. Indeed, from the very beginning of the film when he is interviewed by journalists soon after touching down at the airport, he consciously plays on his selfimage and turns it upon himself, seeking either parodically to conform to it or deliberately to negate it, which come down to the same thing. But in a second moment of the film – which makes possible that first – it is through Dylan’s attempts to take a distance on himself like this that he gives himself away, that we see the ‘real’ Dylan beneath the mask. And this is emblematized by Dylan’s performance of both his and others’ songs in the film, in which, as Dylan emphasizes – and Rothman insightfully echoes – against any matter of their interpretation, it is a matter not of ‘knowing’ but of ‘acknowledging’ them. They are ultimately not about anything but are that thing; and their performance, no matter how conscious, practised and technically adept, would not work unless the performer loses themselves in them and actually becomes the song.8 As Rothman writes: ‘Behaviour that seems candid, for example, may really be an act. Yet perceived as the act it is, it is nonetheless revealing. . . . As in the later philosophy of Wittgenstein, the goal is not knowledge but acknowledgement (the acknowledgement of the limits of knowledge)’ (DFC, 156). In a way, like Morin and Rouche’s cinema-verite, it is not a matter of capturing some unmediated reality; the act of filming or the presence of the film-maker is always a part of what is being recorded. But also, against Morin and Rouche, what is being recorded is always beyond the control of the film-maker, who is finally unable to predict or scientifically reflect upon the consequences of their actions. Put simply, there is no looking back. And, after Rothman’s book, almost in fulfilment 124

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of its logic, there are a whole series of documentaries exploring the same ‘mousetrap’ logic as Pennebaker’s film. The British artist Jeremy Deller made The Battle of Orgreave (2001), in which he recreated the decisive pitched battle between miners and policemen that took place during the Miner’s Strike in South Yorkshire in 1984, which effectively ended trade unionism in Britain, using actual participants from the event, but this time mixing sides, so that some miners played policemen and some policemen miners. And, extraordinarily, what happens in Deller’s reenactment is that, overcoming decades of entrenched enmities, miners and police alike discard their usual identities and start attacking with gusto their everyday colleagues now on the other side. And we see something of this also in Joshua Oppenheimer’s Act of Killing (2012), in which he asks the anti-Communist killers of President Suharto’s still-ruling regime in Indonesia to re-enact their crimes for a supposed ‘Western’-style fiction film based on their actions. In fact, as they re-enact their crimes for Oppenheimer’s camera, after decades of denying them and indeed having them celebrated by a subservient population, they are finally forced to confront the meaning of what they have done and acknowledge their guilt.9

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7 MICHAEL FRIED AND MODERNISM

On the occasion of the publication of Cavell’s memoir Little Did I Know (2010), Michael Fried writes a heartfelt account of his long relationship with its author and what it has meant to him over the years. They first met at a party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1962, when Cavell had a year’s fellowship at Princeton and Fried had just started graduate Art History at Harvard. Upon first encountering each other, they spoke hurriedly, passionately, surprised perhaps at all of the things they had in common. It was as though they had finally met someone to whom they did not have to explain themselves, who could understand what they were saying almost before they had said it. Cavell arrived at Harvard himself to teach the following year, and Fried organized a number of occasions to catch up. But they did not quite hit it off again until Fried was in Cavell’s apartment one evening and Cavell had to go out. Before leaving, Cavell gave Fried a typewritten copy of ‘Ending the Waiting Game’, his essay on Beckett’s Endgame, and Fried stayed there all evening reading it, waiting until Cavell got back to tell him how extraordinary he found it; and it is at this point that their friendship blossomed. Of course, without saying as much – and Fried’s account written so many years later cannot but come with a certain retrospect – there is the sense that both intuited that the modernism they believed in was under threat and that the decade of the 1960s would usher in a series of irreversible social and cultural changes that would ultimately be known as postmodernism. More specifically, with the Vietnam War and struggles over civil rights, there was the threat of the break-up of the very idea of ‘America’ and whether it was anymore capable of producing a true ‘democratic’ consensus. As Fried writes in ‘Meeting Stanley Cavell’:

The answer [as to why Cavell was reluctant to resume the friendship], I suggest, is simple: at some level or another, there must have been a fear that with the best will in the world it might prove impossible to recapture the sense of excitement and of intense mutual attunement [of our first meeting] I have tried to evoke. That would indeed have been a serious disappointment, a far more serious one than the obvious disappointment, which I assume Stanley shared, that shadowed our almost daily dealings with one another in a distinctly lower key.1 We can undoubtedly trace in particular detail the profound intellectual closeness between Cavell and Fried. As we have already seen, Cavell credits Fried at several important moments in the essays of Must We Mean?, not just in ‘A Matter of Meaning It’, which is on modern art (and we suspect that Cavell’s very willingness to write on visual art as part of his wider philosophical project owes much to the example of Fried), but also in ‘The Avoidance of Love’, which takes up the question of theatre ‘defeating’ theatre. Then in The World Viewed there is the long ‘Excursus: Some Modernist Painting’, in which Cavell speaks of the way that modernist painting must seek to acknowledge its ‘frontedness’, which is to say its ‘presentness’, to the spectator (as equally the spectator must acknowledge their ‘frontedness’ or ‘presentness’ with regard to the painting). It brings about what Cavell calls there the ‘candid’ (WV, 111), which undeniably bears some relation to what Fried will later call ‘absorption’, and which he had already spoken of a few years before in his ‘Art and Objecthood’ as the suspension of ‘theatre’. Indeed, it is even Fried in ‘Art and Objecthood’, undoubtedly drawing on conversations with Cavell, who was the first to suggest that the problem of the spectator in front of the work of art was not shared by cinema, insofar as the spectator there is automatically removed, and that therefore cinema does not count as a modernist art (AO, 164). And Fried for his part draws on such Cavell essays as ‘Music Discomposed’ and ‘A Matter of Meaning It’ to allow him to break with Clement Greenberg in developing a non-essentialist and non-teleological conception of modern art. That is, against Greenberg’s conception of medium as what is ‘peculiar and exclusive’ to each artform and the progress of each artform as the gradual doing away with of what is ‘dispensable’ or ‘inessential’ about it, Fried makes it clear that, while broadly agreeing with Greenberg’s conception of medium-specificity and the development of an artform being driven by aesthetic self-reflection, medium is not any set of physical characteristics but a series of ‘conventions’, and is directed not by 128

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any goal-directed final reduction but by what at any particular moment convinces as an authentic example of that artform. Fried in any number of books and essays cites and acknowledges the work of Cavell. It is undoubtedly Cavell who allowed him to break with his first great influence Greenberg and decisively shift his art writing in a direction that we will call philosophical. It is the logic of scepticism and its overcoming that, as we hope to show, not only drives Fried’s work but gives it its wider resonance and ‘applicability’, without it being about anything else but art. And it is an influence that has lasted until the very end of Fried’s career, perhaps even in unacknowledged ways, for if a late book like Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before seems most obviously to mark an explicit return to the concerns of Cavell, we would also say that Fried’s choice of philosophical guides to read particular bodies of work there – Heidegger to read Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein to read Bernd and Hilla Becher – very much reflects Cavell’s preferences. However, to unravel the relationship between Fried and Cavell in more detail, we might begin by looking at Fried’s ‘foundational’ essay, and certainly one of the most decisive written on art in the past fifty years, his polemic against Minimalism, ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967). In fact, by this stage of his career, the prodigious then-twenty-eight-year-old Fried had already written a number of important and still-cited essays on the art of his time, amongst them Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella (1965), which speaks of the way that each of those painters continues a line of painterly investigation begun by Jackson Pollock; ‘Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings’ (1966), which is on his one-time Princeton classmate Frank Stella’s shaped canvases, which are no longer simply rectangular but resemble something like a triangle wedged into a square; and ‘New Work by Anthony Caro’ (1967), which is on the British sculptor Anthony Caro, whom he had met when he was studying in England in 1961 and 1962, and in which Fried demonstrates that he can write about sculpture in the same way he was writing about painting at the time. But what exactly were the arguments Fried was proposing in these early essays? How was he developing Cavell’s insights about medium as not simply a ‘physical material but a mater​ial-i​n-cer​tain-​chara​cteri​stic-​ appli​catio​ns’ (MW?, 221)? How does he understand modernism putting a kind of pressure on the artist via the medium, so that they cannot repeat themselves, ‘not because serious painting is not forced to change, but because the way it changes is determined by the commitment to painting as an art, in struggle with the history which makes it an art’ M ICHAEL FRIED AND MODERNISM

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(MW?, 222). In Three American Painters, Fried speaks of the way that, for all of the apparent materiality and physicality of Pollock’s paint and its application by being dripped onto the canvas, his work is a finally ‘optical’ phenomenon that is to be understood in terms of its composition: ‘The materiality of the pigment is rendered sheerly visual, and the result is a new kind of space in which conditions of seeing prevail rather than one in which objects exist’ (AO, 224–5). In ‘Shape as Form’, Fried along similar lines suggests that, if Stella’s shaped canvases with their stark and simplified bands of colour can appear merely ‘literal’ objects, there is a higher level of organization that overarches and sublates this materiality: ‘Stella’s paintings [are] as radically illusive and intractably ambiguous as any in the history of modernism. Radically illusive in that what is rendered illusive in them is nothing less than literalness itself ’ (AO, 94). And, finally, in ‘New Work by Anthony Caro’, Fried observes the same dematerialization in the arguably even more material and physical medium of sculpture, whereby an overall sense of the ‘image’ of Caro’s steel constructions allows us to overlook their obvious weight, scale and even location in the gallery: ‘Sculptures like Span and Horizon are held together by . . . the meanings they make. It is as though Caro’s art essentializes meaningfulness as such – as though the possibility of meaning what we say or do alone makes his sculpture possible’ (AO, 175). How does ‘Art and Objecthood’ at once continue and extend these concerns? The essay is famous – or notorious – for its strident denunciation of Minimal Art or what it calls ‘literalism’ (AO, 148). Fried begins his argument with, or at least bases his argument on, two ‘experiences’ of Minimal Art. The first is that of Minimalist sculptor Robert Morris, who in his essay ‘Notes on Sculpture’ writes of the way that the ‘better new work takes relationships out of the work and makes them a function of space, light and the viewer’s field’ (AO, 153). And we might take as an illustration of this a work by fellow Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith entitled Die (1962), which is a six-foot cube formed by soldering identical sheets of cast iron steel together. Undoubtedly, the work comes out of a long tradition of steel sculpture pioneered by such artists as Julio González, Alexander Calder and David Smith, but Fried’s point is that Smith’s Die is also a rejection of this. In fact, despite the apparently forbidding and non-anthropological nature of the sculpture and the way it appears to repel any spectatorial engagement, the work would be incomplete without its audience. More than this, we might even understand the work as nothing more than the reflection or 130

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equivalent of its audience, indicated both by its approximately humansized dimensions and the fact that it is hollow, suggesting an empty body. This is Fried describing the experience of encountering such Minimalist work in a gallery: ‘Being distanced by such objects is not, I suggest, entirely unlike being distanced, or crowded, by the silent presence of another person’ (AO, 155). The second testimony Fried adduces is that of Smith himself in a conversation with the curator Samuel Wagstaff, in which he describes driving down the New Jersey turnpike at night with a group of students and suggesting that this was the kind of experience he wanted in his work. The journey down the turnpike was concrete, open-ended, durational, with no limit as to what counted as relevant and what did not. Every moment of the trip was equally important and everyone undergoing it was entirely immersed in it without any external space to reflect upon it. And for Smith this would be the model for the art he wanted, without in any way seeking to frame this experience or draw a boundary around it. Rather, art would be merely another such experience like driving down a turnpike at night. Again, as Fried summarizes in ‘Art and Objecthood’: ‘There was, Smith seems to have felt, nothing to “frame” his experience on the road, no way to make sense of it in terms of art, to make art out of it, at least as art then was. Rather, “you just have to experience it”’ (AO, 158). This is Fried’s ‘literal’ in ‘Art and Objecthood’. It is to be found in the fact that there is no attempt to construct a properly aesthetic experience and communicate it to the spectator. Rather, in Minimal works of art we are simply presented with ordinary objects of no different status than other objects in the world. They do not want or require the transformation or sublimation of materials that aesthetic experience involves, but are to be experienced as such. It is not a matter of any ‘internal’ relationships between its various parts that would allow us to discern some underlying order or pattern to the work. It is not any kind of ‘conviction’ (AO, 165) or sense of the work believing it has accomplished something that it seeks to pass on, but only a matter of ‘interest’ (AO, 165), which is merely a momentary engagement without any underlying reason in the work. And thus it is not a matter of any controlling purposiveness or intentionality behind the work that we look for, some sense of logic or coherence behind what is immediately evident. There is not any gradual coming to know or acknowledge some other ‘individuality’ (WV, 33), some desire to understand what they mean or think, but something more like directly recognizing another person, in which the work does not in M ICHAEL FRIED AND MODERNISM

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any way confront us but is simply a reflection of us. As Fried writes in ‘Art and Objecthood’ of Smith’s cube, connecting it to the experience of driving down the turnpike: ‘Smith’s cube is always of further interest; one never feels that one has come to the end of it; it is inexhaustible. It is inexhaustible, however, not because of any fullness – that is the inexhaustibility of art – but because there is nothing there to exhaust. It is endless the way a road might be, if it were circular, for example’ (AO, 166). Again, contrast this to what he has to say about Caro’s sculptures: ‘A characteristic sculpture by Caro consists, I want to say, in the mutual and naked juxtaposition of the I-beams, girders, cylinders, lengths of piping, sheet metal and grill that it comprises rather than in the compound object that they compose’ (AO, 161). To put this another way – and this is what Fried means by the ‘theatrical’ in ‘Art and Objecthood’ – in Minimal Art it is not the relations between the parts of the work but the relation between the work and the spectator that is most important. Indeed, it is not even a matter of the work being made up of relations but of it being merely its relation with its spectator. This is to be seen in photographic reproductions of Minimalist work, which offer neither the definitive image of the work nor an image that is secondary or inconsequential in relation to it. Take, for example, two pieces very similar in logic to Smith’s Die: Carl Andre’s 144 Lead Squares (1969) and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970). In Andre’s Lead Squares, a photographic reproduction will inevitably show the work not as the square it actually is, but rather as a kind of trapezoid or parallelogram. Indeed, the very point or insight of the work is that as we walk around it we gradually realize that we will never see it ‘as such’, but only a series of perspectives onto it. Our relationship to it is not ideal or aesthetic but embodied, phenomenological, bound by our own physical limits. And similarly with Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, the implication is that, even though we know that the work is a kilometre-long path of stones laid out in a spiral pattern in a lake, walking out on the work ourselves we will never experience it this way. And even the well-known aerial shot of the piece is not the ultimate ‘truth’ of the work, but only itself another perspective onto it. Again, this is the reason why we might say that it is not a matter of ‘medium’ with regard to Minimalist Art. Our experience in front of it is not prompted or in any way sharpened by any sense of a pre-existing artistic legacy to which it belongs. It does not appear to exist in any kind of continuum with aesthetically comparable works, which is to say we do not reflect or have no means to reflect upon the particular way we feel 132

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in response to it. Rather, it is a matter of an unspecified and seemingly unmotivated feeling or emotion when confronted with an example of it. Indeed, as much as possible, the work wishes to escape the restriction of any particular recognizable medium: painting, sculpture, photography, film. Once more, it is not that modernist art simply excludes all worldly experience, but it must always be filtered through a specific artistic language. This is also Cavell’s Wittgensteinian point that disagreements and misunderstandings are always observed through, or better take place as, shifts in the conventions of language. Indeed, we might even say – in that non-essentialist and non-teleological conception of medium we have been exploring – that the history of a particular artistic medium is nothing else than the history of these disagreements, that the ‘connections’ made possible by a shared medium are inseparable from the remarking of these disagreements. For Fried, nothing new can be said unless it can be said within a medium, and a medium – as long as it remains viable – is always saying something different. ‘Art and Objecthood’ is undoubtedly a major essay in art history. And although written very much as an intervention in the art of its time, complete with a series of numbered prescriptions and calls to action, it is now seen as one of the major historical accounts of the movement, often reprinted in anthologies of the period, alongside competing manifestos from the artists he was criticizing. In fact, it is understood by many as the best account of Minimalism altogether, which even though critical gives a coherence to the movement it otherwise would not have had. It is certainly the case that subsequent generations of artists and critics, in arguing against Fried by asserting the positivity of literalism as an artistic project, merely repeat the terms of Fried’s argument without really questioning them, and thus remain within the limits he sets. Indeed, the subsequent period of art, which we might call postmodernism, was largely the assertion of an anti-intentionality and anti-medium-specificity that was already at stake in Minimalism. Fried writes in ‘Art and Objecthood’ as though that modernism he advocates was already under serious threat – ‘The success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theatre’ (AO, 163)2 – and this prophetic aspect of the essay undoubtedly came to pass. Modernism for Fried is precisely the continual challenge of making a particular medium convincing; but at a certain point – and in this it is effectively like the Hollywood comedies of remarriage, for all of the apparent difference in cultural sensibility – we are no longer able to keep on reinventing the medium, to keep on saying M ICHAEL FRIED AND MODERNISM

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the ‘same’ thing differently. As a result, when Fried comes to reprint his early writings in his collection of art criticism from the period, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1998), he remarks that he simply could not find anybody else at the time who he thought adequately continued that modernist ‘tradition’ he sought to outline: ‘[To continue writing art criticism] in addition to championing yet again the same handful of artists, I would have had to insist yet again that the dominant avantgardes of the day were not worth taking seriously, and that, I had the wit to realise, was unlikely to interest anyone’ (AO, 14). And Fried was not to return to art criticism, or perhaps more accurately to write about the art of his time, until the late 1990s when he encountered the work of the abstract painter Joseph Marioni and several years later the work of a number of photographers working in a large tableau-style format. What Fried did after his celebrated and controversial early career as an art critic is almost unprecedented. After a number of preliminary versions throughout the 1970s, he published in 1980 an extraordinary history of French mid-eighteenth-century painting, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. It is nothing less than an alternative history of modern art, breaking with the by-then widely accepted Greenbergian understanding that modernism in the visual arts began some time in the mid-nineteenth century, when it could be argued that we have the first taking up of its medium as the proper subject of any particular artform. That is, Fried sets back the origins of modernism a little over a century and, instead of finding them in the wellknown work of Courbet and Manet, argued that they are to be located in a series of works by such largely overlooked artists as Jean-BaptisteSiméon Chardin, Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Claude Joseph Vernet. And the paintings he takes up as evidence, at least before he came to them, were generally regarded as modest, domestic scenes of little ambition and limited lasting influence on the subsequent history of art. To point to just a few of the instances Fried analyses in Absorption and Theatricality, we have Chardin’s The Soap Bubble (1737), in which a boy blows a large trembling soap bubble with a straw and holds it there before us without it bursting. Or his The Card Castle (1737), in which another boy has built a delicate and all-too-easy-to-fall house of cards inward-facing on a card table. In Greuze’s The Father of the Family Reads the Bible to His Children (1755), an old man reads the Bible not only to his children but also to his presumably illiterate servants. Or in his A Girl with a Dead Canary (1765), a young woman weeps with her head in her hand at the death 134

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of her pet bird. And in Vernet’s Landscape with Waterfall and Figures (1768), a group of travellers walks into a landscape in order to take in a far-distant view at the back of the painting. It is in these works, as we say, that Fried locates the origins of modernism, which is to say the beginning of that situation or problematic he sees continuing some two centuries latter with the battle between Hard-Edge and Colour Field painting and Minimalist objects in ‘Art and Objecthood’. But how are we to understand this? The painterly examples he points to are undeniably minor, small-scale, undramatic and undemonstrative, featuring ordinary subjects caught up in everyday scenes (playing games, reading the Bible, going for a walk in the countryside). But these works really only take on their meaning dialectically, in relation to what they are not. In fact, for a long time, the work of the period that art history remembered was the large, spectacular, virtuosic and crowd-pleasing painting of the immediately preceding period of the Rococo, which could be said to have begun during the reign of King Louis XV, some time in the second decade of the eighteenth century. To recall a number of the betterknown examples of the style, we have Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera (1717), in which a group of attractive, well-heeled and selfregarding aristocrats set off on a ‘fête galante’ to the mythical island of love and birthplace of Venus, accompanied by flying cupids, looking for all the world like the contestants at the beginning of a Big Brother series. Or we have François Boucher’s Brunette Odalisque (1745), his infamous portrait of his near-naked wife, perched on the side of a couch, coquettishly lowering her eyes as though she were not aware of being looked at, while at the same time indicating that she is entirely comfortable at being observed. Or, finally, we might think of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing (1767), in which a young swain seated on the ground before an attractive young woman on a swing looks up her petticoat as she tilts into his space and kicks off, in an exquisite emblem of the crossing of this space (and indeed that between the painting and the spectator), one of her crinolined slippers, which is caught hanging mid-air between them. Fried’s point, as anti-intuitive as it appears, is that Chardin, Greuze and Vernet’s art is not merely the modest, uninflected and unambitious practice it was always taken to be, but a rejection of the theatricality of the Rococo that preceded it. What we have in the painting of Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard is the immediate playing to the crowd, the crossing of the lines between art and life and the dismissal of strictly aesthetic pleasures in favour of more worldly, embodied ones. The paintings are M ICHAEL FRIED AND MODERNISM

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made for and do not exist outside of the spectator looking on at them. They are directly implicated in the work, an active participant whom the work addresses and wants to make, at least in a metaphorical way, enter the situation it depicts. In Watteau, the figures in the painting preen for themselves, but also for the spectator looking on. In Boucher, the model pretends not to notice, but actually wants us to know that she knows we are out there. And in Fragonard, in an even more explicit way, the painting urges us to ‘catch’ it as it crosses the space between us. However, against this prevailing attitude towards art and how the spectator is to relate towards it – and our point is that this attitude, for all of its obvious differences, is similar to that of Minimalism3 – the anti-Rococo artists Fried speaks of seek deliberately to marshal resources so that the painting does not appear merely made for its effect upon the audience, is not to be judged for how it makes them feel about themselves. We see this different mode of address in their paintings in the fact that the figures in them do not appear to be aware of anyone looking at them, but have their eyes closed or head bent down, look into the far distance or have their back towards the spectator. And, beyond their mode of address, the paintings frequently allegorize in their subject matter their ideal viewer and how they seek to relate to them: the painting is a kind of soap bubble or house of cards keeping the world out and precariously kept aloft, a Biblical story that carries the listener away and makes them unaware of their surroundings, a journey into another world that the spectator must enter. This is the ‘absorptiveness’ of anti-Rococo painting that Fried opposes to the ‘theatricality’ of the Rococo. And suddenly we realize that those small, intimate and seemingly unambitious domestic scenes are actually of the greatest ambition and import in seeking to rescue painting from the fall into theatricality and implausibility; and it is exactly at this moment that modernism begins as the never-ending struggle between scepticism and its overcoming. This is Fried setting out in its most general terms towards the beginning of his book the dialectic between absorption and theatricality that drives both his argument and the history of Western art as he sees it (for it is only with the advent of modernism that art acquires a history strictly speaking): ‘The primacy of absorption in French painting and criticism of the early to mid-1750s must be seen in connection with the reaction against the Rococo that began several years before. The basic features of the reaction are well known: a turning away from the exquisite, sensuous, intimately decorative painting that had held the field for roughly thirty 136

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years; and an insistence on the need to return to what were perceived as the high seriousness, elevated morality and timeless aesthetic principles of the great art of the past’ (AT, 35). The book is about this crucial episode – unremarked by art historians until Fried – in which painting for a moment regained an authenticity through understanding that its proper effect was to be attained not by reaching out and directly appealing to its audience, but through a kind of sincerity, modesty and sense of its own proper limits, in which it does not explicitly solicit the viewer’s gaze but contradictorily imagines a situation in which no one is in front of the canvas or the painting is complete without its viewer. That is to say, the work of Chardin, Greuze and Vernet can be understood no longer as simply neutral, indifferent, what it appears to be, but as a refusal of the dramatic, histrionic and frankly more appealing art of Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard; and this neutrality, indifference and lack of an awareness of an audience is no longer the default state of painting but something that can be achieved only with a great deal of effort. However, there is indeed a reason why art history, at least until Fried, has largely not remembered this moment in this way – although Fried in his study does adduce such critics of the time as Denis Diderot and the Comte de Caylus who did recognize this – and that is because, soon after that moment Fried traces, the work of the anti-Rocco artists began to strike advanced taste, that is, the taste precisely formed by the works themselves, as sentimental, overemotional, indeed, theatrical. In fact, soon after that inaugural moment Fried identifies, they failed to convince at all. Fried then at the end of Absorption and Theatricality looks at the next broadly recognized moment in art history, Neo-Classicism, as represented by Jacques-Louis David and his Belisariuses of 1781 and 1785, and interprets them in their non-lateral composition and introduction of a surrogate for the beholder at the back of the picture as a new solution to the problem of theatricality after the work of the generation of artists of 1750 no longer appeared authentic. Nevertheless, Fried begins his next book in his so-called art-historical ‘trilogy’, Courbet’s Realism (1990), with a summary of how taste had turned again by the time of Courbet in the mid-nineteenth century. Not only against the Neo-Classicism of David’s great history paintings of the 1780s and 1990s, but also against the Romanticism of Théodore Géricault and the images of peasant life by Jean-François Millet. In summary, that fundamentally ‘dramatic’ (CReal, 45), if anti-theatrical, conception of painting derived from Diderot was no longer seen to convince. As Fried writes in Courbet’s Realism, for example, of Millet: ‘The critical response M ICHAEL FRIED AND MODERNISM

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alone suggests that [the dramatic conception of painting] wasn’t nearly far enough, or rather that, so long as that framework remained intact, the most extreme efforts to undo its effects ran a high risk of appearing not only theatrical but egregiously so’ (CReal, 45). It is this that leads Fried, in both an example and a chronology that appears more orthodoxly modern, to Courbet as the latest inheritor of the ‘anti-theatrical’ struggle begun by Chardin and Greuze. But, of course, as Fried makes clear, the terms of this struggle continually change. The very point of that modernism Fried works within is that the same essentially ‘dramatic’ solution shared by Chardin, Greuze, David, Géricault and Millet cannot be endlessly repeated. Necessarily – and this is the contradiction that drives Fried’s account – the solution Courbet proposes is at once more powerful and emphatic than that of Chardin and Greuze and put forward with a greater awareness of the difficulty of defeating that theatricality it is up against. It is not merely a mental absorption that is the subject of Courbet’s work – a boy blowing bubbles, a young woman crying, a father reading the Bible to his family – but a full-bodied involvement or engagement in strenuous physical activity. It is something we have already seen in, say, Millet’s The Gleaners (1857), but it takes on a whole other degree of assertiveness and desire to make believe in such Courbet works as The Stonebreakers (1849), The Wheat Sifters (1853–4) and even A Burial at Ornans (1849– 50). Indeed, although ‘theatricality’ is still the countervailing term against which convincing modern painting arrays itself, ‘absorption’ is no longer strong enough to cover its possible reversal but only ‘embodiment’ (CReal, 225). This is Fried on Courbet’s project of the literal incorporation of the spectator in the form of one of the figures in his painting, in which they are no longer as before outside looking in but now inside the painting, as it were, entirely identified with the figures within it (and, if anything, it is Vernet from Absorption and Theatricality, although undoubtedly the least prominent of the anti-Rococo painters there, who emerges as the true progenitor of what is to come in Courbet’s Realism with his ‘pastoral’ as opposed to ‘dramatic’ conception of painting): ‘I repeatedly suggest [as part of Courbet’s anti-theatrical project] that central, foreground figures depicted from the rear are in various respects surrogates for the painter (or, as I shall chiefly say, the painter-beholder) and moreover that they evoke the possibility of quasi-corporeal merger between the painterbeholder and themselves’ (CReal, 48). But then, by a short generation of some twenty years later, this solution itself is felt to be inadequate. The simple attempt to do away with by literally 138

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incorporating the spectator in front of the work no longer convinces. It is this that leads Fried to write the final book in his trilogy, which in some ways can be seen to take us up to the situation with which he began his art-critical project in the 1960s. It is Manet’s Modernism: Or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (1996); and, if anything, the solution Fried sees in Manet’s painting is at once even stronger than in Courbet and almost an inversion of it. After observing the failure of Courbet’s project of the denial of the spectator through their incorporation in the picture, Manet comes to a radical, antithetical conclusion: that the only way to defeat the corrupting sense of the painting being painted for the spectator is neither to deny their presence (as in Chardin and Greuze), nor to incorporate them into the picture (as in Vernet and Courbet), but actually to acknowledge their presence standing in front of the picture by having the picture look at them (MM, 266). It is this that explains the famous and extraordinary ‘stares’ out of the canvas in Manet’s work: Portrait of Victorine Meurent (1862), Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862–3), Olympia (1863), Le chemin de fer (1873) and Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881–2). It is what Fried calls Manet’s ‘facingness’ (MM, 17, 266) or ‘strikingness’ (MM, 280). And in setting up his paintings in this way, Manet precludes the ability of the spectator to look on from the outside as though unobserved, or as though the figures in the painting perform for them but are unable to admit doing so. Rather, it puts the spectator on the spot, with no outside position from which to view the painting as though they could somehow step back from themselves. In some ways – to think again how we might understand Fried coming back here to where he began – this is what Cavell means by the ‘frontedness’ of post-war American painting and the ‘acknowledgement’ it involves in the ‘Excursus’ of The World Viewed: ‘A painting may acknowledge its frontedness, or its finitude, or its specific thereness – that is, its presentness; and your accepting it will accordingly mean acknowledging your frontedness, or directionality, or verticality towards its world, or any world – or your presentness, in its aspect of absolute hereness and nowness’ (WV, 110). And, of course, along the same lines, we would suggest that what Fried is saying here bears some resemblance to the movement from theatre to cinema in Rothman. Just as it is easy to imagine Hannay with his collar up as a figure in a painting by Boucher, so we might imagine Olympia as a kind of psychotic Norman or indeed Dylan in Don’t Look Back, in which it is a matter of him overcoming the fact that he is always being looked at by himself looking more intently at and even through his audience during the performance of a song. M ICHAEL FRIED AND MODERNISM

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Here we might say that we reach the culmination of Fried’s history, not merely in the sense that the solution devised by Manet seems much like that of Pollock, Louis and Stella with their flat canvases arranged for the gaze of the spectator, but because the very form of Manet’s solution repeats the deep logic of what has always been at stake in his work. As we have seen before with Cavell and Rothman, the ultimate act of overcoming scepticism is its acknowledgement. It is what is at stake in Cavell’s conception of remarriage, where the couple continue to communicate with and understand each other through the literal sharing of doubt. It is also at a more abstract level what is at stake in Wittgenstein, for whom the ultimate attainment of ‘certainty’ is not any set of definable values or understandings, but rather ‘our manner of judging, and therefore of acting’ (OC, §232).4 This is indeed Cavell’s point concerning the self-refuting nature of scepticism insofar as it has to be known to itself in The Claim of Reason. And this in effect – although it is admittedly an unexpected comparison – is what is at stake in Manet for Fried. Perhaps even against Fried’s own insistence that modernism puts forward positive values or his earlier argument that it is a matter of ‘defeating’ theatre, what we have in Manet, as much as anything else, is the remarking of the negative. It is the absolute acknowledgement that the work is theatrical, that the figures in the paintings are aware of the spectator, that the artist paints for the effect upon the audience, in order to bring about a situation in which there is no simple place outside of the theatrical from where we could say what it is. For, by contrast, Minimalism and perhaps even the Rococo assumes that theatricality can be the subject of the work, consciously manipulated by the artist, who is ultimately not subject to it. This is indeed the objective hypocrisy of the Minimalists and more particularly the postmodernists who followed them: that, for all of their claims merely to open the work up to the world and the spectator, in the end like Hitchcock with his audience they still wanted to hold something back, still wanted to maintain some position outside of the relationship between the work and the spectator, still wanted to hold onto the privilege of art. By contrast, Manet and what we might call the broadly ‘absorptive’ tradition are at once more theatrical than the theatrical and in this truly outside of the theatrical.5 This is Fried on the self-contradiction of theatricality in Manet’s Modernism: ‘Manet’s modernism, with respect to the issue of beholding, consists precisely in the doubleness of its relation to the Diderotian tradition: on the one hand, marking the close of that tradition by insisting as never before on the “truth” about painting that the 140

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tradition had come to deny or forestall; on the other hand, demonstrating by example that there could be no more laying bare of the “truth” and therefore no extinguishing of that tradition’ (MM, 406). Perhaps another way of putting this is that the gap or distance between ‘theatricality’ and ‘absorption’ has entirely shrunk by the time of Manet. By this we mean that not only is his ‘facingness’ effectively the same as a self-conscious theatricality, except fully intended by the artist,6 but that the historical shift from what was previously seen as convincing to what now appears as unconvincing is considerably shorter. This is indicated not only by the rapid turnover of identifiable ‘movements’ in modernism, with David some fifty years after Chardin and Greuze, Courbet some forty years after David and Manet some thirty years after Courbet; but we would say – and here we come back to something like those matters we explored around the melodramas of the unknown woman – something could no sooner be known or remarked (i.e., recognized) as an absorptive strategy by the artist (and therefore by the spectator) than it would turn into the theatrical. In other words, it would not – or not only – be a question of a slow incremental shift in historical taste, of the kind traced in great detail by Fried across the three volumes of his trilogy, from the absorptive to the theatrical, but something that occurs as a result of the very identification of absorption itself. This is the extraordinary paradox of Fried’s art-historical project: that, if with Absorption and Theatricality in renarrating the paintings of Chardin and Greuze it invents from nothing the whole problematic of absorption as the overcoming of a prior theatricality, doubling what is so that now the absence of theatre is the overcoming of theatre, at the same time in doing so it necessarily turns this absorption theatrical. Fried is thus always looking for another historical period when absorption was still possible. The history Fried traces is a kind of permanent failure brought about as much as anything by Fried himself. It is Fried’s very art-historical consciousness in front of the painting or sculpture that he is trying to get rid of. That is to say, we can read Fried’s art history as strictly equal to his art criticism. It is not that the art criticism is a matter of arguing for absorption as opposed to the art history, in which it is a matter of understanding how absorption and theatricality have related to each other over time (AO, 51). Rather, both are driven by a kind of aporetic logic, in which theatricality does not exist until it is remarked by absorption, and this absorption in turn can no sooner be remarked than it turns into theatre. And, indeed, we can find indications of this insight on the part of Fried M ICHAEL FRIED AND MODERNISM

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throughout all of his art-history books: that the shift from ‘absorption’ to ‘theatricality’ occurs not in time, historically, but logically, instantly, as the effect of a radical doubling assumption after which everything is at once the same and different.7 In Absorption and Theatricality, Fried uses Diderot to speak about the way the spectator of the painting must be in two places at once, each making possible the other: ‘We have arrived at a paradox. As we have seen, the recognition that paintings are to made to be beheld and therefore presuppose the presence of a beholder led to the demand for the actualisation of his presence. . . . At the same time, it was only by negating the beholder’s presence that this could be achieved’ (AT, 103). In Courbet’s Realism, Fried argues that the ‘embodiment’ at stake in Courbet’s paintings literally absorbs the spectator so that they are no longer standing in front of the painting, but for this to happen they must also remain in front of the painting to recognize this appeal to enter: ‘It is as though in the Burial Courbet attempted to go beyond what until then had been the painter-beholder-specific focus of his antitheatrical project by enforcing a separation between the painting’s relationship to himself as painter-beholder and its relationship to an unspecified beholder or collectivity of beholders other than himself ’ (CReal, 142). And, finally, in Manet’s Modernism the gaze from the picture strikes the spectator, ensuring that there is nowhere outside of it from where they can see it, but similarly this gaze would not have its effect unless something of the spectator remained outside of the canvas to be struck by it: ‘Among the factors is the treatment of the model, who the viewer is made to feel was present before the painter – the painter-beholder – and by virtue of that fact is not present to him. . . . . To the extent that the viewer nevertheless feels summoned by Manet’s figures in the name of painting, he is faced with an ontological double bind that cannot be easily resolved’ (MM, 345). It is this paradox or circularity that drives Fried’s argument and the art history he constructs, which functions as an effect or allegory of this circular logic. In one way, this art history takes place as the continually updated solution to a tradition that has fallen into scepticism, while at the same time it brings about, insofar as it allows us to see, this scepticism (again, it is the anti-Rococo artists in their absorptive defeat or covering over of theatricality that make us aware of it for the first time). And, as we have seen, this ‘history’ takes place in smaller and smaller steps, insofar as each new ‘absorption’ is nothing more than the remarking of what is theatrical, which at once creates a theatricality before it and will itself require another moment after it in order to remark it. (Art history 142

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as such can never be anything less than literal, remarked from an outside point of absorption.) It is this that explains the onward march of Fried’s art-historical narrative as the ongoing attempt to find that ‘later’ absorptive position from which the previous moment of theatricality can be remarked. And all of this can be seen in Fried’s recent writing on the American painter Joseph Marioni in his Four Honest Outlaws (2011). Marioni makes his canvases by dripping variously coloured layers of paint down a tilted canvas in what can appear – and certainly to an extent is – an uncontrolled and uncontrollable process with little or no presence of the artist’s hand. (Marioni occasionally directs the paint as it runs down the canvas with either a finger or the handle of his paintbrush, subtly brings the edges of the canvas inward towards the bottom and creates different viscosities of paint by mixing acrylic with pigment in various proportions, but the final composition does largely appear to come about with little artistic intervention.) We might describe his work – in an art-historical oxymoron – as Minimalist painting, in which the real subject of the canvases is the material properties of the paint itself. The only difference, Fried insists, is that – as opposed to a painter who in many ways might appear very similar, Robert Ryman8 – Marioni must be seen as intending everything in his paintings. It is not that they are not arbitrary, material, uncomposed; but this must now be understood as not possible outside of Marioni’s intention. Intention here is not evidentiary or demonstrable but a kind of pure doubling of what is. As Fried writes: ‘He regards it as crucial that nothing in the finished work feels drawn or marked in any way, and more broadly the overall impression, as numerous commentators have not failed to observe, is of the painting having made itself ’ (HO, 79). And, indeed, we would want to suggest that what Fried says about Marioni here is at once a continuation of what he said about Stella some fifty years before and the last possible thing he could have to say about painting. For here with Marioni – but already with Stella – we have the purest expression of the paradox that the ‘depicted’ is a pure doubling of the literal, while the ‘literal’ for its part could not be seen outside of the ‘depicted’ (AO, 81). Equally at the other end of art history, after the trilogy of books on French art, Fried writes The Moment of Caravaggio (2010), in which he happens to locate even further back in art history the moment of modernism. That is, for Fried now it is not in 1750 with the anti-Rococo of Chardin and Greuze that the origins of modernism might be found, M ICHAEL FRIED AND MODERNISM

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but one hundred and fifty years earlier in 1600 in Rome when Caravaggio broke with the religiously inspired art of his time by producing works that sought to ‘deeply absorb’ (MC, 99) the viewer in what the paintings were ‘doing, feeling and thinking’ (MC, 99). Fried describes this, in a telling phrase, as the ‘cutting out’ (MC, 180) of the work from its religious background, which is to refer to the fact both that Caravaggio broke with the existing tradition of religious art and that he was amongst the first generation of artists who painted on canvas and not frescoes, thus inaugurating the whole economy of monetary and aesthetic evaluation. And this is to say that, as a result of the end of the religious justification for art and the entry of the aesthetic, it is henceforth a matter of painting having to convince us in its own terms, unsupported either by tradition or theological doctrine. A perfect example of this is Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St Thomas (1603), which more than a religious painting about the overcoming of St Thomas’ doubt in the resurrection of Christ is about the beholder’s belief in Caravaggio’s depiction of St Thomas’ doubt in the resurrection of Christ (MC, 83–6). And, similarly, Caravaggio’s Judith and Holofernes (1599) is about another cutting out or cutting off, which again serves as an allegory for the separation painting must enact from the world in order to produce the proper state of ‘immersion’ (MC, 207). But what we ultimately want to say here is that, just as Fried has to keep extending art history at the end in order to overcome a prior scepticism, so he has to keep on getting earlier in order to point to a moment of absorption before the fall into scepticism. And, fascinatingly, Fried admits this in The Moment of Caravaggio when he points out that, if the question of absorption is at stake in Caravaggio, there is not yet – if this is possible – a corresponding scepticism (MC, 106–7). To conclude here, we turn again to what Fried might mean by speaking of the ‘cutting out’ involved in Caravaggio’s work: ‘The decisive emergence or coming into prominence of a new artistic and artifactual entity, the independent and autonomous gallery picture’ (MC, 155). As we say, it can alternately be understood to be referring to its cutting out from religious tradition, its cutting out as a canvas and even its cutting out from the concerns of everyday life. But we would also want to suggest that it is to point to the ‘cutting out’ of that extraordinary hypothesis of absorption itself, which arises out of nothing and after which its very absence or opposite is possible only because of it. The world is henceforth to be explained only for another entirely different reason:

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it is no longer simply neutral or indifferent but, as with those antiRococo paintings of Chardin and Greuze, already the ongoing attempt to overcome theatrical self-consciousness. In other words, Fried is quite right to begin his history with the radical ‘cutting out’ of absorption by Caravaggio. Perhaps the only difference for us is that, at least in part or inseparably, his argument is not art-historical but ‘philosophical’. If it arises out of a particular historical moment, it also creates the possibility of this moment. It is a pure effect of the power of thought to make real by positing a ‘transcendental’ condition for which everything now stands in. And it is an ‘absorption’ that is ultimately inseparable from ‘theatricality’, in that it is no sooner able to be materialized or instantiated than it turns into its opposite. But then this itself must be revealed from yet another point of ‘absorption’. Hence the temporal expansion of Fried’s history, both backward and forward in time. However, just as Fried’s history ends with the final acknowledgement of the closing of the difference between absorption and theatricality, so his history begins this way. For soon after The Moment of Caravaggio, Fried admits that the moment of Caravaggioesque ‘absorption’ did not last for long – indeed, we might suggest, at all – before unleashing a kind of theatricality. And, in fact, as with Fried’s other art-history books, it is the way that art history begins as the aporia between absorption and theatricality that is the very subject of his subsequent book. (We might understand The Moment of Caravaggio as a held or suspended possibility ‘before’ art history: it concerns that doubling gesture that opens up the possibility of the ‘fall’ into art history as the aporia between absorption and theatricality.) As Fried writes in After Caravaggio (2016), in terms uncannily similar to what he says of Marioni, who perhaps shares with Cecco del Caravaggio more than his Italian surname (and Marioni explicitly sees himself as the latest in a long lineage of painters, beginning with Giotto): This double structure of absorption and address was taken up by some of the leading Caravaggisti, for whom it became a basic pictorial constructive principle. . . . The first is a ‘moment’ of extended duration, of the painter’s engagement in the ongoing, repetitive, partly automatic act of painting. . . . The second is a ‘moment’, notionally instantaneous, of becoming detached from the painting, which is to say of no longer being immersed in it but rather of seeing it as if for the first time. (AC, 122, 124)

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As we have seen, Cavell draws a profound distinction between photography and painting in The World Viewed. Consistent with his idea of medium not as any kind of ‘essence’ but a ‘convention’, this is to do not with any immutable physical fact, but rather with their respective forms of spectatorial address. For Cavell, the photograph – but he is speaking also of film, whose basis is photographic – is not the reproduction of any ‘real’ or ‘reality’, as proposed by such theorists as Panofsky and Bazin. And yet, as Cavell admits, there nevertheless is something distinctive about the photographic image. If it is not real, it is also, as Cavell insists, not not real. What he means by this is that, unlike other mediums, the photographic image does have a particular connection to a pre-existing reality. It does make sense, looking at a photograph, to ask, ‘what lies behind it?’ or ‘what lies beyond the frame?’ (WV, 23). However, as Cavell equally acknowledges, we do not simply have reality when we look at a photograph. We are not immediately in or with it. On the contrary, with the photographic image, we are in some way outside of the reality depicted. We are not there in the same time and space as it, but look on at this time and space through the photograph, which is a kind of window. As Cavell writes in The World Viewed: ‘A camera is an opening in a box: that is the best emblem of the fact that a camera holding on an object is holding the rest of the world away’ (WV, 24). And this separation of the spectator from reality is even more pronounced in cinema. If in theatre, it is a matter of bringing about the separation between the actors and the audience through the stage and theatre lights, in cinema this separation is a necessary effect of the technology. It is the camera that initially sees instead of us, and we can only look on through the ‘barrier’ (WV, 24) of the cinema screen. This is Cavell again in The World Viewed: ‘What

does the silver screen screen? It screens me from the world it holds – it makes me invisible. And it screens that world from me – that is, screens its existence from me’ (WV, 24). This photographic or cinematic situation is also not at stake in the relationship of the spectator to the painting. In the long ‘Excursus: Some Modernist Painting’ of The World Viewed, Cavell makes the point that, unlike the photographic image on film, in which although the spectator is looking on at reality they are not there with this reality, painting is defined in the first instance by the presence of the spectator in the same time and place as the work of art. Although the painting is not real in the way the photographic image is, there is nevertheless a presentation of the spectator and the painting to each other that is something like the first condition of painting. But then, as Cavell goes on to add, with the spectator and the painting facing each other like this, something like the ‘subjectivity’ (WV, 22) of the spectator gets in the way. In other words, a kind of mutual self-consciousness arises, in which the painting is conscious of and plays to the gaze of the spectator and the spectator starts to doubt what they are seeing, insofar as they realize that what is there has been put on only for them. That is, if the spectator of a film is able to see through a screen, the spectator of a painting is able to see only through the screen of their self.1 The task of modern painting, therefore – it is this that makes it modern – is at once to take this subjectivity into account and to overcome it by once again separating spectator and painting before joining them through this separation. It is this complicated operation that Cavell calls the ‘candid’ in ‘Excursus’, which is a kind of ‘presentness’ of the painting to the spectator that nevertheless occurs ‘independently’ of them (WV, 110, 111). And modernist painting begins this separation of spectator and painting not with the doing away with of the spectator as in cinema, but with the doing away with of the subject of the painting. This is what Cavell understands by the move towards abstraction in post-war American art in The World Viewed: ‘To maintain conviction in our connection with reality, to maintain our presentness, painting accepts the recession of the world’ (WV, 23). But, of course, the other contrast of film with painting is that it is not just the spectator and not the subject matter that retreats, but that this removal of the subject is automatic in film. It occurs as a result of the apparatus – we are almost tempted to say the medium – and requires no input or assistance from the photographer or film-maker themselves. In other words, the removal of the spectator from the scene photographed, 148

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unlike that of the spectator before the painting, is necessary, definitional, part of the essential set-up of cinema itself. And it is this, Cavell goes on to say, that makes of film a ‘moving image of scepticism’ (WV, 188). For, as we have previously argued, the other side of scepticism – the other half of its aporia, as it were – is that, if there is the ‘theatricality’ of the spectator and the image facing each other, Cavell’s diagnosis of the consciousness of the spectator coming between the spectator and the world, there is the complementary scepticism of removing the spectator, so that they are entirely outside of the world. This is undoubtedly a toolittle commented-upon point, but it is nevertheless true that for Cavell the ‘overcoming’ of scepticism, let us say its acknowledgement, is not the simple doing away with it. Rather, as he writes in The Claim of Reason, but it is also what is at stake in The World Viewed, the straightforward ‘defeat’ of scepticism is only to return us to it: ‘The wish underlying this fantasy [of overcoming scepticism] covers a wish that underlies scepticism, a wish for the connection between my claims to knowledge and the objects upon which the claims are to fall to occur without my intervention, apart from my agreements. As the wish stands, it is unappeasable. In the case of my knowing myself, such self-defeat would be doubly exquisite: I must disappear in order that the search for me be successful’ (CR, 351–2). And it is for this reason that it is possible, as Cavell suggests at certain points in The World Viewed, that film is not an art, or at least not a modern art, insofar as it is not a matter in it of scepticism and its overcoming. However, it is notable that, after the ‘Excursus’ on American post-war painting and the way it is forced to overcome the ‘theatricality’ (WV, 111) of the spectator in front of the canvas, Cavell has chapters on ‘Exhibition and Self-Reference’ and ‘The Camera’s Implication’, in which he sets out, beyond his previous emphasis on the medium of film, a certain social history of the effect of movies on the contemporary America in which he is working. He writes there of the way that movies, and more generally the whole Hollywood publicity machine, have shaped everyday life, ranging from the difficulty of getting subjects to pose naturally for the camera, to the pervasiveness of pornography, to the influence of character types on how we see ourselves. This is Cavell in ‘Exhibition’ on the way that movies are now an indissociable part of the world around us: ‘I feel the screen has darkened, as if in fury at its lost power to enclose its content. Light itself seems to become, of all things, indiscriminate, promiscuous’ (WV, 130–1). In other words – although this will raise the complex question of the relationship of the physical properties of a medium to its history – this M ICHAEL FRIED AND PHOTOGRAPHY

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separation between the photographic image and the spectator is no longer as assured or automatic as it previously was. The camera is no longer outside of what it films, guaranteeing its integrity or wholeness, but as in painting inside, insofar as the subject of the photograph can be seen to be conscious of or reacting to the camera; and henceforth the photographer is confronted with the same problem as the modern painter of how to reintroduce that distance. And this can be seen even more generally, to the extent that it is the social itself that is now conscious of being filmed, grasps itself as though in a film. Fantasies that were once private and had to be acknowledged in their privacy – and this again is like the question of ‘literality’ in theatre today – are now shared and made publicly available; and thus we no longer have to be individually responsible for them, but only witness them with others. This, for example, is Cavell’s diagnosis of pornography: ‘That such an experience [of common awe] is for many people confined to the viewing of a pornographic film, deprived of what it analogues in serious art or in actual sex, is an indictment of society’s invasion and enforcement of privacy’ (WV, 46). All of this is to say that Cavell understands these new conditions as an expression of social modernity, and it is at this point that film and photography become modern arts. The exact chronology is hard to pin down, but if we had to do so we would suggest that the turning point comes some time in the late 1960s at the very time Cavell was writing his book. (Or perhaps on a more autobiographical note in the shift from Cavell’s childhood experience of cinema in the 1930s and 1940s to his more adult one, beginning some time in the 1950s.) It is a period that Cavell classifies as ‘Neo-Hollywood’, in which he suggests that the ‘types’ and even ‘individualities’ that previously characterized Hollywood movies break down and begin to enter everyday life. In the almost documentary informality of such films as The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, all mentioned by Cavell, the polish and artificiality of the classic Hollywood genres and the way they were consciously different from life (of course, in some way allegorizing the separation of the spectator from the screen) breaks down. In Cavell’s words, ‘The interchangeability of the new performers is a perfect negation of that condition of movies I described as one in which individuality is the subject of the film. These figures no more lend themselves to such study than they do to imitation. To impersonate one is to impersonate all; their personalities are already impersonations’ (WV, 71–2).2 And, although we cannot make a strict correlation here, we 150

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cannot help feel that in saying this – and remember that the division in American civil life at the time could be seen as a crisis in the very idea of democracy itself – Cavell is offering a critique of the ‘permissiveness’ and lack of social regulation of the 1960s. With the breakdown of the once ‘automatic’ separation of movies and life, we have a scepticism – another kind of scepticism than before – in which the search for truth, morality and still viable conventions for social life is given up altogether. It is this implicit critique of the America of his day that we see particularly in the long chapter, ‘More of The World Viewed’, that Cavell added for the second edition of the book in 1979, in which he can say things like, ‘The myth of film [which is ending] is that nature survives our treatment of it and its loss of enchantment for us, and that community remains possible even when the authority of society is denied us’ (WV, 214). And yet, complicating this failure of the automatic removal of the spectator, or at least its chronology, we must remember that those Hollywood comedies of remarriage that Cavell studies in Pursuits of Happiness explicitly take up the problematic of scepticism. Already back in the 1930s, we might say, the separation of the spectator from the image and the overcoming of this separation were something that had to be striven for, and in the case of the melodramas of the unknown women arguably failed to be achieved. All of this is why in the foundational comedy of remarriage, It Happened One Night, the film ends with a blanket hung between Peter and Ellie to re-establish the proper distance not only between the characters but also between the characters and the audience in order to allow them properly to relate to each other. Now all of this is to raise the complex question of the ‘mediums’ of photography and film in relation to their ‘conventions’. As we have previously seen, throughout Cavell’s discussion of art he insists that the ‘medium’ of a particular artform is not to be reduced to a set of physical properties. It is this, as we have seen, that allows Fried to break with Greenberg and his conception of modernism as the attempt by each particular medium to discover its underlying essence. For Cavell and Fried, by contrast, a medium is driven not by the ongoing attempt to determine the ‘effects peculiar and exclusive to itself ’, but rather by the attempt to make a ‘convincing’ (WV, 142) work of art, when judged against previous examples, at a particular time. We can see this conception of medium generally expressed in Cavell’s essay ‘A Matter of Meaning It’, where he says that ‘we realise that the criteria [for defining a painting] are something we must discover, discover in the continuity M ICHAEL FRIED AND PHOTOGRAPHY

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of painting itself ’ (MW?, 219); and it is also to be found in The World Viewed, where he writes that ‘the task is no longer to produce another instance of an art but a new medium within it’ (WV, 103). And yet, as we have seen, there appears to be a tension between the ‘automaticity’ of the mediums of photography and film, in which the spectator is necessarily not part of what is captured in the image, and the fact that this can change historically or films like the comedies of remarriage and the melodramas of the unknown woman can meaningfully speak of or allegorize this as though it were not always the case. Or, put another way, The World Viewed can be read as an ontology of the photographic image until its modernity, when the separation between the screen and the spectator no longer automatically holds, but must continuously be both maintained and overcome. However, this moment of modernism is difficult to locate and, after it, let us say with Neo-Hollywood in the 1960s, the photographic image can always be seen to be involved in this problem of the overcoming of scepticism, as seen with the comedies of remarriage, which occur towards the beginning of cinema with the advent of sound. All of this is relevant when we turn to the subject of this chapter, which is Michael Fried’s taking up of photography in Why Photography Matters as Art Now as Never Before. The book first of all is notable for Fried’s return to the art of his time since he stopped writing art criticism almost forty years before. As we have seen in the previous chapter, after around 1970 he no longer dealt with contemporary art and commenced the long sequence of art-historical books that began with Absorption and Theatricality. Indeed, as we noted there, he abandoned writing art criticism because it became more difficult for him to find new art that sought to overcome theatricality. It appeared that the battle between art and objecthood had been lost, or that the very problem no longer concerned artists. However, Fried now argues in Why Photography Matters – this, as it were, is the condition of possibility for him writing a book on contemporary art – what we see from the late 1970s, that is, ironically, around the very time he decided to abandon writing art criticism, is that the issue of absorption that he had previously traced in modernist painting and sculpture was to found in certain kinds of photography. That is to say, it is photography and not painting and sculpture – or at least largely so – that continues the modernist problematic of overcoming a prior theatricality and producing an ‘absorptive’ work of art. In a wide variety of different practices that seem to be unified only by a medium – amongst them, the German Thomas Ruff, the Dutch Rineka Dijkstra, 152

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the Japanese Hiroshi Sugimoto and the French Jean-Marc Bustamente – Fried sees work that he finds to be artistically ‘convincing’, or at least in which ‘conviction’ is at stake and not the typical post-Minimal irony or scepticism. As Fried writes in the Introduction to his book, in which he sets out the stakes in contemporary photography as he understands them: ‘The issues of theatricality and objecthood that were crucial to my art criticism in 1966–7 are once again, in Heidegger’s tremendous phrase, “rooted in questioning,” not least questioning conducted with great force and brilliance by the photographers themselves’ (WP, 4). Of course, there are many questions that could be raised here, and commentators have not been slow in doing so. The first is obviously, given Fried’s Cavellian notion of medium and his well-known rejection of inter-media art – as he says in ‘Art and Objecthood’, what lies between mediums is ‘theatre’ (AO, 164) – how is it that he is able to suggest that photography somehow takes over the question of absorption that was previously at stake in painting and sculpture? In other words, in suggesting that it is photography today that is the proper or at least most powerful inheritor of the problem of spectatorial beholding, isn’t Fried proposing a new inter-media art, a photography that is in effect like painting? Certainly, in his descriptions of any number of the photographs in the book, Fried explicitly speaks of them as though they were paintings and suggests relations to works he has previously written about. For example, he will compare the Canadian Jeff Wall’s Adrian Walker, Artist (1992) to Chardin’s The Young Draftsman (1737) or the German Andreas Gursky’s Rhine II (1999) to Barnett Newman’s Onement I (1948). And this will lead such commentators as Diarmuid Costello to ask whether Fried is thereby breaking his own mandate against mixing media, as seen in that hybrid of painting and sculpture in Minimalism.3 Equally – and this is to take us back to what we were just saying about Cavell – it is to raise the question of how photography, which at least in that ‘automaticist’ reading of it situates the spectator so that they are no longer before what they look at, can ever be involved in those questions of beholding that Fried raises in his art criticism and history. Indeed, Fried himself, following Cavell – or even perhaps leading him – speaks of film as a ‘refuge from theatre and not a triumph over it’ (AO, 164), insofar as it does not involve the problem of spectatorship, in ‘Art and Objecthood’. In other words, Fried eliminates film and by implication photography from his critique there, insofar as it is not a modernist art, even a bad one, in the way Minimalism is in that essay. M ICHAEL FRIED AND PHOTOGRAPHY

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In fact, intriguingly – and this is why we began here with a detailed consideration of The World Viewed – there is the suggestion in Why Photography Matters that photography today no longer automatically resolves the question of spectatorship, putting the spectator on the other side of the subject as it once did. Rather Fried’s point is that in photography after the 1970s we find the same problems of beholding and theatricality that were once found in painting. This is perhaps, as in Cavell, a result of the modern image regime in which a consciousness of photography enters everyday life. But it is also, in a way not available to Cavell even when he updated The World Viewed, a result of the new technology of digital photography, which is like painting in the photographer’s ability to work in large scale and to compose images that are no longer indexical and are therefore subject to increased artistic control. As Fried writes in Why Photography Matters, outlining this shift to modern digital photography: ‘The advent of digitisation, with its implication that the contents of the photograph have been significantly altered or even created out of whole cloth by its maker, threatens to dissolve the “adherence” of the referent to the photograph’ (WP, 107). In other words, it is a matter both of the subjects in photographs being more conscious of being photographed and of the spectator looking on at the photograph being more conscious of the possible intervention by the photographer. And we see this ‘historical’ distinction in the contrast Fried draws between two otherwise very similar photographic projects: the American Walker Evans’ secret photographing of his fellow travellers on the New York subway just after the Depression and the French Luc Delahaye’s also secret photographing of his fellow travellers on the Paris Métro in the 1990s. Fried makes the point that Walker’s original ambition to record passengers lost in their thoughts unaware of being photographed is simply no longer available to Delahaye, both because passengers would be far more aware of the possibility of being photographed and because that space for private reverie is no longer available in public, and Delahaye’s project in its sheer cumulative repetitiveness (he was able to take many more images than Walker insofar as he used a digital camera) is as much as anything about this failure or impossibility. So, if Fried’s account is ‘historical’, insofar as it is only after a certain moment that photography is no longer able to rely on the nonconsciousness of the subject and the automatic removal of the spectator, and therefore is both sceptical and allows the overcoming of scepticism, when did this history begin? In the book’s opening chapter ‘Three 154

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Beginnings’, Fried seeks to identify those signs or indications that allowed him to think that the problem of beholding that he had believed was no longer relevant for contemporary art could now be seen in photography. First of all, he finds in certain of Cindy Sherman’s well-known Untitled Film Stills of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which are still largely read in terms of an ironic playing out of gender stereotypes in our society, a certain thematic of absorption. More precisely, if on the one hand they are undoubtedly ‘staged’ for critical interaction with their audience, on the other hand they are ‘antitheatrical’ (WP, 8) in the way that against or beyond this the figures in them often gaze thoughtfully out of the photos, apparently unaware of being seen. This is echoed in Wall’s Movie Audience series (1979), in which he records close-ups of faces in a darkened movie theatre both enraptured and illuminated by the out-ofshot cinema screen. The second inspiration for Fried’s insight is French critic Jean-François Chevrier’s observation that photography today is no longer simply destined for newspapers, magazines and reprinted collections in books, but is often exhibited in art galleries ‘tableau format’ (WP, 14), in imitation of paintings. This is not only to pose new problems of composition and how to hold together an image of this scale (indeed, these new photographs are often larger than easel paintings and are therefore more like the work of those abstract expressionists Cavell speaks about in his ‘Excursus’ in The World Viewed), but also necessarily raise the question of their relation to a spectator standing in front of them, also much like painting. The photographers Fried considers working in this manner are again Wall and his staged scenarios of everyday life, Ruff and his coloured prints of his fellow students from the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie and Bustamente, whose explicitly flat and lateral compositions could be said to take the tableau format itself as their subject. Finally, Fried selects two texts on the theme of looking on at people unaware in everyday life, the anonymous Adelaïde, or la femme morte d’amour (1735) and Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of Dawn (1970), and reads them through a number of texts on theatre by Denis Diderot, which he had earlier considered in his Absorption and Theatricality. In the following chapters of the book, Fried, echoing the heterogeneity of his introductory chapter, outlines in more detail the evidence for photography being the medium in which the issues of absorption and theatricality are most productively pursued today. Importantly, that is, we suggest that Fried does not propose any single or even obviously unified set of qualities that characterizes this new photography. Indeed, M ICHAEL FRIED AND PHOTOGRAPHY

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the organization of the book is a little like the constitution of a genre in Pursuits of Happiness, in which each new member cannot merely repeat the previously known set of qualities but must add something different. Or even, it could be said, Fried concludes his book with a meditation on Bernd and Hilla Becher’s ‘typological’ (WP, 308) images of industrial architecture, in which ‘the finitude or determinateness of a given object is in an active relationship to an infinite number of opposed possibilities’ (WP, 326), not merely because it speaks of the medium of the new photography but because it echoes Fried’s own method of discussing photography in his book. However, we might briefly here outline what we take to be the principal qualities or characteristics of this new photography and Fried’s arguments concerning them. There are Wall’s photos of what we might call scenarios of ‘absorption’ (WP, 38), which Fried can directly compare to paintings from that tradition in French art he has previously established: Adrian Walker, an image of an anatomy student drawing an embalmed arm, to Chardin’s Young Student Drawing; and After ‘Spring Snow’ (2000–2005), an image of a young woman turned away from the camera pouring sand from her shoe, to Courbet’s images of peasant labour from the 1850s. Then there are the German Thomas Struth’s images of crowds in front of frescoes and paintings in churches and museums (Gallerie dell’Accademia, 1992; Art Institute of Chicago, 1990), which Fried reads as revealing the works’ ‘closedness’ and ‘indifference’ to the spectator (WP, 120). This argument is echoed in his reading of the German photographer Andreas Gursky’s depictions of anonymous social spaces (Salerno, 1990; Atlanta, 1996), which for him evidence our ‘severedness’ (WP, 164) from their worlds. There are photographs of families by Struth (The Bernstein Family, 1990; The Consolandi Family, 1996) and images of adolescents posing on the beach by Dijkstra (Odessa, Ukraine, 1993; Hel, Poland, 1999), which for Fried demonstrate the final inability of the subjects to maintain their ‘pose’ in front of the camera, that is, self-knowingly or self-possessedly to project themselves as they would like to be seen. And something like this is also played out in the street photography of the Swiss Beat Streuli and the American PhilipLorca diCorcia, in which despite the self-consciousness of the subjects and the exhaustion of the ‘candid’ – and this reminds us of Delahaye – the photographers are in some way trying to take this into account and make their images engaging. Finally, Fried looks at the photographed paper sculptures of the German Thomas Demand (Poll, 2001; Corridor, 1995), which attempt to assert the ‘intention’ (WP, 271) of the photographer 156

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against the long-running claim that there is always something about the photograph that exceeds their control. There are undoubtedly a number of tensions between the various aspects of Fried’s argument here. We might speak of it in terms of the ‘new feature or features’ (PH, 29) added by each successive member of a genre or the ‘contrastive’ (WP, 325) elements put together in the Becher’s typologies of industrial objects, but most obviously it can appear as though he is simply allowing different moments of his art history to coexist. That is to say, in photographs like Wall’s Adrian Walker Fried makes a comparison to the French art of the 1730s discussed in Absorption and Theatricality. This is also the case with Struth’s museum pictures and Gursky’s images of anonymous social spaces that he describes as excluding the spectator from the space being depicted, which is also a strategy of the French art of that period. (And, in fact, there is another temporal disjunction, insofar as the works of art featured in Struth’s museum photographs are largely from the Renaissance and Baroque, which at least for Fried at the time he wrote his book was before the modernist problematic of beholding arose.) In a photograph like Wall’s After ‘Spring Snow’ – and we would say implicitly of such photographs as Wall’s Untangling (1994), which depicts a workman untying a heavy rope, and Morning Cleaning (1999), which depicts a cleaner washing the windows of a museum – he makes a comparison to images by Courbet of peasants undertaking manual labour from the 1850s. Next, in the largescale portraits by Ruff of his fellow art students, Struth of bourgeoise families and Dijkstra of adolescents at the beach, we find the whole problematic of ‘facingness’ (WP, 340), of a certain engagement with the image produced in and through its awareness of being looked at, at stake in Manet’s portraits of the 1860s. And, finally, in Fried’s discussion of Demand’s photographed paper sculptures and the depiction of factory architecture by the Bechers we come back to the issues of intentionality and objecthood that were first to be seen in his dispute with Minimalism in the 1960s. There can certainly appear to be an inconsistency here, with a simple variety of ‘anti-theatrical’ approaches proposed. And undoubtedly one of the tensions involved with Fried’s return to the art of his time is that between art criticism and art history because, as opposed to art history, in which he simply ‘tries to understand the basis of the division of opinion’ (AO, 51), in his art criticism, in which there isn’t this historical record, there are ‘judgements of value both positive and negative’ (AO, 51). M ICHAEL FRIED AND PHOTOGRAPHY

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And, indeed, Fried acknowledges the partial, preliminary and timebound nature of his account, which he understands not only as dealing with a still-unfolding phenomenon but also as something of a critical intervention within it: ‘The gulf [between art history and art criticism] no longer looms as it previously did; put slightly differently, the present book turns out to be generically mixed – at once criticism and history, judgemental and non-judgemental, engaged and detached’ (WP, 4). But perhaps this distinction – or collapse of distinction – is able to be rewritten more generally as that between history and ontology or even convention and medium that we have seen previously in The World Viewed. For, we would propose, for all of the apparent inconsistency or at least plurality of approaches to be found here, there is in fact a consistent line or logic that unifies them. That is, if Fried appears to be arguing for now past modes of absorption – and this is very much as in The World Viewed where, after the proposing of a Neo-Hollywood exhibitionism, photographic automaticity was never simply automatic but always retrospectively modern – he can also admit that all of this is merely a ‘performance’ (WP, 136) of absorption. That is, he will say of Wall’s Adrian Walker that, if it recalls Chardin’s depiction of a man drawing, it also knows that this no longer works or operates only in an exaggerated form: ‘[That Wall’s draughtsman is entirely absorbed in his work] is unlikely, both because the depicted situation appears patently staged and because the conspicuousness of the apparatus of display [Wall exhibits his work in an illuminated lightbox on the wall of the gallery] suggests a comparable conspicuousness of the photographic apparatus as such’ (WP, 41). Similarly, if Struth’s museum photographs evidence the idea that the frescoes and paintings do not play to the audience, they also reveal the breakdown of that separation in contemporary viewing circumstances: ‘All this [the distinction between the different types of Struth’s museum photographs] implies a subtle balancing act. . . . Possibly the point of [a photograph featuring Delacroix’s Liberty at the Barricades exhibited in Tokyo] concerns precisely the painting’s transmogrification under “foreign” conditions of exhibition’ (WP, 124–5). All of this is to indicate – or to remind us – that those prior historical solutions Fried points to in art history were never permanent and not even entirely convincing at the time they were proposed. That is, if in Fried’s art history he is able to document what was artistically convincing for a period, the effect of his art criticism – and his admission late in his career that the distinction between the two is not watertight – is that even 158

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back then the work never entirely convinced and opinion was divided. Or even, we might say – and this is perhaps the real truth of the works ‘performing’ absorption – this absorption is no sooner stated than it is done away with. For Fried will have to say of Wall’s mobilization of a subsequent moment of absorption in his After ‘Spring Snow’ that it does not entirely succeed or at least is ambivalent: ‘As for the young woman [in the photograph] herself, although we viewers know she can be performing only for the camera, she strikes us – does she not? – as wholly absorbed in what she is doing’ (WP, 349). And the same will go for Wall’s (in his Picture for Women (1979), which replay aspects of Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère), Ruff ’s (his portraits of art students), Struth’s (his portraits of families) and Dijkstra’s (her portraits of adolescents at the beach) mobilization of a still later strategy of absorption: Manet’s ‘facingness’ or having the subject of the painting actually confront the spectator. Again, while in Manet this could produce a kind of ‘strikingness’, in which despite the works’ obvious consciousness of being beheld by the spectator there is nevertheless something that goes beyond this to produce an effect of immersion, in these more recent attempts to repeat his method we are simply too aware of the composedness of the image and the selfconsciousness of the sitters: ‘Wall exploits both the inherent verism of the photographic medium and its ineluctable differences from natural vision to quietly but unmistakably acknowledge the posedness and constructedness of his compositions, an acknowledgement I have also described as his pictures’ to-be-seenness’ (WP, 341). All of these works – as with Delahaye’s remaking of Evans’ subway photos – are as much as anything about the very failure or impossibility of previous strategies of absorption in preceding painting and photography. Thus we might say that, if Fried’s art history progresses ‘dialectically’, with each subsequent art movement arising out of the shortcomings or inadequacy of the one before – Chardin and Greuze out of the failure of Boucher and Fragonard, Courbet out of the failure of Chardin and Greuze, Manet out of the failure of Courbet – it is not so much a progression as a repetition of the same problematic. There is not even a momentarily unambiguous success, or success is inseparable from the failure to come. Which is to say that all further attempts to overcome theatricality are already implicit in the first. It is undoubtedly in this sense that we must understand the availability of all of these different problematics of absorption and theatricality at once. Why Photography Matters is a book of criticism as well as history, and perhaps shows us M ICHAEL FRIED AND PHOTOGRAPHY

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that Fried’s art history has always been a matter of criticism in this sense. But the other way of understanding this continual ‘failure’ of absorptive strategy, the fact that each attempt to bring about an unawareness of the spectator reveals itself as a kind of ‘pose’, is that absorption has always been like this. In other words, what attempts by artists like Manet to bring about absorption not through a simple ignoring of the spectator but in and through their acknowledgement – in effect, the fact that absorption is not opposed to theatricality but possible only in and through it – reveal is that this only apparent separation of absorption and theatricality has always been the case, all the way back to those anti-Rococo artists Fried studied in Absorption and Theatricality. Already there absorption was not easy, unconscious, ‘automatic’, but deliberate, consciously striven for, in effect a ‘pose’ bordering on the acknowledgement of its failure, as Fried now describes the contemporary photography of Wall, Ruff, Struth and Dijkstra. How might we see this played out in more detail in Why Photography Matters? Let us, indeed, take up the question of the ‘pose’ in photography. The pose is famously discussed by Roland Barthes in his Camera Lucida (1980), the book that arguably inaugurated modern photographic studies and is explicitly acknowledged by Fried as the single discourse that has to be dealt with in any discussion of photography today. In the chapter ‘Barthes’ Punctum’, Fried takes up Barthes’ book and begins to think how it might align with his own problematic of absorption and theatricality. In doing so, he addresses Barthes’ famous distinction between the studium and the punctum to argue that Barthes’ work does indeed have an antitheatrical possibility. For Barthes, the studium is that aspect of the photo in which we look for a wider social meaning, in which we understand the photographer trying to show us something. The studium, that is, is generalizable and intended to be seen or recognized by the spectator. The example Barthes uses is the Dutch Koen Wessing’s photograph of nuns and soldiers walking past each other during the Nicaraguan civil war, which for all of its apparent incongruity makes meaning out of this unexpected coincidence: ‘I understood that its existence derived from the co-presence of two discontinuous elements, heterogeneous in that they did not belong to the same world: the soldiers and the nuns’ (CL, 96). By contrast, the punctum is something that has no particular meaning and has not been deliberately put there by the photographer. It is therefore not generalizable and does not even operate in terms of meaning. Barthes’ famous example of this is a photograph of his mother, with whom he 160

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was close, as a young girl, in which he can already recognize the person she grew up to be. In Barthes’ much-quoted words, the punctum ‘pricks’, ‘wounds’ or ‘bruises’ (CL, 95). And, of course, the fact that Barthes privileges the punctum as what is uniquely photographic – the punctum, unlike the stadium, as what is not consciously shown to the spectator or even known by the photographer before they take their photograph – allows Fried to think of it as an example of the anti-theatrical. In a related discussion in Camera Lucida, Barthes takes up the question of the ‘pose’ for the camera. Of course, the point of the usual photographic portrait for the camera is that the subject is supposed to look relaxed and even unaware of being photographed. Again, it is what Cavell speaks of in The World Viewed in terms of the photographer yelling out ‘watch the birdie!’ as they take the photograph. And Barthes looks at several photographic portraits in his book, most notably one of the painter Piet Mondrian sitting sideways with an arm thrown over the back of a chair in what we are meant to understand as a surprisingly informal pose for such a rigorous and cerebral artist. As well Barthes speaks of his own experience being photographed, similarly trying to achieve a nonchalant and unself-conscious look. But, as he makes clear – and this is not disassociated from his preference for the punctum over the studium – these poses are essentially put on. For all of their apparent unawareness and indifference to being seen, they are highly conscious, directed specifically to the viewer whom they know is looking. As Barthes writes of his own experience of posing for a photograph for the back cover of one of his books: ‘Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I instantly constitute myself in the process of “posing”, I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image’ (CL, 107). And, as we have suggested, it is just this ‘failure’ of the pose that Fried points to throughout Why Photography Matters: the way the adoption of apparently ‘absorptive’ poses by the subjects of photographs is revealed to be mannered, self-conscious and thoroughly aware of the audience, both by the photographer in constructing them and the subjects themselves in playing them out. Thus, to run again through the diverse practices Fried deals with in his book: in Wall’s Adrian Walker, the scenario is ‘patently staged’ (WP, 41), and in his After ‘Spring Snow’, there is a quality of ‘to-be-seenness’ (WP, 349); in Ruff ’s pictures of his artschool colleagues, there is a ‘thematised facingness’ (WP, 149), in Struth’s family portraits, the sitters are ‘fully aware of themselves and conscious of how they present themselves to the M ICHAEL FRIED AND PHOTOGRAPHY

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camera’ (WP, 202) and in Dijkstra’s pictures of adolescents, the subjects are ‘fully aware of being photographed’ (WP, 207); in Delahaye’s Métro portraits, there is again a ‘to-be-seenness’ (WP, 223); and in similar street photography by Streuli we have an ‘unimpeded access to their human subjects’ (WP, 244) and diCorcia a ‘dramatic theatricality’ (WP, 253). However, as we suggested, if in one way what this sequence of contemporary photography shows is the impossibility of the absorptive pose, in another way what it might be said to reveal is that absorption has always been a matter of the ‘posing’ of absorption. In this sense, the contemporary photography Fried deals with in Why Photography Matters manifests not – or not only – the decline of the pose but casts a revealing retrospective light onto it. That is to say, if we go back to Fried’s original characterization of absorption in Absorption and Theatricality, we can see that it is precisely not a matter of any simple unself-consciousness or something easily attained. Rather, the effect of unself-consciousness and unawareness of an audience is achieved only through the failure to remain unself-conscious and unaware of the audience. The effect of unself-consciousness and unawareness is nothing natural or arrived at without effort, but realized only with great effort and the revealing of the limits of this effort. That is, it is paradoxically only through the attempt at posing and control that we might produce something that goes beyond them. This is the real meaning, we suggest, of the necessity of ‘rehearsal’ in Diderot’s The Paradox of Acting, in which it is only through the exhaustion involved in trying to appear nonchalant and unaware that a real nonchalance and unawareness might be obtained: ‘When, think you, does the company really begin to act, to understand each other, to advance towards the point perfection demands? It is when the actors are worn out with constant rehearsals, are what we called “used up.” From this moment, their progress is surprising; each identifies himself with his part; and it is at the end of this hard work that the performances begin.’4 And we saw something like this, indeed, at the end of our discussion of Rothman on documentary, where it was only through Dylan’s absolute self-consciousness and attempt to take into account the gaze of the audience that we get the real Dylan. And this is the case here with those photographers Fried takes up. To consider only the most obvious cases, it is exactly through the efforts of the sitters in Struth’s family portraits – particularly the men at the centre of these often high bourgeois families – to control how they are seen that something else emerges, something ‘behind’ them as it were, in his rigorously lateral pictures. And in a 162

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similar manner, it is through the attempts to arrange themselves to be seen in perhaps their first moment of self-consciousness that Dijkstra’s adolescent sitters reveal their true selves, which it is tempting to call their ‘childhood’, although it is a ‘childhood’, as Barthes discovers with his mother, that lasts all of our lives. Understanding absorption like this also allows us to answer another objection that often comes up with regard to Fried’s relation to Barthes. Cultural critic Walter Benn Michaels in the essay ‘Photographs and Fossils’ has made the point that it is unexpected – if not actually contradictory – that Fried has turned to Barthes’ arguments concerning the studium and the punctum because the punctum is unintended by the photographer and its meaning is ultimately decided by the spectator. Of course, in this, as Michaels observes, it is comparable to that open-ended, spectatororiented Minimalism that Fried critiqued in ‘Art and Objecthood’. Fried responds to Michaels’ objection (it was originally made of a preliminary version of the chapter ‘Barthes’ Punctum’, published in 2005) in Why Photography Matters, and Michaels in turn elaborates on this in his more recent Beauty as a Social Problem (2015).5 However, we might perhaps intervene in the debate by suggesting that Fried is not simply opposed to unintentionality, but more to the usual ways of thinking how we get there. In other words, to return to that question of the ‘pose’ in Fried, we suggest that the proper absorptive effect, which must appear unintended and unself-conscious, is only to be brought about, in the case of acting at least, as Diderot makes clear, through strict training and devotion. That is to say, Fried is not simply opposed to unintentionality, at least in the sense that the work is not to be intended for the purpose of being seen, but this is to be attained only by means of a great effort of intentionality. And this is demonstrated in Why Photography Matters in the work of Thomas Demand. Demand in his large-scale, non-digital photographs produces approximate cardboard replicas of often socially overloaded cultural scenes, for example, the contested Florida ballot boxes whose meaning had to be decided by the US Supreme Court or the anonymouslooking corridor in Milwaukee where serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer carried out his murders. Fried characterizes the works as ‘allegories of intention’ (WP, 261), undoubtedly in the sense that Demand constructs his scenarios so that everything in them is determined by him. But in both of these pieces there is a kind of irresolvable mystery or lack of control or intentionality: in Poll, no one knew what the voters wanted; in Corridor, the impossible-to-know motives of a deadly psychotic.6 M ICHAEL FRIED AND PHOTOGRAPHY

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And Demand would make another work, the video Pacific Sun (2012), in which we watch an absolutely meticulous recreation of an apparently random event: objects chaotically sliding back and forth across an inhouse camera as a cruise ship is hit by a series of huge waves causing it to tilt from side to side.7 This interplay between intentionality and what goes beyond it is also to be seen in the work of another artist Fried writes about: the Scottish film-maker Douglas Gordon. In Gordon’s k. 364: A Journey by Train (2000), he records the journey of two Israeli musicians, Avri Levitan and Roi Shiloah, through Poland to play Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E Flat Major, k. 364, with the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra. In the film, we watch the musicians first on a train from Berlin, then rehearsing in Poznan and finally playing in Warsaw, with Mozart’s music running throughout, sometimes in synch with the action and sometimes not, across two large screens frequently showing different points of view onto same scene. We listen first to snippets of Mozart as Avri and Roi sit and talk on the train, travelling through the haunted landscape, especially for Jewish musicians, of the Holocaust, then in longer sequences in rehearsal and then in complete uninterrupted form during the final performance. Again, as in our analysis of Don’t Look Back, we might divide up our response, both to Mozart’s music and Gordon’s film, into three different moments or categories, which cannot strictly be separated and are not simply sequential. In the first, associated with the train journey, we let the music wash over us, taking us away from where we are and allowing all sorts of associations, undoubtedly idiosyncratic to every listener and watcher. (There is a video by Gordon, Play Dead; Real Time (2003), which features an elephant repeatedly lying down and getting up in an art gallery, about which Fried uses the term ‘empathetic projection’ (AL, 175) from Cavell’s The Claim of Reason to refer to the way we imbue the elephant with all sorts of human emotions that seems appropriate to describe our relationship to Mozart’s music here.) Then in a second moment in the film, associated with the rehearsal, both the musicians and we step back from the music to reflect upon its proper meaning and performance in a critically and historically informed relationship towards it. Gordon makes this clear with a series of shots of the two musicians interacting with each other and the conductor, and later a shot of a wall of photographs of famous musicians who have previously played at the concert hall in Warsaw as they are about to enter. Then, in a final moment of music and film, through the very technical virtuosity of the two musicians and the 164

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orchestra, they and we ‘lose’ ourselves in the music, becoming unaware of our surroundings and playing and listening to it as though for the first time in a kind of improvisational ‘presentness’ (AL, 234). At this point, we return to that first moment of our relationship to the music, but instead of an empathetic projection onto it in which it can stand for anything according to the listener, it is the music itself that expresses the world and gives shape to our thoughts. (Fried speaks of this inversion with regard to Play Dead, in which instead of all reactions being equally valid, there is a ‘continuum’ (AL, 177) of responses, in which only some are valid, as though the work determines how we react.) As Fried writes of k. 364 in Another Light: ‘[I would assert] in the strongest possible terms that “presentness” in this context does not mean literally forgetting or denying what has gone before (not merely the hours [of rehearsal] in question or previous European musical culture but also the Holocaust, for example) but rather of finding the proper means of acknowledging them’ (AL, 240).

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9 PERFECTIONISM

We previously left our discussion of Hitchcock’s films by suggesting that with Psycho Hitchcock finally succeeded in bringing about a nontheatrical, properly cinematic relationship between the screen and the spectator. As we saw in The Murderous Gaze, a film like The 39 Steps directly plays on the relationship between the screen and the spectator. The characters there know that they are being looked at and seek to take this gaze into account, occupying as it were a third position between themselves and the camera. This is certainly one way of understanding what Cavell means by speaking of the way that ‘at some point the unhinging of our consciousness from the world interposed our subjectivity between us and our presentness to the world’ (WV, 22) with regard to modern painting, and as we have seen this problem is also to be found in photography and film when automatism no longer holds. We have only to think of Hannay turning his collar up with his back to the camera to introduce himself or deliberately grabbing Pamela and kissing her to attract the attention of the police looking for him in The 39 Steps. In both cases, he is not unknowingly shown by the camera, but alternately hides something from or reveals something to it, imagining himself as seen from its point of view. Or to put this another way, although both of these actions appear unaware and unconscious of the camera and the spectator, both are deliberately staged for them. In this sense, they are as Rothman would say ‘theatrical’, and we might compare them to both what Cavell calls ‘exhibitionism’ (WV, 118) in The World Viewed and Fried calls ‘to-be-seenness’ (WP, 35) in Why Photography Matters. But for Rothman at a certain point in Hitchcock’s oeuvre something decisively changes. We shift from ‘theatre’ to ‘cinema’. And this is characterized for Rothman by Norman’s radical unawareness of being seen or how he is being looked at, both by the other characters in the film and the camera, in Psycho. As we have previously pointed out, this can be

found for example in the sequence in which Arbogast the detective comes to interview Norman, looking for the now-dead Marion, and the camera radically enters Norman’s space, crossing the hotel desk he is standing behind and showing him in extreme and almost unrecognizable close-up from beneath his chin. Or it can be observed in the chilling conversation Marion has with Norman in his parlour where she is eating the sandwich he has given her and he neither flirts with her, as all men seem to want to, nor recognizes that what he is saying is too intimate and she is politely indicating that she would like to get away. And, most famously, it is to be witnessed in the final shot of the film when Norman has been captured and now sits in a cell and the camera shows him face-on in brightly lit close-up for some time, and again Norman does not react but merely stares unblinkingly at the camera that must be just before him. Unlike Hannay in The 39 Steps, Norman does not adopt any roles (spy, local politician, the lover of Pamela) or hold anything back from the camera. As opposed to the dark and shadow of the broad social panorama of The 39 Steps, everything here in the intimate chamber drama of Psycho is visible and known. And, therefore – and this is what ‘cinema’ in Cavell’s and Rothman’s sense might mean – we in the audience are forced to see ourselves in Norman (and Hitchcock). There is no longer any distance – either that of the screen or the self-consciousness of the characters – between us. Norman and his maker give us exactly what we want in their conscienceless destruction. And this breaking down of the theatrical distance between the spectator and what they see is brilliantly allegorized by Norman’s slashing away of the shower curtain during the murder scene in the shower. All of this comes together in Rothman’s powerful – and autobiographical – ‘Postscript’ to his book, in which he speaks of his own identification with both Norman and Hitchcock during the writing of The Murderous Gaze: ‘Yet the Hitchcock for whom I speak, who calls forth my words, is also my creation. I am his character and he is mine; the boundary between my identity and his is unfathomable’ (MG, 346). Indeed, more than this, we suggested that we can see something of the same trajectory in Rothman’s book on documentary cinema, Documentary Film Classics. Here too we begin with the collapse of ‘automatism’ and the fall into ‘theatricality’ with such early documentaries as Nanook of the North, which pretends that the camera is not there but in which everything is actually staged for it. We then move through such cinemaverité documentaries as Chronicle of a Summer and A Happy Mother’s Day, in which like The 39 Steps there is an explicit acknowledgement of 168

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the camera, as the subjects of the film speak directly to the film-makers of their hopes and fears, and even when they appear to ignore the camera (like Hannay at the beginning of The 39 Steps) this is done with an awareness of its effect on the audience. Then finally with Don’t Look Back we get something like that ‘cinematic’ Rothman identified in The Murderous Gaze, with Dylan at the end of the film losing himself in song, no longer aware of being looked at or taking into account how he strikes people. And it is at this point that, like Psycho, documentary becomes properly ‘cinematic’ and reaches its full potential as both an artform and a way of revealing or responding to the world. Indeed, we might even say that within Don’t Look Back itself we can trace the arc from the ‘theatrical’ to the ‘cinematic’, with Dylan both in the press conference at the beginning of the film and in his first interactions with fans highly selfconscious and playing on his image, seeing himself from the outside, but by the end of the film, both in his playing and his interactions with others, unself-conscious, thoroughly accustomed to being filmed and stared at. And it is at this point, we might say, that we see the ‘real’ Dylan behind the mask, the one who does not ‘look back’ into the camera. Indeed, in an uncanny way, we might even make a comparison between Dylan and Norman in his brightly lit cell looked on at by the analyst and Marion’s sister and ex-lover. This is what Rothman says in his chapter on Don’t Look Back of a shot of Dylan, from behind and at a distance, illumined by a bright spotlight, during his final concert at Albert Hall: ‘There is no longer any visible sign that Pennebaker’s camera and Dylan occupy different places, that anything separates them. The bars between them have, indeed, busted down’ (DFC, 197). However, it is perhaps not quite as simple as this, and this is not exactly what is at stake in Rothman’s notion of the ‘cinematic’. For let us go back again to Norman in Psycho. Is it the case that he is simply unaware of the camera (and us) in that final scene? No. He talks in an internal monologue there of deliberately keeping still and not letting those looking on know what he is thinking. (‘They’re probably watching me. Well let them see what kind of a person I am. I’m not going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching.’) And similarly with Dylan it is absolutely open to be argued that his apparent ‘authenticity’ in front of the camera (e.g. the well-known scene in which he chastises unruly fans for wrecking his hotel room) and lack of self-consciousness while singing on stage is a performance, something deliberately put on for the camera or audience. And it is in this way that we might align Rothman’s cinematic with Fried’s P ERFECTIONISM

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absorption: not as any simple unawareness of being looked at but the ongoing attempt to overlook the obvious fact and consciousness of being looked at. Indeed, it might be suggested, it is through this attempt to appear unself-conscious or even the failure of this attempt that we get to know Norman and Dylan. It is not directly that we get to know them or even through their playing to the audience, but rather through their attempt to hide themselves and hold something back from the audience, which is also still to take into account the audience’s gaze upon them, to see themselves from the audience’s point of view. Absorption, the attempt to appear unaware or unconscious of the audience, is revealed as merely another form of theatricality; but it is just in this falling back that a real absorption, something that goes beyond the subject and their ability to see themselves from the outside, is brought about. We might relate all of this, once more, to what Fried says about the subjects of Ruff ’s, Struth’s and Dijkstra’s photographic portraits. They all attempt to adopt a neutral ‘pose’, an indifference to being beheld; but it is exactly through this that something else is produced – the impossible-to-repress personality of the sitters in Ruff, the unexpected and unobserved family resemblances in Struth, the adolescent hiding behind the adult pose in Dijkstra. It is at this point that we might turn to Rothman’s Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock. As Rothman says there, the book was written some thirty years after The Murderous Gaze, and during this time he admits that he has rethought what he originally said there. To begin with, the book does not treat, as Rothman notably did in The Murderous Gaze, just five Hitchcock films in microscopic, almost frame-by-frame detail, but is instead a survey of Hitchcock’s entire career, including on occasions his 1960s TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (e.g. the episodes ‘Breakdown’, originally screened in 1955, and ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’, originally screened in 1958). In doing so, attention is necessarily paid to what are commonly considered Hitchcock’s ‘minor’ films and his rare artistic failures (e.g. Rich and Strange [1931], The Wrong Man [1956] and Torn Curtain [1966]). And the narrative does not end with Psycho, usually understood to be Hitchcock’s last great masterpiece and the film with which Rothman had previously argued Hitchcock realizes his cinematic project. Rather, for Rothman, Psycho is not the end of Hitchcock’s project, summarizing all that came before, but a new beginning, opening up the way for the films that came after (The Birds [1963], Marnie [1964], Topaz [1969] and Frenzy [1972], amongst others). And this ‘unfinishedness’ is 170

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undoubtedly appropriate because Rothman is now arguing in Must We Kill? – it must be said unexpectedly and without any direct biographical evidence – that Hitchcock’s oeuvre is one of the pre-eminent examples of Emersonian ‘perfectionism’ in cinema. In Rothman’s words from his ‘Introduction: Drawing a New Circle’, which are obviously informed by Cavell, for whom we know that perfectionism was a long-running intellectual concern: Must We Kill? argues that Hitchcock’s ambitions towards the Emersonian perfectionism that was in ascendency in Hollywood during the period of the New Deal [the comedies of remarriage], and his ambivalence towards overcoming or transcending this ambivalence, was the driving force of his work. (MWK?, 7) Thus, to come back to Psycho, what Rothman now emphasizes is not the ‘cinematic’ aspect of the film, the way Norman is unaware of being looked at, but the fact that a certain ‘birth or rebirth’ (MWK?, 198) is to be seen there. First of all, as we say, Norman is not simply unaware of being looked at, but exercises a rigorous self-control so that he appears unaware; and then it is through something like the ‘failure’ of this, the inability of him entirely to remain indifferent beneath our gaze, that we see something of the ‘real’ Norman, like the skull that emerges through his face in the final moments of the film. And this might be thought in terms of a shift from thinking Psycho and the character Norman, driven as he appears to be by uncontrollable impulses, in terms of fate or destiny, to thinking instead of a special kind of ‘freedom’ or ‘unrestrictedness’ brought about by this effort at self-control. Indeed, in some ways, we would even say that our previous reading of Rothman on Psycho in The Murderous Gaze was inflected by his own subsequent revision of his interpretation of the film in Must We Kill? (In a similar way, we can go back to Fried’s earlier writings on absorption in the light of Why Photography Matters and offer a new and updated reading of them.1) The important thing is that ultimately Rothman’s identification with the characters in Hitchcock’s films, and with Hitchcock himself, is different in Must We Kill? than in The Murderous Gaze. If at the end of The Murderous Gaze, his identification was direct, as if they could be fully known and were in some sense identical with Rothman himself (or he with them), in Must We Kill? they are unknown, cut free from Rothman, with him unable to identify with them unmediatedly. And this, as he realizes there, is the P ERFECTIONISM

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more profound meaning of Cavell’s notion of acknowledgement: that the freedom of the characters in, say, Lear and the ‘presentness’ of theatre is that, even though the lines they speak are obviously written for them, it is as though the characters there can act freely, not only breaking with the various determinations upon them, but even from our expectations of them, how we think they will or should behave as though they were us. That is to say, in acknowledgement proper we identify with the characters not in their sameness to us but in their difference from us, a ‘difference’ that is itself possible only through our acknowledgement. This is obviously the case with Hitchcock too, as Must We Kill? attests. Rothman previously thought he knew Hitchcock, that he could identify with him, project himself onto him, indeed in a way even was him. But now he realizes that not only did he not entirely know Hitchcock, but he never will, that Hitchcock is different from him, autonomous like his characters. And in Must We Kill? Rothman traces – and, of course, this is complex in relation to the trajectory he had previously sketched in The Murderous Gaze – the gradual ‘freeing’ of Hitchcock’s characters, particularly in the films after Psycho. (And, ultimately, we would seek to reconcile the two paths Rothman takes through Hitchcock’s films by thinking that this perfectionist freedom is possible only through the ‘destiny’ of the cinematic.) To take just one example, the early-period Hitchcock Secret Agent (1936) is a suspenseful spy thriller set during First World War in which the death of a British writer is faked so that he can be sent into the field to track down a double agent who is about to sell secrets to a foreign power that will cost thousands of soldiers’ lives. At one point in the film, our hero looks through a telescope as an assassin working for him pushes an old man – whom they have mistakenly identified as the agent – off a cliff. The camera holds for long moments as the assassin approaches and our hero calls out to the old man from far away, ‘Watch out, for God’s sake!’ But eventually the assassin does push the old man off the cliff, as we knew he would, following both his military training and a kind of unexplained psychopathy. For all of the apparent suspense of this moment, events turn out exactly as they had to, both at this point and in the film in general. (Later in the film, the assassin and the real double agent meet their justice thanks to an accidentally dropped Allied bomb). But now take by contrast Hitchcock’s much later North by Northwest (1959), a similar story in which our hero, having also made the move from ordinary citizen to spy, at one point is betrayed by his female counterpart only to end up with her at the conclusion of the film, 172

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all misunderstandings swept aside. However, at one point in the film, in what is surely a conscious replay of the sequence involving the murder of the old man in Secret Agent, the enemy head gets an underling to kill someone from his own side who is endangering their plan by trying to kill our hero. Here too the assassin raises his gun and we get to look through his telescopic sight at the victim standing far away, again wondering whether his boss will go ahead and order the murder. He does, but this time – and the film is clear about this – both he and we in the audience are struck by how unexpected this is, how it does not follow any destiny but seems to upend the entire logic of the film, allowing the escape of our hero and now reformed heroine, not only from the spy chief ’s control but also Hitchcock’s own plans for them (and we might further say from the spy chief ’s own understanding of himself, the ‘plot’ by which he had hitherto given his life a meaning). But it is undeniably in Rothman’s analysis of Hitchcock’s late-period film Marnie (1964) that we can see these perfectionist questions played out most clearly. The film is one of the last that Hitchcock made, immediately following The Birds (1963), and the last for which any kind of critical claim has been put forward. The plot – controversial even at the time and especially difficult to approve of nowadays – consists of a young woman Marnie, played by Tippi Hedren, seen previously in The Birds, who while working as a secretary is seen by her boss Mark, played by Sean Connery, already famous for his role as James Bond, stealing from the office safe after hours. However, instead of apprehending her and calling the police, he effectively blackmails her, forcing her to become his wife in exchange for not telling the authorities. (Of course, this coersive plot is overlaid today by the historical fact that Hitchcock apparently pressed his own intentions upon Hedren in an unacceptable way.) Marnie, believing she has no alternative, agrees, and the first part of the film ends with an extremely awkward scene in which Mark seeks sex with Marnie while onboard a cruise ship during their honeymoon and Marnie refuses. Mark at first apologizes, but then forces her to make love with him before breaking it off. But part two of the film opens with a rather unexpected twist. Instead of breaking up, Mark and Marnie remain together, with Mark now seeking to help Marnie overcome her ‘problem’. Indeed, during a visit to Marnie’s mother there is revealed an incident from Marnie’s past that helps explain her behaviour. Her mother, who worked as a prostitute, was once fighting with a client and the young Marnie, seeing this, hit him over the head with an iron poker, killing him. The incident, needless to P ERFECTIONISM

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say, scarred her deeply, leading to her ‘coldness’ towards men, both sexual and otherwise. In fact, it seems that Mark not only knew that Marnie was a thief but even suspected this about her before he decided to marry her, and that in a perverse manner this was even one of the things that attracted him to her. Now all of this can be read, as in Rothman’s first interpretation of Psycho, as pointing towards all of the things that ‘determine’ Marnie, robbing both her and the film of any kind of free will. As a young child, she suffered from a traumatic incident that, in classic psychoanalese – or at least the kind that we find in films like Marnie – rendered her repressed and unable to enjoy ‘successful’ sexual relations with a man. There is then the intervention of Mark, who for reasons of his own – which again can only appear disreputable – decides to marry Marnie. But here the first of Marnie’s perfectionist surprises takes place. Although neither we nor even Mark himself can entirely understand why he decided to marry Marnie – undoubtedly, there is an element of masculinist ‘challenge’ about it, in that he cannot deny that he is sexually excited by a woman who refuses his sexual advances – after their honeymoon, perhaps despite himself and his previous understanding of himself, he becomes truly concerned at getting to the bottom of Marnie’s troubles and trying to help her. This arguably unsympathetic character becomes, despite all of the factors suggesting otherwise, sympathetic and we get the sense that he discovers something about himself that he did not previously know. And Marnie for her part is gradually able to ‘work through’ her otherwise defining trauma using the very materials she has been left with. Thanks to the therapeutic sessions she has with Mark, she is able to understand what prevented her from having ‘successful’ sexual relations and is gradually able to overcome it. The film thus ends – as Rothman well knows, in something of a variant of the remarriage genre – with Mark and Marnie together again with every prospect of being able to consummate their newly found love for each other. And although what we have here, again like the remarriage genre, is the man ‘teaching’ the woman, just as importantly the man learns something about himself in doing so. Indeed, it is Rothman who learns something about himself through the film, which appears to him to have a much more open and non-determined relation to the spectator than Psycho. Nevertheless, importantly – and here we return to that final twist observed in both Psycho and Don’t Look Back – it is not simply open but an openness achieved only through great restriction and determination. As Rothman writes in the long chapter he 174

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devotes to Marnie in Must We Kill?: ‘Marnie has finally freed herself from her “private trap,” her compulsive need to “clutch at things.” She has not escaped her mortal life, her humanness’ (MWK?, 254). Of course, in all of this Rothman acknowledges his indebtedness to Cavell’s particular brand of Emersonian perfectionism. Perfectionism is the explicit or implicit subject of a number of Cavell’s books throughout his career, from the early The Sense of Walden (1972), which analyses Emerson’s follower Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 memoir Walden, through the mid-period This New Yet Unapproachable America (1989), which traces a series of connections between Emerson and Wittgenstein, and on to the late period Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of a Moral Life (2004), based on a long-running series of lectures Cavell gave for a course at Harvard called Moral Reasoning. Perfectionism, in other words, is absolutely one of the guiding principles of Cavell’s work, at once its explicit motivation and its hidden explanation. In at least its classic formulation, it is a moral doctrine that takes into account equally the imperfection of the human and of any available political system. It aims to produce an ethical practice based neither on an absolute moral law nor a utopian political system, but that through a process of selfreflection would gradually approach a better world, which in some ways it is also admitted we will never reach. In the words of Aristotle, who is often seen as the originator of the doctrine: ‘The end is not a mere speculative knowledge of what is to be done, but rather the doing of it.’2 Of course, the two pre-eminent moral or ethical doctrines, at least in the West, are deontology and utilitarianism. The former is associated with Kant and is based on the idea that moral rules can be rationally deduced and must be logically consistent, that is, are not to be judged against any worldly effect or consequence they might have. In Kant’s declarative words from his Critique of Practical Reason: ‘[Moral] laws must completely determine the will as will, even before I ask whether I am capable of achieving a desired effect or what should be done to realize it. They must thus be categorical.’3 And the classic and much-cited example of what Kant means here is to be found in his prohibition against lying. We must not lie because it is logically inconsistent to do so – that is, we would be unable to generalize the principle to form any universal moral code without it becoming self-contradictory – even though in particular circumstances, as we all know from everyday life, lying seems to be the better, less harmful, ultimately more ‘moral’, option than not lying. This is Kant again forbidding any such thinking: ‘[Not lying] is the effect of P ERFECTIONISM

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a respect for something entirely different from life, in comparison and contrast to which life and all its enjoyment have absolutely no worth.’4 The other influential moral doctrine, utilitarianism, can appear almost the opposite of this. Here, by contrast, moral systems are judged not against their causes but in terms of their effects. That is, a code of morality is not that against which all else is tested, but rather one of a variety of tools designed to produce certain social and political results. Morality is assessed not in itself but in relation to the outcomes it produces, which themselves have been evaluated as desirable or not. It is not anything abstract, but serves to bring about something higher than itself – this, of course, is unthinkable for Kant, for whom morality is the highest of all principles – some desired social, economic or political consequence. Utilitarianism was first developed by a series of English philosophers, who were attempting to assert democratic liberalism against the absolute authority of the British monarchy. The first was Locke, who in his Two Treatises on Government (1689) spoke of the way that ‘Law, in its true notion, is not so much the limitation as the direction of a free and intelligent agent to his proper interest, and prescribes no farther than is for the general good of those under that law.’5 The other, and perhaps more decisive, was John Stuart Mill, who in his On Liberty (1859), picking up the notion of the pursuit of happiness from Locke, took this even further to argue: ‘The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, utility, or the greatest happiness principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness.’6 And today this utilitarianism, or at least variants of it, is the dominant philosophical explanation or justification for morality in the West, as seen for example in Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, which argues in the words of the American Declaration of Independence for ‘the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’,7 or Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics, which argues for a particular ‘best consequences’ utilitarianism that ‘furthers the interests of those affected, rather than merely [being] what increases pleasure’.8 And it is undoubtedly the implicit justification for the system of law in virtually every democratic government in the world, including the United States, where if we can put it like this morality is allowed, but only insofar as it serves a wider and more demonstrable purpose, such as personal liberty, economic prosperity or political stability; and citizens are required to assume something of a ‘contract’ – another utilitarianderived concept – to obey the rule of law in exchange for the enforcement of these values. 176

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Now perfectionism, as usually conceived, and Cavell in some ways is not too far from this, is understood to be closer to Millian utilitarianism than Kantian deontology. After all, like utilitarianism but unlike deontology, it does not propose an absolute moral doctrine that must be obeyed regardless of the consequences, but an incremental, gradualist system of ethics that takes into account human failings and imperfections while admitting that we will never ultimately obtain absolute justice or moral perfection. Cavell himself in his Cities of Words writes long chapters on Locke and Mills, in which he accepts his affinity with and sympathy for their overall ethical doctrines: ‘The revolutionary insight that inspired their genius for persuasion [Cavell is speaking here of Locke and Mill] was that fundamental public institutions held to be sacred, beyond human judgement (the divine right of kings to rule; the sacrament of marriage), are human interpretations of constructions which, whether devised by Gods or men, are meant for human benefit; and that when that benefit is lost, a given dispensation of such institutions (of a marriage, of an entire government) may be regarded as dissolved’ (CW, 51–2). Indeed, Cavell throughout his work remains an advocate for a form of liberal democracy, which constitutes the essential ground within which he thinks with its values of consensus, conversation and the slow arc towards the realization of truth and justice. However, complicating this – as Cavell well knows – is that the particular American perfectionist tradition that begins with Emerson and is carried on in the work of Thoreau is often called, following Emerson, American Transcendentalism, and Emerson was explicitly inspired by Kant in the formulation of his ideas. The particular perfectionism that Cavell aligns himself to – often called by commentators Emersonian perfectionism – absolutely has aspects of Kantian deontology about it, in a way that we explain in more detail later but that we might summarize for the moment by noting that it is driven by the ‘transcendental’ question of what produces the possibility of morality, or perhaps more specifically what drives the series of incremental changes in our moral position that makes up perfectionism. This is Cavell in Cities of Words on the complex relationship between Kant and perfectionism: The idea that those who aspire to a moral life (I might say a philosophical life) already live, as it were, in an association (real or imaginary) other than the one manifested in our everyday world of imperfect laws and enforcements and unstable or unworthy P ERFECTIONISM

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incentives is a deeply attractive one. I have described something I take as its analogue, from a perfectionist outlook, as the idea of an unattained but attainable further state of society present within this one. (CW, 138) In fact, Cavell’s particular brand of perfectionism might be described as belonging to neither deontology nor utilitarianism, but operating as something of a ‘supplement’ to both. More than this, we might even describe his particular Emersonian perfectionism as something of a ‘supplement’ to perfectionism itself.9 But what could we mean by this? To begin to answer this question, let us turn to two distinctive aspects of Cavell’s interpretation of Emerson. The first is Cavell’s emphasis on – or even discovery of – what he calls Emerson’s notion of ‘doubleness’ (CHU, xxi, xxxv). In this he is speaking, first of all, of classic perfectionism, but even more so of Emersonian perfectionism, as a kind of work on the self. For, of course – and this is one of its differences from any kind of collective utopian ethics in which individual subjecthood is surpassed, as in certain versions of Marxism – the ethics or morality of perfectionism is individualized. Not only is it the task of a particular individual, but it is the creation of individuality itself. This is, needless to say, that doctrine of ‘self-reliance’ first elaborated by Emerson in his essay of that name in 1841, which has become something of an unofficial American ideology. It is not just that the self must become reliant only on itself, but that this self-reliance is what produces the very selfhood of a self. This is Cavell setting out this notion of Emersonian perfectionism: ‘The constraint [perfectionism] seeks to its standard is understood as the self ’s coming to itself, or to its next self ’ (CHU, xxii–xxiii). And then, as the quote suggests, what perfectionism sets out to accomplish is the gradual perfection or improvement of the self through a process of selfreflection, which is also a kind of self-criticism. It is here that Cavell can see the affinities between his interest in Emerson’s Transcendentalism and Descartes’ Cogito, insofar as both are about the fact that, ‘if I am to exist, I must name my existence, acknowledge it’ (IQ, 106). For what Cavell goes on to suggest through Emerson is that this perfectionist improvement is not necessarily something observable, but the very reflection upon our limits and failings as such. In other words, preceding and inspiring actual change is the sense that something is imperfect or less than it should be. Indeed – this is the decisive twist that Cavell sees in Emerson – even without any ‘objective’ evidence, perfectionist improvement has already 178

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happened simply as a result of remarking what is wrong, and more than this remarking things just as they are. It is this that the notion of ‘doubleness’ captures: the fact that the subject is in a sense in two places at once: in an imperfect world that is unchanged, and through reflection upon this in a world that is already different. This is Cavell in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome on this remarkable Emersonian innovation: To recognise the unattained self is, I gather, a step in attaining it. . . . A further implication, hinted at a moment ago in passing, is that our position is always (already) that of an attained self; we are, from the beginning, that is, from the time we can be described as having a self, a next, knotted. (CHU, 12) The other quality that Cavell sees as distinctively characterizing Emerson or that Emerson introduces can seem almost the opposite of this, taking place not on the micro-scale of the self but the macro-scale of philosophy. However, the point we would want to make is that they are ultimately the same. Here it is Emerson’s famous phrase ‘drawing circles’ around things from his essay ‘Circles’ (1841) that Cavell pays special attention to. In this essay, Emerson uses the image to address the Kantian distinction between Reason and Understanding; but Cavell employs it much more widely to speak of philosophy’s relationship to its subject altogether: the aim of philosophy is to draw a ‘circle’ around its subject, both to set out its borders and through this very act of drawing to point to an implied space outside of what is delineated and which we might call its conditions of possibility. This is Cavell in his Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (2003) commenting on this small phrase from Emerson that he makes do so much work and that he has done so much to popularize (we might recall Rothman calling his ‘Introduction’ to Must We Kill? ‘Drawing a New Circle’, for example): ‘In “Circles” Emerson invites us to think about the fact, or what the fact symbolizes, that every action admits of being outdone, that around every circle another circle can take its place’ (TE, 17–18). And to draw all this out a little more, Cavell then goes on to elaborate how this is an exercise in something like Kantian Transcendental Critique, but with the twist that the circle attempts to outline only what is, is nothing more than what it outlines. This is Cavell again in Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes remarking on this often-overlooked aspect of Emerson’s relationship to Kant: ‘In [Kant’s] Critique [we read]: “Concepts of objects in general thus underlie all empirical knowledge as its a priori P ERFECTIONISM

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condition.” I am taking it that Emerson is turning the Critique upon itself to ask: what are the conditions in human thinking underlying the concept of condition, the sense that our existence is, so to speak, had on condition?’ (TE, 70). And it is in this regard, finally, that we might begin to think Emersonian perfectionism as a ‘supplement’ to Kantianism: because it is not merely a rejection of the Transcendental exercise but a qualification of it, and perhaps even a thinking of what makes it possible. Or as Cavell puts it in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, it is a matter of ‘Transcendentalism countering the transcendent’ (CHU, 99). (It is at this point that we might think the affinities between Emerson and Hegel and his similar thought that Kant’s so-called Transcendentals, even though they are not meant to be known, are always in fact a reflection of the world they condition, as remarked from yet another point outside of them.10) That is to say, to ‘draw a circle’ around a philosophical system is not directly to propose any transcendental condition, but rather in simply delineating the system as it is to think that empty place from where it is thought or spoken. However, as Emerson does with Kant’s transcendental conditions, it can always be shown that this apparently ‘empty space’ imports qualities from the system it speaks of, and the process has to be repeated again. How are we to summarize both of these as some way of characterizing Cavell’s particular mode of Emersonian perfectionism? We can see that his is not the usual conception of perfectionism as any kind of gradualism or incrementalism, with each successive stage leaving the previous one irrevocably behind. It is not any kind of measurable successiveness, even if without end or undirected by a stated goal, that Cavell takes as his model. Rather, we would say that perfectionism for Cavell is a kind of ‘doubling’, in which we at once never leave the beginning and are already at the end.11 It is a ‘doubling’ we find both with regard to the self (CHU, xxi) and to other philosophical systems (CHU, xxxv). That is to say, perfectionism – against the usual reading of it and any alignment of it with utilitarianism – is not any practical, empirical, verifiable activity, but rather a series of ‘hyperbolic’ (NYU, 62) rethinkings of what is, which at once leaves everything the same and, insofar as it explains it now for a completely other reason, entirely different. It accords a great power to thought as something that is always able to exceed – and in a way has already exceeded – its determining circumstances. In some ways, as we have suggested, it is like Descartes’ Cogito or Kant’s Transcendental Critique, which represent the thinking of a certain doubt lying behind 180

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things or the conditions of possibility of experience. But it also – and this again is how perfectionism is subtly different from them and a little like utilitarianism – seeks as much as possible to think things in their own terms, to think not outside of things but things as already their own condition of possibility, insofar as they can be thought as such. This is Cavell’s complex notion of ‘aversion’, originally found in Emerson’s ‘SelfReliance’, which he understands as both a turning away and a turning towards: a turning away insofar as it thinks the underlying condition for things and a turning towards insofar as this seeks to return us to what is. What is is only because it stands in for something else, and this something else can be thought only in terms of what is. This is Cavell in The New Yet Unapproachable America (1989) on this double movement of thought: Philosophy (as descent) can thus be said to leave everything as it is because it is a refusal of, say disobedient to, (a false) ascent, or transcendence. Philosophy (as ascent) shows the violence that is to be refused (disobeyed), that has left everything not as it is, indifferent to me, as if there are things in themselves. (NYU, 46) This is why both the subject and the world are able to be described as ‘doubled’ or ‘divided’ in Cavell, and why the task of philosophical thought is to double or divide what is. And ultimately how might we understand perfectionism in all of this? Perfectionism with regard to the self thinks through its failings, limitations, shortcomings and imperfections. And in doing so the self already surpasses itself, insofar as this could be done only from a ‘better’ place. But any attempt actually to instantiate this change, to give reality to that ‘better’ place from where our faults can be thought, necessarily fails, can be done only in the very terms we are trying to escape. And this process is repeated, insofar as we can only think this failure from another, still ‘better’ place. So that there is a constantly ascending series of thinkings of previous thoughts, of that ‘empty space’ from where that previous thought was thought, which insofar as it can be thought at all returns us to the ‘same’ self we were trying to leave, the ‘same’ insofar as we cannot compare who we are now to any other. With the result that, as Cavell says, if there is a constant ‘ascent’ in perfectionism, there is also an equal and opposite ‘descent’, insofar as we return each time to the same self. And it is for this reason that perfectionism is endless: not because of any actual limit to our powers of self-improvement, but because it is our very attempt to overcome them that produces them in the first P ERFECTIONISM

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place. And the same for perfectionism’s thinking of the conditions of this world. Here too, perfectionism does not so much think a better world as the faults and limitations of this one, which is to say it opens up a kind of ‘transcendental’ perspective onto this world that suggests somewhere else, some other place from where this has been thought. It is this that is perfectionism’s ‘better world’; but again, to go back to Kant, our point is that it cannot actually name or think these transcendental conditions without necessarily returning to our own (or the world as such without importing some transcendental condition). Once more, if we can conceive of the history of philosophy as a kind of progression, with each successive system thinking the limits of the one before from that unspoken place from which it is thought, each philosophical system also repeats the same aporia: its attempt to draw a line around the system before, showing how its ‘outside’ is only part of what it names, always allows another to draw another circle around it, showing in turn how this apparent outside is only a projection of it. The words that name what is outside (doubt, transcendental condition, Absolute Spirit) might change, but the model for thinking philosophy stays the same. Each system is distinguished by a great philosopher’s name (Descartes, Kant, Hegel), but the underlying philosophical gesture remains consistent. Cavell in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome makes the unexpected point that Nietzsche was strongly influenced by Emersonian perfectionism, and we can immediately sense the truth of this. It is not so much any equivalent moral or political doctrine, although comparisons have been made, including on occasion by Cavell himself, but the fact that Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Eternal Return is not only an apt description of the logic of perfectionism as we have described it, but itself one of those ‘conditions of possibility’ that perfectionism seeks to think. That is to say, the test of the Eternal Return is that what is can be only if it is able to return an infinite number of times. The Eternal Return, therefore, is not anything outside of the world, not a straightforward ‘transcendental condition’. Rather, it is just things themselves, but subject to the requirement of being able to be repeated, which we might translate as being able to be thought. Nietzsche’s Eternal Return is a perfect example of a ‘transcendental’ condition that is also nothing else than what it conditions, so that what is also stands in for what makes it possible. The fact that there is something (able to be thought) is just what has made that something possible. The world is divided not between it and some higher region for which it stands in, but between it and itself, 182

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which is exactly what Nietzsche means by saying that his thought ‘breaks history into two’.12 And we see this particular Nietzschean perfectionist thinking characterizing a whole strand of twentieth-century philosophy. For example, one of Cavell’s long-term interlocutors, Jacques Derrida, has a notion of ‘différance’ as a ‘quasi-transcendental’, which is to say that différance as a certain delay or space within presence both makes presence possible and ensures that there is only presence. To quote Derrida in Positions: ‘What defers presence is the very basis on which presence is announced or desired in what represents it, its sign or trace.’13 And all of this is absolutely at stake in Cavell’s notion of the ‘ordinary’, and why this ordinary is, perhaps surprisingly, what is aimed at by perfectionism when we might think that perfectionism would aim at the extraordinary. For what is implied in Cavell’s notion of the ‘ordinary’ as a desired object or goal of thought? It is precisely that the ordinary must be attained or achieved, which is also to say that the ordinary is conditioned. That is to say, the ordinary henceforth is not simply what is but stands in for something, indeed, stands in for itself (IQ, 165–6, 170–1). The ordinary is not simply what is, but an impossible goal, insofar as what allows it (or the thinking of it) also disallows it. However, it is also necessarily attained, where we unavoidably start from, insofar as we can only end with the ordinary, or any new transcendental term we discover will only constitute another ordinary. It is at this point that we return to what we were saying at the beginning of this chapter and in the last. For what we were suggesting there is that Fried’s and Rothman’s work – admittedly in one case, unadmittedly in the other – is effectively perfectionist. Let us begin with Fried. In his writing on the photographic portraits of Ruff, Struth and Dijkstra – but we would argue that this is the key to everything he says in Why Photography Matters – the sitters are exposed in a total theatricality. Their indifferent ‘pose’ by which they attempt to remain unconscious before the camera is revealed as fictitious, deliberately and self-consciously put on for the audience. And yet, nevertheless, in this something else is produced: a certain effect that the sitter cannot control and of which they remain unconscious, which we would call absorption. Absolutely here the ordinary or the unconsciousness of being seen is not to be attained directly for Fried, but as with Cavell is a kind of doubling or double negation. It simply remarks the conditions for its appearance – theatricality – which is also just what it is. And this is why the subjects in the portraits Fried considers are divided between ‘two complementary axes’ (WP, 203): P ERFECTIONISM

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at once there is a certain ordinary produced through the return of the conditions of possibility of the thing itself and in this something else is produced, which is exactly what Dijkstra speaks of as the ‘gap between intent and effect’ (WP, 207). And we see the same thing with Rothman’s Psycho: there too the cinematic is not the direct unawareness of the camera or even the overcoming of this awareness, but a kind of surplus brought about by this effort at unawareness, something beyond the control of both actor and director. Again, as Cavell suggests, the ordinary breaks with the ordinary insofar as it can be thought, although such thinking will also return us to the ordinary as the only terms in which we can think. It is what Cavell calls the ‘uncanny’ in the essay ‘The Uncanniness of the Ordinary’ (IQ, 153–78). And it is this complex thought – to use Lacanese, of a certain Real at once before the Symbolic and yet possible only within it – that we can see Rothman trying to think in Must We Kill? As he now says of The Murderous Gaze: The book’s five original readings picture Hitchcock as intending his films to sustain incompatible interpretations, as if he were creating his films from a place beyond suspense. I took [Hitchcock’s aspiration] to be acknowledging, and embracing, the mysterious doubleness he took to be at the heart of pure cinema. (MWK?, 24) To conclude here, this is the true perfectionism at stake in Rothman’s new book. It is precisely not the modernist ‘progression’ from theatre to cinema that we see in The Murderous Gaze, in which we can find with each film Rothman chooses a clear advance on what came before. For of this we might say – or at least this is one way of interpreting Rothman’s retrospective view of The Murderous Gaze – that, for all of Hitchcock’s supposed ‘freedom’ in this reading, his ability to stand outside of himself and the relationship between him and his audience, predicting and manipulating their response in advance, there is ultimately a kind of destining of him. His work becomes caught up in a wider logic that ultimately determines it. (We might say the same of ‘literalist’ art according to Fried: that for all of its supposed freedom and open-endedness, the ability of the artist, like Hitchcock, to stand outside of the work and look on at the relationship between it and its spectator and make it the subject of the work, it too is finally destined and determined, ultimately devolves into the same work of art each time, with no authentic ‘advance’ on what has come before.) On the contrary, in Must We Kill?, drawing the proper lesson of Psycho, 184

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Rothman first of all sees Hitchcock as highly determined in his work – in Rothman’s phrase, his cinema ‘fixes its subjects [including Hitchcock himself], possesses their life’ (MWK?, 191) – but it is exactly through this that Hitchcock is free and undetermined – again, in Rothman’s phrase, the subject in his films rises like a ‘phoenix from its own ashes’ (MWK?, 195). (And once more this is what Fried means by intentionality leading to the unintended with regard to Marioni, Demand and Gordon.) And it is this ‘perfectionism’ that ultimately is modernism in Cavell, Fried and Rothman. It is not a simple free ‘advance’ upon what is, with its suggestion of genius, innovation and so on, and not even – the tempting false reading of Cavell on medium or genre – the filling in of what is missing, simply adding qualities that were not previously there. Or rather, if this is true – and hence the distinctive quality of perfectionist ‘advance’ – each new member in a modernist tradition has to propose a new condition of possibility for what is, provide a missing quality or attribute in the sense that it is shared by all the others but has not hitherto been seen by them. In effect, each new member has to draw a circle around everything that has come before. But then again each new member, in that perfectionist ‘double movement’ we have spoken of, also reveals that the previous final member was not an exception providing the transcendental condition for all of the others, but another just like them, able to be explained by the new missing condition that it provides. Modernism is perfectionist or perfectionism is modernist. From early in his career with such essays as ‘Austin at Criticism’ and ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’, Cavell rejects the prevailing analytic mode of criticism, of adjudicating in terms of right and wrong. Instead, he adopts – before he discovered Emerson – Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism ‘The deepest problems are in fact not problems at all’ (Tractatus 4.003) as a guide. And this is perfectionism in the sense we have been trying to argue for: it is not merely that in our ability to think these problems we do away with them (problems are only problems insofar as they can be thought, which is also to indicate that place outside of them from where they can be thought), but also that philosophy does not so much offer any kind of opposition to or alternative to the world – some problem with it that it is the solution to – but thinks the world just as it is, but for a completely different reason. And, as we suggest, the task of thought – this is the challenge that perfectionism proposes – is to think that missing condition of possibility that doubles what is, at once drawing a circle around it and in doing so proposing another reason for it. This for P ERFECTIONISM

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Cavell, repeating Descartes, can be seen in the problem of scepticism. In one way, scepticism operates as a certain transcendental condition: what is is only insofar as it takes the place of scepticism, attempts to defeat or overcome scepticism. However, this scepticism itself can be thought only from a ‘higher’ condition of certainty, which can itself no sooner be thought than it turns once again into a scepticism that must itself be thought from another, ‘higher’ position. Cavell, we might suggest, enters the history of philosophy, which of course is perfectionist, in proposing a ‘new’ condition of possibility for things. In this regard, this history can be seen as a series of superimpositions, or to use Emerson’s language circles around circles; but it is also each time the same repeated gesture, a circular aporia with each system making up for the ‘failure’ of the one before and in so doing itself bringing about this ‘failure’. As Cavell writes on this revolving unendingness of philosophy in the aptly named A Pitch of Philosophy: As if the price of having once spoken, or remarked, taken something as remarkable (worth noting, yours to note, about which to make an ado), is to have spoken forever, to have taken on the responsibility for speaking further, the responsibility of responsiveness, of answerability, to make yourself intelligible. The sense that once one has acted or done something one has acted or done something forever. (PP, 126)

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CONCLUSION

Cavell once wrote an essay entitled ‘The Wittgensteinian Event’.1 (He also once wrote another essay entitled ‘What is the Emersonian Event?’2) Whatever he means by this, for us reading it today it cannot but have an echo of the notion of ‘event’ as theorized by the likes of Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou.3 But what does Cavell mean by the Wittgensteinian ‘event’? Of course, in an obvious way, it is meant to refer to Wittgenstein’s founding of what is called ‘ordinary language’ philosophy, which Cavell characterizes as ‘an intervention in intellectual culture that has had the power to change for some how they conceive the possibilities and necessities of philosophy’ (DA, 192). It is a gesture that led to a whole subsequent school of particularly British philosophy, including such figures as G. E. Moore, G. E. M. Anscombe and Gilbert Ryle, which Cavell inherited and worked within when he commenced his postgraduate studies at Harvard. It would be a Wittgensteinian ‘event’ in that it was inaugural, influential and something on the basis of which others were able to establish a long-running philosophical institution. But Cavell means something else or something more than this, indeed something more akin to Žižek’s and Badiou’s notion of the event. It is something that, in Cavell’s words, brings about a ‘great separation’ (DA, 192), by which we mean an absolute division between before and after. Indeed, there is no ‘before’ the event, insofar as what comes before can now only be thought in terms of it. So that, if in one way we can judge and think it historically and institutionally in terms of the discipline of philosophy, in another we cannot or it cannot merely be reduced to these, insofar as it brings these categories about or redefines them in its terms. Or, if it is subject to these categories, insofar as they are the only ones in which we can think, it also is not insofar as it points to their transcendental condition, that which ‘precedes’ them and makes them possible.

However, to be more specific, what exactly might Cavell mean by the Wittgensteinian event? What is it particularly that Wittgenstein makes ‘available’ (DA, 193) that produces this effect? As we can read in the chapter ‘Criteria and Skepticism’ of The Claim of Reason, what Wittgenstein introduces is the thinking of a doubt or scepticism: ‘Our relation to the world as a whole, or to others in general, is not one of knowing, where knowing construes itself as being certain’ (CR, 45). Now, of course, as Cavell well knows, any number of great philosophers have also thought this doubt or scepticism: Descartes, Hume, Kant and Heidegger, amongst others. All are acknowledged by Cavell at various points of his work. But the crucial thing about Wittgenstein for Cavell – and we emphasize that this is his reading, that it is Cavell who makes Wittgenstein like this – is that for him doubt or scepticism goes down all the way. Everything is always subject to doubt, and the belief that we stand outside of it only reduces us to it again. Of course, such thinkers as Descartes and Kant also think doubt; but for them there is always some point outside of it: for Descartes, the speaking of doubt; for Kant, the naming of the transcendental conditions of experience. But for Wittgenstein there is no position outside of doubt, or if there is in order for it to be named – this like Descartes and Kant – it could no sooner be so than we would return once again to doubt. So that the struggle with doubt is ceaseless and ongoing, insofar as the attempt to speak of it brings it about.4 Or perhaps Cavell is not so much opposed to Descartes and Kant as applying their own insight to them: that there is no final position outside of doubt, not even the philosophical system itself that states it. We could no sooner try to state the truth of this doubt than we would lose it and have to start again. It is a repeated, reiterative process that Cavell means when he speaks of the ‘acknowledgement’ of doubt. And for Cavell it is precisely Wittgenstein who thinks this, to the extent it can be thought. This is Cavell again in ‘The Wittgensteinian Event’ on the difference between Wittgenstein and Kant: ‘The difference from Kant is Wittgenstein’s conviction, as I might put the matter, that no system of concepts – call this a philosophical theory – could as it were establish reliable retreats or reliefs for, or limits which control, this restlessness [of human reason]’ (DA, 195). What then is the final status of doubt in Wittgenstein’s philosophical system? Or to put it another way, how does Wittgenstein’s philosophical system relate to this doubt? Doubt, as we say – and this is why we connect it to Kant – is something of a transcendental condition for things. After 188

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the initial hypothesis of doubt, everything we do or say is an attempt to stand in for it, to seek to take its place or otherwise overcome it. (The analogy here is to the comedies of remarriage where the couples speak in order to repair misunderstandings, to put aside resentments, to make up for a separation that has already occurred – and this, as we say, applies even to couples meeting for the first time, when it is as though they have already broken up and are getting together again.) But there is no evidence for this doubt, insofar as it can never be definitively proved – any proof for doubt can only be doubted, just as the attempt definitively to defeat it can only return us to it – and even its absence henceforth can be understood only as the attempt to overcome it. Doubt in this sense, as we have been trying to suggest, is a kind of doubling hypothesis, both undemonstrable and irrefutable, which is also the effect of the words that speak it. Once doubt is spoken, there is no turning back and, indeed, nothing to turn back to, insofar as any before or outside of it can only be thought in terms of it. Doubt arises suddenly out of nothing, as a pure supposition, splitting the world from itself. And there is no exception from this, for every statement about it is already split from itself, unable definitively to state doubt from some point outside of it, but bringing it about in its saying what it is, so that this splitting carries on forever.5 What then do we say about Cavell’s writing in relation to all of this? To both this philosophical history and this event of doubt that it speaks of? Cavell’s writing is widely known and commented upon for its discursive, conversational and seemingly non-philosophically rigorous style. It is something widely explained as Cavell’s singular voice, his particular mode of expression, his individual manner, as though of no wider consequence and that ‘behind’ which Cavell’s real philosophical message is to be found. From an unsympathetic point of view, it is regarded as a kind of indulgence that has to be got around to discern the underlying truths he is communicating; or, from a more sympathetic point of view, it is seen to testify to his post-Wittgensteinian stance on philosophy, in which it is not a matter of arriving at definitive truths. However, we suggest that both of these understandings fall short, fail to capture the full meaning of the philosophical event that Cavell not only writes about but also seeks to be. What do we mean by this? In fact, we want to suggest that this conception of philosophy belongs not so much to Wittgenstein as to Cavell himself. It is he who sees that there is no final position outside of scepticism, so that the attempt to attain some perspective onto it by speaking of it has constantly to be repeated. And C ONCLUSION

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it is this that explains Cavell’s endless, loquacious, circumlocutory style, the feeling that he will never stop speaking, not only in any particular essay but throughout his career. Because the manner in which his books are free from scepticism is in their saying and not in anything he says. It is this that is meant by the ‘lease’ or unleashing of the voice in opera (PP, 13–41); it is this that is at stake in the testing of conventions in art (both of which are ways of thinking about his work). But it is also this speaking in the form of the said that brings about the very scepticism it is fighting against. It is for this reason that Cavell’s writing is endless: because it is fighting against the very scepticism it brings about. It is always starting again to overcome the scepticism that remained when he previously stopped speaking. And it is just this splitting or doubling that Cavell means by that tendency to ‘sublime’ language (DA, 206) he speaks of with regard to Emerson, which is not simply some transcendence – we might recall his previous remark opposing the Transcendental to transcendence – but rather giving language the power to overcome its own effects. Language is not ‘sublime’ but ‘subliming’, suggesting something outside of language or language outside itself, in the form of a saying as opposed to a said. So how then are we to read Cavell today? And what is it to read Cavell? We have just seen Cavell write in order to make up for a prior scepticism, a scepticism that in part his writing brings about. That is, if in one way the hypothesis of scepticism appears to respond to a prior doubt, in another it is also this doubt that it brings about. This is why Cavell is always engaged in a certain rewriting of himself, to find the place from where that prior scepticism can be spoken of. Each new writing is not merely sequential, but the attempt to make up for a prior scepticism, in that drawing of circles, each at once encircling the other and leading back to the other, that we have spoken of. And it is this that is at stake in our relation to Cavell as readers, insofar as Cavell is first of all a reader of, to the extent that he rewrites, himself. In other words, when we read Cavell it is as though we were seeking to overcome some previous misunderstanding. We are attempting to stand outside of previous readings and suggest for all of their apparent difference what they have in common, what the ‘underlying’ truth of the text is they all endeavour to speak of. This is Cavell writing of Emerson’s ‘Experience’, but it applies to all meaningful philosophical texts, which effectively produce the rules and conditions by which we must read them: ‘I would like to say that Emerson’s “Experience” announces and provides the conditions under which an Emerson essay can be experienced – the conditions of its own possibility’ (NYU, 103). 190

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But this is not, as in the orthodox understanding of philosophical texts, to suggest some eternal, unchanging and transcendent truth that each reader must make unerring contact with. Rather, as we have seen with Cavell himself, important philosophical texts are defined by their own splitting, dividedness, are already their own reading. As we have argued with Cavell – but this is the meaning of that whole sceptical tradition in philosophy that he at once follows and creates – texts from the beginning are already only their own (re)reading. In a sense, and this again is the question of Cavell re-reading himself in order to overcome a prior scepticism, if we might think that we are merely following the meaning of a text that is ‘before’ us, this meaning also exists only after it has been read. It is its reader or reading that gives a text the meaning it always retrospectively had. But, again, how are we to understand this? Does this just mean that any reading of a text is sufficient, that readers ‘project’ themselves onto the text, which becomes merely their reflection? That all texts are effectively the same, infinitely open to all possible readings? In fact, it means almost the opposite. For, as we have just said, for a reading to count – this again is that question of Emersonian circles, of the great texts of philosophy providing the ‘conditions of possibility’ of their reading – it must somehow stand outside of all other readings and say what they have in common. It must be that outside speaking position from which scepticism, the misunderstandings of all previous readings, can be seen. It cannot be itself simply sceptical, but must occupy that position from which prior scepticisms can be diagnosed. And then another will come along, as long as the text continues to be read, showing how it in turn embodies a certain misunderstanding, as seen from a position outside of it. In effect, each reading must seek to deduce that condition of possibility of its own and all other readings. (It is this series of commonalities in difference, or circles around circles, that we might again describe as a ‘continuum’, following Fried.) But in order to explain all this another way, let us turn to another writer in whom Cavell sees the same problematic playing out, the nineteenth-century Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard. In Cavell’s early essay ‘Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation’ in Must We Mean What We Say?, Cavell speaks of our relation to one of the most interpreted and ‘encircling’ books ever written, the Bible. His subject is the relationship between the Word of God and its interpreter, in which the authority of the Word arises only after its revelation and yet this revelation can be seen only as the retrospective effect of this authority: C ONCLUSION

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‘[Kierkegaard] will begin with an immanent context, appealing to ordinary contexts in which a concept is used, for example, ordinary cases of silence, or of authority . . . and then abruptly and sternly he will say that these concepts are decisively or quantitatively different when used in a transcendental sense’ (MW?, 170). And, intriguingly, we might suggest that this is analogous to what Žižek says about Kierkegaard in his ‘Why is Every Act a Repetition?’ with regard to the relationship between the ‘personal description’ of Christ and his ‘teaching’: ‘If Christ’s authority is contained neither in his personal qualities nor in the content of his teaching, in what does it reside? The only possible answer: in the empty space of intersection between the two sets, that of his personal features and that of his teaching.’6  Žižek in his analysis speaks of the way that it is in the relationship between the teachings of Christ and his personal description – their overlapping circles – that there is produced a certain objet a or partial object, which is at once the lowest and the highest of things: an ‘inert piece of the real’ that ‘sticks out of the symbolic order’.7 And we suggest that we see something similar in Cavell. It is that a text, like the Bible, is open to infinitely many possible readings, but in order to count as a reading it must capture something of Christ Himself. In other words, it is not a mere interpretation of its ‘teachings’, which as we know have been read almost infinitely differently over history, but must also express something of the ‘personal description’ of Christ, that place from where all of these possibilities have been spoken and what they all have in common. In other words, again, in order to count as a valid interpretation of the Bible, it cannot be just another interpretation but must somehow be about all of these interpretations, which is also to say that the Bible is about all of its interpretations. So that at once the Bible is only a retrospective effect of its interpretation and allows, predicts and speaks in advance of all of its interpretations. And it is exactly this that Cavell does with Emerson and

personal description

a

teaching

FIGURE C.1  ‘From Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan Inside Hollywood and Out, Routledge Publications, 1992.’

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his interpretations of other texts: to show that in his interpretation he is merely following what the text is already about or makes possible, which is also only to be seen after his interpretation. Cavell in effect speaks for all other interpreters, revealing what they all have in common and how they have been allowed by the original text, in speaking for the text himself. The words of the Bible or any other great text open up a space ‘beyond’ all interpretation – we might say a truth beyond scepticism – but this is to be attained only through interpretation, indeed, through the history of its interpretations, which of course in their difference from each other can only suggest a scepticism or the failure of interpretation. Of course, all of this is analogous to what Cavell means by modernism, and certainly for Cavell philosophy as such, philosophy as a history of philosophy, is modernist. For let us go back again to what Cavell says of modernism in such essays as ‘Music Discomposed’ and ‘A Matter of Meaning It’. Modernism in the sense we have described it is the end of tradition in art. There are no longer pre-established rules to be followed in making or recognizing art. Nothing in principle will always count as a work of art; there is nothing in advance that belongs to the history of any particular artform. But at the same time, in order to be a recognizable work of art, to join the history of an identifiable medium, it has to occupy that empty space from which the prior history has been spoken; it has to think what all of the examples of that previous tradition had in common; it has to show how that last previous work that appeared to break with history is actually part of it. In other words, each work of art in a modernist tradition at once breaks with that history, is that point outside of it from where it can be seen and creates a new history in its light, which if it has succeeded in doing so another work coming after it will reveal. This is what Cavell speaks of in an essay on – of all things – television, when he points to the ‘seriality’ (TOS, 244) of a program like Hill Street Blues (and it is important that Cavell rereads his previous conceptions of art history and even medium here in terms of ‘genre-as-medium’ (TOS, 42), and this notion can even be understood to explain Fried’s construction of a history of photography in Why Photography Matters). That is to say, as we have already seen, it is not merely a matter of adding another member to a genre as though simply carrying on as before or as though there were a ready-made gap just waiting to be filled. Rather, each has to make up for what in retrospect is seen to be missing, speak from that empty position that makes the commonality of all that has already been possible. As Cavell writes in ‘The Fact of Television’: ‘When a given member diverges, C ONCLUSION

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as it must, from the rest, it must “compensate” for this divergence. The genre undergoes continuous definition or redefinition as new members introduce new points of compensation’ (TOS, 245). However, to conclude here, what happens when we no longer speak of this genre or medium, when there is nothing more to say or add, as arguably happened with the comedies of remarriage? Or, what is perhaps the same thing, when we are not able to read or recognize the text, when it no longer speaks to us, as is arguably the case in the melodramas of the unknown woman? After all, Cavell will write in a Nietzschean vein that Emerson’s philosophy is ‘for all and sundry, or fails to’ be (LD, 6); and to the extent that Emerson is about his own reading, this would apply to Cavell too. In one way – and this is one aspect of that doubling we have been speaking of – there is no way of not reading the great texts of philosophy. What is before or outside of them can now only be understood in their terms. A painting simply unaware of being beheld is now only the overcoming of theatricality. The unknown woman is only unknown because she is recognized. The lack of acknowledgement is only the refusal of acknowledgement. The ordinary is henceforth uncanny. The world just as it is is to be explained only because of something else. So that our inability to read is only a rejection of reading, only a turning away after a revelation. And yet, the other aspect of these great doubling hypotheses of philosophy is that we always fail to read them, never finally understand them. For every attempt to read them is only to make up for a previous failure, which another coming along after will in turn show to be merely another failure. A doubling hypothesis is something that all attempts to state will fall short of, including the one that originally proposed it.8 This is why there is a history of such doublings and different terms for them throughout philosophy: because each is an attempt to sum up all of the others and say what they stand in for. (This again why each reading is at once a specific content, Christ’s ‘teachings’, and transcendent, His ‘personal description’. It is also why there is ultimately no difference between reading a Hollywood film and Kant.) In this sense, as part of this doubling or breaking of the world into two that we have spoken of, great texts are divided between those who can read them and those who cannot, but this is the same person reading the text at every moment.9 And this is why each of our attempts to read a text – as in our relationship with other people – takes place at once in the two modes of conversation and conversion. At once we talk to people or read a book in the mode of conversation, of what is said, thereby 194

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missing them or it. But then at some point during this conversation a certain conversion takes place, a stepping back from what is being said in an attempt to speak of the rules or conventions that make possible the conversation. This is again the paradox of perfectionism as at once endless ascent and endless descent. Or indeed of drawing a circle as the continual approach towards the transcendental and the aporetic return to where we began. (And here, there would be a whole conversation to be had about the relationship of Cavell to what we might call metanoia, thought as conversion, and the mostly overlooked fact that two of Cavell’s most important interlocutors, Emerson and Thoreau, were either Ministers in a Church or brought up with a religious background.10) And all of this is to be seen in our relationship to Cavell here, or indeed that of a reader to any great text, including those that Cavell reads: Wittgenstein, Descartes, Hollywood films, art, opera. At once we might say, if our own reading has succeeded here and this is certainly our ambition, Cavell is only what we are saying he is, is merely a reflection of us. As he says of Emerson, he is only our relationship to us, he does not exist outside of our conversation with him. And yet at the same time – and this is perhaps an appropriate note on which to end the book – he is also what we always attempt to stand in for, what has allowed us to speak of him and what we inevitably fall short of. If Cavell – our Cavell or any Cavell – is only a retrospective effect of his reader, he also has the last word, as both what allows us to come along and point out the ‘true’ Cavell that others have missed and what will allow others to continue speaking of Cavell, even after our own last word.

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NOTES

Introduction 1 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, London, 1989, p. 155. 2 Indeed, Žižek has even written an essay recently, ‘How to Renounce Your

Passion: A Hegelian Lesson on the Ethics of Marriage’ (http​​s:/​/w​​ww​.ab​​c​.net​​ .au​/r​​eligi​​on​/zi​​zek​-h​​egeli​​an​-le​​sson-​​on​-th​​e​-eth​​ics​-​o​​f​-mar​​riage​​/1096​​4090)​, that stands in the closest relationship to what Cavell argues in Pursuits of Happiness.

3 V.I. Lenin, Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to

October 1917, ed. Slavoj Žižek, Verso, London, 2002, p. 172.

4 Hal Foster et al., ‘The Politics of the Signifier: A Conversation on the

Whitney Biennial’, October 66, Autumn 1993, p. 4.

5 Hal Foster et al., Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism,

Postmodernism, Thames & Hudson, London, 2004, p. 675.

6 See, for example, Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age

of the Post-medium Condition, Thames & Hudson, London, 2000; and ‘Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition’, October 116, Spring 2006, pp. 55–62.

7 For a good summary of this, see Franklin Cox, ‘Stanley Cavell on Modern

Music: “Music Discomposed” and “A Matter of Meaning It” after Forty Years’, Journal of Music Theory 54(1), 2010, pp. 37–60.

8 See, for example, Berel Lang, ‘Nothing Comes of All: Lear-Dying’, New

Literary History 9(3), Spring 1978, pp. 540–1; Martin Werner, ‘Must We Mean What We Say?’, Modern Language Review 74(1), January 1979, pp. 125–6; and Harry Berger, ‘King Lear: The Lear Family Romance’, The Centennial Review 23(4), Fall 1979, pp. 354–5.

9 Helene Keyssar, ‘The Strategy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’,

Educational Theatre Journal 27(1), March 1975, pp. 85–97.

10 See, for example, David Rudrum, Stanley Cavell and the Claim of Literature,

Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 2013, pp. 47–9.

11 The Claim to Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy,

ed. Andrew Norris, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2006, p. 18.

12 Espen Dahl, Stanley Cavell, Religion and Continental Philosophy, Indiana

University Press, Bloomington, 2014, p. 27.

13 Stanley Cavell, ‘The Wittgensteinian Event’, in Reading Cavell, eds. Alice

Crary and Sanford Shieh, Routledge, London, 2006, p. 10. This version is different from the one to be found in Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow.

Chapter 1 1 Stanley Cavell, ‘Notes after Austin’, The Yale Review 76(3), June 1987, p. 314. 2 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Oxford University Press, Oxford,

1971, p. 133.

3 J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1970,

p. 181.

4 David Hall, ‘The Observance and the Breach: Rom Harré on Life and its

Rules’, The Pantograph, 25 August 2015 (http​​s:/​/w​​ww​.pa​​ntogr​​aph​-p​​unch.​​ com​/p​​ost​/r​​om​-ha​​rre​-p​​hilo​s​​ophy-​​inter​​view)​.

5 Austin, Philosophical Papers, p. 56. 6 Lalita Rana, Geographical Thought: A Systematic Record of Evolution,

Concept Publishing, New Delhi, 2008, p. 265.

7 Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein,

Austin and Cavell, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2017, p. 26.

8 Bertrand Russell, Russell on Metaphysics: Selections from the Writings of

Bertrand Russell, Routledge, London, 2003, p. 151.

9 Cavell’s well-known example of this in The Claim of Reason is the word

‘feed’, which can be used as ‘feed the kitty’, ‘feed the lion’ and ‘feed the swans’, but also as ‘feed the meter’, ‘feed in the film’, ‘feed the machine’, ‘feed pride’ and ‘feed wire’ (CR, 181–3).

10 Probably the best-known essay on this topic is Ann Garrey,

‘Intersectionality, Metaphors and the Multiplicity of Gender’, Hypatia 24(4), Fall 2011, pp. 26–50. For a more up-to-date treatment of the same issues, see Stephanie Julia Kapusta, Contesting Gender Concepts, Language and Norms: Three Critical Articles on Ethics and Political Aspects of Gender NonConformity, especially chapter 1, ‘Dispute over “Woman”: Resemblance, Dissemblance and Contestability’ (PhD thesis, University of Western Ontario, 2015).

11 Perhaps the definitive expression of this in literature is Jorge Luis Borges’

essay ‘Kafka and His Precursors’, in which he writes of Kafka’s various ‘precursors’: ‘If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have listed

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resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. The last fact is what is most significant. Kafka’s idiosyncrasy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist.’ The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922–86, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1999, p. 365. 12 See on this, for example, Stephen Mulhall, Philosophy’s Recounting of

the Ordinary, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994, especially the chapter ‘Criteria, Scepticism and the External World’. See also Jason Bridges, ‘Wittgenstein vs Contextualism’, in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: A Critical Guide, ed. Arif Ahmed, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, pp. 109–28.

13 It is the Oxford ‘private language’ philosophers Peter Hacker and

P.F. Strawson who are perhaps most closely associated with this view. For a more contemporary version of the same argument, see Hanne Appelqvist, ‘On Wittgenstein’s Kantian Solution to the Problem of Philosophy’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26(4), 2016, pp. 697–719.

14 Cavell writes: ‘For an utterance to be a “remark” (for it to remark

something) is an alternative way of achieving competence as an assertion (alternative to its being intended to tell someone something)’ (CR, 210).

15 Mulhall, Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary, p. 78. 16 Ibid., p. 81. 17 See on this Samuel Weber, ‘Closure and Exclusion’, Diacritics 10(2), Summer

1980, pp. 35–46.

Chapter 2 1 Undoubtedly Cavell’s definitive statement of this is the essay ‘Declining

Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture’, in This New Yet Unapproachable America. The French Cavell scholar Sandra Laugier will also write on this in ‘This is Us: Wittgenstein and the Social’, Philosophical Investigations 41(2), April 2018, pp. 204–22.

2 Avrum Stroll, Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty, Oxford University

Press, Oxford, 1994, p. 138.

3 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Cambridge University

Press, Cambridge, 1986, p. 41.

4 Ibid., p. 69. 5 To take one typical passage: ‘The head-on effort to defeat scepticism

allows us to think we have explanations when in fact we lack them. More important, in fighting the sceptic too close in, as it were, the antisceptic

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takes over – or encourages – the major condition of the sceptic’s argument, viz., that the problem of knowledge about other minds is the problem of certainty’ (MW?, 258). A similar point is made by Élise Domenach in ‘“La verite du scepticisme,” le destin d’une expression’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 256(2), 2011, pp. 201–20. 6 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, p. 31. 7 Ibid., p. 25. 8 Jacques Derrida, ‘Madness and the History of Civilization’, in Writing and

Difference, Taylor & Francis, London, 1982, p. 34.

9 For Cavell’s classic statement of this, see ‘The Uncanniness of the Ordinary’,

in In Quest of the Ordinary, pp. 153–78. We will later relate this to what Cavell speaks of as the ‘fantasy of necessary inexpressiveness’ (CR, 351) with regard to the melodramas of the ‘unknown woman’.

10 Cavell will elaborate in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: ‘We may

laugh and cry at the same things, or not; some experience may throw us out of, or into, agreement here, but the idea of achieving agreement in our senses of comedy or tragedy seems out of place. When the child starts to walk, she or he walks, tentatively, as I do; we agree in walking; but we have not achieved this agreement, come to agree; it makes more sense to say that we have each come to walk’ (CHU, 94).

11 T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His

Followers, Thames & Hudson, London, 1985, p. 259.

12 T. J. Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, Critical Inquiry 9(1),

September 1982, p. 152.

13 Michael Fried, ‘How Modernism Works: A Response to T.J. Clark’, Critical

Inquiry 9(1), September 1982, p. 220.

14 Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, in The New Art: A Critical

Anthology, ed. Geoffrey Battcock, Plume, New York, 1973, p. 102.

15 Fried, ‘How Modernism Works’, p. 223. 16 It Happened One Night, Columbia Pictures (1934) D: Frank Capra, Script:

Robert Riskin.

Chapter 3 1 Gerald L. Bruns, ‘Stanley Cavell’s Shakespeare’, Critical Inquiry 16(3), Spring

1990, p. 614.

2 Freud writes ‘Thus, strictly speaking, we do not know what we are laughing

at’, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1991, p. 146.

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3 Cavell speaks of Greenblatt in Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of

Shakespeare, p. 164. For two essays addressing Cavell’s relation to Greenblatt, see Richard P. Wheeler, ‘Acknowledging Shakespeare: Cavell and the Claim of the Human’, in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, eds. Richard Fleming and Michael Payne, Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg, 1989, pp. 145–8; and Garrett Stewart, ‘The Avoidance of Stanley Cavell’, in Contending with Stanley Cavell, ed. Russell Goodman, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, pp. 144–5.

4 See, for example, Colin Davis, Critical Excess: Over-reading in Derrida,

Deleuze, Lacan, Žižek and Cavell, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2010: ‘At the same time, Cavell accepts that he is perhaps being wilfully outrageous, conceding that he is trying to convince himself as much as anyone else. Often, though, he does not so much argue his position as present or assert it, appealing for but not compelling agreement’ (p. 157).

5 Cavell will not do this directly in the case of Vertigo, but we interpret what

he writes in Cities of Words, in the context of Max Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman, as a displaced confession of sorts: ‘The exactitude of the recurrence [of Ophuls’ camera repeating the same set of images twice] is an image of Lacan’s discussion of the ego-ideal’s demanding, demanded, search for its object. Perhaps the greatest, most concentrated, treatment of the implacable violence in this search is Hitchcock’s Vertigo’ (CW, 405). There is, in fact, a whole PhD thesis on the subject of Cavell and Vertigo, Andrew Paul Djaballah, ‘Stanley Cavell, Film Studies and Vertigo’, which even includes a chapter ‘Stanley Cavell and Vertigo’ (http​​s:/​/s​​pectr​​um​.li​​brary​​.conc​​ordia​​.ca​/9​​ 76376​​/1​​/MR​​63191​​.pdf)​.

6 Of course, it is a complex question of when we in the audience recognize that

Lear should be acknowledging Cordelia. Do we see that it is Cordelia whom Lear should be trusting at the time or only after the events that follow? Needless to say, all of this has to do not only with Lear’s acknowledgment of Cordelia but our acknowledgement of her (and Lear). Indeed, in a certain way, for the reasons we give towards the end of this chapter, we never see acknowledgement at the time but only either too soon or late. And all of this has to do with the relation of Shakespeare’s play with modernity itself, for we would suggest that, according to Cavell’s chronology, modernity comes about at some point in the play.

7 Stewart takes this up in ‘The Avoidance of Stanley Cavell’, in which he speaks

inter alia of the things Cavell ‘avoids’ in his reading of Shakespeare. But this is possible, at least in part, only because in Cavell’s notion of ‘avoidance’ not to know is to avoid. And in aligning ‘avoidance’ with the doubling capacity of scepticism, in which the ordinary can be understood only as the overcoming of scepticism, it will mean that it is precisely Cavell who cannot be avoided.

8 In this regard, acknowledgement in theatre is exactly like acknowledgement

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stated in Chapter 2, this is also the case for works of art in modernity: the commonality between the various works that make up a particular medium or tradition is able to be seen only from the point of view of a new work that appears to have nothing to do with it. 9 In this regard, we might mention Sozita Goudouna’s Beckett’s Breath: Anti-

theatricality and the Visual Arts, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2018, which uses Beckett’s thirty-second playlet Breath I (1969) to consider how Beckett grapples with issues of ‘theatricality’ and the consequences of this for the visual arts in general.

Chapter 4 1 Cavell writes: ‘The problem [of the play] is unavoidable. How can critics not

have seen it? . . . I have more than once suggested that in failing to see what the true position of a character is, in a given moment, we are exactly put in his condition, and thereby implicated in the tragedy’ (MW?, 310, 313). In other words, we cannot see that Lear has failed to acknowledge Cordelia until we have acknowledged him, although in that circular fashion we have pointed to it is also true to say that we have not acknowledged Lear until we see that he has not acknowledged Cordelia.

2 Amongst the most important of the commentaries on the relationship of

Cavell to film and photography are William Rothman and Marian Keane, Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 2000; Catherine Wheatley, Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema, Bloomsbury, London, 2019; and Joel Snyder, ‘Photography and Ontology’, in The Worlds of Art and the World, ed. Joseph Margolis, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1984, pp. 21–34.

3 Cavell writes in The World Viewed: ‘To act without performing, to allow action

all and only the significance of its specific traces and no self-consciousness to blunt or disperse that knowledge. . . . Brecht automatically gets an unanticipated version of his wish for the epic in theatre: not the dissociation of actor and character, but their total coalescence, allowing a dissociation or freeing of action from speech’ (WV, 153). He will then go on to say that it is the condition of epic theatre to confront ‘its own continuous failing – every night our knowing the truth of our condition and every day dawning just the same’ (WV, 154), but this does not mean that this will necessarily be true forever, that one day we might wake up and things will be different.

4 Amongst the important essays written on Cavell and the question of

‘automaticity’ are Diarmuid Costello and Dawn M. Phillips, ‘Automatism, Causality and Realism: Foundational Problems in the Philosophy of Photography’, Philosophy Compass 4(1), 2009, pp. 1–21; Temenuga

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Trifonova, ‘Film and Scepticism: Stanley Cavell and the Ontology of Film’, Rivista di Estetica 46, 2011, pp. 197–219; and Carol Armstrong, ‘Automatism and Agency Intertwined: A Spectrum of Photographic Intentionality’, Critical Inquiry 38(4), Summer 2012, pp. 705–26. 5 See, for example, Roger Scruton, ‘Photography and Representation’, Critical

Inquiry 7(3), Spring 1981, pp. 577–603.

6 Fried writes in ‘Art and Objecthood’: ‘There is, however, one art that, by

its very nature, escapes theatre entirely – the movies . . . At the same time, the automatic, guaranteed character of that refuge – more accurately, the fact that what is provided is a refuge from theatre and not a triumph over it – means that cinema, even at its most experimental, is not a modernist art’ (AO, 164). For an essay taking up the relationship between Fried and Cavell on cinema, see Martin Shuster, ‘The Ordinariness and Absence of the World: Cavell’s Ontology of the Screen – Reading The World Viewed’, Modern Language Notes 130(5), December 2015, pp. 1067–99.

7 Wittgenstein writes: ‘Nothing could be more remarkable than seeing

someone who thinks himself unobserved engaged in some quite simple everyday activity. Let’s imagine a theatre, the curtain goes up and we see someone alone in his room walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, seating himself, etc., so that suddenly we are observing a human being from the outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves’, Culture and Value, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1970, p. 6e.

8 By this we mean to speak of the way that for some commentators the

‘historical’ introduction of issues of scepticism and its overcoming has not really taken place in cinema and there remains only the ‘automatic’ removal of the spectator, which is not properly sceptical or is merely sceptical. This is the position of the important Cavell commentator David Macarthur in his ‘Living Our Scepticism of Others through Film: Remarks in the Light of Cavell’, SubStance 45(3), 2016, pp. 120–36, which is additionally critical of a number of aspects of Cavell’s treatment of cinema.

9 T. J. Demos has also had something of the same insight in Vitamin Ph: New

Photography in Perspective, Phaidon, London, 2006, p. 6.

10 For another attempt to think Cavell’s differing uses of ‘automatism’ and how

they might be thought in relation to each other, see Lisa Trahair, ‘Being on the Outside: Automatism in Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed’, FilmPhilosophy 18, 2014, pp. 128–46.

Chapter 5 1 We might give just three examples here: Michael Wood, Pursuits of

Happiness, New York Review of Books 28(21), 1 January 1982; Michiko N OTES

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Kakutani, ‘Books of the Times’, New York Times, 9 February 1982, p. C8; and Geoffrey Hawthorn, Pursuits of Happiness, London Review of Books 4(6), 1 April 1982, p. 14. 2 Cavell was later to write on The Winter’s Tale in Disowning Knowledge, in

which it is found amongst Shakespeare’s tragedies. In fact, The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s so-called problem plays, such as Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well, in which critics are unable to decide whether they are comedies or tragedies. For an essay on Cavell on The Winter’s Tale, see Tatjana Jukić, ‘Cavell’s Shakespeare, or the Insufficiency of Tragedy for Modernity’, Bollettino Filosofico 32, 2017, pp. 67–87.

3 Freud writes: ‘We found that the characteristics and effects of jokes are

linked with certain forms of expression or technical methods, among which the most striking are condensation, displacement and indirect representation’, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, p. 222.

4 Cavell himself has written on the remake of Mr and Mrs Smith in terms

of the comedies of remarriage in ‘Falling in Love Again’, Film Comment, September–October 2005, pp. 50–4.

5 Karen Hanson, ‘Being Doubted, Being Assured’, in The Senses of Stanley

Cavell, p. 217.

6 Tania Modleski, Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a

‘Postfeminist’ Age, Routledge, London, 1991, p. 9. E. Ann Kaplan will say something similar in a review of Contesting Tears: ‘While I now see the logic of Cavell’s points, his excuse for not paying attention to feminist melodrama work because not “specifically invited to” strikes me as disingenuous. Cavell evidently only engages with research that is in line with his own thoughts: he sees no need to take other points of view into account.’ ‘The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman’, Film Quarterly 52(1), Fall 1998, p. 78.

7 See Marian Keane, ‘Who’s Silencing Whom?’, Film and Philosophy 2, 1995,

pp. 111–18; and William Rothman, ‘Cavell’s Philosophy and What Film Studies Calls “Philosophy”: Must the Field of Film Studies Speak in One Voice?’, Film and Philosophy 2, 1995, pp. 105–10.

8 Gaslight, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (144), D: George Cukor, Script: John van

Druten and Walter Reisch.

9 We might take, for example, Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The

Woman’s Film of the 1940s, Bloomington University Press Indiana, 1987; and Home Is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill, British Film Institute, London, 1987.

10 Perhaps the first to propose something like this was Rothman in ‘Pathos

and Transfiguration in the Face of the Camera: A Reading of Stella Dallas’, where he writes: ‘But perhaps Stella never really was that pathetic figure we took her to be: perhaps she always knew herself better than we knew her,

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and perhaps all along we have failed to acknowledge her. Perhaps when she presented herself at the hotel, for example, she knew perfectly well that her outfit violated “respectable” taste and was deliberately affronting snooty sensibilities, although without weighing the consequences for Laurel of this theatrical gesture.’ The ‘I’ of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History and Aesthetics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, p. 93. Cavell will acknowledge the importance of Rothman’s essay in CT, 198. 11 Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation, MIT Press,

Cambridge, MA, 2002, p. 124.

12 We wonder whether this situation might be compared to what Cavell calls

the ‘fantasy of necessary inexpressiveness’, in which there is no longer any position from which scepticism is remarked and we are relieved of the ‘responsibility of making myself known to others’ (CR, 351). In another way, this might even be compared to Cavell’s ‘ordinary’, which lies at the end of a long line of perfectionist questing. On the other hand, of course, we could not speak of any of this without doing away with it. We will return to these matters in our Conclusion. Equally, we might add that, if the comedies embody a certain aporia between scepticism and its overcoming, the exception and the universal, the melodramas might express either a simple exception, as in Cavell’s unique recognition of these ‘unknown women’, or the absence of any such exception, as in Copjec’s feminine sexuation. Notably – and provocatively – Cavell will say that women and men experience scepticism differently in Contesting Tears, precisely in relation to Lacan (CT, 101–2). For a good discussion of these issues, see Wheatley, Stanley Cavell and Film, pp. 166–9.

Chapter 6 1 William Rothman, ‘Vertigo: The Unknown Woman in Hitchcock’, in The ‘I’ of

the Camera, p. 221.

2 Cavell writes in The World Viewed: ‘I have described this loss of connection,

this loss of conviction in film’s capacity to carry the world’s presence as a new theatricalising of its images, another exhibiting of them, another replacement of the intensity of mystery with the intensity of mechanism. . . . The conventions upon which film relied have come to seem conspiracies: the close-up, which used to admit the mysteriousness of the human face, now winks a penny-ante explanation at us. Hitchcock parodies this with the long final shot of Tony Perkins in Psycho, making a mystery of himself ’ (WV, 131).

3 Murder!, British International Pictures, 1930, D: Alfred Hitchcock, Script:

Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville and Walter C Mycroft.

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4 This would be as in ‘ordinary’ conversation each statement attempts to stand

outside of the conversation and is put back into it by the statement that comes after. Perhaps what we are looking at here is a certain aporia between the world and the play, the play and the play-within-the play.

5 Alenka Zupanćić, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two,

MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2003, p. 116.

6 Ibid., p. 118. 7 See on this Misha Kavka, Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy: Reality

Matters, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2008.

8 All this might be considered in relation to the apparent paradox Cavell

outlines in ‘Ending the Waiting Game’: ‘Perhaps the sense of happening (vs. acting) is an effect of the theatre’ (MW?, 159). That is to say, just as we said that literality taken to its limit opens up a point of scepticism, a place outside of it, in Beckett, so the total equivalence of Dylan to his audience in an absolute theatricality allows him to be unself-conscious, suggests a space not merely identical to him but also beyond or outside of him. This we would say is the real meaning of Cavell’s complex words regarding the English actor Paul Schofield playing Lear: ‘It is not merely that the words are so perfectly motivated that they appear to be occurring to the character, but that the style of delivery is itself one of occurrence: the words do not so much express thought as they represent after-thought, or pre-thought’ (MW?, 159).

9 We might think here also of a sequence of Ingmar Bergman films, for

example, Scenes from a Marriage (1974), Sarabande (2003) and After the Rehearsal (1984), in which despite or precisely through the intense selfconsciousness of the characters – at heightened moments of the drama, they are apt to say such things as ‘This is like a bad play!’ or ‘Please stop overacting!’ – they stand utterly revealed both to us and to each other. Something like this can be read in Cavell’s essay ‘On Makavejev on Bergman’, where he will write of Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie (1974), which in some ways is a response to Bergman’s Persona (1966), that ‘its use of documentary footage declares that every movie has a documentary basis – at least in the camera’s ineluctable interrogation of the natural endowment of the actors, the beings who submit their being to the work of film’, in Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman, State University of New York Press, Albany, 2005, p. 19.

Chapter 7 1 Michael Fried, ‘Meeting Stanley Cavell’, MLN 126(5), December 2011, p. 942. 2 Of course, Fried’s belief that it is possible to ‘defeat’ theatre would return

us to theatre in the same way as the defeat of scepticism would return us to scepticism in Cavell. That is to say, if attempts to argue against Fried by

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asserting theatre merely repeat the terms of his argument, so Fried’s attempts to defeat theatre merely take us back to theatre. In fact, as we outline later in this chapter, what is at stake is a certain aporia between theatre and its overcoming, which if it imposes a limit upon the ability to defeat theatre, also means that it is through theatricality that an anti-theatricality is possible, as seen, for example, in Fried’s subsequent analysis of Manet (and also Thomas Ruff, Thomas Demand and Douglas Gordon). In some sense, this would be as in Cavell’s treatment of Beckett, where equally it is through the attempt to drive the logic of literality or theatricality to its limit that a properly theatrical distance is opened up between the spectator and the characters. 3 In fact, the prophetic aspect of Fried’s connection became clear in the decade

after the publication of Absorption and Theatricality when the artist Jeff Koons put together the Rococo and Minimalism in such works as Rabbit (1986), Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), Made in Heaven (1989) and Puppy (1992). Indeed, in the well-known photograph of Rabbit where the camera on the plinth opposite reflected in it makes up its nose and belly button, we have exactly the same incorporation of the spectator’s gaze into the work as in Minimalism.

4 For an essay connecting Fried and Wittgenstein on this question of

‘scepticism’, see Élise Marrou, ‘“We Should Be Seeing Life Itself ”: Back to the Rough Ground of the Stage’, in Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism, ed. Anat Matar, Bloomsbury, London, 2017, pp. 126–42.

5 To say this again, in contrast to the simple exception to theatricality of

Minimalism, some place from where it can definitively be known and mobilized, Fried would propose a certain acknowledgement of it, which is to say that reiterative process by which every exception to theatricality (necessary to have any conception of it at all) ends up being folded back into it from some new place outside of it. And this, indeed, is why every use of the words ‘defeat’, ‘oppose’ or ‘overcome’ scepticism in our own text needs to be understood as though in inverted commas or as only temporary or as though the particular holders of these positions are only temporary. On the notion of acknowledgment in Fried, see Danielle Follett, ‘The Stakes of Modernist Acknowledgement’, nonsite​.o​rg 22, September 2017 (http​​s:/​/n​​ onsit​​e​.org​​/feat​​ure​/t​​he​-st​​akes-​​of​-mo​​derni​​st​-​ac​​knowl​​edgme​​nt).

6 In fact, as implied in Cavell’s ‘A Matter of Meaning It’, it is the understanding

that the artist ‘intends’ their work that means that they are not simply outside of it but in a relationship of mutual acknowledgement with it, in which each as it were speaks to the other from a position of shifting inside and outside, whereas it is the Minimalist, postmodern and even theatrically Hitchcockian position of not intending the work and leaving it up to the audience to decide that would ultimately claim to be unambiguously outside the work. We will see this again in a moment with the distinction between Ryman and Marioni.

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7 We might put this another way by saying that in the later Fried it is a matter

neither of art criticism nor of art history: art criticism because there is no opposition between theatricality and anti-theatricality; art history because the movement between them no longer takes place in time, but is logical and instantaneous.

8 See on this Yve-Alain Bois’ ‘Ryman’s Tact’, October 19, Winter 1981, pp.

93–104, in which Bois argues that at a certain point in the production of his paintings Ryman consciously or deliberately gives up control and hands over responsibility to the process.

Chapter 8 1 Of course, this is complicated because Cavell also says of cinema that we

‘look out at [the world], from behind the self ’ (WV, 102). However, as we have seen, in cinema the existence of the screen makes this removal of the self automatic, which then is lost and has to be re-attained, whereas in panting it is something to be achieved, which then allows the mutual acknowledgement or even ‘facingness’ of painting and spectator.

2 That is – and this to speak of the book’s complex, often conflicted

temporality – if in one reading of The World Viewed it is ‘types’ that are theatrical and ‘individuality’ that is the attempt to overcome them, in another reading it is ‘individuality’ that is itself already theatrical. ‘Individuality’ can be seen at once to come after Neo-Hollywood as a form of cinematic acknowledgement and to be what is theatricalized by NeoHollywood. And, of course, this Neo-Hollywood can be understood to correspond to the very time of the writing of Cavell’s book itself. In other words, in that way we have seen before, The World Viewed introduces precisely that sceptical theatricality it also argues against.

3 See on this Diarmuid Costello, ‘After Medium Specificity Jeff Wall as a

Painter, Gerhard Richter as a Photographer’, in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins, Routledge, New York, 2007, pp. 75–89; ‘Pictures, Again’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 8(1), 2007, pp. 10–41; and ‘On the Very Idea of a Specific Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography as Arts’, Critical Inquiry 34(2), Winter 2008, pp. 274–312. See also Vered Maimon, ‘Michael Fried’s Modernist Theory of Photography’, History of Photography 34(4), 2010, pp. 387–95.

4 Denis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting, Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly, 1883, p. 82. 5 Walter Benn Michaels, ‘Photography and Fossils’, in Photography Theory,

pp. 438–42. Michaels also writes about this in ‘Neoliberal Aesthetics: Fried, Rancière and the Form of the Photograph’, nonsite​.o​rg 1, Spring 2011 (http​​s:/​/n​​onsit​​e​.org​​/arti​​cle​/n​​eolib​​eral-​​aesth​​etics​​-frie​​d​-ran​​ciere​​-and-​​the​-

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f​​orm​​-o​​f​-the​​-phot​​ograp​h); and the chapter ‘Formal Feelings’, in The Beauty of a Social Problem, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2015. Fried replies to Michaels in the ‘Conclusion’ of Why Photography Matters. 6 For a powerful treatment of the issue of intentionality in Demand through

Fried, see Robert Pippin, ‘Why Does Photography Matter as Art Now, as Never Before? On Fried and Intention’, in Michael Fried and Philosophy: Modernism, Intention and Theatricality, ed. Mathew Abbott, Routledge, New York, 2018, pp. 48–63.

7 Fried has written on this work in ‘Thomas Demand’s Pacific Sun’, in Another

Light, pp. 251–69.

Chapter 9 1 This would be the case too with Fried and his arguably revised notion of

absorption: it would be a matter not simply of the subject appearing to be unaware of the spectator, in which there would still be a certain mastery and standing outside of the relationship between them, but of the subject failing to maintain this outside perspective, so that they reveal themselves in a way they cannot control, and thus in a sense are free. However, this revelation cannot occur except through the attempt to remain indifferent and unaware of the spectator. This will be part of the paradox of perfectionism where it is not a matter of willing any particular end, although no end could come about without an act of will, which of course bears some relationship to what we have seen Cavell and Fried say about ‘intention’ in art. See on this Cavell’s essay ‘Aversive Thinking: Emersonian Representations in Heidegger and Nietzsche in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome’ because obviously all of this bears some relation to the question of the Will in Nietzsche’s thinking of the Eternal Return: the idea that not only must the Eternal Return be willed but that ultimately it is only something like the Eternal Return that makes will possible.

2 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Jazzybee Verlag, Altenmünster, Loschberg,

2015, p. 185.

3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, The Bobbs-Merrill Company,

Indianapolis, Indiana, 1956, p. 18.

4 Ibid., p. 91. 5 John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, Cambridge University Press,

Cambridge, 1988, p. 305.

6 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Cosimo Classics, New York, 2008, p. 6. 7 Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism

and Progress, Penguin, New York, 2018, p. 413.

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8 Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993,

p. 14.

9 On perfectionism as a ‘supplement’ to other moral theories, see Conditions

Handsome and Unhandsome, where Cavell speaks of ‘perfectionism not as a competing moral theory but as emphasising a dimension of the moral life of any theory it may wish to accommodate’ (CHU, xxxi). For three important texts on Cavell and perfectionism, see Philippe Corcuff and Sandra Laugier, ‘Perfectionisme démocratique et cinema: pistes exploratoires’, Raisons politiques 38, Mai 2010, pp. 31–48; Hent de Vries, ‘“A Greatest Miracle”: Stanley Cavell, Moral Perfectionism and the Ascent into the Ordinary’, Modern Theology 27(3), July 2011, pp. 462–77; and Piergiorgio Donatelli, ‘Moral Perfectionism and Virtue’, Critical Inquiry 45(2), Winter 2019, pp. 332–50.

10 See on this G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, Humanity Books, New

York, 1969, where he writes: ‘The very expression synthesis [in Kant’s synthetic unity of apperception, which is the condition of possibility for experience] easily recalls the conceptions of an external unity and a mere combination of entities that are intrinsically separate . . .  and has reverted once more to the assertion that the Concept is permanently conditioned by a manifold of intuition’, p. 589. On Kant’s own (necessarily failed) ambition to make the conditions of possibility of objects just the objects they condition, see Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007: ‘The a priori conditions of a possible experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of objects of experience’, A 111.

11 See, for example, ‘Finding as Founding: Taking Steps in Emerson’s

“Experience”’, in Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes: ‘And here we reach our momentary end [in “Experience”], since we are beginning again. . . . At each step, or level, [in life] explanation comes to an end; there is no level to which all explanations come, at which all end’, pp. 138, 139.

12 Alain Badiou cited in The Shortest Shadow, p. 9. 13 Jacques Derrida, Positions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1982, p. 8.

Conclusion 1 Stanley Cavell, ‘The Wittgensteinian Event’, in Philosophy the Day after

Tomorrow, pp. 192–212.

2 Stanley Cavell, ‘What is the Emersonian Event? A Reply to Kateb’s Emerson’,

New Literary History 25(4), Autumn 1994, pp. 951–58.

3 For an admittedly unofficial attempt to think the Cavellian ‘event’, see the

Agent Swarm website, ‘On Events in Philosophy: Badiou, Feyerabend and

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Cavell’ (http​​s:/​/t​​erenc​​eblak​​e​.wor​​dpres​​s​.com​​/2015​​/08​/3​​0​/on-​​event​​s​-in-​​philo​​ sophy​​-badi​​ou​-fe​​​yerab​​end​-a​​nd​-ca​​vell/​). 4 For a dissenting view on Cavell’s interpretation of Wittgenstein, see

Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, ‘Too Cavellian a Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein’s Certainty, Cavell’s Scepticism’, in Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism, pp. 92–110. But, of course, in another way, Moyal-Sharrock’s argument only goes towards showing how Cavell makes Wittgenstein over in his image, as any properly powerful philosopher necessarily does.

5 This conception of doubt has been with Cavell since the beginning of his

career. Take, for example, three sentences from towards the end of The Claim of Reason: ‘I do not ask for conviction in the notion that passive scepticism repeats the condition of prophecy. . . . My intuition that I can live my scepticism with regard to other minds is an intuition that there is no comparable, general alternative to the radical doubt of the existence of others. . . . If this is how it is, then instead of taking this picture as one in which scepticism oscillates with my life I can readily take it as one in which this oscillation with scepticism occurs within my life’ (CR, 447, 449).

6 Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out,

Routledge, New York, 2001, p. 92.

7 Ibid., p. 102. 8 It is at this point that we come back to the ordinary as at once the end

point of perfectionist ascent and what perfectionism thinks is lost and is always trying to recover, thus turning it into merely the opposite of the ‘unordinary’. (It is just in this way, as we have seen, that Cavell could no sooner name the ‘unknown’ woman than she would be known or Fried speak of absorption than it would turn into theatricality. It might even be this ordinary that Copjec is aiming at when she describes Stella in Stella Dallas as no longer a hysteric placing herself outside of the world.) There are a number of important essays and books by Sandra Laugier on the ordinary in Cavell: ‘Emerson: penser l’ordinaire’, Revue française d’études américaines 91, Février 2002, pp. 43–60; ‘Rethinking the Ordinary: Cavell after Austin’, in Contending with Stanley Cavell, pp. 82–100; and the ‘Conclusion’ to Recommencer la philosophie: Stanley Cavell et la philosophie en Amérique, Vrin, Paris, 2014, especially the section , pp. 285–92.

9 Cavell will write ‘Philosophical Investigations, like the major modernist

works of the past century at least, is logically speaking esoteric. That is, such works seek to split their audience into insiders and outsiders (and split each member of it)’ (CR, xx) – and this would apply to Cavell’s own work as well.

10 See on this Armen Avanessian and Anke Henning, Metanoia: A Speculative

Ontology of Language, Thinking and the Brain, Bloomsbury, London, 2016.

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INDEX

absorption  126, 128, 134, 138, 140–5, 152–9, 160, 162–3, 170, 183, 209 n.1 acknowledgement  4, 16, 28, 55–69, 72–8, 82–6, 92, 94, 99, 102–4, 108–10, 116, 119–20, 124, 140, 155, 165, 172, 188, 201 n.6, 201 n.8, 202 n.1, 207 n.5 Act of Killing  125 Adam’s Rib  88, 91, 92, 95–7 Agent Swarm  210 n.3 agreement  23–8, 46, 65, 91, 133, 200 n.10, 201 n.8 America  88, 127, 151, 177 analytical theory of language  18–20 Ancient Greek drama  52, 54, 71, 76 Andre, Carl  132 Anscombe, G. E. M.  15, 187 aporia  109, 145, 182, 186, 205 n.12, 207 n.7 Aristotle  175 Armstrong, Carol  203 n.4 As You Like It  89 Augustus/Augustinian theory of language  17–22, 31, 33, 41 Austin, John  6, 12–16, 28–29 automatic/automatism  73–7, 80, 83, 92, 112–14, 119–21, 148–53, 160, 168, 202 n.4, 203 n.8, 203 n.10 Avanessian, Armen  211 n.10 The Awful Truth  88, 96 Bacon, Francis  34–5, 51 Badiou, Alain  187

Barthes, Roland  84, 160–3 Battle of Orgreave  125 Baudelaire, Charles  73, 79 Baudrillard, Jean  81 Bazin, André  3, 73, 147 Becher, Bernd and Hilla  129, 156, 157 Beckett, Samuel  3, 7, 63–6, 71, 72, 76, 82, 85, 114, 206 n.8 Benton, Robert  97 Bergman, Ingmar  206 n.9 Berman, Ingrid  100 Bethel, S. L.  52 Bonnie and Clyde  150 Borges, Jorge Luis  198 n.11 Boucher, François  135–6, 139, 159 Boyer, Charles  100 Bradley, A. C.  56 Brecht, Bertolt  71, 72, 76, 114, 202 n.3 Bridges, Jason  199 n.2 Big Brother  123–4, 135 Bois, Yve-Alain  208 n.8 Bringing Up Baby  88, 95 Bruns, Gerald  52 Buñuel, Luis  120 Bustamente, Jean-Marc  153, 155 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid  150 Calder, Alexander  130 candid  124, 128, 148, 156 Caravaggio, Cecco del  145 Caravaggio, Michelangelo  144–5 Carnap, Rudolph  15 Caro  44, 129–31

Cavell, Stanley ‘Austin at Criticism’  28 ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’  27, 31, 39 ‘The Avoidance of Love’  3, 51, 55–6, 71, 85 City of Words  175, 177, 201 n.5 Claim of Reason  12, 28, 29, 37, 140, 164, 188, 211 n.5 Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome  179, 182, 200 n.10, 210 n.9 Contesting Tears  2, 7, 97–100, 107 Disowning Knowledge  3, 51, 52, 57 Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes  179 ‘Ending the Waiting Game’  3, 51, 63–5, 67, 127, 206 n.8 Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation’  191 Little Did I Know  11, 127 ‘A Matter of Meaning It’  207 n.6 ‘Music Discomposed’  44–5 Must We Mean?  3, 34, 47, 128 New Yet Unapproachable  175, 181 ‘Notes on Austin’  12 Pursuits of Happiness  2, 7, 47, 87, 90, 95–6, 151, 156 Senses of Walden  175 ‘What is an Emersonian Event?’  187 ‘The Wittgensteinian Event’  8–9, 187 World Viewed  2, 41, 72–3, 85, 94, 107, 117, 121, 139, 147–8, 154, 155, 161, 167, 202 n.3, 205 n.12, 208 n.2 Caylus, Comte de  137 Chaplin, Charlie Chardin, Jean-BaptisteSiméon  134–5, 137–8, 141, 145, 153, 156, 158–9

Chevrier, Jean-François  155 Chopra, Joyce  120, 123 cinematic  7, 73–8, 82–3, 110–11, 117, 119, 120, 124, 148–9, 167–9, 171–2, 184 circle/circularity  6, 110, 116, 142, 171, 179–80, 185–6, 192–5 Citizen Kane  100 Clark, T. J.  40 Coburn, Charles  92 Coen Brothers  97 Colbert, Claudette  47 comedy  7, 44–7, 54–8, 87–100, 105, 109, 113 Comolli, Jean-Luc  73 conditions of possibility  5, 26, 34, 38, 85, 89, 91, 116, 152, 178, 181, 190 Copjec, Joan  105, 118–19, 205 n.12 Corcuff, Philippe  210 n.9 Costello, Diarmuid  153, 208 n.3 Cotton, Joseph  100 Courbet, Gustav  134, 137–8, 141, 142, 156, 157, 159 Cox, Franklin  197 n.7 Crazy Stupid Love  97 criteria  15, 26–7, 49, 151 Cukor, George  100 Dahl, Espen  5 David, Jacques-Louis  137, 141 Davis, Colin  201 n.4 deconstruction  1, 2, 29 Delacroix, Eugène  158 Delahaye, Luc  154, 159, 162 de Lauretis, Teresa  99 Deleuze, Gilles  2 Deller, Jeremy  125 Demand, Thomas  156, 157, 163–4, 185 democracy/democratic  8, 61, 88, 127, 151, 167–7, 176–7 Demos, T. J.  203 n.9 deontology  175, 177 depicted  143

Index

213

Derrida, Jacques  29, 34, 38, 102, 183 Descartes, René  34–8, 51, 65, 80, 98, 101–2, 178, 180, 182, 186, 188, 195 de Vries, Hent  210 n.9 diCorcia, Philip-Lorca  156, 162 Diderot, Denis  13, 142, 155, 162 Dijkstra, Rineka  152, 156, 157, 159, 160, 162, 163, 170, 183 Djaballah, Andrew Paul  201 n.5 documentary cinema  6–7, 110, 119–24, 168–9 Domenbach, Élise  200 n.5 Donat, Robert  111, 112, 113 Donatelli, Piergiorgio  210 n.9 Don’t Look Back  107, 120, 122–4, 164, 169, 174 Double Indemnity  103 doubling/redoubling  9, 34, 38, 42, 46, 66, 84, 91, 110, 114, 117, 142–3, 178–9, 180, 181, 185, 189 doubt  27, 32, 33–8, 41, 43, 47, 77, 89, 92, 100–1, 180–9, 211 n.5 Dylan, Bob  123–4, 139, 162, 169–70, 206 n.8 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  8–9, 170–1, 175–82, 185–6, 190–5 Empson, William  57 Eternal Return  182, 209 n.1 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind  97 Euripides  52 Evans, Walker  154, 159 Evil Dead  117 exception  89, 92, 96, 103, 105–6, 110, 118, 185, 189, 205 n.12, 207 n.5 exhibitionism  158, 167 facingness  139, 141, 157, 159, 161, 208 n.1 family resemblance  20–2, 27, 32, 43, 170

214

Index

Fellini, Federico  46–7 feminine  99, 102, 105, 118–19 feminism/feminist  21, 98–9, 104–5 Ficarra, Glenn  97 film  73–85, 147–50 Flaherty, Robert  107, 120–1 Follett, Danielle  207 n.5 Fonda, Henry  91, 92 formulae of sexuation  105–6 Foucault, Michel  38, 102 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré  135–7, 159 Freud, Sigmund  55, 96, 116 Friday the 13th  117 Fried, Michael Absorption and Theatricality  94, 134, 137, 141–2, 155, 162 After Caravaggio  145 Another Light  165 ‘Art and Objecthood’  80, 130–2, 135, 153, 203 n.6 Courbet’s Realism  137, 142 Four Honest Outlaws  143 Manet’s Modernism  139, 140, 142 The Moment of Caravaggio  143, 145 Why Photography Matters  8, 94, 129, 152–3, 159–60, 162, 163, 167, 171–2, 183, 193 frontedness  128, 139 Gable, Clark  47, 87 Galileo Galilei  6, 34–5, 51 game  19–23 Garbo, Greta  73, 78, 98 Garrey, Ann  198 n.10 Gaslight  100–3, 105, 109 gaze  75–6, 79–81, 112–13, 118, 121, 123–4, 137, 140, 142, 148, 162, 167, 170–1, 207 n.3 Geach, Peter  15 genre  79, 83, 89, 96, 97, 150, 156–7, 185, 193–4 Géricault, Théodore  137, 138 Giotto  145

Godard, Jean-Luc  81, 88 Gondry, Michel  57 González, Julio  130 Gordon, Douglas  164–5, 185 Goudouna, Sozita  202 n.9 The Graduate  150 Grant, Cary  87, 91 Greenberg, Clement  40, 64, 73, 128–9, 151 Greenblatt, Stephen  4, 57, 201 n.3 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste  134–5, 137–9, 141, 143, 145, 159 Gursky, Andreas  153, 156 Hacker, Peter  199 n.13 Halloween  117 Hanson, Karen  98 A Happy Mother’s Day  120, 122–3, 158, 168 Harré, Rom  14 Hawthorne, Geoffrey  204 n.1 Hazlitt, William  56 Heath, Stephen  73–4 Hedrun, Tippi  173 Hegel, G. W. F.  94, 180, 182 Heidegger, Martin  129, 153, 188 Henning, Anke  211 n.10 Hepburn, Katherine  87, 91 Hill, David  198 n.4 His Girl Friday  88, 90, 91 historicism/historicity  4, 6, 31, 35, 57 Hitchcock The Birds  170, 173 Frenzy  170 The Lodger  107, 110 Marnie  170, 173–5 Murder!  110, 111, 112, 114–17 North by Northwest  172–3 Psycho  107, 110, 117–19, 139, 167–72, 174 Rich and Strange  170 Secret Agent  172–3 Shadow of a Doubt  100 The 39 Steps  110–14, 118, 123, 167–8

Topaz  170 Torn Curtain  170 Vertigo  57, 107–9, 201 n.5 The Wrong Man  170 Hume, David  188 indifference  38, 41, 66, 81, 84–5, 91, 94, 110, 123, 137, 156, 161, 170 individuality  83, 131, 150, 178, 208 n.2 intention/intentionality  12, 15, 46, 131, 133, 143, 156–7, 163–4, 185, 209 n.6, 209 n.1 intersectionality  1, 21–4, 192 Intolerable Cruelty  97 It Happened One Night  47–9, 85–6, 88, 90, 91, 151 The Jazz Singer  90 Johnson, Samuel  56 joke  74–5, 86, 204 n.3 Jourdan, Louis  108 Jukić, Tatjana  204 n.2 Kael, Pauline  88 Kakutani, Michiko  203 n.1 Kant, Immanuel  6, 12, 23, 28, 95, 175–6, 177, 179, 180, 182, 189 Kapusta, Stephanie Julia  198 n.10 Kavka, Misha  206 n.7 Keane, Marian  3, 99, 107 Keyssar, Helene  197 n.9 Kierkegaard, Søren  191–2 Knight, G. Wilson  57 Koons, Jeff  207 n.3 Kramer vs Kramer  97 Krauss, Rosalind  2, 197 n.1 Lacan, Jacques  105, 116, 184, 201 n.5, 205 n.12 Lady Eve  88, 90, 91, 92–5, 96, 103 Land without Bread  120, 122 Lang, Berel  197 n.8 laughter  55, 96, 81, 113, 200 n.2

Index

215

Laugier, Sandra  199 n.1, 210 n.9, 211 n.8 Leacock, Richard  120, 123 Letter from an Unknown Woman  100, 105, 108, 201 n.5 Liman, Doug  97 literal/literality  63–6, 72, 130–1, 133, 143, 150, 184, 206 n.8, 207 n.2 Locke, John  34–5, 80, 176, 177 logical positivism  15, 16–17, 27 Louis, Morris  140 Lubitsch, Ernst  97 Macarthur, David  203 n.8 Makavejev, Dusan  206 n.9 Malcolm, Norman  15, 55 Manet, Edouard  40, 134, 139–41, 157, 159–60, 207 n.2 Marioni, Joseph  134, 143, 145, 185, 207 n.6 Marrou, Élise  207 n.4 Mazursky, Paul  97 medium  2, 40–3, 51, 73, 84, 96, 110, 117, 119, 128–33, 151–2, 147, 185 Metz, Christian  73 Michaels, Walter Benn  163 Mill, John Stuart  177 Millet, Jean-François  137–8 Minimal Art/Minimalism  52, 129, 130–3, 135–6, 140, 143, 153, 157, 163, 207 n.3, 207 n.6 Mishima, Yukio  155 modernity/modernism  7, 34, 35, 38, 41, 47, 51–3, 61–6, 70, 71, 75, 79–80, 82, 85, 89, 110, 117, 120, 122, 128, 133–4, 149, 184–5, 193 Modleski, Tania  98–9 Moi, Toril  17–18, 198 n.7 Mondrian, Piet  161 Moore, G. E.  187 Morin, Edgar  120, 122, 124 Morris, Robert  130 mousetrap  115–17, 123, 125 216

Index

Moyal-Sharrock, Danièle  211 n.4 Mozart, Wolfgang  44, 164 Mr and Mrs Smith  97 Mulhall, Stephen  26, 199 n.12 Mulvey, Laura  73 music  11–12, 44–5 Nanook of the North  107, 120–1, 122, 123, 168 Neo-Hollywood  110, 117, 150, 152, 158, 208 n.2 Neurath, Otto  15 Newman, Barnett  153 Nietzsche, Friedrich  9, 116–17, 182–3, 194 Night and Fog  120, 122 Norris, Andrew  4 nothing in common  21, 22–4, 26, 39 Now Voyager  100 ontology  3, 33, 85, 152, 158 Ophuls, Max  105 Oppenheimer, Joshua  125 ordinary  5, 27, 31, 38, 83–4, 194, 200 n.9, 201 n.7, 205 n.12, 206 n.4, 211 n.8 ordinary language philosophy  12, 14, 15, 20, 23, 25, 27, 29, 35, 39, 47, 60, 64, 187 Oudart, Jean-Pierre  73 pain  24–5, 28, 32, 55 painting  75, 128–9, 139, 148 Pakula, Alan  97 Panofsky, Erwin  73, 147 Peirce, C. S.  14 Pennebaker, D. A.  107, 120, 123–4, 169 perfectionism  4, 8, 167, 171, 175–85, 195, 209 n.1, 210 n.9, 211 n.8 performative  13, 15, 34 The Philadelphia Story  88, 90, 91 Phillips, Dawn M. 202 n.4 philosophy  12, 38, 51, 73, 87, 97, 116, 179, 181, 185–90, 193

photograph/photography  73–7, 147–50 Pinker, Steven  176 Pippen, Robert  2, 209 n.6 Pollock, Jackson  129, 130, 140 pornography  81–2, 149–50 pose  80–2, 149, 159–62 post-medium  2 postmodernism  1–2, 4–6, 46, 127, 133 prescription/prescriptive  6, 34, 82 presentness  45, 62, 70, 75, 77, 128, 139, 148, 165, 167, 172 punctum  84, 160–1, 163 Rana, Lalita  198 n.6 Real  124, 184 Reiner, Carl  97 remark/remarking  25, 44, 54, 56, 64, 65, 91, 96, 109, 113, 133, 140, 142–3, 179, 199 n.14 remarriage  48, 86–92, 113, 133, 140, 194 Resnais, Alain  120 Rococo  135–6, 138, 140–5, 207 n.3 Romanticism  35 Rothman, William Documentary Film Classics  7–8, 107, 119–20, 168 Murderous Gaze  3, 7, 110–11, 119, 167–8, 171, 184 Must We Kill?  3, 9, 107, 170–2, 184 (with Marian Keane) Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed  3, 107 Rouch, Jean  120, 122, 124 Rudrum, David  197 n.10 Ruff, Thomas  152, 155, 157, 159–61, 170, 183 Russell, Bertrand  14, 16, 19 Russell, Rosalind  90, 91 Ryle, Gilbert  187 Ryman, Robert  143, 207 n.6, 208 n.8

Sarris, Andrew  88 scepticism  4–6, 33, 37, 43, 47, 51, 54, 55, 64, 65, 71, 77, 77, 80–5, 89, 91, 94–5, 99, 1010, 105, 106, 118, 120, 144, 149, 154, 186, 188, 190, 201 n.7 screen  76–9, 76–83, 86–7, 121, 147–8, 150, 152, 167, 168 Scruton, Roger  78 Searle, John  29 Shakespeare, William Coriolanus  54 Cymberline  90 Hamlet  54, 56, 62, 64, 66, 90, 115–17, 123 King Lear  35, 54–61, 65, 69–71, 82, 88, 90 Much Ado About Nothing  66, 89 Othello  52, 54, 61, 90 The Winter’s Tale  56, 72, 89–90, 204 n.2 Sherman, Cindy  155 Shuster, Martin  203 n.6 Singer, Peter  176 Smith, David  130 Smith, Tony  130–2 Smithson, Robert  132 Snyder, Joel  202 n.2 something in common  19–21, 24, 39 Sophocles  52 Spinoza, Baruch  12 Stanwyck, Barbara  87, 92, 103 star  78–9, 83 Starting Over  97 Stella, Frank  129, 130, 140, 143 Stella Dallas  57, 98, 100, 103–4, 109 Stevens, George  97 Stewart, Garrett  201 n.3, 201 n.7 Stewart, Jimmy  91, 107 Stoppard, Tom  4 Strawson, P. F.  199 n.13 Streuli, Beat  156, 162 Stroll, Avrum  33, 199 n.2 Struth, Thomas  156–62, 170, 183 Index

217

studium  84, 160, 163 Sturges, Preston  92 sublime/subliming  190 Sugimoto, Hiroshi  153 supplement  178, 180 symbolic/symbolic order  105, 106, 112, 123–4, 184 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr  44 television  117, 193 That Old Feeling  97 That Uncertain Feeling  97 theatre defeating theatre  65, 67, 81, 114, 140 theatre/theatrical  7–8, 51, 63–7, 70–2, 76, 79–83, 92, 110–23, 128, 135–40, 145–9, 153–5, 160, 167, 183, 185, 208 n.7 Thoreau, Henry David  8, 175, 177, 195 To Be or Not to Be  92 Tracey, Spencer  91, 96 tradition  39, 41–5, 53, 70, 83–4, 96, 134, 142–4, 185, 193, 202 n.8 tragedy  53–6, 61–2, 71, 96 Trahair, Lisa  203 n.10 transcendental (conditions of possibility)  6, 23–4, 85, 91, 116, 145, 177–83, 188 Transcendentalism  177–80 Trifonova, Temenuga  202 n.4 Truffaut, François  88 type/types  79–80, 83, 149, 208 n.2

218

Index

uncanny  38, 184, 194 unknownness  27, 109 unknown woman (melodrama of)  98–107, 118, 141, 194, 200 n.9 utilitarianism  175–8, 180–1 Vernet, Claude Joseph  134–5, 137, 138 Vidor, King  103 voice  5, 91, 98, 102, 107, 189–90 Wagstaff, Stuart  131 Waisman, Friedrich  15 Wall, Jeff  129, 153, 155–61 Watteau, Jean-Antoine  135–7 Weber, Samuel  197 n.17 Welles, Orson  100 Werner, Martin  197 n.8 Wessing, Koen  160 Wheatley, Katherine  202 n.2, 205 n.12 Wheeler, Richard P. 201 n.3 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  6, 14–16, 18, 19–3, 28–42, 47, 51, 81, 84, 121, 124, 129, 133, 140, 187–8, 195, 203 n.7 Wollen, Peter  73 woman  21–2, 91, 98, 174, 198 n.10 Woman of the Year  97 Žižek, Slavoj  1–2, 187, 192, 197 n.1, 197 n.2 Zupancic, Alenka  116–17

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