Cavellian Meditations: How to do Things with Film and Philosophy

Film-Philosophy 18 (2014): Special Section on Stanley Cavell

Cavellian Meditations: How to Do Things with Film and Philosophy1 Robert Sinnerbrink2 But can philosophy become literature and still know itself? - Cavell 1979, 496 Philosophising on Film It is a curious feature of philosophical writing that authors rarely reflect on what motivates their concern with a chosen topic. The importance of a philosophical problem, argument, or discourse is assumed to be selfevident; or the kind of self-reflection that philosophers otherwise bring to their reflections is deemed unseemly when applied to one’s own commitment to philosophy. Among the many reasons why Stanley Cavell remains anomalous in contemporary philosophy is his acknowledgment of the biographical aspect, or more exaltedly, the existential commitments of his own writing. He tells the story, for example, of how his coming to philosophy was inspired by his experience of particular texts, both philosophical and non-philosophical, an experience that was as much about writing and reading as about reflection and understanding. It was not only the philosophical power and originality of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations that inspired Cavell’s desire to do philosophy but the fact that it was the first text he read that ‘staked its teaching on showing that we do not know, or make ourselves forget, what reading is’ (Cavell 2006, 28). Cinema too was a spur to philosophy, Cavell naming three films that suggested to him new possibilities of philosophical thought and expression: Smiles of a Summer Night [Sommarnattens leende] (Ingmar Bergman, 1955), Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras, 1959), and L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960). Anticipating Cavell’s abiding concerns in his writing on film, these three films, he remarks, are cinematic works that opened up the question of what constitutes ‘a medium of thought’; they altered ‘the iconography of intellectual conversation’ (Cavell 2006, 29), suggesting the possibility that film might be an apt and equal partner to philosophy, or that some kind of marriage between the two might be possible. Cavell’s autobiographical reflection is fascinating, not only for its challenge to conventional academic philosophical discourse but for its suggestion that film and philosophy are fundamentally, rather than accidentally, related in his thought. 1

A shorter version of this article appeared in Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies, no, 2 (2014): 75-90. The current version has been revised and expanded in response to anonymous reviewers' comments, for which I am most grateful. 2 Macquarie University: [email protected] www.film-philosophy.com

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Cavell’s anecdote is suggestive, moreover, for it addresses the question of experiencing and communicating how thinking might happen: the media it may employ, the manner of its expression, and its transformative effects upon us. We might call this the problem of giving voice to philosophy’s encounter with film, and to film’s opening up of philosophy to cinematic exploration. What happens to philosophy and the way we think, which is to say write, once philosophy opens itself to an encounter with film? What happens when one allows whatever we mean by ‘philosophy’ to be transformed by our experience of cinema? Cavell notes the importance of this question for the manner and style of his own writing about film, his attempt to do justice to the unique manner in which ‘films think’. In an interview with Jeffrey Crouse, William Rothman elaborates on this Cavellian theme, describing his own work as attempting to put into words ‘the thinking inscribed in a film’s succession of frames’ (Rothman 2012, 69). Rothman is following in Cavell’s footsteps here: thinking philosophically about film, as Cavell remarks, taught him ‘the necessity to become evocative in capturing the moods of faces and motions and settings, in their double existence as transient and as permanent’ (quoted in Cavell 2005a, xxiii). The way movies express thought, at once evanescent and enduring, presents a singular challenge to philosophy, which has been traditionally bound to (static) abstraction and (context-insensitive) generalisation. Indeed, the encounter between film and philosophy opens up a space of mutual interaction or dialogue between images and concepts that might enable us to explore different ways of thinking or indeed different ways of doing philosophy. In what follows, I offer some ‘Cavellian meditations’ on how philosophy might strive to capture the ways film think; how the thought of movies—the manner in which they elicit and express thought—can prompt philosophy to reflect on its own means of expression, its own possibilities for selfreflection. How to give voice to the thought of movies is a question that animates all of Cavell’s work. It has inspired a distinctive way of approaching film and philosophy—what many today call ‘filmphilosophy’—in which the question of style, finding words adequate to our aesthetic experience, is central to comprehending what films mean: what they express, prompt us to experience, or invite us to think. At the same time, however, Cavell’s work has left many philosophers of film and film theorists distinctly unsettled or even deeply unconvinced. How can Cavell eschew argument or ‘theory’ and yet still be regarded as engaging in philosophical work on and through film? What reasons does Cavell give for avoiding argument, and affirming philosophical style as a means of securing conviction in a reader? Is this not a reversion to rhetorical persuasion, where it is the means, rather than the matter, of written discourse that performs the work of persuading a reader? Can one argue or debate with Cavellian filmwww.film-philosophy.com

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philosophy? In what follows I seek to address these questions, offering a sympathetic defence of Cavell’s approach to writing philosophically on film, while also acknowledging the problem of the ‘avoidance of argument’ that continues to dog his work. My suggestion is that the performative aspect of Cavell’s writing—the manner in which his prose attempts to emulate, evoke, or mirror the experience of its object—should be supplemented by the invitation to critical reflection and philosophical reorientation that Cavell’s work extends. Style in Philosophy In both their manner and method, Cavell’s writings pose the question of style in philosophy. Is style a virtue or vice in doing or writing philosophy? Is it mere ornament, a rhetorical device that authors are permitted to use provided it does not overwhelm conceptual content? Or is it a valid technique of persuasion, one that marries meaning and manner in the nuanced articulation of thought? Cavell’s style has drawn particular comment, both celebratory and sceptical, among readers and critics of his work. Áine Kelly describes it well: Challenging, complex, intricate, intractable, obstinate, testing and tough – and that’s for the reader with more than a passing familiarity with the writings of Cavell’s chosen philosophical forbears: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Langshaw Austin. There’s a profound sense of struggle in Cavell’s writing, of intellectual labours enacted directly and unflinchingly in his reader’s presence. (Kelly 2010, 212) No reader of Cavell’s work, whatever their opinion, remains indifferent to its style. His is a unique authorial voice, rare in the world of ‘professional’ philosophical writing. A writer of philosophical prose with pronounced literary inflections, Cavell’s style has been criticised as difficult, demanding, and distracting. For some, it is precisely his style, perhaps more than his subject matter—scepticism and ordinary language philosophy in dialogue with literature, drama, and cinema—that renders ambiguous and uncertain his status and placement as a philosopher.3 Is Cavell a philosopher in the analytic tradition, an unorthdox Wittgensteinian, an ‘ordinary language’ philosopher, ‘Continental’ thinker, a late American transcendentalist, a literary theorist, an essayist, a critic? The temptation to say that Cavell is, in some ways, all of these things, tends to complicate and obscure rather than clarify or resolve the matter. Here again it is the question of Cavell’s style that is at issue.

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See Gould (1998) for one of the few studies of Cavell’s style as a means of philosophical expression. www.film-philosophy.com

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Can style alone (though separating style from substance is here the question) disqualify a text from philosophical consideration?4 Consider the case of Derrida, whose self-referential manner of writing, constantly questioning its own status, and probing of aporetic or ‘undecidable’ elements in literary and philosophical texts, led to his virtual exclusion from the philosophical community.5 Although never subject to the same hostility as Derrida, elements of this censorious response, precisely in respect of his style, are evident in the case of Cavell, who has received tentative acknowledgement but also met with pointed avoidance. In a review of The Claim of Reason, for example, Anthony Kenny dismisses, even mocks, ‘Cavell’s self-indulgent style’ (Kenny 1980, 449). In a gesture of disavowal, Kenny acknowledges Cavell’s ‘philosophical and literary gifts’, while at the same time dismissing the book as ‘a misshapen, undisciplined amalgam of ill-assorted parts’, one that ‘could have been much better had it been pruned of dead wood and over-exuberant foliage’ (Kenny 1980, 449). Kenny’s intriguing horticultural metaphor, taking the philosophical text as an English garden to be pruned and cultivated, is highly illuminating. Cavell’s book, from this point of view, appears as an unseemly riot of exotic foliage, one full of ‘dead wood’ and excessive growth clearly at odds with the austere pruning of the ‘English’ philosophical text. What is criticised in Cavell’s writing, evident in Kenny’s review as in others, is not just philosophical obscurity so much as a moral failing: a lack of self-restraint, a self-indulgent style, an excessive expressiveness.6 For readers steeped in what Nietzsche called ‘the ascetic ideal’ (Nietzsche 1989b, 97 ff.)—the philosopher’s mistaking of ascetic self-denial for intellectual virtue—Cavell’s prose style can come across as either a compromising pleasure or else a disturbing distraction. There is too much in Cavell’s writing: too many allusions, too much self-reflexivity, autobiography, idiosyncrasy, complexity, reflexivity, ambiguity, interruption, irony, a ‘Continental’ concern with style, which risks confusing or provoking the reader schooled in prose that is more functional than artisanal. In fine, there is too much in Cavell’s writing of that which ‘professional’ philosophy demands, subtly or otherwise, be excluded, devalued, or dismissed in order to count as philosophy proper.

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See Culler (2003) for an interesting discussion of ‘bad’ philosophical writing, and an intriguing discussion of the case of Cavell (43-56). 5 Cf. the protest by a number of professional Anglophone philosophers, led by Barry Smith, when Derrida was awarded an honorary doctorate by Cambridge University in 1992 (Smith 2005, 4-6). 6 Culler notes that these criticisms of Cavell’s style were also repeated by other philosophers: ‘Mark Glouberman, in the Review of Metaphysics, calls his style “inexcusable”; Dan Ducker, in International Philosophical Quarterly, writes that “the pattern of withholding judgment, of putting off closure, builds certain frustrations in the reader. There are moments in Cavell’s book where one wants to scream, ‘Good God, come to the point!’”’ (Culler 2003, 48). www.film-philosophy.com

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Consider the following sentence, in which Cavell chides self-assured pragmatist readers of the Philosophical Investigations for remaining insensitive to the existential pathos that animates Wittgenstein’s text: The human existence portrayed in Philosophical Investigations, as I see it, is one of continuous compromise with restlessness, disorientation, phantasms of loneliness and devastation, dotted with assertions of emptiness that defeat sociability as they seek it […]. (Cavell 2005b, 161) Hardly the sort of sentiment one finds in learned scholarly commentaries on Wittgenstein.7 As Richard Eldridge remarks, ‘[t]his sentence alone, I think, affords a sharp sense of what is most interesting and important, and also most foreign to most of professional philosophy, in Cavell's way of thinking about human life’ (Eldridge 2005). Interesting and important because it expresses the philosophical sensibility that shapes Cavell’s engagement with Wittgenstein, but also his concern with the problem of philosophical expression, of philosophy ‘as a kind of writing’ (can come across sometimes in a more demanding, less conversational mode than Rorty). Foreign because today’s ‘professional’ philosopher can come sometimes across, in his or her writing, as little more than an efficient knowledge consultant undertaking specialised, technical labour on behalf of the global enterprise of academic research. No wonder the troubled vision of human existence Cavell finds in the Investigations prompts bewilderment, bemusement, and avoidance.8 For Cavell, following Wittgenstein, philosophy is more than an obscure archive of technical problems or conceptual puzzles requiring clever solutions, more than an assiduous ‘personal assistant’ to the research programs of the natural sciences. It presents, rather, a way of thinking infused with an existential pathos, a mode of writing expressing a fundamental mood, an ethical ‘attunement’ towards the world. It is the latter that is vividly conveyed in Wittgenstein’s remarkable prose, which combines philosophical reflection, and essayistic discussion with parable, dialogue, and aphorism (all of which can also be found in Emerson’s, Nietzsche’s, and Heidegger’s texts). Why does writing on film in a philosophical manner demand an attending to style? Why do films matter philosophically? Cavell’s wager is that cinema not only provides a profound expression and response to the problem of scepticism, thus contributing to the renewal of philosophy, it also calls upon philosophy to renew or transform itself via its encounter with cinema. The encounter between film and philosophy, or between image and concept, is a relationship that demands careful and supple means of expression. Cavell’s 7

Perhaps with the exception of the ‘New Wittgensteinians’ such as Cora Diamond or Stephen Mulhall. 8 See Eldridge (2005) for a discussion of the ‘avoidance’ of Cavell’s philosophical and literary writings. www.film-philosophy.com

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way of philosophising on film requires us to attend to the kind of experience that cinema affords and to find ways to articulate this experience in a manner that is philosophically illuminating. This is the core of Cavell’s interest in the question of style: how writing about film can prompt philosophers to examine how their writing may or may not do justice to the kind of experience that film affords; and how this experience might prompt the receptive film-philosopher to alter the mode and manner of her theoretical discourse in keeping with the kind of experience—call it another way of thinking—that cinema makes possible. That this is more than an aesthetic quirk is suggested by the philosophical significance that Cavell draws from his own experience of film. Indeed, far from serving as a stock of colourful examples, Cavell underlines the importance of this experience of film for the development of his own prose style. Cavell acknowledges this insight on the occasion of the publication of La projection du monde, the French translation of The World Viewed: [T]he effect of thinking about film on my ambitions for philosophical prose—I have in mind particularly the necessity to become evocative in capturing the moods of faces and motions and settings, in their double existence as transient and as permanent— has proved to leave permanent marks, as I judge it, on the way I write. It was, I believe, more than any other ambition I held, a basis of freedom from the guarded rhythms of philosophy as I had inherited it. (Cavell 2005a, 282) This remarkable comment makes explicit the intimate link between the experience of cinema and the question of style in Cavell’s philosophical prose. Attending to the evocations of mood, whether of faces, movements, or places, and capturing both the transience and permanence of what is depicted on screen, is for Cavell a philosophical inspiration, an ethicoaesthetic obligation, and a literary challenge. How to capture this complexity of experience, this paradoxical condition between transience and permanence? How to render it in prose capable of evoking the mood of aesthetic and moral receptivity conducive to original philosophical reflection? And more personally, how might the experience of cinema liberate a philosopher finding his or her way out from the constraining boundaries, institutional prejudices, and ‘guarded rhythms’, of conventional academic prose? These are worthy questions, though not the sort that tend to attract philosophical analysis. Cavell, for his part, addresses them by taking much the same view of Wittgenstein’s style, an exemplary case of philosophical prose in which matter and manner coincide. Discussing a lecture course on the Investigations that he co-taught with Hilary Putnam, Cavell describes how his lectures aimed

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to move more systematically towards an articulation of Wittgenstein’s manner, the sheer sense of the deliberateness and beauty of his writing, as internal to the sense of his philosophical aims, than I had ever tried before. (Cavell 1996b, 370)9 Cavell’s aim here, of concern throughout his career, was to find a way of acknowledging the philosophical significance of the literariness evident in texts like the Philosophical Investigations. Not merely as decorative, ‘as a kind of ornament of the contemporary, or near contemporary, scene of professional philosophy’, hence as something that no longer demands philosophical accounting (Cavell 1996b, 376). On the contrary, the question, as Cavell asks, is what to do if one has ‘an intuition, or illusion, that more is at issue’ in Wittgenstein’s text ‘than ornamentation (not that that issue is itself clear)’ (Cavell 1996b, 376). What if ‘you do not wish to deny argumentation, or something of the sort, as internal to philosophy’, yet want to acknowledge the role of the literariness of certain styles of philosophical prose as integral to their meaning and purpose? (Cavell 1996b, 376) Such a dilemma will, of course, make it difficult to accept, but just as difficult to drop, the ‘demand for some philosophical accounting’ of texts that are at once literary and philosophical (Cavell 1996b, 376). This difficulty is compounded by the fact that Cavell can find no standing aesthetic theory that would help us understand the Investigations’ literariness (Cavell 1996b, 376). Hence he experiments and writes of the text’s ‘everyday aesthetics of itself’ as a way of capturing the ‘literary conditions of its philosophical aims’ (Cavell 1996b, 376): conditions that the text itself enables the attentive reader to understand and appreciate. It is not a question here of seeking an ‘aesthetics’ within the text, but rather an acknowledgement that an ‘aesthetic concern of the text’ is not ‘separate from its central work’: namely, that the text’s style is intrinsic to the communication of its meaning. This coincidence of aesthetic and philosophical concerns, much like ‘the sense of moral or religious fervor’ that pervades the Investigations, is one that Cavell will read using Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘perspicuous presentation’ (Cavell 1996b, 377). Much the same could be said of Cavell’s own philosophical texts, which also display an ‘everyday aesthetics’ of themselves: the marriage of aesthetic, moral, and philosophical concerns evident in his writing’s ‘perspicuous presentation’, its original composition and singular style. Cavell’s Style As exemplary cases of film-philosophy, Cavell’s writings on film combine, in a personal and recursive voice, aesthetic receptivity with philosophical 9

Interestingly, Cavell notes that the ‘modernism’ of European philosophy (Heidegger and Derrida)—its attempts to deal with the ‘broken relationship to its past’—prompted him to move further in this ‘literary’ direction in his reading of Wittgenstein’s text (Cavell 1996b, 370-371). www.film-philosophy.com

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reflection. Whether via close readings of individual films, or essays reflecting specific topics, Cavell’s writing is always concerned with how style is related to thought in the encounter between philosophy and film. Indeed, film-philosophy, in Cavell’s view, is not simply a matter of framing arguments, undertaking analyses, or debating theoretical claims. It is a matter, rather, of aesthetic experience and its rhetorical presentation, of how philosophical insight is married to literary expression in the quest to restore and enrich our engagement with the ordinary as a source of philosophical experience. Indeed, Cavell’s conversational, reflexive, even autobiographical style recalls Nietzsche’s dictum that every work of philosophy is ‘the personal confession of its author and a kind of unconscious biographical memoir’ (Nietzsche 1989a, 43). No attentive reader of Cavell could miss the significance of Nietzsche’s intuition. Can philosophy admit art, literature, poetry—not to mention the subjectivity of the writer or thinker—back into the realm of reason? Can it accept thought at the hands of poetry? Cavell has addressed such questions as much in his manner of writing as in the claims—of reason and of art— that his prose makes upon the reader. In an interview with James Conant, Cavell remarks that philosophy without theory implies the necessity of attending to style: to how one says, which is to say, writes, what one is given to think. Style in philosophical writing, in other words, becomes important when one eschews the kind of theoreticist view of philosophy, for example, that currently dominates mainstream aesthetics and contemporary philosophy of film (see Livingston and Plantinga, 2009). The challenge for this performative mode of writing, however, is how to achieve philosophical conviction. How to persuade a sceptical reader when one is not dealing with facts or arguments but with interpretations or reflections? As Cavell remarks, if one gives up something like formal argumentation as the route to conviction in philosophy, and you give up the idea that either scientific evidence or poetic persuasion is the way to philosophical conviction, then the question of what achieves philosophical conviction must at all times be on your mind. The obvious answer for me is that it must lie in writing itself. But in what about the writing? It isn’t that there is a rhetorical form, any more than there is an emotional form, in which I expect conviction to happen. But the sense that nothing other than this prose here, as it’s passing before our eyes, can carry conviction, is one of the thoughts that drives the shape of what I do. Together with […] the sense that […] if there is any place at which the human spirit allows itself to be under its own question, it is in philosophy; that anything, indeed, that allows that questioning to happen is philosophy. (Conant 1989, 59) Cavell’s comment calls for further reflection, a deeper meditation on how one should write (philosophically) about film. Cavell is clearly not dealing www.film-philosophy.com

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here with the more conventional philosophy of film, in which it is precisely a matter of ‘formal argumentation’ or even ‘scientific evidence’ (as in recent analytic-cognitivist approaches to film) that carries conviction for the reader. Nor are we dealing with the opposite end of the spectrum, for example certain writers in the cinephilia movement, for whom impressionistic ‘poetic persuasion’ may well take the place of more traditional forms of analysis and criticism. Rather, Cavell points to the philosophical writing that attempts to steer a course between formal argumentation and sheer poeticism, achieving philosophical conviction by the reflective character of the prose itself. In other words, we might call this an argument through perspicuous and evocative redescription or a matter of ‘argument through imagery’ 10 : through the imaginative and aesthetic proposal of forms of description with the capacity to broaden and complexify our horizons of understanding, the manner in which we make sense of a phenomenon (like a film or an idea). In Cavell’s hands philosophy is thus neither science nor poetry but exists ambiguously between the two: a questioning rather than asserting, a reflecting rather than a concluding. Cavell’s prose invites the reader to experience the world in a different light, to think differently rather than just correctly, one might say. Cavell’s film-philosophy articulates the aesthetic experience of film such that it opens up new horizons of understanding that might alter the way we think about the relationship between philosophy and film. One can imagine a sceptical reader intervening at this point: here, precisely, is the difficulty that opens up for Cavell’s ‘method’ of argument from evocative redescription. If one eschews both theoretical argumentation and lyrical poeticism as means of achieving conviction, then all that is left are varieties of aesthetic or rhetorical persuasion: the use of imagery, rhetoric, and literary style as a means to aesthetically, rather than argumentatively, persuade the reader. If one accepts rhetorical persuasion rather than argument, the question is why this might be necessary or preferable in the case of philosophising on film compared with other realms of philosophical reflection. Moreover, if one accepts aesthetic persuasion rather than argument (or poeticism, for that matter), so the criticism might continue, then such claims can only be accorded the same degree of ‘rhetorical’ assent as aesthetic claims more generally, which is to say that they remain a matter of debate, of an individual’s philosophical ‘taste,’ and thus open to contestation without definitive resolution. Hence the question of how ‘conviction’ can be achieved remains unresolved, save by relegating philosophical reflection on film to the level of aesthetic criticism of works of art, which potentially undermines or weakens the ‘philosophicality’ of such reflections altogether.

10

I owe this point to Jennifer McMahon.


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There is some truth to this criticism, which deserves a considered response. One solution, proposed for example by Stephen Mulhall (2008, 129 ff.), is to recast this critique as an argument about the ‘priority of the particular’ in making aesthetic and philosophical claims about film. Mulhall’s Cavellianinspired film-philosophy argues that such claims are to be defended, not by general arguments concerning the ‘film as philosophy’ thesis, but by detailed analyses and critical interpretations of films themselves. For Mulhall, as for Cavell, this is the only way to debate, argue, or defend the claims made for these films’ philosophical significance (for example, whether the Alien quadrilogy analysed by Mulhall in his book On Film can reflect on the ‘dialectic of originality and inheritance’ inherent to the composition of cinematic sequels). From this ‘Cavellian’ perspective, moreover, it is the ‘priority of the particular’ (2008, 129 ff.) that matters in aesthetics and in philosophy of film, assuming that we wish to do justice to cinema’s aesthetic complexities, and to entertain the possibility that films can philosophize by cinematic means. To do so, however, also demands that we remain open to the kind of self-questioning that philosophy generally demands of other disciplines and indeed should demand of itself. Conventional ‘philosophy of film’, to be sure, depends upon general arguments and theoretical claims aiming at the highest level of generality. Cavellian or Mulhallian film-philosophy, by contrast, prioritizes the particular, responds aesthetically to the work, and develops its argumentative claims on the basis of philosophically-informed film criticism. Our critical reader might respond that this Cavellian-Mulhallian defence of the ‘priority of the particular’ in film-philosophy is itself an argumentative claim, one that stands or falls independently of whatever film examples or cases studies one might wish to adduce in its favour. As such, we are again back facing the same problem of providing argumentative reasons to justify the eschewal or argument or avoidance of ‘theory’ in doing film-philosophy in the Cavellian manner. My response here is to acknowledge that this is an argumentative defence of a position that eschews argumentation as the principal means of arriving at philosophical conviction, but that this is a legitimate response that concedes the importance of trying to engage one’s critics on their own ground rather than simply avoiding dialogue or denying the legitimacy of critique. One could go further and reply that such arguments require in any case a metaphilosophical response: for they are arguments or debates about the nature of philosophy, of what we mean by philosophy, or what counts as a valid philosophical claim or methodological approach, and therefore that one can adduce arguments to defend the ‘film as philosophy’ approach practised by Cavell, as an alternative way of philosophising, while avoiding charges of performative or pragmatic infelicity. For this is a metaphilosophical dispute about the validity of www.film-philosophy.com

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philosophical pluralism, not only in aesthetics and film-philosophy but more generally—a questioning that puts philosophy, understood as a monological discourse, into question. This kind of metaphilosophical debate does not rule out combining theoretical reflection (philosophy of film) with aesthetic meditation (film criticism); on the contrary, both can and should work together, in felicitous dialogue, to make film-philosophy more plausible and persuasive, even for its critics or detractors. Returning to Cavell, we might call his method of working between film and philosophy a hermeneutic parallelism or argument from aesthetic plausibility: a challenging way of arguing for the philosophical significance of film since it requires both aesthetic and hermeneutic claims to be taken as evidence of a philosophical significance independent of the more familiar recourse to conceptual arguments, historical-contextual evidence, or authorial intention. It is a way of practising philosophy, or a variety of filmphilosophy, that resembles the practice of artistic criticism, having similar hermeneutic constraints, although it ventures to make broader philosophical claims on the basis of critical readings of particular films. Once again, this is not to deny the contestability or such claims but to defend a metaphilosophical pluralism: one that acknowledges that one of the ways in which philosophy might engage with art is by a dialogical reflection that not only illuminates the work but transforms our horizon of understanding by aesthetic as well as conceptual means. ‘What Becomes of Things on Film?’ A fine example of this kind of hermeneutic parallelism or argument from evocative description - what I am otherwise calling Cavellian meditation can be found in a short but lapidary text, ‘What Becomes of Things on Film’ (Cavell 2005a, 1-9). Originally read at the 1977 MLA conference in Chicago, and published in 1978, it limns some of the essential themes in Cavell’s way of thinking and writing on film, from The World Viewed to his subsequent books on remarriage comedy (Cavell 1981) and the melodrama of the unknown woman (Cavell 1996). At the same time, the text attempts to show how it is that film and philosophy might interact: how ontological and aesthetic problems can give rise to reflection and to criticism via thoughtful engagement with films that the reader is invited to consider in light of her own experience. The piece is a brief response to the titular question—what becomes of things on film?—that weaves together variations on an essential Cavellian theme: the dialectical interplay between ontological, aesthetic, and metaphysical dimensions of film. The first sentence is, literally, a continuation of the title question: ‘And does the title express a genuine question?’ (Cavell 2005a, 1). This question and problem introduces Cavell’s meditations on the photographic basis of cinema and the question of cinematic realism, namely ‘the relationship between things and www.film-philosophy.com

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their filmed projections’; that is, between absent originals and their images, which are present by way of photogenesis (Cavell 2005a, 1-2). This is, however, no static or fixed relation. It is a relation of ‘something becoming something’, rather like, to quote Cavell, how ‘a caterpillar becomes a butterfly or a prisoner becomes a count, or as an emotion become conscious, or as after a long night it becomes light’ (Cavell 2005a, 1-2). Far from being mere rhetorical ornament, Cavell’s language is phenomenologically rich and philosophically illuminating. The relationship between things and their projected images is dynamic, transitive, and transformative; a ‘becoming’ that is akin to a metamorphosis combining the senses of a ‘natural’ transformation, a psychological and social event, and an experience of aesthetic pleasure in contemplating nature. The writing not only states but shows what it seeks to claim, reflecting or enacting the very point it seeks to make. To dispel any confusion, Cavell clarifies two potential misunderstandings of his point of view. It is not that all cinematic images have a profound ontological import. It is rather how particular instances invite the philosophically-inclined viewer to find words adequate to the singular experience they afford; experiences that can have, once ‘perspicuously presented’ and articulated in thought, a more general philosophical significance. Cavell’s first example concerns Buster Keaton’s comic masterpiece, The General (1925). It is not that Cavell is claiming that this particular film or film more generally foregrounds the ‘conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy of things’ as such (Cavell 2005a, 2). Rather, Cavell claims that Keaton’s ‘extraordinary gaze’ and extraordinary interactions with things, tools, and technology (like the eponymous steam engine) ‘illuminate and are illuminated by’ Heidegger’s concept of the ‘worldhood of the world’ (Cavell 2005a, 2): the complex nexus of background relations of meaning within which we encounter items for use and find ourselves engaged practically with others. Keaton’s kinetic antics in The General reveal, whether comically or disturbingly, the world of his immediate involvement in the mode of breaking down, of not working, of thwarting our routines or designs, hence as revealing things in their ‘conspicuousness obtrusiveness, and obstinacy’. What Cavell aims to achieve with this philosophical parallel is ‘to help us to see and say at once what it is Keaton permits us to laugh about and what concretely the nature is of the mode of sight from which Heidegger begins his analysis of Being-inthe-world.’ (Cavell 2005a, 2) Keaton’s actions, ever resourceful and flexible, thus reveal not only a world of things but a way of seeing the world; one that acknowledges the limits and uncertainty of our knowledge but also the possibility ‘of living honourably, with good if resigned spirits, and with eternal hope’ within this world (Cavell 2005a, 3). Indeed, Keaton’s undashable character incorporates both ‘the necessity of wariness in an www.film-philosophy.com

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uncertain world’ and the ‘necessary limits of human awareness’ (Cavell 2005 a, 3); a felicitous combination of doubt and hope that is at once comic and Stoic, sceptical and creative. Cavell then contrasts this with Chaplin’s rather different view of ‘knowledge and his world of things,’ as evident, for example, in The Gold Rush (1925), with its two famous routines, ‘the Thanksgiving dinner of roast shoe, and the dream-dance of the rolls on forks’ (Cavell 2005a, 3). In both cases Chaplin takes an ordinary object to be something that it is not, reinterprets it in a new light, treating a thing as something altogether unexpected (a shoe as a dinner, a dinner roll as a shoe). Here Chaplin’s comic inventiveness is linked to Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘seeing as’; the human capacity ‘for seeing or for treating something as something, which Wittgenstein links with our capacity for ‘intimacy in understanding’ the ‘inner meaning that we attach to words and gestures’ (Cavell 2005a, 3). This parallel between Chaplin and Wittgenstein is also presented, if one will, as an instance of ‘seeing as’: seeing Chaplin’s comic gestures of mad reinterpretation as instances of both visual comedy and cinematic philosophy, even where the character of Charlie, unlike the agile but melancholy Keaton, remains firmly ensconced within (or errantly wandering without) the ordinary world of experience (Cavell 2005a, 3). Both Keaton and Chaplin make comedy not only out of human limitation but out of human invention; both attest to our human capacity, under certain conditions, for happiness in a world that both thwarts and enables our projects and desires. Keaton shows how this felicity is conditioned by a certain agile virtuousness or gracious virtuosity, ‘of courage, of temperance, of loyalty, and of an aptness of the body that Spinoza calls wisdom’ (Cavell 2005a, 4). Chaplin shows how it is conditioned by freedom of imagination, ‘especially the imagination of happiness itself,’ a cheerful pessimism or humour in adversity that acknowledges and transcends the limits of the given (Cavell 2005a, 4). What is the import of Cavell’s claims? It is not as though either Keaton or Chaplin intentionally sought to ‘illustrate’ Heidegger’s concept of the ‘worldhood of the world’ or Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘seeing as’. Rather, Cavell suggests that the same kind of thought is on display in the artful, inventive, and comic ways in which both Keaton and Chaplin put such concepts into action; expressing through cinematic performance and comic play thoughts that parallel, resonate with, or extend what Heidegger and Wittgenstein explore philosophically in Being and Time and in the Philosophical Investigations. Cavell’s mediating role as critic is crucial here, since it is the philosophical interpreter who articulates the link between discrete cinematic sequences and particular philosophical ideas. The medium of this intervention and interdisciplinary translation is, once again, the philosophical prose that Cavell writes, the philosophical www.film-philosophy.com

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interpretations that he presents, which attempt to make the reader see the philosophical and hermeneutic parallel, to experience the thought, in light of his or her own experience of the films in question. Here again, however, our critical reader might object: is this not an unjustified ‘imposition’11 of an arbitrarily chosen philosophical framework on to these films, a charge of which film-philosophers like Cavell are often accused? What grounds the hermeneutic parallel drawn between Heidegger/Wittgenstein and Keaton/Chaplin other than the esoteric insight of the philosophical critic? Now it is certainly true, one could say in response, that Cavell’s tendency to avoid theoretical argument in favour of aesthetic reflection opens him to the oft-made charge of ‘philosophical imposition’; yet this Cavellian mediation or hermeneutic parallelism can be defended if we rearticulate or reinterpret it as making an aesthetic argument where the critic has to articulate, perspicuously and persuasively, the link between the film’s aesthetic features and the philosophical claims made on its behalf. This argument will involve a combination of aesthetic criticism and philosophical reflection to show why it might be illuminating to couple Heidegger/Wittgenstein and Keaton/Chaplin, not only to make Heidegger and Wittgenstein more intelligible but to show how this parallel opens up different ways of experiencing the thought articulated in these remarkable films. The film-philosopher thereby becomes a mediator or go-between in the dialogical encounter between film and philosophy. This is, to be sure, a philosophical experiment that has no guarantee of success. It does not proceed by logical demonstration, discursive argumentation, or scientific evidence. It is practising film-philosophy as a way of interpreting the world—the world of film and how film views the world (in a word, ‘the world viewed’)—as a mode of ‘seeing as’; of drawing attention to the limits of our knowledge and the creative ways in which we can reinterpret our experience both aesthetically and philosophically. In keeping with the view that philosophy means putting into question, any such writing also puts itself into question as much as questioning what one is given to think by the experience of film. A further challenge when one is writing on film in this way is that claims concerning aesthetic appreciation, interpretation, and evaluation may also fail to carry conviction. Aesthetic appreciation of film, after all, is not simply a matter of argument but of different ways of seeing, feeling, and reflecting. As Cavell remarks of his own writing on romantic comedies of remarriage, for example, which he rates as serious artistic works capable of sustaining genuine criticism:

11

See Wartenberg (2007, 25 ff.) for a discussion of the ‘imposition objection’.


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Now we are at the heart of the aesthetic matter. Nothing can show this value to you unless it is discovered in your own experience, in the persistent exercise of your own taste, and thence the willingness to challenge your taste as it stands, to form your own artistic conscience, hence nowhere but in the details of your encounter with specific works. (Cavell 2005a, 93) Aesthetic value is founded in an experience of works of art. For Cavell, this means in the formation of one’s artistic conscience; the intimate, receptive, and repeated engagement with unique and singular works (in this case, films). Cavell’s remarks preface his more extended discussions or ‘readings’—an apt metaphor that has been unreasonably maligned—of two fine Hollywood films, George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (1940) and a dance sequence from Herbert Ross’s Pennies from Heaven (1981). ‘On what grounds?’ our sceptical interlocutor might ask. My response would be to say that it is true that aesthetic criticism must needs be combined with philosophical reflection in order to both do justice to the film and to ground the kind of philosophical parallels that are being drawn in relation to it by the critic or interpreter. There must be an aesthetic justification, moreover, for any philosophical discussion of film worth having, but this cannot be ‘proven’ by rational argument or theoretical analysis as such. It relies on nothing more and nothing less than a shared community of taste; of the kind of communal aesthetic experience or space for cultural conversation within which any such discussion, criticism, and appreciation can take place. This won’t do, my skeptical partner retorts, for how are we to provide reasons justifying why it is worth philosophising, say, on Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) or Irving Rapper’s Now, Voyager? (1942)? Warming to my out-of-school theme, I might answer that there is no obvious reason or argument to be given, from a philosophical point of view, as to why one should write on these films, or about film or art more generally, rather than, say, other works of art, or on logic, politics, or metaphysics, or other things. Or even if one were, for some reason, tempted to offer such an argument, it is unclear what the import of ‘arguing’ for the validity of such an enterprise would be, unless one was already convinced that it is philosophically worthwhile. We certainly do ‘argue’ over the meaning, value, and implications of individual works; but aesthetic argumentation is a hermeneutic undertaking that must do without the certainty of mathematical knowledge, the conceptual and empirical justification of theoretical knowledge, or the force of practical reasoning in regard to moral knowledge. The assumption that there exist works of art (including cinema) that are worth responding to thoughtfully is a presupposition, rather than a conclusion, of meaningful philosophical and aesthetic discourse. Art, at any rate, does not ‘argue’ in a narrow theoretical sense but rather invites a response, offers an aesthetic experience, one that we are free to take up or not as a way of prompting reflection, interpretation, www.film-philosophy.com

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analysis, and communication—in other words, the very ‘indeterminacy’ of art offers an invitation to think with and through the work that Cavell’s philosophy acknowledges and extends in a fragmentary, questioning, openended manner.12 The question ‘why this film?’ is not a theoretical but an aesthetic or, perhaps, an existential question.13 The best one can say is that there is an aesthetic experience that moves one to communicate this thinking in ways that seek to illuminate both film and philosophy—and thus broaden or deepen the kinds of experiences and insights these make possible—for a community of those similarly affected or attuned. The justification of the kind of philosophical writing Cavell pursues, which J.M. Bernstein (2003, 130 ff.) has called a ‘modernist philosophy’, presupposes a community of inquirers from whom questions of art and its validity, indeed its philosophical significance, are acknowledged as meaningful and important. From this point of view, films that can elicit and sustain artistic criticism will count as works of art; those that can elicit and sustain philosophical criticism will count as philosophical works. One can therefore defend the aesthetic and philosophical value of a particular film precisely through the plausibility or persuasiveness of the kind of philosophical film interpretation that one can produce in response to that film.14 And these philosophical implications drawn from the film, moreover, can be further elaborated and articulated by combining close interpretation and analysis with more general theoretical reflection, philosophical questioning, and critical discussion. Faced with a sceptical interlocutor, demanding further reasons why such films should be given serious philosophical attention, I might reply, quoting Wittgenstein’s Investigations, that now ‘I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do”’ (Wittgenstein 1953, §217). At this point, much like Cavell’s Wittgensteinian teacher, wondering why she has failed to suggest why such films matter, or why they might be worth the time of day, or even one’s life, to understand and appreciate, I might lapse into silence, not out of rancour or disdain but out of a sense of exhausted perplexity. From this Cavellian point of view, we can say that aesthetic experience precedes and informs philosophical reflection, rather than the reverse. Such reflection opens up, illuminates, and broadens one’s aesthetic experience, which in turn fosters the kind of transformative thinking that calls for novel 12

I thank Jennifer McMahon for drawing my attention to this point. The motivation for engaging in philosophy, for that matter, is also not a matter of philosophical or argumentative grounding; hence the invocation of wonder, puzzlement, disappointment, alienation, perplexity, desire, love, and other forms of affective attunement as answers to the question, why philosophise? 14 See Mulhall (2008, 129-155) for a defence of the claim that the ‘film as philosophy’ idea can be best defended by providing philosophically and aesthetically persuasive readings of particular films. 13


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means of expression. Call this a virtuous hermeneutic-aesthetic circle. This is why Cavell and other (romantic rather than rationalist) film-philosophers can write philosophically on film without necessarily regarding themselves as doing conventional philosophy in a narrower sense. For such writing is less an adversarial intervention designed to refute the flawed efforts of others than an invitation to think for oneself in relation to a community that remains fragmentary or dispersed. Rather than finding in film a useful or interesting object of analysis or raw material for theoretical debate, it demands an effort to do justice—in the way we think and write—to the kind of aesthetic (and philosophical) experience that film can afford us. Whether this kind of writing carries philosophical conviction for the reader will depend, to some extent, upon that reader’s own aesthetic and philosophical orientation; his or her openness to the kind of self-questioning that is inherent to philosophy, including the questioning of what he or she understands (or has been taught) that philosophy (or film) should be. This attitude of open questioning, moreover, is more likely to persuade the reader to consider the possibility that the kind of aesthetic experience evoked by a film demands novel or exacting means of expression. And here it is both the philosopher’s prose and the film, in felicitous concert, that can carry aesthetic and philosophical conviction—that is, for the kind of viewer or reader who is open to such experience, who is receptive to different ways of thinking, feeling, and communicating. It is this openness to questioning, to having our habitual ways of seeing and thinking put into question, which makes film philosophical in the best sense. To the question concerning what makes ‘philosophy philosophy’, Cavell offers an intriguing reply: I understand it as a willingness to think not about something other than what ordinary human beings think about, but rather to learn to think undistractedly about things that ordinary human being cannot help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to them, sometimes in fantasy, sometimes in a flash across a landscape; such things, for example, as whether we can know the world as it is in itself, or whether others really know the nature of one’s own experiences, or whether good and bad are relative, or whether we might not now be dreaming that we are awake, or whether modern tyrannies and weapons and spaces and speeds and art are continuous with the past of the human race or discontinuous, and hence whether the learning of the human race is not irrelevant to the problems it has brought before itself. Such thoughts are instances of that characteristic human willingness to allow questions for itself which it cannot answer with satisfaction. (Cavell 2005a, 92) It may be that we cannot help but ask such questions, the ones we cannot really answer; yet these are the questions that may give ‘directions to answers, ways to think, that are worth the time of your life to discover’ (Cavell 2005a, 92). Such is the philosophical thinking that is at stake, for www.film-philosophy.com

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Cavell, in the ‘the thought of movies’: being open and receptive to the experience of film in order that we might explore ways of thinking that would otherwise remain obscure, forgotten, or unfamiliar to us. In this way, film’s philosophical vocation, ordinarily unobtrusive and elusive, becomes luminous in its disclosure of the familiar as unfamiliar, of the ordinary as extraordinary. Philosophy, from this point of view, is not simply an explanatory theoretical enterprise but gives voice to ways of thinking that seek to transform our understanding. Cavell’s thought remains true to this conviction, or what Bernard Williams called the ideal of philosophy as a humanistic discipline (Williams 2006). For Cavell, this means that philosophy, including philosophy of film, cannot be reduced to the natural (or human) sciences, remains committed to the importance of argument and analysis, yet pursues these ends while remaining attentive to meaning, expression, and value—to find words adequate to the experience of what matters to us morally, culturally, and aesthetically. Echoing Harry Frankfurt, for Cavell too, there is a third dimension to philosophy alongside deciding what we should believe and establishing how we should act: namely, ‘what to care about’ (Frankfurt 1982, 257). And one of the things that Cavell and other filmphilosophers today find worth caring about, which means writing thoughtfully about, is the marriage between philosophy and film.


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Bibliography Bernstein, J.M. (2003) ‘Aesthetics, Modernism, Literature: Cavell’s Transformations of Philosophy’. Richard Eldridge, ed. Stanley Cavell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 107-142. Cavell, Stanley (1979) The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cavell, Stanley (1981) Pursuits of Happiness. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Cavell, Stanley (1996a) Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Cavell, Stanley (1996b) ‘Epilogue: The Investigations’ Everyday Aesthetics of Itself’ in The Cavell Reader. Stephen Mulhall, ed. Cambridge MA./Oxford: Blackwell, 369-389. Cavell, Stanley (2004) Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of Moral Life. Harvard: Harvard University/Belknap Press. Cavell, Stanley (2005a) Cavell on Film. William Rothman, ed. Albany: State University of New York Press. Cavell, Stanley (2005b) ‘Responses’ in Contending with Stanley Cavell. Russell B. Goodman ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 157-176. Cavell, Stanley (2006) ‘The Future of Possibility’ in Philosophical Romanticism. Nikolas Kompridis, ed. London/New York: Routledge, 2131. Conant, James (1989) ‘An Interview with Stanley Cavell’ in The Senses of Stanley Cavell. Richard Fleming and Michael Payne, eds. Lewisburg PA.: Bucknell University Press. Culler, Jonathan (2003) ‘Bad Writing and Good Philosophy’ in Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 43-67. Eldridge, Richard (2005) ‘Review of James Goodman (ed), Contending with Stanley Cavell.’ Notre Dame Philosophical Review, April 8 [http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24835-contending-with-stanley-cavell/]. Accessed April 1, 2012. Frankfurt, Harry (1982) ‘The Importance of What We Care About.’ Synthese, n. 53: 257-272. Gould, Timothy (1998) Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kelly, Áine (2010) ‘‘Stylists in the American grain’: Wallace Stevens, Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty.’ European Journal of Pragmatism and American Studies, v. 2, n. 2: 211-223. Kenny, Anthony (1980) ‘‘Clouds of Not Knowing’ review of The Claim of Reason by Stanley Cavell.’ Times Literary Supplement, 18 April: 449. Livingston, Paisley and Plantinga, Carl eds. (2009) The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. New York/London: Routledge. www.film-philosophy.com

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Mulhall, Stephen (2008) On Film, Second Edition. London/New York: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1989a [1886]) Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1989b [1887]) On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books. Rothman, William (2012) ‘‘Why Not Realize Your World?’ Philosopher/Film Scholar William Rothman Interviewed by Jeffrey Crouse.’ Film International, v. 9, n. 6: 62-73. Smith, James K.A. (2005) Jacques Derrida: Live Theory. London/New York: Continuum. Stewart, Garrett (2005) ‘The Avoidance of Stanley Cavell’ in Contending with Stanley Cavell. Russell B. Goodman ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 140-156. Wartenberg, Thomas E. (2007) Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy. London/New York: Routledge. Williams, Bernard (2006) ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’ in B. Williams, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline. A. W. Moore ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, 180-199. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953) Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Filmography Antonioni, Michelangelo (1960) L’Avventura. Italy/France. Bergman, Ingmar (1955) Smiles of a Summer Night [Sommarnattens leende]. Sweden. Capra, Frank (1934) It Happened One Night. USA. Chaplin, Charlie (1925). The Gold Rush. USA. Cukor, George (1940) The Philadelphia Story (1940). USA. Keaton, Buster (1926) The General. USA. Rapper, Irving (1942) Now, Voyager. USA. Resnais, Alain and Duras, Marguerite (1959) Hiroshima Mon Amour. France/Japan. Ross, Herbert (1981) Pennies from Heaven. USA.


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