Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film

The Idea of America

Andrew Taylor, Áine Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136156335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first book to offer a thorough examination of the relationship that Stanley Cavell's celebrated philosophical work has to the ways in which the United States has been imagined and articulated in its literature. Establishing the contours of Cavell's most significant readings of American philosophical and cultural activity, the volume explores how his philosophy and the kind of reading it demands have an important relation to broader considerations of the American national imaginary. Focused, coherent, and original essays from a wide range of philosophers and critics consider how his investigations of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, represent a sustained engagement with the ways in which philosophy might provide us with new ways of thinking and of living. This is the first detailed and comprehensive treatment of "America" as a category of enquiry in Cavell's writing, engaging with the terms of Cavell's various configurations of the nation and offering readings of American texts that illustrate the possibilities that Cavell's work has, in turn, for literary and film criticism. This study of the role played by philosophy in the articulation of the American self-imaginary highlights the ways in which the reading of literature, and the practice of philosophy, are conjoined in the ethical and political project of national self-definition.

1 Acknowledging Stanley Cavell

Paradox, Poiesis, and Philosophy in America

Olaf Hansen

TEMPORALITIES

Just as every single event has its present, its past, and its future, … actuality as a whole also has its past and future.

(Franz Rosenzweig)¹

Theories of acknowledgement, based on ordinary language philosophy, can develop in many directions: into the deontological ethical philosophy of Levinas, into a neo-Kantian, nonacademic celebration of God (as in Rosenzweig), in the direction of Heidegger's thinking toward Dasein in Being and Time, or into the ongoing rumination about unsolved problems found in Wittgenstein's Investigations. As points of departure, there are Novalis, Schlegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, arguing in different ways against the domineering figure of Hegel—a familiar story, it seems, until Stanley Cavell introduces a whole new, but well-rehearsed set of protagonists. Since 1972 Thoreau, Emerson, and Poe have become for Cavell the center of a widening circle and part of an intricate argument at the core of which was the question: what could America possibly be about, as a morally acceptable community based on shared ideas of moral perfectionism, acknowledgement, and a meaning found not in essence, but in everyday use?

In 1789 Novalis anticipated the theories of modernity with which we are by now so familiar. “We seek,” he confessed on behalf of many among his contemporaries, “the absolute everywhere and only ever find things.”² Clearly, such an understanding of reason and morality that claims to be public by way of creating a sense of community must have an effect on our understanding of culture and society, along with our attitudes toward modernity and “speech thinking” or experiential reality. If we leave negative criticism aside (from Benjamin's sense of impoverishment to Schmitt's anxiety over a loss of political order to Weber's stoic diagnosis of disenchantment), we can easily ascertain the advantages of Rosenzweig's cogent analysis of temporality as revelation in our particular world. Like Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein, Cavell, in looking forward, provides more of a promise for the future simply because he reaches further back.

From the start of his philosophical career, it has been obvious that Cavell would never write a general theory of anything, in the vein, for example, of John Rawls, preferring instead what Rosenzweig described as “the wandering of the Shekhina”³ as a more valid form of thinking. It has also been clear that Cavell's detailed analysis of Thoreau and Wittgenstein, to name just two of the diverse members of his eclectic canon, could not achieve its purpose without a tremendous impact, particularly in its singular emphasis on the depth of experience.⁴

To acknowledge both the work and the person of Cavell (as if the two could be separated) demands, above all, that we follow up on the implicit but fundamental questions that he has repeatedly raised over the years, questions that remain unanswered. Their insistent latency, their exigent existence direct us beyond Cavell (if we are really to do his work justice) and toward a closer look at the work of his intellectual antecedents. Such a project also requires that we recall, carefully and step by step, the particular circumstances in response to which he raised his questions in the first place. The process of returning by going beyond is one part of what we call “acknowledgement.” As Rosenzweig would have maintained, the affirmation and pursuit of identity in difference must be the beginning of any acceptance of alterity.⁵

As a start, we will ask ourselves what Cavell meant when he called for a renewed reflection on Plato's expulsion of poetry from the Republic. What does his question anticipate about the significance and perhaps distinctiveness of America, where both poetry and philosophy still compete for the same limited prize? Raising any question first carries with it the claim of existing and the right to be heard adequately. Even silence is part of this process. The generations of American writers treated by Cavell occupy either the center or the temporary margins of self-invention. Cavell offers moments of silent reflection and poetic admiration for both, the fragment and the paradox that we recognise from pre-Socratic philosophy. Cavell's American antecedents could fall and often did, and the fall was often severe. Consider Melville's dilemma, or the travails of Emerson and Poe. Consider the despair expressed by Thoreau, when he complains in his journal that we can never articulate what seems the best of us, in spite of the “manly anxiety to do Truth justice.” “Truth,” writes Thoreau, “strikes us from behind, and from the dark, as well as from before and in broad daylight.”⁶

Melville knew about the agonistic side of Truth, which ever begins and renews itself by returning to its origins. Each such beginning involves a certain embarrassment in acknowledging its lack of originality, but it also attests to what Cavell describes as the need to “introduce myself intellectually,” the need to identify “with the stranger, even, as Emerson almost says, with the immigrant” (PDT 111). The stranger, a familiar figure in Cavell, is not really at home, although he has an acute sense of place, as anyone with an experience of diaspora can attest. Is there a better way to describe Melville's dramatic efforts to find a way home? Via Europe? Via Jerusalem?

ALLEGORIES

Instinct and study; love and hate;

Audacity—reverence. These must mate,

And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,

To wrestle with the angel—Art.

(Herman Melville)⁷

Herman Melville, thoroughly undone by his country and its language, published his last novel, The Confidence Man, on April 1, 1857. Addressing both country and language, he comes to the conclusion that words count as scenes of both instruction and confusion and thus necessarily as provocations, constantly changing their meanings, while truth remains a vexing, forceful necessity—a distant but compelling possibility. Melville's shape-shifting confidence man anticipates the Wittgensteinian concept that following a rule is primarily an act of observing customs, uses, and institutions.⁸ Once in the boat, each and every passenger is already doomed, just as each of us is similarly doomed to conformity and habitual behavior once we have come into existence. The confidence game, then, is deadly serious; it is the only game we must need to know how to play—if only we knew the rules. But we do not, at least not all of them. Even the simplest signs do not help. Throughout The Confidence Man, for instance, the meaning of the term “charity” remains as unclear as that of “trust.” Instead of rules and definitions, we are provided with narratives, deliberations, verbal transactions, and, in the end, silence. Like Wittgenstein and Rosenzweig beyond him, Melville acknowledged the need for a new way of understanding and attending to language. But ultimately he lacked the patience for deciphering the revelations of ordinary speech, and, in the end, the abyss of language silenced him. Melville had no answer to Emerson's question, “Where do we find ourselves?” Here, the image of the ladder leads us back to Paul Bunyan, to Hawthorne's “Celestial Railroad,” to the biblical imagery of Jacob's Ladder.

All of these allegories are fraught with meaning, but they do not really radicalise enough the dilemma of coming to terms with our finite existence and the immanence of time. Nor do they provide us with a sense of place, an idea of what it means to live in a particular, specific culture, and in one of serious limitations. We can easily reconstruct the ambivalence and the satirical invitations that Transcendentalism evoked among contemporaries and even more so in later generations. Nevertheless, a shared sense of deficit prevailed from Poe to Henry Adams. Yet how do we account for the intense rhetoric posited against this sense of failure? What had gone so terribly awry? What suffering collectively qualified the men and women in question to think and express themselves in ways that essentially guaranteed isolation in their time? What led Emily Dickinson to a realm of condensed thought that, for her contemporaries, must have seemed as inaccessible as the anarchism of Mark Twain's wildest speculations about the reality of the real in “The Mysterious Stranger” (or his ongoing fascination with Siamese twins)? And continuing this tradition today, what is it that drives Cavell's fascination with the “screwball comedies” of the 1930s and 1940s? Could these strange preoccupations perhaps be akin to the kind of “boxing in” that Rosenzweig ascribes to being a Jew, as the self-indentured other? What we feel in encountering each of them, but do not really understand, is the sense of urgency that turned these writers into thinkers. Whatever characterised them as individuals, and defined the distances between them, they shared an acute sense of disappointment, a historical birthright, which they claimed against good sense and which they finally managed to transform into a universal problem. Beyond the borders of their homelands, London and Paris became new, seemingly more inhabitable homes for so many writers and intellectuals. Increasingly, travelling abroad meant not to be a foreigner.

Those who stayed behind continued to encounter and participate in the old competition between philosophy and literature. But they could no longer, as had an earlier generation of American intellectuals, understand and approach America from the elevated position of Plato's Republic. Too much had happened. They had inherited an unprecedented—and burdensome—immediacy. From the early writings of the Federalists and Antifederalists, from Thomas Paine via the Adamses, from Hamilton and Madison to Jefferson, the nature of what America might become had been discussed at an elevated, at times sublime, level, often abstract and highly principled when it came to the science or art of government, frequently with great passion and unfettered radicalism. How else would one discuss the possibilities of a revolution and political and individual independence? Virtually everyone wanted to contribute to the emerging blueprint for America and to participate in its actual construction. Religion and politics both played their roles in a drama for which a stage had been set, with a cast of first-class actors. With the conclusion of the elections of 1800 and 1804, the political realm and the discourse that sustained it had begun to deteriorate. The course of history had become profoundly unpoetic, unphilosophical, a matter of disenchantment. The messianic moment that all the protagonists had anticipated was over. The future had at last been realised; it had become human. In the wake of the Louisiana Purchase it would even acquire a name, Manifest Destiny. Nothing could be more disastrous both for those who prophesised the new millennium or for those who openly avoided talking about it. Two empires, that of the covenant and that of ideas, collapsed simultaneously, and history became part of the ordinary (in the words of Emerson), both slippery and elusive. The task now was to begin again from scratch, to find a new voice, to embark on another effort of anamnesis. And with this new beginning, the task of American thinking actually began to reflect on and substantively address the world of ordinary life.

Consider just a few of the “beginnings” from the period, all of which are familiar and all of which (in their dramatic manifestation of what Rosenzweig would later describe as “speech thinking”) invite a dialogue:

“What are you doing now? He asked. Do you keep a journal? So I make my first entry of the day.” (Thoreau [1837])⁹

“Where do we find ourselves?” (Emerson [1844])¹⁰

“Yet, mad I am not – and very surely I do not dream.” (Poe [1843])¹¹

“Call me Ishmael.” (Melville [1851])¹²

Words had to be made sensible again, had to assume a new relation in the process of constituting thought. They had to be words that mattered. They were fragments, provoking dialogues of intense consequences. They aspired to be of universal importance, and eventually they would be.

THE UNIVERSAL FRAGMENT

One understands the fragment at the expense of its fragmentary nature. Understanding is precisely the suppression of fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Stanley Cavell and the Claims of America
• 1 Acknowledging Stanley Cavell: Paradox, Poiesis, and Philosophy in America
• 2 Reading Cavell Reading
• 3 Stanley Cavell, “Aversive Thinking,” and Emerson's “Party of the Future”
• 4 Self-Relayance: Emerson to Poe
• 5 The Haunting of History: Emerson, James, and the Ghosts of Human Suffering
• 6 Philosophy Out of Earshot of the School: Tocqueville and the “American Philosophical Method”
• 7 Attachment and Detachment in Cavell and Santayana
• 8 Agee after Cavell, Cavell after Agee
• 9 “A Dance of Frenzy, a Dance of Praise”: Fred Astaire Acknowledges America
• 10 Cavell, Thoreau, and the Movies
• 11 Embodying an American Union: Cavell's Conjugal and Conversational Ties
• 12 The Experience of the Movies: Cavell's Hollywood and Robert Warshow
• 13 Emersonian Affinities: Reading Richard Ford through Stanley Cavell
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index