Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 6 Number 3, December 2005
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Goodman, Russell, ed., Contending with Stanley Cavell. New York, USA, Oxford University Press 2005 205 pp. ISBN: 0195175689 £26.99 hardback
Reviewed by
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
The American philosopher Stanley Cavell is a hard one to peg, so to speak. He made his mark in philosophy with works like Must We Mean What We Say? in 1969 and The Claim of Reason in 1979, but Cavell has not limited himself to this somewhat academic subject. In works like 1972’s The Senses of Walden and 1990’s Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, he takes up the American transcendentalists Thoreau and Emerson to engage them as serious philosophical thinkers, and not just the ‘essayists’ they are for so many students of American literature. Cavell has also shown himself to be an admirable reader of Shakespeare in 1987’s Disowning Knowledge, and currently, a formidable film theorist with studies of rather mainstream films in Pursuits of Happiness (1981), and in Contesting Tears (1996).
Thus, for a philosopher, Cavell has stretched his own boundaries, but a more interesting question is has he stretched the boundaries of those areas to which he has contributed so much thought? Do other film theorists, other Shakespeare or Emerson scholars, and so forth see Cavell merely as an enthusiast? Do his “non-philosophical” works (I qualify this phrase here because I have a suspicion that Cavell would see it as unfair, and I agree) somehow make him less of a philosopher?
These issues of evaluation are the impetus behind the collection of writings titled Contending with Stanley Cavell, edited by Russell Goodman. The contributions come from philosophers Richard Rorty, Simon Critchley, James Conant, Russell Goodman, and longtime Cavell commentator Stephen Mulhall. Additionally, Andrew Klevan speaks to certain aspects of Cavell’s film studies, and Garrett Stewart takes on the question as to why Cavell is not as appreciated by other literary scholars as much as he should be. As Critchley and others attest, Cavell has become more widely known today by English critics and writers, but Cavell is also finding his way into continental European thought, as his current French translator, Sandra Laugier, shows in her contribution to the volume.
I could not think of a better title for a collection like this, for it is only through “contention” that someone is recognized by most serious thinkers; as with entertainment and love, indifference here is the ultimate blow. As Rorty’s essay shows, though, written as it was in 1980, the field of philosophy has dealt with Cavell’s ideas as serious reappraisals of the field itself in light of the “risk” of skepticism that pervades many of its foundational works. Alongside this concern with skepticism, the accompanying essays point to Cavell’s concern with rather “mundane” things, and I do not use this word negatively. Cavell’s writings on language philosophy, specifically his studies of Wittgenstein and Austin, deal with the nature of “ordinary” language and how it is possible, philosophically speaking, that we have the ability to trust ourselves to the point that we have the faith that we do in our use of language. When we come across Klevan’s investigation into Cavell’s discussion of that classic tale of “redemption through the mundane,” the film It’s A Wonderful Life, and the essays from Critchley and Goodman on Cavell’s faith in the idea of “America,” we sense a pattern developing to Cavell’s rather wide-ranging interests. Here, we see perhaps the other side of Cavell’s struggle to understand skepticism, for skepticism is the continual danger, the risk if you will, staring over our shoulder whenever we start to discuss how we operate in the everyday, ordinary way we do. If skepticism is that rip in the fabric of our lives, as Cavell’s view of tragedy gives it, how is it that the rip is somehow stopped, that it does not continue down to the very heart of things? The answer for Cavell lies not in the corner of some obtuse thinker, but in the recovery of the everyday (Sandra Laugier’s essay is titled “Rethinking the Ordinary,” by the way), and that helps to explain his deep discussions of thinkers and artists whose central themes share the embrace of the everyday, thinkers like Heidegger, Emerson, and Wittgenstein, and artists like Shakespeare, even those who deal in Hollywood melodrama like Frank Capra.
The collection is therefore apt to attract specialists as well as those like Cavell himself whose interests lie scattered among several areas. As capstones to the collection, Cavell contributes two essays, the second being a new essay of his, “Passionate and Performative Utterance: Morals of Encounter,” which deals with Austin’s language theories, specifically Cavell’s “addition” to these theories of the concept of the “passionate utterance.” If the performative utterance such as “I thee wed,” as Austin gives it, can be seen as “an offer of participation in the order of law,” then Cavell argues that the passionate utterance, “I love you,” is “an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire.” Again, the fact that the disorder of desire does not create a disorder everywhere, that the individual desires are “hemmed in,” if you don’t mind the pun on the earlier discussion of skepticism, without ripping all the way down, is at the heart of the discussion here, for one of Cavell’s conclusions is that language “is public.” I would like to think that, given his dealings with the moral or ethical element of language, there is most likely a play on words here.
The first of Cavell’s essays, though, are his congenial responses to the essays in the collection. Cavell here continues the discussion initiated by Rorty, Critchley and others, conceding some points, finessing others. Interestingly, Cavell reveals some true frustration with the rather unenthusiastic response from the literary world to Cavell’s writings. He writes
I cannot deny that I have struggled over the years with a feeling of some disproportion between cause and effect concerning the sequence of texts I have published, kept alive during a couple of decades of near public silence accompanied by private letters of acknowledgment and rumors of approval.
Cavell adds that some have admitted to being grateful for his influence on their work, but “saw no way of articulating this indebtedness” in their own, leading him to see his “enterprise as bound up in some illicit trade.” I can personally attest, however, that if he is a black market item, the market, despite fluctuations, is strong overall—both a philosophy class and an American literature class I had as a graduate student not too long ago had Cavell’s writings as main texts for the course. What this intermittent or “illicit” use of Cavell testifies to, though, is summed up best by Cavell himself, for he admits that in a way he is an intellectual “exile,” not really anchored or settled in one area. The “perpetual homelessness,” however, has come to “provide a reasonable intellectual home” for him, so there’s no reason to fear that either he or his works will settle down and grow old anytime soon. Cavell, in a word borrowed from the man himself, is “odd,” but he writes, “being odd, and staying odd, of course has its pains, but surprisingly, even increasingly, its pleasures.”