Also by Stanley Cavell

Must We Mean What We Say" TIle Senses of Walden

The Claim of Reason

The Warld Viewed

REFLECTIONS ON THE ONTOLOGY OF FILM

Stanley Cavell

-/'

Enlarged Edition

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England 1979

]00 I l' H n W 0 R L D V lEW E D

interviews seem 10 me to veer, in their effect, toward my experience of those real-life testimonials more and more frequent in television commercials whose subjects are anonymous in everything but name.

Or take Godard's use of the sound of philosophy, in those longish dialogues his women elicit from actual philosophers. It is a good perception that recognized this sound for the cinema. that found thai in an environment of nonsense and insinuation and eyn icisrn the sound of sense still fa lis sweetly upon the human car. But Godard hasn't seen it through, because he does not care whether what the philosopher says is valid Of nolthat is, he listens 10 it the way his girls do, or the way a bourgeois audience does, somewhere within embarrassment, envy, contempt, and titillation. And while his talent and wit lead him to remark that philosophy is now stimula ted by pretty girls, either he fails to recognize. the humor and sadness of this, or else he sees nothing further. From Plato on, sexual attractiveness has been an open motive 1O philosophy, as if to acknowledge the intimacy and mutuality of one soul's investigation of another. And if sexuality is the dis lcgue's conclusion, this need not mean that its point was seduction; it can acknowledge that the only successful conclusion of such investigation is mutual sa tisfaction, and (hat what remains between the participan ts is not a thing left unsaid. Where philosophy is foreplay, that at least refuses i ntellectuality as a substitute for sexuality (a more hilarious sense of "pla ton ic"). The love that philosophy can leach is the power to accept intimacy without taking it personally. I ts opposite is vanity, which takes every attention personally and none intimately. (Naturally, these states are commonly mistaken for one another.) Godard's girls walk away intact from these COil froruations. Is this supposed to show that they are unsed ucible? So are prostitu tes, Anyway, they are seduced-by slogans, advertisements, and illicitness,

Philosophy ought either to be a nobler seduction. or else its acceptance of separateness ought to be acknowledged as its

Automatism

101

power, its capacity LO forgo further proof of love. Godard avoids the choice, 1110st distinctly in La Clrilloise.· where the color suggests make-believe and so provides the OUt that the whole thing is child's play. In the long train- dialogue at the end, the ph i losopher speaks with gen "inc intelligence about issues close to socialist grownups of in telligence. But since we have been shown rhat the girl before him is an unloving and dangerous nitwit, we have to conclude either (I) that the' man cannot tell this, or (2) that he doesn't care because he wants her and is willing to pay (1)\ intimacy and intelligence 10 get what he wants, tickling her fancy that she has a mind and is capable of serious action, or (3) tha t this is the fate of in tell igence in (he capitalist world, or the fate of old intelligence upon the new young, or (4) that men and women have lost all ear for the differences between words (and deeds) of love, lust, instruction, valor, meanness, hope, or play. That all this is common in our world (and if you like, commonly deserved) is not news, and to spread its commonness is not art. Some people once thought that women do not have souls. Some thought that a group of people has its own soul. We no longer say such things. But just whom, Or w hat group,. does each of lIS treat as though it bad a soul?

14

Automatism

I have spoken of film as satisfying the wish for the magical re- \ prod uenon of the world byenab ling us to view it unseen. What we wish to see in this lVay i~ the world itself-that is to say, ev-

102 I THE W 0 R L D V [ E W B D

erything, Nothing less than that is what modem philosophy has told us (whether for Kant's reasons, or for Locke's, or Hume's) is metaphysically beyond our reach or (as Hegel or Marx or Kierkegaard or Nietzsche might rather put it) beyond our reach metaphysically.

To say that we wish to view. the world itself is to say ~we are wishing for the condition of viewing as such. That is our

-way of establishing our connection with the world: through viewing it, or having views of it. ,?ur condition has become one in which our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling unseen. We do not so much look at the world as look ow at it, . from behind the self. It is our fantasies, now all but completely thwarted and out of hand, which are unseen and must be kept unseen. As if we could no longer hope that anyone might share them-al just the moment that they are pouring into the streets, less private than ever. So we are less than ever in a position to milrry them to the world.

Viewing a movie makes this condition automatic. lakes the responsibility for it out of our hands. Hence movies seem more natural than reality, Not because they are escapes into Ianrasy, but because they are reliefs from private fantasy and its responsibilities. from the fact tha t the world is already drawn by fantasy. And not ·because they are dreams, but because they permit the self to be wakened, so thai we may stop withdrawing our longings further inside ourselves. Movies convince us of the world's reality in the only way we have to be convinced, without learning to bring the world closer to the heart's desire (which in practice now means learning to stop altering it illegitimately. against itself): by taking views of it.

I said also thatwhat enables moving pictures to satisfy the wish to view the world is the automatism of photugraphy. I have not claimed that film which is not used photographically, to rep rod uce the world, ca 11 nul be used for the purpo~e of art 1 remark only that film which is not used photographically, In the sense intended, is not being used in its power of auwma-

Automatism

(0)

tism. Reproducing tne world is the only thing film does OIiIOIl1(1/i· cally, J do not say that art cannot be made without this power, merely that movies cannot so be made. Of course we may have to forgo this power: it may lose its power for us. That just means that the movie :",i11 have 10SI its power. For what has I made the mOVIe a candidate for art is its natural relation to its traditions of automatism, The lapse of conviction in its traditional uses of its automatism forces it into modernism; its potentiality for acknowledging that lapse in ways that will redeem its power makes modernism an option for it.

One might explain the movie's natural relation to its traditions of automatism by saying that a given movie can naturally tap the source of the movie medium as such, And the medium is protounder than any of its instances. This sounds like other ideas aile comes across currently. But the idea of a medium of art is stilled if one does not recognize that this was always true, that the power of a given sonnet or rondo or portrait was its power to stand for the form it took and thence 10 invoke the power of poetry or music or painting as such. Modernism signifies not that the powers of the arts are exhausted, but on the contrary that it has become the immediate task of the artist to achieve in his art the muse of the art itself-to declare, from itself, the art as a whole for which it speaks, to become a present of that art. One might say that the task is no longer to produce another instance of an art but a new medium within it. (Here is_the releva.~of.s~ries in_modern painting and sculp~urc, and of cycles in movies, and of the quest for a "sound" in Jazz and rcck.) It follows that in such a predicament, media are not~lven a priori. The failure to establish a medium is a new de(lth, an absoluteness, of artistic failure.

It i .

. IS In thinking of the power of an art as such that I think

~gatn about a hesitation I have sometimes felt toward regard-

lUg the . , . .

im . movre as a n art at all, rts effects being 100 powerful or

. ~edlate to count as the effects of art. It may be that this hes-

Itatlon aris h ... .

es w en one IS out of touch With some object which

104 I T H [; W 0 R L D V lEW E D

drops us into the power of its established art. Or it may come from the reeling that movies achieve this power too easily. But if this is more than <I grudge again~t fortune (how hard must an artist work? and for what"), what does it signify'! In paying my respects to James Agee, I noted that ill ilny film, however unpromising, some moment of interest, even beauty, is likely t'O appear. That is what the camera, left to itself, i. like: the objects it manufactures have for us the same natural interest. or fascination, or boredom, or nothing, Of poignance, or terror, as the world itself. This needn't mean that we are unable to tell the good from the bad. So the question recurs: If we treat the movie in any ofits occurrences as art, then how can we explain that throughout a period in the remaining arts in which artists folded themselves double and risked absolute failure in their devotions, movie-makers were able LO tap the source of their art so innocently? Which is to ask again how [he movie for so long could have remained traditional. (For so long? For a mere sixty years? No, for these Sixty years.)

I characterized the task of the modern artist as one of creating nOI a new instance of his art but a new medium in it. One might think of this as the task of establishing a new automa-

_ tisrn. The use or the word seems to me righ t for both [he broad genres or forms in which an art organizes it elf (e.g., the fugue. the dance forms, blues) and those local events or topoi around which a genre precipitates itself (e.g., modulations, inversions, cadences). In calling such things automarisms, I do not mean that they automatically ensure artistic success or depth, bUI that in mastering a tradition one masters a range of aurornatisms upon which the tradition maintains itself, and in deploy" ing them one's work is assured of a place in that tradition.

To pose the category of automatism accurately, ) must go further into a region of modernist painting I have responded to and develop it there first. This will for the moment neulralize the presence of the ph ysica I mechanisms of ca mera and projec-

Automatism [05

[Or. These mechanisms produce Ihe physical or material basis of the medium or film, which I am articulating as successions of automutic world projections. What gives significance to reatures of this physical ba. is are artistic' discoveries of form and genre and type and technique, which I have begun calling autcmatisms."

It may seem perverse of rnc, since 1 am intent upon keeping these levels of arusuc fact separate, to u e tile concept of auIOmallsm---:anyway. the term au tcmatic=-also in the descriplion of nlm s physical baSIS. r do not Lake the perverseness here to be or my. ma~ing. I rrpflrt il has to do with the identity of the art of film Itsell-Ihe fact that its medium just does have this manufacturing mechanism ali ts basis. In part it has to do with the fate of modernist art generally-cthar its awareness and responsibility for the physical basis of its art compel it at once to assert and deny the control of its art by thai basis. This is also why, allhoLigh I am tryi ng lu free the idea of a medium from its confinement in referring to the physical bases of various arts I go on using the same word 10 name those bases as well as ~o ~haracterize modes of aChievement within the arts. Why not Just stick to terms like "form," or, as Northrop Frye uses it "genre"? 38 BUI CO r' h . '

. . n usion ere IS caused by precisely the fact

that this concept is justified in both places. And it will nOI be dispelled by redefining Or substituling SOme labels. It could

also be said iI t d . " .

.' 1<1 rno ern 1st art IS Itself an investigation of this

c0nfuslOn, or of the complexities of Lhis fact.

The compl '.

W " ~1(IIICS are ar once historical and ontological.

d hen 10 a philosophical frame of mind one says that the meIUmofan art is rh hvsi l basi

di .' . e P ysica asis of that art (e.g. that the me-

iurn of palIlting j . . . . . . '. .

a d h s parnt, and the medium of wnlmg IS words

n I e medium f '. '

Pres' 0 music IS sound), one may be either sup-

SIng Or assurm k

which h . 111Iug a nowledge of the history of forms in

t. esc SO-Called m dl h b

art: e ra ave een used to make objects of

. Or on..e may b . . .

e expressmg a recogmnon that the established

I'

106 I l' 11 Ii W 0 R L o V I £ WED

genres within the arts are "merely" "conventional," that they cannot be taken for granted any longer, that each of them places demands which constrict as well as. rele~se a s~bject. In Lessing's Laocoon, the search for the limits of individual a~ts takes place over an assumption that the different arts are different genres, as it were, of a total something called the Arts. But then, painting and poetry had something O~VIOUS "' cummon: each narmted or pictured events. Lessing s pomt rs thai each must be faithful to its own way, dictated by the nature of its medium, of doing the common thing. What moder~ist painting proves is that we do not know. a ?riOr~ what paintmg has to do or be faithful to in order to remain painung. So there is no way, or ways, in which it does something differently rr~m the way poetry does it. Its mode of existence is dl~erenl. In 111- sisting on i I.S specific mode of existence, a modernist art seems to break down the concept of genre altogether: what a painter or poet or composer has to achieve in his painting or poetry ~r music is not a landscape or sonnet or fugue, but the Idea of 11.15

art as such.

A description of the styles and genres Of. classical music

would be a description of the media of classical music. In a moderni~t art. to which the concepts of style and genre lack clear application, Lhe conce£t of a medium loses touch with ideas of manner and ordonnance, _?nd seems to separate out for denotation the physical materials of the art as such. But what is the medium of painting or poetry or music as such? One of two responses seems forced upon us, and neither is an answer to the question. A first response will be: The medium of music as such is sound as such' the medium of painting is paint as such, etc. Such responses seem to mean that all sound is music, all areas of color are paintings. But th~S says nothing about the nature of music or painting; it is a claim about someone's-or humankind's--experien«e of the world, e.g., that nature, or a passage of time or space, is for certain creatures. a medium of expression. (Something like this claim is what art It-

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self, in romanticism, undertakes [0 maintain after religion has apparently abandoned the idea. To forgo art in favor of the natural, or contingent, is therefore not likely to be a favor either to nature or to art.) A second response will be: othing isthe medium of, say, painting as such. A medium of painting is whatever way r ways paint is managed so as (0 create objects we accept as paintings. Only an art can define its media. A modernist an, investigating its own physical basis, searching out its uwn conditions of existence, rediscovers the fact that its existence as an art is not physically assured. II gracefully accepts OUf condemnation to meaning-that for separate creatures of sense and soul, for earthlings, meaning is a matter of expression: and that expressionlessness is not a reprieve from meaning, but a particular mode of it: and that the arrival of an understanding is a question of acknowledgment.

My impulse to speak of an artistic medium as an "automatism" is, 1 judge, due first to the sense that when such II medi u rn is discovered, it generates new instances: not merely makes them possible, but calls for them, as if to attest that what has been discovered is indeed something more than a single work could convey. Second, the notion of automatism codes the experience of the work of art as "happening of itself." In a tradition, the great figure knows best how to activate i~ automaLisms, and how best to entice the muse 10 do most of the lV~rk. In a modernist situation there is no such help: your work IS all your own, there is no longer a natural relation between your work and its results, to_},) are looking for what works (happens of itself). 0nly after the fact will the muse come to bless your work, or not. The autornatisrns of a tradition are ?iven to the traditional artist, prior to any instance he adds to II; the master explores and extends them. The modernist artist has I~ ~xplore the fact of automatism itself, as if investigating ~at 111$ at any lime that has provided a given work of art with t e power of its art as such. A third impulse in calling the crea-

hon of a d' . .

me rum the creauon of an automatism is to register

108 I T jl E W 0 l\ L D V lEW E 0

, the sense I hat 1 he poi n 1 of 111 is effort is 10 free me not rn erel y from mv confinement in automatisms that I can no longer acknowledge as mine (this was the point or the explicit effort at automatic painting and writing early in the century), but 10 free the object from me, to 3ive new ground fOT its alll()nO!I~'

15

Excursus: Some Modernist Pointing

1 n a very useful and interesting monograph entitled Dada. Surrealism and Their Heritage. William Rubin relates the epochal paintings of Jackson Pollock to the idea of automatism: "What Pollock took from Surrealism was an idea-aUlOma\lSmrather than a manner," J' But what was the idea? The surrealists looked for autornausms: which would create images; Pollock looked for an automatism with which to create paintings. The ideas are as different as the manners. Using automatism 10 create paintings is what painters have always done. In order that any new automatism he found might create paintings, he had newly to consider what constitutes a painting (1\111<11 it was painters have always done, That is. made) ami, in particular, ,[~ discover what would give any automatism of his the signiticance or painting.

The third feature I distinguish~d in the concept of automatism-its claim for the autonomy of the art objecl-indic,ltes why it is inapt to think of Pollock's major work as "action painting," The "action" in question was a discovery o~ Pollock's that precisely vaded ihc traditional actions of painters. which he had found no longer made paintings, and it would have absolutely no artistic relevance unless it produced entities

Excursus: SOllie Modernist Painting

109

we accepted as paintings. (Calling a Pollock an action painting for the reason that the pain IeI' moved in new ways in painting it is about as useful as calling a treaty a piece of paper for the reason that il is written on paper. Though its being written on paper is certainly a significant fact about it:)

Then what was his discovery? The all-o er line? What makes tha; a discovery. or an automatism? Its being a W<I)' or laying on pal nt quickly, with repeated gestu res? But repetitive gestures and the search lor quickness ill application are in 1111:mselves nOI news. And again. it would have been no discover at all had not his all-over line (applied that way, by trailing, in black and white. on that format, with that reticence of {other] color ) been accepted as pain ling. The question ought therefore to he: Since il makes paintings, what d es his all "over line discover.

One fact of painting it discovered is lIS primitive a any: not exactly th[n a painting is flat. but that its flatness. together with its being of a limited extent, means that it is 1010'1)' there, wholly open to you, absolutely in from of your senses, of your eyes, as no 01 her r crm of art is. Total I hereness is not wha t aesiheticians used to mean. whatever they meant, hy calling half of the art. spatial, distinguishing them from those which are temporal, fur total thercncss can be taken as a denial or (physical) spn iiality, of what three-dimensional creatures who normally walk or sit or turn mean by spatiality, What is in three-dimensional space is not (til there to the eyes, in the sense revealed,

, What does it mean to say that a painter discovers. by paintIlls" something true of all paintings, something that everybody bas always known is true of paintings generally? I. it a case of ~omething hidden in unconsciousness becoming conscious? It

IS like so n thl hidd '

• I e ling I en 111 consciousness declaring itself. The

mode IS revelation, I follow Michael Fried in speaking of this

f<l('1 of III derni ..

• 0 ernlst palr1ll1lg a' an acknowledging of its condi-

1\0ns Ally " .

, pallltlllg might teach you what is true of all paint-