Essay Review
Present Tense: Working with Cavell
BY TIMOTHY GOULD
crary, alice, and sanford shieh, eds. Reading
Cavell. Routledge, 2006, x + 262 pp., $105.00
cloth, $31.95 paper.
goodman, russell b., ed. Contending with Stanley
Cavell. Oxford University Press, 2005, x + 205
pp., $45.00 cloth.
rothman, william, ed. Cavell on Film. SUNY
Press, 2005, xxvii + 399 pp., $89.50 cloth, $27.95
paper.
These three books offer a look at recent crit-
ical literature inspired or provoked by Stanley
Cavell. The two critical anthologies contain work
by Cavell, and Russell Goodman offers Cavell a
chance to respond to his interlocutors. William
Rothman has compiled Cavell’s previously uncol-
lected writing on film. The thoughts echo beyond
the books that contain them. Nearly twenty essays
about Cavell and almost thirty pieces by Cavell
yield a range of writing that permits a serious en-
gagement with his work.
For Cavell, aesthetics exists not merely on the
margins of philosophy but at its core. This de-
mands a more immediate engagement with the
arts than is common, which has left Cavell at odds
with professional philosophers and also with some
aestheticians. In his move to enlarge the register
of the aesthetic as it might be, he seems to slight
aesthetics as it is. Cavell’s “Crossing Paths” (in
Rothman) declares his sense, shared with Arthur
C. Danto, that the immediacy of the arts initially
undermines the more standard approaches of uni-
versity aesthetics.
Beginning in the early 1960s, Cavell attracted
intense controversy. Goodman’s Contending with
Stanley Cavell echoes this critical situation, as if
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65:2 Spring 2007
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reading Cavell is still a matter of contention and,
moreover, of contending with Cavell himself. To
contend with such a body of work is not just
a matter of arguing with its arguments but also
of having to reckon with the comprehensive in-
terconnection of its projects. Reminders of the
professional riskiness of Cavell’s work crop up
in all three volumes.1 Garrett Stewart (CSC) ex-
plores Cavell’s happy and unhappy engagements
with Stewart’s disciplines (film, poetics, and nar-
rative theory). Richard Rorty (CSC) refers to
Cavell’s quarrel with his profession, and he urges
him to leave the landlocked squabbles of aca-
demic philosophy and head for the open seas of
otherness.
Cavell still inspires controversy, though per-
haps less melodramatically than in the earlier days.
His defenders no longer betray the sense that
Cavell’s opponents are trying to quarantine his
work, rather than refute it—as if to prevent his
infectiousness from spreading. It is probably good
that this melodramatic image is passing. But the
sense that Cavell’s influence, like Ludwig Wittgen-
stein’s, is somewhat illicit and not controllable by
ordinary measures of intellectual hygiene has not
really dissipated, though it may have diminished.
A loss of the urgency that Stewart and Rothman
recall may betoken a faded perception of the in-
tellectual forces still mobilized to keep Cavell at a
distance.
Cavell has suggested why his work is unlikely
to settle into a comfortable niche of the profes-
sion. First, there is his modernist ambition, shared
with Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger but cast
in terms adapted from the arts. Cavell has de-
scribed philosophy as existing in the condition of
230
the modernist arts and of having constantly to de-
fine itself against its past accomplishments to pre-
serve those very accomplishments. He wants to
divide his readers into those who are formed by
the canons of academic philosophy and those who
wish to uncover what such philosophy has con-
cealed and preserved. Cavell speaks both to our
willingness to give up the profession’s sense of
progress, including its standards of prose, and to
our fear that to relinquish professional rigor is to
give up philosophy. When Stewart speaks of Cavell
as exploring the drive to the unparaphrasable or
Rothman picks up Cavell’s remark on the “un-
teachable point” of any enterprise, they are each
elucidating an aspect of Cavell’s writing that we
cannot accurately address within the profession
as it stands.
To join in the conversation that Cavell invites is
to risk exclusion from the body of discourse that
holds the profession together—and pays the bills.
But this profession also constitutes a part of the
intellectual world that Cavell wants to remain in
touch with, even as he periodically departs from
it and resists its self-stultification. For Cavell, “the
problems of philosophy”—which Rorty wants us
to leave behind—remain the alternative to taking
philosophy as a series of texts to be read. With-
out this idea of a “problem” as a correlative to the
idea of a “text,” both ideas are philosophically im-
poverished. “Text” on its own says no more than
“reading” on its own. If anything can be read, then
anything can be a text, and conversely. The range
extends from Henry David Thoreau reading a car-
load of sails to our reading, potentially, the stars.
The question now becomes not what to read but
why and when is reading begun? And when is it
done?
Cavell says that he conceived The World Viewed
as contributing to two conversations, the one that
called for his contribution and the one that his
writing calls for. A decade later, he delineated
a mode of philosophical reception and rigor—he
called it “reading”—that is the other face of a writ-
ing responsive to its own unrelenting implications.
Such reading and writing demand a responsibility
as heavy as logic and as conclusive as a musical
cadence. But if the reader’s responses are already
anticipated in the text, then (as Cavell predicted)
some readers will find themselves shut out, and
they will find the writing to be not self-responsive
but self-indulgent.
Many contributors are clearly writing not for
those who quit at the first inward turning of
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Cavell’s sentences but for those who are staying
the course. (This is very clear in Stephen Mulhall
[RC, CSC], James Conant [RC, CSC], and Stew-
art.) But from time to time even his friendly read-
ers will also feel shut out, or preempted, by the
very attraction and comprehensiveness of Cavell’s
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prose. So what is one to say? How do we continue
the work of such a writer? To continue a conver-
sation we must include some response to the top-
ics proposed by the writer, and we must be able
to respond to the tone of voice or at least allow
for a comprehensible shift or break in the tone.
Cavell makes a point of including writing as one
of his topics. Accordingly, many of the contribu-
tors comment on Cavell’s modes of writing. But
many of the essays hit on other topics central to
Cavell’s work: everydayness, skepticism, and the
Other; film; Shakespeare, Romanticism, and the
conflict between the false and frozen complete-
ness of moralism and the transient completeness
that “Emersonian perfectionism” is striving for.
The role of film in Cavell’s work is empha-
sized in Stuart Klawans (RC), Andrew Klevan
(CSC), and especially in Rothman. Psychoanal-
ysis remains on the fringes of both books, though
one can sense its presence in Nancy Bauer’s (RC)
readings of speech and film in the context of the
debates about pornography. Her juxtaposing of
the perlocutionary effects of words and the more
primitive, or less articulated, power of the image is
illuminating, and it invites further work. Her anal-
ysis reinserts an aesthetic dimension to psycho-
analysis and politics, as well as a kind of would-be
therapeutic dimension to pornography.
Stewart and Simon Critchley (CSC) say some-
thing about Cavell’s address to Shakespeare and
Shakespeare criticism and to Ralph Waldo Emer-
son and the Americanists. Except for Rothman,
there seems little sense of how the movies allow
us to see both Shakespeare and the opera as antic-
ipating the absorptive power of film and its genres.
Rothman and Klevan both suggest how Emerson’s
attention to the “low” and “the near” allow Cavell
to link the perception that film demands—and the
perception that film permits—to our readings of
the everyday. This points to the transcendentalist
underwriting of ordinary language, something that
renders more intelligible the fact of our ordinary
vulnerability to skepticism and our intermittent
ability to turn it aside.
Many contributors say something about the
“philosophy of the ordinary,” but there is almost
no actual philosophizing from the ordinary use of
Essay Review
words. The practice of working from the ordinary
things we have to say, in their ordinary circum-
stances, seems to be the hardest thing in the world
to learn from Cavell (or J. L. Austin or Wittgen-
stein). As a set of procedures, it has never been that
easy to characterize (compare Cavell’s “Austin at
Criticism”). Cavell’s perception of the shortcom-
ings in the various descriptions of such philoso-
phizing explicitly leads him to the idea of Thoreau
and Emerson as “underwriting” the ordinary. It is
as if the Romantic wish for an intimacy of the word
and the world can find satisfaction in the most or-
dinary moments of our ability to put the world into
words. This links the skeptical distance and the Ro-
mantic wish to overcome the alienation and per-
versity of speech. This marks another difference
from Rorty’s perception of skepticism as wholly
other than Romanticism. Unlike Rorty, Cavell has
consistently been aware of the proximity of Ro-
manticism to the genesis of the aesthetic and of
their mutual effort to provide a human ground for
utterance, judgment, and feeling.
It sometimes seems as if, in their impatience to
get to the meatier topics, Cavell’s readers invoke
the power of the ordinary in a kind of nostalgic
memory or hope of what it might be like to philos-
ophize like that. Here our hope for making sense
lies in the fact that the memory of the everyday
(like Baudelaire’s “memory of the present”) is it-
self still somewhere in the vicinity of the every-
day. Rothman and Klawans address the everyday
that film evokes and reveals. The everyday world
of film is fated to occur at a distance—hence a
nearness—whose relation to the world of our ev-
eryday words remains largely unassessed.
Conant does his level best to make a man-
ageable topic out of “America.” He compares
Cavell’s reflections to the role of nationality and
language in other philosophical projects, preemi-
nently in Greece and Germany. Such philosophi-
cal projects have remained locked up in Heideg-
gerian, nationalist, and fascist tendencies. To take
it up in a democratic spirit seems a true continua-
tion of Cavell’s aspirations (chastened somewhat
by Critchley’s strictures).
Sandra Laugier (CSC) provides a perspective
on the ordinary, deepened by her Continental
experience of the past and its emerging analytic
elements. She moves quickly to shore up the ordi-
nary with its transcendental underwriting. She ap-
parently takes the divergence in Emerson of “the
world that I think from the world I converse with”
231
as a sign that skepticism has already succeeded
within our ordinary lives—as if she has equated
the Romantic sense of self-division with our more
mundane vulnerability to skepticism. Cavell sug-
gests her perspective is representatively European
and hence a useful measure of our own inheri-
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tance.
Sanford Shieh (RC) works to locate the starting
points of skepticism, which is already a major part
of locating the motive to skepticism. Apart from
this motive, we cannot hope to find skepticism’s
“truth.” He works within the issues raised by Mul-
hall’s response to Steven Affeldt’s essay (unfortu-
nately not reprinted in this anthology) concerning
whether criteria form a framework for judging cor-
rectness and incorrectness. These papers force us
to think about the relation of criteria to concepts
and their frameworks. Some idea of a framework
goes way back in the discussion of skepticism. In
Individuals, P. F. Strawson writes of the skeptic:
“He pretends to accept a conceptual scheme, but
at the same time quietly rejects one of the condi-
tions of its employment.”2
This is perhaps a version of what Shieh calls the
traditional interpretation. Mulhall seems to share
the tendency to interpret criteria as belonging to or
even constituting such a framework. In turn, that
suggests that the primary use of criteria is to al-
low us to justify our uses of words, our utterances,
based on something independent of those utter-
ances. Of course, in a great many cases, the source
of our responses will be precisely the criteria that
are alive in our utterances. Shieh and Affeldt ask:
Can a framework composed of criteria form a gen-
eral response to the threat of skepticism? Here,
the appropriate path must find a way of saying
“no” without denying the truth that Mulhall is
invoking.
Cavell reads Wittgenstein as reminding us that a
scheme or “framework” (Gurüst also means ‘scaf-
folding’) is not a structure on which agreement is
based. “It is what human beings say that is true and
false; and they agree in the language they use. That
is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.”3
We can read Wittgenstein as saying that the agree-
ment in our forms of life gives rise to a framework
of concepts, which in turn makes possible certain
judgments of right and wrong, correct and incor-
rect. Or we can read him as saying that in certain
regions, like mathematics, there is something like a
framework, so that “disputes do not break out . . .
over whether a rule has been obeyed or not.”4 That
232
framework is made possible by our agreement in
judgments, our attunements in those forms of life
we call counting, measuring, factoring, finding the
square root or the differential. In certain regions of
our language, our agreement makes possible fur-
ther agreement that for certain purposes we could
call “more precise.” And so we are lead to the idea
of a framework, which seems designed to sharpen
our sense of the articulation among our concepts
and the greater precision that this articulation per-
mits when we are using our concepts to map the
world. This does no harm as long as we do not
take the framework as the foundation of the judg-
ments, rather than the other way around. The idea
of a framework is, on this reading, no more funda-
mental than the idea that, ideally, we use words in
a kind of calculus. For certain purposes, this is also
a useful comparison.
Shieh refuses to take the attunement that al-
lows criteria to be manifested in our utterances to
be a consequence of the existence of criteria. That
refusal may seem too small an achievement, as if
“attunement” just repeated that we are in accord
in these uses of words or perhaps this moment of
shared laughter. This seems much less than claim-
ing to discover a framework. It is in some such
spirit that Cavell speaks of our disappointment
in criteria, which is also presumably a disappoint-
ment in our attunement in the use of these criteria.
It becomes important to remember that we need
to reaffirm this attunement above all when it is
broken, when we are trying to recall it, or when
our wish to make it into something stronger ends
up undermining it.
Of course, it is sometimes critical that saying
or doing something is right or wrong, grammatical
or ungrammatical, foul or fair, safe or out. Then
we may look to our criteria as if they formed a
framework. What we cannot do is take our attune-
ment, our agreement in judgments, and make that
agreement in turn the arbiter of correct and in-
correct, as if we had thereby taken a further step
toward grounding the agreement of our judgments
in something deeper than our mere agreements.
A rejuvenated discussion of skepticism might
lead to our understanding that the way Cavell
writes is not simply an exhibition of the will to
elaborate or qualify the bald assertions of analytic
philosophy. The “way he writes” grows precisely
from the task of tracing the skeptic’s claims to their
human roots, of restoring the voice that was will-
ing to utter the (literally) unutterable. There is no
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
one “way” that Cavell writes, any more than there
is “one voice” that needs to be recovered. What is
“aesthetic” in Cavell’s work is equally a matter of
our knowledge of the world: every act of writing
is already a kind of judgment of the world.
If few contributors respond directly to the de-
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mands of Cavell’s voice, most of them seem to have
heard the resonance of Cavell’s tuning fork. They
felt themselves tested by it. Without pretending to
cover all the interesting material in these volumes,
I single out Paul Franks (RC), who has done more
than most to go over the post-Kantian problem-
atic of the Other that lies within the Kantian moral
consciousness. Eli Friedlander (RC) reverses the
direction of the problematic by taking the aes-
thetic exemplar both as a given and as a possibility
that cannot be dismissed. The exemplar thus be-
comes a kind of fact that cannot be circumvented.
Where the moral consciousness demands of itself
a knowledge of the Other, we gain access to the
exemplar only by its influence on us, its ability to
stir us to the height of activity.
Hilary Putnam (RC) stands as Rorty’s an-
tipodes, urging Cavell on the profession rather
than urging Cavell to take his leave of it. Good-
man, analogously, urges Cavell to repair the rup-
tures in the American tradition—above all be-
tween Emerson and various pragmatisms. Cavell
persists in finding the ruptures and repressions of
Emerson as essential to the possibility of recover-
ing our tradition. While not disagreeing that a re-
paired possibility of continuity would be desirable,
it would distort the possibilities of actually using
that tradition, in the way Cavell has received it. Yet
it is in this very conversation with Goodman that
these claims about rupture and repression, found-
ing and reception, become most vivid. So there is
after all perhaps a kind of interrupted conversa-
tion that begins to be heard again, in the act of
deferring it.
Crary extends Cavell’s interest in Austin to-
ward perfectionism, preparing a path for Cora Di-
amond’s (RC) sense that this project is both puz-
zling and absorbing from the ground of language
up. Here, too, the aesthetic, the ethical, and our
knowledge of the Other are found to be painfully
inextricable. Diamond displays the kind of pro-
ductive puzzlement in her engagement with Cavell
that few philosophers have wanted to work with—
even within the main circuits of Cavell’s influence.
All honor to those who put their perplexity to
use and, in this case, who apply the pain of hard
Essay Review 233

philosophy to the painful problems of human ex- 1. Essays included in Russell B. Goodman, Contending
istence. with Stanley Cavell, will be noted as CSC, and those in Alice
Crary and Sanford Shieh, Reading Cavell, as RC. William
Rothman, Cavell on Film, is referred to as “Rothman.” Co-
nant and Mulhall appear in both volumes.
TIMOTHY GOULD
2. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein,
Department of Philosophy Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon,
Metropolitan State College of Denver

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1979, reprinted with a new preface, 1999), p. 47.
Denver, Colorado 80204 3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,
3rd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), § 241.
internet: gouldt@mscd.edu 4. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 240.