Stanley Cavell Research Articles

El matrimonio entre el cine y la filosofía: Apuntes sobre la metafilosofía de Stanley Cavell

En este trabajo expondremos brevemente algunas características fundamentales de la concepción de la filosofía defendida por Stanley Cavell, con especial atención a su reivindicación del cine como agente filosófico de pleno derecho. Nuestra intención es presentar las claves del planteamiento metafilosófico de Cavell, con el objetivo de desarrollar posteriormente su concepción del arte cinematográfico como un tipo de praxis filosófica particular, fundada en la tesis de que el cine puede concebirse como un “medio de pensamiento” adecuado para afrontar sendos problemas filosóficos.

Thinking about future/democracy: towards a political theory of futurity

Today, representative politics are often perceived as being primarily concerned with short-term goals. Moreover, the future appears to be pre-determined by economic or technological necessities. This ‘closing’ of the future, however, becomes increasingly problematic in the face of global existential crises, such as environmental depletion and climate change. These catastrophic developments could only be mitigated by immediate, decisive political interventions, which would amount to systemic changes that redirect technological research and economic activities. This article seeks to outline how political theory and philosophy can contribute to “(re-)Politicizing the Future”. I argue that political thought should take temporality, and in particular futurity, as a central conceptual and methodological concern. Drawing on the works of prominent twentieth century thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Stanley Cavell, and Jacques Derrida, I want to develop a deepened analytical understanding of the possibility for a ‘future directed’ political thought which highlights intrinsic connections between sustainability and democracy.

“A World Complete Without Me”: Writing Cinema in Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions

ABSTRACTPaul Auster’s creative practice involves a tendency to transcend the boundaries between different mediums, as exemplified by his cinematographic fiction. Although relevant research has started to gain traction in recent years, there are still few in-depth analyses of the medium of film, its implication in the verbal medium, and its connection with the themes explored in an individual novel of Auster’s. Drawing on Stanley Cavell’s film philosophy, the present essay attempts to explicate the meaning and function of writing cinema in The Book of Illusions. Starting with several fundamental issues concerning viewing and writing—including the philosophical basis on which cinematic experience and its expression can possibly be construed—this essay delves further into their connections with one of the ethical questions presented in the novel: how can and should one relate to another’s life and work? From the viewpoint of Cavellian film philosophy, the question may be phrased this way: how can and should I, a viewer, respond to “a world complete without me”?

‘English, motherfucker, do you speak it?’ Pulp Fiction and the Future of Film-Philosophy

In recent years, film scholars have been increasingly preoccupied with questions as to how films can ‘be’ or ‘do’ or ‘be used for’ philosophy. From the ‘be used for’ position, films are seen as mere examples or jumping-off points to philosophy ‘proper’; from the ‘be’ position, films are seen as philosophy, as simply another form of philosophical argumentation; and from the ‘do’ position, films are seen as examples or illustrations of preexisting philosophical positions/protocols. In this essay, I will operate primarily from the ‘do’ position and explore how Quentin Tarantino ‘does’ ordinary language philosophy. Renowned for his innovative and influential dialogue, I intend to shine a light on a neglected aspect of Tarantino’s writing style and examine, with reference to the work of ordinary language philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell, the argumentative protocols discernible in Pulp Fiction (1994). More specifically, I will analyze the famous ‘foot massage argument’, utilizing such concepts as ‘projective imagination’ and ‘explaining the syntactics’ versus ‘demonstrating the semantics’, in the hopes of indicating the fecundity of the continued study of Tarantino’s justly famous dialogue. I also intend to broaden my investigation to consider, in light of responses to this material during the IFVCR Network conference and in light of current discussions within film studies, the disciplinary implications vis-a-vis film-philosophy of conducting such ordinary language investigations of dialogue and communication in film.

Temptation and Therapy

Abstract Although many philosophers have, throughout history, regarded themselves as answering the skeptic, the question arises whether answering the skeptic is the thing to do. If not, the question becomes how else to respond to her. Wittgenstein-inspired stances are, in general, therapeutic. In this article I focus on the problem of other minds in order to analyze and compare the different shapes such therapeutic stances may have. I begin by showing how crucial resisting the temptation to answer the skeptic was for John McDowell’s early formulations of disjunctivism in the 1980s. In his article “Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge” I identify substantial positions such as the rejection of highest common factor views, the diagnosis of the connection between such highest common factor views and an (untenable) conception of appearances, as well as the proposal of a non-Cartesian, or modest, approach to indistinguishability for a subject. Whatever his success in these other enterprises, McDowell continues to regard both the temptation to answer the skeptic and a substitute therapeutic stance as epistemologically motivated. But if skepticism is more than an intellectual conundrum, as maintained by Stanley Cavell, the source of such temptation has to be considered in a completely different light.

Perfectionism and the Place of the Interior Life in Business: Toward an Ethics of Personal Growth

ABSTRACT:Stanley Cavell’s moral perfectionism places the task of cultivating richer self-understanding and self-expression at the center of corporate life. We show how his approach reframes business as an opportunity for moral soul-craft, achieved through the articulation of increasingly reflective inner life in organizational culture. Instead of norming constraints on business activity, perfectionism opens new possibilities for conducting commercial exchange as a form of conversation, leading to personal growth. This approach guides executives in designing businesses that foster genius and channel creativity, while giving all stakeholders a meaningful voice within a culture of trust. We first give an account of Cavellian perfectionism. Then, we explain how this underrepresented strand of moral reflection challenges and enriches, but does not supplant, prevailing ethical theories—including other versions of perfectionism. We then demonstrate the salience of Cavellian perfectionism to business ethics through examples from marketing, human resources, and executive organizational design and development.

The physician of cinema: Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life

ABSTRACTThis article contends that, in contrast to the broadly metaphysical (or “transcendental”) reading with which he’s associated, Terrence Malick consistently makes nature, or physis, the subject of his films. Returning to the his critical reception, the essay begins by suggesting that Malick’s biography has been leveraged to credentialize philosophical approaches readily identified with Stanley Cavell and Martin Heidegger. By contrast, his directorial itinerary reveals a commitment to the natural world—to different milieus, habitats, ecosystems, and topographies—that culminates with The Tree of Life. Above all, the analysis turns on the latter’s “cosmobiogenesis” sequence, especially in light of an early draft of the film’s script. The article broadly considers the relation between cosmology and biology (i.e., an “anthropic principle”), singles out four biological concepts (symbiosis, predation, coevolution, and self-organization) that clearly inform the film, and analyzes the “evolution of empathy” in the notorious dinosaur scene. Finally, the essay examines the formal means with which the film envisions life: on the basis, it seeks to refute “metaphysical club” by conceiving of Malick as the physician of cinema.

Reading Oneself in the Text: Cavell and Gadamer’s Romantic Conception of Reading

ABSTRACTCan we gain knowledge by reading literature? This essay defends an account of reading, developed by Stanley Cavell and Hans-Georg Gadamer, that phenomenologically describes the experience of acquiring self-knowledge by reading literary texts. Two possible criticisms of this account will be considered: first, that reading can provide other kinds of knowledge than self-knowledge; and, second, that the theory involves illegitimately imposing subjective meaning onto a text. It will be argued, in response, that the self-knowledge gained in reading allows one to gain other sorts of knowledge too, and that the reading process described by Gadamer and Cavell avoids excessive subjectivism.

New Literary History at 50: Reflections and Futures

New Literary History at 50Reflections and Futures Bruce Holsinger When rita felski assumed the editorship of New Literary History just over ten years ago, she invoked John of Salisbury's twelfth-century Metalogicon and the famous image (attributed to Bernard of Chartres) of dwarves seated on the shoulders of giants: a notion well suited to her thoughts on the daunting prospect of succeeding the journal's founding editor, Ralph Cohen. On succeeding Rita Felski in turn, I am put in mind of the opening sentence of the Policraticus, John of Salisbury's more rambunctious work of humanistic observation: "Although pleasurable in many ways, the pursuit of letters is especially fruitful because it excludes all annoyances stemming from differences of time and place, it draws friends into each other's presence, and it abolishes the situation in which things worth knowing are not experienced."1 This caustically optimistic view of a transhistorical republic of letters rings true to a new editor's ears, tuned as they are to the simultaneous joys and challenges of leading this storied journal and its particular pursuit of letters into the immediate future. Rita Felski's own will to transcend time and place in the pages of New Literary History is reflected in the variety of historical and theoretical topics her special issues have explored, as well as the colloquial spirit she brought to the editorship through the many intimate gatherings and major conferences arranged over the last decade, all of them organized around things worth knowing and knowing anew, to borrow from John of Salisbury again. One measure of the excitement she brought to NLH can be discerned in the large percentage of the essays coming across our transom that rely fundamentally on her work, which remains at the center of current discussions around modes of reading after the so-called postcritical turn. It is humbling to follow in her footsteps and take on the formidable task ahead. I am deeply grateful to her for the wisdom and counsel she has provided over the last eighteen months, and (like everyone else who reads this journal) in awe of where she has taken NLH over the last ten years. [End Page v] New Literary History began as the 1960s closed, publishing its first issue in October of 1969 and inaugurating a fifty-year run that has helped shape the contours of literary study over several generations. It would be difficult to name a prominent figure in theory and criticism who has not published work at one point or another in its pages. Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Paul Ricoeur, Stanley Cavell, Fredric Jameson, Martha Nussbaum, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Wolfgang Iser, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Stanley Fish, Hayden White, Richard Rorty, and more recently Bruno Latour, Sara Ahmed, Graham Harman, and Wai Chee Dimock—the illustrious lists go on, and on, and on, drawn from every school of criticism and every theoretical disposition, from French feminism and poststructuralism to new materialism and object-oriented ontology, from Marxism and cultural materialism to ecocriticism, critical race theory, and new historicism. As Cixous herself remarked in these pages some years ago, the longevity of NLH itself represents "a coherence in the world of letters … a proof of, and a metaphor for, the world-wide need to think and save literature."2 Nor has the journal, despite its title, limited itself to the literary. Perspectives from other fields and paradigms have long enriched its intellectual mission to plumb the depths of literary history, politics, genre, and form from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, often seemingly far afield. Past issues have featured essays by Stephen Jay Gould on the science of form, Marshall McLuhan on performance, and the composer and conceptual writer John Cage, who published one of the original fragments of his Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) in a special issue on "Modernism and Postmodernism" in 1971.3 Historians of art, theater, and music, as well as philosophers, classicists, and historians, have figured prominently among its hundreds of contributors over the years. One of the editorial delights of this coming anniversary year has been the excuse it has afforded to browse...

Revolutions of the Ordinary: Victorian Studies and the Turn to Ordinary Language

“To engage seriously with ordinary language philosophy,” Toril Moi tells us in the introduction to Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell, “is a little like undergoing psychoanalysis. Wittgenstein assumes that we don't begin doing philosophy just for the sake of it, but because something is making us feel confused, as if we had lost our way.” As Moi begins her project of explaining to an audience of literary critics the insights of ordinary-language philosophy, represented primarily by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell, and making a case for the value of their ideas for the practice we usually call close reading, this psychoanalytic metaphor makes a sudden turn to diagnosis, or to the initiation of a kind of therapeutic address that can feel coercive even in its charisma. You must recognize your sickness, Moi insists, before you can be receptive to the treatment. “Who wants to undergo philosophical therapy,” she goes on to ask, “if they feel that everything in their intellectual life is just fine as it is? Paradoxically, then, the best readers of the reputedly ‘conservative’ Wittgenstein might be those who genuinely feel the need for a change” (12). What kind of therapeutic project does Moi want to pursue in this book, which begins by distinguishing the best readers (the readiest patients) from those who think, conservatively, that everything is “just fine as it is”?

The Spaces of Art

The Spaces of Art Marcia Landy (bio) THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CINEMATIC REALISM BY HERMANN KAPPELHOFF Columbia University Press, 2015 Among his prolific writings on film, Hermann Kappelhoff has published monographs on the director G. W. Pabst and the New Objectivity; on melodrama, cinema, and sentiment; on realism; and on Hollywood genres between the wars. In The Politics and poetics of Cinematic Realism, Kappelhoff has undertaken an ambitious examination of the aesthetics of prevailing cinematic forms drawn from European and Hollywood cinema. His attention to the expressive poetics of cinematic form invokes the philosophic thinking of Jacques Rancière and Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty to provide a framework for his rethinking of cinema history, film form and theory, performance, and reception for the creation of a shared cinematic sensibility. Kappelhoff's book is organized by decades, by selected exemplary films, and by film and theoretical cultural writings to account for changing formal and historical developments for rethinking the medium. Kappelhoff's objective is "to make clear what distinguishes the question of the relationship between poetics and politics in the cinema from a return to the cinema as a medium that produces ideology" (13). Chapter 1, "Poetics and Politics," defines the key words under scrutiny. Kappelhoff largely derives his conception of "aesthetics" from Rancière to designate "the forms of thinking or the forms of art no longer in dependency on a previously established reality (of human nature)." An aesthetic regime for Rancière "designates a connection between an arrangement of art and an idea of thinking itself" (7). [End Page 213] Kappelhoff's conception of politics entails "changing the 'dispositifs of power' as a permanent refiguration of the community in the mode of dissensus" (21). The experience of dissensus as "breaking old configurations" (22) is at the center of Kappelhoff's utopian quest to distinguish a politics of cinema through poetics, occupying a familiar terrain that links his work to long-standing political considerations of "poetic cinema as" a periodic form for addressing dissatisfactions with reigning patterns. My question thus is, How effective is Kappelhoff's argument for dissensus as political in relation to contemporary cinema? The author's conception of "cinematic realism" is reliant on "images that are indeed presented as perceptions of the world corresponding to what we are used to, but that propose arrangements of bodies and spaces that are radically separate from the world of our everyday experience. In the history of cinema, it is 'realism' that stands for this paradox" (24). Hence, the reader will be given random "test cases" that will represent a historical form of appearance, the "(incalculable because historical) effect of a certain historical shape of the mutual relationship between poetics/art and politics … to create a "new landscape of the visible" (23). From this landscape the reader should gain a sense of the spaces of the history of cinema as an art, if not of history itself, as inherent to perception and affect. Kappelhoff insists ingeniously that "the films discussed are chosen quite at random, and their representative value could be contested" (25). In chapter 2, "Before the War," Kappelhoff's identification of these "spaces of cinema history" begins with Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948). In Eisenstein's films (and writings), the cinematic is determined not by a priori space as given but through movement, montage, and rearrangement, thus privileging the technical. Eisenstein "proposes a type of movement-image as a kind of perceiving and sensing to be … [that] understands the cinematic image as a temporal structure that becomes spatial by becoming a specific world of perception within the living, present seeing and hearing of the spectator" (36). Kappelhoff connects the characteristics of Eisenstein's montage to the films of Pabst and Die neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity) through Alfred Döblin's, Hebert Ihering's, and Béla Balázs's emphasis on the relationship between the visible man and the cinematic image "that could manage to reduce the world of art to the photographable" (48). [End Page 214] The connection between viewer and social reality in early modernity as described by the German theater critic Herbert Ihering is a "barbaric primitive period of a coming civilization...

The Matter of High Words: Naturalism, Normativity, and the Postwar Sage by Robert Chodat

MLR, .,   West show, and other amusements to be gaped at. Pynchon’s adventure-hero aeronauts , the Chums of Chance, visit the fair, as do Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Merle Rideout, Lew Basnight, and several other characters. e focus on cities, Mogultay argues, spreads out from the Exposition, and in many we find variations on themes first offered here. e Archduke goes slumming in the Black region of Chicago, and that desire to view enclaves touristically is repeated in other cities, particularly in Venice and New York. e city is theorized as spectacle, and as something to be arranged in the viewer’s memory as an adventure. e city is also studied in terms of its governance and planning. Some of Pynchon’s work, as Mogultay shows, sets up the city as the new frontier, and Pynchon makes use of popular frontier novel tropes both in themselves and as they morphed into detective plots, first about the Pinkerton men, then in London with the Sherlock Holmes style of operator, and then as the focal figure of hard-boiled noir fiction. All three phases of detection are undertaken by Lew Basnight in his quest to understand himself morally. He must in the end admit his own complicity, and we as readers are expected to do the same. We can be grateful to Mogultay for what he illuminates, but at times the rarefied issues curdle the flow of his usually readable style: In Pynchon’s novel, the city as dream experience thus emerges facilitated by technological developments and based on rationalist principles. riving on the pervasive logic of the spectacle, this dreamworld can be said to foster the atomization of long experience. Moreover, as a corollary of the intellectual strain to make sense of the urban experience, an increasing forgetfulness seems to take hold. Pynchon indeed provides a quite Benjaminian rendering of urban modernity here, which can, accordingly, be construed as mirroring the aesthetics of postmodern urbanism. (pp. –) Spectacle is a crucial focus throughout the book, so at times cities are theoretically framed in ways their inhabitants would neither recognize nor understand. e last chapter, ‘e Doleful City’, explores Pynchon’s fantasized version of the / attack on the World Trade Center. Pynchon emphasizes the immediate impulse to memorialize a site rather than to treat it as a lived-in environment. roughout, Mogultay studies Pynchon’s extraction of the roots of the postmodern city from the modern, and shows how restructuring is ‘geared toward the fabrication of place images’ (p. ). Pynchon shows sign value ultimately overriding and replacing the use value of a city. P S U K H e Matter of High Words: Naturalism, Normativity, and the Postwar Sage. By R C. New York: Oxford University Press. . iv+ pp. $;£.. ISBN ––––. Robert Chodat’s book makes a substantial contribution to the ongoing revaluation of important figures and trends within post-Second World War American literature and philosophy outside of the postmodern and poststructuralist canon. e  Reviews ‘postwar sages’ the book explores—Walker Percy, Marilynne Robinson, Ralph Ellison , Stanley Cavell, and David Foster Wallace—push back against what Chodat identifies as a nominalist disdain for ‘wooly, discomfiting, abstract normative concepts ’ dominant within scientific, aesthetic, and other intellectual circles (p. ). His subjects emerge from a ‘pragmatist-Wittgensteinian tradition’ where meaningful terms gain legitimacy from their social legibility rather than their Platonic foundations (p. ); thinkers within this legacy argue for the significance of moral terms such as ‘courage, fraternity, marriage, [or] fallibility’ while understanding that their definitions are contextual and contingent (p. ). Reading his subjects’ non-fiction allows Chodat to trace the social and political debates that matter to them. Robinson, for example, inveighs against mechanistic applications of Darwinism to human behaviour, while Ellison scorns the social scientific emphasis on black identity’s disempowerment; Wallace’s essays reflect the neo-Aristotelian emphasis on public and communal norms in s–s philosophy (which Chodat ably summarizes). In the case of nearly all the authors he examines, however, the move between essayistic non-fiction and memoir or narrative fiction does not allow for simple transfer of arguments. Percy’s novel Love in the Ruins () paradoxically seems to contradict the rigorous anti...

Attention, Avoidance, and Tragedy: What Simone Weil Could Have Said about King Lear if She Had Read Stanley Cavell

Attention, Avoidance, and Tragedy: What Simone Weil Could Have Said about King Lear if She Had Read Stanley Cavell

“Strangers and pilgrims”: The migrant archetype in the cinema of Terrence Malick

The migrant archetype is a prevailing motif of the cinema directed by Terrence Malick to date: most of his main characters share the condition of being displaced or nomadic people. This article is focused on analysing six films –belonging to different periods of Malick’s filmography– in which this condition is significantly emphasized: Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012) and Knight of Cups (2015). The aim of this study is to reflect upon the central role of the migrant archetype in the works of Malick, showing to what extent the essential features of this archetype are inherited from United States mythology. In the end, this connection between film and myth is due to a common ground: on one hand, the thought of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson about the idea of America, revisited in the last decades by the philosopher Stanley Cavell; on the other, the legend of the first New England settlers, in which the biblical theme of exodus and the figure of the pilgrim are fundamental. Thus, I aim to prove how –and explain on what grounds– both in the construction of Malick’s migrant characters and in the mythic representation of the American migrant the same feature stands out: the condition of “stranger and pilgrim”.

Tell me the story: Marginalisation, transformation, and school-based restorative practice

•Proponents of restorative practice suggest that by offering pupils a chance to tell the story, schools can transform the behaviour of pupils making them happier, and more productive. Yet, despite well-researched evidence about behaviour and disadvantage, less is known about the marginalisation that pupils experience. The central concern of this article is to consider the extent to which a turn to educational philosophy can offer a plausible response to the limitations of a restorative approach. By providing a reading of Stanley Cavell’s autobiographical memoir, and Cavell’s own exploration of Emerson and Thoreau, this paper argues for a reconceptualisation of restorative practice that understands ‘story’ as a means to a metamorphosis, or re-creation, of the self.

Shakespeare versus Aristotle

Efforts to describe Shakespeare’s tragedies and place them within the history of the genre have been long misled by dubious assumptions about Shakespeare’s secularism dating back to the influence of German Romanticism. The use of concepts drawn from Aristotle’s Poetics has been compromised, as well, by patterns of misinterpretation, reflecting the influence of Renaissance Protestants such as Melanchthon who sought to reconcile classical tragedy with Christianity. Hamartia as Aristotle uses the word does not mean sin. Anagnorisis does not mean repentance. Using these terms as euphemisms for these Christian concepts has proved attractive, nonetheless, because it allows critics to avoid recognizing Shakespeare’s indebtedness to the moral vision of Christianity. As in medieval Biblical drama, tragedy for Shakespeare is the failure of a sinner to repent. As in the case of confession, Shakespeare represents repentance as a process which requires engagement with other people: an intersubjective transformation Stanley Cavell calls “acknowledgment.”

3. Student Complaints: Performative or Passionate Utterances?

Abstract In a well-documented case from late 2016, Oxford University graduate, Faiz Siddiqui, sued his alma mater, claiming that the “appallingly bad tuition” he received cost him the first-class degree that he felt he should have received. In tracing how the rise in such complaints seems ineluctably linked to the increasing commodification of the sector, we ask what it means for a student to express her voice within the university. In doing this, we draw a contrast between the (safety of the) formal procedures to which many students resort when making a complaint, and the possibilities of addressing issues in a face-to-face encounter. To understand the differences in these two approaches, we make an unusual move to consider the work of J. L Austin (1962). We then outline Stanley Cavell’s criticisms of the formal procedures that underlie such utterances. We suggest that a commitment to passionate utterance along Cavellian lines, highlights not only the place of emotion in a complaint, but also the responsibility, and answerability, of each party to the other.

Unrarified Air: Alfred Stieglitz and the Modernism of Equivalence

Unrarified Air:Alfred Stieglitz and the Modernism of Equivalence Kate Stanley (bio) In 1923 Alfred Stieglitz published "How I Came to Photograph Clouds," a short essay in which he writes: I always watched clouds. Studied them. … So I began to work with the clouds—and it was with great excitement … Every time I developed I was so wrought up, always believing I had nearly gotten what I was after—but had failed. A most tantalizing sequence of days and weeks.1 This "tantalizing sequence" of initial experimentation would later yield a formidable legacy, as Stieglitz would spend nearly a decade (1923–31) producing the pivotal series of cloud photographs he would title the Equivalents.2 During this period he printed and exhibited hundreds of cloud images, most taken during the summers he spent with Georgia O'Keeffe at Lake George, in the Adirondacks. When Stieglitz turned his camera to the skies in the early 1920s, the resulting photographs sometimes included a sliver of horizon or the silhouette of a tree, inclusions which hold the vastness of the cloudscape in relative perspective against the scale of the earth. Yet by the late 1920s, most visual references to solid ground disappear from the work, seeming to set the clouds adrift within their frames. Free of mooring, their spatial proportions and positioning indeterminate, the cloud images become disoriented from any authoritative vantage: their shapes and textures may imply certain atmospheric vectors or conditions, but no single beholder's grounded point of view definitively calibrates them (fig. 1). [End Page 185] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent, 1925, gelatin silver print, 11.8 x 9.2 cm, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1928, 29.128.4. Image courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. While critics frequently convey the disorientation that the Equivalents provoke in viewers, interpretations of this vertiginous experience tend to divide into two critical camps—one reflecting a formalist investment in modernism, the other reflecting a philosophical investment in transcendental idealism. When Stieglitz's clouds are considered in modernist terms they are most often seen to indicate "radical absence," as sheer and arbitrary signs that potently signify a missing referent.3 Per Rosalind Krauss's influential reading, Stieglitz exemplifies Stanley Cavell's early definition of the modernist artist, a figure tasked above all with revealing the criteria upon which his aesthetic medium fundamentally depends. Krauss argues that Stieglitz reveals the "essence" of modern photography in the technique of the cut or crop, which punches the cloud images out of "the continuous fabric of the sky" ("Stieglitz/Equivalents," 134). Within this interpretive framework, the logic of equivalence suggested by the work's title polemically equates clouds with a monumental vacancy: the "absence … of the world and its objects, supplanted by the presence of the sign" (140). In other words, Stieglitz's project is seen [End Page 186] to disclose an exemplary modernist aim by transforming the "natural signs" of clouds into the "unnatural signs, into the cultural language" of modernism itself (135). In Krauss's account, clouds operate for Stieglitz as a kind of non-subject that allows him to give the unique mediating properties of photography his undivided attention—the evanescence of his content pointing up the coalescence of his form.4 Here Stieglitz's search for illuminating equivalences uncovers the fundamental modernist problem of correspondences—that unbridgeable chasm of difference between representation and referent, between clouds in a photograph and clouds in the sky. With this correlation irrevocably ruptured, the photographer's search for equivalence can only finally depict the fact of disconnection, absence, and self-referentiality. Yet while for Krauss Stieglitz may represent a modernist semiotics of absence and abstraction, his clouds have just as frequently been framed as signs of divine presence made visible, or what Stieglitz himself once described as "God in some form or other."5 Beginning with Waldo Frank in 1919, a long line of commentators have asserted Stieglitz's place in an American tradition of transcendental idealism that traces back to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Frank describes this idealist project as a "transcending leap away from all that was mortal-human."6 Those who follow in Emerson's stead, Frank observes...

Introduction to Focus: The Ordinary

Introduction to Focus: The Ordinary Richard Deming (bio) Recently, I had the opportunity to tour the sewers of Vienna, a city I dearly love. Afterwards, numerous people asked me why I would do that, spend time in the grotty underground, given the remarkable beauty of Viennese traditional and modernist architecture? Why wouldn’t I just spend more time taking in, for instance, the grandeur of the Hofburg? To begin with, there is a metaphoric significance to the fact that in the very city where Freud developed his ideas about the unconscious, one can actually be given a tour of the underground. Indeed, the health of the city is dependent on that sewer, and has been for centuries. My guide, a retired historian, pointed out that few people ever think about where the water they use to drink, wash, and cook comes from. They never ask about that ordinary but crucial aspect of their lives. To know the sewer, to acknowledge its complex and important history and function is to know better how the city itself works and how its infrastructure shapes daily living. Yet people seem to consciously, willfully avoid thinking about what exists beneath their feet. The trope speaks for itself. Each day, our phones, computers, and tablets shout at us a variety of reminders, warnings, and declarations that indicate whatever else it might be, our moment in history is anything but ordinary. From looming climate catastrophe to a dizzying range of technological innovations one almost never dreamed would be possible, it certainly seems an inescapable, incontrovertible claim that the Ordinary is lost to us. In his essay included in this issue’s special focus, political theorist Thomas Dumm makes the stakes clear: “The question we face is whether the very idea of the ordinary as a place of meaning and a resource for life can survive in the face of the catastrophic.” Yet, by the same token, has there ever been a time that, while living in it, one would have comfortably described the era as ordinary? Although it seems true that we are on the edge of very real crises, it might be that ordinary is a descriptor that cannot be applied to eras and times, and has much more to do with one’s own life. It has a different measure, and, perhaps, its opposite may not be, or may not always be extraordinary, just as a term such as normal seems to mean something different from ordinary. Normal is perhaps a value assigned by others, and authorized by the collective, whereas ordinary is determined from within. It may be that some of the crises of our time arise from an ongoing repression of the Ordinary as a focus of our attention. From Heraclitus to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sigmund Freud to Stanley Cavell, there has long been within certain strains of thought an argument that finds the Ordinary, that which is most familiar to any one of us, is actually that which is most unknown to us, most unfamiliar, and, therefore, remains deeply mysterious. The Ordinary often eludes thinking because by its very nature we come to consider—if, that is, we ever do consider it—as not warranting any sustained, serious thought. Familiarity, so it seems, breeds indifference, Yet, the problem becomes evident: we overlook, consciously and unconsciously, the very things and experiences that are most determining of what we call—if we call it anything—our daily life. Defining the Ordinary is a crucial part of the problem of discussing it. What counts as the Ordinary? Is a flower ordinary? Is a comb? Is washing the dishes ordinary? Yes, perhaps, one is inclined to say, but something about attaching the word to a thing or even a routine action might be misleading. To a certain extent, thinking about the Ordinary is a broadly philosophical and even phenomenological endeavor, and in such regards the term indicates one’s relationship to an action or thing or circumstance. Calling something ordinary signifies a relationship familiar enough that our sense of the relationship helps us to define to and for ourselves who we take ourselves to be. This seems to be why David LaRocca in his discussion of...

Cavell and Critique

Stanley Cavell—my mentor and good friend—died on June 19, 2018, a week before I sat down to revise this tribute to him. I first presented these words in Cavell’s presence at a 2017 workshop at Tufts University on “Changing Politics: Conversations with Stanley Cavell.” I was then concerned with a crucial political dimension of Cavell’s thought that even admiring readers of his work sometimes overlook. This topic strikes me as, if anything, even more pertinent now. Within a day of Cavell’s death, obituaries began to appear in the U.S. and abroad, and a common theme was Cavell’s astonishing breadth as a thinker. He was, different papers reported, as eloquent and engaging on topics as various as Emerson and Thoreau, movies from Hollywood’s “golden age,” Shakespeare, Wittgenstein and Austin, what he called “the fact of television,” Heidegger, Kleist, Kierkegaard, Hitchcock and Beckett. It is certainly true that Cavell had a great range. At the same time, as Nancy Bauer, Sandra Laugier and I observed in a post in the New York Times philosophy blog, The Stone, there is an important political thread running through Cavell’s explorations of his many topics and questions, namely, a preoccupation with what it is to be a responsible participant in a democratic polis and, specifically, a democratic polis as brutally and profoundly imperfect as the United States of America. Cavell’s commitment to liberating, democratic politics was reflected in his actions beyond his writings, with some of his political endeavors described in his autobiographical tome Little Did I Know and others recorded in the work of his students and friends.