Stanley Cavell and Interpretation
Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 10:40PM I was once a huge fan of Stanley Cavell's essays; I've read most of them, and I've lifted a sentence fragment from The World Viewed to serve as a motto for my website.
Today I tried rereading a random pair of his essays. The first was "The Argument of the Ordinary" from the collection Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome and the second was "Fred Astaire asserts his right to praise" from Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow. Reading each piece I found myself less able to follow or more able to see my misunderstanding of Cavell's central argument. Either way I was frustrated by Cavell's easy annexation of several diverse arguments -- he will simply mention Kripke or Emerson as an invocation and develop his next paragraph as a response to an unexpressed interpretation of the invoked author's views. Cavell sometimes brings a half dozen texts to the table, opens none of them, an preaches over them as if thier contents were clear. What he has to say presumes more than most of his readers are prepared to consider, yet he is unforgiving and even gleeful with his Emersonian independence from scholarly interpretation.
What I mean by that is Cavell does not try to explicate the texts he discusses; he does not lay out their contents so that we may examine their details and understand them. As an indirect but forseeable consequence, we are unable to examine his contents and understand his writing. At the very least we can tell (since he states it repeatedly throughout his essays) that Cavell justifies this via a cross-reading of Emerson and Wittgenstien. Cavell returns to Emerson's maxim that no man must rely on anything except his own inner resources (see "Self-Reliance") and to Wittgenstien's skepticism over whether any man may know the inner thoughts of another (consider Philosophical Investigations 275).
So what is my complaint? I have no doubt that Cavell has a firm grasp of the texts he references, and no doubt that he wants us to achieve the same hold on these texts, so what is the problem with Cavell's writing as if only a special audience were to get the full import of his reflections?
The problem, and my complaint, is that very fact: Cavell writes as if he has an exclusive audience. He writes not only as if he were a university professor, not only if he were Ivy League, not only if he were tenured at Harvard... Cavell writes as if he were writing for those authors he fondly quotes, an audience no doubtedly serving as a better version of himself. Most signs point to that conclusion, and what is revealed is that Cavell is not only an obscure elitist but also an unrelenting perfectionist. He is bound to set the bar so high for his readers that they give up on competing against him, thus conceeding the Olympian crown to Tennyson's Ulysses. Unfortunately, this means his readers (including myself) are bound to follow him.
