Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 13, June 2002
Willam Rothman
Response to Tepper
Craig Tepper 'The Cavell
Cavil' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6
no. 12, June 2002 http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n12tepper In his review of _Reading
Cavell's The World Viewed_, Craig Tepper allows that the
quality of _The World Viewed_'s writing earns it a companion
volume, and does not deny that we have valid reasons for
proceeding in our reading the way we do. He judges our
reading to be 'close' and 'alert', our insights 'sharp', our
references to Cavell's other writings 'apposite'. And he
finds the philosophical view at the heart of _The World
Viewed_, as our book helps bring it into focus, to be
breathtaking. By Tepper's own reckoning,
then, our book -- and _The World Viewed_, of course -- must
be judged to be, at the least, a considerable achievement.
But does he reflect even for a moment on our achievement,
much less Cavell's? No. All he does is harp on what he takes
to be the 'chief difficulty' that 'plagues' both books, the
'totalizing technique', as he calls it, he takes them to
share. According to Tepper, Cavell
withholds explanations, deferring them to the end, and thus
all the views and judgments he presents in the course of the
book are 'provisional'. And our book's aim, Tepper asserts,
'is never simple clarification where clarification might
entail any narrowing of Cavell's 'meaning''. Tepper goes on:
'If Wittgenstein suggested that an explanation is what
satisfies, Rothman and Keane, like Cavell, are not offering
anything like 'explanations'. Read on, read further,
meanings are to be deepened and widened is their tact
[sic]. In due course, all nine of Cavell's other
works' -- actually, Cavell has published not nine books but
thirteen by latest count, with more on the way -- 'eight
written subsequent to _The World Viewed_, are copiously
cited'. It is simply not the case,
though, that Cavell keeps saying (or implying), in effect,
'Wait until later'. On every page of _The World Viewed_, he
enters claims and offers explanations. He never takes them
back; they are not 'provisional'. To be sure, if we follow
his thinking, our understanding does deepen as we read on.
But that is not because Cavell employs what Tepper
disparagingly calls 'totalizing technique'. As we read _The
World Viewed_, following his thinking, our perspective
changes. When Tepper says that _The
World Viewed_ 'withholds its fullest aspect' until the end
and that we do so as well, hence that reading our book is
like reading Cavell's, the word 'withholds' implies,
erroneously, that Cavell deliberately refrains from saying
until the end what he could just as well have said at the
outset -- as if there were some other, more direct, path to
the perspective of self-knowledge that is in our view at
once the book's philosophical aspiration and achievement. Of
course, Cavell places certain of his claims and explanations
at the end of the book, but that doesn't mean that until
then he withholds them. Certain of his claims and
explanations, certain of his thoughts, are not possible for
him to express, or for us to grasp, without following the
book's thinking to its conclusion, that is, without
achieving the perspective that is the book's conclusion, its
conclusive achievement. Again, that is not because Cavell
employs 'totalizing technique', but because the writing of
_The World Viewed_ is 'under its own question', as Cavell
sometimes puts it. What _The World Viewed_ is about cannot
be separated from what the book is. That is part of what
makes it philosophy, in Cavell's view. On every page of our book,
we, too, enter claims and offer explanations. Except for a
handful of exceptions, our claims, too, are not
'provisional'. And, of course, we mean our explanations to
be satisfying. They satisfy us. Tepper is right, however,
that our aim is not what he calls 'simple clarification',
where 'clarification might entail any narrowing of Cavell's
meaning'. Why should we aim to 'narrow' Cavell's meaning?
Our aim is to hone in on it. Innumerable times in our book,
this requires us to run through a range of possible readings
of particular passages, commit ourselves to one (or
sometimes more than one, if two or more aspects are equally
in play), and explain our reasons for making these choices.
And we are forever paraphrasing Cavell's words and/or
amplifying on them by referring to his other writings. But
that is as it should be, given that our goal is to read _The
World Viewed_ in a way that follows its thinking. Cavell is
a major philosopher, after all, one who is committed, on
philosophical principle, to saying what he means, to finding
words he can stand behind to make his thoughts intelligible
to himself and others. Reading Cavell's words, we are
committed, on philosophical principle, to being open to what
they say and mean. Our reading is close, as Tepper
recognizes. But it is not closed, as he charges. That honor
belongs to him. 'Rothman and Keane', Tepper
writes (in a sentence that is as ungraceful as it is
ungracious), 'are generally tone deaf to' -- can one be
'tone deaf' to unvoiced difficulties? -- 'or uninterested in
giving voice to, the difficulties Cavell's book presents
outside those difficulties Cavell's method presents to
itself'. Because of our totalizing technique, Tepper
suggests, we offer no explication for 'the host of
provisional views and judgments offered' that 'readers have
found by turns provocative, wrong-headed, odd, or just
counter-intuitive'. What are the views and
judgments he has in mind? He doesn't say. He goes on to give
virtually no examples other than the one he addresses at
length, which he considers, in any case, to be 'an exception
that proves the rule'. What readers have found Cavell's
views and judgments to be 'provocative, wrong-headed, odd,
or just counter-intuitive'? How does he know this is how
readers find them? Again, he doesn't say. Tepper's language here seems
deliberately designed to convey the impression that the film
study literature has already done the job of identifying the
host of views and judgments in _The World Viewed_ that
allegedly strike readers this way, and has clearly
articulated what seems so provocative, wrong-headed, odd, or
just counter-intuitive about them. That is anything but the
case. Within film study, Cavell's writing, when referred to
at all, is routinely dismissed as vague, impressionistic,
self-indulgent, unrigorous, but this charge is never backed
up with specific examples. Several philosophers -- Alexander
Sesonske, Douglas Lackey, and Noel Carroll among them --
have been more forthcoming, presenting arguments intended to
counter several of Cavell claims. Our book addresses and
contests a number of these arguments But even if these
philosophers' arguments were accepted at face value, they
would hardly validate Tepper's blanket assertion that all
readers -- all readers who are not Cavell's disciples, that
is -- find _The World Viewed_ to be chock full of judgments
that are provocative, wrong-headed, odd, or just
counter-intuitive. As it stands, Tepper's assertion is as
unsupported and pernicious as those dismissals of Cavell's
writing by smug self-styled 'theorists', untutored in
philosophy, that are so prevalent within the field of film
study. Marian Keane and I,
personally, do not feel that any of Cavell's views and
judgments in _The World Viewed_ are counter-intuitive, odd,
or wrong-headed. (Some are provocative, perhaps, but it must
be kept in mind that Cavell is not a philosopher whose aim
is to provoke.) We hope, and believe, that most readers of
our book, as they follow Cavell's thinking with us, will
feel that way as well. The only example Tepper
offers is our treatment of Cavell's response to Alexander
Sesonske's response to _The World Viewed_. Except for the
condescending phrase 'soldiers on', we have no major problem
with Tepper's summary of Sesonske's objection, and Cavell's
reply, as we summarize them in our book. Tepper questions
whether Cavell succeeds in disarming Sesonske's objection,
as we claim he does, simply by pointing out that Sesonske
errs in assuming that Cavell believes movies to be
recordings of reality. Cavell's point, which Sesonske
misses, is that movies are projections, not recordings, of
reality. Tepper launches into several paragraphs that have
all the earmarks of dense argument, except for the fact that
they are complete nonsequiturs. The more he babbles on,
erroneously charging Cavell with a kind of essentialism that
Wittgenstein's _Philosophical Investigations_ teaches us to
distrust, the clearer it becomes that Tepper has completely
missed the point of Cavell's rejoinder to Sesonske, which is
that movies are not recordings at all. And the clearer it
becomes that Tepper does not really have a clue who Stanley
Cavell is, nor how deep a reader of Wittgenstein he is, as
evidenced by his philosophical masterwork _The Claim of
Reason_, and later books, among them _This New Yet
Unapproachable America_ and _Philosophical Passages_
(Tepper's cluelessness is never more obvious than when,
early in his review, he sums up Cavell's philosophical
enterprise as a 'contest with language'.) Chiding us for failing to
attend closely enough to Cavell's response to Sesonske, the
'evidence' of our alleged inattentiveness that Tepper
presents is an out-of-left-field claim that what is 'central
to Cavell's view of our relationship to movies' is that 'the
world we view in movies shares an identity' -- what does
that mean? -- 'with the world that provides the scene for
our lives'. Tepper goes on: 'For Cavell, it is not that
there aren't differences, it is that their likenesses, their
resemblances, are so pervasive and transparent that they are
missed. When Cavell's book succeeds in revealing their
correspondence it provides readers with the thrill of
insight, the exhilaration of seeing something clearly
obvious. It is this quality that has won him adherents and
earned him a companion reading.' As an interpretation of _The
World Viewed_, this strikes us, frankly, as not only
out-of-left-field, but also off-the-wall. On what grounds
does he make these claims as to what is 'central' to
Cavell's view of our relationship to movies, and what
'quality' the writing of _The World Viewed_ possesses that
has 'won him adherents and earned him a companion volume'?
What evidence does he provide? None. On what grounds does he
claim to know what it is that 'adherents' -- elsewhere, he
denigrates them as 'disciples' -- value in the book? He
doesn't say. What evidence does he provide? None. Viewed from a
Wittgensteinian perspective, Tepper argues, Cavell attempts
to have it both ways, attending to the particular case while
also following that 'craving for generality' that, according
to Wittgenstein, leads philosophers astray. Tepper
writes: 'Rothman and Keane
consistently draw our attention away from how Cavell, in
demanding adherence to his meaning in each 'particular
case', simultaneously appeals to 'our craving for
generality' -- how, for example, when Cavell speaks of 'the
world viewed' he conflates the world viewed in a movie with
the world itself.' How do we 'consistently
draw' attention away from this? Tepper doesn't say. How does
'conflating' the world on film and 'the world itself'
exemplify Cavell's appealing to our craving for generality?
Yet again, he doesn't say. Rest assured, in any case,
that Cavell is not guilty as charged. Nor are we. Cavell
does not conflate the world on film and 'the world itself'.
The world projected on the movie screen, in his view, is the
world transformed or transfigured by film. What that
transformation is, what it comes to, is a central issue in
_The World Viewed_. Tepper professes to find it
dumbfounding that we 'seem not to see, or are affecting not
to', that Cavell's assertion that 'the fact that the
projected world does not exist (now) is its only difference
from reality' -- significantly, Tepper omits Cavell's
parenthetical 'Existence is not a predicate', a link with
the understanding of Wittgenstein's concept of 'criterion'
that Cavell works out in _The Claim of Reason_ -- is likely
to generate confusion because 'we ordinarily think a movie
*differs* from reality' (note the slippage from 'projected
world' to 'movie') in '*a host* of ways'. But when we say:
'The projected world does not differ from reality by being,
for example, two- rather than three-dimensional', we are
acknowledging that we want to say -- as Tepper wants to say
-- that there is a host of ways in which the projected world
differs from reality. And yet, it is incontrovertible that
if the projected world did exist now, it would not be
separated from reality at all; it would be real. When we go on to reflect on
Cavell's understanding of the temporality of film, we are
acknowledging how remarkable it is that the world projected
on the screen is at once present and absent, like the world
of our memories. Cavell's claim does not seem provocative,
wrong-headed, odd, or counter-intuitive so long as we keep
in mind, as _The World Viewed_ calls upon us to do, that
film is something so strange, so singular, that we do not
know how to place it ontologically. What is remarkable, in
other words, is film's mode of existence itself, not
Cavell's claim that 'the fact that the projected world does
not exist (now) is its only difference from
reality'. What is truly dumbfounding
is Tepper's belief that by saying 'If I stand up in front of
the projector's beam don't I see my own head in silhouette?'
he can expose us as benighted souls who have been reading
Cavell too long. On the one hand, Tepper is astonished that
we don't consider this supposed objection to Cavell's view.
On the other hand, he points out how easily we could have
dismissed it. Evidently, he doesn't deem it a formidable
objection. Why does he imagine that any reader would? If
not, why should we consider it? Tepper opines that in
'pretending' that Cavell's claim is 'transparent', we are
'struggling to preserve an illusion of naturalness about
Cavell's words. It is the loss of a similar illusion which
Cavell confesses to having been a source of his own
promptings to write about cinema.' First, Cavell
specifically does not say that in the decades that he --
along with countless millions of others -- enjoyed what he
calls a 'natural relation' to movies, he was in the grip of
some kind of illusion. The world projected on the movie
screen is not an illusion, in Cavell's view. Awakening to the realization
that going to the movies was no longer a normal part of his
week, his experience of movies, and the movies in his
experience, Cavell began for the first time to think
philosophically about film. Writing _The World Viewed_
closed the book on his natural relation to movies. And our
book, far from asserting that _The World Viewed_ is
'transparent', far from trying to preserve 'an illusion of
naturalness' about Cavell's words, insists from first page
to last that without thinking, thinking for oneself, it is
not possible to read _The World Viewed_ in a way that
follows its thinking. The writing of that book was a great
achievement. And the writing of our book, our reading of
_The World Viewed_, is an achievement as well (if a modest
one by comparison). When Tepper says that
acknowledging how startling Cavell's claim ('The fact that
the projected world does not exist (now) is its only
difference from reality') is 'would have done more to
advance our understanding than pretending to its
transparency', he does not deign to say what this would have
done to advance our understanding. In any case, his use of
the word 'our' here is quite disingenuous. Throughout, his
know-it-all tone (all too familiar among academic
philosophers!) is meant to project an image -- here we have
a real illusion! -- of a philosopher who knows perfectly
well what Cavell's philosophical practice comes to, what
quality has won it adherents, what is central to his views.
Does his writing give us any grounds for believing that he
possesses such knowledge? No. Tepper ends by quoting what
he takes to be _The World Viewed_'s 'fullest statement',
that: 'A world complete without me which is present to me is
the world of my immortality. This is an importance of film
-- and a danger. It takes my life as my haunting of the
world.' He calls this a 'breathtaking' view -- the one and
only moment he acknowledges the grandeur of the book's
aspiration. But does he say, on the basis of his experience,
what makes this view so breathtaking? No. Instead, he
writes: 'Perhaps a book that hopes
to present so breathtaking a view, that so deftly invites
the reader to occupy the exact same space as its author, to
assume his language as well as his vision, is doomed to
hermetic enshrinement, to be available only to those who
initiate themselves by way of its difficulties.' Is it really the case that
_The World Viewed_ invites the reader to occupy the exact
same space as its author? Of course not. Reading _The World
Viewed_ isn't the same as writing it. Once these words are
in the world, they are open to being read. To read these
words the way we do, to follow their thinking, is not to
'assume' Cavell's language, to claim possession of it or
take it for granted. Reading _The World Viewed_ in a way
that follows its thinking requires questioning its words,
interrogating them, checking them against our own
experience. It is perhaps fair to say
that _The World Viewed_ -- and perhaps our book as well --
is only 'available to those who initiate themselves by way
of its difficulties'. That is, it is available only to
readers who follow the book's thinking. Is that the same
thing as saying that such a book is 'doomed to hermetic
enshrinement'? Is 'hermetic enshrinement' a just
characterization of our book? Of course not. Marian and I
don't worship _The World Viewed_, we read it. We are readers
of Cavell, not his 'disciples', if that is taken to mean --
Tepper takes it this way -- that our close relationship to
Cavell's thought in general, or our close reading of _The
World Viewed_ in particular, deprives us of the power to
think for ourselves. On the contrary, we find it enabling.
We try in our book to help readers to realize how liberating
Cavell's understanding and practice of philosophy can
be. In _Reading Cavell's The
World Viewed_ we do not hide the fact -- it is hardly
something to be ashamed of -- that Stanley Cavell is a
cherished friend. Nor the fact that we have both had the
good fortune of having been his students (we still are, if
'student' is understood in Emerson's sense). Cavell is a
great teacher of philosophy, and for him philosophy is not a
game of one-upmanship, as it is for Tepper. In the classroom
as well as in his published writings, what Cavell teaches
above all is the necessity of thinking for oneself, of
checking one's own words, and those of others, against one's
experience (and vice versa). Tepper predicts that 'the
audience for _Reading Cavell's The World Viewed_ will in the
main be [Cavell's] disciples', adding: 'Those who
turn to it in frustration, looking for a way in to _The
World Viewed_, will remain so.' Do we accept Tepper's view
that our potential readers can be divided between Cavell's
disciples, on the one hand, and, on the other, readers of
_The World Viewed_ who are frustrated, and will remain
frustrated, because they are unable to find a way in? Again,
our answer is: of course not. We know many readers, in and
out of the field of philosophy -- potentially, there are far
more -- who are in no sense Cavell's disciples but who find
his writings, as we do, to be enabling, indeed inspiring,
but challenging. In our experience, most of
the people in the field of film study who have dismissed
_The World Viewed_ cannot accurately be described as
'frustrated'. They haven't tried, but failed, to find a way
'in'. Mostly, they haven't tried. Even more objectionable,
though, is Tepper's studied ambiguity as to his own relation
to _The World Viewed_. Is he one of those frustrated
readers, poor souls, whose pain he claims to feel? He denies
it, for he makes a point of showing -- or, rather,
pretending -- that he is really 'in', indeed more 'in' than
we are. Then how can he be so sure that he speaks for all
readers who are not Cavell's disciples? How can he be so
sure that they are frustrated? And how can he so sure that
our book will not, cannot, speak to them? University of Miami,
Florida, USA Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Willam Rothman, 'Response to
Tepper', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 13, June 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n13rothman>.
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