TOWARD A READING OF THE WORLD VIEWED Author(s): WILLIAM ROTHMAN and MARIAN KEANE Source: Journal of Film and

Video, Vol. 49, No. 1/2 (Spring-Summer 1997), pp. 5-16 Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the University Film & Video Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20688129 . Accessed: 22/01/2014 13:46
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TOWARDA READING OF THEWORLD VIEWED

WILLIAM ROTHMAN AND MARIAN KEANE

From its first large-scale entrance into American universities in the late 1960s, film studieshas been sweptby a succession of the oretical frameworks and methodologies. The publication of several influentialessays and Wollen's Signs and books (forexample, Peter Meaning in the Cinema; the translations in Screen of articles from the post-May '68 Cahiers du Cinema, most influentialamong them the piece on YoungMr. Lincoln; Laura "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Mulvey's Cinema") represent formativemoments in thisdevelopment. Equally formative was the publication, in 1971, of Stanley Cavell's The World Viewed. event in the But what made this an important was the in of film America studies history mis book's nonreception by thefield. On the takenground thatThe World Viewed advocat ed a realist theory of film in the Bazinian mold, those in the field dismissed Cavell's book. In the intervening years,most scholars and teachersof film studies have not returned to The World Viewed to reconsider that initial judgment that the book's theoretical claims are simplistic?and the book's potential use fulness remains all but completely unknown. The potential value of The World Viewed for the serious studyof film is a functionboth of
William is an associate professor and Rothman director of the graduate program in film studies at theUniversity ofMiami School of Communication. is the author of Hitchcock?The He Murderous and Documentary Gaze, The "I" of the Camera, is an assistant pro Film Classics. Marian Keane fessor of film studies at theUniversity of Colorado

the fruitfulness of its guiding intuitionsand the scrupulousness with which Cavell takes it upon himself?chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence?to find words of our common language, ordinary words we and he are equally capable of understanding, to make his intuitions? indeed, himself?intelligible. Cavell's writ ing always endeavors at once to exemplify the and to teach thedisci importanceof intuition of that words achieve a perspec pline finding tive thatenables a clear understanding to be
reached.

In accepting this double obligation, The World Viewed relies on procedures of philo sophical investigationpioneered by Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin (Cavell's own professor of philosophy) and often associated with the term "ordinary language philoso phy."An analytical philosopher proceeds by abstract analysis or by defining technical terms to be given special uses. Like Wittgenstein and Austin, Cavell proceeds by appealing philosophically towhat we ordinar ily say and mean. It is an extraordinaryand illuminatingfeatureof The World Viewed that it introduces no special terminology, no "buzz words," but ratherrelies entirelyon the precision and clarity of ordinary words in their appropriate contexts. In appealing to what we ordinarily say and mean, Cavell's aim is tomake us conscious of differences (between a photograph of a tree and a paint ing of a tree, for example, or between a pho tographof a treeand the tree itself) of which
we had somehow not been conscious, to ren

at Boulder. femi She has written on Hitchcock, nist film theory, film acting, film authorship, and film genres. 1997 byW. Rothman and M. Keane

der themperspicuous. In general, to ask of someone who has mas

tered the language?oneself, for example? as "What should we say if...?" such questions

Copyright ?

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or "In what

circumstances

would

we

call...?"

is to ask the person to say something about himself or herself, to describe something that we ordinarily say andmean (like Freud's pro cedures of free association, dream analysis, investigationof verbal and behavioral slips, noting and analyzing "transferred" feeling, and so on) are procedures for acquiring self
knowledge. person does. Hence, Cavell's appeals to what

that Cavell's philosophical procedures cannot be taught. Over theyears, in thecourse of try learnedpractical ways of teaching this way of end These and ways begin thinking. by encouraging students to attend to their own words and to be responsive to the instruction and encouragement and the sense of libera tionCavell's words are capable of providing those who aspire to give voice to their own experience ofmovies. What follows is material drawn from two chapters of Cavell's "The World Viewed": A Philosophical Perspective.We arewriting this many teachers and book-length reading for the students who seek a philosophical alternative to thedominant theoreticalframeworks of film studies. The World Viewed speaks directly to theirquest?our quest?for a way of thinking seriously about film that does not deny the value of our experience ofmovies, or thevalue of giving voice to our own experience.
ing out various classroom strategies, we have

When we acquire knowledge through these caused by lack of information. What we come to know are not factswe had simply failed to know. They are factswe had denied, factswe had failed to acknowledge. It is misleading to picture Cavell as having firstaccepted or adopted a "theoreticalframe work" or "methodology" and then accepted its results,because it is not possible to accept or adopt thisway of thinkingapart from its results.The mode is not assertion; it is revela tion. In investigating the kind of knowledge of which self-knowledge is a paradigm, Cavell employs philosophical procedures that
enable one to procedures, we do not cure an ignorance

The Ontology of the Photographic

Image

Without knowing oneself, one cannot know

what self-knowledge is.

acquire

self-knowledge.

In "The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear" written on the eve of the theoret ical revolution in literary studies, Cavell New Criticism in noted thatthe success of the was "a func the academic study of literature tion of theway it is teachable. You can train someone to read complex poems with suffi cient complexity, there is always something to say about them" (269). The theoretical sys tems that supplanted the New Criticism in lit erature departments and that have come to dominate the academic study of film as well sharewith it thisfeatureCavell calls "extreme
teachability."

The starting point of the argument in "Sights and Sounds," Chapter 2 of The World Viewed, is that movies have to do with the projection of reality. As Cavell explains in "More of The World Viewed," the lengthyaddendum includ ed in the 1979 "enlarged edition": Since the objects of film I have seen
which . . . strike me as

of art all incontestably use moving pic tures of live persons and real things in actual spaces, I began my investigation of film by asking what role realityplays
in this art. . . .The issue . . .was,

having

the force

case, forced upon me by the experience of Panofsky and of Andre Bazin . . . whatever my discomforts with their unabashed appeals to nature and to reali ty (165-66). In arguing that theunprecedented role reality plays in film must be his startingpoint in medium?in reflectingon theontology of the reflecting on what film is, on itsmode of

in any

There is and can be no "extremely teachable" systemfor trainingsomeone inCavell's philo sophical discipline, for acquiring the philo or for sophical perspective of self-reflection, passing it on. This does notmean, however,

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is well aware that he is existence?Cavell bucking a "pervasive intellectual fashion, apparently sanctioned by the history of epis temology and the rise of modern science, according towhich we never really, and never really can, see reality as it is" (165). is willing to resist this fashionable skepticism because of his conviction that "a general dismissal of reality depends upon theories (of knowledge, of science, of art, of reality, of realism) whose power to convince is hardly greater than reality's own" (165). We would add to his list some of the new Cavell
theoretical

themesof The World Viewed. Equally central is the ontological difference between reality and projections of reality?that is, what the mode of displacing reality in film comes to, what the transformationsof reality on film make possible (and what theymake neces
sary).

struction, and cultural theory, for exam ple?that claim to underwrite the view that we can never know reality as it is?"whose power to convince is hardly greater than reality's own" (165). Yet it is a fundamentalerror to think of Cavell as a Bazinian realist.While agreeing that movies are "committed to communicate only by way of what is real," as he paraphrases Bazin, Cavell rejects the "unabashed appeals" to nature and reality inherentinBazin's view that cinema is essentially a dramaturgy of nature or Panofsky's view thatphysical reali ty as such is themedium of movies. "What Panofsky and Bazin have in mind," Cavell medium of suggests, "is that thebasis of the movies is photographic, and that a photo graph is of reality" (16). But Panofsky and Bazin do not ask thepointed question Cavell asks, thequestion thatguides the thinkingof The World Viewed:What becomes of reality when it is projected and screened? What becomes of objects and persons in theworld when film displaces them from theirnatural
sequences and locales.1

frameworks?semiology,

decon

These themes are linked, in turn, to yet another of the central themes in The World Viewed: the difference between film and painting?what their difference comes to, what itmakes possible, and what itmakes necessary, for each. (In attempting to under standwhat something is, Cavell attempts to work through, specifically and concretely, theways itdiffersfromother things. Not for different how different of kinds getting things are is a fundamental methodological principle of The World Viewed.) One way The World Viewed develops these themes is by reflectingon the historical fact that modernist painting came to forgo the rep resentationof reality. Embracing the interpre tationof the history of painting proposed by Michael Fried, Cavell challenges the perva sive view that with the painting contemporary advent of motion pictures (in common with other representationalarts, such as thenovel) had been "withdrawingfrom the representa tionof reality as from a hopeless, but always unnecessary, task" (165). Even as paintings were forced to forgo likeness, Cavell insists, reality continued to play a central role in
painting.

"On film reality is not merely described or merely represented," Cavell writes (166). Movies project and screen reality rather than describing it, as (some) novels do, or repre senting it, as (some) paintings do. Insofar as movies representreality, theydo so byway of projections, not representations, of reality. The ontological differencebetween represen tations and projections is one of the central

According to The World Viewed, photograph icmedia such as movies did not take up the task of representing reality.Reality plays a central role infilm,Cavell argues, but its role is not that of being represented.One of the of The World Viewed is that guiding intuitions the role reality plays in films cannot be accounted for without addressing theontolog ical difference between photography and painting. In turn, the ontological difference between photography and painting cannot be accounted for without addressing the mysteri ous relationshipbetween a photograph and the object(s) and/orperson(s) in that photograph.

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Near the startof Chapter 2, Cavell takes an initial stab at characterizing this relationship: "A photograph does not present us with 'like
nesses' aim of

theway the sound of a horn is separable from thehorn itself?that a photograph is a copy of. We said that the record reproduces its sound, but we cannot say that a photo graph reproduces a sight (or a look or an
appearance). . . . What you see, when

say, with the things themselves" (17). His readerwithout proof but to call upon the read er to prove something, to test something against herself or himself. But how are we to proceed in testing such a claim? What does such a test involve? Cavell's "we want to say" alerts us to the fact thathe realizes it sounds paradoxical, or even obviously false, to say thatphotographs pre sent us not with the likenesses of thingsbut with the things themselves.But "Photographs do not present us with things themselves" or false. sounds equally paradoxical and Austin's Embracing Wittgenstein's we can that find out methodological principle what kind of object anything is by investigat ing expressions that show thekinds of things said about it, the lesson Cavell draws from we do not know how to charac the fact that terize the relationship between a photograph and the objects and persons in that photo graph is thatwe do not know how to place photographs ontologically.We do not know
what photographs are. here, as always, is not to convince the

things;

it presents

us, we

want

to

you sight something, is an object?any way not the sight of an object. Nor will
the epistemologist's "surfaces" provide "sense-data" correct descriptions or

here_If the sense-data of photographs were the same as the sense-data of the objects they contain, we couldn't tell a photograph of an object from the object itself.To say thata photograph is of the surfaces of objects suggests that it Objects are too close to their sights to give them up for re-producing; in order to reproduce the sights they (as itwere)
make, emphasizes texture.... I feel like saying:

make

a mold, (19-20).

you

have

to

or take an impression

reproduce

them?

What accounts for our failure to know this? Cavell specifies a source of our perplexity: we don't know how to We might say that thinkof the connection of a photograph and what it is a photograph of.The image is not a likeness; it is not exactly a repli though all of these . . . share a striking feature with photographs?an aura or historyofmagic surrounding them (18). An recording is not ontologically unplaceable theway a photograph is, Cavell remindsus. A recording (of a French horn, for example) is a copy (in principle, it can be an all-but-perfect copy) of something (of the sound made by that horn). But there is no comparable something?no thingseparable in principle from the object in the photograph, audio
ca, or a shadow, or an apparition either,

The implication is not thatphotographs repro duce the objects in them, but that pho tographs are not recordings at all. To speak of a photograph as if itwere a recording, as Bazin does, is to forget how differentpho tographs and recordings are, to fail to acknowledge what each, in its difference, is,
what makes each special.

Cavell also finds himself unable to accept Bazin's suggestion thatphotographs are visu al molds or impressions. To speak of pho were molds is to forget how tographsas if they differentphotographs and molds are from each other. In particular, it is to forget that "molds and impressions and imprintshave clear procedures forgettingrid of theirorigi nals, whereas in a photograph, the original is stillas present as iteverwas. Not present as it once was to the camera; but that is only a mold itself (20). mold-machine, not the By speaking of them as if theywere molds, Bazin fails to place photographs ontological ly.He forgetswhat it is about photographs we find so perplexing.And to forget that what

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According to Cavell in The World Viewed, to know that a photograph is of one's grand mother, for example, is to know something about one's own origins, exemplified here in a portrait of Sarah Shagan Rothman and a less formal picture of Catherine O'Brien Keane, grandmothers of the authors. perplexes us about photographs is not only to forgetsomethingabout theseobjects, it is also thingabout our own experience, that is per plexing forus to thinkabout, to tryto place. "A child," Cavell writes, "mightbe verypuz zled by the remark, said of a photograph, " That's your grandmother' (18). The child does not yet know (as we might put it)what a photograph is, has not yet learned to say and mean the kinds of thingswe ordinarily say and mean in talkingabout photographs.This object she is holding inher hand is obviously not thechild's grandmother in the flesh.Then how can she call this her "grandmother"? How can itbe her grandmother?who is not now present?is invisible? Her puzzlement reveals, as well, that if the child does not (yet) know what a photograph is, simply pointing to a photograph of her grandmother and saying "That's your grandmother" is unlikely in and of itselfto teach this to her.
to forget something about ourselves, some

The Puzzlement of Seeing Something That Is Not Present

Cavell's example, Characteristically, is a resonant it may casual appear, however one. To

know thatan object is a photograph is toknow somethingabout itsorigins.To know that this is a photograph of one's grandmother, that this is themother of one's own mother or father, is to know something as well about
one's own

the picture, about how one enters into this picture. The scene of instruction Cavell
invokes intimates a

origins?about

how

one

entered

within The World Viewed as a whole, between the way it is mysterious to us what pho tographs are, how they have entered the world, and the way it ismysterious tous what
we are, how we case, have entered the world. "Children are

connection,

explored

very early no longer puzzled by such remarks, luckily" (18). Children quickly

In any

as Cavell

notes,

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learn to say andmean thekinds ofwords ordi narily said and meant about photographs. And, as Cavell's "luckily" implies, they are fortunateto learn theseways of speaking. But that children are soon no longer puzzled by remarks like "This is your grandmother" said in the presence of a photograph does not mean thattheyhave arrived at a solution, as it were, to thepuzzle that the existence of pho tographs once posed to them. Indeed, ifwe when we stop to thinkabout it, the fact that look at a photograph, we see things that are not present is still as puzzling to us as it ever was. That ordinarilywe do not stop to think we repress our origi about photographs, that nal puzzlement, is itself a puzzling fact? about photographs and about ourselves. "It may be felt that I make too great a mys tery of these objects," Cavell writes. "My feeling is rather thatwe have forgottenhow mysterious these things are, and in general how differentdifferent things are from one another, as thoughwe had forgottenhow to value them" (19).When we forgethow mys terious photographs are, how different they are from other kinds of things, we forget something about the value of photographs. This is a crucial point. Because when we for get how mysterious photographs are, we also forgethow mysterious we are (how different human beings are fromother kinds of beings We forgethow to value and fromeach other).
our own

when we look at a photograph,we see things that are not present. Such theorizing begins from a wish to deny the puzzlement internal to our experience of photographs, internal to
what, in our own tographs, experience, to be. and ourselves, we know pho

Let us here iteratethat, in entering this claim, Cavell calls upon us, as always, to test it claim is that it remainsmysterious to us what photographs are, it is no evidence against his may be difficultor impossible position that it to spell out a coherent and intelligible realist theory of photography. This means that the kinds of objections No?l Carroll cogently raises inPhilosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory against theposition he attributes to Bazin have no force against Cavell, although Carroll takes some of them to apply toThe World Viewed, too: Bazin believes that a . . . photographic objects, places, events, and persons that A photographic image re gave rise to it. its himself does model_Bazin presents not really supply an argument for this contemporary point. The leading
Bazinian, image is always an image of ... the against our own experience. Because his

Cavell initiates his argument by asking films reproduce (98). what it is that As we have seen, however, Cavell does not initiatehis argument in Chapter 2 by asking
what films

Stanley

Cavell,

however,

does.

something about the value of being human.

lives,

our own

experience.

We

forget

Up to thispoint inChapter 2, Cavell has not claimed toprovide a definitionofwhat a pho tograph is. Nor does the remainder of the chapter provide such a definition. Neither does the chapter go on to advance a theory thatclaims to explain theontology of thepho tographic image. For example, Cavell does not offer a comparable theoryof his own to counter Bazin's theory that photographs are recordings or molds. On the contrary, the claim made by Chapter 2 is that to advance such a theory?to theorize, for example, that photographs are iconic signs, or ideological
constructs, or media texts?is

acknowledging our impulse to say thata pho tograph presents us not with reproductions, with likenesses of things,butwith the things themselves,Cavell's question iswhat it is that a photograph of an object presents. Perhaps it is simple inattentiveness to Cavell's words or, perhaps, a reluctance to repudiate the commonly held opinion that Cavell is a Bazin clone that leads Carroll astraywhen he writes:
Cavell.. . argues that "sights" are rather

reproduce

or

re-present.

Rather,

explain, or explain away, themystery that

to attempt

to

queer metaphysical entities thatmight better be banished from one's ontology

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in thename of parsimony. . . .But if it is not the sight or the appearance of the object that a photographic image repre must be theobject itselfthat sents, then it is represented (145). Cavell's argument is not, as Carroll takes it to be, that objects do not have sights theway French horns have sounds, thatfor thatreason a photographof an object cannot representthe must be of that it sight object, and thattherefore theobject itselfthatthephotograph represents. Rather, his argumentis thata photographdoes not bear the relationship to anything that a recordingbears to the sound it reproduces.A photograph does not reproduce the sight or appearance of an object thatis "in" it,but nei does itreproduce theobject itself. Cavell's ther no a is is that that there thing photograph point reproduces.And he concludes from this that or copies or photographs are not reproductions at all. Nor do recordings photographs represent ("re-present") theobjects thatappear in them, for the reason thatin a photograph theoriginal is stillas present as iteverwas. When Cavell argues thatwhat makes pho from all otherkinds of things different tographs in theworld, what makes their singularityso mysterious singularlydifficultto place, is the we see fact that when we look at a photograph, things that are not present, he anticipates aft objection: "Someone will object: 'That is play not withwords.We're not seeing something ing we are at present; perfectly looking something " present,namely, a photograph' (19). Carroll voices precisely the objection Cavell anticipates: "But why must we believe that somethingor anything is in fact re-presented via photographicrepresentation?...What pho does is toproduce a stand-infor its tography model" (145). Cavell's reply to his own imag ined interlocutor is a tellingrejoinder: "That is somethingI have not denied. On the affirming contrary,I am precisely describing, orwishing means to say that there is to describe, what it this photographhere" (19). Cavell's point is thatthe relationshipbetween an object or a person in a photograph and the

photograph itself is differentfrom thatobject or person's relationshipwith any other kind of thing in theworld. Merely saying that a photograph "produces a stand-in for its model" does nothing to remind us how that kind of stand-in is differentfromother types of stand-ins (from counterfeitsor fakes, for example, which are intended to be passed off for the real thing,or fromproxies or agents, which are not). Ordinarily, a stand-in stands in for a different person or thing.There are criteria for distin guishing between the two, although in some cases it may require special expertise to apply those criteria, to recognize that these are different individuals. The person(s) and/orobject(s) a given photograph is of and the person(s) and/or object(s) in thatphoto graph are identical, however, not different. There are no criteria for distinguishing one from theother for the simple reason that they
are one and the same.

To speak of photographs as stand-ins, then, is not to render perspicuous the singular rela tionship between a photograph and the per son^) and/or object(s) in it.To believe that theyare is, once again, to forgethow differ ent photographs are from all other kinds of things in theworld. Again, Chapter 2 in no way claims to explain or explain away what we find per plexing in the relationship between pho tographs and the person(s) and/or object(s) in them.The chapter only calls upon us not to forget, to stop forgetting, that there is somethingmysterious to us in the fact that when we look at photographs, we see things
that are not present.

The 'Inescapable Fact' ofAutomatism Although The World Viewed does not accept Bazin's suggestion that cameras are mold machines, itdoes endorseBazin's view that,as Cavell puts it, "photographs are not hand made; theyaremanufactured," thatthereis an "inescapable factofmechanism or automatism

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in the making of these images" (20). A deep claim of The World Viewed is that themys tery, thewonder, of photographs resides in theircapacity to allow persons and objects to
present?to reveal?themselves.

automatism is a key to thinkingthrough that

relationship.

As a first step,Cavell argues: [It is]misleading to say, as Bazin does, that "photography has freed the plastic arts from theirobsession with likeness," for this makes it seem (and itdoes often look) as if photography and painting were in competition, or thatpainting had wanted something that photography broke in and satisfied (21). formulation implies, in effect, that painting wished to be photography. But the aspiration of painting was always to create paintings, Cavell argues. And the obsession of painting, historically, was not with like ness butwith reality. This same obsession that led painting to create ever-more-perfectlike nesses ultimately forced painting, inManet, to forgo likeness, because "the illusions ithad learned to create did not provide the convic tion in reality, the connection with reality, that itcraved" (21). And ifphotographydid not freepainting from likeness, it also did not free it from the idea thata painting had to be a picture (that is, of or about something else): Painting did not free itself,did not force itself to maintain itself apart, from all objective reference until long after the establishment of photography; and then not because itfinally dawned on painters that paintings were not pictures, but because thatwas the way to maintain connectionwith (thehistoryof) the artof painting, to maintain conviction in its powers to create paintings, meaningful objects in paint (21). Furthermore, the final denial in painting of objective reference was not a complete yielding of a connection with reality,Cavell argues. On the contrary, this denial was motivated precisely by the craving for this
connection, which likenesses were no

In our experience of teaching The World Viewed, students frequentlytake umbrage at the idea that the world itselfplays such an active role inphotography. They takeCavell to be implyingthatthere is no art tophotography. Nothing could be furtherfrom his intention. He is not denying that photographs can be composed like paintings, for example, or oth erwise shaped or manipulated by an artist's hand. His claim is that there is an inescapable aspect or element ofmechanism or automatism in the making of photographs, not thatthereis nothing butmechanism or automatism in the making of these images. His claim is that the art in photography therefore lies in creating pictures thatacknowledge this fact about their making, thatacknowledge that they are pho tographs (the way modernist paintings acknowledge thattheyare paintings). Although Cavell agrees that it is significant what he takes to be Bazin's claim thatthe ele ment of mechanism or automatism in their making enables photographs to satisfy "once
and for all and that photographs are not handmade, he rejects

Bazin's

sion with realism" (20). This claim is mis leading, because it denies photography the statusof amedium. That photography enables theworld to present or reveal itselfdoes not mean there is no differencebetween a photo graph and the subjects of thatphotograph. Then what does the fact of automatism in the making of photographsmean? "Getting to the right depth of thisfact,"Cavell says, is a task the remainder of Chapter 2 undertakes. Or dense two and a half rather,an extraordinarily pages begin to undertake this task. For "get ting to theright depth of this fact of automa tism" is a project thatoccupies thewhole of TheWorld Viewed. This must be so, given that the relationship between film and painting is one of the central concerns of the book and given Cavell's conviction that the concept of

in its very

essence,

our obses

able to satisfy. Objective referenceno longer

longer

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enabled painting to satisfy this craving because itno longer enabled painting to pro
vide a

presentness to the world, the world's pre sentness to us. (The concept of "present ness," crucial to the argument of The World Viewed as a whole, is taken up at length in the pivotal chapter "Excursus: Some Modernist Painting." Suffice it to say here that Cavell does not give theword some spe cial meaning, does not use it as a technical
term. "Presentness," like "whiteness" as Cavell or used the term a noun

convincing

sense

of presentness?our

in The World Viewed, is an ordinary noun

"blackness,"

formed from the word "present" in accor dance with the familiar grammar of the English language. What theword "present ness" means, what presentness is, hinges on what "present" means, on what the present is, on what we mean when we speak of the present, or speak of someone or something
as present. "Presentness" as in Derrida's of presence."2) does not mean of "the "presence," metaphysics critique

The World Viewed understands theunhinging of our consciousness from theworld to be a historical event?and also a mythical event, like thebiblical fall fromgrace. Picture itas a philosophical and spiritualand psychological and political cataclysm thatpresents us with a new fact (or is it a new consciousness of an old fact?) about ourselves, about our condi tion as modern human beings.We now find ourselves, know ourselves as, isolated by our subjectivity. It is our subjectivity that is pre sent to us, not a world we may objectively apprehend.Nor do we objectively apprehend our own subjectivity;even our subjectivity is only present to us subjectively. Our con sciousness has become unhinged from our selves, too. (This idea or claim matches Freud's intuition?his inheritance and revi sion ofKant?that psychic reality is the real ityof theunconscious.) "So far as photography satisfied a wish," Cavell goes on, it satisfied "the human wish, since the intensifying in the West Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation?a wish for thepower to reach thisworld, having for so long tried, at last hopelessly, to manifest fidelity to another" (21). Our wish to escape subjectivi ty cannot be separated from our wish to achieve selfhood; selfhood cannot be
achieved

That objective reference no longer enables painting to provide a sense of presentness reflects a fundamental change in the condi tion of human existence, Cavell argues. Our consciousness has become unhinged from the world, he says in one of his most suggestive passages: "At some point theunhinging of our consciousness from theworld interposed our subjectivitybetween us and our presentness to theworld. Then our subjectivity became what is present to us, individuality became isolation (22). The World Viewed returnsagain and again to this idea of the unhinging of our conscious ness from the world. At one level, Cavell locates this "unhinging" at a particular histor ical moment (the Protestant Reformation, Shakespearean tragedy, the birth of modern with philosophy inDescartes's confrontation skeptical doubt). But Cavell suggests that it may also be located (psychoanalytically, as it moment in every modern were) at a particular human being's lifehistory; once having taken place, it is also repeated again and again in that individual's everyday life.

apart from escaping themetaphysical isola tion thathas become our condition. Cavell's powerful and original philosophical idea is that selfhood cannot be achieved apart from theacknowledgment of others (theiracknowl edgment of us, and ours of them).Hence he writes, "Apart from the wish for selfhood (hence the always simultaneous granting of otherness as well), I do not understand the value of art. Apart from this wish and its achievement, art is exhibition" (22). Merely to represent (as expressionism does, for example) our terrorof ourselves in iso lation, which is our response to this new fact of our condition, is to exhibit our isola tion?it is to theatricalize and thereby seal our fate. Cavell argues that for modern human beings, for all of us who find our

apart

from

reaching

this world,

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subjectivity interposed between our selves and theworld, modernist painting and pho tography represent two different routes to overcoming theatricality, to reaching this world and achieving selfhood. Modernist painting accepts the recession of theworld in order tomaintain conviction in its own power to establish connection with reality. It acknowledges the endless presence of subjectivity in order to permit us "present ness to ourselves, apart fromwhich there is no hope for a world" (23). "To speak of our subjectivity as the route back to our convic tion in reality is to speak of romanticism," Cavell observes: Hence Kant, and Hegel; hence Blake secreting theworld he believes in; hence Wordsworth competing with the history of poetry by writing out himself, writing himself back into theworld. A century later Heidegger is investigating Being by . . Wittgenstein investigates theworld . we we what say, what by investigating are inclined to say, what our pictures of world from our possessions so thatwe may possess itagain (22). In such passages, The World viewed may be read as acknowledging its own roots within romanticism.For Cavell is a philosopher who what investigates theworld by investigating we say about the world, who seeks by writing to restorehimself to the world, who calls upon us towrest theworld from our possessions so we may possess itagain in a new way. that In The World viewed, Cavell acknowledges thatwhat he calls his "natural relation" to movies has been broken.His book calls upon us to acknowledge that we, too, are no longer world ofmovies theway we possessed by the
once were, that we no phenomena are, in order to wrest the investigating Dasein . . . and

what

we

By investigatingan experience of films that is ours as well, The World Viewed calls upon us tomake that experience present to us. The goal is not to enable us to restore the relation tomovies thatonce came naturally to us, but to enable us to achieve a new philosophical relation to movies, to the world, to ourselves. Movies are photographic. And the route of photography to reaching this world and achieving selfhood, as opposed to the routeof modernist painting, is by overcoming the endless presence of subjectivity. Photography maintains the presentness of the world by accepting our absence from it. The reality in a photograph is me while I am not present to it present to ... (throughno faultofmy subjectivity). . .. Photography overcomes subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, a way that could not satisfypainting, one which does not somuch defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction (23). With this thought,thatphotography produces images of reality automatically, without the interventionof subjectivity,Cavell feels, he has at least provisionally gotten "to theright depth of this fact of automatism."

say about

the phenomena

of movies.

Conclusion: The Value of Conversation We are now prepared to say why Cavell believes it is misleading to claim that the inescapable fact ofmechanism or automatism in the making of photographs enables photog once and forall, and in itsvery raphy to satisfy essence, our obsession with realism: first, because our obsession was neverwith realism but with reality (with reaching this world, attaining selfhood) and, second, because pho tographsare notmore realistic thanpaintings. That photographic media communicate by way ofwhat is real does notmake them inher makes no more sense ently realistic. Indeed, it

world ofmovies theway we once did.

longer

possess

the

In giving thought to our new sense that the world ofmovies has become lost tous, Cavell proceeds by investigating, philosophically,

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to speak of photographs as realistic than to speak of reality as realistic. Realistic as opposed to what? Fantastic? What could be more fantasticthanreality? Reality is real, not realistic. After all, as Cavell remindsus, reali ty is precisely what it is thatfantasy may be mistaken for. When objects and persons in the world are projected and screened, theyare dis placed from their natural sequences and locales. This displacement, which enables movies to depict the fantasticas readily as the natural (a point crucial to the argumentof The World Viewed as a whole), is itselfan acknowl edgment of theirphysical reality.Only what exists in theworld can be photographed, can be subject to photography'sway of displacing things and people. And what exists in the world alreadybears the stampof our fantasies. There is no particular featureor set of features by which the world on film can be distin guished from reality, and yet theworld pro jected on themovie screen does not exist movies makes (now). The role realityplays in theworld on film a moving image of skepti cism, Cavell argues. But he also argues?and forCavell this is a fundamentalphilosophical principle?that thepossibility of skepticism is to theconditions of human knowledge. internal That we cannotknow reality with absolute cer taintyis a fact about human knowledge, a fact
about what

according film studies the authorityof a sci ence, a certaintyunattainable by acts of criti
cism accountable to our experience.

Far more radical, The World Viewed denies us both of these assurances. The book denies us the assurance that in our postmodern age there is no such thingas truth,thatno inter And it pretation isworthmore thanany other. denies us theopposite assurance, thatby con forming to its way of thinking, we can acquire truths that have been scientifically proven. It denies us the assurance that there are no longer any villains. And it also denies us the assurance that we are on the side of the ble of vanquishing villains like capitalism or patriarchy or bourgeois ideology or a hege monic American culture that imposes its lies on unthinking masses. Continually turning in on itself, The World us to ourselves, calls Viewed continually turns world and upon us togo forward, to reach this achieve selfhood. We keep on being told that we live in an age that has moved beyondmod ernism. Yet on what authorityarewe to accept we have been released from it as proved that our condition as modern human beings, that we no longerwish to master the self's fate, or we can no longerbelieve suchmastery to that be possible? Some will condemn Cavell's rad ical aspiration as romantic, not recognizing thattheir despair of selfhood is itselfromantic. Others will condemn it as irrational,not rec ognizing that theirpositivist faith in rationali ty itselfhas an irrational aspect. Both sides will assume that the language of the self has been discredited as a basis for serious thought. And yet apart from the language of the self we have no language with which to converse with others. The language inwhich we voice our own thoughts and feelings is not a pri vate language; it is our common language. The language of the self is the language of others, Cavell's writing reminds us. In remindingus of the importance of turningto our own experience, The World Viewed reminds us of the importance of turning to others. It reminds us of the importance of
angels, that we are joining a movement capa

we cannot Itdoes not followfrom thisfact that world or ourselves in it. reallyknow the Theories that claim to prove the skeptical view thatwe can never really know reality cannot ultimately defeat our conviction in reality.But neither can simplistic appeals to reality, claims thatwe can attain certainty after all, ultimatelyfree us from the human uncertainties, the anxieties, thatgive rise to we philosophical skepticism, to thedoubt that can know theworld or ourselves in it. The dominant contemporary film theories either embrace skepticism or claim to defeat we have nothing it.They either assure us that to lose by accepting the view thatknowledge is impossible, or else theyassure us that they provide systems of thought capable of

knowledge,

for human

beings,

is.

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conversation, ourselves with

the

of importance expressing and enthusiasm, conviction

and the equal importance of acknowledging each other's words. Therein lies the greatest potential usefulness of The World Viewed in teaching students to think seriously about film. Film studies is a field thathas foregone conversation for so long that ithas forgotten something about what conversation is, for gotten how to value it.

taking American culture seriously is deeply woven into the fabric ofAmerican intellectu al life, too. In The World Viewed, this is already a central, if implicit, theme.

Works Cited Carroll, No?l. Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988. Cavell, Stanley. "The Avoidance of Love: A Reading ofKing Lear."Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. 1969. Cam bridge: Cambridge UP, 1976. Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. "Naughty Orators: The Negation of Voice in Gaslight." Languages of the The Unsayable: Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. Eds. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. "Nothing Goes Without Saying." London Review ofBooks 6 Jan 1984: 3-5. A Pitch ofPhilosophy: Autobiographical Exercises. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994.
Philosophical Emerson, Austin, Passages: Derrida. Wittgenstein, Cambridge:

Notes 1 In fact, this issue, implicitly at the heart of The World Viewed, becomes the explicit subject of a later Cavell essay, "What Becomes of Things on Film?" reprinted in Themes Out of School. 2 Cavell's relation toDerrida is a subject as large as the implications of thehistorical split between Anglo-American and Continental branches of the Western philosophical tradi tion.Extended discussions on Derrida's writ ing (challengingDerrida's readings ofAustin, for example) appear in Cavell's recent and A Pitch of Philosophical Passages Philosophy, and a sustained discussion of Derrida's work, with a focus on the proce dures and anxieties of learning, of teaching and being taught, hence of inheriting and refusing to inherita tradition,a language, a culture, a form of human life, appears in Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of theUnknownWoman. This topic of inheritance receives a new, pertinent analysis by Cavell in "Nothing Goes Without Saying," a reading of Marx Brothers scripts and films, in which Cavell reflects on what he calls "that tangle of American culture" that encompasses both Emerson and the Marx Brothers (who would have been capable of incorporatingEmerson into their act as their long-lost brother, Waldo) and on the French resistance to tak American culture seriously.Resistance to ing

-.

-.

-. -.
-.

-.

-.

Blackwell, 1995. Themes out of School: Effects and Causes. 1984. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. "What Becomes of Things on Film?" Philosophy and Literature 2.2 (Fall 1978):
249-57.

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The World viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979.

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