Stanley Cavell's The World Viewed

hi folks and Welcome to our video on Stanley  cavelle's the world viewed Reflections on the ontology of film so who is Stanley Cavell well  he's primarily considered to be a philosopher a professional philosopher who happens to be  interested in film the school of philosophy he's probably best known for being associated with  is called ordinary language philosophy we'll talk about what that means in a little bit but the two  biggest names that you might want to associate with kavel and ordinary

language philosophy are  Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.L Austin Cabela is also interested in philosophical skepticism which is a  large philosophical concept we'll talk about more in a little bit but skepticism can generally  be understood as The Human Condition of not having access to the world not having certain  knowledge of the world and third Covell is known for an interest in the intersections between  philosophy and the Arts he's written extensively about literature Opera painting film music

and  it's worth mentioning that he's not necessarily interested in the ways that say artworks simply  illustrate philosophical ideas he's also deeply interested in what art is as a philosophical  question in itself so I should add maybe a fourth thing that he's interested in which is  Aesthetics the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of Art and Beauty the book that  we're going to be discussing is called the world viewed it was published in 1971. the first thing  you might want to kn

ow about the world viewed if you're interested in film and film theory is  that it's understood to be a work of classical film Theory which is strange because it was  published in 1971. in film studies we tend to break up film Theory into two historical sections  contemporary film Theory and classical film Theory and we tend to think of classical film Theory  as breaking off in the 1960s as the traditions of psychoanalysis and semiotics and the study  of ideology got incorporated into film studi

es in the late 1960s and 70s we tend to call that  contemporary film Theory but cavel is not so much part of this trajectory more specifically  this book as a work of classical film theory is associated with realist film Theory the branch  of film Theory associated with folks like Andre bazan and Siegfried krakauer those who think  film is special as a medium of art because of its connection to the Material World third one  of the major arguments about film is that it has a special relationship

with philosophical  skepticism if there's maybe one argument that this book is most infamous for it might be that  one and we'll talk about that in a bit fourth is the role that modernism plays in this book and by  modernism I mean kind of two things one modernism as a movement within the Arts that's associated  with the 19th and 20th Century artworks that were understood to be going against traditions and  experimenting and two modernism as it's related to modernity the larger socio-cultural ch

anges  that happened after the Renaissance with the Age of Reason and the enlightenment that tend to be  going against tradition broadly conceived usually tradition in the form of religious belief lastly  the book is known for its emphasis on classical Hollywood Cinema my classical Hollywood Cinema  I mean the movies produced largely between the 1930s and the 1950s that followed strict aesthetic  norms and Industrial practices Cavell will make it quite clear that he has an aesthetic preference 

for classical Hollywood Cinema especially as distinct from the more modernist Cinemas that  would emerge after classical Hollywood Cinema in the 1960s in the United States and in Europe  when we think about Stanley Covell as the film thinker we tend to think about his obsession his  interest in classical Hollywood films the two other books about film that Cavell is known for  are these 1981's Pursuits of happiness in 1996 contesting tears each book coins a genre within  classical Hollywood Cinem

a one that he's calling Hollywood comedies of remarriage which is about  screwball comedies from the 1930s and early 40s and the other he's calling the melodrama of  the unknown woman featuring films primarily from the 1940s these two subsequent books are  going into a lot more detail about individual films you can call these books primarily works of  film criticism that are inflected with a sincere and deep interest in the history of philosophy by  contrast I would say that the world viewed whi

le containing many bits of criticism is also a work  of film Theory and that it contains a lot more abstract arguments about film as a medium so these  are the table of contents of the world viewed it's a long and complex book and each chapter deserves  close attention but it's important to know that a few chapters have been privileged within the  history of film studies and the ideas they contain have been canonized more than others there's a  film Theory Anthology that reproduces only four cha

pters from this book and those chapters are two  through five seen here and so in order to provide what I think is maybe a standard and introductory  account to this book I'm largely going to stick to the kinds of arguments that appear in this part  of the book so the main arguments that occur in those four chapters largely concern what's known  as cavel's realism that is his arguments about how film is connected to the material world my  main aim right now is to think about how covel's realism

is distinct from the main thinkers of  realism within film theory that come for him and that main thinker is really Andre bazan you  can see the connection between Cavell and Andre bazan even in the secondary title of cavell's  book Reflections on the ontology of film no thinker in the history of film studies is more  associated with that word ontology than bazan who wrote a famous essay called the ontology of  the photographic image in both instances we can think about that word ontology as mea

ning  something like the essence or the being a film and Beyond this connection in the title  of the book kavel will overtly acknowledge his indebtedness to Zan he says the final or immediate  stimulus to consecutive writing of this book came in early 1968 when I read some essays by Andre  bazan Andre bazan's famous text the ontology of the photographic image perhaps the one he's  most famous for is a complex text but one of its major arguments in simplified form comes from  a sentence like this

he says the existence of the photo graft object shares in the existence of  the model like a fingerprint think about it like this bazan really wants his reader to understand  the essential difference between photographs and paintings like what is the difference between a  photograph of this apple and a painting of this apple one of bazan's arguments is going to say  that a photograph even if it's not super sharp and out of focus still contains something of that  Apple's being or Essence as if t

he essence or being of the Apple has been transferred or lifted  from that apple and projected into the image that we call a photograph whereas no matter how much  the painting of the apple looks like the Apple it doesn't contain that Essence because it's still  a rendering of the Apple through the artist's hands so Cavell will say things in the second and  third chapters that sound a lot like this kind of argument about photographs about the relationship  between an object in the world and a ph

otograph of that object so Cavell will say a photograph does  not present us with like of things it presents us we want to say with the things themselves  now this sentence seems a lot like this other sentence from bazan's essay where he says the  photograph has been created out of the ontology of the model it is the model both bazan and kivel  are saying something like if you have an apple and a photograph of the Apple it's almost like they  are winning the same thing we know that that's not li

terally true but for some reason saying that it  is communicate something unique about that kind of picture to give you a better sense of how cabel's  reasoning leads him to this conclusion I want to read you a longer passage he says let us notice  the specific sense in which photographs are of the world of reality as a whole you can always ask  pointing to an object in a photograph a building say what lies behind it totally obscured by it  this only accidentally makes sense when asked of an obj

ect in a painting you can always ask  of an area photographed what lies adjacent to that area beyond the frame this generally makes  no sense asked of a painting you can ask these questions of objects and photographs because they  have answers in reality the world of a painting is not continuous with the world of its frame at  its frame a world Finds Its limits we might say a painting is a world a photograph is of the world  notice that this passage contains a number of different articulations t

hat all point to the same  kind of observation an observation that was also made by bazan that photographs unlike paintings  seem to have this strong connection almost a material connection to the world that they depict  but I want you to look at recurring kinds of phrases and words that point to a major difference  between Covell and bazan look at all of these phrases you can always ask when asked of last of a  painting we might say and also look at this phrase We want to say Cavell tends to us

e these words a  lot words like ask say and we and I've counted how many times he uses them throughout the entirety  of the book The World viewed what does this mean is this just an idiosyncrasy of caval's writing  or does it mean anything about the methodology that he's applying well it helps point to what's  known as ordinary language philosophy the branch of philosophy that kavel is most famously  associated with or neural language philosophy can be understood as a philosophical method that 

involves avoiding philosophical theories in favor of close attention to the details of the use of  everyday ordinary language so let me give you an example of what that might mean in practice  say for example you have two philosophers the philosopher on the right side of the screen is an  ordinary language philosopher the philosopher on the left side of the screen is not an ordinary  language philosopher but it might be say a philosopher associated with What's called the  analog tradition both p

hilosophers are interested in these Concepts knowledge truth Consciousness  the kinds of Concepts that philosophers have been interested in for centuries the philosopher on  the left might try to understand knowledge truth or Consciousness by asking the question what is  the essence of X what is the essence of knowledge truth and Consciousness and proceed by reflecting  abstractly on what those things are the ordinary language philosopher though thinks that this  method is a mistake instead of a

sking what is the essence of X the ordinary language philosopher  asks a different question they might say what is the precise meaning of X the word X in a given  sentence uttered in a particular context the ordinary language philosopher says wait a minute  the word knowledge has a number of different uses in ordinary language and by ordinary language  they simply mean the way that native speakers of a given language are going to communicate  in everyday contexts so imagine conversations in whic

h sentences like these will come up I  know how to ride a bike I know Robert well I know that you're lying to me all those sentences  use the word no and thus we might say are part of this General concept that we call knowledge but  each of them has a very different definition of knowledge and you know that if you speak English  simply because you speak English and you recognize the differences in those sentences when I say I  know how to ride a bike you can't know how to do something like ride

a bike by reading about riding  a bike you have to do it over and over again until the knowledge becomes absorbed in your body  that's kind of what know-how is knowing how to ride a bike is a very different kind of knowledge  than knowing that the first film was exhibited in 1895 in France they both partake in what we call  knowledge but they're different concepts because we know that we invoke the concept knowledge very  differently when we utter the word knowledge or no so the ordinary languag

e philosopher kind of  summarizes this approach this way he says ordinary language philosophy involves examining what we  should say when and so why and what we should mean by it in other words to get at the essence of some  concept philosophically you have to examine the precise conditions in which you would use the word  associated with that context the implication is sort of that if you speak the language you already  know the differences you're just not in the habit of articulating those dif

ferences to yourself  because they're so close to you because you just know how to use language So Daniel summarizes  the importance of ordinary language philosophy to the world viewed In this passage like why does  it matter that caval is using this approach why should we emphasize it he says that when covel  says that we want to say that photographs present us with quote the things themselves he offers not  an end so much as a beginning it's true that the position cannot be upheld but it matte

rs that we  are tempted by it as for instance when in looking at a photograph of the Eiffel Tower I say that I  see the Eiffel Tower not a representation of it part of his goal Cavell says is to get us his  readers to recognize how mysterious photographs are by seeing how difficult it is to talk  about them their familiarity shouldn't mask their essential strangeness so when Cabela says  that we want to say that photographs present us with the things themselves Covell is not making  the mistake

of equating photographs with the thing that a photograph is of he's describing a  condition of language that he thinks seems like something that you might agree with you can't  guarantee that you would also want to say that but he is saying it such that it feels right  and those are the grounds for his evidence so again I just want to emphasize that although a  lot of cavell's arguments sound very bazanian they sound like they are repeating bazan the way  that he gets at those truths comes from

a very different way of thinking and to expand on one of  the major differences not just in method but in results between covell's realism and bazan's  realism we need to talk about philosophical skepticism so I mentioned earlier that Cavell is  associated with philosophical skepticism and he even will say things that make it very clear that  this book is about the relationship between film and skepticism he says film is a moving image  of skepticism now what could that possibly mean well first

we need to get a firm grasp of what we  mean by philosophical skepticism it's a family of philosophical views that question the possibility  of knowledge especially common sense knowledge for example like knowing that the desk in front  of me exists independently of my perception of it that idea that I can never tell if I'm  awake or dreaming that I can't tell if the desk in front of me is real or an illusion that I  have no certainty about my sensory access to the world that's a particular kind

of skepticism  that we call Cartesian skepticism named for the philosopher Renee Descartes and that's primarily  the kind of skepticism that covel is invoking when he says skepticism you can think of the premise  of the film The Matrix as illustrating in popular form a myth about skepticism the character thinks  he's in the real world but realizes in fact that he's just in a simulation and wakes up to find  himself in the actual real world the film teaches us that when you have a computer syste

m that can  simulate through software a perceptual experience there is no way to tell the difference between a  false perceptual experience and an actual one this idea is also Illustrated in what's known as the  brain in a vat thought experiment how do I know that I'm not just a brain in a vat getting fed  software information making me think that I'm standing in front of my computer speaking to you  well I don't actually know this is the kind of idea that cavella is working with so what the hec

k  could be the relation between the Photographic Arts including film and philosophical skepticism  Cavell will say so far as photography satisfied a wish it was the human wish to escape subjectivity  and metaphysical isolation a wish for a power to reach this world here Covell is presuming that you  understand that one of the Perpetual obsessions of philosophers throughout the centuries has been  this problem of skepticism how do I actually know how can I guarantee that I have knowledge of the 

world that seems to be in of my senses so it's important to keep in mind that when Cabela is  talking about skepticism as this like Perpetual Obsession within the history of philosophy he also  means to evoke all the ways that skepticism is indeed part of our ordinary lives we may not like  Neo the character in The Matrix question whether our reality is real most of us won't however  think about the fact that I can't guarantee that my spouse is not cheating on me that I can't  guarantee that th

e words that come out of my best friend's mouth are sincere that I can never  access the mental contents of the people who I hold most close to me that is also a condition  of skepticism often called other Minds skepticism but it's a similar idea I do not have guaranteed  access to either the world in front of me because I'm always seeing it filtered through my sensory  apparatus nor do I have complete unmediated perceptual access to the mental contents of the  people around me that creates Cove

ll thinks this kind of underlying anxiety and a wish that we can  fix that problem or even feel like we're fixing it so he says that film and photography in a way can  make it feel like we're fixing that problem they satisfy the wish to escape our own subjectivity  and our own isolation how do they do that though we can think about it this way let's say I'm  looking at the Apple we talked about earlier I can only reach that apple to use Cabela's term  through my senses or subjectivity when I loo

k at it I'm not necessarily grasping it but I am  seeing it through my eyes which are a particular way of beholding images of the world but when  photography was invented something happened the camera can reach the Apple independently of my  senses not subjectively through me but objectively because the camera is a machine a mechanism whose  functioning is somewhat automatic in capturing images of the world I can of course change the  angle of the camera I can change the image but there is somet

hing about light itself and the  Apple itself that work to produce the image of the Apple so unlike a painting of the Apple which  was purely my subjectivity rendering the image the photograph of the Apple seems to be partly  produced by the world Itself by the Apple itself so when I see that photographic image or a film it  almost feels like for the first time in history I can reach the material world independently of  my senses now keep in mind this does not solve the problem of skepticism I c

an only of course  access the photograph of the Apple through my own eyes however I am seeing a view of the world that  feels much less like it's filtered through my own perceptual apparatus and think about films for a  second when we sit in a movie theater together and we're all looking at the same series of images of  photographic images of the world we're seeing very lifelike images of the world but we're all seeing  them from the same angle something which we just cannot do with the Apple th

at's in front of us  when we're sitting in a circle around it Covell is trying to get us to realize that this is a moment  shift in the history of our access to the world so why is this way of thinking about photography  different from say bazan's way of thinking about photography well to understand that we need to  look at a phrase I alighted in the first version of this passage what he really says is that so  far as photography satisfies a wish it satisfied a wish not confined to painters but

the human wish  to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation let me contextualize that further above this  passage he says it is for example misleading to say as bazan does that photography has freed the  plastic Arts from their obsession with likeness for this makes it seem and it does often look as  if photography and painting were in competition or that painting had wanted something that  photography broke in and satisfied so what Cavell is saying here is that the thing that  photography

changed in the history of the world was not our attempt to produce likenesses through  images it was much bigger it was not just about say the history of painting it was the history of  people trying to access the world with knowledge you put it this way bazan says that photography  satisfied the artist's Perpetual desire for realism in images for an image that would look or  be a lot like the thing that they were trying to reproduce but Cavell says no much bigger than that  photography satisfi

ed every human being's desire to access World beyond the limits of our own  subjectivity this is not just about artists and images and getting things real it was about human  beings and the world and feeling as if we have some kind of access to the world beyond the limits  of our own subjectivity so that's how skepticism relates to caval's realism and further how that  distinguishes cavel's realism from say bazans the third thing I want to talk about is the  role of criticism in this book what d

o I mean by criticism well I mean art criticism the discussion  analysis of individual works of art I don't mean criticism in the idea of like critiquing something  or saying that it's bad like when I criticize you for your behavior no I mean criticism in the sense  that's used within the humanities which is a word that we use to mean the discussion or analysis  of individual works of art throughout this book Covell will talk about why criticism is important  to the arguments that he's making in

his book in a way criticism is indeed important to most works of  film Theory most works of film Theory contain some kind of analysis of individual works of art in  this case films but it might be fair to say that kavel is one of the film thinkers who cares the  most about the nature of criticism and talks the most about why criticism matters to the arguments  that he's making that's not something that most film theorists actually examine so throughout the  book especially in the preface and th

e forward and the first chapter Covell will kind of talk  about his values as a film thinker it really emphasized what he keeps calling experience  the experience of the film his experience of the artwork it'll kind of make it clear that  what he means by experience is opposed to what you might call technical or scientific certainty  the kind of stuff that was really popular in the 1970s with semiotics and shot by shot breakdowns  anytime that you use Theory to Aspire to something that resembles

scientific objectivity in your  approach to analyzing art he's like I don't want to do that at all he thinks that's a problem  so in the forward to his book he'll actually talk about a class about film Aesthetics that he  taught and he comes to some kind of Discovery in teaching that class and he says this he says the  only technical matters we found ourselves invoking in this class so far as they were relevant to the  experience of particular films which was our only business are in front of y

our eyes so In this  passage he's talking about our inclination in say film studies to count shots or to label shots  as POV shots or to come up with names like shot reverse shot or to talk about camera angles all  those kinds of technical specificities he thinks that they don't actually get us very far and that  an aspiring for technical specificity we might be erasing our own experience of the film as a  world unfolding in front of our eyes for about two hours in a similar way he'll talk about

the  importance of memory what's really strange about this book is that he was writing ahead of time  before he could say access these films easily and watch them again before he wrote them and he'll  acknowledge this he'll say most of the films that I'm writing about in this book I'm writing about  from memory some of them I've only seen once and most film studies today we would never do this and  furthermore we would never admit it but for Cavell there's something about memory that highlights

  the importance of experience that even though we might think about memory as a problem when it  comes to analysis he thinks that's not really a problem because you can never be not objective  when you're talking about your experience of art it just is subjective so he says a few faulty  memories will not themselves shake my conviction in what I've said since I am as interested in how  a memory went wrong as in why the memories that are right occur when they do so once again he's  not trying to

overcome the fact that what he's doing is subjective that's because he has a large  philosophical stake and the fact that encounters with art are only ever subjective that doesn't  mean that they can't be intersubjective that we exchange our subjectivities in order to find some  kind of common ground but it doesn't mean that we come up with some scientific language or set of  principles that impose scientific certainty on the act of doing art criticism he also mentions  this important word conv

iction he'll emphasize throughout this book that all the things that he's  saying about film and individual films arise from his subjective conviction rather than some kind  of idea of objective reporting and again because a lot of us are trying to think about art criticism  as needing to be as objective as possible maybe as neutral as possible we might be offended by  this but the reason that he's so insistent upon maintaining the conviction of his insights  is that he knows that art is the kin

d of thing that cannot be reduced to a rational or logical  set of principles art is not a math problem and That's essential to understanding the uniqueness  of art as a thing in the world so why does this emphasis on criticism and unsubjective conviction  matter for him and why might it matter within the history of film Theory well he'll talk about  this in the book he'll say it is arguable that the only instruments that could provide data for  aetheria film are the procedures of criticism so o

ne way of answering the question why does  criticism matter for cabel is to say it is necessary for doing Theory to theorize is usually  to make some general hypothesis or Claim about the nature of a thing or in film studies an artistic  medium and he says you can't do Theory without criticism what does he mean he expands on that in  a passage here he says giving significance to and placing significance in specific possibilities and  necessities of the physical medium of film are the fundamental

acts of respectively the director  of a film and the critic or audience of film what constitutes an element of the medium of film  is not knowable prior to these discoveries of Direction and criticism he's basically saying  that you can't know what film as a medium is until you watch movies and each movie will teach  you something different about film as a medium because each movie is a different instance  of that Medium of film you don't learn the same thing about what film can do when you wat

ch  different movies think of this way of thinking as a response to a tendency within film Theory and  art theory in general to theorize the nature of a medium just by reflecting upon the nature  of that Medium by describing objectively its properties we might think about all the different  components that make up film as a medium we might think about the nature of the Celluloid that  runs through the projector we might think about the nature of a film camera we might think about  the fact that

the screen is flat and rectangular and that we must watch it together in a dark room  all of these things are indeed properties of what we call Cinema but cavel thinks that we really  can't come to any knowledge about Cinema just by reflecting upon those properties we might call  that say media essentialism where we ask what is the essence of a medium come up with these  properties and just think about what those properties entail instead Covell is going to say  that we need media criticism firs

t we need to ask what does this particular instance of the medium  this film teach me about the possibilities of that Medium each film will theoretically teach me  something different and only from those encounters with individual films can I come to any kind of  General truth about the thing that I'm calling film but in response to this you might say Cavell  what about all those ontological Reflections that you've talked about in your opening chapters  about photography aren't you just doing th

at kind of media essentialism that philosophical Naval  gazing just by thinking about what a photograph is well Covell will anticipate this objection and  here's what he'll say he'll say the common appeal to technological properties is caused in part by  a sense that the sheer power of film is unlike the power of the other Arts here he is acknowledging  that the history of film theory has involved a lot of attention to the technological properties of  film what we've called media essentialism an

d here he's admitting that there's a good reason for this  he's not chastising anyone for doing this he's even saying I share this sense he says I agree  that this power is essentially related to film's technology but he says the aesthetic role of this  technology is not specified by studying it apart from its specific achievements in significant  films so Cavell will come to say that he's only discovered the general truths that he claims about  the technological specificity of Photography and f

ilm from his encounters with individual films  interestingly the films that he loves best classical Hollywood films this is another  thing that we might talk about in another video on Covell that even though kavel is a  realist that he's really interested in the connection between material reality and film as a  medium his favorite movies are not the ones that we call realist they are not say confined to the  long take deep focus techniques of Orson Welles or or the dead time of Italian neo-real

ism and in  order to answer that question why that's the case we'd have to talk about the hidden variable that I  haven't talked about in this video but I just want to say would help bring everything together which  is film's relationship to modernism if you want to understand this entire book as containing  a flowing argument that links criticism and ordinary language philosophy and skepticism  and classical Hollywood Cinema I would say the thing that brings it all together is modernism  which

I'll talk about in the next video thanks