Reading Cavell (review)

In their introduction to Reading Cavell, Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh claim as the volume's "principle of unity" "the role within Cavell's thought of the view or, in Cavell's terms, the 'vision' of language" (which he derives from Wittgenstein) according to which the "language and concepts we use are invariably 'ours' in the sense that they reflect human interests." "Our modes of thought and speech," they go on to explain, "express our shared humanity" or what Cavell calls our "attunement in our criteria" (1). Although each of the eleven essays in the volume expresses the unique, individual, and often brilliant vision of each of their authors, they do tend to coalesce around this distinctive feature of Cavell's thought: what we might designate, not so much ordinary language philosophy as a philosophy of the ordinarily (and extraordinarily) human.

The first three essays deal with the ordinary language philosophy out of which Cavell's other interests can be understood to evolve. Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein entitled "The Wittgensteinian Event" already exhibits Cavell's language-oriented, readerly approach to philosophy: his "reading" of Wittgenstein's text, he tells us, "is guided by the idea of taking it not alone as an object of interpretation but at the same time as a means of interpretation" (10). "Reading" the text (to invoke the title of this volume) is for Cavell the activity of philosophy, cultural criticism, and ordinary human exchange.

The eventfulness of language, its performativity — how we do things with words — also governs the thinking of Stephen Mulhall and Alice Crary in their two essays. Mulhall's "Suffering a sea-change" is itself a Cavellian reading of Austin, not only in that it evokes those dimensions of Austin's thought important to Cavell, which Cavell then supplements or transforms, but also in the sense that it takes seriously the hesitations and recursions expressed in Austin's text, which constitute moments of its own self-transformation. Self-transformation, albeit as moral growth, is also the focus of Crary's essay on Austin. Crary takes up "Cavell's claim that Austin provides support for a species of 'moral perfectionism'" (42) in order to draw out the "implications" of Austin for "ethics — implications connected to the fact that the conception of language-world correspondence that it brings into question determines the problem-space within which theories of moral judgment are for the most part developed and debated" (43). "Part of what is disappointing about existing discussions of Austin's view of language in relation to ethics," writes Crary, "is . . . that they overlook the sense in which his view equips us to acknowledge the possibility of simultaneously emotional and cognitive forms of moral growth" (59–60). Like the idea of self-transformation in Mulhall's essay, the idea of "perfectionism" (not perfectibility) and "growth" here constitute Cavellian markers of the dynamics of interrogation, interaction, and self-implication, which for him define "reading" (or thinking) as the project of philosophy.

To quote Nancy Bauer concerning the figure that concerns all of these first four essays: "Austin's goal is not to . . . propound some counter-theory [of language]." Rather, he is "suggesting that doing philosophy . . . does not require that we be able to pin down the semantics of natural language in advance of what Wittgenstein . . . calls 'looking and seeing'" (69). For Bauer the misapplication of Austin to the discussion concerning pornography results in the evasion of "an honest accounting of our investments, both positive and negative, in the phenomenon of pornography." And she concludes: "the example Austin sets gives us reason to imagine that we will feel at least as much exhilaration as despair or shame when we recognize the depth of our own implication in what our words — and, I am suggesting, our pictures — see and do" (91–92).

It is from this same position of self-investment and self-implication that Cora Diamond situates her reading of J. M. Coetzee's Lives of Animals, which turns out to be nothing less than an investigation of the "vulnerability" of that...