Introduction

Stanley Cavell's work emerged in a context that was fully defined by modernist concerns, and his early writings wrestled with, incorporated, negotiated, and sought to understand the changes that modernism wrought in both the arts and philosophy. In Must We Mean What We Say?, the collection of his essays from the 1960s, the artistic touchstones are emphatically modernist: Samuel Beckett, Arnold Schönberg, and Anton Webern are the subjects of essays, and key examples within essays invoke works by Anthony Caro and Federico Fellini. A modernist sentiment frames even Cavell's more overtly philosophical work there: "It is," he writes in the foreword, "the difficulty modern philosophy shares with the modern arts … , the new difficulty which comes to light in the modernist situation."¹ In an essay published during these years but not included in that collection, Cavell describes his philosophical project as involving what he called "revolutionary departures from traditional philosophy."² The aim of ordinary language philosophy was to challenge the dogmas of philosophy, to provide a way of thinking about philosophical problems that fit a situation—of the arts, of philosophy, of the world—in which nothing could be taken for granted any longer.

Within the context of this avowed declaration of modernist principles, an orientation at once artistic and philosophical, it is striking that Cavell's writings on film have been seen outside this framework. There are, to be sure, good reasons for this. Some of these are internal to his texts, as he will say throughout The World Viewed that a guiding interest of his lies in the way that film "avoided" the conditions of modernism while coming of age within it.³ But largely the reason is that readers have found it hard to know what to do with Cavell's writings on film—or even where to place them (as in his characterization of The World Viewed as a "metaphysical memoir").⁴ His excursions strike many readers as highly idiosyncratic. His engagement with cinema does not conform to the familiar categories of film theory as it became canonized over the past several decades: ideology critique, cognitive formalism, feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and so on. Even the tenets of realist film theory do not accurately capture the terms of his project. Nor do his writings on film abide by the academic genres of philosophical inquiry, as Cavell repeatedly makes appeals to common sense, to shared experiences, and to the efficacy of ordinary language to explain what cinema is and means to everyday life.

Even for sympathetic readers, it can be hard to reconcile Cavell's concerns and passions in his writings on film with the ambitions of the dominant models of modernist aesthetics and thought. His frequent characterization of cinema's power as stemming from its "traditional" or classical nature seems divorced from the major contemporary cinematic movements (his dismissal of Jean-Luc Godard is notorious in this regard). Cavell's interest in Hollywood cinema combined with his commitment to American philosophical and democratic traditions means that the politics of his philosophy of film are neither avowedly radical nor conventionally revolutionary. He asks not how we can radically change the world but rather how and under what conditions political community persists with some success and promise. (Cinema has a role in this project, but whether the cinema being made at the time of his writing can fulfill this role is unclear.) Caught between a now bygone classical Hollywood and a more dispersed post-Hollywood film culture, The World Viewed risks providing an account of the value of a medium only after it no longer matters.

These concerns are not merely academic. The stakes that Cavell places on the cinema—and on his engagement with it—could not be higher. Film is taken to be a philosophical medium that addresses the conditions of skepticism, teaching viewers how and on what terms to believe in the world it projects. This mediated condition of world belief signals a new moment in the history of not only the arts but also philosophy. Indeed, it is the combination of the seriousness of the stakes...