Between Scylla and Charybdis: Toward a Viable Medium Specifi city

A curious discovery awaits anyone who spends a little bit of time with the arguments around medium specificity. In their broad strokes, those for and against seem irreconcilable: one side insists on the role of mediums (however understood) in delimiting possibility and value in the arts, whereas the other rejects this as projecting necessity where there is none to be found, prescribing where only description has a place. In the fine grain of their attention to actual works of art and criticism, though, each side of the divide may be seen to speak in deep sympathy with the other, making observations or concessions that could suggest the possibility of reconciliation. Noël Carroll, for example, will offer up readings of movies that could be written by a devoted medium specificity adherent: here, for example, he argues for the greatness of Duck Soup by calling upon elements of the film medium as inextricable and essential parts of its effect:

Part of what is valuable about the scene is that it is a recording of a performance. … Moreover, the black and white photography, the cut of the actor's clothing, their diction, their bearing all conspire to evoke a powerful feeling of "thirties-ness" that could not be replicated today on stage or film—not only because many of the actors are dead but also because films don't look and sound that way any more, and, in all likelihood, theater never did. That this specific performance is on film—film of a certain technological vintage—is part and parcel of the scene's power, no matter that it is dominated by speech.¹

Cavell, on the other hand, will qualify his claims about the specific properties of mediums by emphasizing the role that criticism and audience play in making film, for example, the medium that it is:

Giving significance to and placing significance in the 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; together with the idea that what constitutes an "element" of the medium of film is not knowable prior to these discoveries of direction and of criticism.²

Far from any specter of the given, then, film's specificity appears as a constellation of practices and expectations—the only remaining objectionable element, for the antimedium theorist, is just that Cavell is still talking about the medium at all: why not just call it practices and be done with it, if when it comes down to the details both sides are offering the same sorts of descriptions?

Rather than marking a slight confusion on top of a deeper agreement, the agreement in criticism is a sign that disagreement over medium specificity cannot be settled within arguments about art and aesthetics. The root of the disagreement is located elsewhere: in each side's understanding of how necessity and convention sit together in human practices. Hence, when Carroll says something like "whether embracing a difficult effect in a medium will result in success or failure cannot be prejudged; we must simply wait and see what the outcome is," he takes it to be fatal for medium specificity.³ But a reformed medium specificity theorist such as Cavell can accept this conclusion, because he disagrees with Carroll about what it means. Carroll hears it as describing the lack of necessity in art, whereas Cavell hears it as a description of exactly the kind of necessity that art is interested in and the way that mediums reveal it. He is interested in success and failure exactly because they cannot be known in advance: because whatever is determinative about medium-specific practices cannot be prescriptive in its necessity. The precise inflection of Cavell's account of medium is one that seeks necessity as a revelation—he finds us moored in modes of activity that we participate in without explicit knowledge of how they shape our experience, and discovering the limits of practice reveals hitherto unrecognized necessity and commitments. Insofar as one thinks of medium as what is determinative of...