What a joy to discover someone who cares about both dedicatees of The Claim of Reason: both Thompson Clarke and the memory of J. L. Austin.1 I suppose you need to have felt the very real power of Austin’s procedures in order to appreciate the breakthrough energy of Clarke’s philosophical analysis of the verb to nibble, but to those who have felt that power, to those who have thought that if only they possessed Austin’s courage, they too could have stared down the skeptic, to those people, the dense analytical poetry of Clarke’s few published pages opened a new field of philosophy, the problem of the plain.2

As Cavell put it in the foreword to The Claim of Reason, Clarke convinced him that “the dictates of ordinary language . . . were as supportive as they were destructive of the enterprise of traditional epistemology.”3 Clarke discovered that philosophy can be on no surer footing defending the possibility of knowledge than attacking it, and Cavell’s word for this, the fate of human knowledge, is disappointment. He can write specifically of our disappointment with criteria, and more generally of what he found displayed in the writings of Wittgenstein as “the human disappointment with human knowledge.”4 Simply put, this means that the human quest for knowledge is at sea, rocking between feeling secure and feeling insecure, no land in sight. It is a rocking Cavell refers to as the uncanniness of the ordinary.5 And it is precisely this rocking back and forth which, as Cavell sees it, measures the distance between his own work and that of Derrida, for whom, on this account, there are no, even moments, of security.6

Cavell’s discussion of democracy, like his discussion of human knowledge, is also faithful to a disappointment, here a disappointment with democracy.7 As he can speak of our human disappointment with human knowledge, so he very nearly speaks of our democratic disappointment with democracy.8 Government by and for the people sounds splendid, but there is always the issue of my relation to this people, the issue of consent: “whether the voice I lend in recognizing a society, as mine, as speaking for me, is my voice, my own.”9 If the voice I lend in recognition of society is not my own, but those of some crowd or other, then I will have succumbed to that virtue in most request: conformity.10 This can drop us suddenly into a numbing fear, the fear that our deepest, dearest thoughts might, after all, not be ours but only those of some societal voice ventriloquizing through us. It is a matter of losing one’s voice, and it is more serious than many kinds of disappointment, and so taking a word from Cavell’s interpretation of Walden, Norris insists that our democratic disappointment with democracy can deliver us to despair.11

Norris’s book is wonderful at tracing the parallel lives of Cavell’s epistemological and moral writings. If there is a way out of this despair it will be by acknowledging the partiality of voice. When it is a question of knowledge, Norris reminds us that we are tempted to try to give up our voice altogether, letting the words do all the work by themselves, as if we were only borrowing our language from God, or anyway their pure, independent propositional content. Acknowledging the human conditions of human speech, that is our partiality, will never answer the skeptic, Cavell learned that from Clarke, but it might rock us momentarily out of the sea troughs of skepticism. When it is a question of democracy’s disappointment, losing our voice to conformity, then once again a momentary way out depends on our acknowledging the partiality of our voice, that it is mine. We might perhaps put it this way: while in the epistemological case, our disappointment rises or falls as we refuse or acknowledge the partiality of the human, in the moral case, our disappointment rises or falls by the refusal or acknowledgment of our very own partiality.

Unfortunately that makes it sound too scientific, as if the study of the human or myself might be offered as an explanation of these two inflections of philosophy’s disappointment. Neither the human nor me myself are knowable otherwise than in our acknowledgment of them, and so they must remain, in their way, unknowable. I suspect this is why Norris suggests that Cavell’s perfectionism owes less to Aristotle than it does to what is called existentialism.12

Even in the wake of Norris’s impressive presentation of Cavell’s impact on politics and the practical, I find myself unable to keep from wondering about the force of those words politics and practical.

It seems a natural question; because on occasion Emerson was perfectly able to dismiss what he called “your virtuous projects,” insisting that “philanthropies and charities have a certain air of quackery.”13 And given these kinds of remarks, it is easy to receive Emerson, and therefore also Emersonian perfectionism, as concerned less with what passes for politics and more with that spiritual tradition in philosophy that Foucault called the care of the self.14 Less with politics than with what some still refer to as the meaning of life. Of course in an Emersonian frame of mind, this meaning of life, no less than Cavell’s Perfectionism itself, is never attained, remaining always to be attained. And so the natural question is about the lines linking the meaning of life with, for example, coming out on the losing side of an election.

The democratic disappointment of democracy is not only the discovery that my voice is not my own, a matter first of all about my taking the easy route of conformity—Who am I? Who have I let myself become?—but also the discovery that however corrupted I may in the evening admit to being, I am still unable to find my feet with the people I once felt one of—Who are they? Who have they let themselves become? This is still a question of the spirituality, of the meaning of life, but directed neither exclusively to myself nor to another, but directed to the others of whom I am one. Perhaps this is one of the inflections of Norris’s title: Becoming Who We Are. But I wonder about more specifically political questions, what Emerson can call Causes, including for example Abolitionism.15

What are the lines linking those political Causes with Emerson’s call to attend affectionately to the “meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of an eye; the form and gait of the body.”16 Well that is my question.

I suspect, or rather hope, that if we could all attend affectionately to the meal and the milk, the ballad and the news, the glancing eye and loping gait, there would be no voices opposed to abolitionism. And beyond this hope, I sometimes feel this as a challenge, an incitement to becoming exemplary in the work of achieving that togetherness, or attunement, of our voices. So one side of this question is what is the connection between attending affectionately to the familiar and the low, and Causes, Causes like Abolitionism. Yet while I hope or yearn for such a connection, there are places where Emerson seems to feel a difference between those two, between a spiritual concern and a political concern. In one place anyway, he can speak of a double consciousness, of our living two lives, one of the understanding and one of the soul.17 So another side of this question linking the spiritual and the political is whether we might do as well keeping those two separate as striving to bring them together. What are we to do with that other Emersonian voice, Nietzsche’s for example, who could write: “Any philosophy that believes that the problem of existence can be altered or solved by a political event is a sham and pseudophilosophy.”18

And so sometimes, I am tempted to separate the instrumental from the spiritual, yet the instrumental needs a direction, a goal, and what goal should we pick? In my naïveté, I am struck by the way, for example in the United States, political voices from different positions often characterize that goal in the same way, and then disagree, violently enough, over the instrumental means. Providing health care by the market or by the government is only one example of this. What makes for violent disagreement is partly due to endorsing different moral principles which differently constrain our different paths to what we could exaggerate as being identical goals. I wonder therefore, if there might be a role, within an Emersonian perfectionism, for an instrumental politics without principles. Although our lives would be spiritless and meaningless if we only approached life instrumentally, might a pure but partial instrumentalism be just what politics and the practical demand?

I am convinced by Norris’s overall argument, and find him appealingly right and subtle in bringing out both the uncanniness in Cavell’s version of ordinary language philosophy and the way that skepticism is reframed there rather than dismissed or embraced. I also find the picture of political life that comes out of this account tempting and illuminating.

Coming from this position of sympathy, I want to push the questions of hope and conflict raised in the book a bit further, asking after what we may expect from this vision of shared forms of life and what kinds of conflict are imagined when avoidance and skepticism frame our conception of political disagreement. While I think these questions bear on our present political situation, I will pursue them more abstractly here, both because I want to think about them in terms of Cavell’s philosophical commitments and because they are—as Socrates said and Norris reminds us—the sort of questions that make us quarrel. While I do give examples, I mean them to stand as paradigms of disagreement rather than provocations to argument—though I confess them to be shadowed by thoughts of Black Lives Matter, #metoo, and other sites of ongoing questions as to the nature of our community and the extent to which it is shared.

This Cavellian politics, grounded in his commitments to ordinary language philosophy and skepticism, presents us with a vision of communal life as already present and yet to be achieved. It is present in our shared forms of life and the common shape they give to our commitments and desire; it is delayed because our enactment of these forms is imperfect, due to both the opacity of self-knowledge and the pervasive, deeply human avoidance of these commitments and the responsibility lodged within them. Regarding this picture I have two related doubts. First, are enough of our commitments shared and grammatical/transcendental in the way that the best case examples are? May we expect to discover implicit and pervasive agreement about the just and the unjust in the same way that we find agreement in distinguishing between knowledge and belief? Second—and I take this to be the same question from another angle—how far will a skeptical model get us in thinking about how disagreement works?

The first question I take to be basically unanswerable on Cavellian grounds: the uncanniness of our life in language, the way we are shaped by forms both intimate and unknown, means that while we may hope to find agreement we cannot expect it. The systematicity Cavell seeks is still just an empirical a priori born out of convention: the reach of its logic cannot be assumed but only tested, and what commitments I have may always turn out to be merely idiosyncratic, not revelatory or shared. This makes the second question about the skeptical framework also basically unanswerable, if I am right about their connection; I’ll spend a bit more time on this, though, to bring out how our hopes for the Cavellian approach extend just as far as the shared systematicity of our commitments does, and no further.

To open up this thought, I want to look at two instances of finding out what we mean, and what coming to agreement looks like in each of them. The first is Cavell’s; it is more a type than a specific instance. In it, what we are presented with is a mind that does not fully know itself, that takes on commitments that are in conflict with each other or that fail in some way to fully respond to what is known or believed. The skeptic and anti-skeptic of “Knowing and Acknowledging” give us a small example of what this could look like, expanded to a community of disagreement; Cavell memorably describes them as if they are two halves of one mind that must be gotten back together, reconciled through a work of description that shows their division to be temporary. We see conflict and reconciliation in one mind in Cavell’s example of the slaveholder, discussed here in chapter 3, “Community and Voice.” The slaveholder is susceptible to perfection because the inconsistency of his speech and behavior shows that he cannot fully mean what he says: his explicit claim that slaves are not people is incompatible with the various ways that his behavior continually recognizes and depends upon that disavowed personhood. Here, too, we have a mind that can be gotten back together through some work of reflection and humility, on the way to a better world more true to its own buried sense of things. Revelation, here, brings with it the possibility of change and agreement—perceiving what one means holds the seeds of amelioration.

My second instance comes from Cora Diamond, and puts more pressure on the possible analogy between the soul and the city. It comes from an old paper about an old debate: “Experimenting on Animals: A Problem in Ethics.” Like Cavell, Diamond operates in the mode of revelatory description: she is trying to see why arguments over vivisection go as they do, and what the true stakes of disagreement might be.

What we might hope for here is something like what happens with the skeptic and the slaveholder: the vivisectionist would not experiment on his dog, and believes in fairness, so we can show that his actions are inconsistent. What Diamond shows instead is that the divide comes from deeper commitments: the vivisectionist and anti-vivisectionist do not disagree over whether animals can feel pain or whether that pain has moral standing, but instead over the role of imagination, science, and practicality in human life. The central difference in this example is that there is nothing illogical or internally inconsistent on either side, no unacknowledged commitment to the other perspective, and thus no reason outside goodwill that they should be committed to taking on what the other one sees. Where Cavell presents the slaveholder as someone who has culpably abstracted from his own life, this is not so clearly the case here: it is not just consistent but sometimes valuable to devalue the sympathetic imagination and prioritize pragmatic concerns. Conversation between these two sides is not obviously open to conversion and amelioration as it is in the case of the slaveholder; each is in line with their own commitments and values. Whatever reconciliation may happen between the two seems more likely to look like uneasy cohabitation than getting two halves of one mind back together.

What Diamond’s example gives us is space to hold off from any expectation of reconciliation, from expecting that disunity is only temporary. Our political disagreement over the status of animals comes out of disagreements that exceed the political, and that are in disharmony that seems not to demand or expect reconciliation. Here, revelation comes apart from force and transformation—it reveals a rift without showing a path to conversion. Outside of political differences about how animals should be treated, I may even value this divide—I depend upon my vet’s ability to suspend her sympathetic imagination in favor of practical activity when she treats my dog, e.g.—but recognizing that does not move me towards a reconciled view of vivisection. Here our capacity to talk to each other gets us to a moment of recognition, but not further—it even suggests, perhaps, that I should not expect or desire reconciliation.

This is not a gotcha moment; Norris discusses the second type of example, and its existence does not undermine the hope of community, or of moments where deeper understanding brings reconciliation rather than a better sense of a divide. My own hope here was not to foreclose on such possibility but to invite meditation on it from within a different picture of disagreement and difference, and connect that difference to Cavell’s own picture of our life in language. What do we do when the city seems not to be one soul temporarily divided, when we are just a collection in the midst of the untidy mess of how things are? It is open to us to say that, after all, there was no community but only a gathering; here at the beginning of 2018 this seems at once true and urgently in need of rejection.

Stanley Cavell is not a political philosopher in any standard sense of the term. Direct and consecutive engagement with canonical texts in, and standard topics of, political philosophy occupy a rather small part of his extensive body of work and, indeed, he has argued that philosophy should be wary of the temptation to intervene directly in political affairs.1 Even so, broadly political themes and issues—even if sometimes in unfamiliar guises—emerge with sufficient regularity throughout Cavell’s work to indicate a deep and enduring concern with such matters. Further, and importantly, these engagements emerge naturally from within the main lines of Cavell’s considerations, as though they are invited by the character of those considerations; and this suggests that, beyond whatever explicit engagements with directly political matters we may identify, a weave of broadly political concepts and concerns runs just beneath the surface of a great deal of Cavell’s work.

In this meticulously researched, deeply thoughtful, and richly provocative book, Andrew Norris works to make elements of this underlying weave of broadly political concepts and concerns more explicit and available than Cavell himself has done in order to reveal what he sees as the coherence and systematic character of Cavell’s continuous, but also developing, thought about public life. One goal of this effort is to “alter our understanding of [Cavell’s] work as a whole” by “showing it to have more sides and greater depth than is sometimes thought” (3).2 This is an important goal, and Norris’s work should be enthusiastically engaged by students of Cavell and will, it is to be hoped, encourage further attention to his work among political philosophers and political theorists. However, Norris also harbors goals that are more directly practical. He aims to reveal what he sees as Cavell’s vitally important contribution not only to contemporary political theory but to the character of our political lives themselves. He hopes to show, that is, that and how Cavell speaks to contemporary political theory and contemporary political life “in ways that might help to transform that theory and that life” (3, emphasis added). Accordingly, while he doesn’t say so explicitly, Norris is clearly—and in my view rightly—urging us to read Cavell in the way that, and with the seriousness with which, Cavell himself reads Wittgenstein, Emerson, and Thoreau; as a kind of philosophical prophet of the ordinary calling us to join him in the always unending work of becoming who we are and achieving the eventual ordinary. In a sense, then, Norris is playing the role of Aaron to Cavell’s Moses; reformulating Cavell’s thought so that it can be better “heard by the wider community of political theorists and philosophers” (3). But only in a sense. For, on the one hand, we might say that Cavell is already playing Aaron to Wittgenstein’s, Emerson’s, and Thoreau’s Moses. And, on the other hand, Norris’s work, in being pitched much more heavily toward an academic audience than is Cavell’s (as its sometimes distracting 62 pages of notes attest), may be less effective in reaching a nonacademic readership.

Much of the power of Norris’s work lies in the detailed and subtle readings that he offers of the texts of Cavell’s with which he engages as well as in the ways in which he brings those texts into contact with figures Cavell does not himself consider. Although I cannot trace any of these readings here, students of Cavell, and others, will benefit from doing so. What I want to do instead is sketch the general character of the contribution to political philosophy and political life that Norris sees Cavell making as the background against which to raise some questions that I hope will advance our engagement with this material and these issues.

Norris sees the fundamental character of Cavell’s concern with the political as beginning from, and centered in, a concern with individual lives rather than with social structures and institutions, material and economic conditions, or concrete cultural and historical circumstances. Seeing this as a point of deep connection between Cavell and Socrates, Norris remarks that “for both Socrates and Cavell, politics, devoted as it is to the good life of individuals who make up the polis, is found first and foremost in individual lives” (6). Further, since, as he goes on to say, those “lives are too often characterized by the ‘silent melancholy’ and ‘quiet desperation’ Emerson and Thoreau discern in their fellow citizens” (6), Norris sees Cavell’s broadly political focus on individual lives as, again like Socrates’, directed toward individual awakening and transformation. However, as Norris’s book as a whole is meant to show, the project of individual awakening and transformation quickly moves toward, or reveals itself to be, also broadly political.

To give a sense of the main lines along which Norris traces this connection between individual awakening and the political, consider that individual awakening is, in the first instance, an awakening to the reality and the potentiality of our lives; to the reality that they are mostly lives of self-alienation and conformity (otherwise there would be no need for awakening) but also that they hold forth the promise of autonomy and authenticity (otherwise there would be no possibility of awakening). Further, part of the reality of our lives to which we awaken is our essential and necessary embeddedness in community (or communities); so that my discovery, or working out, of who I am is at the same time a discovery, or working out, of the community (or communities) of which I am a member—a point Norris expresses by saying that one of “Cavell’s central political claims is the roughly Hegelian one that our individual autonomy and our membership in a community with others are constitutive of one another” (6). This constitutive embeddedness in turn implies, or registers, that the character of the communities within which we are constituted deeply informs the possibilities for, and the character of, our individual lives but also that the ways in which we inhabit and express our individual lives contribute to the constitution of those communities and to their character, quality, and vitality. Therefore, in working to overcome our self-alienation and to come to ourselves, we are at the same time contributing to the transformation of the community or communities of which we are a part. However, because we are essentially creatures of becoming and are also endemically driven to self-alienation, Norris emphasizes that overcoming our self-alienation and coming to ourselves are always partial and so necessarily ongoing. Partly due to this necessity for continuous engagement in the work of becoming who we are, and in line with Cavell’s emphasis on the role of attraction to exemplary figures in his elaboration of Emersonian Perfectionism, Norris argues that an essential part of the way in which we each contribute to the transformation of our community/communities is through giving expression to a vision of an eventual community in which we can more completely realize ourselves and attracting others to join us in contributing to its constitution and to its continued vitality.

If this sketch traces a central path along which Norris sees Cavell linking individual awakening to the political, it is important to emphasize that, as it stands, it is not simply incomplete and devoid of the details that give the picture depth and force, but it fails to capture what is distinctive about whatever contribution Cavell might make to our thinking about politics and public life. For much, at least, of what is distinctive about Cavell’s contribution to these matters is a function of the ways in which they emerge out of, and are structured by, his elaboration of the vision of language he finds first in Austin and then more richly developed in Wittgenstein and by his investigations of skepticism.3 This is a point that Norris emphasizes. In explaining why the connections he makes between Cavell’s work and politics and political philosophy may be “looser than many readers would expect or desire,” Norris points to the fact that “Cavell approaches almost everything he discusses from the perspective of one trained in ordinary language philosophy” and that “his master topic of skepticism provides the terms in which he discusses almost everything, including, if not especially, political matters” (8).

To provide some substance to these claims, consider simply the following four especially salient points.

First, Cavell’s initial and most fundamental instance of our being in community is our community in our shared language. That is, it is ordinary language that provides him with his primary image of our embeddedness in a shared, normatively controlled but open-ended structure that is constituted and maintained through our own ongoing activity and that both frames the ground of our mutual intelligibility and provides the terms within which we shape our individual identities. Indeed, it is Cavell’s effort to elaborate the endlessly astonishing depth and specificity of our agreement in language—a depth of agreement that we cannot have reached through explicit agreements and the intimacy and extent of which we mostly do not recognize—that leads him into his most extensive (but still quite brief) engagement with the political idea of a social contract as the foundation of society. Cavell suggests that the question “how could I have been party to the establishing of criteria if I do not know that I have and do not know what they are” is analogous to, and so may be illuminated by considering, questions of how I can be party to a social contract if I am not aware of granting my consent and do not recognize my responsibility.4

Second, Cavell’s account of each individual’s representativeness and representative authority is initially framed within his vision of our inhabitation of our shared language. That is, it is specifically in the context of defending the procedures of ordinary language philosophers—their claims to say what “we” do (and do not) say and what “we” must mean by what we say without providing empirical data to support those claims—that Cavell argues that to be a native speaker of a language is to be representative of the speakers of the language—able to say what “we” say—and that all native speakers are “fully authoritative” in doing so.5 This representative capacity and authority are crucial marks of the character of our embeddedness and constitutive participation in the community of our common language—of the ways in which our common language exists through its ongoing inheritance and transmission enacted in our speaking. As Cavell memorably puts the point in responding to Benson Mates’ charge that ordinary language philosophers are entering claims about usage without providing sufficient empirical evidence: “To answer some kinds of specific questions, we will have to engage in that ‘laborious questioning’ Mates insists upon and count noses; but in general, to tell what is and isn’t English, and to tell whether what is said is properly used, the native speaker can rely on his own nose; if not, there would be nothing to count.”6

Third, this account of the representative authority that we each possess as native speakers of our language and of how it undergirds the claims of ordinary language philosophers to speak “for us,” becomes a model for Cavell’s account of the structure of both aesthetic judgment and, most importantly for present purposes, claims to (political) community. As Cavell elaborates them, that is, ordinary language claims, aesthetic judgments, and claims to political community share a similar, but not identical, grammar or transcendental logic.7 In each, a universal claim to speak “for us” or “for all” is grounded in the (purported) representativeness of the speaker (as a native speaker, as human, as a member of the political community) rather than in any appeal to empirical evidence. Consequently, differences or (apparent) disagreements among individual claims are not accounted for in terms of infidelity to the empirical data and are not resolved by marshalling such data. Differences or disagreements are resolved through conversation (e.g., clarifying how we are each imagining a situation) and if a disagreement cannot be resolved, neither speaker must be wrong about the facts. Rather, their authority as representative—the “us” for whom they speak—has been restricted.8

Fourth, much as Cavell’s vision of ordinary language forms his central image of community and of our embeddedness in and constitution through community, skepticism represents his central instance of, and his central account of, the self-alienation that he sees as fundamental to the condition of individual lives and that calls for their (political) awakening and transformation. It’s true, of course, that Cavell discerns and traces skepticism in many forms and guises, but it is skepticism understood as the repudiation of the shared criteria undergirding the meaning and applicability of the concepts of our ordinary language that provides Cavell’s clearest and most developed account of what Norris calls self-alienation or self-estrangement. As Norris puts it, “skepticism is Cavell’s term of criticism (of critique) for that process of self-alienation” or is “the name for a mode of denying our life” (51). In particular, the skeptical repudiation of our shared criteria provides Cavell’s deepest account of how we cast ourselves into a condition of (unrecognized) unintelligibility and isolation from others. Severed from the criteria that structure the meaning of our words, we continue to utter them but cannot mean them. And having torn, or torn ourselves from, the fabric of shared criteria that knits us together with others, we lose our capacity to recognize and respond to the (inner) lives of others along with our capacity to speak with and for others—for it is the attunement expressed in shared criteria that enables us to find ourselves in others and to speak representatively. In the wake of this skeptical repudiation, then, authenticity and community become impossible and our relations to ourselves and others can only be conforming and instrumental.

*          *          *

In sketching these points, I’ve meant to endorse Norris’s claim that Cavell approaches everything through his work on ordinary language philosophy and skepticism, but also to give a sense of why, and how, these points are essential to any account of Cavell’s contribution to political thought and political life. Each of these points is rich in broadly political salience and, as such, it is easy to understand how they might both prompt and support the kinds of naturally emerging forays into the political that punctuate so much of Cavell’s writing.9 Indeed, we might even go so far as to maintain that an account of Cavell’s contribution to political thought that failed to make his work in these areas central—by, for example, focusing solely on his relatively late elaboration of Emersonian Perfectionism—would not simply be incomplete; in an important sense, it would not be Cavellian at all.

I am, then, in deep sympathy with Norris’s efforts to show that, and how, Cavell’s work on ordinary language philosophy and skepticism provides an especially rich and illuminating perspective from which to approach vital questions of political theory and political life. And, indeed, adopting this perspective has made possible much of the extraordinary strength and interest of Norris’s entire book. At the same time, I find some of the ways in which Norris brings this work of Cavell’s to bear on concrete political issues of our alienation (from ourselves and others) and the work of creating a more authentic political community problematic. I might, at least initially, frame my sense of what I find problematic by saying that Norris sees Cavell’s work in these areas as too politically self-sufficient, as though it, itself, directly satisfies the political needs that it identifies or as though its application to politics could be direct and immediate.

Part, but only part, of what I mean by saying that Norris sees Cavell’s work in these areas as too politically self-sufficient and too immediately and directly applicable to politics is that, while arguing that Cavell’s work shows that and how the loss and recovery of meaningful speech are critical political (as well as philosophical) problems, he gives essentially no attention to the broadly material—historical, social, cultural, economic, etc.—conditions of this loss and recovery. As a result, the political vision that he articulates seems not simply to center “first and foremost in individual lives” (6), but to rest both the cause and the remedy of the political lifelessness, conformity, instrumentality, and inauthenticity it discerns (solely) in individuals and their individual relation to language.10 Cavell himself, of course, often gives only quite minimal attention to the material conditions of speech.11 Indeed, an obvious mark of his relative neglect of such matters is the fact that, in elaborating a vision of the repudiation and recovery of voice and meaningful speech, he feels free to draw upon and bring into conversation with one another a range of figures including Socrates/Plato, Rousseau, Emerson and Thoreau, Austin, Wittgenstein and, to go no further, Heidegger when, clearly, the broadly material conditions bearing on the loss and recovery of voice (even for a white male) in fourth-century BCE Athens, eighteenth-century France, nineteenth-century America, and twentieth-century England/America and Germany/Europe are dramatically different. To the extent that we allow this lack of attention to material conditions, it is because we understand Cavell to be operating primarily at the conceptual and philosophical level and not at the level of concrete political realities.12 However, Norris’s wish to press Cavell’s work into explicitly political service makes it even more urgent and essential that he attend to the broadly material conditions of situated and embodied speech. However, I suspect that in part because he sees Cavell’s work on ordinary language philosophy and skepticism as politically self-sufficient and immediately and directly applicable to politics, he does not (recognize the need to) do so.

Let me add, however, that this way of framing my overarching concern is, to some extent, a secondary and meta-level, reflection. That is, it is a way in which I can understand what might link, and at least partially account for, more local and specific hesitations, resistances, and objections that have arisen for me at moments throughout Norris’s text. Accordingly, by way of grounding and supporting this overarching concern, I want to consider a couple of these specific moments. I will focus on ideas that are at the heart of Norris’s account of Cavell’s contribution to politics—the idea of our alienation from our language (and hence from ourselves and others) and the idea of our capacity to speak representatively for ourselves and others.

Norris argues that alienation is the central danger faced by democracy since it demands the active engagement of the people and alienation undermines that engagement. In beginning his discussion of Cavell’s reading of Walden, Norris remarks that “if the citizenry are alienated from their lives, and find them unfulfilling and empty, their active involvement in the wider life of their polity will suffer and decline” (143). Furthermore, although there is no reason to believe that Cavell regards alienation from our language as the sole source of the alienation from our lives that Norris is addressing, it is arguably the source of alienation with which his work is most directly concerned. In particular, as Norris masterfully details, Cavell’s work on Wittgenstein, Thoreau, and Emerson traces ways in which, to put the point very generally, our alienation from our ordinary language leaves us bereft, powerless, disinvested from our lives, and unable to recognize or sustain anything but instrumental relations to others. In so doing, he convincingly demonstrates that Cavell’s work in diagnosing and treating this alienation from our ordinary language is politically vital. My concern, however, is that by too directly and immediately applying conclusions that Cavell reaches regarding the skeptical impulse to repudiate the criteria undergirding ordinary language, Norris has not provided a politically sufficient account of the bases of that alienation.

That is, in his investigations of skepticism as informed by his reading of Wittgenstein, Cavell concludes that skepticism reveals a fundamental, natural, human drive to escape conditionedness—as though conditions were, always and necessarily, limits—which fuels, and is fueled by, fantasies about our language and our relation to it that alienate us from our language. Norris helpfully expresses central forms of these fantasies as “the twinned illusions that our words do not require our meaning them—that they mean themselves—and that the meaning of our words is wholly malleable, entirely up to the individual speaker” (160–61). Norris adopts this lesson from Cavell’s work and applies it directly to (Cavell’s reading of) Thoreau’s account of the source of the quiet desperation of our lives. “Succumbing to such fantasies,” he remarks, leaves us unable to properly do any of the things Thoreau’s neighbors, in their initial questioning of him, rightfully take to be essential parts of a ‘mode of life’ worth living” (161). Indeed, beyond his discussion of Cavell’s work on Thoreau, it seems that Norris, more generally, accounts for (and sees Cavell as accounting for) our alienation from our language and our lives in terms of individual, skeptically/metaphysically motivated, fantasies. I think it is unclear, however, that this Cavellian lesson from skepticism can be, or should be, directly applied to either Cavell’s reading of Thoreau or, more generally, to a Cavellian politics of our alienation from our language and our lives.13 Without entering into a reading of Cavell’s book on Walden, I will mention here three connected reasons why, I think, we should not rest with Norris’s account of the source of our alienation from our language.

First, as I mentioned above, in neglecting to address the material conditions of the loss and recovery of meaningful speech, Norris’s account can seem to risk providing a Cavellian politics that doesn’t simply begin with a focus on the individual but that begins with the individual considered as the subject of “natural” human drives, wishes, fantasies and the like that are unconditioned by her/his material, historical, cultural, economic circumstances. I take it that Norris does not embrace such a view—any more than Cavell does. However, neglecting to consider material conditions gives his account this kind of cast. This can be seen in Norris’s discussion of John Field—surely one of the most maligned figures in the history of political thought—in which he uses Field as an example of the way in which “succumbing to fantasies” about language leaves us unable to properly carry out functions essential to living a worthwhile life—in this case, feeding himself and his family. Norris seems to accept Thoreau’s diagnosis of Field as “utterly clueless about how to live a decent and free life” and, because he lacks the “knowledge of ‘arithmetic’ and economy Thoreau outlines in Walden’s first chapter, . . . [feeling] forced to live beyond his means.” Norris continues, “In order to buy the luxuries he equates with the promise of America—‘tea and coffee, and meat everyday’—Field works for others and impoverishes himself” (161). But is Field’s understanding of the promise of America and so his cluelessness about how to live a decent and free life a function of his succumbing to fantasies about language and the meaning of words? Is it even something for which he, as an individual, is (primarily) responsible? As Thoreau well knows, Field lives within a pervasive system of material—economic, cultural, social, etc., structures—conditions that support this understanding of the promise of America, that make it, indeed, part of the language that he speaks. Field may, then, be clueless, but that seems to be more properly regarded as an indictment of his society than as a result of his (individually arrived at and sustained) relation to language.

Second, and expanding on this first thought about John Field, consider Wittgenstein’s remark that “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.”14 Cavell has emphasized the bi-directionality of this relationship between language and form of life.15 That is, our language contributes to the forming and informing of our biological and our social/ethological form of life and our forms of life contribute to the forming and informing of our language. From this bi-directionality Cavell has argued not only that a primitive language (such as that envisioned in Philosophical Investigations §2) will only support a primitive form of social life, but also that a primitive, or impoverished, or fractured form of social life will give rise to and perpetuate a primitive, or impoverished, or fractured, language.16 I want to extend this idea to suggest that some features of our forms of social life might encourage, or even drive us toward, an alienated relationship to our language. To offer just one well-known example, in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf contends that the (written) English language given to her to inherit and in which she is to discover and express herself, is so pervasively and insidiously structured by a history and culture of male domination that it is not naturally conducive to the expression of a woman’s subjectivity.17 Here, it seems to me, we have a form of alienation from our language and, indeed, a form of alienation from language that impedes the ability to authentically relate to oneself and others. However, this alienation is not a function of fantasies about language. Rather, it arises from the material—social, cultural, economic, etc.—conditions of our lives and the ability to more fully come into language will require changes to these conditions.

Third, Woolf’s discussion of a woman writer’s struggle with and against a language infused with a history of male domination, suggests a more general point. The thought that chafing against language, or a relation to language that is in some ways alienated, is simply a product of fantasies of transcendence may be connected to a supposition that our language is a politically neutral medium that only contains resources for freedom—a view of language that is aided and abetted by ignoring the historically conditioned character of our language and the ways in which it enshrines structures of oppression. Although Emerson and Thoreau share forms of Wittgenstein’s idea that our language can contain pictures that hold us captive, they can also invite us to view our language as politically neutral and, as in Emerson’s image of language as a “lap of immense intelligence,” suggest that, if we simply allow ourselves to sink into this welcoming lap, we will discover nothing but power and expressive freedom.18 This helps to support their rebuking us for our restlessness in language as though we are simply fleeing the resources that can provide the freedom we seek or as though, to use an image of Norris’s, it simply “expresses our hurried capacities for sensing, our reluctance to speak and live, as Thoreau puts it, deliberately” (160). I join both Cavell and Norris in largely endorsing the depth of this rebuke and the conviction that access to (expressive) power and freedom is to be gained through deeper, less hurried, and more deliberate engagement with language—in part because our language itself contains the resources for identifying and redressing the very structures of oppression that it also enshrines. However, recognizing that the gift of language also contains a web of domination, allows us to acknowledge a motive for a certain alienated relation to language that goes beyond skeptical fantasies and misguided ideas of the nature and source of freedom. We may not, like Caliban, prefer the immediacy and primitive freedom of a bestial cry to subjection to a language in which he is interpolated as a slave. But we may find good reason to hold ourselves a bit apart from the language we are offered, to keep it at arm’s length.

If individual alienation from our language is the central political threat to the life and vitality of a democratic order, Norris argues that Cavell’s work shows that and how the remedy lies in a transformed relation to our language that (re-)opens us to the meaning and possibility of our individual lives and attracts us to (re-)engage in the ongoing work of giving voice to—and hence constituting—who we are as individuals and as a community. This transformed relation to our language will enable, and will in important part consist in, our coming to speak for ourselves but also representatively for a possible or transformed political community. One way Norris expresses the connection between speaking for ourselves and others and their political importance is this:

If my membership in a community allows me to speak for others, it requires that I do so when speaking with them. I achieve publicity [i.e., authentically speak for myself] and realize my citizenship by speaking in the public voice [i.e., in such a way as to claim to speak for others] and hearing my fellow citizens do so. In the end, our common identity or public community is realized in its representation by us, in conversations in which we ask who we are, and how we might know ourselves. Such talk is, in an important sense, our common good. (100)19

Norris’s accounts of Cavell’s readings of Rousseau, Thoreau, and Emerson (which constitute chapters 3–5 of his book) specify, elaborate, and support this general claim. These accounts are tremendously rich and powerful and although there are, to be sure, specific points that might be taken up and contested, I have no desire to do so here. Rather, the questions that I wish to raise operate at a more general level. In particular, as I found in his discussion of our alienation from our language, it seems to me that, here too, Norris applies conclusions that Cavell has reached in his considerations of ordinary language philosophy too directly and too immediately to the political context, and, as a result he neglects to consider the material conditions of our speaking for ourselves and others in ways that both depart from Cavell and are politically problematic.

By way of briefly elaborating and grounding this general concern, I want to look at a set of claims that Norris enters in close connection with those regarding the political danger of alienation from our language that I discussed earlier. In response to the idea that citizens who are alienated from their lives will be unable and unwilling to take up the tasks of democratic citizenship, Norris remarks that “if the polity is guided by and dedicated to the power or rule of the people, the people need to be able to articulate who they are, how they see the world and one another, and their sense of their tasks in this world and community” (143). And, as Norris goes on to makes clear, this means that “ordinary citizens” must be able to “speak in the public voice and, in their claims to community, express the general will as authoritatively as the most prominent philosopher or Founding Father” (143–44). This is clearly a very strenuous demand. However, it is intensified by Norris’s further, and important, addition that “if we as individuals are to speak in the public voice, each of us must first speak in our own voice. I cannot speak for us, if I cannot speak for myself (144).

I want to offer three sets of comments prompted by these remarks.

First, in saying that each ordinary citizen must be able to express the general will as authoritatively as the most prominent philosopher or Founding Father, Norris should not be read as claiming that each citizen will, in fact, be recognized as equally authoritative or granted equal authority in the constitution of any actual political community. This is, too obviously, not the case. However, Norris does not address this fact. He does not consider the kinds of broadly material conditions that bear on the differential authority granted to different (groups of) voices (e.g., based on gender, race, class, manner of speech, etc.), nor does he address the ways in which the fact of this differential authority, and the citizens’ knowledge of this fact, affects their willingness and their capacity to form and enter their voices. Given the evident importance of these kinds of issues within a democracy, it is surprising that Norris does not discuss them. Cavell’s own most direct and extensive discussions of these matters occur in work that Norris does not engage—Pursuits of Happiness and Contesting Tears; Cavell’s studies of Hollywood comedies and melodramas of the 1930s and ’40s, respectively.20

Second, in claiming that each citizen can speak authoritatively in her/his own voice, he is not claiming that everyone, in fact, does so. Norris recognizes—and it is one of the central topics of much of Cavell’s work—that discovering and claiming one’s own voice, is an enormously complex process. Indeed, Norris’s discussion of Cavell’s work on Emerson and Emersonian Perfectionism in chapter 5 represents a nuanced consideration of the issue of how the individual voice is related to and distinct from the voice of the exemplary genius who awakens it / reminds one of it and calls it out. However, thinking again of Virginia Woolf’s richly detailed description of the ways in which a woman’s ability to discover and claim her own voice requires not simply a room of her own and a modest level of financial security but the psychological freedom these support, I am struck by the fact that neither here, nor elsewhere, does Norris address the broadly material conditions underlying the discovery and expression of one’s own voice. Here, in fact, when Norris emphasizes how “demanding this task [of speaking for myself] is,” what he presents as demanding is avoiding the kind of emptiness of speech that results from a skeptical repudiation of the conditions of meaningful speech as such. “To say what I mean,” he remarks, “will require that I mean it, and I cannot mean anything I want at any given time” (144). However, important as the grammatical conditions for meaningful speech as such are, the conditions for speaking meaningfully are not yet conditions for speaking in one’s own voice. I may, after all avoid literal nonsense and yet speak in conformity. But it is speaking in my own voice, as Norris emphasizes, that a vital democracy requires. Invoking the Socratic image of our “speaking in our sleep,” Norris remarks that “to the extent that this is a failure to give voice to ourselves, it leaves the demos voiceless as well” (144).

Third, and most globally, perhaps Norris is helped to neglect consideration of the material conditions of speaking in our own voice for ourselves and others because he understands Cavell to have demonstrated that we can each do so—even if, in fact, we do not. Immediately following the remark quoted above that, in a democracy, “the people need to be able to articulate who they are, how they see the world and one another, and their sense of their tasks in this world and community,” Norris claims that “we have seen that Cavell defends in the strongest possible terms their ability to do so” (143). While it isn’t entirely clear how this claim should be understood, given the overall structure of Norris’s argument here—and in the book as a whole—I take the claim to be that Cavell has defended the ability of the people collectively to articulate who we are, how we see the world and one another, etc., because he has defended the ability of each individual to (undertake to) do so. In a sense, this seems correct. It’s not clear, though, where Norris sees Cavell arguing that each individual has the ability to articulate who we are, how we see the world, etc. This may be a point at which Norris is taking a claim that Cavell has reached regarding ordinary language to directly yield a political conclusion. For Cavell has argued, of course, that each native speaker of a language is equally authoritative and able to speak for “us” about the meaning and implications of what we say. Further, it is also true that Cavell believes in the human capacity for representativeness—a capacity inseparable from the inheritance, possession, and transmission of language—and sees conversation among individuals speaking representatively as the basis of a democratic polity. However, neither of these points represents a defense of our individual ability to make the kinds of claims that Norris outlines. In particular, neither the ability to speak authoritatively regarding our language nor the representativeness that is inherent in speaking a language entails that each is equally authoritative to articulate who we are, how we see the world and one another, etc.

On the one hand, rather than confidently defending our capacity to speak authoritatively for any community, Cavell’s writing continuously recalls—and, indeed, might be seen as pervasively shaped by—the fragility of community and of our conviction that we make sense to ourselves or others. This conviction is supported by nothing deeper than a sense of attunement, a sense that you are able to recognize yourself in the others around you and that they are able to recognize themselves in you. However, as was clear even before the publication of his autobiography, Cavell’s writing is haunted by the fact that this attunement can break—leaving us baffled by others and, partly in consequence, a mystery to ourselves.21 However, even granting a floor of sufficiently stable attunement to support a sense of oneself as part of a community, the capacity to even tentatively and partially grasp the nature of that community and of oneself as a part of it—constituted by it and contributing to it—depends upon information, perspective, opportunities, and, again, broadly material conditions that are not equally available to all. To be clear, I am not suggesting that the ability to speak for oneself and the others with whom one regards oneself to be in community depends upon any specific information, perspective, etc., that some individuals, groups, or experts might possess (or come to possess through anthropological, psychological, or sociological study). Rather, I am recalling that the realities of any actual society and the structures of differential privilege and opportunity they support mean that not all will be able to articulate who “we” are—even to the limited extent of articulating their experience of deprivation of voice. This inequality in the capacity to speak for oneself and others is clearly of vital importance to a democracy. A sense of this inequality, of having been denied the requisites for understanding themselves and others, is what drives the central women in both the comedies and melodramas Cavell studies to seek what he calls “an education.” And Cavell’s readings of these films illustrate both individual and social steps to redress this inequality.

*          *          *

I would like to bring these preliminary and provisional thoughts about Norris’s book to a close by returning briefly to a more general level of consideration. I have emphasized my agreement with Norris’s claim that whatever contribution Cavell makes to political thought and political life must be seen as rooted in his work on ordinary language philosophy and skepticism. At the same time, I have also tried to bring out some of the ways in which, and places at which, what I see as Norris’s moves to apply this work too directly and immediately to the political strike me as problematic—in part because, as I see it, he is led to neglect the broadly material conditions bearing on the central issues he addresses; the loss and recovery of our capacity to speak representatively for ourselves and others.

It’s important to recognize, however, that Norris is well aware that his efforts to present Cavell’s work as political philosophy, and especially to do so through emphasizing its roots in ordinary language philosophy and skepticism and its unfolding through a series of readings (as opposed to more traditional arguments), will not persuade all. In terms borrowed from Cavell’s account of Wittgenstein’s vision of language, we might think of Norris’s efforts as an attempt to project Cavell’s work into the context of political philosophy.22 He acknowledges that this projection, like any projection into a new context, will involve an alteration to the contours of our concept of political philosophy. “I am not . . . under the illusion,” he remarks, “that Cavell can easily or comfortably find a place within [the wider community of political theorists and philosophers] as it stands.” However, he goes on, “this does not mean that Cavell does not speak to contemporary political theory and contemporary political life, but rather that he does so in ways that might help to transform that theory and that life” (3). And he equally recognizes that some will contest this projection. They will not, that is, accept it as an extension or transformation of our concept of political philosophy that can be seen as natural and followed. He notes that, even though he has sought to approach Cavell’s work through a “focus on questions of politics and political philosophy,” given “the kind of philosopher Cavell is, . . . that focus may still be looser than many readers would expect or desire” (8). And, after noting that some have “the impression that [Cavell’s] concern with politics is either superficial or simply too intermittent to be of any real importance,” he mentions that “a prominent political theorist who works on a number of Cavell’s favorite texts once assured me, ‘Cavell has no real interest in politics’” (4).

In this book, Norris does not engage these resistances or objections to his projection of Cavell’s work. He does not undertake to imagine and elaborate the perspectives or positions from which these resistances emerge, he does not consider their specific bases and explore their grounds, nor does he consider how the resistances, and efforts to address them, might alter and enrich our understanding of the issues. Indeed, in response the remark by the prominent political theorist, Norris simply offers a blunt rebuttal: “Cavell, however, insists throughout his work that he does [have a real interest in politics], and his writing is filled with political terms . . .” (4). But of course, unless the prominent political theorist was simply unaware of Cavell’s insistence and of the (frequent) appearance of (many/central) political terms in his writing, this response will do nothing to alter her/his view.

My interest here isn’t in criticizing Norris for not, in this book, engaging these challenges to his projection. This can be not only sensible, but necessary; he has a position that he wants to offer for consideration and taking up challenges might impede that work. I do want to emphasize, however, that unless we are convinced that one side or another in this conflict is simply wrong, the situation confronting us is of precisely the sort that Norris argues Cavell shows to be at the heart of political life understood as a quest to understand ourselves and our being as a community. It is a situation, that is, in which competent speakers enter claims about what “we” as political theorists and actors do and about the nature of political theory/philosophy and how it engages with political life, and there is—at least apparent—disagreement among these claims. In such a situation we can, of course, declare our allegiances and choose sides. That is, we can decide that, at least as regards the matter of Cavell’s work, there is currently no community among us and we are not interested in seeking to constitute such a community. However, I take Norris’s work itself to suggest that this situation of conflict invites further consideration of the respective positions and continued conversation—of the sort begun in these pages—about who we political theorist are and what are our constitutive forms and modes of political reflection and engagement.

With these thoughts in mind, and considering both my agreement with Norris’s judgment that Cavell’s work on and from ordinary language philosophy and skepticism has evident and rich broadly political saliences that must be central to any contribution he makes to political theory and political life and my recurrent sense in studying Norris’s book that this work of Cavell’s cannot be directly political in the way Norris suggests (that making it directly political leaves too much of what I see as essential to engagement with the realities of political life out of account), perhaps the largest question raised for me by Norris’s work, is how we ought to understand, approach, and/or go on from these dimensions of Cavell’s work and their broadly political saliences. Should we, for example, regard them as providing an especially illuminating perspective from which to approach questions of political theory and political life? Should we regard them as, in themselves, constituting responses to questions of political theory and political life? Or should we, perhaps, regard them as exemplifying some other way, or ways, of engaging these matters that is, as yet, undescribed?

That is, because of the richness and specificity of the ways in which Norris’s book unfolds what he sees as Cavell’s contributions to political thought and life, he has put us in a position to ask, at a different level, about the relationship between philosophy, as understood and practiced by Cavell, and politics. I have put this question, for myself, as a question of the space between philosophy and politics (or, as I have also conceived it, between the city of words and the city.)23 As I mean it, the question includes consideration of the distance between their respective questions, modes of argument and analysis, forms of evidence, etc.—consideration, that is, of how, and in what ways, these are shared, similar, congruent, different, antagonistic, etc. But it also includes consideration of the contours of the space and of what might occupy the space—consideration, that is, of the modes of engagement, exchange, and translation between philosophy and politics that will allow them to helpfully inform and illumine one another rather than shun one another or, oppositely, completely overtake or swamp one another.

Cavell’s work, notorious for resisting disciplinary classification, is an especially rich site for exploring and charting this space. And Norris’s book is a remarkably bright lamp by which, and with which, to work.

I would like to conclude by responding to Martin Shuster’s introduction, in part because his was the only response I received after learning of Cavell’s death. Shuster is surely right that Cavell has left a rich philosophical legacy which we have yet to appreciate in full, and that in this sense he is hardly gone. But it is still terribly sad to lose someone who so exemplified in his conduct and life the virtues and responsiveness of which he wrote. I am sure I am not alone in remaining deeply grateful for the kindness he showed me.

The question with which Shuster concludes evokes something much worse than sorrow. I am not confident that I know the answer to it. I would hesitate to contrast love of the world in Cavell with love of the other or of oneself, as the three are at the very least deeply entangled with one another, if not aspects of a single love. But it is plain that the former has a special place in Cavell’s thought as an object of skepticism: “What skepticism suggests,” he writes, “is that since we cannot know the world exists, its presentness to us cannot be a function of knowing. The world is to be accepted; as the presentness of other minds is not to be known, but acknowledged” (Cavell 1969, 324, emphases mine). And there is plainly a sense in which the world is diminished or impoverished when an entire species is lost. But is it less of a world, or less the world? I do not know if Cavell’s work provides an answer here. That said, “the world” does not name some sort of super-thing above and other than the “things” in it, many of which are being destroyed under the direct or indirect pressure of human activity. Following Cavell’s work in the epistemology of moods that he takes up from Heidegger and Emerson, we may observe that these changes are reflected in the mooded way the world is for us—that those ways are more likely to be shot through with anxiety, sorrow, grief, and despair. Moreover, many of the activities and dispositions that wipe out species and coastlines and forests and access to clean water are precisely the sort of violent, “unhandsome” grasping that Cavell identifies as one of the principal practical expressions of skepticism, and to which he opposes acknowledgment, acceptance, and reception (Cavell 1990, 38–39). There is, then, a sense in which the mass extinctions and environmental crises we have wrought in pursuit of short-term profit and convenience do not merely chip away at the world, but attack it as such. Does it follow that “the very possibility of the world, any world, is under threat,” or that we should or must suspend “the very moral perfectionism that constitutes that world”? If anything, I should think the opposite: that the crises of our time reveal the special pertinence of Cavell’s perfectionism. But this is as much a question of hope as it is of argument. And hope is not easy to come by.

References

Cavell, Stanley. 1969. “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear.” In Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1990. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.