Felicity Callard

The kind of scientific enterprise in psychology that would make sense

Halfway through The Ascent of Affect, Ruth Leys’s sparkling history of the post-war sciences of the emotions, is a footnote on Stanley Cavell. Leys is in the midst of discussing some of the difficulties she identifies in the thinking of one of the psychologists (Richard Lazarus) to whom she devotes two chapters. Leys is intrigued that Lazarus—while he engages with the writings of the philosopher Anthony Kenny in an effort to explicate some of the complex conceptual issues regarding emotion that he, Lazarus, is trying to untangle—is unable really to learn from philosophical writings that might have assisted him in his struggle. This meant that Lazarus and his colleagues erred—and they erred because they “‘psychologized’ and operationalized the issue of intentionality in ways that pulled against Kenny’s Wittgensteinian-inspired diagnosis.”42 It is at that point that the footnote on Cavell appears. There, Leys elaborates on Cavell’s “brilliant thought,” which articulated Wittgenstein’s achievement in his Philosophical Investigations as the de-psychologization of psychology. If we take on board Cavell’s insights with the seriousness they deserve, exhorts Leys, we need fundamentally to ask “what kind of scientific enterprise in psychology would make sense in the light of the considerations Cavell raises?”43 By the end of her monograph, Leys encourages the reader to confront a hard truth: virtually none.

I start with this footnote on Cavell to make clear the stakes of Leys’s book. While she describes The Ascent of Affect as an intellectual history which focuses “on a select number of exemplary figures and episodes,”44 it is an intellectual history of a distinctive kind. Exemplary figures from post-war psychology and related human sciences do indeed comprise the heart of The Ascent of Affect. But one cannot grasp the full scope of this ambitious book without seeing the central place that Cavell and other ordinary language philosophers hold within it—even as Cavell himself is mentioned on only one other occasion beyond his appearance in the footnote. The Ascent of Affect is not an intellectual history of the sciences of the emotions which is content with documenting, describing, and offering some thoughts on who was influenced by whom and to what ends. It is a book which contests some of the foundational commitments of scientific approaches to the emotions themselves—in particular those that Leys assigns to the “non-intentionalist” side of the ontological divide which structures the book in its entirety. That emotions are intentional states—that they involve questions of meaning by dint of their intimate involvement in the cognition of objects—has, Leys notes, “a distinguished history,” and one she wishes to extend.45 She includes here Franz Brentano, Sigmund Freud, Martha Nussbaum, and Jean-Paul Sartre. But many post-war emotion scientists have ended up, she argues, installing non-intentionalist models of affect, in which affect is independent of meaning and signification. Into this category Leys places, amongst others, the scientists Paul Ekman, Jaak Panksepp, Silvan Tomkins, and Robert Zajonc. Her intellectual history yokes her formidable knowledge of the twentieth- and twenty-first century psy disciplines to her readings of philosophers such as Cavell and Kenny—and then takes on both the scientific writings and the laboratory practices of several prominent scientists of the emotions, from the early 1960s to the present. Psychology comes out badly.

In certain respects, the book is a lament. A number of psychologists (largely American, largely male) are unable really to take on board interventions from and alternative formulations offered both by a number of other human scientists and by a number of philosophers (largely male, largely American). For Leys, laboratory experimentation in psychology in relation to emotion is significantly—perhaps unresolvably—flawed. And yet, even as much of the scientific research produced on emotion is, on Leys’s account, conceptually and often methodologically incoherent, it not only continues to circulate but arguably gains strength. Basic Emotion Theory, whose foundations, Leys argues, were built by Silvan Tomkins, and which found its fullest articulation in Ekman’s writings, remains the “dominant paradigm,” both in psychology and in the cognitive and affective neurosciences.46 Even scientists who disagree with Ekman’s model of the emotions use one of his key methodological tools (his now famous photographs of posed expressions): this, Leys argues, is “an extraordinary fact, when you think about it.”47 Meanwhile, many scholars within the humanities and interpretive social sciences who are enamored of affect, Leys contends, uphold and amplify precisely the kind of (non-intentionalist) accounts of affect to be found in Ekman. At moments, there are perhaps hints that things might yet improve if we wait a while: Leys argues, in relation to Kenny’s contributions that, “Philosophical work does not circulate in other disciplines the way empirical research does, and it usually takes several decades before it is actually understood and digested in ways that allow it to have an impact outside philosophy itself.”48

If the book is a lament, it is also a vigorous and impassioned book committed to argument—and hence to disagreement. Leys argues that the psychologist Silvan Tomkins makes a “mistake” when he implies that “because the affects can have a multiplicity…of objects, they are inherently without any relation to objects whatsoever.”49 She profoundly disagrees with the psychologist Paul Ekman, some of whose arguments, she avers on more than one occasion, fall into “incoherence.”50 She finds fault with the psychologist Richard Lazarus, even as she is sympathetic to his broader position, stating that his “entire picture of appraisal as involving inner cognitions intervening causally between the person and the world … was a mistake, one that led to several dead ends.”51 She disagrees with the “new affect theorists” (such as Brian Massumi and William Connolly), and makes clear that her critique “goes well beyond the suggestion that they are poorly informed about the neurosciences on which they lean, or that they are determined to find in certain neuroscientific claims precisely what they are looking for even if those claims are poorly empirically, although these are certainly among my criticisms.”52 She disagrees with the historian Lynn Hunt for proposing that “politics and culture can be understood in neurobiological terms,” and for appearing, on Leys’s reading, to imagine that it is possible for historians of the French revolution to come to some kind of agreement through recognizing, to use Hunt’s own phrase, “unrecognized common ground on which all these debates have taken place.”53

Hunt’s “common ground” is one in which the “rat-a-tat of scholarly political cross-fire” gives way, at some point, “in part out of exhaustion,” and yields a “partial, provisional, and always revocable agreement on what needs to be explained.”54 Leys, in contrast, has no interest in coming, “in part out of exhaustion,” to what she would no doubt regard as mealy-mouthed consensus. She deploys her muskets with both flair and stamina. In Leys’s book, there is no happy place where intentionalist and non-intentionalist theories of the emotions might meet. At the end of her 400-page monograph—meticulously researched and astonishing in its ability to interrogate such a wide scope of materials from many decades of several human sciences—she remains unrelenting in the prosecution of her argument. The reader, having been taken through the formulations of many investigators of the emotions, is forced to reckon with Leys’s stark conclusion that:

In the field of emotion research there is no intellectually viable alternative to Fridlund’s position, whatever the cost may turn out to be to many of the existing ‘scientific’ studies of emotion.55

Or, we might say, there is only one scientist of the emotions—Alan Fridlund—whose methods and conceptual framework are able, for Leys, fully to stand up to Cavell’s fundamental challenge. Fridlund is a psychologist at UC Santa Barbara, probably previously unknown to many of the book’s readers. His research positions facial expressions as being primarily about our intentions and not about our feelings, and this behavioral ecological account of facial expression constitutes, for Leys, the most trenchant opposition to the model of basic emotions provided by Ekman. Fridlund is, moreover, an “apostate”—and on two grounds. He is a scientist who rejected the position of his supervisor (he was Ekman’s student), and his critique of Ekman departed from established interpretations of Darwin’s theory.56 Indeed, Leys notes, making clear how ferocious scientific disputation can be, Fridlund ended up—after his significant contributions in the 1990s—largely removing himself from research on the emotions on account of the reaction from those supporting Ekman’s position.57 Leys, standing shoulder to shoulder with this apostate, has no doubt how extensive the challenge of Fridlund’s approach is for his disciplinary interlocutors:

it’s as if Fridlund is asking investigators to give up many of the tools, methods, and assumptions that for so long have been standard in their science in order to operate differently—at best, as researchers in the tradition of the study of human nonverbal communication, or as ethologists studying the interactions of nonhuman animals in the field; at worst, to make room for anthropologists who are good at describing different cultures or historians capable of depicting past emotional regimes.58

In a profound sense, The Ascent of Affect sets the cat amongst the disciplinary pigeons. This is an intellectual history that works to deflate psychological and cognitive neuroscientific research on the emotions—or at least the kinds of laboratory research that have, over the last half century or so, become dominant. At the same time, it insists on how crucial certain traditions of anthropological, historical, ethological, and philosophical research are—not only for understanding but for empirically investigating the emotions. And it does so—unlike many writings that attempt to critique scientific models of mind and of affect—by immersing itself in the specifics of hundreds of the findings and experiments that make up the sprawling terrain of the post-war psychological sciences. Leys’s prose allows readers from multiple disciplines to understand what is at stake scientifically as well as philosophically—in the face of what are, doubtless for many, dense and forbidding materials. The book’s contributions tumble from its 400 pages in multiple directions—and pose theoretical and historiographical challenges and provocations for any scholar who comes in its wake.

But the central reason why The Ascent of Affect is such a startling book is surely the uncompromising nature of its conclusions. It is not that the reader does not know what she is getting. The word critique appears in the subtitle, after all, as well as in the title of the final chapter (“The Turn to Affect: A Critique”). But we should recall that there are many styles of critique, and many ways in which academic arguments are made.59 It is, rather, perhaps, that many writing in the humanities today—not least if they were writing as historians of science or as cultural theorists—would veer away from implying that certain positions in the epistemological domain with which they were concerned were unviable. It is worth noticing, here, how faithful Leys is to the project of nonsite.org (of which she is a board member)—namely that of “criticiz[ing] what is and replac[ing] it with what we think ought to be.”60 Readers’ overall reactions to the book will no doubt be inflected by whether or not they are sympathetic to such a project. In the remainder of these comments, I offer, as an interdisciplinary scholar who, like Leys, is interested in the recent history of the psychological disciplines, a few reflections on the ramifications of Leys’s strong commitments in relation to: (i) how she approaches and interprets the terrain with which she is concerned; and (ii) her oeuvre as a whole.

(i) I have long been struck by Leys’s particular skill in interpreting experimental scenes. Both in The Ascent of Affect and in her earlier book From Guilt to Shame,61 she demonstrates how several rather odd experiments have become curiously central to studies of emotion as they cross the psychological sciences, social sciences, and humanities. An anthropological film from the 1940s showing Aborigines experiencing initiation rites in the form of subincision of the penis has not only been used experimentally to elicit levels of castration anxiety, but in various studies of stress and on the role of cognitive appraisal in the emotions. A very particular reading of Benjamin Libet’s experiment on the half-second delay, as well as of an experiment from 1980 involving a film of a melting snowman, helped Brian Massumi bolster his arguments about the autonomy of affect. Ekman’s study on differences between the emotional experiences and facial expressions of Japanese and American experimental subjects—which Leys, following Fridlund, argues “has been repeatedly misreported by [Ekman]”—cemented Ekman’s neurocultural theory of the emotions.62 One of the most compelling contributions of The Ascent of Affect is to show in detail how certain theoretical commitments in the interdisciplinary field of emotion research have been consolidated through the luminous power of particular experimental set-ups. Once one really starts to examine those set-ups in close-up, as Leys does, many are not really able to hold the weight that has been given to them, either by the formulators themselves, or by those invoking them elsewhere.

Leys’s sustained interest in both the power and the fragility of laboratory and experimental contributions has much to offer multiple disciplinary debates concerning the use of and difficulties associated with psychological experimentation. (The book surely should provide some fascinating openings for those wanting to investigate the current so-called “replication crisis” in psychology.)63 But I cannot follow Leys when—having struggled to find examples of laboratory experimentation that would “make sense in the light of the considerations Cavell raises”—she puts the word scientific in inverted commas in the very final sentence of the book. (“In the field of emotion research there is no intellectually viable alternative to Fridlund’s position, whatever the cost may turn out to be to many of the existing ‘scientific’ studies of emotion.”)64 Such a carving of the “scientific” from the scientific refuses one of the most compelling arguments made by historians of science and science and technology studies (STS) scholars. Namely, that practices of science make new scientific objects—and that these scientific objects “can be simultaneously real and historical.”65 That scientific experiments might be methodologically and conceptually confused does not therefore make them (only) “scientific.” Psychological experiments, as Jill Morawski has argued, “stag[e] the real” and end up also making the real. Through the cultural know-how and role expectations of both experimenters and experimental subjects, as well as through the particularities of the experimental set-ups themselves, new scientific objects—and hence, I would argue, new scientific affects—come into existence and come into legibility.66 Many kinds of scientific enterprise do not make philosophical sense. Making philosophical sense is not their goal.

The Ascent of Affect is a work of intellectual history whose narrative arc is held in place by the proper names of individual scientists, and is undergirded by the contributions of particular philosophers. It thereby works at some distance from arguments such as these which come from the history of science and from STS. But I could not help reflecting, as I read the book, how these theoretical literatures would shed light on one of Leys’s own sources of dismay and preoccupation: the “continued success of the [basic emotions] paradigm.”67 In attending to what makes scientific practices endure, it is worth recalling Bruno Latour’s famous injunction (made in 1987, contemporaneous with many of the scientific publications with which Leys is concerned): “stick…carefully…to [the] method of following only scientists’ practice, deaf to every other opinion, to tradition, to philosophers, and even to what scientists say about what they do.”68 I have spent some myself working with or in close proximity to psychological scientists, and have witnessed and analysed both how particular experimental instructions and paradigms become embedded, and how their operational pliability keeps scientific practice going, even as scientists—and indeed experimental subjects—might have very different understandings of, and commitments to, some of the key terms, tools and methods that they deploy.69 Unlike Leys, I find it a wholly unsurprising fact, rather than “an extraordinary fact,” that “even [Ekman’s] critics use his photographs.” Leys is surely right that it is difficult to “handl[e] issues of cognition and intentionality in psychology,”70 which has made it difficult to construct compelling counter-proposals to Ekman’s models. But there is, I believe, much else that we need to understand in order to figure out how we have come to end up with a vibrant interdisciplinary scientific field of research on the emotions in which, to draw from Leys’s own opening vignette, there is “no consensus” regarding the “most basic assumptions.”71 Historical and social scientific investigations oriented towards scientists’ practice and not simply towards their retrospective descriptions of what they’ve done will be indispensable here.

(ii) The Ascent of Affect extends Leys’s long-standing and powerful interventions in relation to trauma, psychoanalysis, and, indeed, affect theory in distinctive ways.72 In a certain respect, each of Leys’s three books—she describes The Ascent of Affect as “the third in a trilogy of studies dealing with related topics in the recent history of the human sciences”73—operates through the elaboration and interrogation of a bifurcated field. This bifurcation takes place through the poles of the mimetic and anti-mimetic in Trauma: A Genealogy; across the related though distinctive phenomena of guilt and shame in From Guilt to Shame; and between intentionalist and anti-intentionalist models of the emotions in The Ascent of Affect. Certain phenomena and figures—such as hypnosis, or Diderot’s writings on the actor—appear and reappear, since they mark Leys’s enduring interest, across all three books, in the question of how both mimetic and spectatorial models variously come to constitute models of subjectivity and subject–object relations. But this bifurcation does not operate in quite the same way across the trilogy. In Trauma: A Genealogy, Leys, in explaining her focus on mimetic and anti-mimetic models of trauma, describes what she regards as “structural repetitions” that beset trauma’s history: these are “perpetually resurfacing theoretical and practical difficulties” which all circle around the question of imitation.74 In the second monograph, Leys wagers that her analysis of how survivor guilt has been replaced by shame catches a moment in which the oscillation—the manifestation of the structural repetition—moves from the mimetic (guilt is fundamentally to do with an unconscious identification with the other) to the anti-mimetic (shame establishes a spectatorial relationship where the subject is perpetually subject to the disapproving gaze of the other).75 Eve Sedgwick is the fulcrum here, in that Sedgwick introduces, on Leys’s account, anti-mimetic, anti-intentionalist formulations of Silvan Tomkins to the humanities. (Notably, Leys uses the adjective “brilliant” to describe Sedgwick in both the second and third volumes of the trilogy; this is the same adjective that she uses to describe Cavell’s contributions.)76 And one might observe certain kinds of re-runs—or at least on-going altercations—in The Ascent of Affect, too, even as Leys does not explicitly figure the combat between intentionalist and anti-intentionalist accounts as a manifestation of the structural repetition identified in the first two volumes. But in this third volume, Leys finds little to rescue—little, really, to interest her intellectually—in one pole (the anti-intentionalist pole) of the debate. Or, to put it another way, she finds no real brilliance amongst those scientists she describes as formulating anti-intentionalist models of the affects. In the first volume, Leys argues for the “interpenetration” of the mimetic by the anti-mimetic (and vice versa), or the very “collapse of one into the other”—such that the main goal is neither to tie an individual to either the mimetic or anti-mimetic position, nor to assert that one position is strongly preferable to the other.77 By the third volume, however, a contestatory dynamic takes places on more individualized—and hence in certain respects more familiar—ground. Individuals are interpreted through either an intentionalist or anti-intentionalist lens—and are then pitted against one another. One side is much more heavily favoured than the other.

As the trilogy proceeds, then, there is a hardening of the stakes of the argument. Some of this, I suggest, has to do with a shift in who Leys’s main interlocutors are. In her first two monographs, many interlocutors—and sparring partners—are those turned towards psychoanalysis, and/or those within literary and critical studies who are indebted in some way to Alexandre Kojève (such as Giorgio Agamben, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Cathy Caruth, and Michel Foucault). In Trauma: A Genealogy, Freud, the “ineluctable” figure not only in the history of trauma but in the logic of the book itself, is figured as offering both mimetic and anti-mimetic accounts of trauma.78 While psychoanalysis in this first volume provides both the scene for analysis and one of the primary epistemological domains through which analysis proceeds, the third volume draws its primary energy not from psychoanalysis but from certain traditions of philosophy that lie at some distance from it. Psychoanalysis is now installed, straightforwardly, simply on the intentionalist side—the ‘good side’—of the divide that structures the book. This, I suggest, marks a tidying up of Freud—not least in relation to his extraordinarily complex and vacillatory accounts of anxiety, which had, notably, been the focus of some of Leys’s own most trenchant readings of the interpenetration of the anti-mimetic by the mimetic in her first volume. There is much more to be said here. For now, I would suggest that in some of Freud’s work (notably in his work on the actual neuroses, and in particular in relation to anxiety neurosis), it is far from clear whether affect is tied to an object in the kind of straightforwardly intentionalist mode to which Leys assigns it.79

As I read and re-read The Ascent of Affect, I wondered, then, what might have been allowed to unfold if the oppositional structure of the intentionalist versus the non-intentionalist model of the emotions had not so strongly oriented its argument—and had not so definitively been brought to life through individual scientists being positioned as inhabiting the one or the other. Eddies, or patterns, or interpenetrations of one model by another—which Leys’s third volume might have occluded by the brightness of the philosophical gaze which falls on each actor and model—might have been able to come to visibility. Those eddies might open other ways of narrating post-war theoretical and empirical research on the emotions. They might well throw up parts of Freud that have more in common with parts of Tomkins than one might expect—or certain movements within “affect theory” that are significantly closer than Leys imagines to the intentionalist accounts that draw her interest. Brilliance of various kinds might well be found in additional places.

And finally: It is impossible in 2019 to read a book titled The Ascent of Affect without turning one’s mind to the political present. This is a moment in which—to invoke the title of sociologist Will Davies’s book—feeling appears to have taken over the world.80 The background for Leys’s discussion of the general turn to affect includes some of the topoi of what we might call the heyday of neoliberal USA (for example, Massumi’s discussion of affect in relation to the figure of Ronald Reagan). The chapter in which she most explicitly addresses the political ramifications of “affect theory” (“The Turn to Affect: A Critique”)—first saw the light of day in Critical Inquiry in 2011.81 2011 was undoubtedly a somewhat different political moment from the one we inhabit in 2019. It will be important for readers to continue pressing Leys’s arguments against these shifting socio-political realities. Much continues to be thrown up by recent geopolitical reconfigurations—and this includes the intensified capacities of our current media ecologies. Leys argues that, for affect theorists, “what is crucial is not your beliefs and intentions but the affective processes that are said to produce them, with the result that political change becomes a matter not of persuading others of the truth of your ideas but of producing new ontologies or ‘becomings,’ new bodies, and new lives.”82 Such an assessment—one with which Leys of course profoundly disagrees—cannot but carry added charge when read in 2019. Indeed, what “persuading others of the truth of your ideas” might mean in a moment now diagnosed as “post-truth,” has become a pressing and politically urgent site of inquiry, when the armamentarium of tools of persuasion is both large and increasingly devoted to affective amplification. We know how fundamental beliefs, intentions, and dispute are for Leys: we can read her commitment to all of them on virtually every page of her book. The Ascent of Affect is exquisitely powerful in its criticizing of the current terrain—whether that comprising the sciences of the emotions or that constituting the cultural-political domain more broadly. But if Leys’s goal is indeed not only to criticize what is, but materially to “replace it with what [she] think[s] ought to be,” that remains, and not just for her, a much more difficult task to envisage let alone achieve.

Phil Hutchinson

Hidden Summits: Brute affect, phenomenal affect, and members’ accounts of emotional phenomena

Anyone who has struggled up a challenging ascent will relay to you the all-too familiar experience of climbing over a ridge one had assumed would mark arrival at the summit, only to find oneself on a ledge or small plateau looking up to see the summit still some way away, reaching into the clouds above.

Ruth Leys has done us all a great service by mapping out an original and enjoyable path that offers us many rewarding views of the terrain of emotion research, including new illuminating perspectives that bring to awareness new aspects of territory we had thought familiar. Ruth also guides us successfully to the summit of affect theory, by showing us how thinking of emotions as affective states has had impact upon current thinking in the humanities and social sciences. But the summit as presented to us by affect theory is a false one, because, as Ruth so clearly shows, the map of the emotions with which affect theory furnishes us is at best only partial, and at worst actively misleading. Of course, genealogies aren’t climbs, and affect isn’t a mountain. Metaphors illuminate by shedding light, but are also liable to obscure by casting shade.

Looking back, in Anglo-American philosophy at least, the 1990s were the turning point. In philosophy, a renewed interest in the emotions had emerged in the late 20th century, with prominent publications from authors such as Bob Solomon,83 Patricia Greenspan,84 Martha Nussbaum,85 and Gabriele Taylor,86 following on the heels of earlier work by Anthony Kenny.87 These authors advanced versions of what were widely, though not uncontroversially, referred to as cognitive accounts of emotion.88 As the century came to a close, Paul Griffiths’ rather shouty—though hugely enjoyable and readable—polemic, What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories had appeared and shaken things up a little.89 This was swiftly followed by influential work by authors such as Jesse Prinz90 and Craig DeLancey91 that helped reorient the rapidly growing discipline away from cognitivist accounts and toward affective accounts of emotion. Fewer philosophers sought to defend an analysis of emotions undertaken in terms of thoughts and their objects, and more seemed to favor some version of Jamesian physiological accounts, which sought to explain emotions as essentially physiological changes in the bearer of the emotion that were triggered by causal impacts from the environment. In retrospect, the ascent of affect to the central place it now holds, should not, I believe, be understood purely as having its roots in the widespread acceptance of Ekman’s research and the promotion of that within philosophy by authors such as Griffiths. There are also wider trends that contribute, and which might be seen to motivate this promotion.

This conception of affect is brute, in that it bears no informational content alone. It is the result of environmental triggers with causal powers that have impact on the senses. The affect theorist seeks to reliably associate these sensory impacts with patterned physiological changes, which, the hope is, will serve to reliably explain and type-individuate the emotions. The underlying physiological responses are then variously, putatively, explained in terms of “sensations,” “somatic changes,” “patterned changes in the autonomic nervous system,” “neurological changes” that are mapped and represented by fMRI scans, and so on.

Part of the problem here is that, as Lisa Feldman Barrett noted, the century-long scientific attempt to identify the underlying physiological patterns which might explain and type-individuate emotions and thereby provide us with the emotion natural kinds has simply yet to deliver and furnish us with those natural kinds and, therefore, the explanations.92 Nevertheless, philosophers like Prinz, and, indeed, psychologists such as Barrett, remain undeterred. Writing in 2004, Prinz stated clearly that emotions are, first and foremost, or essentially, the physiological changes caused by environmental triggers. This is why, while appealing to computationalism to flesh out his theory, Prinz still defended a neo-Jamesian account of emotion-as-essentially-affect.93

So, we’ve two versions of the affect program: Ekman’s experimental program, and the (neo-)Jamesian hybrid versions—like those of Prinz and Barrett—advanced in the mid-noughties. Both of these might be seen to be largely motivated by a commitment to a kind of crude naturalism, as Ruth Leys suggests in her introductory chapter.94

I believe there is third path one can discern. For this we need to look in perhaps-unexpected places. We’re not here focusing on approaches to psychology with experimental pretentions, as with Ekman’s program, or as with the neo-Jamesian hybrid affect programs. The motivation is not a kind of crude naturalism or even scientism. Here, the move to affect is given impetus by existential phenomenology and related approaches to philosophy and cognition. There are many places we might look for evidence in support of this claim, but I’ll briefly discuss here just two: 1. Some late writing by Robert Solomon, and 2. Hubert Dreyfus’s contributions to his debate with John McDowell.

When Robert Solomon, the “cognitivist,” or “judgmentalist” philosopher of emotion sought, in his later writings, to defend his account from attack by authors such as Paul Griffiths, he turned to existential phenomenology to help him out. Here Solomon invoked Heidegger, and the American Heideggerian philosophers, George Downing and Hubert Dreyfus. Building on Downing’s writings on absorbed coping, Solomon coined the term “judgments of the body,” remarking that he thought that a better way of talking about what Jamesians, such as Prinz and Griffiths, referred to as “affect.” “Judgments of the body” are, for Solomon, pre-linguistic (embodied) judgments.95 Downing, in the chapter which Solomon is drawing on, uses slightly different terminology, writing instead of “cognitions of the body” or “forms of coping that are pre-cognitive.”96 This is what affect is for existential phenomenologists, according to Downing and Solomon.

Solomon’s late recruitment of Heideggerian conceptions of coping in an attempt to defend his account of emotion from the attack coming his way from Paul Griffiths is telling, because Griffiths had labelled cognitivists in the philosophy of emotion “propositional attitude theorists.” For Solomon, the task had, therefore, became one of finding a way to retain his claim, his slogan, that emotions are judgments, without of-necessity being committed to an account of judgment-as-a-propositional-attitude. That, as they say, is a big ask. Judgment is generally seen as a paradigm or “textbook” case of a propositional attitude: where the judgment is an attitude (like a belief or construal) and the intentional (what it’s directed at) and meaningful (what it means) content of the judgment is provided by the proposition, which represents the (intentional) object of the judgment: e.g. “Luke is threatening me.” Or, “the dog is dangerous.” What Solomon seems to want and to claim for his “judgments” is that they are still judgments but that they are not propositional attitudes, because they do not have propositional, or representational, content: there is in play no proposition serving to represent the state of affairs of “Luke being threatening” or “the dog being dangerous.” In a form of words we will see Dreyfus employing, drawing on Merleau-Ponty, we might say that in the “flow” of “absorbed coping,” I experience the “force of being repelled” by Luke or the dog. Unfortunately, Solomon didn’t get to flesh-out in any detail what precisely he was arguing before his untimely death.

The difference in terminology between Solomon’s account and Downing’s make it difficult to invoke Downing’s argument to do the detailed work Solomon never got to do and say more precisely what these non-propositional judgments might actually look like. That said, I’m not sure the resources are there in any case. For example, what is it about Luke that generates this “repellent force” we experience in the flow of absorbed coping, and how do our bodies judge this? Nevertheless, I think we can get the gist of what Solomon was trying to get at. Solomon is gesturing towards there being patterns of behavior which make manifest, in the way we experience them, our discernment between loci of significance in the environment. This might be thought to meet the criteria for attributing an act of judgment without necessarily entailing the presence of a propositionally structured representation.

Solomon’s late attempt to accommodate something like affect while defending his claim that emotions are judgments, draws, as we have seen, on the existential phenomenological tradition, and specifically the work of Heidegger’s American interpreters. That tradition has largely depicted emotion as affect, not owing to commitments to a crude naturalism, much less in following Ekman’s research, but rather as grounded in accounts of human embodied ways of negotiating the world which do not draw upon representations of the world and manipulations of those, prior to acting. This is what is invoked by Heideggerian talk of coping, and specifically, absorbed coping, and one can find very similar ideas in Merleau-Ponty.

To understanding further, let’s turn attention to Hubert Dreyfus, in the context of his debate with John McDowell. Dreyfus serves to indicate how the phenomenal affect of the existential phenomenologists is both distinct from the affect of the affective sciences, and of Ekman, Griffiths and Prinz; but equally distinct from cognitivist accounts of our emotional responses:

[W]hy would one let oneself be led to make the counterintuitive move of relegating our nonconceptual, nonlinguistic yet meaningful comportment to instinct rather than introducing a third space, namely that of meaningful normative forces? […]

We have seen that in fully absorbed coping, mind and world cannot be separated. Rather, at ground level, we are directly merged into a field of attractive and repulsive forces. Thus, there is no place in the phenomenon of fully absorbed coping for intentional content mediating between mind and world.97

Phenomenal affect is nonconceptual and nonlinguistic, while remaining meaningful comportment. It is not to be understood as, on the model of, or by analogy with, instinct. This is how phenomenal affect differs from brute affect, found in Ekman. Phenomenal affect is the experience of attractive and repulsive forces—we experience the repulsive force of the dangerous dog, without representing that dog propositionally as “the dog is dangerous;” we just “feel the force,” so to speak, while in the flow of fully absorbed coping. So, while not instinctual, phenomenal affect is therefore, equally not explained in terms of propositional attitudes. There is no intentional content. Phenomenal affect makes manifest to us the existence of a space between, on the one hand, the space of the instinctual responses of our first biological nature, and on the other hand, the space of the rational reactions and reflections of cognitivism, when we understand that as implying processes with propositionally structured representational contents.

So, the ascent of affect—it’s ubiquity as a way of talking about the emotions and of applying emotion research in disciplines as diverse as philosophy and architecture, film studies, and medicine—draws upon some rather diverse sources. It might draw upon the affective sciences, and what I’m here calling brute affect. Equally, it might draw upon existential phenomenology, and what I’m here calling phenomenal affect. What are the commonalities? Well, in both brute affect and phenomenal affect the invoking of affect serves to illustrate the reflex-like phenomenology of basic emotions and the absence of ratiocination. Regarding the differences, it is illustrative to consider Solomon again. Solomon thought he could recruit phenomenological talk of affect-as-embodied-judgments-of-the-body to defend his judgmentalist account of emotion against criticisms coming from advocates of the affective sciences of emotion, such as Paul Griffiths. This led us to observe that there are two types of affect at large in the wild: brute affect and phenomenal affect. Brute affect can be explained in purely causal-material terms, while phenomenal affect is a kind of—phenomenologically-speaking—reflex-like responsiveness to loci of significance in the lifeworld, which is enacted without invoking cognitive, or mental, processes. So, while both emphasize the reflex-likeness they differ in the explanatory space they occupy. Brute affect occupies the space of natural scientific explanation, a disenchanted objective world disclosed to us by subsuming it under law-like generalities: laws of nature. In contrast, and this where the debate between Dreyfus and McDowell gets started, phenomenal affect is operative in the lifeworld—the world as it is experienced by people who are partly constitutive of that world. Basic interaction with the lifeworld in the flow of fully absorbed coping is still a form of interaction, and is still experienced; only neither as brute affect nor cognitively, so to speak.

Phenomenal affect is, then, a quite different beast to the affect discussed by Ekman and Griffiths. Indeed, phenomenal affect is much closer to what cognitivists in the philosophy of emotions have advocated in one significant way: it resists the depiction of emotions as passions and preserves some degree of subjectivity and even agency in emotional experience. Brute affective accounts, by contrast, depict the person experiencing the emotion as subject to that emotion, the emotions can thus be depicted as “passions” and a person who is in an emotional state is passive.

I’ve argued elsewhere that the brute affective account of emotions is unsustainable, and I am far from the only one to have done so. In The Ascent of Affect, Ruth Leys provides us with much that draws the account’s explanatory abilities into serious question. Even those prominent recent writers who have tried to defend the approach, such as the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett and the philosopher Jesse Prinz have acknowledged that affect, in its own brute terms, cannot serve as an explanation for human emotions without us finding some way of hybridizing it with elements of cognitivist or social constructivist accounts.98 So, brute affect has failed as an explanation of emotion; the question is whether affect can be defended by finding some way of imbuing it with the capacity for information pick-up, without invoking cognitive processes that serve to represent. Phenomenal affect suggests there is such a way, but the precise nature or the most plausible way of articulating this kind of affect-information is still an open question.

The writings of existential phenomenologists on this can seem a little metaphor-heavy, with talk of “flow” and “attractive” and “repulsive” “forces” being employed to try to depict this kind of experience of and responsiveness to loci of significance in the environment without invoking conceptual capacities, much less propositional contents. The task has, in recent decades, been taken up by Ecological Psychologists,99 Enactivists,100 and others who subscribe to 4E—embodied, embedded, extended and enacted—accounts of cognition.101 This work is now filtering through to emotion research, so we now have a born-again Jesse Prinz proposing an enactivist account of emotion and in doing so employing the language of affordances, taken from Ecological Psychology.102 It is notable that in a manner that rather undermines the progress this might be thought to represent, Shargel and Prinz throughout this paper still talk of representations. Similarly, we find Rebekka Hufendiek invoking Gibsonian affordances (via Turvey and Chemero) in her “naturalist” account of emotion, while similarly undercutting the extent to which this might amount to progress over older representationalist accounts by then writing, “[t]he notion of affordances adds something fundamental to the story of how we represent the world when being emotional”[!]103 So, these new enactivist and ecological accounts of affect still, in the final analysis, seek to smuggle in a lot of the old version of content, by still talking of representations. Another trick—otherwise called committing the mereological fallacy—is that of theoretically postulating sub-personal mechanisms as the bearers of content—content which has been denied to the person. Popular theoretically postulated subpersonal candidates in 4E and enactivist cognition are sensorimotors. Other E-accounts of emotion which have recently appeared struggle with similar dilemmas.104

The problem is that the embrace of affect, or, as it came to be called, Basic Emotion Theory (BET)—whether as brute affect, drawn from the affective sciences, or phenomenal affect, drawn from existential phenomenology—is often motivated by a misunderstanding of the alternatives; a misunderstanding in turn based on a conflation of the conceptual with the propositional. One finds, I would suggest, this misunderstanding and conflation in authors as otherwise diverse as Paul Griffiths, Hubert Dreyfus and Dan Hutto and Erik Myin. Throughout his 1997 book, Griffiths depicted cognitive accounts of emotion as “propositional attitude theories” of emotion, rejected them and favored the affect program research on those grounds. Griffiths’ thought seemed to be that if we reject propositions, we reject concepts; and brute affect is what remains. Hubert Dreyfus’s contributions to his debate with John McDowell had, central to them, his rejection of any role for concepts in absorbed coping.105 Concepts, he maintained, served to ensure a gap between mind and world. Nevertheless, when he comes to criticize McDowell his target turns out to be McDowell’s propositionalism and his invoking of linguistic capacities, so the perceived requirement for rejecting concepts remains somewhat obscure. One also finds the conflation active in the Radical Enactivism of Dan Hutto and Erik Myin, in their rejection of content, or what they call CIC—”cognition (necessarily) involves content.” Hutto and Myin rightly want to reject propositional (representational) content, but in executing this task they deny a non- or pre-propositional role for concepts. The conflation in all three cases is of propositionalism—the commitment to content being essentially propositional—with conceptualism—the commitment to our ways of meeting the lifeworld, experiencing and being responsive to loci of significance in that world, being enabled by our conceptual capacities, which are prior to (though essential for) our linguistic capacities. In response to Griffiths, Dreyfus, and Hutto and Myin, I would argue that one can and should reject propositionalism without rejecting conceptuality. There is no need to turn to affect.

It should be noted that the ascent of what I’m here calling phenomenal affect owes much to a well-founded rejection of (Cartesian) representationalist cognitive science, certainly in the work of Dreyfus, and in the work of Hutto and Myin. But we can reject representationalist cognitive science, as Wittgensteinians always sought to do, and Ethnomethodologists sought to do, without dispensing with conceptuality. If you do dispense with conceptuality, the result is that you have to exogenously introduce theoretical terms, such as “affordances,” or go to work introducing analysts’ metaphors, such as those of “force” and “flow” to do the work our everyday concepts were already doing before you banned them. For example, “stairs” might afford “climbability,” and “stairs” might exert an “attractive force” on me in the flow of fully absorbed coping, but it is also the case that the concept of “stairs” is internally related to the concept of “climb.” You simply would not be said to have grasped the concept of “stairs” if you had no concept of “to climb.”

There’s another way we might go, which is, I believe, shown to us by Harold Garfinkel. Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology is one of the great works of the 20th century, is overlooked by philosophers to their cost, but offers, I would argue, a better alternative path for existential phenomenology (Garfinkel was heavily influenced by Alfred Schutz).106 For Garfinkel, people, or members (of social orders), already act in, and are responsive to, loci of significance in the lifeworld; and in so acting and being so responsive they endogenously make these actions and responses accountable, without the need for the exogenously introduced theoretical terms or metaphors imposed on them by phenomenologists, engaged in formal analytic work. Indeed, Garfinkel and Wittgenstein might be seen to complement each other here, for it is not merely the thought that we have no need for the exogenously produced and introduced theoretical terms or for the phenomenologists’ metaphors; it is that in imposing these exogenously produced terms we do violence to, change, or render obscure the phenomena in which we are supposedly interested. If, as the phenomenologists argue, as we saw Dreyfus argue above, the task is to acknowledge, to do justice to, the absence of a gap between mind and world when depicting people in the flow of absorbed coping, then we need to report that lifeworld as it is for the members who are a constitutive part of it. We do not do this by introducing new ways of conceptually configuring that world, which are divergent from the members’ own ways of accounting for their world, as they experience it and as they are partially-constitutive of it; we do it by describing those members’ activities and responses in ways which match their own accounts, drawing on members’ categories and refusing to exogenously introduce concepts (theoretical terms and analysists’ metaphors) unavailable to those members and their ways of accounting for their experience of and responsiveness to the worlds of which they are a part.

In short, we need to dispense with affect in both its brute and phenomenal guises and instead undertake an Ethnomethodological study of emotion.

James A. Russell

Leys’s book is so much more than a history. It is an historically informed and powerful critique of scientific theories of emotion from about 1950 to the present. She embeds the theories in their intellectual and philosophical context. And the history is key, for history, or a misinterpretation of history, has been a weapon in the promotion of certain theories over others. Hers is a highly evaluative history; she’s clear on who got it right, who got it wrong. I agree with her, with one exception.

Leys focuses on the currently predominant scientific program on emotion, known as BET (Basic Emotion Theory), which she traces to the psychologist Silvan Tomkins. Other key theorists covered are Paul Ekman, Richard Lazarus, and Alan Fridlund. She presents separate chapters on the Lazarus-Zajonc debate, with subsequent work by Uleman and Bargh, and another on Griffiths and Scarantino’s attempt to defend BET. Her account of Fridlund’s theory as the most viable alternative to BET is especially valuable because Fridlund himself is not prolific.

The key to Leys’s argument is that emotions are in their essence “intentional.” The word does not have the everyday meaning that it does for most speakers of English, namely that emotions are expressed or enacted deliberately or on purpose. Rather, Leys uses “intentional” in its technical sense as used in philosophy to mean that an emotion is directed at an object: one loves someone or something, is angry with someone, is afraid of something. The someone or something is called the object of the emotion. Thus, emotions are about something in the same way that beliefs and desires are. To believe is to believe something (e.g., I believe her book is a major contribution), and to desire is to desire something (and I wish everyone would read it).

For Leys, the intentionality of the emotions is the essential feature omitted by BET. This omission is extremely important because BET is presupposed in much basic and applied research from neuroscience to software development. BET has spread to the humanities. Analyses based on the assumption that emotions are intentional were progressing nicely, but were overtaken by Tomkins’ alternative analysis. Tomkins appropriated Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics to argue that cognition and affect are separate, autonomous systems, with cognition intentional but affect not. For Tomkins, emotions are simply bodily eruptions that are not about anything. Tomkins argued that at least some emotions clearly have no object (feeling depressed or anxious), but even those that appear to have an object do not. In these cases, the apparent object is simply the event that triggered the emotion’s occurrence. The emotion triggered is nothing more than a coordinated muscular, vascular, and glandular response, accompanied by its own set of qualia. Emotions are fixed action patterns sculpted by evolution.

To illustrate, consider so called “facial expressions of emotion.” On BET, they are non-intentional muscular patterns that erupt along with other components of the emotion. (Darwin had theorized that the specific facial pattern is a vestige of a once useful action, such as baring the teeth in preparation for biting in anger.) On Fridlund’s theory, in contrast, “facial expressions” are intentional; they are directed at an audience and finely tuned to the immediate circumstances in order to guide trajected social interaction.

Now to my disagreement with Leys. In the epilogue to her book, Leys critiques my analysis of emotion, which I have called a Psychological Constructionist account. She finds my analysis “so close” to newer versions of BET “as to be indistinguishable from them.” This conclusion surprised me and will surprise proponents of BET, for the two accounts are fundamentally different. What Leys noticed are specific points of agreement between me and certain researchers associated with BET; what she missed is that, in science, as new evidence comes in, researchers change elements of their accounts. And that is a good thing.

Let me illustrate with a change in my account of the perception of emotion from a facial expression. In 1997, I had hypothesized that the valence (the positive or negative affect) ascribed to a person’s face alone would override context in determining what specific emotion the person is perceived to have. Later evidence showed the opposite: context overrides the valence ascribed to the face.

Similarly, researchers associated with BET have changed specific elements of their accounts as evidence came in. For example, Leys noticed that Levenson, a major figure in BET, and I had reached a similar conclusion about emotional qualia. But Levenson is, to my knowledge, alone among BET theorists in sharing this conclusion. Whereas BET traditionally stipulates that each emotion entails its own qualium, fixed by human biology, one premise of Psychological Construction is that qualia are not fixed; there are no preset emotion qualia to be discovered. Rather, each society in its culture and language invents a way of parsing subjective emotion experiences in terms of what I called “scripts.” Individuals consciously experience a specific emotion (they “meta-experience,” in my terms) when they perceive a resemblance between the culture’s script for a type of emotion and their current condition. This hypothesis is essential to a psychological constructionist account, and was to my thinking from the outset. Levenson’s cross-cultural research with the Minangkabau of West Sumatra led him to a similar conclusion about qualia.

As yet another example, Bev Fehr and I found that categories such as emotion, love, and anger are heterogeneous clusters. Members of such categories bear a family resemblance to one another, as Wittgenstein termed it, rather than a set of common elements shared by all. Subsequently, Ekman announced that emotion categories contain “emotion families,” and Scarantino acknowledged that emotion categories used in BET are heterogeneous.

Finally, Leys objected to another component in my account, core affect, which in its simplest form lacks intentionality. Perhaps she takes core affect to be emotion. As I define it, core affect is not emotion. It’s our twin bias settings (level of activation, and negative or positive valence) that tune whatever we’re doing, whether we’re emoting or not. Or perhaps she objects to thinking of anything as non-intentional or that anything non-intentional can become intentional. I agree with Leys that typical subjective emotional experiences, such as feeling frightened by a robber, in love with your partner, or proud of a friend’s success, are all intentional states. Core affect can become intentional when it is cognized and attributed. When I see a friend, realize I am excited, and attribute my excitement to seeing the friend, then my excitement is about my friend: i.e., it is intentional. Still, core affect can exist in a non-attributed, non-intentional, non-experienced form and still be effectual. Core affect is subject to circadian rhythms, infections, and drugs. Should I miss my usual afternoon coffee and fade off during a colloquium, my core affect has changed. It’s unhelpful to say that the change in core affect is “about” the coffee or the colloquium. In such cases, core affect simply is, and there is no “about” to it.

Altogether, Leys provides a devastating analysis of the history of the scientific study of emotion. Her book is must reading for all who presuppose BET, knowingly or unknowingly, or who are unfamiliar with Fridlund’s alternative. Her book is less successful in analyzing current research, including very real differences among current alternatives, including mine. Each of the active research programs contains various assumptions and hypotheses. But nature does not vote a straight party line, and we can expect pieces from each program to bear fruit while other pieces fall by the wayside. That has certainly happened to me, and I have had to drop some hypotheses and develop new ones. I look forward to her writing a new book, Affect in the 21st Century, which assuredly will be just as fascinating and just as important.

Ruth Leys

I am grateful to my respondents for their comments on my book. I appreciate the seriousness with which they have engaged with my arguments and the various and often unexpected ways in which they have highlighted, elaborated, or contested my analyses. I am pleased to have this opportunity to reply.

Clive Barnett

It is rare to find a reader so attuned to my intellectual ambitions and so immersed in the stakes of my arguments as Clive Barnett. I thank him especially for his sympathetic and wide-ranging discussion of the philosophical issues raised by my book. It seems to me that Barnett uses his perspective as a geographer to clarifying effect when he conceives some of his analyses in terms of the spatial metaphors that structure the arguments between antagonists in the debate, notably Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell, over the role of conceptuality and mindedness in embodied action. Barnett’s comment on the way in which the protagonists frame some of the key issues at stake in the Dreyfus-McDowell dispute, and indeed in the dominant paradigm of the affects as independent of cognitions in terms of the metaphors of “inside” and “outside” or “upper” and “lower” floors respectively, is instructive.

I have one correction I’d like to make to Barnett’s helpful commentary. At the end of his remarks he suggests that my own account of intentionality is rather different in its implications from that associated with the “nonsite school” which, he suggests, “has been primarily focused on redeeming a somewhat traditional-looking concept of artistic intentionality closely associated with claims to aesthetically mediated access to objective truth.” I don’t believe there is any difference between my own views on the nature of intentionality and the nonsite group of scholars to whom he refers. Specifically: 1) the basic nonsite position isn’t limited to “artistic” intentionality but rather involves the larger claim that the meaning of statements, texts, works of art, etc., depends on the intentions of the author, instead of being simply a matter of the experience of the reader, or observer, or addressee. And 2) there is no implication that understanding meaning in these terms gives us access to “objective truth,” however one construes the term “objective.” Grasping the fundamental role of intention (traditional-looking or not) in determining meaning gives us access to meaning, period. One might say it gives us access to the “true” meaning of a statement or work of art, but even so, “objectivity” doesn’t enter into it.

Moreover, I have no “objective” set of procedures for determining the meaning of a statement or work of art, just my “ordinary” capacities of understanding. Nor are there “objective” procedures or criteria for settling disagreements in this realm. As Cavell (and Wittgenstein) have suggested, in a debate we simply make the best case we can for our views. And then, as Wittgenstein does say, “If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’”107 Is this “objective”? Obviously not. But it isn’t exactly “subjective” either. In other words, the rightness of my convictions can’t be proved “objectively,” if by objective proof is meant something settled, unchallengeable, beyond all doubt or question.108

A related point concerns the issue of universality, which it seems to me even scholars committed to notions of intentionality often get wrong. Ideological disputes are inherently universalizing. This is because whereas we can’t disagree about how we feel—we just feel different things—we can and do disagree about what is true independently of how we feel or what our subject position or identity may be. Indeed, as Walter Benn Michaels has argued, it is only the idea that something that is true must be true for everyone that gives sense to disagreement: the belief that some social system is better than another, or that a certain political arrangement is unjust, is intrinsically universal. It is common for scholars to view the appeal to universality as a means of enforcing agreement. They contend that appeals to the universal are likely to conceal ethnocentric and other biases because standards of universality are only local. But as Michaels has rightly argued, “the fact that people have locally different views about what is universally true in no way counts as a criticism of the universality of the true. Just the opposite; the reason that we cannot appeal to universal truths as grounds for adjudicating our disagreements is just because the idea of truth’s universality is nothing but a consequence of our disagreement. The universal does not compel our agreement, rather it is implied by our disagreement, and we invoke the universal not to resolve our disagreement but to explain the fact that we disagree.”109

Felicity Callard

I am grateful to Felicity Callard for the many positive things she says about my book and the close attention she has paid to my arguments. Her response has surprised me in various ways.

Probably the biggest disagreement between Callard and myself is that she believes that emotion science today is a “vibrant interdisciplinary scientific field of research” whereas I regard it as marked by stasis and incoherence. The point of my book is to show that emotion research continues to plod on without consensus regarding its basic assumptions, is riven by methodological inadequacies and theoretical contradictions, and is thus destined to fail as a cumulative enterprise. This is not for a moment to deny that research on the affects gives all the appearance of a lively, well-funded laboratory science—indeed there is no sign that the field is going to collapse any time soon. But it is to deny that, with the exception of Fridlund’s behavioral ecology approach to the affects, an approach that offers many pointers for further research, the sciences of emotion as presently practiced and theorized are productive in any meaningful way.

I’m not sure on what Callard bases her impression of the current vibrancy of the emotion field. What seems to animate her view is that, if only I hadn’t cast my discussion in terms of the opposition between intentionalist versus non-intentionalist approaches, then not only would other ways of narrating the history of post-WW2 approaches to the emotions become visible, but the interpenetration of each position by the other would somehow illuminate examples of interesting work that my framework obscures.

To this I have several reactions. First, many narratives of the history of emotions not framed in terms of the question of intentionality versus non-intentionality already existed before my book appeared, without actually clarifying the issues at stake. I can’t see the value of yet another such narrative. Nor can I see what advantage there would be in abandoning the framework I offer by somehow amalgamating the two positions. On the one hand, as I show at length in a two-chapter discussion, as a committed intentionalist Richard Lazarus nevertheless found it difficult to establish a psychology of “appraisal” without succumbing to some of the very non-intentionalist, cybernetic-style of reasoning he otherwise decried. As a result, he could not sustain his intentionalism. Only by deploying the framework I offer do problematic and indeed contradictory aspects of his laudable efforts to master the emotion field become evident. (Callard claims that I have little intellectual interest in the non-intentionalist position. This puzzles me. It is precisely the continuing appeal of anti-intentionalism that I have found so interesting, which is why I have spent so many years on the topic.)

On the other hand, it seems to me that what is really at stake in Callard’s rejection of the intentionalist-antintentionalist framework that structures my arguments is her commitment to some notion of interdisciplinarity that would allow for unexpected forms of alliance between apparently competing positions, or forms of “brilliance,” to become apparent in ways that she believes are blocked by my arguments. She observes: “As I read and re-read The Ascent of Affect, I wondered . . . what might have been allowed to unfold if the oppositional structure of the intentionalist versus the non-intentionalist model of the emotions had not so strongly oriented its argument—and had not so definitively been brought to life through individual scientists being positioned as inhabiting the one or the other. Eddies, or patterns, or interpenetrations of one model by another—which Leys’s third volume might have occluded by the brightness of the philosophical gaze which falls on each actor and model—might have been able to come to visibility. Those eddies might open up other ways of narrating post-war theoretical and empirical research on the emotions.”

In his response to my book Phil Hutchinson remarks that “[m]etaphors illuminate by shedding light but are also liable to obscure by casting shade.” Like Hutchinson, I have an aversion to weak metaphors, in this case the metaphor of “eddies.” What kind of “eddies” (or flows) does Callard imagine might serve to undo my effort to clarify the issues at stakes involved in the recent history of the emotion field? As she also writes: “In Leys’s book, there is no happy place where intentionalist and non-intentionalist theories of the emotions might meet.” Well, there is in my view no such happy place, and I can’t help thinking that anyone who believes there is should provide at least a hint of its coordinates. Apart from the suggestion that aspects of Freud’s work have more in common with aspects of Tomkins’s views than one might expect, Callard’s only other proposal is that certain movements within affect theory are “significantly closer than Leys imagines to the intentionalist accounts that draw [Leys’s] interest.” What Freud has in common with Tomkins, or what those “movements” within affect theory are, she does not say, though I would be glad to learn about both of these topics.110 More generally, I suggest that Callard’s desire to find some “eddies” that would allow intentionalism and non-intentionalism to meet in some happy place is to ignore the efforts made by philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, McDowell, Robert Pippin and others to show why that is a misguided wish.

I have focused on the above issues in Callard’s response to my book as the ones that seem to me most in need of discussion. But I want to return in closing to say how much I appreciate the many good things she says about my work. I am especially grateful to Callard for commenting so warmly on the efforts I have made to examine the details of experimental work on the affects. Understanding the ways in which theoretical approaches to the emotions are translated into and supported by experiments is at the heart of my project as a historian of recent approaches to the emotions. Often this has meant entering into excruciating detail concerning laboratory setups and methods in order to grasp the ways in which certain “iconic” experiments have leant plausibility to theoretical claims, even as those experiments can be shown to be “fragile,” as Callard helpfully puts it. I can’t follow her when she appeals to science and technology (STS) arguments to the effect that all scientific experiments end up making “new scientific objects” (and even “new scientific affects”?), regardless of how conceptually confused they may be—as if she believes that any scientific experiment is valuable regardless of its intelligibility or validity. “Many kinds of scientific enterprise do not make philosophical sense,” she writes. “Making philosophical sense is not their goal.” Indeed, making philosophical sense may not be their goal, but making sense is a sine qua non of their being taken seriously: not all experiments are equally valid if their results turn out to be unreplicable and the “objects” they create turn out to be illusory. In any case, I agree with Callard, and hope I have demonstrated this in my own work, that there is a need to undertake, as she suggests, “historical and social scientific investigations oriented towards scientists’ own practices and not simply towards their retrospective descriptions of what they’ve done.” I thank Callard for drawing attention to the importance of these issues as they emerge in my book.

Phil Hutchinson

In The Ascent of Affect I made use of Hutchinson’s productive thought that the possession of concepts and the human capacity for language or “propositional attitudes” can be dissociated in ways that permit us to embrace the idea that many non-human animals, which lack human language, nevertheless possess certain kinds of intentional “world-taking” capacities.

In his brashly argued, influential book, What the Emotions Really Are (1997), the philosopher of biology Paul Griffiths offered as the only available choices in this domain either that the emotions are 1) cognitive and hence ineluctably tied to the human capacity for language, or 2) non-cognitive and non-conceptual in line with Ekman’s Basic Emotion Theory. In part because of the difficulty of accommodating non-human animals to the picture of emotions proposed by the cognitivists, Griffiths endorsed Ekman’s Basic Emotion Theory, even though, as I demonstrate in my book, that theory is riddled with experimental and theoretical incoherences. Against these two approaches, and as a result especially of his engagement with the thought of Wittgenstein, McDowell, and Charles Travis, Hutchinson has suggested that we reject the conflation between the conceptual and the propositional endorsed by so many cognitivist philosophers and non-cognitivists alike.111 Picking up on Hutchinson’s proposal, in The Ascent I pursued the idea that we need not impose a radical distinction between humans and non-human animals in the domain of the emotions based on the issue of language possession, even as we also can and must acknowledge the decisive difference that the evolution of language has made to human forms of life and understanding.

In his present response to my book, Hutchinson pursues this theme in his interesting proposal that existential philosophy has provided a “third path,” alongside the two paths followed by Ekman-style affect program theorists and neo-Jamesian hybrid theorists. This third path has led to a similarly mistaken account of affect as independent of cognition or meaning. He calls the affect proposed by the existential philosophers, “phenomenal affect,” which he identifies as a form of affect on a par with, but different from, the “brute affect” associated with the affect program theories of Tomkins, Ekman, and others.

By “phenomenal affect” Hutchinson means the concept of affect espoused by existentialist theorists such as Robert Solomon and Hubert Dreyfus, according to whom fully-absorbed copings with the world are nonconceptual and nonlinguistic in character while at the same time being meaningful comportments. For Hutchinson, such phenomenal affect theorists—like Griffiths in this regard—mistake the alternatives available to them by arguing that if affect is to be understood as non-propositional then it must be non-conceptual as well. Hutchinson argues that the “phenomenal affect” theorists therefore simply repeat the mistakes of the BET or “brute affect” theorists, and that accordingly their views should be rejected. He extends his analysis to include the recent turn to James Gibson’s theory of “affordances” by the new ecological, enactive, extended, and embodied cognition theorists whose approaches he criticizes in similar terms.

As is always the case when I read his work, I find Hutchinson’s discussion helpful and enlightening. Gibsonian affordances are an important element in my new project on the vicissitudes of the idea of newborn imitation, so Hutchinson’s comments on this topic are especially pertinent for me. I thank him for his positive response to my book and for the illuminating philosophical perspective he brings to an understanding of these issues.

Jim Russell

I am grateful to Russell for his generous, sympathetic response to the arguments of my book. As he observes, he agrees with me except for one issue, which is that I have aligned his psychological constructionist position with that of Basic Emotion Theory (BET), thereby saddling him with many BET-related claims with which he is otherwise not in accord.

In the Epilogue to The Ascent of Affect I criticized the componential approach to the emotions that characterizes the new BET theorists. Although he does not remark on this aspect of his work in his response, Russell too espouses a componential theory of the emotions. To explain emotional episodes he posits the causal role of various internal mind-brain components or systems. He does not consider any of these components, including the subjective experience of emotion (or “qualia”), necessary or sufficient for an emotion to be instantiated (see The Ascent p. 360, where I quote him to this effect).

But if this is the case, I don’t see why Fridlund’s damaging comments on such componential views—especially his remarks quoted on p. 358 of The Ascent concerning the implications of the absence of qualia as definitive for emotion—don’t also apply to Russell’s position. Of course, I understand that, unlike his Ekman-inspired colleagues, Russell rejects the distinction between “display” rules (or conventional displays) versus authentic expressions of emotions. But I believe Fridlund’s critical remarks also cut against his componential version of emotion.

Moreover, the fact that Russell has changed his mind about the role of certain proposed components of emotional responses on the basis of new evidence, or has had to drop some hypotheses and develop new ones, does not in itself prove that emotion science is proceeding in a cumulative manner or like a “normal” science in Kuhn’s sense of the term. For example, in his response Russell observes that he and Beverly Fehr have discovered that emotion categories are “heterogeneous clusters” with fuzzy borders. By this Russell means that emotion categories are best understood as prototypical in character, bearing family resemblances to each other rather than sharing a set of common elements. He observes in this regard that BET theorists Ekman and Andrea Scarantino now acknowledge the same thing, implying that their change of mind and agreement with Russell on this point indicate that the emotion sciences are progressing nicely through a convergence of data and viewpoints.

But Russell’s findings about the heterogeneity of emotion categories have merely encouraged Ekman, Scarantino, and other BET theorists not only to broaden the number of emotional kinds, but to identify so many potential components in emotion (none of which is criterial), that—in their hands at least—the concept of emotion is even further from rigorous test. In addition, if, as Russell believes, emotion categories are heterogeneous and their boundaries fuzzy, how can researchers determine what components are critical for any particular emotional episode? How can they hope to identify what group of hypothesized emotional elements intercorrelate across the thousands of specific situations we humans are likely to encounter during our lifetimes? The problem is especially acute if, as Russell seems to believe, context trumps everything else.

In this same connection, I think another problem with Russell’s approach is precisely what might seem to be one of its strengths: the fact that it is so ecumenical. By stating in a recent debate over the nature of emotion that the revised BET approach proposed by Dacher Keltner and Daniel Cordaro “moves towards Fridlund’s account, at least a little,” or that he sees no inconsistency between his psychological constructionist project and Scarantino’s “new” BET theory (see The Ascent, p. 367), Russell risks obfuscating the differences between Fridlund’s Behavioral Ecology View, his own psychological constructionism, and the views of the new BET theorists. The result is that he gives cover to Keltner, Cordaro, Scarantino and other BET theorists by treating them as if they are contributing to a shared scientific project while implicitly encouraging them to continue adhering to increasingly unsustainable ideas. He thereby risks further muddying already muddy waters.

This is especially the case when one considers the fact that for Keltner and Cordaro, “intention”—or what Russell refers to as the “dynamic quality of social interactions” (see The Ascent, p. 367)—is a possible but not a necessary component of any particular emotional response. This view is at odds with Fridlund’s Behavioral Ecology View, in which intentionality is not optional, but is constitutive of or inherent in facial behavior. So for Russell to say that Keltner and Cordaro are moving towards Fridlund’s account “a little” risks misrepresenting the stakes involved in the latter’s position.

As for the concept of “core affect”: as I see it, there are two problems that need to be addressed. One problem concerns the empirical validity of the core affect concept. My question is: How can core affect—defined as a free-floating, non-intentional, pre-conceptual, primitive mental-state component of emotional episodes—be detected independently of its manifestations?

Take the example Russell gives in his response, in which he misses his usual afternoon coffee and fades off during a colloquium. He states that it is “unhelpful” to attribute his fading off to the lack of coffee or to his experience of the colloquium itself. But why is it unhelpful, when his missing his coffee or his experience of the colloquium would appear to be the obvious intentional objects in the emotional scenario he describes? How is it helpful to be told that his fading off has no meaning, but is merely due to changes in a hypothetical “core affect”? Or that “In such cases, core affect simply is, and there is no ‘about’ to it”?112

In other words, what evidence independent of the “intentional” manifestations of Russell’s emotional lassitude does he have for the role of core affect? Of course, if the absence of coffee makes his heart rate slow down then the resulting feelings of lassitude might be due to physiological changes; but I don’t think Russell conceives of core affect as a strictly physiological condition. So to repeat: How can core affect be identified separately from its intentional manifestations?

The other problem concerns the theoretical status of core affect as an essential ingredient of emotion that nevertheless itself lacks intentionality. Russell observes that “[c]ore affect can become intentional when it is cognized and attributed.” This raises a key question: how do the cognitions or concepts he associates with emotions become added to a non-intentional component of this kind? The issue takes us into deep waters, and it is not clear to me that Russell, or indeed anyone else committed to psychological constructionism, has the philosophical resources to handle the issues at stake. The discussion forces engagement with the topics addressed by philosopher, John McDowell, whose work I discuss in my book, especially the crucial question as to whether perception is conceptual “all the way out,” as McDowell maintains against those philosophers who argue in favor of the existence of non-conceptual perception out of which concepts and meaning are somehow added on. If Russell believes it is possible to derive emotional meaning from a non-intentional, non-signifying state such as core affect, I would like to know how he envisages or imagines this derivation occurs.

This is not a trivial question in the psychology of the emotions or in the philosophy of mind. McDowell has remarked that the “myth of the Given”—the idea that brute stimuli impinge on our senses in the form of non-conceptual, causal impacts—“offers exculpations where we wanted justifications.” He thereby points to the difficulty inherent in showing how causal explanations can generate normative, conceptual judgments. This is the kind of philosophical problem inevitably confronting scientists such as Russell who at once appeal to notions of core affect in the etiology of the emotions, but then imagine that core affect can become meaningful by some as yet unknown tack-on process of conceptual supplementation. I have yet to read a convincing account of this process by the many philosophers committed to naturalism in the philosophy of mind, and it is not surprising that psychologists have not been able to provide one either.

As I observed in The Ascent, Russell has been a brilliant critic of Ekman’s Basic Emotion Theory and an indefatigable researcher who has conducted impressive experimental research showing the validity of many of Fridlund’s insights concerning the sociality of facial displays. Russell’s colleague Lisa Feldman Barrett, too, has published many cogently argued critiques of the Basic Emotion Theory, as well as valuable overviews of the research literature on emotion demonstrating how weak the evidence in favor of BET really is. Both these researchers, along with colleagues such as José-Miguel Fernández-Dols and Carlos Crivelli and their teams, have played a crucial role in leading the fight against a picture of the emotions that has bedeviled the research field for far too long. As I also noted in my book, the trouble arises only when Russell and Barrett attempt to theorize alternative approaches that end up so close to those of the “new BET” researchers as to nearly indistinguishable from them, with all the ensuing confusions and uncertainties regarding what it is they think they are studying. As an essential ingredient of Russell’s psychological constructionism,“core affect” simply adds to the uncertainty and confusion.

A Joyful Palace Revolution

The “revolution” in Toril Moi’s Revolution of the Ordinary comes from within the very fortress of literary theory. The author of the canonical reader on feminist theory, Sexual/Textual Politics, not to mention classic studies of Simone de Beauvoir and Henrik Ibsen, Moi is surely one of the greatest practitioners and explicators of literary theory of my generation. So when she turns on the “theory project,” taking aim at the founding fathers—Saussure, Derrida, de Man, Jameson, Culler, and others—we would do well to listen carefully. Very carefully. She knows what she is talking about; she helped build the very edifice she is now taking apart, brick by brick.

Her dissatisfaction with the “hermeneutics of suspicion” has been brewing for a while, and she is part of a growing group of critics who advocate for kinds of reading that have been suppressed—let’s face it, sometimes openly derided—by the regnant paradigm of “critique,” namely reading that includes moments of potential admiration, inspiration, recognition, and instruction. Along with Rita Felski (in, for example, The Limits of Critique), Moi has had it with theory’s arrogance, with its monopoly on hermeneutic prestige, and with its thorough-going negativity and skepticism when it comes to language and meaning itself. But whereas Felski seeks to expand the interpretive palette, ceding to theory a place within that bigger tent, Moi strikes at the very heart of literary theory as we have known and practiced it over the last several decades. Hers, in short, is an even more radical critique of critique. It is a daunting task and one that will no doubt make enemies of erstwhile friends. She is just the woman to do it.

The key dispute goes to the very nature of language. Moi demonstrates with painstaking fastidiousness how the legacy of Saussure has been deployed to undergird extremely skeptical views of language and meaning. But the central terms, “the empty signifier” and the “material mark,” she says, remain “radically incoherent concepts” (118). She does not object (and who would?) to the conclusion that language can fail, and perhaps frequently does. What she opposes—vigorously—is making this view of language absolute. But this is precisely what Saussure’s disciples and revisers have wrought: “For post-Saussureans like de Man and Culler,” she says in a highly entertaining and devasting critique of de Man’s use of an Archie Bunker episode, “puns provide an attractive model of language because they show that words aren’t names intrinsically connected to things, a point that is then taken to prove that reference itself is always unstable” (148). And again, though here for slightly different reasons: “Teachers and commentators have usually taken de Man’s message to be that ‘[since] you cannot reconcile rhetoric and grammar,’ the meaning of language, and literature, is ‘radically undecidable’” (138).

Unstable meaning and “undecidability” were the grand conclusions we were all expected to arrive at in graduate school when I was a student, at least in those courses where theory counted, and where a prestige publication was the goal. A well-known bumper sticker that mocks Christian fundamentalists reads: “Jesus is the answer. What was the question?” But with just a minor modification, we could make this slogan apposite of “the theory project” at its worst: a series of foregone conclusions awaiting confirmation via the next literary text to come along—another kind of dogma. As Moi puts it: “To read the text suspiciously is to see it as a symptom of something else. That ‘something else’ usually turns out to be a theoretical or political insight possessed by the critic in advance of the reading. Instead of responding to the text’s concerns, the critic forces it to submit to his or her own theoretical or political schemes. The result is often entirely predictable readings” (17).

Much of what Moi argues in Revolution of the Ordinary resonates deeply with my own experience of literary studies. And I suspect that will be the case with numerous other readers as well. Perhaps without even knowing it, we had been yearning for a magisterial study that would realign the entire discipline by embracing a broader, richer conception of language that acknowledges that meaning is in many contexts remarkably durable (sometimes frightfully so); that language can connect us to the real world, even while it can distort and mystify; and that communication is frequently successful, not ipso facto doomed to failure. These are not naïve claims, but comprise rather a more accurate description of how language actually works.

She grounds this more capacious view of language principally in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, specifically within his posthumous Philosophical Investigations. But this is where all attempts at precis must break down (at least where my poor attempts do), and where her task grows exponentially more difficult for an array of reasons: Wittgenstein is frankly not well known in literary studies, so Moi must provide us a primer on his basic ideas. (This in itself is a formidable task.) Worse, when he is recognized, Wittgenstein is either affiliated with his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (not terribly relevant to this study), and/or taken to be irredeemably conservative or quietistic, thanks to the prejudicial treatment he has received at the hands of Gellner and above all Herbert Marcuse.

This dismissive view of Wittgenstein (baseless though it may actually be) applies specifically to key terms that are crucial to Moi’s argument, namely to “ordinary language,” “forms of life,” and common sense meanings. These very terms are taken as “proof” of ordinary language philosophy’s inability to contest the status quo, mired as it is in the quotidian. We have been taught to assume that the soup of “ordinary” language lacks theory’s privileged “rigorous concepts” and thus fails to provide any semantic purchase for critiquing the ideology of which it inadvertently partakes. Suffice it to say that Moi takes all of this on point by point and concludes that “the need to free ourselves from illusions is as strong in Wittgenstein as it is in Marx and Freud” (60). And ordinary language, she endeavors to show, gives us the tools to do just that.

I have to confess that some of the issues Moi targets have been bugging me for over twenty years. How, for example, do theorists who deny agency to others (having transferred it to language itself) explain their own privilege? Why isn’t language “writing” them? Why are they (or “we” theorists) exempt? The inconsistency becomes particularly irksome when one puts this in the context of the “Bad Writing Contest” (163-66), where we read on the one hand that “many [theorists who endorse difficult prose] object to the very idea that subjects express themselves, which they see as kowtowing to liberal humanism,” while they reserve to themselves the right (and the ability) to deploy “difficult writing” as a “necessary [tool] to shake up uncritical consumers of dominant ideology” (164). I remember asking about this contradiction in graduate school, but I had to wait almost twenty-five years to get a richly satisfying answer from Moi.

Equally aggravating to me was the model of social change implicit in much theory. It seemed to me that there was an element of vanity, even self-congratulation at play in the degree to which we attributed efficacy to our theorizing: it was as if social change could only come about via the use of sufficiently rigorous theoretical concepts—what Moi calls a “theoreticist” (and elsewhere a “decisionist”) fallacy. A related move is to abstract social problems to “their conditions of possibility. When we have exposed them as socially constructed, and thus contingent, we feel that our work is done” (176). But is it really? Prior to graduate school, I had worked for five years in an inner-city high school in Jersey City, so I was fairly certain that this was not the way—or the only way—to effect social change. But I got no hearing. I was merely theoretically naive.

I’m sanguine about the impact of Revolution of the Ordinary, not only because of the book itself, but also because Moi’s case is strengthened by important allies she has not explicitly called upon here. First, if we want to identify an indisputably progressive critic of the status quo who believed firmly—and whose literary work clearly demonstrates—that “ordinary language” can be deployed to bring about consciousness-raising, then we need do little more than mention the name Bertolt Brecht. Without wishing to equate “ordinary language” with the language of “the chap on the street” (Marcuse’s reductive move), we can nevertheless see in Brecht an optimistic embrace of “Menschenverstand” (common sense) as a foundation for revolutionary activity. One need look no further than his signature revolutionary drama, Die Mutter (The Mother), to exemplify the point.

Second, Moi would appear to enjoy the support of Adorno himself in her analysis of “the craving for generality” as a nefarious and “often-unacknowledged intellectual attitude that governs our thinking. It is a picture that holds us captive” (93). Is this not essentially Adorno’s central argument against Heidegger in The Jargon of Authenticity? Is he not here, as well as in Minima Moralia at pains to identify the virtues of “non-identical thinking” as well as the evils of over-abstraction? Even if he does not always abide by his own admonishment, Adorno can credibly be cited as a powerful kindred spirit inveighing against the dangers of generality and abstraction in modern thought. Another ally from within the fortress of high theory.

Third, in her beautiful advocacy of “acknowledgment” as a potentially richer mode of response to works of art than thoroughgoing suspicion (chapter 9), Moi has an important intellectual forebear in the American pragmatist philosopher, William James, who argued in The Varieties of Religious Experience against William Clifford that in some fundamental areas of knowing (such as religion and personal relationships) radical skepticism (the “manly” virtue Clifford espouses) is fundamentally misplaced. On the contrary, some truths can only be apprehended via love, or what James calls our “passional nature.” Fully in concert with Moi’s admonition that literary scholars should declare themselves unabashed humanists, rather than mimic the methods of science, James warns against the encroachment of scientific skepticism upon all areas of human life.

One could continue to weave this web of intellectual genealogy and affinity, and other readers will no doubt do so. The critical reception of Revolution of the Ordinary should include efforts not only to challenge Moi, but to extend and deepen her analysis as well. For it rests, I contend, upon foundations even greater than those she has explicitly claimed in the study.

But let’s be honest: the news may not be all encouraging for this book. Moi will have her energetic detractors, of that we can be certain. I had the great pleasure of serving as a member of what one might call an academic focus group for the first draft of the manuscript that eventually became Revolution of the Ordinary. Organized by the Franklin Humanities Center at Duke University, we were a group of academics (from a variety of departments connected to literary and cultural studies) and publishers. During the discussion of the manuscript, as I recall it, most participants were notably supportive. But during the lunch break, with Moi out of earshot, they weren’t having it: none were willing to let go of “the theory project,” upon which many have built their careers and reputations. After lunch, and after a little prodding, some colleagues did come clean with their unwillingness to accept Saussure as the lynchpin to the argument against theory. Each participant had a reason why his or her theoretical investments should be exempt from the knife of Moi’s analysis. I mention this not to reintroduce the thorny issue of the degree to which core Saussurean ideas indwell even post-Saussurean thought (Moi addresses this head on in the book). My point rather—in the tradition of the sociology of knowledge—is to inquire into the ways in which our own biographies will affect our willingness and ability to accept the challenge at the core of Revolution of the Ordinary.

Allow me to reflect briefly on my own: As someone who has been dissatisfied with central aspects of the theory project—its utter predictability, its devolution into dogma, and its skeptical epistemological extremism—I was ripe for this book. I was all ears. But I have not made a career deploying Benjamin, Derrida, or de Man; quite the opposite. Whenever possible, I have hewed to the examples of my great teachers, who were literary historians (Alfred Doppler and Karl Guthke), or students of narrative (Dorrit Cohn). But I know what is expected as a member of the guild, so I have played along, and frankly learned a great deal in the process. I have no regrets on that score.

Like most of my colleagues, though, I am no specialist on Saussurre (any more than I am on Wittgenstein). I never read Saussurre’s lectures in the original French—nor do I have any intention to do so—and I’m fairly sure that most of my colleagues never have either. If we are honest, we accepted a lot on faith and authority—two things supposedly alien to theory! Furthermore, my enthusiasm for Moi’s book does not fully depend on Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy (though I will be tracking the discussion on that point closely). It is, rather, my own experience of language and meaning-making as something much broader and more variegated than the Saussureans and post-Saussureans would admit that has been decisive for me. Wittgenstein’s formulations (as well as Cavell’s and Moi’s) help me understand these experiences and communicate them to others more effectively. But at bottom, one must ask how necessary the Wittgentstein foundation really is, or needs to be.

I mention all this simply to raise the question of expertise and authority: on what exactly did we and do we base our intellectual allegiances? It seems to me that when we are considering a paradigm shift as momentous as what Moi advocates in Revolution of the Ordinary we ought to take stock of our current investments and ask honestly what it would take for each of us to make the leap. There have of course been others who have mounted serious challenges to the theory project. I’m thinking, for example, of Michael Morton’s The Critical Turn: Studies in Kant, Herder, Wittgenstein, and Contemporary Theory (1993); of Mark Roche’s Why Literature Matters in the Twenty-first Century (2004), and (for somewhat different reasons) of Vittorio Hösle’s Objective Idealism, Ethics, and Politics (1998). Despite the cogency of their arguments—some of which overlap with Moi’s quite nicely—they remained uninfluential, largely ignored by the theory community, as far as I can tell. Moi’s book has already ruffled feathers and evoked rebuttals, and that is as it should be. And we’d expect no less from an insurgent from within the theory establishment. Because this is in a sense theory’s reckoning with itself, we will not be able to avoid the debate as we have in the past. Remaining on the sidelines, or pretending the challenge is not facing us squarely, is simply less of an option given Moi’s towering prominence.

At any rate, what we have in this pathbreaking book is not merely a revolution, as Moi suggests in her title, but a joyful one, as I contend in mine. That is because Moi has provided a roadmap for reconnecting literary studies to concern for the social world we all inhabit. Rather than making epistemology the be-all and end-all, and reducing any moral concern to questions of what we can and cannot know, Moi strongly advocates reading practices that acknowledge people as potential agents; as actors (authors, readers, social actors) who have social and personal responsibility; and as subjects who write and are not merely written by “language itself.” More than that, her book is infused with a deep concern for pedagogy and with a profound respect—as one potential response—for the work of art. She concludes with a poignant manifesto: “A society that loses faith in language will also lose its sense of reality. A society that rejects the very idea of a just and loving gaze as so much unscientific sentimentalism will try to replace judgment with measurements….In a world in which so many powerful persons and institutions have a vested interest in making us lose faith in language’s power to respond to and reveal reality, precise and attentive use of words is an act of resistance” (242).

I am not blind—I hope—to the book’s (and perhaps my own) shortcomings. In any particular disagreement, Moi is generous to her opponents to a fault, differing it seems only where absolutely necessary. Nevertheless, I find myself asking if there is not some better way to acknowledge the achievements of theory, despite its post-Saussurean extravagancies and distortions. And I have to confess that I’m still struggling with Wittgenstein—trying, for example, to figure out exactly how “exemplary” contrasts with “representative.” I assume that since language use is infinite we simply can never know for sure if anything is ever really representative. (One contemporary linguist views language as a moving parade in which we are all participants—a brilliant image, I think, to express its uncontainability, its refusal to be brought under the strictures of analysis.) But, still: how exemplary is exemplary? And while I love the book’s final chapter for its soaring ambition, it strikes me as a bit schematic, perhaps more an outline for a future book. I can sense Moi’s desire to exemplify the kind of reading she has thus far only adumbrated, but these sections dealing with primary literature are just far too brief, at least for my taste.

But pace to those who tell us that Moi has sold out aesthetics in favor of ethics, or that in her rush to embrace the real, she has lost touch with the imaginative possibilities of literature. Let us not forget that Moi is a gifted literary critic, not only a theorist. That is a real calling card, one that frankly distinguishes her from many others who play the theory game. Even if this single monograph does not provide her the berth to indulge that kind of work in greater detail, I am not willing to forget that she is elsewhere the author of the magisterial Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, and a truly fine reader of literature in general.

I am not naïve about the revolution. Of those who engage with this book, many may seek to excuse themselves from Moi’s general indictment of theory, to find some clever way around her frontal attack on Saussure and his legacy. Let the conversations begin! She will have answers, and it will be fun to watch the debates unfold. But it will not be enough, from my point of view, to rescue this or that favorite shred or strand of the theory project. Opponents will owe us not merely a defense of the status quo, but an explanation as to how we get to those joyful aspects of aesthetic “acknowledgment” Moi adumbrates—that is, how we can embrace language in its full range of functionality, beauty, and social utility.

In her new book, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell, Toril Moi rails against the way literary critics and theorists use metaphors of “surface” and “depth” when they interpret texts. Regardless of which side of the surface-depth binary we privilege, she claims, these metaphors entangle us in a misconception of how language works, and distract us from our real task: looking at the human realities each text explores. Language itself has neither surface nor depth; to the degree that a text communicates something real, it does so as “ordinary language,” which has neither surface nor depth but is entirely open to view, “doing work,” drawing “useful distinctions” that answer to “our real need” as human beings (161). Metaphysicians, deconstructionists, Marxists, feminists, and identity theorists get carried away by the urge to create theoretical generalizations, whereas language that does work moves from the “particular case” towards larger insights. Our primary goal should be to accurately describe particular cases, allowing nothing theoretical to intrude, and to use the clearest language possible, remembering that the language we interpret has neither surface nor depth. If we don’t do that, then we produce what Wittgenstein calls “language on holiday,” “language idling” (Philosophical Investigations, 38, 132; Moi, 47-49).

Moi attributes her notions about ordinary language to “ordinary language philosophy,” the trend in philosophy associated primarily with J. L. Austin and the later Wittgenstein. She is particularly impressed with Wittgenstein’s dictum in Philosophical Investigations §435 that in language “nothing is hidden,”11 from which she concludes that the reason language—innocent in itself, completely open to view—sometimes misleads, is that we, the users of language, misuse it to “lie, cheat, and deceive (179-80).

Given her blanket rejection of the metaphors of surface and depth in language, one would think she would explain why Wittgenstein feels no compunction in using it. As he says in §664,

In the use of words, one might distinguish “surface grammar” from “depth grammar.” What immediately impresses itself upon us about the use of a word is the way it is used in the sentence structure, the part of its use—one might say—that can be taken in by the ear. —And now compare the depth grammar, say, of the verb ‘to mean’, with what its surface grammar would lead one to presume. No wonder one finds it difficult to know one’s way about.

The point Wittgenstein is making here with the help of the surface-depth metaphor is fundamental to his whole inquiry: that, as he says in §132, the distinctions we need to make are ones “that our ordinary forms of language make us overlook.” These remarks indicate that ordinary language isn’t merely the simple-souled, compliant friend as which Moi takes it, it’s a slippery little devil, one that it takes more than a refusal of the surface-depth metaphor to deal with—a phenomenon that, in fact, this metaphor can help us to understand.

It’s true that Wittgenstein doesn’t think the confusions engendered by our ordinary forms of speech can be cleared up by any general theory; what is needed, as Moi correctly notes, is careful attention to how “ordinary language” actually works in particular cases of its use. But no amount of attention to particular cases of language use is going to yield the necessary clarification unless we have been trained to look at these particular cases in the radical new way that Wittgenstein teaches, a way that involves conceptual generalizations of a type that function awfully like theoretical concepts, and which are anything but “ordinary.” Even his concept of ordinary language is un-ordinary; you don’t really know what it means until you’ve spent a lot of time with Wittgenstein. He isn’t just looking carefully at language and exhorting others to do the same, he’s teaching a highly specialized method, a method that he says can be taught only by examples; but we can’t understand what the examples are supposed to be teaching without the new concepts Wittgenstein invents, concepts one can call theoretical or not, as one pleases, but which are certainly not derived directly from ordinary usage, and which apply to vast swathes of language.12

In order to understand the notions of surface and depth grammar, for instance, we have to understand the extremely original way in which Wittgenstein defines “grammar.” To actually use Wittgenstein’s concept of grammar, it isn’t enough to have a loose conceptual grasp of his method, as Moi does; one has to develop an instinctive feel for grammar, a feel guided by a sense of the philosophical problematic that guides Wittgenstein’s investigations. One can’t “hear” grammaticality correctly unless one has a firm grasp of the method that corresponds to this problematic. Moi suggests that the person off the street should be able to understand such apparently ordinary language distinctions as that between “language that does work” (ordinary language) on one hand, and “language idling” or “language on holiday” (theory) on the other. But this distinction evidently constitutes just what Moi claims is impossible—a general theory of language, one that divides all of language into two types, one of which is valid and the other—theory in general—is not; one of which gives us access to the real, the other of which creates mere illusions. This distinction certainly isn’t mere description. Mere description is something that, if it’s accurate, most people will agree with without specialized training, which is far from the case here.

Moi thinks all one needs to do to get to language that “does work” is pay close attention to the “particular case,” but even the notion of a particular case as mobilized by Wittgenstein is slippery in a way that eludes her argument in Revolution of the Ordinary. He doesn’t mean “particular” in the sense of “individual,” as she often takes it, but in the sense of “specific”: not “what Fred said yesterday to Sam,” but “the kind of thing one says in this kind of situation.” Even more important, Moi also misses the fact that the specificity and concreteness Wittgenstein is after are strictly linguistic—that is, typical cases of linguistic usage—not the specificity and concreteness of “real life.” It is true that Wittgenstein investigates usage, to a certain limited degree, as intertwined with the “forms of life” within which they acquire their sense. But he never fills in the details of forms of life beyond certain schematic descriptions, just enough to illuminate the conceptual point he wants to illuminate; it’s not as though he’s interested in these details—at least philosophically—for their own sake, or for humane reasons. Moi, by contrast, wants to talk about things like racism and the oppression of women, and to discuss them as they affect individual persons. The “real need” of which Wittgenstein speaks is an intellectual need, not the needs for acknowledgement or freedom from discrimination of individual human beings or groups of human beings about which Moi is concerned. No doubt such need is more important than the matters most philosophers or theorists address, but that is simply not the kind of real need in question in the Philosophical Investigations.

The truth is that Wittgenstein was a philosopher’s philosopher, who in the Philosophical Investigations was concerned (as the book’s title specifies) with philosophical problems. In life he was a generous man who gave away his fortune, and traveled to the Soviet Union in hopes of finding the kind of society that he could live in; but in his writings the only needs he’s concerned with are those ensuing from a philosophical tradition that had caused him, and was still causing others, real spiritual torment by its mistaken conceptions of mind, thought, and truth. At the center of this mistaken philosophical “picture” was the post-Cartesian conception of mind/consciousness as what in the Blue Book Wittgenstein called “a queer kind of medium” that dwells in the head somewhere. This medium can, purportedly, do things no natural medium, subject to naturalistic explanation, can do, such as make a mental image directly “refer” to an object in the world, or bestow meaning on the dead body of a physical sign token. In order to get us unstuck from this metaphysical picture, Wittgenstein asks us to consider thought as no different than, yes, writing—in a sense of “writing” that has important correspondences with the Derridean sense:

The word “signify” (bezeichnen) is perhaps used most straightforwardly when the name is actually a mark on the object signified….

When philosophizing, it will often prove useful to say to ourselves: naming something is rather like attaching a name tag to a thing.13

Thinking in terms of name tags on things is a way of reminding ourselves that a word, even an ostensibly learned one, functions in the same way whether it’s in one’s “mind” or written down on paper. Wittgenstein admits that certain words do call certain images into mind, but this is part of what creates the mistaken notion of the “queer medium” in which magical acts of meaning and reference can occur.

Moi has apparently picked up her Wittgenstein mainly from Stanley Cavell, who, although he is scarcely on the same level with the other two writers named in her subtitle, is by far the most important influence on her views. It’s a curious preference for a champion of pellucid language, since Austin (who only pops up here and there in this book) and Wittgenstein both write spectacularly terse, lucid, analytical prose, while Cavell’s style is portentous, long-winded, full of rhetorical flourishes, and to me, at least, far from a model of clarity. But it is he who introduces the kind of moralism that dominates Moi’s last two chapters. We finally learn here that what really enables accurate reading of the particular case is a good heart and “a just and loving gaze” that gives people and texts the acknowledgment they need and deserve. For examples of the just and loving gaze, Moi cites poets, fiction writers, and certain philosophers—Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and Martha Nussbaum; not a single model of good reading can she find among literary critics or theorists. The implication is that our accursed tribe has become addicted to abstract theory because we lack just and loving hearts; and that Moi herself does not lack it. This may be so, but it isn’t evident in the cursory and contemptuous way she dismisses the writers she doesn’t like (full disclosure: I am one of these). Nor am I convinced her exemplary writers are as morally exemplary as she so readily assumes: Rilke, for example, whose writing Moi praises, abandoned his newborn child and his wife to run off to Paris to perfect his art (where he was later joined by his wife, also an artist, sans baby). One doesn’t have to be an ethically exemplary person to write just and loving prose, of course; but one has to wonder what role the heart plays in such writing. Is what makes “The Panther” a great poem really a just and loving heart, or something else—a total devotion to becoming a great poet, perhaps?

More important than the moralism, however—at least from a philosophical standpoint—is that in these final two chapters Moi reveals, almost accidentally, her commitment to the Romantic version of the Cartesian split that Wittgenstein so intensely wanted to dismantle. During her discussion of Rilke, she articulates—somewhat offhandedly, as though she doesn’t realize the momentousness of what she’s saying—a Romantic-expressivist view of art, one which she describes in terms of the subjective “unknown inner space” (237) and the worldly “outer.” This, of course, is the surface-depth metaphor to end all surface-depth metaphors, the main target of the Philosophical Investigations (and identified by Derrida as the matrix of all other metaphysical oppositions). Since she’s not applying the metaphor to language, Moi feels free to apply it to that which language expresses: “Writing is expression, in the most literal sense of the word, for it turns the inner into something outer” (236). By contrast, Wittgenstein in The Blue Book—the best place for a beginner to get oriented toward the project of the Philosophical Investigations—writes that “We are not concerned with the difference, inside, outside.” That’s the conceptual move that, in Wittgenstein’s method, opens the way to treating signs indifferently as in the head or written on paper.

One understands nothing about the Philosophical Investigations if one doesn’t realize that the conception of mind as a “queer” inner medium is the major target at which it takes aim. One especially doesn’t understand the force of Wittgenstein’s notion that in language nothing is hidden, which needs to be understood by contrast with the absolute hiddenness of the inner medium (not by contrast with something hidden by the forms of language themselves, a purely perspectival hiddenness). Because this is so, I had the temerity to suggest in a book Moi summarily dismisses (as she dismisses many other texts by “theorists”) that Wittgenstein was in a certain way, one that needs to be carefully articulated and delimited, on the same page with Derrida, who in Of Grammatology declared that “the deconstruction of presence proceeds through the deconstruction of consciousness.”

Reading Toril Moi’s new book reminded me of when New Hampshire’s famous rock formation, The Old Man of the Mountain, finally just fell off the mountain in 2003. It is somewhat frightening to see Moi cast aside the grounds of the discipline as most of us have been trained in it, as so much in the humanities seems already precarious. But it is thrilling and freeing too.

I will focus here on what I take to be the crucial parts of this wide-ranging book: the discussions of Saussure and of concepts, and the use of the term human being. As to the first, Moi notes that “in the humanities today, the doxa concerning language and meaning remains Saussurean, or rather, post-Saussurean” (15). In particular, she highlights that “recent theory formations that seek to get past subjectivity and language” (17) are “still work[ing] with the Saussurean and post-Saussurean picture of language, even if only implicitly” (17). The stakes of inquiring into Saussure, then, include inquiring into whether or not language’s relation to the world really is a problem, and if subjectivity—or the human presence in relation to language—is itself a problem.

Moi makes two essential points concerning Saussure. First, she notes the scientific purpose of his view of language as a structure that can be studied as an object outside of individuals’ use of it. As she says, “Saussure want[ed] to found a science” (17), and to do so he needed a way to treat language as a stable object he could analyze from the outside. “Saussure’s major contribution to linguistics is his concept of ‘language’ (la langue), a completely new theoretical construct defined as a ‘self-contained whole and a principle of classification’” (114).

This is crafted by separating language from parole, “language uttered by an individual speaker” (115). As Moi observes, this “makes ‘language’ a theorizable entity, something one can grasp as a whole, something that can be the proper subject for a science” (114). But it is “an artificially produced object . . . carved out of the unwieldy chaos of ‘speech’” (114). Moreover, Moi contends, it does not make sense to take this artifact-language, created for scientific study, and turn it into a “general philosophy of language” (114). For Wittgenstein, she explains, language is not a structure or object that can be thought outside of our acts of using it; it has no objective existence, so to speak, at all. It does seem strange that Saussure’s work should have become the basis of literary theory. Why should we think that language as a general system is what is at stake in our interest in literature, since literature is if nothing else a specific use of language?

The second important point that Moi makes about Saussure concerns the structure of the sign: in essence, we did not grasp the point of the arrows on either side of the oval in Saussure’s classic diagram of it. “[N]othing is more characteristic of the post-Saussurean intellectual universe than the almost mystical belief in the ‘materiality of the signifier,’ and its sister concepts ‘the empty signifier’ and the ‘mark’” (116). These theoretical concepts are based on the idea that the linguistic sign is composed of two elements: a material signifier, be it a mark or a sound, and a concept, which then get sealed together into the sign. The problem with this is that, as Moi observes, “Saussure keeps reminding his readers that the signifier can never come apart from the signified” (117). Because they don’t exist apart from one another in the first place, the signifier and signified cannot be sealed together.

“In a posthumously discovered note [Saussure] writes: ‘It is not true, indeed it is extremely false to imagine there to be a distinction between the sound and the idea’” (117). And as Moi calls to our attention, a fascinating example in Course in General Linguistics compares language to “a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound” (quoted in Moi, 117). That’s why there are those arrows going up and down, to remind us that the two halves of the sign don’t exist except in relation to one another: the sign is one thing, not a compound of two things that, like chocolate and peanut butter, can be encountered both together and apart.

If you’ve ever found it odd that theory courses (perhaps even your own) tend to teach a tiny extract from Saussure, now you have a sense of why. The discipline adopted a small chunk of his terminology—which it misread—and then used that to define an entire philosophical sense of language, ignoring the scientific use for which Saussure intended it. Perhaps ignoring most of Saussure was necessary to keep ourselves from noticing how little his work fit with our account of it. At any rate, to be persuaded by Moi’s points about Saussure is to lose interest in a myriad of readings concerned with revealing language’s structural and/or material nature.

It is also to lose interest in readings seeking to get out of the imposed structure of language to reach a life prior to or beyond it. Most theories of language used in English, Moi notes, follow Saussure’s lead by defining language as a system that can be thought of outside of the use to which humans put it. In contrast, Moi argues through both Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell that language exists only as it is part of human life and practices. A powerful moment in support of this view is her discussion of Paul de Man’s reading of a scene from All in the Family, in which “his lack of interest in the actual speakers in their concrete situation…makes him deaf to the nuances” at stake in a fight between Archie and Edith Bunker. De Man is unable to see “a clash…between a wife who wishes to explain something, and a husband who refuses to listen” (142).

At a later moment, Moi asks that we at long last “acknowledge the obvious, namely that texts are made by someone” (202). It’s time, in short, to stop fighting against expression, a concept that was central to literary criticism before the rise of formalism and structuralism but has been resisted ever since. Here, Moi is abandoning decades of interest in texts framed not as human expressions but as “object[s]” (202), be they made up of the materials of signifiers or the materials of print and beyond. It does seem odd, to say the least, that literary criticism should be so adamantly opposed to the expressive, and so consistently committed to not acknowledging authorship at all.

Using Wittgenstein’s argument that language is indissociable from use leads Moi to argue against “the denial of the human” (128) that is such a dreary feature of scholarship in an era of posthumanism. But this denial of the human is nothing new in literary studies; we can trace it back through de Man’s fascination with Rousseau’s fear that language, since it is a “machine” that does not express him, might as well “mutilat[e] or behead” him.14 Still farther, it goes to Saussure’s bracketing of speech and also to Vladímir Propp’s observation that “phenomena and objects around us can be studied from the aspect of their composition and structure” (4), and his essential structuralist idea that to understand folktales, one should treat them like objects, identifiable through their formal structure.15 An irony of Moi’s book is that even as it upends so much disciplinary common knowledge, it shows why inquiring into the history of one’s discipline matters: otherwise, we can be repeating the moves of critics now a century behind us without even knowing why and how that’s happening.

One of the revolutionary things about Revolution of the Ordinary is the frequency with which the word human appears in it. This comes from Moi’s rejection of the idea that language can be studied apart from its use, not from a commitment to the exalted value of the human. Many critics are, however, likely to balk at the word, because “the human” was used historically as a principle of exclusion, grounding distinctions between who and what counts as valuable and who and what does not. Here, I think the disagreement at stake is importantly about an approach to concepts in general.

In a fascinating passage, Moi finds Jacques Derrida up in arms because John Searle “accuses” him “of believing that ‘unless a distinction can be made rigorous and precise it isn’t really a distinction at all’” (67; Moi quotes Searle). Moi observes that “Derrida reacts with fury” (67) to this charge; he is “shocked because he can’t fathom how anyone could possibly take such a notion of concepts to be a problem” (68). In Derrida’s words: “What philosopher ever since there were philosophers…ever renounced this axiom: in the order of concepts . . . when a distinction cannot be rigorous or precise, it is not a distinction at all” (Derrida, quoted in Moi 68). Critics who have become accustomed to nodding their heads in sympathy every time a binary distinction has been questioned may start up in wonder to hear this from Derrida. But Moi drives home that, in fact, “[r]igorous concepts” with firm definitions “are the very hallmark of ‘theory’” (68).

Derrida’s project, Moi emphasizes, is to reveal that so many concepts fail—can be deconstructed—because they contain fissures and inconsistencies. And “[a]fter deconstruction comes construction” (69), the invention of new concepts which are meant not to be muddled like the old ones. Hence “the long series of Derridean concepts: diffèrance, mark, supplement, iterability, trace, pharmakon, hymen, parergon, and many others” (69) in the pantheon of theory’s terms.

Moi goes on to observe how widely the project of theory has been to object to concepts which fail its definite ideal. As an example, she notes that while Kimberlé Crenshaw’s essay introducing intersectionality did not use concepts that way, in the field of intersectional feminist theory, “Even when the theorists’ whole project is fueled by a desire to understand the infinite differences among women in all their particularity, they set out do so by producing a general theory (of difference, of identity, language, power, and so on) that they hope will generate the appropriate understanding of the particular case” (93). Her point is that Crenshaw was right to bring up the way that race and gender oppression intersect; the mistake was subsequent theoreticians’ focus on honing conceptual categories as a way to develop Crenshaw’s insight. Moi maintains that “[t]he very idea of ‘exclusionary’ concepts is based on a wrong-headed and counterproductive picture of concepts and theory, a picture that in fact presupposes the very ‘exclusionariness’ or boundedness that feminist readers are eager to undo” (88).

In contrast, Wittgenstein thinks we may sometimes want utter precision from concepts, but that at other times uncertainty will be preferable. Moi illustrates this by saying that if she “want[s] to take a picture of you in front of the Eiffel tower, surely ‘stand roughly there’ is all” that’s needed—latitude and longitude for an exact spot will not help (73). Moi’s contention, then, is against the entire sense that concepts are a problem because they have firm and clear boundaries which are at once too restrictive (too bounded) and too imperfect (as cases always arise which seem not to fall under their boundaries). If you follow her objection to the way theory understands concepts, a lot of work in the discipline at large looks a bit like Eeyore putting a deflated balloon in and out a jar, torn between a commitment to concepts as definitive containers and a desire to trouble or unsettle them.

Instead, Moi suggests that we can think of concepts (such as “women”) as “network[s] of criss-crossing similarities, constantly established and extended in concrete use” (100). Following Wittgenstein, that is, we can see that a concept is less like a jar with a lid and more like a knot of seaweed that one can pick up and manipulate, drawing out some strands while leaving others in the background. On this understanding of the concept, speaking of the human being is a less dramatic gesture.

Indeed, Moi’s point might be that we already use the idea of the human being, without necessarily invoking the West’s historical conjunction of enlightenment and imperialism. The question becomes, how is that term being used, rather than what convictions and connections that term seems—in itself and apart from its use—to necessarily bring with it. Moi’s point would also be, I believe, that our conscious resistance to the term “human” does not connect to our lived practice in which we employ a flexible sense of the human frequently. Among these might be an interest in where and how human beings treat each other well or badly, fairly or unfairly.

Ultimately, Moi’s use of the human, like her sense of how concepts function generally, actually ratchets down the reach of the claims-making involved rather than raising it to the universal. I take this to be one of the main effects of a move away from thinking about the objective, structural conditions of language and focusing instead on its use: authored texts don’t voice an entire system in the way that machine-texts do.

An instance of this is Moi’s use of the word ‘we.’ Moi notes that it “has a bad reputation, for it is often taken to be inherently ‘exclusionary.’ But ‘we’ can be used in a myriad of ways, and only a few of those ways are objectionable. Ordinary language philosophy often talks about ‘what we should say.’…[T]his ‘we’ is neither an order nor an empirical claim. It is, rather, an invitation to the reader to test something for herself, to see if she can see what I see” (18). The “we” is a way of speaking in the hope that “there can be a community that includes me. Maybe there isn’t, at least not right now. To write is to risk rebuff” (19). To speak of a we, as of the human being, is to open up the possibility that one’s sense of something is of interest to others, is shareable by others, and that others might have something to say in response. Thus the commonalities invited through terms such as “we” can be as usefully indefinite as the concept.

Another way to think about the use of the term human in this book is to see it as part of an extended argument for the return of a basic premise of second wave feminism—that our own experience is the place to begin political and philosophical inquiry. In this respect Moi argues against Joan Scott’s influential argument in “The Evidence of Experience” that “experience is at once always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted” (91; Moi quotes Scott). If in Scott the point was that experience is not a natural condition existing prior to cultural forms, one could say Moi’s point is that cultural forms are not objectifiable abstractions that exist prior to experiential phenomena (in short, this is not a Marxist book).

For Moi, Wittgenstein’s sense of a form of life makes identifying a natural, real life apart from a formal structure nonsensical—which is to say both an appeal to reality outside of form, and an appeal to form as an object knowable unto itself, apart from experience, make little sense. This is another place where the magnitude of the argument emerges: the whole way most English scholars think about reality, as made up of structures that shape an existence that is betrayed and constrained by that very shaping, doesn’t make sense to Moi anymore. She’s inviting us to come through the looking glass with her and give up on the mistaken idea that the form of language or culture exists apart from our natural, material, or real being. What will we think about once we’ve stopped worrying about the split between language and reality?

On the one hand, we’ll have to think more about what’s going on with people, as Moi emphasizes in her attention to Archie and Edith’s relationship. This is the implicit point of her frequent reminder that Wittgenstein sees philosophy as a kind of “therapy” (158). In this sense, she’s pulling for the return of a basic premise of the humanities: that it is a means for people to transform their experience of themselves and of the world. As Moi bursts out, late in the book, “The education of one’s experience by paying attention to it: what a hopeful idea! Experience is not fixed; previous experience does not doom me forever to repeat the same mistakes” (219).

Yet because of her sense of the form of life, in which natural existence and cultural existence are as inextricably coextant as the signifier and signified, the interest in experience Moi calls for is also an interest in how language is used. Currently, an interest in how language is used is relatively minimal in literary criticism. The most profound revolution here may lie in asking scholars in English to see language not as a problematic external structure against which we struggle, but as an intimate part of our being. If we return our attention to the realm of language in use—as expression—perhaps what Saussure cast off as “the unwieldy chaos of speech” will reopen as a place in which we thrive, or at least move with greater ease.

Toril Moi’s Revolution of the Ordinary has two goals. Through her lucid and learned accounts of crucial terms in Wittgenstein’s thought—“use,” “language game,” and “form of life”—Moi invites us to embrace a set of intuitions about the consequences entailed by the idea that we are beings who lead “lives in language.” Like Stanley Cavell, one of the book’s tutelary spirits, Moi seeks to show that what may have seemed like intractable failures of knowledge are really a kind of stubborn refusal to embrace what we must already know. For Cavell, this was notably the case when it came to the acknowledgement of persons: however badly or often we might fail in our responsiveness to others, he claimed, we do not really encounter the radical question of the reality of other minds and the claims that they make on us. For Moi, it is importantly true in the case of language. On her account, we do not ever really encounter the problem of the arbitrariness of the sign that generates the agon of deconstruction; we cannot really propose an alternative to convention that could give the observation that our norms and meanings are “socially constructed” any critical force. And thus, the second argument of the book: that by bringing the insights of ordinary language philosophy on literary study, we will come to see that a whole set of debates about the theory of language and the normativity of social practice that Moi regards as central to the discipline are misguided from the start and should be left behind, clearing the way to a transformed practice of reading.

I want to focus on a relatively narrow piece of the book’s second argument: the claim that the most important transformations on literary study will emerge when we stop thinking about literary texts as objects and start thinking about them as actions. For Moi, the payoff in considering texts as actions is also twofold. First, in coming to recognize texts as intentional—“spoken or written by someone at a particular time in a particular place”—we transform reading into what she calls “a practice of acknowledgement,” a practice that lays a host of transferred ethical obligations on the reader. But thinking about literary texts as “actions” also has practical implications for what I want to call (somewhat malgre Moi) our interpretive method. Specifically, it is supposed to correct our account of artistic intentions by changing when we derive them. Citing Elizabeth’s Anscombe’s account of intentionality, Moi argues that the question of literary intention can be answered only “retrospectively,” projecting back from the text to the intention that would explain it. To make her case, Moi points us to the example of Flaubert: As Flaubert “struggled with every word and comma in Madame Bovary,” crossing out and rewriting, Moi suggests, he did not fashion his novel after some fully formed idea, or “a pre-existing mini-work in his head.” Flaubert may have set out “at some point” to write a novel about “provincial life in Normandy”; but this original intention was not decisive; which is to say it was not the intention that guided his day’s work: “[O]nly by looking at what he had done could Flaubert decide whether it was what he had wanted to do.” And what is true of Flaubert—as an author, along the way—is true of us, as readers, at the end. On Moi’s account, to treat a work as an action is to see the literary object as an “intentional object,” something that “is meant to be exactly as it is,” and to work backwards, deriving the reasons for why it is exactly that way.

But exactly what way is the work? Or, to put it another way: what is our reason for assuming that the final state of the poem’s language—this set of sentences, that array of commas—is the place from which we ought to begin to derive our retrospective account of the work’s intentions? Suppose I were to compose a poem with the intention of creating a sequence words that have a very particular sound to them:

O world! O life! O time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more—Oh, never more!

Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight;
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more—Oh, never more!

Shelley’s “A Lament” has that quality that George Sainstbury called “inevitableness”—a high degree of finish that indeed makes it seem intended to be “exactly that way.”  But as it happens, we have a robust record of the contingent and fitful work by which this inevitableness was produced. In Shelley’s notebooks, we can observe the poet in action, crossing out and revising, unfolding draft after draft separated by pages of other work, doodles of trees and men, and addresses of friends:

[First Draft, Stage 1]

Ah time, oh night, o day
Ni nal ni na, na ni
Ni na ni na, ni na
Oh life, O death, O time
Time a di
Never Time
Ah time, a time O-time
Time!

At first blush, the drafts of “A Lament” would seem to fully affirm Moi’s account of writerly action. What could be more obvious from Shelley’s crossings out and rewritings than that the poet did not fully possess his intentions at the outset, or in the midst of his work? As Bennett Weaver described the manuscripts in his own account of the poem’s “magic of inevitability”:  “Obviously in them we have nothing crystallate. We have a tone, we have a strong iambic rhythm, we have great nouns to receive the beat of the rhythm. Among those nouns time is dominant….Whether the words came in response to the rhythm or whether the rhythm was determined by the words who can say?…Anything like a poem is far off.” Like Moi’s Flaubert, Weaver’s Shelley undertakes a focused effort to get the work “right”; and what he is getting right is not the willed execution of what a “nuclear idea” (something like Moi’s “mini work”). Shelley may have intuited that “time” would be important to his poem in retrospect, but it isn’t quite time for the poem, which remains “far off” with the nouns like “life” and world” that will show up later.

But I want to say that our record of Shelley’s poem in action poses some important questions to Moi’s idea of the poem as action. Consider these two versions of the work at an intermediate stage, lettered on two facing pages of the notebook:

[First Draft, stage 3]

This draft of “A Lament” allow us to consider that the action achieved in the poem might not have been the discovery of its nouns, but the fulfillment of a metrical scheme. While some nouns do appear, they appear as the vehicle of a pattern of sounds (time, night, day; ah, oh, o?) and stresses (ni na, na ni) for which words are necessary but secondary. Indeed, we may be struck, not only by the intensity of Shelley’s work on rhythm, but by its relative indifference to nouns; by the strange fact, for example, that (as Weaver notes): “For the strange final line of symbols, concluding with a detached na followed by an emphatic exclamation mark, there are no words.”

Even this hypothetical wordless poem does not present an insurmountable problem for Moi’s argument just because it does not take place in what we would ordinarily call ordinary language. Doubtless we could, with recourse to a concept like “form of life,” produce the world in which this action in sound and stress should count as part of a language game. This would be take “na na na” as in some sense another word, like “bububu”: or, if not a word exactly, then something that we could, given world enough and time, come to understand. Our retrospective account of the meaning of the poem might depend on articulating the reasons Shelly puts a “na ni” here and a “na na” there; rather than than on reasons for choosing “life” or “world,” but it in either case it would depend on the articulation of a life and world, in which the making of patterned sounds counts as a meaningful action.

But what seems more compelling in the example of Shelley’s poem—and what the hypothesis of a poem defined by its form makes vivid—is the difference between the kinds of reasons that would justify a poem considered as the endpoint of an action and the kinds of reasons motivating the actions that brought the poem about. What is the relation between the intentions retrospectively animating the “crystallate” poem, the poem that is exactly some particular way, and the intentions motivating the making of the poem that way? What are actions from the perspective of the artist in process, working (apparently) from an intention he cannot not fully be said to have except in retrospect? These facing pages preserve the tension not between two different actions, one meaningful in one way, the other meaningful in another, but between two different temporalities of intentional action: one fully intentional but not (yet) “meaningful”; the other the province of meanings that were not quite what one intended to make when making them.

Indeed, meter focuses our attention on this problem in the temporality of action, not just in the drafts, where Shelley can be seen comparing values of sound, stress, and duration against other rejected possibilities, but in the finished poem. Reading a poem enjoins an ongoing moment-to-moment adjudication of compositional rightness that is not identical to, and therefore not fully displaced by the retrospective judgment of that there are meanings or patterns at work in the poem. In experiencing the aptness or inevitability of a sound or silence in the moment of reading, we affirm the justice of the poet’s choice without necessary reference to the poem’s final form. The phenomenology of form perpetuates into the present of retrospect the feeling of encountering action “in process”—action charged with intention prior to the moment of its crystallization into pattern or sense.  Such experiences of compositionality are registrations of intentionality in operation at every stage, and not just at (or after) the stage of completion.

If the intentions that we discover in retrospect—derived as they are from the final, crystallate whole—are not (as Moi stipulates they are not) the reasons motivating the making of the whole, then from perspective of retrospect, then the poem at any intermediate stage would seem to be unimaginably “far off.” Indeed, Moi’s insistence on retrospect makes it hard to see why we should think her interest in meanings is an interest in intentions at all. Retrospectively divined meanings of a poem would seem to exist, that is, despite the actions of its maker rather than because of them, making the emergence of the finished work seem profoundly uncaused, like a kind of miracle. (cf. Weaver: “No truth was elicited at a flash, no voluntary purpose sought to woo a spontaneous impulse into union. Then after long waiting a creative mood descended sudden from heaven. Passion rose and overcame the swiftness of thought, and beauty was born.”)

The vividness with which these problems of action are felt in the encounter with poems—their lack of fit between what seem like meanings and what seem like motives—might have something to do with the recurrent discovery in the history of poetry that most motives that you could give to account for the making of a poem are better motives to do something else. This is obviously, comically, tragically, true when the motive is political. But it is still plausibly true when the motive is communicative (the idea that a poem is “what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed” is far more often true in the breach.) Meter, in particular, helps us to see is why there is almost no satisfactory account of action that would warrant the work Flaubert put in to writing Madame Bovary or Shelley put into his revisions, or why it should take place in commas or rhythms. One significant exception, of course, would be the action of producing exactly that thing. But this would put us back in what Moi regards as sterile terrain of art for art’s sake: treating the form of an object as its reason for existing.

Moi’s answer to the question of what action a poem is is to see the poem as a move in a game calibrated to some use in our world. This approach, generous as it is to the diversity of human motives, misses something of the seriousness of the challenge that poetry presents, which I might state as a definition: Poetry names those actions in which the relation between means and ends is a persistent problem. This definition does not identify some particular set of formal features as essential to poetry; rather it seems to explain some of the ways in which we use the word “poetry” as responses to the problems form picks out in action: We are inclined to call pictures “poetic” to the extent that they possess features in excess of the motive to depict. Novels are “poetic” when their interest in commas seems at least as motivating as an interest in marriages or trains. Poems are poetic when they call attention to the disrelation between our desired ends and our available means.

When Wittgenstein declares “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him,” he is suggesting that one can always in principle produce the rules of the game in which the poem will come seem to be “a great noun.” Thus an interest in literature is an interest in the world, life, and time that we do or could hold in common. But poetry suggests that we are all always lions: there is a present element of our utterances that cannot be articulated with relation to shared reasons without losing them to retrospect.  An interest in the class of actions that display a lack of fit between our efforts and our interests suggests that the ordinary is not fully and exclusively where we reside.

Reading as an Act of Acknowledgment: Literary Studies after Ordinary Language Philosophy

Toril Moi has set out to write a revolutionary book. Yet from the outset she is clear about the fact that the revolution she aims to describe and enact has a paradoxical quality. It may not be recognized as a revolution at all, and for some it may even seem reactionary. This observation about Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell (2017) may seem obvious, but its implications bear further study. The reasons that cause the revolution of ordinary language philosophy to be missed are the very same ones that also threaten to make the fundamental premise of Moi’s argument go unnoticed. This premise lies at the heart of the transformation of literary studies that Revolution of the Ordinary seeks to describe. It has deeper implications for the manner in which the book addresses itself to its reader. Furthermore, understanding the importance of this basic premise allows us to avoid missing the point of later arguments in the book, particularly those concerning the nature of reading in Part III. I will begin by trying to say something about why the basic premise of Revolution of the Ordinary is at once radical and easy to miss, and why the difficulty of recognizing it highlights the stakes of the invitation that ordinary language philosophy poses to literary studies, before proceeding to consider Moi’s arguments on the nature of reading in more detail.

The challenge that Revolution of the Ordinary takes up can be summarized as follows: how is it possible to make a case for breaking with theory without introducing a new theory to take its place? This challenge necessarily inflects the form of the book (by which I simply mean the reasons why Moi writes as she does) as well as the arguments that it presents. In the first place, according to Moi, the picture of language that is conventionally held in literary theory is embedded so deeply within language itself that when the ordinary language philosopher tries to talk about words in a different way, she simply isn’t able to make herself understood. But the difficulty she faces extends beyond the nature of her subject to the manner in which she seeks to bring it to bear upon literary studies. For at the heart of the book lies a challenge to the very conventions that govern the genre of literary theory itself: namely, that its reader can expect generalized instruction on what it means to read, on how to read, and on how to apply this knowledge to a set of texts under examination. Ordinary language philosophy, Moi claims, can liberate us from this way of doing literary theory and from the pedagogical position of passivity that it implies. In so doing, it promises to open up new and more adventurous modes of reading.

So how do we begin? This is the same question that Moi asks of her subject in the Introduction: “How, then, can anyone begin this philosophy?” (11) In response, Moi invokes another famous series of questions on beginning from a formative text in the tradition of ordinary language philosophy that she takes herself to inherit: “The question of how to begin—in this case, how to begin reading Wittgenstein—makes up the beginning of The Claim of Reason” (11). The famously bewildering opening is as follows:

If not at the beginning of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, since what starts philosophy is no more to be known at the outset than how to make an end of it; and if not at the opening of Philosophical Investigations, since its opening is not to be confused with the starting of the philosophy it expresses, and since the terms in which the opening might be understood can hardly be given along with the opening itself; and if we acknowledge from the commencement, anyway leave open at the opening, that the way this work is written is internal to what it teaches, which means that we cannot understand the manner (call it the method) before we understand its work; and if we do not look to our history, since placing this book historically can hardly happen earlier than placing it philosophically; nor look to Wittgenstein’s past, since then we are likely to suppose that the Investigations is written in criticism of the Tractatus, which is not so much wrong as empty, both because to know what constitutes its criticism would be to know what constitutes its philosophy, and because it is more to the present point to see how the Investigations is written in criticism of itself; then where and how are we to approach this text? How shall we let this book teach us, this or anything?16

The first thing we must learn from Wittgenstein’s philosophy is how to ask the question of what it means to learn from philosophy. Not since Hegel’s Vorrede has the introduction to a philosophical text announced, in such unequivocal terms, its intention to break with the habitual conventions underlying its intelligibility. But Moi goes on from Cavell’s claim in order to raise yet another question, the question of how we come to be called to philosophy in the first place: “To engage seriously with ordinary language philosophy is a little like undergoing psychoanalysis. Wittgenstein assumes that we don’t begin doing philosophy just for the sake of it, but because something is making us feel confused, as if we had lost our way. Who wants to undergo philosophical therapy if they feel that everything in their intellectual life is just fine as it is?” (12)

A philosophical text is the kind of text that we read because we are lost and confused, at an impasse. There is something we want from the text. Our reasons for reading it can’t be separated from our investigation of our own difficulty. Any effort to understand the meaning of the text thus becomes inseparable from the search for self-knowledge. Moi’s claim here recalls a passage from Wittgenstein’s notebooks, transcribed in Culture and Value (1980), in which he imagines an extraordinary scene of instruction:

Instruction in a religious faith, therefore would have to take the form of a portrayal, a description, of that system of reference, while at the same time being an appeal to conscience.  And this combination would have to result in the pupil himself, of his own accord, passionately taking hold of the system of reference.  It would be as though someone were first to let me see the hopelessness of my situation and then show me the means of rescue until, of my own accord, or not at any rate led to it by my instructor, I ran to it and grasped it.17

By indicating that the desire must be found in us, that it cannot be forced or inculcated, not even by the most rigorous logic, Revolution of the Ordinary leaves open from the outset the terms of the reader’s own engagement with its arguments. Only the reader herself can avow or acknowledge the blurs or blocks, confusions or desires, which bring her to try to make sense of this text. This opening gesture allows Moi to establish a mode of address to her reader that is unusual, and that signals a break with the norms of academic discourse. It also serves to introduce the stakes of her subject in a singular manner. Such a gesture—at once empowering and trusting—characterizes something essential about the spirit of Revolution of the Ordinary, which remains full of hope and generosity even at its most polemical moments: a true inheritor of the tradition of ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Cavell, Diamond) that it traces.

The Introduction frames the unfolding of the text as an invitation to go on a journey. The journey retraces the path of its author, in order to understand the genesis of her conviction that ordinary language philosophy has fundamentally changed her work as a literary scholar: orienting her to a different picture of language, leading her to ask different questions, and ultimately giving her a different way of understanding what we do when we read texts. What makes itself heard at the outset, in other words, is something that for various reasons is increasingly rare in literary studies today: a first-person voice speaking of belief in the possibility of personal transformation.

Why is this important? To miss the claim of the first-person would be to miss what is at stake in retracing the journey, namely the search for voice and community whose outcome can never be guaranteed at the outset. “I have sometimes felt,” writes Moi, “that it is simply impossible to convey a position inspired by ordinary language philosophy to an audience steeped in the post-Saussurean tradition. The experience makes me feel helpless, as if I suddenly were speaking a foreign language” (10). The vulnerability and sense of powerlessness that Moi describes so vividly here as the experience of speaking and yet not being able to make oneself understood is not merely a psychological phenomenon. It testifies to the philosophical stakes of the position she assumes. For within the tradition of ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein after Cavell, to appeal to what we say is to issue “an invitation to the reader to test something for herself, to see if she can see what I see” (18). The risk of such a claim lies in revealing oneself as both in need of agreement and at perpetual risk of finding oneself alone, unheard, unrecognized.

From the outset we are thus reminded that the adventure of this text, the adventure of discovering what literary studies might be after ordinary language philosophy, cannot be undertaken without vulnerability. To write—and to read, for that matter—is to open oneself to an exchange that may end in helplessness, bitterness, judgment, the inability to make oneself known. The very framing of Moi’s argument is at one with her attempt to disclose the political stakes of ordinary language philosophy. To risk opening oneself to response, in all the finitude of one’s understanding, is necessary to the search for community: “If I don’t speak up, I will never discover whether there can be a community that includes me” (19). (Here, we may be reminded of the degree to which Cavell’s interpretation of Wittgenstein in The Claim of Reason [1979] and elsewhere is influenced by his reading of Rousseau; any thinker who takes up the task of writing to a non-existent audience with as much seriousness as the author of Reveries of A Solitary Walker [1782] is necessarily aware of the risk of exile embedded within the need of community.)

Moi returns to the significance of this act at the end of Chapter 7, “Critique, Clarity, and Common Sense,” in which she evokes Investigations §217 in the context of a discussion of Wittgenstein and radical politics: “Once I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’” Here, Moi does not elaborate on whether there is an ethical stance inherent in the act of acknowledging the limits of one’s power to elicit a certain response, but she implies that we might discern the salient features of such a stance in her claim that “Wittgenstein chooses the peaceful option: rather than hitting his interlocutor with his bent spade, he rests on it. . . . the passage is telling us that explanations will never solve all the issues that arise when we are forced to face our finitude and separation, face the fact that we are other to each other” (171). The other has a choice, a choice that I cannot make for him, no matter the force of my own beliefs. What does it say about me, for that matter, if the failure of the other to be convinced by the rightness of my beliefs is the thing that arouses my deepest fears, my most self-righteous violence?

In the concluding chapters, Moi unfolds the implications of this standpoint for an ethos of reading. The central concept at work here is that of reading as “a practice of acknowledgment” (216):

If texts are expressions and actions, then they call for our acknowledgment. But what is acknowledgment? Cavell developed the term in an attempt to free us from the skeptical picture of what it is to understand others. . . . I want now to suggest that ‘acknowledgment’ can also provide a different picture of what it is to read a text. The concept can serve as an antidote to the idea that to read a text is to impose our own pre-existing theories on it. (205)

Our English word for “theory” comes from the Greek root thea, meaning a view (literally, a seat in the theater). To be without a theory is hence in some important sense to be deprived of a view—specifically, of the point of view of a spectator. When we acknowledge a text, we don’t stand back from it at a speculative distance. We enact a response to what we take it to be saying. This act necessarily reveals something about ourselves: as Moi puts it, “who we take ourselves to be, how we picture our relationship to the other,” and crucially “our judgment of the situation, the other, and our own responsibilities” (207-8). “The very work of criticism can conjure up anxiety, fear of exposure, dread of being misunderstood,” she writes, expressing her conviction that when we read a literary text that we feel compelled to grapple with further, we are being spoken to in such a way that demands staking the value of our existence in response (190). Here, the markedly existentialist vocabulary of “situation,” “responsibility,” and “anxiety” reveals the extent to which Moi’s inheritance of ordinary language philosophy, like Cavell’s, is inflected by an existentialist tradition of thought; the stakes of this affinity for Moi are made clear in the conclusion of Chapter 10, in which allusions to Arendt’s critique of totalitarianism recall the Cold War context for the American reception of existentialism.18

Establishing the fundamental place of acknowledgment in criticism means that no general theory of how to read can take away a critic’s own responsibility for her reading. Hence Moi’s repeated insistence on the fact that “the politics of literary criticism does not lie in the method, or in the way we picture texts. It lies in the critic. We are responsible for our words, for our own practice… In literary criticism, both politics and aesthetics are matters of response, judgment, and responsibility” (191). If we bludgeon a text into submission with an irrelevant theory, then it is we who are responsible for our failure of acknowledgment—there’s no blaming the inadequacy of the theory. This, Moi argues, marks a radical distinction between the practices that are characteristic of the humanities and those of the sciences. It doesn’t make sense for literary theorists to speak of “methods,” as if what we do involves laying out in advance a set protocol to be followed in every case. (This is not to say, of course, that certain methods or theories might not be useful or illuminating in particular situations, but rather that the question of whether they are in fact appropriate or helpful cannot be settled in advance or an investigation into the particular case at hand.) The aim of reading a literary text is not to produce replicable results, but rather “to figure out what it has to say to us” (194).

This is where the danger of misunderstanding Moi’s position seems most acute. If reading without a theory is simply a matter of giving one’s subjective response, then how can we ever hope to establish criteria for a good reading? What kind of reading would depend on something as naïve as describing a personal response to a text? Moi develops several arguments in Chapters 8 and 9 that would disarm such a line of critique: crucially, she emphasizes that although it is impossible to determine in advance of any reading where it ought to start or what would justify it, “whether the investigation will be important depends on what we noticed in the first place” and that “training, experience, skill, knowledge are required if we are to be able to notice something of genuine interest” (181). But what training—and what experience? How do we know what is of genuine interest? Again, I think that Moi would respond here that it all depends on what is under investigation, and what we find to be of importance to us. To conclude, in response to this claim, that if the meaning of a text cannot be “objectively” ascertained, then it must lie entirely within the confines of one’s own mind, would be to abjure the responsibility of the ongoing task of justification and to surrender to skepticism (and, as with Cavell’s diagnosis of skepticism, although it is always possible that I will find myself alone in a way of reading a text, that possibility isn’t one that can be overcome by certain knowledge of the text’s meaning).

Moi’s anti-theory of literary criticism thus opens up a space for us to consider anew why the work of certain critics has never issued in a recognizable “theory” or “method,” but has nevertheless had a profound influence on literary studies. Erich Auerbach, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sharon Cameron, Allen Grossman, or Helen Vendler, to name but a few such critics: even if others may be inspired to use the concepts or vocabulary developed in their criticism, it nevertheless seems impossible to replicate the intricacy and nuance of their textual readings. If I understand Moi correctly, what she is suggesting is that the greatness of these critics lies not or not only in the fact that due to their training and experience, they are capable of illuminating the meaning of a text for others, and not or not only in the accuracy and truthfulness of the philosophical, ethical, or even political commitments that underlie their readings, but in the way in which their acts of criticism become exemplary of how it is imperative for each reader to become wholly responsible for their own acts of reading and of writing to the highest and most demanding degree. Here, then, is the quiet revolution that Moi’s book seeks to enact: in an age of restlessness and unabated craving for the Next Great Thing, the most transformative act might be the one that invites us to go back to ourselves, and to find in our ways of thinking and speaking not only the means for describing our delusions, our limits, our desires, our blindness, and our beliefs, but also a way of living with them—living them out. Without underestimating the difficulty of this task, Revolution of the Ordinary puts the spade into our hands.

What’s the Use?

If no one has written or posted the word, then no one is addressed by the word.
—William H. Gass, “Death of the Author”

The most urgent question in Toril Moi’s Revolution of the Ordinary is what precisely is at stake in the difference between literary theory’s sixty-year commitment to the post-Saussurean theory of language—the arbitrariness of the relation between signifier and signified—and ordinary language philosophy’s “radical alternative” (1)—distilled most neatly in Wittgenstein’s famous phrase from The Philosophical Investigations, “Meaning is its use in language” (4). In detailing the differences between literary theory’s procedures and Wittgenstein’s approach, Moi points to the different ways theory has in its “craving for generality” (1) occluded the object of its discipline—literature and art. By this she means that as literary theory continues “pressing for something more” (36) than “use” to explain literary meaning, it has raised elaborate scaffoldings that while intended to suture a word to its meaning have instead obstructed our accounts (or interpretations). To return centrally to the question of what interpretation is and to do so by describing what it is at stake in insisting that “meaning is its use in language,” Moi has usefully put back on the table a number of questions that theory has more or less ignored for 30 years—questions of intention, meaning, and, to some extent, aesthetic judgment. Perhaps most significantly, then, Revolution of the Ordinary is a welcome intervention because as much as any recent work of literary criticism, it challenges the discipline of literary theory, offering instead an approach to the study of literature that really is new. If at times Revolution of the Ordinary comes up short, it is because it doesn’t pursue its project far enough, settling instead for reform.

The contemporary literary critical scene, Moi argues, is characterized above all by a desire to move beyond the post-Saussurean turn in literary studies: “A number of new theory formations—affect theory, new materialism, posthumanism, and so on—began their struggle to throw off the yoke of the ‘linguistic turn’” (17). We might call it, more broadly, theory. Despite their best efforts, however, Moi argues they end up ratifying the linguistic turn they decry, working “with the Saussurean and post-Saussurean picture of language, even if only implicitly and for lack of other alternatives” (17).   Where literary theory has labored under the belief that “language as such” can be “brought under a single concept or theory” (13), ordinary language philosophy takes up Wittgenstein’s “far more radical and liberating” theory of language. Of course, what, exactly, Wittgenstein means by “meaning is its use in language” (17) has been the subject of some disagreement. Where deconstructive critics like Jonathan Culler have understood “use” to be the ground or “stabilizing limit to meaning” (37) and thus something to be added after the fact, Moi argues instead that “meaning isn’t an ‘it’ separate from use” (38). She articulates the difference most strongly when she writes “‘use’ is not a common feature shared by all worlds and utterances. It is rather the condition of possibility of having words and utterances in the first place. It’s because there is use that there is meaning” (36). In other words, where Culler argues that “use” means “context” or “ground” (this seems to me the case for all of literary theory) for Moi, “use” is “meaning.”

Except when she finds herself dealing with examples that are precisely about the question of whether something can have meaning even if it isn’t being used. This is the question that’s raised by Moi in several thought experiments like the one in which Stanley Fish asks us to imagine the following:

Suppose you’re looking at a rock formation and see in it what seems to be the word “help.” You look more closely and decide that, no, what you are seeing is an effect of erosion, random marks that just happen to resemble an English word. The moment you decide that nature caused the effect, you will have lost all interest in interpreting the formation, because you no longer believe that it has been produced intentionally, and therefore you no longer believe that it’s a word, a bearer of meaning.19

The distinction Fish makes here—between someone writing and the effects of erosion—is nothing but the distinction between what is being used and what isn’t. His point (following Knapp and Michaels in “Against Theory”) is that “in the absence of the assumption” that what you are looking at is intended, you “will not regard it as language.” That is, to see something as a word (or a poem) is to see it being used as a word, to see it as intended by someone to mean something. If you don’t see it as intended in this way, you’re not seeing it as language.

Moi would seem to be making a similar argument when she writes what makes the rock formation “help” mean the word “help” is the fact that its meaning is “alive in its use.” Yet, Moi dedicates an entire chapter to arguing that Fish has a mistaken view of use when he describes it as intended. In her view, the appeal to intention “takes for granted that the meaning is something other than the word” (35). As she understands Wittgenstein’s concept of “use,” it “requires us to relinquish the ingrained idea that meaning is elsewhere, in some third realm, somewhere between the words and our understanding of them, as if there were a gap or a ‘relationship’ between words and their meaning” (35). For Moi, intended use as Fish lays it out is precisely that “third realm.” She thinks instead that what makes “help” meaningful within the language is the fact that “signifiers are only signifiers because they already have meaning in the language” (135). The difference, then, is between competing views about what “use” means—between on one hand, a notion of use in which it is understood to be separate from intention and, on the other, one in which it is inextricably identified with intention.

The difference is evident in her imagined encounter with the rock formation. As she imagines it, whether or not the rocks were actually used to call for help is irrelevant. Once she has seen that the “marks scratched into the rock spell ‘help’” (135) she cannot worry about whether they were intended to spell help. She cannot, she thinks, “suddenly forget what [she] clearly understood a split second earlier” to be language—“regardless of what [she] goes on to do with them, [she] can’t just will [herself] into finding them meaningless” (135). The question of use matters only after the fact. “The problem of the author,” she writes, “doesn’t matter for the meaning of the words” but it does matter “for how [she takes] that meaning, that is, for what [she does] once [she grasps] that these scratchings spell ‘Help!’” (135) Here she identifies the scratched markings as language prior to or independent of them being used, considering intention only after the fact. But Fish’s point is not that having seen them as language, she should then go on to wonder if they were intended. Rather, he means to say that to see them as language is already to see them as intended. To see them as used is already to see them as used to mean something.

The point, in other words, is that no appeal to intention is necessary because intention is not a “third realm” but simply means the intended use. So, when Moi sees the author’s intention as something outside of the word “Help” that has to be added after the fact when it comes to questions of “action and responsibility,” (135) she commits herself to what Stanley Cavell criticized as the “bad picture of intention” that locates intended use in some “internal prior mental event.”20 The correct picture of intention, Cavell thinks, is that any understanding of an utterance (or poem or painting) is an understanding of what someone has done (its use) and that “it is exactly to find out what someone has done… that one investigates his intentions.”21 So, when Moi says the salient point in Fish’s example is “not whether to ‘interpret’ the word ‘help,’ but whether to call out the mountain rescue squad” (135) she does little more than beg the question: Why would you call the mountain rescue squad unless you thought the scratched marks really were used to mean “help”? After all, if you were to discover that they were instead the effects of erosion, you would realize you had made a mistake. No one actually was calling for help (the scratched marks weren’t being used) and the rescue squad wasn’t needed.

In other words, the reason Moi thinks that it is possible to see something as language and inquire about intention after the fact is because despite her commitment to “use,” her picture of intention is “somewhere between the words and our understanding of them” or in Cavell’s terms, locatable in some “prior mental event,” and thus something that has to be searched for. Whether or not this is what Wittgenstein means when he said “meaning is its use in the language,” it is definitely not what Fish or Knapp and Michaels mean. Nor is it what Cavell means in “A Matter of Meaning it” when he writes “intention is no more an efficient cause of an object of art than it is of a human action; in both cases it is a way of understanding the thing done, of describing what happens.”22

It is, however, surprisingly like what Paul de Man means when he separates the identity of the signifier “Marion” from the intended use to which it’s put. In de Man’s infamous and influential essay “Excuses (Confessions)” the question of meaning is raised not as the difference between use and erosion as it is for Fish, but in equally random and equally material terms as the difference between use and noise. The upshot of de Man’s reading of Rousseau’s Confessions is his belief that all language has a “radically formal” existence independent from both its intended use—Rousseau simply offered “the first thing that came to mind”—and from its recipients—“properly interpreted” his accusers would have known he meant “nothing at all” and thus “any other sound or noise could have done just as well.”23 So, where Fish sees use as necessary not only for accounting for what a particular utterance means, but for seeing something as language at all, de Man sees use as irrelevant to the “radically formal” existence of the word, which “can posit whatever the grammar allows.”  While Moi is right to suggest that de Man’s is mistaken because his picture of language is grounded in a commitment to the materiality of language, she doesn’t see that her causal account of intention is a different way of making the same point. In both accounts the material (de Man’s sounds, Moi’s scratched marks) is equivalent to language. Just as in de Man’s view the noise Marion can be counted as calling out the name, in Moi’s view the scratched marks can be counted as a call for help, regardless of whether it is used to call for help.

Meaning thus appears to be a function not of intended use but of the reader’s response—that is, the scratched marks mean what the reader used them to mean. This is something de Man is certainly committed to and something Fish had at one time been differently committed to. It is not clear, however, whether or not Moi means to commit herself to this view. If one reason she might not want to commit herself to it is because, we have seen, when language is free from its intended use it means nothing at all, one reason she might be is because when language means nothing at all the reader can, but really must, supply its meaning. De Man describes this two-step procedure by arguing that although every text is essentially meaningless, it is also the case that at “the very moment at which it is posited” it is “at once misinterpreted into a determination which is, ipso facto, overdetermined.” If the imposition of meaning is a mistake, he means, it is a necessary one because without the reader to determine its meaning, there is no meaning at all. Moi frames her commitment to the reader differently when she says the intended use “doesn’t matter for the meaning of the words” but it does matter “for how [she takes] that meaning.” I have been arguing that the point is effectively the same: Imagining use as separate from intention commits what there is to be had from an utterance or a poem to the reader.

If de Man’s view of language and Moi’s overlap on this point, the biggest difference between the two accounts is that where de Man thinks all interpretation is a mistake but a necessary one, Moi’s account would make mistakes impossible. This is what it means for her to say of the scratched marks, “regardless of what [she] goes on to do with them, [she] can’t just will [herself] into finding them meaningless.” But no one is asking her to “will” herself to find them meaningless. The point is instead that you would find them meaningless only if you find evidence they were not being used by anyone—which is to say, you have found evidence that you made a mistake. And since what the mistakes are about is how (or whether) the marks are being used, to acknowledge that mistakes are possible is to acknowledge that a word, or poem, or painting if it is a word, or poem, or painting is being used to mean something.

No doubt, Moi would not cop to my identification of her argument with de Man’s—after all the de Manian view of language is precisely what she understands ordinary language philosophy to overturn and, no less importantly, she cites Cavell approvingly when he argues that “what an expression means is a function of what it is used to mean or to say on specific occasions by human beings” (42; Cavell, Claim of Reason, 206). But it remains unclear to me that she really is committed to Cavell’s vision of intention precisely because she would seem to agree with the entailment of de Man’s argument (if not its procedure), which transfers the idea of use from something intended by an utterance to something done with one—that is, transfers use from something internal to language to something outside of it. What Cavell calls the “bad picture of intention.” The reason Moi’s position on this is unclear is because at the precise moment she resuscitates a theory of intention compatible with Cavell’s (and, we have seen, Fish’s) she doubles down on her commitment to the importance of the “practice of acknowledgment,” which for her means that to “give an account of a reading is to give an account of an experience” (198). But if this is the case that we are trying to figure out what someone used the language to mean, it is hard to see why we would need to “discover our own position in relation to the work,” (209) as she suggests we should, or particularize our experience of “the work and its concerns here and now, as they appear to this particular reader in this particular moment in history” (210). It is difficult to see how intention matters here because, as we have seen, if you are trying to figure out what someone meant, the question of intention “directs you further into the work,” as Cavell puts it, and not further into our selves.24 If it were true that we should be invested in our relation to the language rather than the author’s intended use, plausibly there would be as many meanings of a text as there are readers of it throughout history. In her appeal to acknowledgement, then, Moi has given us the scratched markings all over again, as what should be a question about their intended use becomes instead a question of what we, as readers, do with them.

An account of meaning, in other words, has become an account of the practice of reading. If this really is what Moi is after, she has travelled a long way to end up where we already are and have been since the mid-sixties ushered in the linguistic (post-Saussurean) turn. So, in Moi’s interpretive practice, if not quite her own account of language, we end up with a different way of arriving at one of literary theory’s most deeply held convictions—imagining the reader rather than the text is the site of meaning.

Moi is right to suggest, as she does at the book’s outset, that ordinary language philosophy “has the power to transform the prevailing understanding of language, theory, and reading in literary studies today” (18) not least of all because it offers an approach that might loosen theory’s epistemological grip on the discipline. If ordinary language philosophy’s revolution goes unnoticed, as Moi suggests it probably will, because while it shares “many of the same concerns” (10) as theory and might even know what it knows, the “radically different frameworks” (11) in which these concerns are cast will make the task all the more difficult. It is unlikely that literary theory will abide a new concept of language that does not provide a new theory to replace the old one, which is precisely what ordinary language philosophy refuses to do. In this case, however, if the revolution goes unnoticed it will be because with Revolution of the Ordinary we get more of a revision than a revolution, albeit a welcome one for the reasons I suggested at the outset. As is often the case with revolutions though, it is hard to see how we get there from here.

Philosophers have often been institution-builders. Socrates rambled the city asking questions, but Plato founded the Academy, Aristotle the Lyceum, and Kant and Hegel gave lectures and did committee work in all the ways we still associate with professors. Concerned less with any specific knowledge than with knowledge as such, philosophers often aspire to a synoptic view of intellectual life, a grasp of how different fields or methods align or diverge. Moreover, philosophy has traditionally cultivated habits of mind that jive well with a university: a capacity for evaluating evidence, a facility with formal argument, a drive for orderly systems. Recent cuts to philosophy programs haven’t stopped administrators from promising parents that their kids will learn “critical thinking,” a skill that philosophers are often taken (and take themselves) to have mastered more scrupulously than anyone. Indeed, for the last century and a half, philosophers who’ve questioned philosophy—who’ve asked what’s lost in disinterested argument and fastidious procedures—have sometimes abandoned the university altogether, walking in the steps of Kierkegaard, Marx, or Nietzsche.

I mention these affinities between philosophy and academic life in order to reflect upon Toril Moi’s wonderfully illuminating Revolution of the Ordinary, the subtitle of which—Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavel —introduces questions about our scholarly disciplines and educational institutions. For Wittgenstein, too, was one of those who doubted the value of classroom teaching, publishing “research,” chairing departments, and so forth. He held Cambridge in contempt and eventually retired early, plagued by a sense that even his relatively spare professorial duties were interfering with his writing. And the writing he produced—layered, obliquely connected observations punctuated by questions, parables, and metaphors—is not what most college deans would immediately recognize as “critical thinking.” Austin led a more conventional academic life, but more than one person has asked whether ordinary language philosophy waned in the latter third of the twentieth century in part because Austin’s skills were too singular, too unteachably inventive, to survive his premature death in 1960.25 Cavell had long-lasting success, but after starting out as a musician, he came to philosophy as something of an outsider, and as he says in his memoir, he could never fully assent to the belief among his colleagues that good writing chiefly requires “the power of unfolding implication.” He instead sought the sort of “surprises” achieved in Part IV of The Claim of Reason, the almost two hundred pages of “inventions or improvisations” in which the “whole discussion” of earlier parts of the book becomes “reframed, in effect begins again.” This writing—what Anthony Kenny called a “misshapen, undisciplined amalgam of ill-assorted parts”—wasn’t designed for tenure committees to score. But it made the middle-aged Cavell “confident,” after years of doubt, “that [his] writing could go on.”26

What sort of example can such eccentrics provide for the discipline of literary studies? This question came to mind as I read chapter 8 of Revolution, when Moi discusses Fear and Trembling, another text in which a prior discussion is repeatedly “reframed, in effect begins again.” Moi’s point is that, even with Kierkegaard—a writer preoccupied with what’s hidden, in need of interpretation and “revelation”—we can affirm, with Wittgenstein, that “nothing is hidden” to us as readers. Rewriting the Abraham and Isaac story no less than four times, each with slightly different contexts and emphases, Kierkegaard refuses to speak as a certified expert or to treat the biblical text as a symptom in need of diagnosis. The “difficulty, obscurity, and mystery” of the biblical story are made palpable, and interpretation is presented as a strenuous “expedition of discovery” rather than a comforting display of conclusions the author has already reached. “Why,” asks Moi, “don’t we ask our students to do this sort of thing more frequently?” (218-19).

“This sort of thing” is of course one mark of Wittgenstein’s work. If, as Wittgenstein says, we fail to “command a clear view of the use of our words” (§122), and if philosophical problems take the form “I don’t know my way about” (§123), then we can only work piecemeal, working from “muddle” (§153) to temporary lucidity, refusing “theses” (§128), allowing “description alone” to take the place of “all explanation” (§109).27 As Moi notes, these and other remarks are not a demand to stop thinking outright: “When Wittgenstein insists that nothing is hidden, he does not mean that everything is self-evident” (180). Yet they do ask us to resist theorizing about how our words are, or always will be, used. Hence Cavell’s suggestion that readers of the Investigations must work “without an approach” to the book itself. “Approach,” as Cavell puts it, suggests that “we know some orderly direction to it not already taken within it.” Whereas, in truth, all we can do is “find a blur or block from which to start,” a piece of text that might prove fertile (quoted in Moi, 11, 194, 210).

That the same goes for our encounters with art explains why literary scholars often struggle to explain their work to colleagues in other fields. “Literary criticism,” as Moi penetratingly says, “doesn’t have anything we can plausibly call competing methods, at least not in the sense widely used in the sciences and social sciences: a set of explicit—and repeatable—strategies for how to generate new knowledge” (178). We come to texts with (in Rita Felski’s terms) “moods” and “mindsets,” and with specific thematic interests and political investments. But “a mood is still not a method” (179). With some exceptions—specialists in book history, philology, “big data”—literary scholars mostly just read, and almost never with a “clearly defined series of steps to be taken in a specific order to reach a replicable result” (191-92). Good readers, claims Moi (adapting Cavell), treat reading as “acknowledgement,” accounting both for the work’s own concepts and concerns as well as for their own positions relative to the text. Such acknowledgement includes recognizing the fallibility of one’s experience, since, as Cavell says, “one’s experience may be wrong, or misformed or inattentive and inconstant” (quoted in Moi 218).28 In reading (as in living), I speak always from my own experience, yet such experience is never fixed. Genuine seeing requires that I both consult my own experience and subject it to examination, seeking to educate it further, revising habits when needed.

As Moi rightly says, such tasks require “judgment, and courage” (218). But do they—and here I return to my opening remarks—constitute or produce knowledge? In other words, do acknowledgement, consulting and evaluating one’s experience, developing judgment, and so forth contribute to what is commonly held to be the goal of a university?29

One way to answer to these questions would be, in an Aristotelian spirit, to broaden “knowledge” beyond its connections to the natural sciences. The thought here would be that episteme—knowledge of things that are “universal and necessary,” as Aristotle says—must be understood relative to at least two other kinds of knowing. One is phronesis, “practical wisdom,” the capacity to perceive the particulars of a given situation, know when a certain rule may apply, and act appropriately. Because human situations are endlessly variable, navigating them requires “deliberation,” reasoning that will yield not demonstratively true or false conclusions but actions that might contribute to a person’s flourishing: the parent who “knows” when to scold, the hitter who “knows” when to lay off a high fastball. And another would be techne, usually translated as “art” or “making,” activity directed toward the production of something beyond the activity itself. Like phronesis, it is a practical (not theoretical) activity, and the fact that its deliberations don’t yield perfect certainty doesn’t mean it lacks rationality. What the flutist or carpenter “knows” may not replicate what the mathematician or chemist “knows,” but to withhold the term “knowledge” from them is to diminish the kind of training and intelligence these experts exhibit.

Obviously ordinary language philosophy isn’t merely rehashing Aristotle. Cavell claimed to have read him mostly out of “dutifulness,” and Wittgenstein reported never having read him at all.30 Nevertheless, these Aristotelian distinctions—these three uses of “know”—hover around Revolution of the Ordinary, and I wonder whether Moi would find them congenial. Certainly Aristotle is central to several of the figures who play supporting roles in her book: Elizabeth Anscombe, whose account of intention is explicated in chapter 9; Hannah Arendt, whose emphasis on “judgment” Moi admires; Martha Nussbaum, whose link between literature’s moral uplift Moi questions (262n.44), but whose claims about “empathy” Moi finds constructive (220). Perhaps the most well-known recuperation of Aristotle among literary scholars is Gadamer’s Truth and Method, the very title of which challenges science’s exclusive claim to truth. Moi doesn’t mention Gadamer by name, but a Heideggerian note is heard when she draws analogies between how we read and how we evaluate a craftsman’s skillful coping: “I don’t mean to say that [aesthetic experience] doesn’t require special insights, knowledge, skills, and judgment. But so do other experiences as well: truly to appreciate good cooking, a particularly excellent fishing spot, or growing a great soil also requires specific knowledge, judgment, and skills” (219).31 Perhaps it’s not an accident that one of Gadamer’s most cherished metaphors appears in Moi’s account of readerly engagement: “Understood as a practice of acknowledgment, reading becomes a conversation between the work and the reader” (219).

This neighboring strand of thought is worth mentioning for two reasons. First, modern Aristotelians have often been keen to highlight the social, institutional, and historical contexts of our contemporary intellectual life. Such reflection is hardly unavailable to Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Austin; but it’s less sustained and thorough than in the (quite varied) work of Nussbaum, Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, or Nel Noddings.32 And a consideration of such wider contexts would make Moi’s claims more audible. Revolution of the Ordinary shows a remarkable range of reading. For anyone who has only imperfectly followed the fast-moving wheels of literary scholarship, the book includes valuable accounts of how the last decade of literary theory has extended canonical “high theory.” But while it includes some useful remarks on the natural and social sciences, it remains—as its subtitle implies—narrowly focused on the field of literary studies. I wholly agree with Moi that Saussure’s misbegotten picture of language still holds literary studies captive. But it’s less apparent to me that, beyond our ever-tinier corner of the university, such a theory continues to hold much sway or interest, at least in comparison to the claims of, say, neuroscience, cognitive science, neo-Darwinism, and decision theory. Moi sometimes notes, rightly, that post-Saussurean theories can be reductive, most notably in their claims about the “materiality” of the “signifier.” But more could be said about how this reductive impulse matches those of these other, more widely accepted naturalistic models. For it is these models, not post-Saussurean theories, that are shaping our current intellectual conversations and institutional arrangements. Next to them, materiality-talk in literary studies can seem like a relatively negligible symptom of a much wider disease, and it’s in the face of this more deep-rooted malady that the study of literature most needs to be justified.

A second reason for mentioning the Aristotelian tradition is that it gives us some language for thinking about the various forms of “knowledge” that might be expressed and recognized in our educational institutions. It’s not news that modern universities were built on models from the natural sciences, and obviously the STEM fields have grown dominant. Nor is it news that universities have increasingly pushed instructors to design their courses to fulfill particular “learning outcomes”—a requirement that, to critics, means the classroom is now officially a tool of industrial scientific management. Against this backdrop, recall Moi’s question about the defiantly unconventional composition of Fear and Trembling: “Why don’t we ask our students to do this sort of thing more frequently?” Indeed, why don’t we? One reason may be that our schools are designed to issue grades, honors, and all the professional advantages they inarguably bestow; and that we—professionals who’ve succeeded within this system—lack agreed-upon criteria for evaluating students other than by asking how thoroughly they’ve mastered a subject, done their research, erected arguments, and offered clear claims. In such a climate, what may be most needed is a detailed account of how Kierkegaard’s idiosyncratic response to the Abraham and Isaac story offers an exemplary instance of techne or phronesis—how it yields a wholly legitimate kind of knowing, and how it genuinely discloses aspects of ourselves and our common world.

Unless, of course, it doesn’t. Perhaps, after all, it’s just too late in the day for us to agree on exemplary instances of techne or phronesis. That’s one way of construing not only Cavell’s merely “dutiful” reading of Aristotle, but also his account of modernism. In a modernist condition, as Cavell put it early on, works of art promise not the “re-assembly of community, but personal relationship unsponsored by that community; not the overcoming of our isolation, but the sharing of that isolation.” What counts as a genuine poem, or an insightful reading of a poem, or a laudable act, or a just society—all this is newly contestable, mostly a matter of offering what Cavell would come to call “passionate utterances.”33 But then, if this fraught situation is ours, if what we do is so intimate and untidy, it isn’t clear how far analogies between evaluating books and evaluating fishing spots can really go. Nor is it obvious that “literary studies” can in good faith understand itself as a discipline, a professional field that assumes the legal authority to distinguish “good” from “bad” work, certified “experts” from uncertified “non-experts.” At one point, Moi quotes Wittgenstein’s remark that what he most needed was a change not of his thoughts but of his Lebensweise, his entire way of life (qtd. 160). Arguments have their place, but explanations come to an end somewhere. Thus he wrote, as he said, “for only a few readers,” “for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe,” and his work self-consciously sought to “separate those who understand it & those who don’t.”34 In a similar vein, Cavell once said that the Investigations asks for “more than belief,” seeks to penetrate “past assessment and [become] part of the sensibility from which assessment proceeds.”35 But are such changes, such writing, the responsibility of a university? Can they be produced in or by an academic field? If the answer is at least uncertain, is it any wonder that many teachers (I don’t exclude myself) sometimes approach their students’ work in comfortingly technocratic ways? Cavell’s and Wittgenstein’s remarks conjure in me images of a monastery or ashram, with holy guides, initiates, and spiritual exercises. Occasionally, I confess, I do imagine that my own engagements with favorite books, critics, and students are part of such a sanctified practice. But is such an idea anything but a fantasy today? Would we really even want such a practice? And could literary studies become such an activity and still know itself?

When I was working on Revolution of the Ordinary, I often gave papers drawing on ordinary language philosophy. I quickly got used to being misunderstood. At times I felt as if I no longer knew how to communicate with my colleagues. This taught me that unless I could find just the right form, style, tone and structure—the right voice—my book would only provoke more misunderstandings. In the end, I realized that I couldn’t just write about ordinary language philosophy and literary studies. I would also have to offer, simultaneously, a diagnosis of the mindset, convictions, and ideas that might prevent literary scholars from understanding this philosophy.

Reading these eight responses, I was by turns grateful and astonished. Grateful that so many serious critics have read Revolution of the Ordinary so thoroughly, and astonished that the book meets with so much understanding and good will. That it also generates some misunderstandings was only to be expected. I am grateful to Nonsite for organizing this forum on my book, and am delighted to have an opportunity to respond. I also want to thank Ralph Berry, Rita Felski, and John Gibson for their advice.

Theory

Sarah Beckwith elegantly catches the spirit of ordinary language philosophy when she chooses to write about the scene in which James Baldwin understands that Shakespeare’s language is his own language too, that he has as much of a right to it as anyone else. Once he realizes this, he can begin to understand himself and his past. For Baldwin, Shakespeare’s words were empty and cold, separated from his concerns and his world. But then, suddenly, he understood what Cassius was saying. Meaning has to come alive in each and every one of us. Which means that it can also be lost (again) in each and every one of us.

In Revolution of the Ordinary I am not saying that the question of the relationship between language and the world is settled, once and for all, as if I had finally worked out a thesis about the right relationship. Beckwith’s turn to Baldwin brings this out beautifully. I am, rather, saying that words have meaning when we, like Baldwin, find ways to make them our own, so that we can use them for our own purposes. The meaning of words depends on our ability to go on. To go on speaking, to go on using words. That ability cannot be assured once and for all. Above all, it can’t be secured by a theory.

But can we ever avoid theory? In the friendliest possible way Yi-Ping Ong—whose learned and wide-ranging account of my views on reading as a practice of acknowledgment reading strikes me as just right—wonders “how is it possible to make a case for breaking with theory without introducing a new theory to take its place?”

She is not the only responder to raise the question. But the wording of the question itself—can we “break with theory”?—is treacherous, for it may make it look as if we are situated outside the theory in question, as if we always have a clear choice between embracing a theory or escaping from it.

I take Wittgenstein to be saying that we won’t feel the need to free ourselves from the tentacles of theory until they start to choke us. (So we can’t trust ourselves to be “outside” theory.) Some theories may well work for some purposes. But at some point the theory may prevents us from seeing what is right before our eyes: “We want to understand something that is already in plain view” (Philosophical Investigations—hereafter PI, §89). The theory blinds us. But if the theory has become the unquestioned frame for our thinking, we will not necessarily realize that it—the theory—is the problem, that the solution will only come when we free ourselves from its framework. (There is a parallel here to certain Marxist ideas about ideology: ideology makes us take as natural and given things that are not. But we won’t know that we are in the grip of ideology until something strikes us as odd or off, makes us ask questions.)

If we can get clear on the (theoretical) picture that holds us captive, we can avoid projecting it on to problems it is not equipped to deal with. This will not solve all possible problems, only the one we began with. New problems will arise, more philosophical therapy will be required. On this line of thought, there is no way to avoid theory, at least not if we understand the term loosely as “set of ideas or pictures of how things must be.”

But there is, I take it, a way to avoid “Theory,” or what I call the “theory-project” in literary studies. We can reject the idea that the purpose of philosophy (thought) must be to create new concepts, new theories, new instances of the craving for generality. We can also resist the wish to provide metaphysical explanations—for example, for how words connect to the world. But even if we do all this, it doesn’t follow that we won’t be trapped by theory again. Then we will need another round of Wittgensteinian therapy.

Instead of creating new theories, Wittgenstein writes, we should try to recollect, or remember “something, which for some reason, it is difficult to call to mind” (PI, §89). This “calling to mind” of something we in some sense already know is the work of the philosopher. “The work of the philosopher consists in marshalling recollections for a particular purpose” (PI, §127). Note Wittgenstein’s “particular purpose”: philosophy begins when we feel confused, when we feel intellectually boxed in, unable to move—not in general, but because we are stuck trying to solve some specific problem.

To use one of Wittgenstein’s own examples: If we want to skate, slippery ice is exactly what we need. But if we want to walk, the same ice will make us slip and fall: “We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!” (PI, §107). Wittgenstein emphasizes the purpose of our thinking. To think with Wittgenstein is constantly to try to remember why we wanted to know something in the first place.

I began writing Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism when I noticed that most of my fellow critics failed to see—failed to remember—something obvious about Ibsen’s plays, namely that they inaugurate modernism in the theater. In my view, Ibsen is to theater what Baudelaire is to poetry and Flaubert to the novel. I also take this to be pretty much self-evident. This is why I was stunned to realize that critics had fallen into the habit of excluding Ibsen’s plays from the canon of modernism, on the grounds that they exemplified “realism,” a concept they took to be the polar opposite of “modernism.” My work on Ibsen began as an attempt to remind contemporary readers and theater-goers of Ibsen’s modernism.

But does the book escape theory? In Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism I propose new and different ideas about how modernism arose, and how it works. Those ideas challenge existing concepts (theories) of modernism. But I focus specifically on the emergence of modernism: a particular historical moment, a particular dramatist. Am I proposing a theory? To find out how far my account goes, the only solution is for me and others to try to use it, try to go on, try to map its uses and failures. I would say that my book on Ibsen begins to provide the grammar of a region of modernism that standard theories fail to account for.

In Revolution of the Ordinary my discussion of acknowledgment stands as an example of an alternative to laying out a theory about how to read a text. “Acknowledgment” is an attitude, an effort, a response to a claim made by another person, or by a text. But it is not a recipe for a certain kind of reading. We respond to what we notice: meter, themes, characters, ideology—the list is open-ended. Each critic will have to trust her own learning and judgment.

In so far as a theory is something that prevents me from acknowledging what I see, it will choke my capacity for responsiveness to ideas, art, and other people. But this means that “acknowledgment” also puts me—the reader, the responder—on the line. For now my judgments, my capacity to notice things will stand revealed. This is why Cavell notes that the best critic will ask the best questions, notice the best—most interesting, most telling—points.

Do We Need Wittgenstein?

I love Bill Donahue’s witty and perceptive essay. I like the way Donahue interweaves his personal experience as a student and intellectual with his response to Revolution of the Ordinary. As he describes himself in his response, Donahue is the ideal reader for the book: a literary critic who knows his literary theory, but who also has long felt uncomfortable with its strictures. I was truly delighted to see that he recognizes how much Revolution of the Ordinary owes to my own practice of literary criticism, not least in Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism. And I can’t help smiling at his recollection of the Franklin Humanities Center manuscript workshop on an early draft of what would become Revolution of the Ordinary. Just as I am thrilled when people see the humor in the book, I am glad that that Donahue sees the joy in it.

Donahue says that he remains confused about the difference between “representative” and “exemplary.” By “logic of representation”—which I gloss as “the logic of inclusion/exclusion” (RO, 91)—I mean the idea that a concept only does “proper” philosophical work if it represents—“stands for”—all possible individual cases that might fall under it.

Wittgenstein shows that in many cases this logic simply can’t succeed. We will never be able to find the “common feature” promised by the logic of representation (PI, §71). We are doomed to discover exceptions, exclusions and omissions. But Wittgenstein also shows that there is an alternative. Consider the word “game.” It turns out that we can’t find a common feature that unites all its instances. But then, how do I teach the word to anyone? “One gives examples and intends them to be taken in a particular way” (PI, §71). Eventually, the person will learn how to go on, how to use the examples on his own. And this method is not a second-best: “Here giving examples is not an indirect way of explaining—in default of a better one. For any general explanation may be misunderstood too.” (PI, §71).

In chapter 4 of Revolution of the Ordinary I pick feminist intersectionality theory as my example of the “theory-project.” I am not claiming that intersectionality theory represents (stands for) all other versions of the theory-project. I picked it because I think that at least some of its features are widespread and worth looking into. The purpose of analysing an example is to invite others to see if they can see what I see, and then go on to use the example and the insights it yields on their own, bringing it to bear on new cases, discovering overlaps and differences, similarities and divergences. (This is also how we learn the meaning of words.) The meaning of “exemplary,” then, is not “perfect” or “ideal,” but rather “a case that brings out something interesting,” or maybe: “a case that’s good to think with.”

But Donahue’s most important question is whether we need Wittgenstein. The answer is “it depends.” I think that literary scholars today really ought to have a workable understanding of Wittgenstein’s vision of language, for it provides a vital and distinctive alternative to other views on the same matters, views that are widely taught. For the same reason, I think literary scholars really ought to understand Wittgenstein’s critique of theory (or, if one prefers, of certain standard notions of what philosophy is). For a literary theorist it ought to be as unthinkable to know nothing about Wittgenstein as it has been to know nothing about Saussure, or Derrida, or Lacan, or Foucault, and so on through the pantheon of more recent theorists. I wrote Revolution of the Ordinary to make this possible.

But if the question is “Do we need Wittgenstein to do excellent literary criticism?” I hesitate. First, I feel tempted to answer “absolutely not.” I don’t see Wittgenstein as the kind of theorist we can or should “apply” to texts. (In any case, I don’t recommend “applying theory” to texts.) As I just explained, I see Wittgenstein as a philosopher who can help us to clear up the problems that arise when theory (or philosophy) trips us up.

But I can’t give in to that temptation. For literary criticism itself throws up a lot of philosophical problems. Literary critics get trapped in pictures that hold us captive. I have just written a paper on the idea that “we must never treat characters as if they were real people,” a dogma Wittgenstein certainly can help to undo. More broadly, it seems to me that it is difficult indeed to do literary criticism without sometimes finding onself trapped in standard pictures of representation, meaning, understanding, aesthetics, form, and so on. In such cases, we do need Wittgenstein. Literary works themselves also investigate language, practices, judgment, action, expression, response, acknowledgment, skepticism, the question of form and meaning—the list could go on and on. If we are to say anything interesting about such matters, Wittgenstein can be of great help.

After spending years working on Wittgenstein, I think differently about literature. Even in papers where I don’t mention him at all, his philosophy is at work. So in the end, I suppose my answer is: anyone who takes the time to truly understand Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is likely to discover that it has transformed them to the point that there is no way back. Must one read Wittgenstein? Well, that’s an existential question. Must intellectuals read Kant, or Marx, or Freud, or Nietzsche?

Wittgenstein was well aware that his way of doing philosophy often appeared to lead to nothing grand: “Where does this investigation get its importance from, given that it seems only to destroy everything interesting: that is, all that is great and important? (As it were, all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) But what we are destroying are only houses of cards [Luftgebäude] and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood” (PI, §118). Like Wittgenstein, I think there is genuine value in showing that what we take to be deep insights are in fact critical or philosophical illusions.

Misplaced Intentions: On Meaning and Use

Davis Smith-Brecheisen’s arguments confuse me. At times I feel that he has been reading a different book than the one I actually wrote. He writes, for example, that “Moi dedicates an entire chapter to arguing that [Stanley] Fish has a mistaken view of use when he describes it as intended.” But I spend only two paragraphs on Fish (see RO, 135-36). (I do, however, spend half a chapter discussing the view of meaning in Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s “Against Theory.”) And nowhere do I put forward a view on whether “use” (as such) is “intended” or not.

The sense of non-communication arises because Smith-Brecheisen writes as if he is unaware of the vast gulf between Wittgenstein’s vision of language and his own. In particular, he seems not to have engaged with Wittgenstein’s understanding of “use” and “use in the language.” This is not a small oversight, for I devote two full chapters to bringing out what Wittgenstein means when he writes: “For a large class of cases of the employment of the word “meaning”—though not for all—this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (PI, §43).

Three times Smith-Brecheisen summarizes Wittgenstein’s view as: “meaning is its use in language.” But this wording makes no sense. He also clearly misunderstands me when he writes that “for Moi, ‘use’ is ‘meaning,’” and follows this by asking “whether something can have meaning even if it isn’t being used.” The formulation “use is meaning” strikes me as incompatible with Wittgenstein’s §43, and I certainly never use it in my book.

And Smith-Brecheisen’s question—whether “something can have meaning even if it isn’t being used” (my italics) presupposes the very picture of meaning Wittgenstein is at pains to challenge. Smith-Brecheisen posits a “something” (I assume he means a word or an utterance) in search of a meaning. Wittgenstein wants us to stop thinking of meaning as an “it” that somehow can be separated from the word. (To call the word a “something” separated from the meaning is no different: in both cases we split the word from the meaning, the meaning from the word.) Meaning isn’t an entity that resides apart from the word or the sentence.

Wittgenstein’s “use” does not connect words with meaning. It is rather an attempt to explain the conditions of possibility of meaning in language. Language arises because we share (and fail to share) practices and forms of life, because we do things with words, play language-games, speak according to the rules of our grammar, which are, as Rush Rhees puts it, “rules of the lives in which there is language.”

In my book I show how Wittgenstein’s concept of language-games, forms of life, and grammar build a picture of use. I say that a dictionary is a “snapshot of our speaking and writing practices—our use—at a given historical moment.” (33) I also say that dictionaries “struggle to keep up with use, not the other way around” (41). When we encounter words we think we know well in situations in which they are entwined with practices we don’t (yet) understand, dictionaries can become extremely frustrating, as I explain in my discussion of Cortázar’s short story about Lucas and the language of bullfighting (see RO, 30-34). In such cases we may discover that we no longer understand even the simplest words (my examples in Revolution of the Ordinary are basic Spanish words like manso, soso and flojo when used about fighting bulls). But any word—including “help”—can trip us up in similar ways.

“Use in the language” is the ongoing, open-ended, never finished weave of language and practices into which we are initiated when we learn to speak. But we don’t learn use in general, abstractly, we learn use in the encounter with individual examples. (When we talk to little children we make ourselves exemplary, Cavell notes.) To know the use of a word or an expression is to know how to go on with them, know how to project the old words in new situations and new practices.

When Wittgenstein writes “use in the language” he means to point to all this. Given his understanding of “use” it makes no sense to ask whether “use” is intentional or not. Clearly “use” involves all kinds of human reasons, motivations and intentions. It also involves all kinds of human mistakes, errors, and unintentional results. And use is always entangled with human practices in which intentions also have a place. Smith-Brecheisen’s question about intentions is misplaced: it does belong somewhere, but not here.

Fish, and Knapp and Michaels also fight the battle of intentions too close in. Knapp and Michaels refuse to agree that words have meaning “in the language.” Like Smith-Brecheisen, they place their meaning-bestowing “intentions” in the individual speaker, and in individual speech-acts. The result is a weird belief that words are meaningful only if we know for sure that these specific words were uttered by a human agent on that specific occasion. Such concerns might conceivably make sense if they were interested in meaning as (individual) expression—in the ways in which speakers reveal themselves in their words—but this seems not to be the case.

My argument against Fish, and against Knapp and Michaels, has little to do with intention (for “intention” just happen to be their candidate for what bridges the gap between a word and its meaning, between the signifier and the signified). I am arguing against their fundamental picture of meaning. These theorists rightly want to consider words as meaningful forms. The problem is that they think that the only way to get there is to propose a theory that bridges the gap between a word (understood as empty form) and its meaning. In early Fish that theory was “interpretation.” In Knapp and Michaels it is “intentions.” (In later Fish, it seems to be “intentions” and “interpretation.”) In my view, this is a version of the “Augustinian” picture of meaning that Wittgenstein describes in PI, §1.

Paul de Man also shares the Augustinian picture of meaning. In his case, the “mark” or “empty signifier” gets (tenuously) connected to meaning not by intention or interpretation but by différance. If Smith-Brecheisen wants to argue that I share de Man’s view, he has to show that I too share the Augustinian picture of meaning.

Fish considers the case of some scratchings on a rock formation which spell “help.” In so far as Fish’s “help” has a “use in the language,” for speakers of that language, it means “help” regardless of whether it is a result of erosion or the scratchings of a desperate and starving mountaineer. This is why I think that the question is what I do once I see the word “help.” Do I call the mountain rescue squad? Or do I exclaim: “How rare! Erosion created the word ‘help’!” I wouldn’t say: “Well, because there is no author apart from nature, “help” doesn’t mean “help.” The question is not whether “help” is a word or not (as Fish will have it), but how I am to take that word.

This is not an attempt to locate meaning “in the reader.” I am not creating the meaning of “help,” I am wondering what to do about a meaning that is plain for all to see. Language is public and shared. To talk of meaning as if it were in the sole possession of authors or readers makes no sense to me.

I am happy to discuss intentions (as I do in chapter 9). In that chapter, I deny the entrenched idea that “intentions” are mysterious psychological entities lurking inside writers’ heads. Intentions aren’t private acts of will. They can be found in what we do with words, in our public acts of writing and speaking. I am also happy to discuss interpretation. I just don’t think such discussions are relevant in the place where Smith-Brecheisen, Fish, and Knapp and Michaels think they are, namely as an explanation of why words have meaning.

The Cantankerous Critic, or the Personal and the Philosophical

Revolution of the Ordinary got on Henry Staten’s nerves, and I am sorry to see it. He claims that I don’t understand Wittgenstein at all. He is convinced that Stanley Cavell, whom I admire, is a bad and uninteresting philosopher. He also thinks that I’m a Romantic moralist, convinced of my own personal moral superiority to all other literary critics, presumably including Staten.

To prove his point, Staten accuses me of saying things I don’t say and refuses to notice things I do say. I write about Iris Murdoch’s “just and loving gaze.” Staten thinks that I write about a “just and loving heart.” I say, he claims, that we must reject “all metaphors of surface and depth in language.” But I wouldn’t dream of ruling out a metaphor in advance of its use. I bring up Kierkegaard’s reading of the story of Abraham and Isaac—which I explicitly call “deep”—precisely to show that there are ways of using the word “deep” that aren’t enmeshed with ideas of texts as surfaces (see RO 188-190). This isn’t incoherent. It’s a logical consequence of my concern not with “language as such,” but with use.

Staten claims that I don’t realize that Wittgenstein is “in a certain way…on the same page as Derrida.” But I write about the “simultaneous closeness and difference” between deconstruction and ordinary language philosophy (RO, 65), call the conflict between Derrida and Cavell (and between Derrida and Austin) an “intimate conflict,” and spend several pages explaining why it is so difficult to assess such conflicts (RO, 9-11). Staten also feels that I “summarily dismiss” his own pioneering book Wittgenstein and Derrida (1984). But my project in Revolution of the Ordinary is to spell out the consequences of the “ordinary” reading of Wittgenstein for literary studies. I don’t think it is unreasonable, or particularly dismissive, to acknowledge that there are other readings, including Staten’s “traditional” or “standard analytical” reading (see RO, 8; and RO, 65), but still leave them aside in order to show what the “ordinary” reading looks like and what it entails.

Staten claims that I am a “champion of pellucid language.” I am proud to be one. But he also says that I am unwilling to admit that my hero Stanley Cavell is hardly a paradigm of clarity. Yet I explicitly acknowledge the difficulties of Cavell’s style (see RO, 163). I don’t champion any particular writing style: “Ordinary language philosophy neither recommends nor forbids any particular writing style. How you write will depend on who you are, who you are writing for, and what you want to do with your writing” (RO, 163). Good writing can take so many different forms! Clarity, moreover, is not the opposite of difficulty. Many of Wittgenstein’s perfectly clear sentences come across as perfectly cryptic. My—clearly expressed—purpose in bringing up the question of style and writing is to oppose the essentialist belief, embraced by theorists such as Herbert Marcuse and Judith Butler, that a certain kind of intellectual obscurity automatically generates radical political effects. But this is a point Staten simply doesn’t address.

Staten writes that I fail to grasp that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is intended to clear up philosophical as opposed to political or personal confusions. His evidence for this appears to be that I “talk about things like racism and the oppression of women . . . as they affect individual persons.” To him, this proves that I don’t realize that Wittgenstein’s “real need” (PI, §108) is an “intellectual need, not the needs for acknowledgment or freedom from discrimination of individual human beings or groups of human beings.” This is pretty condescending both to me and to feminist theory. Why is Staten so convinced that Wittgenstein can be of no use at all to politically motivated thought? He never explains why he believes that an intellectual need must always be radically divided from a personal or a political need. Was Simone de Beauvoir wrong when she wrote that “there is no divorce between philosophy and life”? Can’t feminists be confused about freedom in their own lives? And if they are, is it clear that philosophical therapy would be of no help to them?

Our intellectual needs aren’t divorced from our ordinary needs, for intellectual life doesn’t take place in a separate realm. Intellectual life is just a region of ordinary life. Philosophical confusions often prevent us from understanding what we need in life. They can certainly prevent us from seeing what we mean by freedom. I discuss feminist intersectionality theory precisely in order to show that philosophical—conceptual—confusions can entangle us in webs of abstraction that make us forget why we were interested in freedom from oppression in the first place. I take Wittgenstein’s philosophy to be ideally suited to help us clear up such confusions. Staten gives no grounds for saying the opposite.

I certainly think it is possible to discuss whether I am a Romantic at heart, but that discussion will have to rest on more than the fact that I sometimes use the word “expression” in its full etymological sense of “outer-ance,” as if the mere invocation of the difference between the inner and the outer were incompatible with Wittgenstein’s philosophy, in spite of the fact that this opposition is a major theme in Philosophical Investigations.

Finally, and most crucially: Staten believes that I completely misunderstand what Wittgenstein means by the “particular case.” But he builds his case on the astonishing idea that Wittgenstein believes in a strict division between language and the world: “the specificity and concreteness Wittgenstein is after are strictly linguistic—that is, typical cases of linguistic usage—not the specificity and concreteness of ‘real life.’” Everything in Philosophical Investigations is intended to trouble at every step the conviction that there is a strict divide between language and the world. Even one of the more “analytic” examples in the book—the “game of measuring with a metre-rule,” or the case of the meter in Paris—is meant to make us realize how impossible it is to disentangle word from world, the thing or object from the language-games it enters into (PI, §50).

To Staten, Wittgenstein’s “look and see” is not an invitation to look at an actual, concrete case, but just to consider “the kind of thing one says in this kind of situation.” I think this is wrong. It is wrong because it is impossible to consider “the kind of thing” one says without first looking at what one actually says. (How else would I know what “kind of thing” one might say?) That’s how I learn to use words in the first place: by listening to what people say, and each time they say what they say on a specific occasion, in particular circumstances.—I don’t disagree that in some cases we draw on our knowledge of use to come up with examples of what one might or might not say. But those examples are still specific, concrete examples. In any case, Staten can’t be unaware that Wittgenstein himself constantly examines specific cases, exact phrases, specific turns of speech.

Staten’s commitment to an absolute divide between language and life misses what I take to be one of the most revolutionary insights in Wittgenstein’s philosophy: that word and world are intertwined, that the world of meanings is a world of users of language, who engage in countless practices interwoven with words. This is why there can never be an absolute divide between our ordinary and our philosophical needs. It makes perfect sense that Wittgenstein is the philosopher who wrote that what we need, above all, is a “change in the way we live.”

Intentions and poetic form

The more I look at Oren Izenberg’s paper, the more it feels as if he is drawing on some underlying ideas about intentions, actions and poetic form that he refuses to share with me. If he would spell out his presuppositions, we might find that we don’t as much disagree as speak past each other. But as it stands, I am not sure how to go about responding to him, for at times I simply don’t understand what he means. What “problem of action” does he have in mind? What is at stake in the distinction between “intentions discovered in retrospect” and “reasons motivating the making of the whole”?

Izenberg rightly takes me to be saying that reading—the work of literary criticism—begins with the text in front of us. A good critic begins, I argue, by noticing something in the text she wants to investigate. She asks “Why this?” But I never say, as Izenberg has it, that “the final state of the poem’s language” is the only one a critic is allowed to read. I do say that the question we ask will determine what materials we find relevant: “How we go about answering the question will depend on what we want to know” (RO, 210). What version or versions of the text we want to look at, depends on what we want to find out.

If Izenberg wants to investigate the form of Shelley’s “A Lament,” it’s up to him to show (as he convincingly does) that the various drafts tell a compelling story. Why would I object to that? In the same way Izenberg believes that I would forbid critics from taking an interest in poetic meter. But I don’t rule out anything in advance: “We can ask ‘Why this?’ about anything” (RO, 190). And nowhere do I lay down requirements for what a critic must or must not consider interesting.

I have no theory about “the place from which we ought to begin.” On the contrary, I insist that there is no guideline for where to start the work of criticism, that all we can do is begin with a “blur or a block” that strikes us as worth pursuing, and go from there (see RO, 194, 210, and 216). If that “blur” or “block” is an intuition about meter, then that’s fine with me.

I mention Flaubert crossing out his sentences and rewriting them. To me, this means that Flaubert needed to see his own sentences on paper before he could decide whether they were what he wanted. I didn’t mean to speculate about whether Flaubert was in “full possession of his intentions” (I don’t actually understand what this means). I certainly don’t imply that Flaubert would or should have been capable of explaining why he preferred this sentence to that sentence. Anyone who writes at all seriously will surely often just “fix” a sentence just because it doesn’t “look right,” without being able to articulate exactly what’s wrong with it.

Izenberg also thinks that I am dead set against “treating the form of an object as its reason for existing.” But where do I propose a theory of acceptable reasons for creating a poem or a work of art? I would seem absurd to deny that some objects or some poems are created for the sake of their form: meter, rhythm, texture, color, shape, and so on.

And where do I say that “a poem [is] a move in a game calibrated to some use in the world”? This seems to me utterly unmotivated by anything in my book. (What game would I be talking about? What use in the world? Why would I believe that all poems do the same thing?) Izenberg’s formulation seems to me to be a vague gesture towards Wittgenstein’s concepts of “use” and “language-games.” But it doesn’t look as if he has tried to master Wittgenstein’s thought on these matters. If he had, he would realize that they hide no theory about what we must do with poetry. I would say that in our culture, “writing or reading poetry” is a language-game (on a par with those Wittgenstein mentions in PI, §23). But that just means that “writing or reading poetry” is a specific human activity in which language and a whole array of different practices are intertwined. This cannot possibly be a contentious claim.

Human beings, and forms

Theo Davis is interested in what I have to say about Saussure, and in the way I use “human being.” She rightly sees that my inquiry into Saussure and his legacy in contemporary critical theory has two significant stakes, namely the question of “whether or not language’s relation to the world really is a problem,” and the question of whether “subjectivity—or the human presence in relation to language—is itself a problem.”

Davis also rightly notes that I refuse to lay down requirements for what words such as “human,” “woman,” and “we,” must mean in advance of their use. “The question,” she writes, “becomes how is that term being used, rather than what convictions and connections the term seems—in itself and apart from its use—to necessarily bring with it.”

Towards the end of her piece, Davis raises a fundamental question about form and formal structures. I don’t really write much about form in Revolution of the Ordinary. But I think Davis is right to say that my book fundamentally opposes the idea that language is pure form, as expressed in theories of the “materiality of the signifier,” or the “mark.” For me, her essay raises a crucial question: If forms don’t exist in isolation, if form always carry meanings that depend on the uses and practices in which they are embedded, then how do we analyze literary form? In so far as “formalism” today tends to mean theories of literature and language that think of forms as if they were entities divorced from our practices and forms of life, they buy into the vision of language I wrote Revolution of the Ordinary to challenge. The challenge now will be to find new ways to discuss form.

Institutions and Knowledge

Robert Chodat asks crucial questions about institutions and knowledge, questions to which I feel broadly attuned. Can the kind of philosophy I write about find a place within the university as an institution? And does the kind of literary criticism I favor—dependent as it is on “acknowledgment, consulting and evaluating one’s experience, developing judgment, and so forth”—really count as knowledge? Does it even “contribute to what is commonly held to be the goal of university?” And can my understanding of the humanities as the field in which learning (a term Chodat leaves out) and judgment come together, stand up against the institutional pressure to reduce our teaching to training in set of measurable skills that provide clear “learning outcomes”?

Chodat thinks that my book should have included “considerations of the social, institutional, and historical context of our contemporary intellectual life.” And he would have liked me to take on not just the Saussurean vision of language that still informs our discipline, but also the reductive naturalisms that more recently have invaded our fields, such as “neuroscience, cognitive science, neo-Darwinism, and decision theory.”

He thinks I should have written something about how the kind of criticism I recommend conveys knowledge. But, then, on the other hand, he thinks that maybe I shouldn’t. For am I not asking for a full-scale change in our way of life? I certainly see certain intellectual transformations as a kind of conversion, in Thomas Kuhn’s sense of the term (see RO, 151, 188, and 257). How can this amount to anything but an esoteric, even cult-like activity?

Chodat’s questions are important. But, to be honest, they read to me as requests for the kind of thing one might write after completing Revolution of the Ordinary. I am, as Chodat guesses, in favor of analyses of cultural and other kinds of institutional and symbolic capital (they figure largely in my book on Simone de Beauvoir), and of the aesthetic, cultural and historical conditions that block or enable the development of new aesthetic forms (see my book on Henrik Ibsen and modernism). Nevertheless, I didn’t include this kind of work in Revolution of the Ordinary. It seemed to me that my most urgent task was to make ordinary language philosophy available to colleagues and students, to do my utmost to make this philosophy a part of the general conversations in our field.

By the time I had completed that project, I neither had the energy nor the wish to begin analyzing the social and institutional factors that might prevent the uptake and reception of Revolution of the Ordinary. (The whole thing would have been awfully depressing. Imagine toiling away on the plausible reasons for your failure before you even publish your book!) As Chodat sees, I am not unhappy to hear that the book fails to conform to the institutional doxa. But for a little while longer I’d rather nurse the hope that it will after all find an audience than write an analysis of why it won’t.

I share Chodat’s worry about the naturalistic logic currently invading the humanities. I definitely could have written more about Cavell’s foundational work on judgment and criteria, which helps us to see why even the most scientific and naturalistic logic rests on the judgments, practices and uses embedded in ordinary language. (Even the most objective measurements require judgment.) In so far as the university as an institution today sets out to measure and count practices of judgment, it is on a collision course not just with my book, but with the foundations of the humanities as such.

The purpose of most disciplines in the humanities is to preserve and develop knowledge of millennia of human history, culture, art, and thought. This requires (historical) learning and trained judgment. Our relentlessly presentist and scientistic culture wants us to believe that these are useless practices producing no significant knowledge. Yet sometimes I think that the scientism and the presentism and the anti-humanities attitudes are more entrenched inside the academy than outside it.

Chodat is too pessimistic. Or rather: I hope he is. I don’t see why the kind of criticism I defend—and try to practice in my own critical work—would strike people as providing less knowledge than the usual run-of-the-mill articles in literary studies today, replete as they are with a vocabulary and syntax that often make even the most necessary analyses of institutions and knowledge unreadable to most, including colleagues in their own field. I worked really hard to avoid that kind of voice in Revolution of the Ordinary. My goal was to make its thought as available as possible, not by simplifying the ideas, but by paying attention to language and form.

In my experience, my own ordinary language philosophy-inspired critical work is not taken to be esoteric. Actors and theater directors who tell me they have never read a word of Wittgenstein continue to find resonances and affinities with my readings of Ibsen’s plays. If we humanists want to convince others—inside and outside the academy—that we offer them knowledge they may care about, we should begin by trying to write in ways that convey that knowledge as precisely and as well as possible.

But Chodat is right: the humanities are under threat. The university as an institution is not friendly to us. And too many of our own colleagues in the humanities buy into the encroaching naturalism and rage for measurements. I agree that we should analyze the institutional conditions we work in, and that we must defend our notions of knowledge. But, at the same time, if we care about what the humanities actually do, we should also try to find new, strong, convincing ways to do our work. That’s what I set out to do in Revolution of the Ordinary.

Colin Koopman:

Paul Grimstad’s Experience and Experimental Writing poses an important provocation to contemporary philosophical pragmatism that can be situated midst what we might please ourselves to call ‘third-generation’ (in the sense of that which a pragmatist orientation generates) pragmatism.  This is to say that Grimstad’s starting point is situated at a moment that looks outward from within the first two generations of pragmatist philosophy.  The first generation was that of inception, in which pragmatism bloomed in late-nineteenth century New England in the words, writings, and deeds of William James, Charles Santiago Peirce, and then later John Dewey.  Not long before Dewey’s passing in the middle of the century, the tradition supposedly fell into sharp decline in the pre- and post-war era, but this only set the stage for a proposed revival of pragmatism.  This time pragmatism generated a decidedly linguistic and professionalized-but-anti-professionalist philosophy as expressed by Richard Rorty, and forwarded more recently by his erstwhile student Robert Brandom (who appears cheerfully professionalized without any bit of anti-professional impulse).  Whereas the first generation of pragmatism was often said to be a philosophy of experiential experimentation, the second generation boldly declared itself thoroughly linguistic such that it searched for pragmatist experimentation at the scene of language use.  This narrative of pragmatism is a story we can generalize across much of the last one hundred and twenty years of philosophy in a number of its most prominent traditions: a shift from an empire of experience to a landing at language.

Those inclined toward pragmatism today, as well as those perhaps not inclined but finding themselves somehow in its sway, face a decisive choice.  The choice is regarded by some as an impasse.  What shall we prioritize?  Experience or Language?  Grimstad’s project is ‘third-generation’ in my sense because it situates its bid both through and beyond these two crucial options of previous pragmatism.  It is the “and” in his title toward which we should look for the distinctiveness of Grimstad’s persuasion.  His book is a bid for both experience “and” writing.  Accordingly, Grimstad moves beyond both of the prior perspectives, according to which either experience or writing alone was sufficient.

Such movements beyond always take place in two directions.  Grimstad, for example, moves both forward out of contemporary pragmatism into its future and backward through the history of pragmatism to its zero moment in the proto-pragmatism of the philosophical moment of the inception of literary America in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his contemporaries.  This is the philosophical moment that F.O. Matthiessen, writing backward from 1941 during exactly that period about which it is often said that pragmatism then fell from its mantles, summarized as “one extraordinarily concentrated moment of expression.”1 Grimstad, in other words, moves American pragmatism forward out of today by pressing it backward through that moment just before American pragmatism became expressly conscious of itself in the work of James and Peirce.  This is the so-called moment of “American Renaissance.”

In moving pragmatism forward through its past, Grimstad rightly senses the need for a third approach which would rest neither on experience alone nor language alone, but which would rather rest both on some third term.  That term Grimstad borrows from another, more contemporary, reader of Emerson who finds himself writing midst pragmatism’s more recent renaissance, namely Stanley Cavell.  Following Cavell, Grimstad looks to the writers of the American Renaissance for “composition.”2 It is in an examination of the work of composing that we might find clues to a conception of pragmatism that is outside of the dominion of the either-or of experience-or-language.  For, as I understand the proposal, composition is (supposed to be) big enough to comprehend both.  We are to look, then, to what Emerson and his contemporaries were doing: to how their work of writing and experiencing was a production of ordering together the manifold diversity of their moment.  Here we might sense that Grimstad is following, whether purposefully or not I cannot say, Matthiessen, who announced that his subject is not so much what Emerson, Melville, and others said as “the degree to which their practice bore out their theories.”3 If Matthiessen, nascent pragmatist that he was, taught us to look toward the work of practice, then Grimstad advises that we look toward the work of composition.  In such work we might find the ‘workings’ of both experience and language, taken of course in the pragmatist sense forwarded by William James’s infamous claim that pragmatism’s “only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us.”4

If composition would hold together both experience and language, then it must do so without allowing itself to slip too far into the territory of either.  An analytics of composition, in other words, must remain independent from the analytics of experience central for first-wave pragmatism and the analytics of language central for second-wave pragmatism.  Or, perhaps, it must so remain if it is to truly usher pragmatism out of the experience-versus-language impasse it finds itself within today.  It is not clear, however, that Grimstad manages to keep composition on its own two legs, at least in the “Introduction” to his book.  I think, as it happens, that his analyses and accounts of Emerson, Melville, and Poe that follow in later chapters do the work of composition he seeks.  But the window we are offered onto that work by the introductory chapter seems to me to fog just a little too much.

One worries at times that Grimstad would be willing to retrieve through composition the workings of experience alone, or even treat composition merely as an index for experience.  Sometimes, in other words, Grimstad appears enmeshed in his titular first word: experience.  This path is perilous.  It may one day work again.  But to get it to do so would require more than philosophy has managed to present.  Even Dewey, inveterate champion of experience, realized in his late work that the word, indeed perhaps even the concept, could not be rescued:

Were I to write (or rewrite) Experience and Nature today I would entitle the book Culture and Nature…. I would abandon the term ‘experience’ because of my growing realization that the historical obstacles which prevent understanding of my use of ‘experience’ are, for all practical purposes insurmountable.  I would substitute the term ‘culture’ because with its meanings as now firmly established it can fully and freely carry my philosophy of experience.5

Dewey’s late alternative to experience was “culture,”6 my alternative is a pragmatist emphasis on processual “transitions,”7 and Grimstad’s is an analytics of ‘composition.’

Grimstad seems to want to both hold on to experience and to press beyond it (Dewey was of the same bent for much of his life).  He frames this in terms of “a shift from one way of thinking about experience—the affective encounter—to another: the process by which literary works become through composition conditioned experiences.”8 To this we can pose two questions.  In shifting away from the affective encounter, is there any use in continuing to deploy experience as an analytic concept?  If so, can experience then bear the shift that is being urged upon it?  Dewey, for most of his life, emphatically answered the first question in the affirmative.  But when he finally came to take the second question seriously, Dewey late in life answered in the negative, thereby also realizing he would have to reverse his answer to the first.  Thus, when Grimstad aims to show through his analytics of composition how his renaissance writers “exemplify, in different ways, the move from earlier accounts of experience (classical empiricism; transcendental idealism) to pragmatism’s idea of experience as experiment” we need to ask these questions of him too.9 For my part, I am not sure what use there is to be had in writing composition back into experience (first question), in large part because I worry that experience cannot bear the shift that is being asked of it (second question).  That is to say that in our present philosophical moment we have yet to have the privilege of meeting with an account of experience that sees its way beyond the impasses of foundationalism and representationalism first diagnosed by the classical pragmatists but also not sufficiently worked out in their writings.

To see why, we can turn to the neopragmatists, whose characteristic championing of the linguistic turn need be read as a rigorously anti-experientialist move.  Grimstad rightly locates Brandom’s and Rorty’s critiques of experience through the Sellarsian critique of the myth of the given.  This is, Grimstad summarizes, “the myth that causal determinations—what the classical empiricists called ‘impressions’—could serve as a foundation for discourse in the space of reasons.”10 The Sellarsian critique of ‘givenism’ can be read as the rigorous pursuit of the snares of foundationalism and representationalism first worked out by Peirce, James, and Dewey.11 But where the classical triumvirate remained wedded to experience, Sellars’s critique of givenism shows why experience should be abandoned due to concerns about epistemological foundationalism first forwarded by the classical triumvirate.  In short, the problem is that an analytics of experience has yet to be detached from a connection to “felt” (James) and “qualitative” (Dewey) modalities of consciousness that are invited to serve as justifiers that cannot themselves be justified.  These “experiences” are taken as justifiers insofar as they construed as evidential for, or inferentially articulated to, other bits of consciousness.  But the same “experiences” are also taken as given, or not in need of justification themselves, insofar as they are merely qualitative feelings (such as a simple affect or a sensation of warmth or cold).  These “experiences” are causal determinations (unjustifiable) that can be made to serve as foundations for normative discursive practice (justificatory).  It is not that any account of experience must of necessity commit this givenist sin of unjustified-but-justificatory.  Rather, the claim is just that nobody (including Dewey) has yet to work out a suitably post-givenist account that would free experience from the stain of the sin.

All of this is internal to Grimstad’s own argument insofar as he expressly endorses the Sellarsian critique as it has been mounted by Brandom and Rorty.12 This is what makes his return to classical pragmatism more than simple first-wave pragmatism redux.  This is why he is properly a third-generation pragmatist.  But I would suggest that making good on these promises would involve a more rigorous tuning of composition as the center of analysis such that experience might become legible through the conduct of composition, but not the other way around, as if we could bear to hear again that old demand to bring it all back down to experience.  In focusing the work of composition on “the specifically modernist predicament of needing to find the criteria by which the work becomes intelligible” Grimstad aims to position himself outside of neopragmatist inferential justification.13 But this is to forget the crucial Wittgensteinean lesson common to the work of Brandom and Cavell: every instance of meaning is an instance of normative determination and thus cannot fail to confront the question of justification. Grimstad would be right to charge that Brandom reaches too far in thinking that meaning always comes back down to inference,14 but for that reason we need not pretend that we can reach back behind meaning into something more pure that would function as experiential finding and founding.  If a work makes a claim in virtue of its particular composition, or say as an effect of its style, rather than in virtue of what it expressly says, then we should be willing to read this making of meaning through composition or style, rather than resuscitating experience to do so.  It is the work that founds meaning, presumably in concert with the history of the practices (and culture?) in which such works have before made meaning, and will again do so later on, in ways as yet undreamt.  We are here clearly beyond inference and purely linguistic articulation. But we are also beyond qualitative sense and purely experiential immersion. We are with the works themselves: how they are composed: practices of composition.

Now, to be sure, all of this is exactly what Grimstad’s book really wants to do (if I may be allowed to speak truth into his pages from a space well outside of the work of their composition), as is evidenced by everything that comes after the introduction. Grimstad there takes his reader touring through the work of experimental composition in Emerson, Poe, Melville, and Henry and William James.  We witness scenes of literary production in Emerson’s essays vis-à-vis taxonomies of natural history, in Poe’s production of the detective genre vis-à-vis the puzzlement he met with in meeting a mechanical chess automaton, in Melville’s fantastic literary reaches in Pierre, or the Ambiguities where he weaves into his narrative a satire of then-emerging practices of public literary criticism, and finally in the late literary and philosophical productions of the James brothers vis-à-vis the cosmopolitan opportunities of radical empiricism.  Grimstad’s focus, via Cavell, is on the work of composition in each writer.  We read of Emerson producing his essays as compendia of his journals, of Poe’s poetic craft and his later explicit thematization in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” and of Melville’s late act of insertion of 160 pages into Pierre as it was nearing the printers in a kind of mocking response to earlier critical reactions to his work.  Grimstad’s accounts focus, in each instance, on what his writers are doing.  Largely absent in the discussion is whatever experiences they may have had.  When experience does arise, it is in the service of action or conduct, thus confirming that literary experiment on this account is not the mere transcription of experience: “Melville turns experience understood as copying into the doing of composition.”15 What matters is always the doing: the work of composing or what I like to call the conduct of composition.16

What I am suggesting, perhaps, is that we follow the contours of Grimstad’s analysis rather than his presentation of where that analysis should lead us, or to put it otherwise by tilting Matthiessen, the degree to which Grimstad’s theories bear out his practice.  If we do that, we find in Grimstad’s categoreme of composition an analytic tool with which contemporary pragmatism has managed to generate a new kind of claim.  This, then, would suggest that Experience and Experimental Writing has, and of its own resources, already achieved a decided claim on the wild and rolling seascape that is contemporary pragmatism.

Ralph Berry:

For much of Paul Grimstad’s Experience and Experimental Writing I have nothing but praise. I am grateful, in particular, for his insight that a version of aesthetic experience repudiated by Walter Michaels and Michael Fried is hardly experience at all, is rather “a field of unorganized affects.” Although claims made on behalf of post-sixties art works and movements have often sought to justify themselves by vague appeals to experience, nothing is to be gained from carrying over uncritical concepts into subsequent critical discussion. Michaels and Fried are right about the confusion of these appeals, but Grimstad is right that, in aesthetic discussion, the concepts of experience, intention, and meaning just function differently. The conflict lies elsewhere.

I am also grateful for Grimstad’s relating Stanley Cavell’s “truth of skepticism”—that inhabiting a world with others is a matter of acknowledgment rather than knowledge—to Cavell’s account of modernism, despite the challenges of understanding their relation. For Cavell, the problem faced by modernist composers and sculptors is to discover in their present practice the continuities with past music and sculpture that conventions formerly provided, continuities on which overcoming subjective isolation depends, and Grimstad has correctly recognized this problem as an aesthetic inflection of other minds skepticism. What Cavell noticed in The Claim of Reason about what Wittgenstein noticed in Philosophical Investigations is that access to another’s subjectivity, if it occurs at all, occurs naturally, making the threat of isolation, not any lack of knowledge, but our repression of it.17 When in The World Viewed Cavell characterizes modernist painting as a return of the repressed,18 he connects Wittgenstein’s philosophical procedures with modernist compositional practice, fully justifying Grimstad’s description of innovations in American literary prose in terms Cavell developed for twentieth-century music, sculpture, painting, and drama.

However, it is just here that I hesitate. When Grimstad claims—I think correctly—that Emerson’s argument with Kant, as explicated by Cavell, is fully manifest in Emerson’s way of writing, which Grimstad calls “experimental,” I am unsure whether he means to be describing Emerson’s philosophical predicament or his literary method. The distinction can seem finicky, especially given Cavell’s own notorious boundary crossing, but even though J. M. Bernstein is right that Cavell’s writing practice is itself modernist,19 there remains in Cavell’s work a persistent troubling of the literary-philosophical relation that, in my reading, Grimstad elides. In support of Emerson as an experimental writer, Grimstad appropriately cites Cavell’s remark that “Emerson’s and Thoreau’s relation to poetry is inherently their interest in their own writing…their interest in the fact that what they are building is writing.” However, Grimstad breaks off his quote before Cavell’s paradoxical conclusion: “Their prose is a battle, using a remark of Nietzsche’s, not to become poetry.”20 In Cavell’s account, the constructive power of language appears for Emerson, as for Wittgenstein, equally promise and threat. Grimstad is at his most interesting when explicating the philosophical consequences of particular compositional practices, but I am less confident that the relation of literature to experience can be clarified by saying that, for Emerson or Henry James or Gertrude Stein, writing is itself a version of, and can be taken as a model for, human experience.

I can sharpen my point. Grimstad lucidly summarizes what he takes “experimentation” to mean for Cavell: “an activity taking the form of a search; one which does not know where it is going ahead of time, fashions’ provisional goals as part of the unfolding of the process, and remains open to the surprises that emerge from an attention to work as it is being made.” This admirable summary encapsulates much of what Cavell implies when emphasizing the role of whim in Emerson’s writing and of inclination or temptation in Wittgenstein’s. However, I cannot tell whether, in using the adjective “experimental,” Grimstad means to be describing a particular mode of compositional practice, one that can be contrasted with other modes—that is, with non-experimental ways of organizing and arranging words—or whether he means to be describing what composition fundamentally is, something writers and philosophers have not consistently recognized, perhaps with consequences for their ways of organizing and arranging words. If the former, then the helpfulness of Grimstad’s account depends on our understanding how each of these contrasting modes of composition—i.e., experimental and non-experimental—addresses a distinct challenge and set of circumstances. If the latter, then its helpfulness depends on our understanding how the experimental nature of all composition, something with which anyone composing must become familiar, could go unrecognized. The difference between these two explanatory aims is hardly absolute, of course. Whether understood as a compositional mode or as the revelation of composition as such, experimental writing is likely to contrast itself with other ways of writing and to attempt to discover writing’s underlying nature. However, I take Cavell’s account of modernist art to be in the service of the first aim more than the second.

Grimstad’s stake in Cavell’s modernism involves a particular view of experience, one that Grimstad attributes to John Dewey and characterizes as “pragmatist.” This view presents itself as a way of avoiding the standoff between Locke’s empiricism, in which experience consists of objective particulars, and Kant’s transcendental idealism, in which experience depends on subjective universals. In contrast to the concern of both with internal-external correspondence, Grimstad offers Dewey’s view of experience as an active process, “an experimental loop of perception, action, consequences, further perception of consequences, further action, further consequences, and so forth.” Although Grimstad does not attribute this (or any) view of experience to Cavell, he believes that Cavell’s modernism—in which the meaningfulness of an artistic composition depends on no previously established conventions or criteria—can help neutralize a forceful criticism of Dewey. According to both Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom, the problem with Dewey’s describing experience as a “continuity between natural events…and the origin and development of meanings” is that it confuses the causes of what one says with the reasons offered in defense of what one says. Because competency in using language implies competency in justifying one’s uses, they argue, there is a gap between nature and whatever can be said about it: “the deliverances of the senses alone are not enough to get a language game going.” Having recognized that in Cavell’s modernism the justification of meaning plays only a secondary role, while the experience of meaning—what Cavell describes as “a continuous seeing of the point”21—is essential, Grimstad hopes to use Cavell’s account of artistic composition to preserve Dewey’s experimental process from Rorty’s and Brandom’s critique.

I don’t see how this can work. Cavell’s description of the predicament of the modernist artist, like his description of the philosopher’s predicament in Philosophical Investigations, begins with an experience of confusion, not of nature. It is this confusion that modernist work, either philosophy or art, comes into the world to combat. In Cavell’s account, the artist abandons her art’s established genres, forms, styles, and techniques, not out of a craving for newness, but because these conventions have become so implicated in art’s impostures, in art’s displacement by its compromised and dispirited likenesses, that, without a severe purification, art’s conventions can no longer function as correctives. No interpretation of Cavell’s modernism makes sense apart from this disorienting encounter with aesthetic fraudulence.22 Against its backdrop, the modernist composition—or our experience of it—appears profoundly negative. In describing Anthony Caro’s sculpture and Beckett’s Endgame, Cavell devotes far more attention to the knowledge of which these works deprive him than to any statement of their meaning. It is as though everything that had previously enabled him or us to judge art, all the accumulated experience on which our critical perspective depends, must be forgone. Although I think the term “experimental” aptly describes this relinquishing of concepts, norms, and touchstones—that is, I have no quarrel with Grimstad’s liberal application of it—its connotation of tentativeness may underplay the fixity, exposure, and helplessness we experience before such works. In The World Viewed, Cavell stops using the word “conventions” to describe the local meaning events discovered by modernists—e.g., Beckett’s “hidden literality,” Wittgenstein’s “perspicuous presentation,” Pollock’s “all-over line”—and starts calling them “automatisms.” The point of the change is to emphasize that, when art happens, it happens of itself, automatically or naturally. To require these discoveries of naturalness to submit to further tests—unless that just means to further experiences of art—will suppress, not just modernism, but experience.

If it is correct to say that the goal or aim of Wittgenstein’s compositional practice in Philosophical Investigations is an experience of meaning that is simultaneously an experience of nature—which I take to be Cavell’s point—then that aim is met only to the extent that experiencing the meaning of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is not composing it. On the contrary, nature in Philosophical Investigations seems more closely akin to decomposing, to discovering the emptiness of one’s most ambitious attempts at composition. (Cavell compares the work of Emerson’s writing to the work of mourning.23) When Cavell concludes that, instead of the metaphysical given of Beckett’s Endgame, meaninglessness is its characters’ goal, their “heroic undertaking,”24 he provokes a question much like Wittgenstein’s in PI §118: “Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important?” No answer that Wittgenstein, Beckett, or Cavell can provide prevents this question from repeating endlessly. Instead, what seems needed is an experiment, one I perform on myself. It involves testing, trying out in imagined contexts meanings with which I am intimately familiar but, in trying to locate their basis in nature and experience, I have deprived of life. For Cavell, such an experiment, when it works, resembles what Emerson calls the “work of genius.” One’s own rejected thoughts return—if not from the dead, then from oblivion—with “a certain alienated majesty.” The meaninglessness imposed on me proves to be my own doing, and where I imagined action was required, I discover meanings already acting upon and through me. Thus composed, my life’s meaning displays all the autonomy of a natural phenomenon. In confessing that, even with no concept or criterion, he is “stuck with the knowledge” that Anthony Caro’s work is sculpture,25 Cavell gives voice to this experience of our passivity before modernism’s achievements. In his view, Endgame is performed by sufferers rather than actors. Nobody on the stage or in the audience knows the meaning of the action. It occurs to us.26

I do not imagine anything I have said is news to Grimstad. He is as familiar with Cavell’s writings as I and knows Emerson’s far better. In truth, it has struck me more than once in reading Experience and Experimental Writing that I may be confused about my own response, that I could be superficially imagining differences where accord lies deepest. Like Wittgenstein’s compositional practice, which involves assembling commonplace observations for a particular purpose (PI §127), Emerson’s method of transposing journal entries into his lectures and essays, which Grimstad sensitively records, offers a practical response to naturalized fraudulence and despair. To audiences too habituated to being audiences, Emerson culls from his journal the evanescent distractions in which our nature is forever revealed. Where I find Grimstad’s commitments most closely aligned with Cavell’s is in his treatment of Emerson’s writing, not as a representation of human experience, but as the disclosure of how we fail to experience, of how the meaning of our lives continually passes us by. This disclosure may be what Grimstad wants from the idea of literary experimentation.

However, between the naturalness with which a phrase like “the deliverances of the senses alone” occurs to me and the contexts I imagine in which examples of its meaning seem familiar, I experience, not a continuous process, but an alienating break. Pinching a nerve in my shoulder is, in its mind-clearing jolt of pain, a vivid example of experience delivered by the senses alone, and yet, contrary to the conclusion drawn by Rorty, Brandom, and Wilfrid Sellars, I know of nothing that will get a language game going faster. However, the examples Grimstad cites—from Rorty, et al—are not of this kind. They are instances in which my response to what my senses deliver bears comparison with a trained parrot’s cry, the rusting of a piece of iron exposed to moisture, or the sound made by a tape recorder hooked to a photoelectric cell at the flash of a light. In other words, the context is one in which my relation to nature is that of a beast, object, or machine. Do I know what the phrase “the deliverances of the senses alone” means in such a context? Despite their lack of familiarity, I find that examples like those Grimstad cites come automatically to my mind whenever, fending off skepticism’s allure, I try to ground my life’s meaning in nature and experience. To the extent that I can imagine what a deliverance of the senses might be in contexts from which the human form of life has been excluded, I do not see how Rorty, Brandom, and Sellars can be other than right. Such experiences “are not enough to get a [human] language game going,” or not unless the game is to explain how I become interested in them in the first place. And I do not see how providing a different model of experience—one based on an experimental process or compositional practice—can end the craving I feel when meanings written into my memory and flesh exercise their constructive power in this way, independently of nature and experience. What seems needed is an acknowledgment of my part in my discomposure, and that seems unlikely to occur apart from a continuous seeing of the point.

In the Introduction to Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses, Paul Grimstad aims to provide the theoretical framework for what later chapters on Emerson, Poe, Melville, and the Jameses render concrete: “the transition from thinking of experience as the squaring of inner and outer matters to thinking of experience as a process continued in composition” (2). The methodology of the study depends upon a fluent juxtaposition of philosophical pragmatism, pragmatist literary criticism, and individual case studies of literary composition. Grimstad’s work thus seeks to be understood as a contribution to (among other things) the revision of dominant paradigms for thinking about the relation between philosophy and literature. By claiming that “certain writers exemplify, in different ways, the move from earlier accounts of experience (classical empiricism; transcendental idealism) to pragmatism’s idea of experience as experiment,” the study does not “reduce literary works to epiphenomenal aftereffects of socialhistorical formations,” but rather aims to reveal how the shift from one way of conceptualizing experience to another takes place in and through particular acts of literary composition (14). Literary criticism, if you will, as a mode of intellectual history. This fundamental assumption underlying Grimstad’s approach—namely, that literary works might be or become philosophically expressive – bears emphasizing at the outset. For it is, first of all, a repudiation of the notion that literature only becomes philosophically significant when it represents ideas, theories, or arguments, and equally of the view that literary works possess attributes that philosophical ones, in their abstraction and intellectualization of lived experience, could never express.
The extent to which the work’s basic assumption challenges the conventional polarization of the functions of literature and philosophy becomes most evident in the individual chapters, which explore what Grimstad dubs “different ways of dramatizing in prose the replacement of experience as correspondence with experience as composition” through readings of Emerson’s Nature (1836) and “The Method of Nature” (1841), Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” (1845), and “The Raven” (1845), Melville’s Pierre (1852), and James’s The Ambassadors (1903) (2). But this commitment to breaking down the false dichotomy implied in the particularity of literature and the universality of philosophy is already evident in the Introduction, where Grimstad seeks to explain how we might understand artworks as arriving, through experiment, at a way of “discover[ing] and acknowledg[ing] the criteria under which their specific ways of saying become provisionally universal” (16). This “process by which literary works become through composition conditioned experiences” is “the way [that] experimental writing involves the wording of the world into something shareable and meaningful” (14).

To reach this conclusion, we need a more perspicuous sense of what is meant by “experience,” “composition,” and “experiment.” As the previously quoted formulations indicate, the three terms appear throughout the Introduction as virtual synonyms of one another, in ways that are at times ambiguous. For instance, Grimstad quotes Robert Brandom’s interpretation of Dewey’s concept of experience: “‘processual, developmental, Erfahrung rather than episodic, self-intimating Erlebnis…a feedback loop of perception, responsive performance, and perception of the results of performance’” (9).27 While the activity of “composition” may well be characterized in these terms, it evidently does not follow that all experiential processes that conform to this criteria are “compositions,” in the sense that Emerson’s “Experience” or James’s The Ambassadors are “compositions.” If there are ways of describing “experience” that do not necessitate “thinking of experience as a process continued in composition,” however, then the question of why these thinkers needed to work out the new conception of experience via the practice of literary composition (and not some other practice) seems relevant to the project (2). Indeed, this is a question that Grimstad addresses at some length towards the end of the Introduction:

My effort to fuse Cavell’s account of modernism, understood as the search in composition for an object worthy of our attention, with Dewey’s account of composition as an experiment in opening up “new fields of experience,” is made explicit when Cavell says of Emerson’s prose that in it can be found a “deduction of every word in the language.” Transposing Kant’s transcendental deduction of the conditions for possible experience, Cavell imagines a deduction resulting not in twelve categories of the understanding but in a prose that would be continually deducing the meaning of “every word.” Cavell finds a description—and, presumably, an example—of this sort of deduction at work in a line from “Self-Reliance”: “primary wisdom is intuition whilst all later teachings are tuitions,” hearing that line as saying that “the occurrence to us of intuition places a demand upon us, namely for tuition; call this wording, the willingness to subject oneself to words, to make oneself intelligible.” In an earlier essay on King Lear Cavell describes this as being in “straits of mind in which only those words said in that order will suffice,” and in a later interview he speaks of the conviction a piece of writing can elicit as a matter of “nothing other than this prose here, as its passing before our eyes.” These last examples, in their different ways, offer both the clearest alternative to thinking of language as bound up with justification—as if just these words in this order, as if style itself, amount to a kind of claiming—and the moment where Cavell’s (however qualified and embedded) affinity with pragmatism becomes most vivid….Thought of as exemplified in Emerson’s distinctively difficult prose…this sort of search is what the classical pragmatists call “experience.” (14)

This passage elaborates the quest for literary style as the bridge between composition understood as experiment and composition qua search for “an object worthy of our attention” (and, indeed, of much more than that; for Cavell,” objects of art not merely interest and absorb, they move us; we are not merely involved in them, but concerned with them, and care about them; we…invest them with a value which normal people otherwise reserve only for other people”).28 Yet the account of why “composition” becomes the exemplary form of this conception of “experience” nevertheless gives rise to further questions. I often do use “just these words in this order” to mean what I say, and although I may be thereby manifesting my “willingness to subject [my]self to words, to make [my]self intelligible,” I do not necessarily take myself to be composing something like “Self-Reliance” or King Lear (or even, for that matter, an e-mail). Thinking in language necessarily submits us to the conditions of meaning. But even if we are to understand this as a kind of “search in composition,” what makes it a search for what will count as literature, here and now, is a different question entirely.

Why should this matter for Grimstad? First, the relation between our everyday use of language and its literary use, between everyday situations and art, between everyday meaning and the meaning we seek in art, seems especially acute given the intense implications of “composition” for later modernist figures such as Woolf and Stein. (I do not wish to imply that Grimstad conflates the pragmatist notion of experience as experimental composition with the inheritance of Cézanne’s notion of composition by these later figures; on the contrary, I wonder how much continuity he would wish to find here, and how much difference.) More importantly, the stakes of his intervention become clear in his discussion of the role of experience and meaning in the work of Michael Fried, Ruth Leys, and Walter Benn Michaels. Grimstad argues, “I want to avoid descriptions of the relation between work and beholder that would pit experience against intention….If Fried wants to replace experience understood as continuousness or duration with experience understood as a channel through which one accesses something at every moment ‘wholly manifest,’ I want to equate experience with the work’s conditions of expressiveness” (12-13). It is almost as if Grimstad wishes to take Fried’s distinction between the experience of literalist art and the experience of modernist art as generating two different concepts of experience, thereby enabling him to recast the dialectic of theatricality and absorption that exists within art itself into experience and posit an alternative model. However, Fried’s description of experience-as-art, the conditions of which are established by minimalist works that necessitate the subject’s awareness of his presence in relation to an object, is not intended to provide the more general grounds for a critique of the importance of experience as such to art and its criticism. Furthermore, although Fried does claim of modernist painting and sculpture that “at every moment the work of art is manifest,” he argues that “[i]t is as though one’s experience of the latter has no duration…as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it” (my emphasis).29 As opposed to Grimstad, his concern is grounded in the problem of how the work of art establishes these illusory conditions of its viewing—the possibility of experiencing it as though these particular conditions were true—and not with the role of experience as such.

At this juncture, the implications of Grimstad’s conception of “composition” as “experimental” insofar as it is a search for “experience” become clear. Quoting John Dewey’s claim in Art as Experience that “because the artist operates experimentally [in this way] does he open new fields of experience,” Grimstad declares, “What is Dewey’s ‘operating experimentally’ but the way a process of composition becomes a search for the criteria by which the work begins to mean? And what are ‘new fields of experience’ but the way those meanings depend on the discovery in composition of the conditions by which they become publicly intelligible? Far from ‘standing in’ for the work tout court, experience is what is found in the work….experience names the conditions under which intentions become sharable in and as the work (and always with the possibility that this will fail; that the work will not arrive at those conditions)” (13).30 If “experience” is understood as the discovery of conditions by which the meaning of the work becomes publicly intelligible, then according to Grimstad those conditions are to be found through the “experiment” of the “composition,” in its search for the criteria by which it has meaning. The terms in need of explication thus shift from “experience,” “experiment,” and “composition” to “criteria,” “conditions,” and “meaning.” For surely the search for the criteria by which they come to have meaning is a process that can and does apply to many experiments in language, without this determining that they are compositions as meaningful as (or meaningful in the way that) the particular works studied in Experience and Experimental Writing claim to be. What are these specific compositions, these “conditioned experiences”—what conditions for experiencing them must they establish, such that we are compelled to understand our experience of them as “meaningful,” “provisionally universal,” worthy of being called works of art in their time?

This question implies a range of a various historical and formal issues that may perhaps exceed the scope of the Introduction, but are relevant to the transgeneric character of the study. Why does “experience as composition” become important to the essay, short story, narrative poem, and novel at this particular moment (2)? If, as Grimstad suggests in a later chapter, “for Poe the experimental magazinist experience is analogous to the invention of a genre,” then how, if at all, does the space of existing genres inflect the inheritance of this conception of experience, and how do the different internal constraints and prehistories of various forms of writing bear upon their establishment of conditions for meaningful experience (64)? Another way to put this point would be to say that for Cavell and Fried, any search or discovery of the conditions for meaningful experience necessarily unfolds within the space of problems generated by particular traditions. The convergence of the particular philosophical issues delineated in the Introduction with the various aesthetic problems confronting the individual traditions from which these writers depart must, in each instance, matter to the significance of the transition from one account of experience to another. An intriguing implication of the study’s methodology is that it posits “composition” qua “experimental writing” as an encompassing category under which works of various literary and philosophical genres may find themselves. The literary-historical implications of this claim seem significant enough to warrant further elucidation.
If the account of the conditions and criteria themselves, and hence the stakes of “experience” in the “experimental writing” of the various subjects of the study, is left open in the Introduction, Grimstad nevertheless is keen to stress that these compositions establish the conditions by which they may be susceptible to failures of meaning. Following Cavell, his study thereby calls our attention to the fact that our words “experiment” and “experience” both stem from the same root belonging to peril. What is tried and what is risked is no less than the possibility of the work itself. In this trial lies the work’s proof of itself.

I feel honored to have such thoughtful comments about my book and am grateful to nonsite for organizing this forum. That one of the respondents is a literary scholar, another a philosopher, another a fiction writer and theorist, and the fourth an art historian makes it even better. It’s encouraging to think my ideas could invite such a wide range of responses. In replying to my critics I will I hope not too indulgently take the opportunity to offer a brief account of how I arrived at the central claims of the Introduction, and to raise some new thoughts about experience in relation both to 19th century literature and experimental writing more generally.

The ideas in the Introduction stemmed initially from the excitement I felt as a graduate student reading Emerson’s 1844 essay “Experience” nearly simultaneously with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Beyond the suggested affinity in “transcendental idealism”—which might lead one to think American transcendentalism were merely a belated Boston version of German idealism (still in some ways the received intellectual history)—reading the Critique could not have been a more opposite thrill to reading Emerson. Emerson writes gorgeously and argues associatively; Kant writes miserably and argues excellently. Beyond the immediate pleasure of Emerson’s strange, elastic sentences, a line near the end of the essay—“but far be from me the despair which prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism”—seemed to capture a central distinction in Kant’s account of Erfahrung: that experience was not some bare encounter with the impingements of the senses (“paltry empiricism”) but a function of judgment and so conceptual through and through.31

Two passages from the (very) late Henry James seemed to solidify the connection between Emerson’s experimental prose and Kantian Erfahrung. The first was a 1915 letter from James to H.G. Wells in which he wrote that “art makes life, makes interest, makes importance…and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.”32 I soon discovered that the famous line had been given vivid exposition in the “Prefaces” James added to the New York Edition of his fiction. One passage in particular, from the Preface to The Golden Bowl, described the revising of the novel as “the history of an effect of experience; the history [that is] of the growth of an immense array of terms [that] in sentence, passage and page simply looked over the heads of the standing terms,” leading to what James called “intenser lights of experience.”33 Where did this new intensity come from? Had fresh experience been created in the process of revision? How exactly was James imaging the relation between composition and experience?

With this set of interests in mind I came across some of the most provocative criticism I’d read in graduate school, Walter Benn Michaels’ The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. I’d already read his essay “Against Theory” (co-authored with Steven Knapp) in a seminar on literature and philosophy and had, like many others, become fascinated by a thought experiment in which a Wordsworth poem appears to wash up on a beach. 34 A version of the argument (if the lines of the poem turn out to be the result of a natural accident like erosion it isn’t a poem at all but merely resembles one) was continued in The Shape of the Signifier in the example of believing the meaning of an Emily Dickinson poem changes if you regularize her cursive handwriting into lineated print stanzas. Such a belief would entail thinking that the shape of the cursive “c” in “Its Coming—the Postponeless Creature,” for example, is relevant to the meaning of the poem. Consider looking at that cursive “c” through a microscope, the edges of the dried ink branching out in irregular furrows into the fabric of the paper. Could Dickinson mean that? Could any human mean that? Would ever more powerful microscopes uncover more and more layers of meaning? It made sense to me to think the answers here should be “no.”

Yet Michaels’ word for the opposite of meaning was “experience” and that’s where I started to lose the thread (my reading in Kant, Emerson and Henry James had led me to think of experience and meaning more as synonyms than as opposites). Paraphrasing Michael Fried’s essay “Art and Objecthood” (a touchstone throughout Shape of the Signifier, whose subtitle—From 1967 to the End of History—is a nod to the publication date of Fried’s essay), Michaels’ notes that Fried “invoke[s] the concept of meaning as against experience.” An example in “Art and Objecthood” that might lead one to think the essay pits meaning against experience is Fried’s discussion of sculptor Tony Smith’s account of a drive across the unfinished New Jersey turnpike at night. As Smith put it, “there was no way to frame it, you just had to experience it”; a situation Smith strangely thought of as “the end of art.” About these claims Fried says that the “availability of modernist art is not [of the kind Smith describes] and that the rightness or relevance of one’s conviction about specific modernist works, a conviction that begins and ends in one’s experience of the work itself, is always open to question.”35 What is interesting here is the way Fried places our capacity for judging and assessing—the “availability” of an artwork—as “beginning and ending with experience.” This, I take it, is experience in the sense of discriminative attention directed at some aspect of the world and not a total, engulfing “situation.” Three things in Fried’s diction to pay attention to on this point: first, the proximity of the words “conviction” and “experience” (to be convinced is to have a certain kind of experience); second, the phrase “experience of the work itself,” ie, the bounded structure of intentions that makes the work what it is and not all the stuff around it; and, three, the idea that our judgments about such works are “always open to question”; ie, our capacity for being convinced by, or rejecting, the work is an act of judgement for which experience must be the condition if such judgments “begin and end” there.36

Nothing in any of this invites Michaels’ sundering of experience from meaning. Indeed, the stark opposition of the words is the mirror image of Tony Smith’s thinking that an experience not of art could somehow be the “end of art”: the latter wildly generalizes experience dissolving everything into a situation; the former banishes experience entirely and so evacuates any chance of encountering an artwork, modernist or otherwise. Michaels does offer a more nuanced rendering of the relation of meaning to experience elsewhere in Shape of the Signifier, noting that Fried’s “fundamental commitment is…to distinguishing between those objects to which our experience is relevant and those to which it is not.”37 Michaels’ “relevant” seems meant to mark a difference between artworks which require the involvement of the viewer to be what they are and those which are what they are independently of the presence of a viewer. Something like this distinction comes through in a recent interview with Fried, where he says that he thought minimalism “worked like something, but it didn’t work the way I thought art should work…it didn’t work the way standing in front of a [Morris] Louis Unfurled worked…[an Unfurled] doesn’t care whether I’m there. It doesn’t care whether I exist. You stand in front of…the Olympia or the Le Dejeuner [sur l’herbe] and Victorine Meurent is looking out of the picture and she ain’t looking at me. She does not care whether I’m there…[conversely] Minimalism depended absolutely on your being there.”38 I suppose I am stating the obvious if I say that some person’s experience would be “relevant” to the distinction made here between Victorine Meurent’s stare and a minimalist work. And while Fried is no doubt right that a Manet canvas doesn’t “care” about him he certainly cares about it. Again, if our capacity for being convinced (or unconvinced) by an artwork “begins and ends with experience” then this must be experience as Kant’s Erfahrung; ie, that which makes possible what Fried calls “availability.” Surely experience in this sense is required even to begin to start making distinctions between everyday experience and experiences of artworks; between works which solicit the beholder’s involvement and those which are entirely independent of any viewer; between works which convince us that they are genuine instances of some medium and those which fail to convince us, and so on.

I took up some of these questions in a recent email exchange with Todd Cronan, suggesting that the crucial distinction in “Art and Objecthood” was not between meaning and experience but rather between everyday experience and an experience of art. To this Todd replied: “I just don’t know what ‘experience’ means when you say it matters in art, except to say it matters if it’s supposed to matter, which just is meaning.”39 I’d reply that experience, as the condition under which any art becomes available at all (Fried’s “begins and ends”), it is not properly describable as more or less relevant, for without it there is nothing (unless we’re talking about brute natural occurrences such as, say, the gravitational collapse of a star, in which case, yes, it doesn’t care about you and there is no experience necessary). The point is nicely captured by Stanley Cavell (with whom Fried was in dialogue at the time of the writing of “Art and Objecthood”) when he writes that “when I experience a work of art I feel that I am meant to notice one thing and not another, that the placement of a note or rhyme or line had a purpose, and that certain works are perfectly realized, or contrived, or meretricious”40

Michael Schreyach

In his response to me Michael Schreyach is careful not to commit to a hard and fast split between meaning and experience, noting how my arguments are in accord with the distinction “formulated by Fried, between ‘art’ and ‘objecthood,’…the latter is comprised by the entire lived situation that attends our every interaction with the physical features of our environment (including objects, and artworks when they are treated like objects). Literal experience, which privileges our subjective responses to things, is distinguished from our experience of art.” Still, if experience is the word for the ability to make the distinction between art and objecthood, I don’t see what is gained by the designation “literal.” As a category of assessment, experience is the condition of possibility for conviction, for attention, for caring or not caring, and of course also for being able to tell the difference between an immersive situation of the Smith turnpike sort and the availability of a fully intended work (again, it is not something that may be parceled out and distributed according to its “relevance”).

Schreyach is thus right when he says that I am concerned in my Introduction to give an account of experience as “discovering the conditions under which the meaning of what [someone] has written or made—that is, the work of art—can become shareable.” Again, the “condition” Schreyach identifies here is experience as discriminative attention, of the sort that would allow both for noticing the formal features of an intended work, as well as the endless decisions and adjustments and revisions that go into its making. This is just where I appeal to John Dewey’s marvelous phrase, from Art As Experience, that “because the artist operates experimentally..he opens new fields of experience.”41 All of this, from the side of composition (the experience James seems to have had revising The Golden Bowl) to the “new field of experience” made available to a reader or listener or beholder, is a function of intentionality and so is a normative matter.

It is worth clarifying a bit here the relation between the words “intention” and “normative.”42 The normative in the sense I use it is in play any time something is taken as something; any time there is an experience of something, überhaupt. The normative in this sense is needed to be able to “make sense of the idea of a mental state’s…being directed toward the world” as John McDowell succinctly puts it.43 Schreyach is clear on this point: “it’s not productive to think narrowly of ‘intention’ as an author’s conscious plan, nor of ‘meaning’ as an item that a reader might discover and then completely know.” Yes. Intention, meaning and experience as I use the words in my Introduction are rather bound up with the conditions that make it possible for some person to take it things are thus and so. Schreyach is right to link all this to what I describe in my Introduction as a concern with “how intentional structures get built into artworks; and how beholders (or readers) come into conceptual possession of those structures” (12). With that description in place, we should now look more closely at the intellectual history of the pragmatist account of experience as experiment, and what it means to say that artists “open new fields of experience” as Dewey put it.

Colin Koopman

A pragmatist corrective to the obsession with skepticism could take the form of the question: why all the hand-wringing over an abstraction one never encounters in practice? The abstraction, germane to all varieties of skepticism, is “correspondence”: the problem of squaring worldly (outer) phenomena with subjective (inner) states. It may be found in everything from the Cartesian substance dualism which tries to square res extensa with res cogitans (from which arises the thought experiment in hyperbolic doubt), to the way Hume’s claim that all knowledge of matters of fact arise from sensory impressions leads to skepticism about justifying induction. Even aspects of Kant’s transcendental idealism preserve elements of the problem of correspondence, though he modifies it to one of the relation of phenomena to “things-in-themselves” (skepticism is now reserved for noumenal entities we cannot access). Part of the aim of my Introduction is to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater by getting rid of “experience” tout court, even as we drop of the problem of correspondence. And this is to some extent just what the classical phase of pragmatism did. Peirce, James and Dewey, in their different ways, devised an entirely new conception of experience which had nothing to do with squaring inner and outer matters. Experience was a process by which you found out what things were and what they meant in practice, through testing and remaining attentive to the results of testing, then responding anew to the results. No longer the episodic event—discretely bundled packets of sensation with their atomic registration in the mind—experience is conceived as doing, attending to the consequences, revising, more doing, more consequences, more revision, and so on.

In his condensed intellectual history of pragmatism Colin Koopman notes the divide between this first phase of pragmatism, with its focus on experience, and the new mode of pragmatism that emerged in the 20th century, as Dewey’s influence was gradually eclipsed by a more exclusive concern with language. As Koopman puts it: “the first generation of pragmatism was often said to be a philosophy of experiential experimentation, the second generation boldly declared itself thoroughly linguistic such that it searched for pragmatist experimentation at the scene of language use.” Koopman rightly frames my Introduction as focused on the schism between experience and language and says what I am doing is part of a “third generation” pragmatism which seeks, or ought to seek, a way out of this impasse, noting that this for me takes the form an “analytic of composition.” Koopman is also right that I get all this into view by looking closely at the literary prehistory of pragmatism—that burst of invention and expressiveness in American literature of the 19th century which I identify as a tradition of experimental writing (Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Melville, the James brothers).44

So, on to the objections. Koopman thinks that my analytic of composition does not convincingly resuscitate the word experience from its deserved oblivion at the hands of analytic pragmatists. The basic accusation is that in hanging on to the word “experience” I can’t help but drag in a lot of foundationalist metaphysics, which was residual in classical pragmatism and which Richard Rorty and his student Robert Brandom definitively did away with as pragmatist sympathizers shaped by the Linguistic Turn.45 As Koopman puts it: “In shifting away from the affective encounter (ie, some version of classical empiricism) is there any use in continuing to deploy experience as an analytic concept?” The answer, for me, is that Deweyan pragmatism was one such effort to continue to deploy the concept of “experience” even after foundationalist models were abandoned. While Brandom is unsympathetic to the whole idea of experience he is one of the best explainers we have of this specifically Deweyan advance over previous uses of the word in the tradition. Experience for the classical pragmatists (especially Dewey) is

not the ignition of some internal Cartesian light…Experience is work…something done rather than something that merely happens—a process, engaging in a practice, the exercise of abilities, rather than an episode [while] earlier empiricists had thought of experience as the occurrence of conscious episodes that provide the raw materials for learning…for the pragmatists experience is not an input to learning…it just is learning….it is knowing how rather than knowing that.46

It would not be wrong to say that my Introduction is an effort to think through exactly this account of experience as it bears upon artmaking, and as a way of thinking through the tension between classical and analytic pragmatism. It is important to consider the role in all this of what Wilfrid Sellars called the Myth of the Given, which I describe in my book as “the myth that causal determinations—what the classical empiricists called ‘impressions’—could serve as a foundation for discourse in the space of reasons.”47 Koopman approvingly cites my summary and adds: “the Myth arises when ‘experiences’ are taken as given, or not in need of justification themselves, insofar as they are merely qualitative feelings (such as a simple affect or a sensation of warmth or cold) [but such] ‘experiences’ are causal determinations (unjustifiable) that cannot be made to serve as foundations for normative discursive practice (justificatory).” That is a nice encapsulation of the confusion between causes and reasons Sellars diagnoses in his critique of empiricism, and Koopman is right that I “expressly endorse” all of this. Here then is just where the rubber needs to hit the road if my argument is going to both resuscitate “experience” and yet prevent it from becoming a mere “unjustified justifier.” Accordingly, Koopman says he wants from me “a more rigorous tuning of composition as the center of analysis such that experience might become legible through the conduct of composition.”

One way I think I manage to do this is to stay with the critique of the Myth of the Given without reducing it solely to a matter of “inference,” and Koopman is right to say that I “aim to position myself outside of neopragmatist inferential justification.” My analytic of composition is in part an attempt to see how the cumulative judgments, revisions and reshapings that occur in the process of making a specific work becomes a model for experience itself (what I hear going on both in James’s Preface to The Golden Bowl and in Dewey’s Art As Experience). But someone attuned to Sellars’ critique of empiricism might reply: how do these brute perceptions somehow become the conceptual apprehension Kant called Erfahrung? One answer would be that Dewey’s artist is guided by an attitude; an awareness that every tweak, nudge, cut, addition and subtraction, is undertaken intentionally (you are not making breakfast, or writing a letter to the editor, or boarding an airplane or playing baseball: you are at work on just this piece). This is not “intention” in the sense of having an explicit meaning one wishes to get across, as if the work of making were a calculated effort to implant some message in the material, but intention in the sense of an open-ended and experimental feedback loop of doing, judgement, further doing, further judgment, and some eventual exit from the process. While not a matter of “inference” exactly—it would be difficult to codify as premise and conclusion these co-inhabiting attitudes—it is nevertheless a unique kind of experience happening in and around the work, perhaps something close to what Robert Pippin has called a “dimension of aesthetic normativity.”48

The normativity implicit in the making and reception of an artwork, which allow the practices of judging, accepting, beholding, rejecting, appraising, analyzing, evaluating—all the capacities that might fall under Fried’s “availability”—are implicit, historical, open to revision and without foundation. “Experience” for me is a word for the medium in which the norms implicit in these practices may occur and go on. What doesn’t happen, and what doesn’t need to happen, is some further explanatory theorizing—the “making explicit” Brandom wants.

Let me make another pass at how we might hang on to the word “experience” and yet not succumb to the Myth of the Given. Koopman says that I “forget the crucial Wittgensteinean lesson common to the work of Brandom and Cavell: every instance of meaning is an instance of normative determination and thus cannot fail to confront the question of justification.” Nothing I say in my Introduction indicates that I disagree with that, but I’ll elaborate the point here via a couple ideas germane to the later Wittgenstein and an exchange between Brandom and John McDowell about how to read a particular passage in the Philosophical Investigations. Here is the passage:

217. How am I able to follow a rule? –If this is not a question about causes, then it is about justification for my acting in this way in complying with the rule. Once I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do.”

In the situation imagined here, a theory about justification is not what the speaker is looking for. Yet it is not that there isn’t some kind of rule—some recognizably correct way of going on—at play when we project our words in the way imagined in the example at §217. Wittgenstein does not want to be explicit about what the rules consist of, other than simply noting that such projection happens. The word he will use to capture this non-formal rule structure is “grammar.” The idea is that in knowing how to go on in our everyday talk we already agree in grammar (one of Wittgenstein’s words for this agreement is Ubereinstimmung which Elizabeth Anscombe translates as “accord”). This does not at all imply that we agree at the level of the content of what we say; indeed, disagreement, even violent disagreement, would already presuppose the kind of “accord” Wittgenstein describes.49 One wouldn’t know there was a disagreement in play were there not already an accord in language. Such questions lead Wittgenstein to want to get us to stop thinking about rules as fixed calculi (of the sort you find in a formal language, which he took as his focus in the Tractatus), and to try to imagine how rules may operate in ordinary use. This leads to puzzling questions about how the rules are supposed to apply: for example, wondering if a rule’s application is all there from the beginning, like a formula. But that seems absurd: how could natural language contain all future applications of every word, as if it were a computer program or algorithm. The answer, rather, is that the rules are implicit in knowing how to do something; in the carrying out of a particular practice.50

The predicament imagined at §217 is the occasion for a telling disagreement between Brandom and John McDowell. McDowell prefers to heed Wittgenstein’s caution against superfluous theorizing about how we go on talking (or following a sign post, or continuing a number series) while Brandom refers to moments like the one cited above—when I have exhausted my justifications then I have reached bedrock. Then I am inclined to say: This is simply what I do—as a form of “semantic nihilism.” Brandom thinks there is a theory that may make explicit what lies even behind Wittgenstein’s bedrock. That theory is the inferentialist one: when we make moves in a language game we are making claims; to make a claim is to commit oneself to something, as well as to be held to those commitments by everybody else making moves in the language game. Such committing oneself to what one says makes one responsible for what is said in a uniquely inferential form: my claimings must be able to stand as premises and conclusions for other moves in the game made by any other competent speaker of the language. And so one is entitled to what one says only insofar as one is responsible in this way (in turn holding everyone else responsible for what they say). For Brandom, the currency behind this entwined commitment, responsibility and entitlement is the giving and asking for reasons. The justification of a claim will, as it a were, make explicit the conditions of your entitlement to that move in the language game. None of this is to give up on the “meaning is use” equation of the later Wittgenstein. The difference is that for Brandom the use may always be explained, the norms made explicit through the giving and asking for reasons. The spade is never turned. All is explicable.

Such a view of the inferential deep structure of language games prompts McDowell to caution against the belief that Wittgenstein’s way of imagining “norms implicit in practice [requires] work on the part of philosophers to uncover and make explicit” such norms, since “there is no reason to suppose there must be a level of normativity below the level at which linguistic practice is described as using this or that concept, and it is no concern of Wittgenstein’s to suggest that there is.”51 The whole temptation to theorize such things, McDowell is saying, is just what Wittgenstein resists. What Brandom labels “semantic nihilism”—my justifications run out, my spade is turned, this is simply what I do—McDowell takes at face value. We might say that McDowell is true to the letter of the Philosophical Investigations while Brandom hears in its spirit an invitation to theorize.52

When Koopman writes that I “would be right to charge that Brandom reaches too far in thinking that meaning always comes back down to inference, but for that reason we need not pretend that we can reach back behind meaning into something more pure, that would function as experiential finding and founding” I’d respond that I do not equate experience with “purity.” Experience (Erfahrung) has rather to do with the norms implicit in the practice of going on in language, but also in practices like composition, reception, acceptance, rejection, indeed a multitude of social practices all of which entail rules not made explicit at the level of the theory. Does that sound like purity? It seems rather that the desire for an exhaustive theoretical account of what we are doing when we go on talking (or go on in some other normative practice) would be closer to “purity”; that is, a desire for total explanation, with nothing left out. Koopman goes on: “If a work makes a claim in virtue of its particular composition, or say as an effect of its style, rather than in virtue of what it expressly says, then we should be willing to read this making of meaning through composition or style, rather than resuscitating experience to do so.” Not at all, since experience would be the word for the practical sense of the implicit norms one draws upon when talking, making, responding, agreeing, being convinced, accepting, rejecting etc. When Koopman finally accuses me (again reverting to the bad, old idea of experience as discrete, episodic encounter) that my “accounts focus, in each instance, on what writers are doing [but] largely absent in the discussion is whatever experiences they may have had” I would note finally that I don’t care at all what Emerson, Poe, Melville, or Henry James “actually experienced.” I care about what they wrote and how they wrote it, and my own experience reading what they wrote, of which my book is a record.

R.M. Berry

Ralph Berry’s response takes up some of these same questions from an angle more explicitly keyed to Stanley Cavell’s writings on modernist aesthetics. When Berry notes that in Cavell’s writing on aesthetics “the concepts of experience, intention, and meaning just function differently” my Introduction could be said to explore what that “differently” might consist in. How is it that experience, intention and meaning should be understood differently when the topic is not declarative assertion, or deliberative rationality, but the sustained attention that goes into the making of artworks, and the sort of care artworks elicit in a beholder, reader or listener?

As I noted in my response to Koopman, I replace an account of experience that would invite a rehearsal of the problem of skepticism and instead emphasize the way classical pragmatism (especially Dewey’s) aligns the word to something more like composition. I describe the affinity between composition and experience in my book as “an activity taking the form of a search; one which does not know where it is going ahead of time, fashions provisional goals as part of the unfolding of the process, and remains open to the surprises that emerge from an attention to work as it is being made.”53 Cavell’s way of describing this in “Music Discomposed” is to say that composition is an “experimental problem” of trying to arrive at “an object in which a human being can or will take an interest.”54 Composition captures a certain kind of “interest”; a directed attention open to surprise, to what may unexpectedly be brought out of some material in the course of doing and making, as well as the choices, decisions, and judgments the will follow from one set of consequences rather than another.

Still, Berry wishes to raise, if not quite a criticism, at least some tough questions about the word “experiment” in all this. He says he

cannot tell whether, in using the adjective ‘experimental,’ [I] mean to be describing a particular mode of compositional practice, one that can be contrasted with other modes—that is, with non-experimental ways of organizing and arranging words—or whether he means to be describing what composition fundamentally is…If the former, then the helpfulness of Grimstad’s account depends on our understanding how each of these contrasting modes of composition—i.e., experimental and non-experimental—addresses a distinct challenge and set of circumstances. If the latter, then its helpfulness depends on our understanding how the experimental nature of all composition, something with which anyone composing must become familiar, could go unrecognized.

The answer here is both. First, I do try in the book to make a case for American writers of the 19th century as “experimental” in the same way we might think of Jean Toomer or Gertrude Stein or Raymond Roussel or Donald Barthelme or Italo Calvino as experimental: that is, self-consciously testing out new ways of telling stories or making sense, formally challenging and unorthodox, in some cases theorizing about the process of inheriting and transforming established literary conventions (the book goes roughly from Emerson’s leaving the Unitarian ministry in 1831 to Henry James’ late style circa 1901-1902).55 Emerson took his training as a minister and in the sermon form as the starting point for making paratactic, collage-like essays built up from journal entries. Poe took the sensational gothic as he found it in Blackwood’s magazine (where he read essays like Thomas de Quincey’s “Murder Considered as a Fine Art”) and arrived at a ludic fantasia of logical inference in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and later gave a step by step account of how he wrote his poem “The Raven” in his mock didactic essay “The Philosophy of Composition”; Melville took established genre conventions like the sea adventure and sentimental romance and turned them into weird, unclassifiable books like Moby-Dick and Pierre. In some ways Henry James is the most exemplary instance of this 19th century experimentalism, as he took his own earlier work as a convention to be transformed, from the realism of Washington Square and The American to what he called the “inveteracy of a certain indirect and oblique” style in The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl; finally becoming a scrupulous theorist of his own formal evolution in the Prefaces he added to the New York edition of his fiction.

To return to the other side of Berry’s question: do these historically local instances of experimental writing lay bare something fundamentally experimental about composition as such? The experimental nature of composition need not be reduced to the problem of modernism, and Cavell is I think able to get the more general inquiry into view just as often as he is describing the vicissitudes of the modernist predicament. Yet Berry says that in Cavell’s account “the artist abandons her art’s established genres, forms, styles, and techniques, not out of a craving for newness, but because these conventions have become so implicated in art’s impostures, in art’s displacement by its compromised and dispirited likenesses, that, without a severe purification, art’s conventions can no longer function as correctives. No interpretation of Cavell’s modernism makes sense apart from this disorienting encounter with aesthetic fraudulence. Against its backdrop, the modernist composition—or our experience of it—appears profoundly negative.” This strikes me as too severe. Cavell is not Adorno.56 In “Music Discomposed” there is a more basic curiosity about what makes a particular work an “object in which human being can or will take an interest”; a curiosity not reducible to art’s “combat” with the world. I take this in part to be a question about the sort of imaginative freedom available to us through the making and appreciation of artworks. This is not the same thing as seeing in artworks a last vestige of the genuine or authentic in the midst of total debasement and fraudulence. While I agree that the specifically “modernist” predicament as explored in Cavell and Fried is a matter of fraudulence and genuineness, I think the experimental nature of composition in general (again, the second half of Berry’s question to me) has more to do with the search for a certain sort of freedom.57

The question of whether Cavell’s account of aesthetic modernism is entirely reducible to the “negativity” Berry describes is related for Berry to whether or not Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is concerned with locating the “natural” in our ways of going on talking. The implication is that our “nature” has somewhere along the lines become lost, or obscured, or faked, or forgotten, or renounced. Accordingly Berry asks if it is “correct to say that the goal or aim of Wittgenstein’s compositional practice in Philosophical Investigations is an experience of meaning that is simultaneously an experience of nature.” I am doubtful that this is what is going on in the Philosophical Investigations and I am not convinced that Cavell’s chapter on “Nature and Convention” in The Claim of Reason is the definitive way to understand the book (this is to leave aside whether the Philosophical Investigations may best be understood as bound up primarily with other minds skepticism, which itself seems a tendentious way of reading Wittgenstein). Let me pose a related but different question: is the account of what Wittgenstein calls our shared “grammar” in Philosophical Investigations reducible to what Berry calls an “experience of nature”?

My sense is that what Wittgenstein means by our agreement in grammar is not a mutual immersion in causal transactions (what we have in common with dust, sound waves, electricity, the tides, fish, as well as with other persons) but our ability to go on talking to one another.  When Berry writes that “experiencing the meaning of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is not composing it” and that “nature in Philosophical Investigations seems more closely akin to decomposing, to discovering the emptiness of one’s most ambitious attempts at composition,” this again seems to me too corrosive. I don’t find this sort of “critique” in Wittgenstein. Rather, I would say that the preponderance of dialogue, scenes of instruction, of giving and carrying out orders, the conversational asides and versions of Socratic dialectic, the whole panoply of voices that run through the Philosophical Investigations, is a virtuosic enactment of how we “compose” our shared grammar.

But, Berry wants to know, what about §118 when Wittgenstein writes: “Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important?” To this overheard voice in the Investigations Berry says: “No answer that Wittgenstein [or Cavell] can provide prevents this question from repeating endlessly.” It should be remembered that the question is posed by a staged interlocutor who mistakes Wittgenstein’s desire to eliminate the illusory puzzlements of philosophy for a caution about toppling what are assumed to be monuments of wisdom and civilization. If Berry says that “no answer…prevents this question from repeating endlessly” that is not quite right, since Wittgenstein himself promptly provides an answer in the sentence immediately following the one Berry cites: the “great and important” things the interlocutor worries about at §118 are what Wittgenstein calls Luftgebaude—aircastles or, more literally, structures of air. I would add that this way of doing philosophy—as a counterpoint of unmistakably human tones; tones of doubt, worry, hubris, concern, incredulousness, conviction, fantasy, caution, curiosity, madness etc—is itself a form of experimental writing.

Now, Berry is of course sensitive to all this in Wittgenstein; ie, the wish to relieve us, or cure us, of the compulsion to become entangled in philosophy. Berry writes: “The meaninglessness imposed on me proves to be my own doing, and where I imagined action was required, I discover meanings already acting upon and through me. Thus composed, my life’s meaning displays all the autonomy of a natural phenomenon.” That sounds to me like a shrewd summation of the “therapeutic” side of Wittgenstein; the side of his thinking that tries to get us to stop obsessing over metaphysical air castles. Berry then elaborates these remarks in what looks to me like a classic ordinary language example. The usage he is concerned to explore is the phrase “the deliverances of the senses alone.” “Pinching a nerve in my shoulder,” Berry writes “is, in its mind-clearing jolt of pain, a vivid example of experience delivered by the senses alone, and yet, contrary to the conclusion drawn by Rorty, Brandom, and Sellars, I know of nothing that will get a language game going faster.” The point of the Sellarsian critique is, I think, that while the pinched nerve might indeed get a conversation going, causal transactions of nervous excitement are different in kind from what is going on when we talk. The ability to take it that something is being said is unavoidably a normative matter. “Man, you know my shoulder is killing me!” followed by “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, that must be a drag” followed by “Oh, its ok, it usually dissipates after a couple days, but it sure hurts right now” and so on, is not an exchange conditioned by causal mechanisms of nerve endings, muscles, tendons and so on, even if at bottom billions of neurochemical transactions are making possible the awareness that allows the conversation to occur (though this is probably not the place to get into the qualia, awareness, materialism debate). The conversation we have about your shoulder is about taking it that something is being said and responding to it, freely. Nothing is compelling me to respond in a certain way about your voicing your pain and nothing in your voicing of pain is compelled or determined in the way that the feeling of the pain is determined. That, in any case, is how I understand the Sellarsian Myth of the Given—as the qualitative distinction between causes and meaning—and everything Cavell says about what we say when depends on that distinction.

My thought that experience is fruitfully imagined on the model of composition as experiment is meant to ameliorate what I take to be a too rationalist insistence on declarative assertions and propositions as the privileged currency of our agreement in language. I imagine this is something close to what ordinary language philosophy is up to, whether in Wittgenstein, Cavell or Austin. I also think it has a lot to do with pragmatism, but you need to think its classical and its analytical phases in stereo, as it were, because you need both experience and language to get the problem into view.

Yi-Ping Ong

Yi-Ping Ong is right to see what I am doing as a “repudiation of the notion that literature only becomes philosophically significant when it represents ideas, theories, or arguments, and equally of the view that literary works possess attributes that philosophical ones, in their abstraction… could never express.” That is generous, and I’d like to think that in my own small way I am helping to break down the received wisdom that literature deals only in concrete particulars while philosophy deals only in generalized abstractions. This brings us back to experience as at once a care for, noticing of, attunement to fine particulars and the condition of possibility for that sort of noticing or care. Experience covers both the general and the particular, and in that way is a good word for looking closely at the relation of literature and philosophy.

I am especially grateful to Ong for being the only respondent to zoom in on the passage in my Introduction in which I take up Cavell’s claim that in prose like Emerson’s one finds a “transcendental deduction of every word in the language”; and the (for me) related description of a “mode of attention to…particular words [which] is directed to the voice which says them, and through that to…straits of mind in which only those words said in that order will suffice.”58 I think of these two passages, from different parts of Cavell’s career, as elaborations and commentaries on each other. Both get at the way a particular ordering words makes vivid the norms implicit in our broader agreement in grammar. To borrow from the title of the later essay: “terms” (words) are “conditions” (of possibility).

On my appeal to these passages in Cavell Ong raises some good questions. “I often do use just these words in this order to mean what I say,” she writes

and although I may be thereby manifesting my willingness to subject myself to words, to make myself intelligible, I do not necessarily take myself to be composing something like “Self-Reliance” or King Lear…Thinking in language necessarily submits us to the conditions of meaning. But even if we are to understand this as a kind of “search in composition,” what makes it a search for what will count as literature, here and now, is a different question entirely.

I am not so sure these are “different questions entirely.” Let’s back up and look in detail at the original passage in Cavell:

It is as if in Emerson’s writing (not in his alone, but in his first in America) Kant’s…understanding the behavior of the world by understanding the behavior of our concepts in the world, is to be radicalized, so that not just twelve categories of the understanding are to be deduced, but every word in the language [and this is related to the idea that] what Wittgenstein means by “grammar” in his grammatical investigations—as revealed by our system of ordinary language—is an inheritor of what Kant means by Transcendental Logic.59

Cavell here imagines a Kantian deduction of “our system of ordinary language.” What does this mean? Think of it this way: when we find meaning in another’s words and find our words taken up by another it is as if we were continually “deducing” the conditions for going on talking. In wanting to think of ordinary language as a transcendental logic Cavell is saying that “grammar” is the condition of possibility in relation to which we make ourselves intelligible (I take it this is why Cavell thinks of Wittgenstein as a Kantian thinker, as have many others).60 But the differences between the First Critique and the Philosophical Investigations are as striking as this suggested affinity. For Kant—systematic, architectonic, deductive thinker that he is—there are twelve conceptual categories working in tandem with intuitions of space and time, all of it a priori and subtended by logical functions from which the categories are themselves deduced.61 The Wittgensteinian transcendental, conversely, is just what we say when—our “system of ordinary language.” It is interesting that Cavell uses the word “system” here because on Wittgenstein’s account natural language is hardly systematic. At many points in the Investigations we get a picture of grammar as messy, cross-hatched, an ad hoc motley, liable to change and open to revision. Yet I think it is right to say that grammar is transcendental insofar as it refers to the norms implicit in our ability to say what anything is.

But what does all this have to do with the “deduction of every word” Cavell found in Emerson’s essay “Fate”? Or, to cast it in the form of Ong’s question: what does the fact that “language necessarily submits us to the conditions of meaning” have to do with “what will count as literature”? It’s as if Cavell has had an epiphany before the defamiliarizing luminosity of Emerson’s prose, where “every word” lays bare the conditions of our accord in grammar and so reminds us of something that is always there but we have forgotten how to hear. Because “condition” is the word Cavell zooms in on in Emerson’s essay, this inspires a flip from transcendental logic (Kant’s conditions of possibility) to grammar as the condition underlying our system of ordinary language.62 That, at any rate, is what I hear going on in the passage. Read as such it offers a way of thinking through Ong’s question about the “continuity” between particular instances of literary style and everyday use. Emerson’s power (and idiosyncrasy) as a prose stylist heightens our intimacy with words and so with each other; the deep yet fragile “con-diction” (Cavell points out the etymology) of our agreement in grammar. That we don’t all sound like Emerson all the time (or ever) does not vitiate the connection.

The question of this “continuity” is rightly bound up for Ong with some remarks near the end of “Art and Objecthood.” She says that,

although [Michael] Fried does claim of modernist painting and sculpture that “at every moment the work of art is manifest,” he argues that “[i]t is as though one’s experience of the latter has no duration…as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it.” As opposed to Grimstad, his concern is grounded in the problem of how the work of art establishes these illusory conditions of its viewing—the possibility of experiencing it as though these particular conditions were true—and not with the role of experience as such.

The point of Fried’s “infinite brevity” thought experiment is, I take it, to limit experience to sheer registration (without duration), and so capture something in the modernist work that is all there all the time. While cast as a speculative “as though” this is an even more unambiguous example of the kind of experience I’ve been talking about throughout these remarks. On my account that “infinitely brief” flash of registration is directed at whatever it is that is “wholly manifest” in the work. Unless the point of the example is to stress something involuntary and mechanical occurring in the moment of conviction (that does not seem right to me) Fried’s flash of registration is inseparable from what makes the work convincing. And because conviction is nothing if not evaluative, Fried’s infinitely brief instant ruthlessly isolates what is conditioned and normative in the experience.  That a modernist work, as Ong puts it, “establishes these illusory conditions of its viewing” (her way of reading the “as though”) does not alter any of this, for that “establishment” of conditions is just more intentionality; just more of Dewey’s artist “opening new fields of experience.” I don’t see why the fields, once opened, should not be wholly manifest in an infinitely brief sample.

*I am indebted to Robert Chodat, Todd Cronan, John Gibson, Martin Hägglund, Susan Howe, Toril Moi, Ross Posnock, Kate Stanley and Mark von Schlegell for valuable feedback on earlier versions of this response. And I cannot emphasize how grateful I am for the care and attention of the responses here.