Bearing the Beyond: Women and the Limits of Language in Stanley Cavell — Page 4:
16 This reading of "forms of life" presents a picture of community in the optative. References to "what we do" in language are attempts to create community. Speaking and living together are open and fluid negotiations of belonging, secured neither by stable boundaries of existing communities nor by transcendental structures of language or of speech. Who we are as a community and who we are within this community is not given prior to our acts of speaking. Answers to these questions are only found as the result of constant struggles and attunements. In contrast to most readers of Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell is acutely aware of the dangers and potentials this plasticity in language implies.
Movies as Sites of Analysis and of Overcoming Skepticism
Masculine Knowing: the Skeptic's Plight of Mind
17 While this basic analysis of the skeptical desire for epistemic certainty is based in a reading of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, in his work on film and opera Cavell goes beyond the Wittgensteinian answer that language is the main culprit. Not language (as a disembodied actor) exerts an irresistible and bewitching influence on the skeptic who is lured into desiring the impossible and into denying the web of relationships on which rests intelligibility in language. Rather, the skeptical problem is driven by a specific plight of mind, by a specific way of being in the world, which makes it seem natural to move from claims to phenomenal knowledge to those to noumenal knowledge. Not structures of language but the epistemic desires of specific language users lie at the heart of the skeptical problem.
18 In Cavell's analysis of the skeptical desire, the idealized position of absolute sovereignty over and impotent isolation from the world reflects a particular masculine vision of knowledge. For example, in his interpretation of Othello, Cavell writes:
The violence in masculine knowing, explicitly associated with jealousy, seems to interpret the ambition of knowledge as that of exclusive possession, call it private property. Othello's problem, following my suggestion that his problem is over success, not failure, is that Desdemona's acceptance, or satisfaction, or reward, of his ambition strikes him as being possessed, as if he were the woman. (Knowledge 10)
Othello as an emblem of skeptical knowledge aims not only to achieve total access to Desdemona as the object of his desire; moreover he fears to be known in turn, since being known seems to require being objectified in the calculus of the skeptic's understanding of knowledge.
19 Particularly Cavell's work on Hollywood movies from the mid1930s to the 1940s can be read as a further examination of the contours and consequences of this idealized masculine knowing. By turning to artistic analysis, Cavell treats the skeptical desire as expressive of gender configurations permeating north-Atlantic culture. More specifically, Cavell considers through his work on these films the question of whether modern skepticism, and with it modern philosophy, could be seen as a profoundly "male affair" (Pitch 169).
20 One site of analysis are the movies that Cavell subsumes under the genre "melodrama of the unknown woman," a designation taken from Max Ophüls' movie of the same name.[5]Other titles are: George Cukor's <em>Gaslight</em>, Irving Rapper's <em>Now Voyager</em>, and King Vidor's <em>Stella Dallas</em>.In the films of this genre we encounter women who are forced to expose themselves to a male world, one that is characterized by a skeptical desire for epistemic control. Like Othello, the men of the melodramas are not ready to be objects of knowledge themselves. Knowledge is understood by the man as total access to and possession of the woman's privacy. In Now Voyager, the man wishes to know the woman's secret, in Stella Dallas, he tries to escape it, and in Gaslight to destroy it "where each objective is generically reflected in the others" (Contesting 14). And by holding on to the idea of knowledge as objectification, the man makes it impossible for the woman to expose herself to his knowledge. The kind of knowledge to which she can expose herself is violent; the terms set by masculine knowledge in the movies disallow the woman to be known outsides of the logic of objectification and thus prevents her from being acknowledged on her own terms.