rendered explicit by Wittgenstein. It really is up to us to acknowledge the
unrestrictive character of the ways in which paradigms do contribute to shape reality
in mutually independent manners. Our relations, rarely with paradigms, and seldom
paradigmatic, nevertheless are unthinkable without paradigms, and this much does
not preclude or exclude but rather appeals to further scrutiny, so as to account for the
collective significances of the diversities of paradigms.

Conclusion

With this paper I first attempted to recover both the *vividness* and the *relevance* of
the limited comparison made by Cavell and Kuhn of the place of paradigms in arts
and sciences. This much was required, I argued, both to render clearer the
incompatibility of their thoughts with undue acknowledgement of the unmythical
character of a private language, and to bring out some fundamental resemblances of
the places of paradigms within these practices. For each thinker, it is not only that
paradigms are *contingent* — as their nonexistence is not inconceivable, but
paradigms are also *free* — as they are expressive and constitutive of freedoms, in
ways that necessarily imply their *relationality* — as the ways in which they
structurally contribute to our lives cannot be relevantly abstracted from our relations,
and from our relations with them within our practices. I then attempted to show that
although both Kuhn and Cavell drew our attention in different ways to the
*unrestrictive limits* of the comparison of the place of paradigms within arts and
sciences. I attempted to show that these unrestricted intersections are at least
threefold. Successful achievements not only *can*, but also *need* to become
paradigmatic in mutually independent and autonomous *practices* which contribute
to the availability of *diversities* of paradigms. For, not only the means and ends of
these practices differ, but also the *dimensions* that are prevalent within these are
mutually independent and sometimes even *asymmetrical* in mutually explicative
ways. Such consideration thus, I argued, left us before the explicitation of the
collective significances of the evolutive availability of *diversities* of paradigms as a
task yet to be achieved.
4. A Willingness for Crisis:
Cavell and Kuhn

PAUL JENNER

In one of the excerpts from memory composing his autobiography, Stanley Cavell recalls attending “an informal but extended discussion among professional philosophers” with Thomas Kuhn, then his colleague at Berkeley. It was the first such meeting the two friends had sat through together, and Cavell describes the vivid impression left on the historian of science: “As we left the scene Kuhn pressed his fingers to his forehead as if it ached. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it. You people don’t behave like academics in any other field. You treat each other as if you are all mad.’”<fnref n="1" /> The perception, Cavell notes, “seemed right [...] but normal enough, and because normal, suddenly revelatory.”<fnref n="2" /> Kuhn’s response clearly anticipates topics and arguments that would come to inform *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*.<fnref n="3" /> Articulated within the terms of those arguments, the exasperating scene becomes one of philosophical discussion in the absence of a paradigm, unable to take place upon an assumed common ground.

The argument of this essay is that Cavell's understanding of philosophy is in-
formed throughout by an aversive dialogue with Kuhn's account of scientific de-
velopment and creativity and its signature ideas about paradigms, normal science, pro-
gress, and crisis. This aversiveness helps to explain some of the difficulties encoun-
tered when attempting to situate Cavell's work in relation to paradigms. Mindful of the
mutual influence between Cavell and Kuhn, Toril Moi notes that "*The Structure of*

<footnote n="1">1. Cavell, *Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory* (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 354. Later in his narrative Cavell returns to the scene of Kuhn's “astonishment at the angry and wide variation of value philosophers place on one another's work.” Ibid., 500. Elsewhere, the same text notes “the civilised violence in philosophical exchange, familiarly alarming to visitors to the subject.”</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. Ibid., 319.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. Thomas Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 3rd ed. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996).</footnote>
*Scientific Revolutions* is deeply Wittgensteinian, not to say Cavellian in spirit and argumentation.”<fnref n="4" /> This connection lends support to Moi’s suggestion that “Kuhn’s notions of paradigms and paradigm shifts provide the best framework for understanding” the relationship between Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy and poststructuralist theory.<fnref n="5" /> As Moi argues in an illuminating analysis of the different understanding of “concepts” within ordinary language philosophy and poststructuralism, the relationship between the two may be understood as an incommensurability between divergent paradigms. The salient difficulty when it comes to Cavell and paradigms, then, is that paradigmatic poststructuralist theoretical orthodoxies about “language, meaning, and interpretation,” for a time so pervasive within the humanities as to be disciplinary second nature to many literary critics, are radically at odds with Cavell’s work and so muted his reception.<fnref n="6" /> It is therefore “no coincidence” for Moi “that almost all the books on Cavell that have appeared since 1989 have been written by philosophers and not by literary critics.”<fnref n="7" />

Writing ten years after Moi’s article, Marshall Cohen struck a slightly different note about Cavell’s reception by philosophers. Cavell’s work, in Cohen’s view, “will be fruitful and multiply only when philosophers engage it critically, find it useful, and perhaps develop it further. For the most part, this has not happened.”<fnref n="8" /> The implication is that Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy has been no more paradigmatic for analytic philosophers than for literary theorists. My purpose in juxtaposing these two accounts is to indicate a sense of difficulty when it comes to understanding Cavell’s work in relation to Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm. As Moi argues, “Attempts to squeeze ordinary language philosophy into the poststructuralist paradigm will always fail.”<fnref n="9" /> My contention is that there are also reasons to hesitate before attempting to squeeze

<footnote n="4">4. Toril Moi, “‘They practice their trades in different worlds’: Concepts in Poststructuralism and Ordinary Language Philosophy,” *New Literary History* 40, no. 4 (2009): 805.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5. Ibid., 804.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6. Ibid., 802. Moi’s ground-breaking analysis identifies the relationship between the two movements not as one of straightforward opposition but as a more complex case of closeness and distance. Ibid., 804.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7. Ibid., 802.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8. Marshall Cohen, “Must We Mean What We Say? On the Life and Thought of Stanley Cavell,” in *Inheriting Stanley Cavell: Memories, Dreams, Reflections*, ed. David LaRocca (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 58. Cohen’s remarks build upon but ultimately depart from Cavell’s own reflections on the reception of his work. “Some friends of mine feel that too much of the writing about my work comes from the sense [...] that if it were just explained a little more clearly, its readership would suddenly become fruitful and multiply.” Cavell, *Little Did I Know*, 514.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9. Moi, “‘They practice their trades in different worlds’,” 803.</footnote>
Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy into, as it were, the “paradigm” paradigm, and that these reasons capture a core element of Kuhn’s influence upon Cavell. Cavell’s reception and transfiguration of Kuhnian ideas is therefore the directional emphasis of this essay, as distinct from scholarship detailing the impact of Cavell’s Wittgenstein on Kuhn.<fnref n="10" /> The reception pertains to Cavell’s understanding of philosophy, placing this essay on a somewhat different path to scholarship on Cavell and Kuhn focusing on topics of artistic modernism.<fnref n="11" />

Readers of *Structure* will recall that an enterprise without a paradigm may be characterised, variously, as dabbling in pre-professional, solitary meanderings, as riven by competing schools, or as undergoing an extraordinary, revolutionary time of crisis, when disagreements over disciplinary fundamentals as to method and goal become newly salient. When Kuhn and Cavell joined the philosophy department at Berkeley in 1956, they brought rumours of disciplinary crisis, of revolutionary work in gestation at odds with a residual logical positivism. Cavell characterises the Berkeley ambience at the time as “still, almost freshly, bearing the mark of Moritz Schlick’s visit there for a semester in the mid-1930s.”<fnref n="12" /> In this disciplinary context, Kuhn and Cavell arrived with

enthusiastic news that, singly and jointly — grating to some, young and old — served to loosen the hold, for a fair number of graduate students, of restrictive doctrines of language and of science, of, let’s say, verificationism in both reals; or, put otherwise, served to demonstrate modes of intellectual serious-

<footnote n="10">10. Vasso Kindi has argued that the influence between the two thinkers is less unidirectional than had been commonly understood, since Kuhn influenced Cavell as much as *vice versa*. Specifically, Kindi argues that Kuhn’s account of revolutionary innovation helped to shape Cavell’s understanding of novelty within the context of artistic modernism and that this understanding, further, raises questions of essentialism in Cavell’s work. Whilst Kindi’s focus is on parallels between Kuhn’s and Cavell’s respective ideas about tradition and novelty in science and art, my principal topic is rather Kuhn’s impact upon Cavell’s understanding of philosophy. (Related essentialist gestures also appear on this terrain, since Cavell receives *Structure* as an occasion to think through *differences* between philosophy, art, and science, and in particular to articulate philosophy’s irreducibility to science, eventuating in a particular understanding of philosophical autonomy.) See Vasso Kindi, “Novelty and Revolution in Art and Science: The Connection between Kuhn and Cavell,” *Perspectives on Science* 18, no. 3 (2010): 284-310.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11. In addition to Kindi’s article just cited and to essays by Mohan and Uçan in this issue of *Conversations*, see Caroline A. Jones, “The Modernist Paradigm: The Artworld and Thomas Kuhn,” *Critical Inquiry* 26, no. 3 (2000): 488-528.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12. Cavell, *Little Did I Know*, 352. Schlick was Mills Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at Berkeley for the academic year 1931-32. For an analysis of his role in “the subtle transformation of American philosophy in the early 1930s,” see Sander Verhaegh, “The American Reception of Logical Positivism: First Encounters (1929-1932),” *Hopos* 10, no. 1 (2020): 106.</footnote>
ness and fruitfulness that were not intimidated by, nor I think unheeding of,
positivism's threats of meaninglessness and lack of rigor.<fnref n="13" />

The positivist doctrines Cavell describes here had aspired to deliver professional philosophy from precisely the type of dissensus observed by Kuhn. For the positivist sensibility, the persistence of schools and seemingly interminable debates over fundamentals within philosophy was symptomatic of a lack of progress, which was exactly what a scientific philosophy promised to secure. Schlick understood logical positivism as providing methods whose “resolute application” would inaugurate, to cite the title of his 1931 essay, “The Turning Point in Philosophy”: “Two thousand years of experience seem to teach that efforts to put an end to the chaos of systems and to change the fate of philosophy can no longer be taken seriously. [...] I am convinced [however] that we now find ourselves at an altogether decisive turning point in philosophy, and that we are objectively justified in considering that an end has come to the fruitless conflict of systems.”<fnref n="14" />

A positivist image of science as the exemplary model of disciplinary consensus and progress is of course a principal topic of *Structure*. Kuhn's answer to the *explanandum* of scientific progress was the ability of scientific practitioners during periods of “normal science” to subdue what would otherwise prove to be halting debates over fundamentals regarding method, goals, and ontology.<fnref n="15" /> Such considerations are postponed in favour of unfolding the working paradigm, until the assumptions of normal science informing that paradigm become unignorably problematic in the face of anomalies that normal science itself has functioned to define. This is the point at which

<footnote n="13">13. Cavell, *Little Did I Know*, 353. It is noteworthy that the news is pictured as “grating to some, young and old,” as something other therefore than the onset of a homogeneous generational shift.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14. Quoted in Pinto de Oliveira, “Kuhn and Logical Positivism: on the Image of Science and the Image of Philosophy,” in *Interpreting Kuhn*, ed. K. Brad Wray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 69.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15. Kuhn's point of course was not that scientists possessed firmer agreement about fundamentals than their counterparts in the humanities. Cavell's recounting of his friend's perplexity at the normal madness of philosophical conversation is of a piece with (and perhaps shaped by) Kuhn's account in *Structure* of the development of his signature concept at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioural Sciences in 1958-59. “I was struck by the number and extent of the overt disagreements between social scientists about the nature of legitimate scientific problems and methods. Both history and acquaintance made me doubt that practitioners of the natural sciences possess firmer or more permanent answers to such questions than their colleagues in social science. Yet, somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry, or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today often seems endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists.” Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, ix-x.</footnote>
ch, on Kuhn's account, the puzzle solving characterising paradigm-led normal science gives way to an extraordinary, revolutionary period of crisis during which self-reflexive questions (determining what count as interesting puzzles and relevant solutions) come to the fore.

Cavell's conviction as to the revolutionary nature of ordinary language philosophy never dimmed. There are nonetheless considerations against understanding its development at his hands as the fashioning of a new paradigm. The foremost of these is that Cavell resists the philosophical equivalent of paradigm-led normal science. Returning to the anecdote with which this essay began, recall that what Cavell found “revelatory” was not so much his friend's impression of alarming philosophical dissensus, but rather an intuition that such disagreement might be “normal” to philosophy. A contrast emerges here with Kuhn's account of normal science, according to which science progresses within the apparent consensus of a paradigm through an ability for a time to bracket the tumult of disciplinary self-questioning. Kuhn's characterisation of normal science informs and helps to articulate a strand of Cavell's work whereby self-reflexive questioning is considered as normal to philosophy, rather than as needing to be overcome before philosophy can make a start or as needing to be postponed in order for philosophy to progress.<fnref n="16" />

The strand is prominent in the foreword to Cavell's first book of essays (certainly a tumult of disciplinary self-questioning) which bears the impress of the two friends' conversations quite comprehensively, taking up such recognisably Kuhnian topics as textbooks, professionalisation, popularisation and incommensurability as these pertain to differences between philosophy, science, and art.<fnref n="17" /> It can be found in Cavell's refusal of the distinction between philosophy and metaphilosophy:

<footnote n="16">16. As Cavell writes in his introduction to *This New Yet Unapproachable America* (“Work in Progress: An Introductory Report”): “On learning from the invitation by the Department of English at the University of Chicago to deliver the Carpenter Lectures not only that they did not expect to hear a completed book of lectures but instead that they hoped to respond to work in progress, I found myself wondering more consecutively than ever before what philosophical work is, and what constitutes its progress.” Stanley Cavell, *This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures After Emerson After Witgenstein* (Alburquerque, NM: Living Batch Press, 1989), 1-28, 1. Finding oneself wondering is of course Cavell’s Thoreauvian phrase for finding oneself *by* wondering, hence Cavell can begin his lecture series just because he has become self-critical about what beginning would imply. On this logic, his report will forever be introductory, just as Kierkegaard’s *Concluding Unscientific Postscript* will never be conclusive.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17. Cavell, “Foreword: An Audience for Philosophy,” in *Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), xxxi-xlii. Elements of Cavell’s grammatical analysis of philosophical “audience” (as a way of mapping the general contours of philosophy) parallel Kuhn’s com-</footnote>
The remarks I make *about* philosophy (for example, about certain of its differences from other subjects) are, where accurate and useful, nothing more or less than philosophical remarks [...] I would regard this fact — that *philosophy is one of its own normal topics*, as in turn defining for the subject, for what I wish philosophy to do [emphasis added]. But someone who thinks philosophy is a form of science may not accept that definition, because his picture is of a difference between, say, speaking about physics and doing physics.<fnref n="18" />

The wish to hold philosophy and metaphilosophy together reflects a companion wish to hold philosophy and science somewhat apart — even as this move draws support from Kuhn's argument fuzzing up the distinction between the two disciplines (since his notion of a paradigm articulates how ways of “speaking about” physics are not separate from ways of “doing” physics). Metaphilosophical questions, rather than needing to be dimmed so that philosophy can get going, are presented as a normal part of that getting going and as usefully at issue. What this entails is that Cavell stages philosophy (specifically his philosophical writing) as taking upon itself questions that the possession of a paradigm would function to answer as it were automatically and in advance. Within science, as Cavell contends in the context of a contrast between the different grammars of audience in philosophy, art and science, “standards of performance are institutionalised.”<fnref n="19" /> The closing sentence of the foreword turns to the performance of philosophy: “There is the audience of philosophy; but there also, while it lasts, is its performance.”<fnref n="20" /> The formulation implicates the duration of the performance with a related question as to the continued existence, the autonomy, of philosophy. One shape philosophical autonomy assumes in Cavell’s work involves a contrast with paradigm-led normal science, whereby standards of performance, rather than “institutionalised,” are at stake in the performance itself. The moral is captured in Cavell’s autobiography, in a very different context, as the intuition that “no one,

<footnote>ments about science and audience found in “Comment on the Relations of Science and Art,” in *The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change* (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 340-351.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18. Cavell, *Must We Mean What We Say?*, xxxii.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19. Ibid., xli. The formulation suggests that Cavell's topic is as much the professionalisation of philosophy (as facilitated by scientism) as scientism itself.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20. Ibid., xlii.</footnote>
and no institution, unless you allow it to, can tell you what you are meant to do, nor
whether you are doing it.”<fnref n="21" />

One reason crisis becomes thematic for Cavell is that, in a contrast with Kuhn's pattern of scientific development according to which periods of crisis are exceptional, viewing fundamental self-criticism as normal to philosophy leaves it open to crisis. In Cavell's 1965 essay "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy," philosophical crisis is presented in straightforwardly Kuhnian terms as intermittent: "What I have written, and I suppose the way I have written, grows from a sense that philosophy is in one of its periodic crises of method."<fnref n="22" /> Heightening this crisis is the Kuhnian thought that "method dictates to content," as might be seen in the way that "an intellectual commitment to analytical philosophy trains concern away from the wider, traditional problems of human culture which may have brought one to philosophy in the first place."<fnref n="23" /> Feeling unable to eschew either the method or the extracurricular concern, Cavell's hope is "to discover further freedoms or possibilities within the method one finds closest to oneself."<fnref n="24" /> Denying a distinction between philosophy and metaphilosophy, thereby making philosophy one of its own normal topics, is one way Cavell relates his analytic methods to the humanities. This can be seen in "The Division of Talent," written twenty years after "Aesthetic Problems in Modern Philosophy." Recounting his experiences at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in 1984, Cavell considers these as symptomatic of broader controversies within the field of literary studies at the time as to the role of theory.

Such a field, I said to myself, seems to have a crisis on its hands. (The willingness for crisis may be to its credit or for its promise. It is definitive of the humanistic professions, as opposed to the scientific, to be at any time subject to the charge, or the confession, that they are in crisis — and also to be always capable of denying that charge — as if a *question* of crisis is itself normal to the humanities, when they differentiate from the sciences. [I am of course thinking here of

<footnote n="21">21. Cavell, *Little Did I Know*, 247.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22. Cavell, "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy," in *Must We Mean What We Say?*, 74.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23. Ibid., 74.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">24. Ibid., 74.</footnote>
Thomas Kuhn’s picture of scientific crises, or “revolutions,” as *breaking in upon a science’s normal periods of progress.] This wants understanding. [...]<fnref n="25" />

Where “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy” considered crises as periodic or extraordinary moments of disciplinary development, the later essay draws a wider circle. A question of crisis is now cast as “normal” to and constitutive of philosophy when it is understood as one of the humanities. Hence, as Cavell puts the matter in his autobiography, “philosophy’s self-criticism must remain perpetual, not a thing for isolated crises.”<fnref n="26" /> The very denial by a humanistic discipline that it is in crisis takes the form of accepting the appearance of crisis (in the form of sustained self-criticism) as in a sense normal.

There is more to be said of how Kuhnian problematics inform responsiveness to crisis in “The Division of Talent.”<fnref n="27" /> The essay takes up the question of the relationship of Cavell’s thought to the philosophy and deconstructive criticism of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. The immediate issue is not whether Cavell and his European counterparts agree or disagree but rather one of finding ground upon which agreement and disagreement might be discerned. For Cavell, “our philosophical-literary culture as it stands” is unable to provide such support, leading to a “present incommensurability,” “amounting even, as for me it is seeming to do, to an intellectual crisis.”<fnref n="28" /> The strand of Cavell’s writing I am emphasising whereby his philosophy, unlike paradigm-led normal science, is one of its own normal topics, informs the comparisons and contrasts the es-

<footnote n="25">25. Cavell, “The Division of Talent,” *Critical Inquiry* 11, no. 4 (1985): 522. Cavell presented the paper “Hamlet’s Burden of Proof” at the ASA in the session “Confronting Critical Cruxes.”</footnote>

<footnote n="26">26. Cavell, *Little Did I Know*, 500.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27. Four decades earlier in his career and at least one world away from the contexts and occasions of “The Division of Talent,” in a co-authored article with Alexander Sesonske, Cavell and Sesonske made comparable reconciliatory use of the Marxist concept of the division of labour, as a way of resolving philosophical disagreement by arraying philosophies in terms of the *academic* division of labour. “The differences [between emotivists and cognitivists], thus, are those which must occur in any complex and extended enterprise; no small group of workers can hope to fully encompass the enormous area to be questioned. But a *division of labor* need be no more *divisive* here than in any other scientific project. This paper is intended as a contribution to a view which realizes that the pragmatist and the positivist can be, and, constructively interpreted, already *are*, mutually supportive.” Cavell and Alexander Sesonske, “Logical Empiricism and Pragmatism in Ethics,” *The Journal of Philosophy* 48, no. 1 (1948): 17. The passage somewhat evokes and anticipates Clark Kerr’s notion of the multiversity as developed in his 1963 Godkin Lectures at Harvard, not to mention its critique by the radical student movement in the 1960s (in response to which Cavell struck a similarly mediating role, “keeping open what lines of communication I could among and between students and professors”). Clark Kerr, *The Uses of the University*, 5th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Cavell, *Litte Did I Know*, 506.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">28. Cavell, “The Division of Talent,” 532 and 527.</footnote>
say explores between his work and philosophical and literary deconstruction. His unsettled relationship to the paradigm of analytic philosophy is of course no less at issue here. Philosophy that does not get going (on the model of Kuhnian normal science) after guiding metaphilosophical fundamentals have been established and learned as parradigmatic, but instead pursues metaphilosophical questions along the way, understandably finds itself preoccupied with beginnings. If this “commitment to account philosophically for one’s intellectual origination” provides a sense of “kinship” between Cavell’s writing and that of Derrida and de Man, “I daresay it is the commitment that causes most bafflement about my writing and most offense taken from it among my colleagues in the profession of philosophy.”<fnref n="29" />

An exchange between de Man and the philosopher Raymond Geuss forms an important node in “The Division of Talent” and provides a surprising connection to Kuhn. Cavell focuses in particular on Geuss’ critique of de Man’s deconstructive reading of Hegel. For Geuss, the reading is wilful, imposing deconstructive dynamics upon Hegel’s text rather than demonstrating their necessity and drawing them out through immanent criticism. The conciliatory response provided by de Man gives Cavell pause for thought. For de Man:

> Geuss’ stance [...] is to shelter the canonical reading of what Hegel actually thought and proclaimed from readings which allow themselves [...] to tamper with the canon. Such an attitude, I hasten to add, is not only legitimate but admirable [...]. The commentator should persist as long as possible in the canonical reading and should begin to swerve away from it only when he encounters difficulties which the methodological and substantial assertions of the system are no longer able to master.<fnref n="30" />

The critical approach de Man outlines here and the moment it envisages for deconstructive criticism is remarkably analogous to Kuhn’s pattern of scientific development, whereby normal science “shelters” a paradigm from criticism until anomalies are unearthed which, as Kuhn puts it, even the “reiterated onslaught” of normal sci-

<footnote n="29">29. Cavell, “The Division of Talent,” 526.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">30. Ibid.</footnote>
ence is unable to assimilate.<fnref n="31" /> Cavell’s characterisation of his own philosophical and critical momentum as more aversive than paradigmatic in its progress is therefore now in opposition both to Kuhnian normal science and to de Man’s apportioning of the normal and the revolutionary within criticism.<fnref n="32" />

If “The Division of Talent” asks urgent questions about incommensurability between and within disciplines, it also outlines some answers, and I will continue with the topic of incommensurability before taking up related questions about professionalisation and esotericism. Cavell’s concern in his reading of Wittgenstein to emphasise the depth of convention in human life helped to define Kuhnian worries over incommensurability.<fnref n="33" /> There is, however, a faith in Cavell’s philosophy that incommensurability need not have the last word, entirely in keeping with Kuhn’s insistence that incommensurability need not entail the irrationality or impossibility of conversation between divergent paradigms.<fnref n="34" /> Several of the essays in *Must We Mean What We Say?* develop the notion of “terms of criticism,” in part to articulate a Kuhnian problematic whereby exchanges between different philosophical schools past and present will not take place on a common ground of commensurability, since each school will characterise rivals in local terms internal to its own philosophy. Such incommensurability is depicted as not in principle insurmountable, however, as can be seen in Cavell’s characterisation in “Knowing and Acknowledging” of the clash between “traditional” philosophy and its “critic” in the figure of the ordinary language philosopher: “What this critic wants or needs, is possession of data and descriptions and diagnoses so clear and common that apart from them neither agreement nor disagreement would be possible — not as if the problem is for opposed positions to be reconciled, but for the halves of the mind to go back together.”<fnref n="35" /> The stakes might appear to have been raised here (however much they have shifted). Nonetheless, a faith is placed in descriptions and diagnoses as commonly shared rather than as hopelessly relative to isolated paradigms; and if the aspiration to locate or invite such commonality is not without “anguish,” it also has its successes or “satisfactions.”<fnref n="36" />

<footnote n="31">31. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">32. Cavell, “The Division of Talent,” 526-27.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">33. See Cavell’s mention of Kuhnian paradigms as involving differences in “natural reactions” rather than in “conventions.” Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 121.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">34. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 198-204.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">35. Cavell, *Must We Mean What We Say?*, 241.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">36. Ibid., 241.</footnote>
Cavell's refusal in "Knowing and Acknowledging" to give up on the descriptive availability of the experiential content underlying competing intradisciplinary philosophical positions extends to a hope (or fantasy) in "The Division of Talent" of inter-disciplinary conversation and commensurability. The suggestion is that there is a guiding "teaching" or experience underlying each discipline that should in principle be communicable across disciplinary boundaries.<fnref n="37" /> My point here is that the disanallogies between Cavell's philosophical writing and Kuhnian normal science, whereby metaphilosophical questions are ever present rather than preparatory, informs the way his writing models this hoped for commensurability by foregrounding and making overt fundamental questions about methods and goals that, within a Kuhnian paradigm, would remain tacit among a community of practitioners.

Both the promise and the risk of this approach are especially clear when understood in relation to *Structure*. For Kuhn, a research community's possession of a paradigm, understood in its sociological sense as a "disciplinary matrix," allows its members to enjoy what he terms a "relative fulness of [...] professional communication."<fnref n="38" /> In the absence of a shared paradigm, professional communication "is inevitably only partial."<fnref n="39" /> Since Cavell's philosophy is not normally separate from metaphilosophy and does not find itself (or present itself as) settling in a paradigm, it follows on this logic that his work will not be guaranteed a paradigmatic fullness of professional communication; hence his perception that this aspect of his writing might baffle his analytic colleagues. Making philosophy one of its own normal topics enabled Cavell's exploration of "the limitations of the English tradition of philosophizing." Nonetheless, that tradition's "glory [made possible I suppose by its limitations] is that within it philosophy is still performable, realizable, in conversation, in mutuality."<fnref n="40" /> If this fact about the Anglo-American tradition was in Cavell's view "definitive" for his work, he nonetheless felt himself somewhat "excluded" from the tradition's "mutuality." Although the analytic paradigm is valuable for Cavell's philosophy, then, it is as it were "valuable beyond measure," in the absence of the immediate relevance of commensurability.<fnref n="41" />

<footnote n="37">37. "I want to know what you think it is essential to know in order to do what you do." Cavell, "The Division of Talent," 532.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">38. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 182.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">39. Ibid., 198.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">40. James Conant, "Interview with Stanley Cavell," in *The Senses of Stanley Cavell*, ed. Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989), 71. Cavell's parentheses.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">41. Ibid., 71.</footnote>
For Kuhn, the relative fullness of communication characteristic of a normal-
scientific paradigm formed a condition of professional progress.<fnref n="42" /> Such tacit understand-
ting came at the cost of rendering scientific practice esoteric: unintelligible or clo-
sed to a non-specialist audience. Where Cavell’s aversiveness forfeits the relatively
full communication that characterises a professional group’s possession of a para-
digm, his transfigurations invite new and unpredictable constellations of friends and
strangers into conversation with his work.<fnref n="43" /> The invitation trades paradigmatic full-
ness of communication for an understanding of philosophy as in a sense non-esote-
ric.<fnref n="44" /> Recalling his transformational encounter with J. L. Austin and ordinary langua-
ge philosophy, Cavell emphasised the openness of Austin’s methods:

> This was no longer the provision of a great result or paradigm of philosophical thought such as Russell's Theory of Definite Descriptions, building on Frege's invention of the quantifier, which we were then to apply with endless unoriginality to a thousand identical situations. The questions raised here are to be decided by us, here and now. No one knows more about what mistakes and accidents are, or heedlessness or lack of thought, than we do, whatever we think we do or do not know. It is a frightening, exhilarating prospect.<fnref n="45" />

The non-esoteric character of Austin's procedures is explicitly contrasted with the
philosophical equivalent of paradigm-led normal science, in the form of the exemplar
provided by Russell's theory of definite descriptions

Having referred throughout to “Kuhnian themes” in Cavell’s work, I should say
a little more about thematisation itself. As Cavell observed, “given the deep variations
in our training and experience, the inspiration Kuhn and I might take from each
other underwent sometimes radical changes in finding a place to exist, in however
revised a shape, in the other’s sensibility.”<fnref n="46" /> Since Cavell and Kuhn are both notably
heterodox figures, this amounts to significantly more than an adjustment for discipli-

<footnote n="42">42. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 24.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">43. As Kuhn noted, “Art is an intrinsically other-directed enterprise in ways and to an extent which science is not.” Cavell’s philosophy here is closer to art than to normal science. Kuhn, *The Essential Tension*, 344.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">44. Cavell, *Must We Mean What We Say?*, xlii, 239-40.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">45. Cavell, “Notes After Austin,” *The Yale Review* 76, no. 3 (1987): 316.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">46. Cavell, *Little Did I Know*, 355.</footnote>
nary differences. What is distinctive about Cavell's reception and transfiguration of Kuhnian ideas is that, although they help to configure and to sustain elements of what Cavell might prefer not to describe as his "methodology," these ideas are pursued at a thematic as well as a technical level.

A headline controversy in the wake of *Structure*, the question of whether Kuhn's Kantianism cedes scientific objectivity and realism, provides an instructive example here.47 The Wittgensteinian and anthropological account of necessity developed by Cavell in his doctoral dissertation played a significant role in shoring up Kuhn's position, and in this sense Cavell's influence on Kuhn is a technical one within analytic philosophy.48 Readers looking to discern Kuhnian shapes in Cavell's work, however, need to look beyond a professionally circumscribed, uniform field of philosophical problems, solutions, and argumentation, or rather consider that and how these elements are reframed. Cavell's remarks in *The Claim of Reason* about wishing to understand philosophy not as a set of given problems but as an engagement with texts might be read as a distancing his work from the philosophical equivalent of the puzzle solving Kuhn associated with normal science. The deeper connection to Kuhn, however, is precisely the emphasis placed by Cavell on texts and the way this chimes with a seminal aspect of Kuhn's own procedures.49 Any attempt to defend or to question the robustness of Kuhn's realism, of course, is unlikely to find immediate use for Cavell's textual reframing of philosophical controversies concerning realism, in an early essay on Emerson: "What the ground of the fixated conflict between solipsism and realism should give way to — or between subjectivity and objectivity, or the private and the public, or inner and

<footnote n="47">47. I emphasise Kantian epistemology rather than historicism (which might seem the more obvious of Kuhn's threats to realism) mindful of the significance of Cavell's transcendental interpretation of Wittgenstein's *Philosophical Investigations* for *Structure*; not of course that this iteration of Kantianism lacks a historicist dimension, hence Kuhn's self-description: "I am a Kantian with moveable categories." Aristidis Baltas et al., "A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn," (1997) reprinted in Thomas S. Kuhn, *The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview*, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2020), 264.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">48. Without denying their obvious importance, Joel Isaac cautions against overstating the depth of impact of Wittgensteinian ideas on *Structure*. If those ideas were vivid for Kuhn, this is partly because they spoke to guiding elements of his thought that were already well formulated and drawn from other intellectual contexts. See Joel Isaac, "Kuhn's Education: Wittgenstein, Pedagogy, and the Road to Structure," in *Modern Intellectual History*, 9, 1 (2012): 89-107.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">49. "I have wished to understand philosophy not as a set of problems but as a set of texts. This means to me that the contribution of a philosopher – anyway of a creative thinker – to the subject of philosophy is not to be understood as a contribution to, or of, a set of *given* problems, although both historians and non-historians of the subject are given to suppose otherwise." Cavell, *The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy* (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 3-4. Kuhn's epiphany about Aristotle's laws of motion (that they were to be understood as belonging to a coherent over-</footnote>
outer — is the task of onwardness.”⁵⁰ The pertinence of Kuhn to this Emersonian horizon is nonetheless quite real, in that both Kuhn and Cavell alike privilege creative process over static results in their respective accounts of science and philosophy.

A suggestive contrast can be made between Cavell and Richard Rorty, another American philosopher greatly influenced by Kuhn’s reopening of a historicist perspective for philosophy. Rorty recalled that after reading *Structure* he “began to think of analytic philosophy as one way of doing philosophy among others, rather than as the discovery of how to set philosophy on the secure path of a science.”⁵¹ His observation that disciplines are obliged to turn to a certain kind of writing and to philosophy in revolutionary periods of crisis is in some ways consonant with the extra-paradigmatic work that writing comes to assume for Cavell.⁵² The overlaps between the two philosophers, however, obscure significant divergences of sensibility.⁵³ Rorty’s critique of *The Claim of Reason* suggested that its reframing of philosophical problems remained needlessly entangled in those problems. If Cavell regarded ordinary language philosophy as revolutionary, in Rorty’s view the revolution stalled in *The Claim of Reason*, since Cavell broke free of philosophical tradition but had yet to leave behind — to continue the Kuhnian analogy — normal science style puzzle solving.⁵⁴ The critique addresses a familiar dimension of Cavell’s reception of Kuhnian ideas, namely his portrait of revolutionary change as entered into reluctantly, out of a preservationist concern expressive of a commitment to continuity and tradition. The relationship between philosophy and its history is of course a further question borne by

all perspective rather than as mistaken physics) arose precisely from “an alternative way of reading the texts with which I had been struggling.” Kuhn, *The Essential Tension*, xi. Cavell’s textualisation of philosophical problems resembles Kuhn’s interest in texts in that the meanings of the philosophical tradition are to be recovered and reframed hermeneutically, in contrast and in response to the positivist dismissals of the tradition as absent of meaning and full of nonsense (uninteresting nonsense at that).

50. Cavell, “Thinking of Emerson,” in *Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes* (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 19.

51. Richard Rorty, “Thomas Kuhn, Rocks, and the Law of Physics,” in *Philosophy and Social Hope* (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 178.

52. “Normality, in this sense, is accepting without question the stage-setting in the language which gives demonstration (scientific or ostensive) its legitimacy. Revolutionary scientists need to write, as normal scientists do not. Revolutionary politicians need to write, as parliamentary politicians do not. Dialectical philosophers like Derrida need to write, as Kantian [systematic] philosophers do not.” Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida,” in *Consequences of Pragmatism* (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 106.

53. For a sustained comparative analysis of Cavell and Rorty, see Áine Mahon, *The Ironist and the Romantic: Reading Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell* (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

54. Rorty praises the writerly fourth part of *The Claim of Reason* but is impatient with the first part’s close engagement with traditional or professional philosophical debates concerning epistemology.
Cavell's writing rather than answered by a paradigm. On Kuhn's account, the posses-
sion of a paradigm resolves and stabilises the relationship of an enterprise to its own
past such that it is no longer at issue. To the extent that past scientific practice is de-
emed as anything other than a history of error, for example, and to the extent that it
is kept in mind at all, it is codified in scientific textbooks as so many anticipations of
the present paradigm. In the absence of a paradigm the philosophical tradition re-
mains at issue in Cavell's work. The argument is that since philosophy does not
without distortion relate to its past in the way a paradigm would allow, it is not best
understood on the paradigm model. It is not so much then that the revolution, or
“onwardness,” is stalled, but that it is a “task,” in part because unlike normal science,
philosophy “has to manage its continuity with itself.”⁵⁵

In a philosophical remark about philosophy, Cavell notes “the familiar fact
that philosophers seem perpetually to be going back over something, something that
most sane people would feel had already been discussed to death. A more familiar
formulation is to say that philosophy does not progress. That depends on who is
doing the measuring.”⁵⁶ Cavell’s writing aspires “to motivate both gestures of pro-
gress, both states of mind, going back and going on.”⁵⁷ If this can be seen in the way
*The Claim of Reason* returns to and reinterprets philosophical problems rather than
leaving them behind, or in his “perpetually probing and returning to portions or slips
of a work” by Wittgenstein or Thoreau or Emerson, it is also of a piece with Cavell’s
broader characterisation of disciplinary change (and of how philosophy in particular
suffers change).⁵⁸ We can return here to the way Kuhn and Cavell brought “enthusi-

Richard Rorty, “Cavell on Skepticism,” *Consequences of Pragmatisim*, 176-90. In truth Rorty’s work as represented for example in his four volumes of *Philosophical Papers* is no less entangled than Cavell’s in this respect, and arguably it is much closer in style or form to the paradigm of professional philosophy (making it more incendiary than baffling).

55. Cavell, “Existentialism and Analytic Philosophy,” in *Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes* (Chicago, IL: The Chicago University Press, 1984), 200. Cavell’s introductory remarks respond to Rorty’s essay review of *The Claim of Reason*. See also Cavell’s description of many of his “commitments and turns” in philosophy: “concerning terms of criticism and the role of esotericism in (modern?) philosophy, and the nature of philosophical importance [... and] concerning the necessity of, or willingness for, philosophical vulnerability of unguardedness, put it as the limits in saying why what you say is interesting (like explaining why what you have said is credible, or funny). Unguardedness here, accordingly, means that there is no defence of a philosophical teaching apart from continuing with it.” Cavell, “The Division of Talent,” 536.

56. Cavell, *Cities of Words: Pedagogical Reflections on a Register of the Moral Life* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 15.

57. Ibid., 15.

58. Cavell, *Little Did I Know*, 474.
astic news” to Berkeley concerning what Cavell describes elsewhere as a “methodical easing” of logical positivism.<fnref n="59" /> Cavell characterises the revolutionary aspects of their work as “not unheeding” of logical positivism and its terms of criticism. In this sense the shift away from positivism is pictured in appropriately non-positivist terms since philosophical innovation here does not involve dispensing with the philosophical past (on the model of normal science).

The movement away from positivism, then, emerges in Cavell’s account as another instance of philosophy managing its continuity with itself, and this work of mediation involves another dimension of his resistance to giving the last word to incommensurability. In his intellectual history of the development of the human sciences at Harvard, Joel Isaac identifies the unhelpful grip on the intellectual-historical imagination of a broad-brush distinction between positivist and post-positivist philosophy. Such imprecision tends to withhold “a basis for discussion across the barrica-de,” whereas a more fruitful perspective would allow for “a middle ground of conflict, adjustment and conceptual change,” whereby “all exchanges between rival traditions need not be zero-sum games.”<fnref n="60" /> Cavell tends to present the work of loosening positivism’s hold on the philosophical imagination in a way that preserves such a middle ground — or at least its idea.<fnref n="61" /> His work stages itself as a “quarrel” with positivist and subsequent modes of analytic philosophy, and therefore as at once a turning toward and a turning away.<fnref n="62" /> It might be felt of course that his oscillation between broad subject contours and personal inflections (“defining for the subject, for what I wish philosophy to do”), his aspiration to speak for philosophy as such, entails another sort of monolithic imagination. Those contours, however, provide discursive space sufficiently broad to encompass plural derivations of philosophical conviction, dialogue, and contestation.

Cavell’s purposive sketch of *Structure* in *The Claim of Reason* frames revolutionary science, or rather the revolutionary scientist, as motivated in a sense by continuity, which is to say by commitment to a broader idea of the science in question. On

<footnote n="59">59. Ibid., 458.</footnote>

<footnote n="60">60. Joel Isaac, *Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 237.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">61. More generally, Cavell’s philosophy stages itself, variously, as mediating between competing philosophical positions, different generations, and opposing political persuasions.</footnote>

<footnote n="62">62. Cavell, “Existentialism and Analytic Philosophy,” 32.</footnote>
this recounting, it is not so much that the fruitfulness of normal science withers and
more that it stops seeming like science at all:

> This is how, in my illiteracy, I read Thomas Kuhn's *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*: that only a master of a science can accept a revolutionary change as a natural extension of that science; and that he accepts it, or proposes it, in order to maintain touch with the idea of that science, with its internal canons of comprehensibility and comprehensiveness, as if against the vision that, under altered circumstances, the normal progress of explanation and exception no longer seems to him to be science. And then what he does may not seem scientific to the old master.<fnref n="63" />

The passage is conspicuous for the way that normal science, which *Structure* identifies as constitutively communal, is individualised in the figure of the “old master,” with her ability to perceive or to effect revolutionary change as continuity. The contention that significant disciplinary change aims to preserve a subject’s broader “idea” is hardly uncontroversial. Not least, the putative idea might be intramundane, a discursive notion not prior to revolutionary schools but more a story such schools might tell to make themselves feel at home. What I mean to emphasise here is that the preservationist impulse underwrites (perhaps more than it counterbalances) significant disciplinary radicalism. If disciplinary innovation is motivated by and responds to a sense of “the inner loss [that] threatens every discipline,” this becomes radicalised and thematised in the case of philosophy, “the discipline whose very existence, and importance, are to be held at risk.”<fnref n="64" />

This essay has considered Cavell's work in the light of Kuhnian ideas that Cavell himself played a role in helping to develop. I have not meant to imply that Kuhnian contexts exhaust the significance of the strands of Cavell's work I have taken up, since these strands are densely interwoven with, for example, modernist predicaments and romantic themes. Education is a major topic of *Walden* and other romantic texts, for instance, because “the quest for one’s own question, and for what it takes

<footnote n="63">63. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 121.</footnote>

<footnote n="64">64. Cavell, “Observations on Art and Science,” *Daedalus* 115, no. 3 (1986): 174.</footnote>
to pose it, are entered into together. One is not the preparation for the other, the madness and the method are the same. (There is no metaphilosophy.) I gather this is not true of science, even definitively not true.”<fnref n="65" /> My argument is that Kuhnian ideas played a formative and structuring role in Cavell’s work. In highlighting reasons why Cavell’s philosophy is more aversive than paradigmatic, my purpose has not been to celebrate or circumscribe Cavell’s work as somehow uniquely singular, for two reasons. First, Kuhn provided a vocabulary of sorts within which Cavell articulated the costs and risks of philosophy taking place without as well as within a paradigm: the uncertainties as to voice and reach, the exposure resulting from the absence of a settled and preparatory curriculum.<fnref n="66" /> Secondly, nothing in this essay is meant to deny the obvious fact that the influence of Cavell’s work has been remarkably plural and pervasive. One way of figuring this reception in the light of the foregoing analysis is that Cavell’s disinclination to settle within a paradigm, his contention that nothing goes without saying, provides at its most effective a sense of openness and an invitation.<fnref n="67" />

<footnote n="65">65. Cavell, *Themes Out of School*, 201.</footnote>

<footnote n="66">66. Cavell does not suppose that “the technical is the only way, or the chief way, or a sure way, in which philosophy may be lost,” nor that “the technical is the only, or the main, discourse within which one can imprison oneself, or perhaps comfort oneself.” Cavell, “Existentialism and Analytic Philosophy,” 200. My comments about exposure refer to Cavell’s methodological unguardedness and his occasional asides about the cost of “conducting my continuing education in public.” Cavell, *In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism* (Chicago, IL: The Chicago University Press, 1988), x.</footnote>

<footnote n="67">67. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Professor Richard King, who encouraged my interest in Cavell. I would also like to thank Rachel Malkin and my co-editor, Brad Tabas, for their perceptive comments on earlier drafts of this essay.</footnote>
# 5. From Automatism to Autonomy

RUOCHEN BO

## Introduction

When we refer to something as automatic in ordinary language, we tend to speak of it as unconscious and working by itself — machinic, repetitive, needing no intervention or control from others to move along its natural course. If a process is automatic, we regularly assume that it happens independently of the human will. What is automa-ted, in other words, will go on until non-human physical constraints prevent it from further labor, such as when the battery is dead in the robot or when the electricity goes out as the washing machine is running its usual course, or when one of its parts is worn out and needs repair. But if the machine “decides” that it is too tired or ha-ving a moody afternoon and wants to stop working mid-way through a task, we can’t help feeling very alarmed.<fnref n="1" /> Usually, we see automatism as precluding autonomy. Its automatic nature seems to suggest that it is, or ought to be, heteronomous in the sen-se that its course of action remains the same until it is told otherwise, e.g., when so-meone else turns the switch on or off. The contrast between the two statuses is preva-lent in philosophical discourses as well, notably Descartes’ thought experiment that an automaton designed to look like an animal would be hard to distinguish from the real thing, but a machine that imitates humans would be far easier to detect, due to the latter’s language and general reasoning abilities, which reflect the fact that it is guided by immaterial mind.<fnref n="2" /> But, given the etymology of the two words, we can see that both notions are more intertwined than conventional overtones reveal. Auto-nomy, coming from *autonomos* — the Greek roots *auto* meaning “self” and *nomos*

<footnote n="1">1. Google recently fired its engineer for contending its AI chatbot LaMDA for being sentient. See for example: Ramishah Maruf, CNN, last updated July 25, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/business/google-ai-engineer-fired-sentient/index.html.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. René Descartes, *Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy* (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), Part V.</footnote>
meaning “custom” or “law” — indicates self-ruling. While automatism, coming from *automaton* and *automatos*, denotes self-acting.<fnref n="3" /> Given that the realm of the self seems to be the key site shared by both notions, we may wonder whether the two ideas as separate and irreconcilable as common sense would have it.

This paper rethinks the relationship between autonomy and automatism through close readings of Thomas Kuhn's theories regarding scientific structure and Stanley Cavell's writings on cinematic ontology. I argue that for both Cavell and Kuhn, in contrast to the ordinary understanding of these two concepts, envision a path from automatism to autonomy. Unpacking this enigmatic path will enrich our understanding of not only both concepts on their own, but also the nature of perception in scientific, cinematic, and ethical understanding. Given the two philosophers' divergent primary concerns, taking their accounts together sheds light on a constellation of different aspects of both concepts. To this effect, in Part I of the paper I analyze how, on the surface, the autonomy of the “revolutionary” scientist can be read as antithetical to the heteronomy of “normal science,” but what Kuhn in fact demonstrates is the centrality of the automatic nature of normal science in paving the way for the work of autonomous revolutionary scientists. I further argue that even though the emphasis in Kuhn seems to be explicitly given to the autonomy of the scientific subject, his theory of the incommensurability of scientific paradigms hinges on an implicit claim in this account — the necessity of the autonomy of the scientific object in pushing for a paradigm change. Compared to Kuhn, Cavell's discernment of the proximity of automatism — in cinematic apparatus and modernist art — with autonomy of the object is more explicit, though no less mysterious. It constitutes one of the three “impulses” of his in speaking of an artistic medium as an “automatism.” Part II of

<footnote n="3">3. This etymology seems to be at variance with its current usage — something which can only act when it is acted on, has no consciousness of its own, functions according to pre-coded and predetermined rules, and is at best a pale imitation of a free subject. The difficulty of drawing connections between automatism and autonomy nowadays is perhaps exacerbated by the negative connotation automatism possesses, being connected with the process of automation and Taylorism, rationalist efficiency and an extractive relationship to the world. The interconnection is further obscured by how automatism is usually associated with *techne*, whereas autonomy is usually thought of in the realm of politics and ethics. For instance, Kant — having rejected Mendelssohn's appreciation of skillful activity as unconscious automatism, fearing that “it renders virtue mindless and unreflective” — limited the notion of autonomy to the domain of human consciousness or action. Melissa Merritt, “Mendelssohn and Kant on Virtue as a Skill,” in *The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise Routledge*, ed. Ellen Fridland and Carlotta Pavese (London and New York: Routledge Handbooks Online, 2020), 88. For him, the notions of moral choice and freedom are rooted in reason and personhood, excluding automatic characteristics.</footnote>
this paper unravels its inconspicuousness. Lastly, I will use a radically non-anthropo-
centric sequence from Robert Bresson’s *Au Hasard Balthazar* (1967) to elaborate on
the various automatisms involved — the automaticity of the film animals, the photo-
graphic automatism and the automatism of projection — and how they lead to seeing
and acknowledging the autonomy of the object and the radical change in vision that is
required to achieve that.<fnref n="4" />

# Part I. Kuhn and *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*

## I.1 Normal Science vs. Extraordinary Science

As the title of Kuhn's book suggests, his project revolves around a reconceptualization
of the nature and structure of scientific revolutions away from a facile understanding
of it as straight-forward, cumulative, and progressive practice.<fnref n="5" /> He coins the terms
"normal science" and "extraordinary/revolutionary science" to distinguish two diffe-
rent realms of scientific practices. The former denotes "the sort of practice in which
all scientists are mostly, and most scientists are always, engaged."<fnref n="6" /> In a mature com-
munity of science, the participants agree on and are committed to a certain set of
fundamentals acquired from regular scientific education and the practices that were
passed down to them in their professional training. In normal science, there exists "a
strong network of commitments — conceptual, theoretical, instrumental, and metho-
dological" — which delineate the scope of scientific examination, arbitrate the legiti-
macy of certain research problems, and provide the rules for conducting experiments
and measurements most appropriate to the goal of further articulating existing theo-
ries.<fnref n="7" />

<footnote n="4">4. The inclusion of the animal here is a gesture toward broadening Cavell's theory of acknowledgement to include the animals but that will not be the main focus of this paper because of different priorities and the limited scope and space. For literature on this topic, see Michael Uhall, “Creaturely Conditions: Acknowledgment and Animality in Kafka, Cavell, and Uexküll.” *Configurations* 24, no. 1 (2016): 1-24; Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe. *Philosophy and Animal Life* (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); and Cary Wolfe and W. J. T. Mitchell, *Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory* (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2003).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition* (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2012). Or *SSR*.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6. Kuhn, “The Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery,” in *The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change* (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 177.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 42.</footnote>
On the other hand, “extraordinary science” refers to significant moments such as the Copernican revolution, Lavoisier’s “discovery” of oxygen or Einstein’s theory of relativity.<fnref n="8" /> These moments designate transitions from an older paradigm in crisis towards a new one, and the process is “far from a cumulative process, one achieved by an articulation or extension of the old paradigm. Rather it involves a reconstructi- on of the field from new fundamentals, a reconstruction that changes some of the fi- eld’s most elementary theoretical generalizations as well as many of its paradigm methods and applications.”<fnref n="9" /> The fact that the emergence of Newtonian physics and of relativity and quantum mechanics both were preceded and accompanied by philo- sophical analyses of the fundamentals of scientific research methods or goals buttres- ses this observation. From this judgment of how scientific changes are non-continu- ous, it seems natural to perceive normal and extraordinary science as separate and drastically different dualities. The former is associated with the enterprise of “indivi- dually heteronomous activity,” since it follows and obeys existing paradigms instead of intending to bring out new paradigms; the latter paints the image of scientists ac- ting autonomously.<fnref n="10" />

Kuhn’s descriptions of the scientists participating in extraordinary research reflects self-determination. “He will *push* the rules of normal science harder than ever to see, in the area of difficulty, just where and how far they can be made to work. Simultaneously he will *seek* for ways of magnifying the breakdown, of making it more striking and perhaps also more suggestive than it had been when displayed in expe- riments the outcome of which was thought to be known in advance.”<fnref n="11" /> The active verbs used here, which highlight the agency and creativity of the individual scientist, serve as a clear contrast to the descriptions of normal science as essentially akin to “puzzle-solving,” a highly determined activity. By emphasizing the fact that “there must also be rules that limit both the nature of acceptable solutions and the steps by which they are to be obtained,” normal science, in comparison, can be understood as

<footnote n="8">8. Of course, the term and the stage need not only refer to world-changing or ground-breaking mo- ments in the history of scientific development, but could also refer to “somewhat smaller, because more exclusively professional” (*SSR*, 67) changes in paradigm. The scare quotes are used in the spirit of Kuhn’s analysis of the complex nature of the discovery of oxygen, or *seeing* the element as oxygen, instead of dephlogisticated air.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 85.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10. Jeremy T. Burman, “On Kuhn’s Case, and Piaget’s: A Critical Two-Sited Hauntology (or, on Impact without Reference),” *History of the Human Sciences* 33, nos. 3-4 (2020): 142.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 87 (emphasis added).</footnote>
intrinsically dependent on external and established preconceptions, rules and stan-
dards.<fnref n="12" /> However, this conventional and schematic understanding of the duality
masks an important connection between the two as they are embedded in Kuhn’s ac-
count. In a recent study analyzing the structure of normal science, William Goodwin
rightly contends: “Representing science with one vanishing point — be it normal sci-
ence or extraordinary science — obscures the details necessary to appreciate its dis-
tinctive developmental pattern.”<fnref n="13" /> An exclusive focus on normal science leads to the
mistaken understanding of science as cumulative; whereas when undivided attention
is given to extraordinary science/scientists, “the sort of rigid reasoning required by
the normal mode” is neglected.<fnref n="14" /> Building on this sentiment, a closer look at Kuhn’s
descriptions of normal science could lead us to see it as providing *a necessary though
insufficient condition* for the revolutionary moment.

I.2 Normal Science Leading to Extraordinary Science

When explaining the nature of normal science, Kuhn consistently emphasizes how
normal science remains instrumental to revolutionary science, but this is easily over-
looked given the exciting and seemingly completely autonomous traits extraordinary
science exhibits. The importance of normal science is rooted in the indispensability,
or in Kuhn’s words, the “priority,” of the paradigm: “To reject one paradigm without
simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.”<sup>15</sup> The three types of
work in which the normal scientist can be engaged include “(i) fact gathering, (ii)
enhancing the contact between theoretical approach and the world, and (iii) articula-
tion of the approach,” all together contribute to “the scope and precision with which a
paradigm can be applied.”<sup>16</sup> Existing paradigms in scientific communities — the con-
solidation and further articulation of which is the primary task of normal science —
serve as a constitutive vehicle for scientific theory building by providing scientists not
only with a map regarding the entities that can be observed in nature, or how these
entities behave, “but also with some of the directions essential for map-making,” viz.

<footnote n="12">12. Ibid., 38.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13. William Goodwin, “Mop-Up Work,” in *Interpreting Kuhn: Critical Essays*, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 103.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14. Ibid., 86.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 79.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16. Goodwin, “Mop-up Work,” 93. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 36.</footnote>
the theory, methods and standards through which these entities are determined and further examined.<fnref n="17" />

The professionalization of the scientific community through its unquestionable adoption of certain paradigms, naturally leads to the rigid restriction of scientific vision as well as a resistance to paradigm changes. But that is not the whole story. Given how the paradigm directs the attention and focus of scientific practices, normal science “leads to a detail of information and to a precision of the observation-theory match that could be achieved in no other way.”<fnref n="18" /> The refinement of observational techniques, the development of a special apparatus that caters to more nuanced and sophisticated experiments and observations, and the cumulation of useful data are all indispensable in creating the conditions for profound and far-reaching discoveries. This is why “pre-paradigm periods” feature numerous competing schools of thought, but since every school must carry out experiments and theoretical thinking from ground up for the lack of paradigmatic rules, the research accomplished remains rudimentary. In Kuhn’s words, “And even when the apparatus exists, novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing *with precision* what he should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong. Anomaly appears only against the background provided by the paradigm. The more precise and far-reaching that paradigm is, the more sensitive an indicator it provides of anomaly and hence of an occasion for paradigm change.”<fnref n="19" /> Contrary to prevailing understandings of scientific endeavor, it is important to note that even the revolutionary scientist is not “inventing” anything *ex nihilo*. The emergence or perception of an anomaly or novelty in science requires a precise vision. These are constituted by both the field’s existing establishment and advancement in its scientific observation and method, as well as via the data it provides. Significantly, these pre-established structures and the ocean of documented information serve as a necessary backdrop for the anomaly to show itself as something *different*, demanding attention and possibly new rules. The automatic continuation of the theories, rules, or the paradigm, therefore, provides an indispensable condition, which potentially paves the way for the autonomous scientists to perform their tasks.

<footnote n="17">17. Ibid., 109.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18. Ibid., 64-65.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19. Ibid., 65 (emphasis in original).</footnote>
The path from automatism to autonomy is also embedded in another aspect of
the priority of the paradigm, exemplified by Kuhn's theory of perception. Going
against what he deemed a long tradition of Western scientific and epistemological as-
sumptions regarding the separation of the neutral and objective brute facts from in-
terpretations of the facts, Kuhn sees "a world already perceptually and conceptually
subdivided in a certain way."<fnref n="20" /> Building on N. R. Hanson's thesis that all observations
are theory-laden, Kuhn insists (in his early writings) that there is no fixed or neutral
sensory experience.<fnref n="21" /> A paradigm and the theories implied in it are prerequisite to
perception itself, which means that a "strong form" of observational incommensura-
bility exists when there is a shift of paradigm.<fnref n="22" /> William Devlin defines the strong
form as holding "that observation is a cognitive achievement as background beliefs
influence the process of observation; that is, they influence background beliefs so
strongly that it determines our perception that something is, or is not, the case."<fnref n="23" />
Looking at a swinging stone, an Aristotelian *sees* a constrained fall while Galileo *sees*
the motion of a pendulum; it is *not* that they perceive the same rope with a weighted
entity at the end going through a specific trajectory, and then give different interpre-

<footnote n="20">20. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 129.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21. Quoted in Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 113; Norwood Russell Hanson, *Patterns of Discovery* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958).</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22. This strong form of incommensurability, I believe, is central to Kuhn's earlier writings, especially *The Structure*, which is the main text that my analysis here builds on. It may seem to contradict Kuhn's later writings. For instance, he discusses "natural kinds" in the following way: "To say that members of natural kinds are given is to say that their properties can be established by direct observation, independent of beliefs or theories about the causes of those properties and independent also of personal or social interest in their determination [...] two people confronting the same creature or material can always — supposing they have normal sensory apparatus and speak the same language — reach agreement about its observational properties." Kuhn and Bojana Mladenović, *The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science* (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 236-237. However, the "contradiction" is nuanced if we consider the fact that the primary examples used in *SSR* — the physical phenomena observed such as the swinging stone — do not fall neatly into the category of "natural kind" and are more complex. Furthermore, Kuhn's immediate qualification of his own description is telling: "Which properties are in fact observed and how closely the results of observation are subjected to critical scrutiny will, of course, be deeply influenced by interest and belief, and these are correspondingly important determinants of the rate and direction of cognitive development." Ibid., 236. The sentiment conveyed here is much closer to that of in his earlier writings. It seems that Kuhn's later writings take a pragmatic turn to focus on the solidarity of a language/culture community and how generalizations about certain properties ought to be agreed upon. Whereas in the earlier writings, the importance (and the productive shock) in encountering a different (or historical) scientific system and culture is more prominent. The "strong form" of observational incommensurability in *SSR* compels one to examine the prejudices or beliefs in one's own time and to take seriously the claim that historical sciences and cultures, e.g., Ancient Greek science and their way of life, could have something to teach us moderns.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23. William J. Devlin, "Kuhn and the Varieties of Incommensurability," in *Interpreting Kuhn: Critical Essays*, ed. K. Brad Wray (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 108.</footnote>
tations, which will be the weak form of the observational incommensurability.<fnref n="24" /> The context of background theories and beliefs condition *how* we see things and *what* we see. Therefore, for perception to be possible in the first place, the “automatic” process of being in the world and acquiring experience in a paradigm-dependent world is decisive. Similar in spirit to Hans Georg Gadamer’s view of prejudice as central to his hermeneutics, both function as a set of tacit beliefs, assumptions or fore-judgements that are required to make a claim of knowledge.<fnref n="25" /> Prejudice-free knowledge or paradigm-free observation is neither desirable nor possible.

In both instances analyzed above — the dependence of the revolutionary scientist on normal science in perceiving scientific anomalies and the reliance on established theories and beliefs in general perception — we see that automatism does not preclude the possibility of autonomy, but in fact plays a crucial role in preparing for something that is more autonomous to come along. But for obvious reasons the two cannot be simply equated and the activity of mere rule-following alone is certainly not going to lead to revolutionary changes. People around Galileo’s time, unlike Galileo, didn’t naturally perceive “pendulums” instead of stones. What, then, is the missing link or the ultimate driving force?

## I.3 Kuhn's Insight on Perception

If we look carefully at Kuhn’s description of the paradigm’s indispensability to perception itself, subtle clues emerge. “What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of such training there can only be, in William James’s phrase, “a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.”<fnref n="26" /> In establishing the autonomy of the scientific subject, Kuhn points to a compound condition. The relationship between the two necessary parts deserves further scrutiny. The very possibility of paradigm change suggests that the scientific object and the paradigm that seeks to define, describe, and explain it are in dynamic tension.

<footnote n="24">24. Certain slippages of the term’s (incommensurability) use might exist in Kuhn, See for instance Nelson W. Polsby’s analysis, “Social Science and Scientific Change: A Note on Thomas S. Kuhn’s Contribution,” *Annual Review of Political Science* 1, no. 1 (1998): 204.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">25. Hans-Georg Gadamer, *Truth and Method*, 2nd revised ed. (New York: Continuum, 2004), Part II, 272.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">26. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 113.</footnote>
Importantly, any single paradigm must be open-ended and cannot possibly exhaust all facets of nature that it seeks to categorize and rationalize. The scientist will inevitably run into resistance when she tries to exhaust all possible implications of the paradigm against nature. This feeds into the evolutionary view of scientific development that Kuhn outlines, which means that “the sciences are bound to diversify, not unify; to become more fragmented, and not more integrated.”<fnref n="27" /> Furthermore, the tension demonstrates the inadequacy of any paradigm; its inevitability encapsulates an important condition often overshadowed by the autonomy of the creative scientist — the autonomy of the scientific *object*.

If nature were completely malleable to and could be exhausted by scientists' theories, then there would be no need for radical rejection of the well-used, well-reognized paradigms. The fact that from time to time, parts of nature seem unruly and resistant to established theory or arbitrary revision shows the impossibility of its complete heteronomy. The psychological and practical difficulties a scientist goes througħ during periods of crisis while recognizing the need for new theories suggests a breakdown between the existing paradigm and the nature that it seeks to describe — the process may be inconvenient, costly or despair-eliciting.<fnref n="28" /> The push for change must come from a necessity, when the scientific and scholarly conscience can no lon ger appease the discrepancy between the existing theoretical account and the external events through accounts of margins of error or accident. Adjustments must be made; new vision and action are called for. In other words, positing meaningful incommen surability between different paradigms implies that theories cannot be purely cons tructed subjectively or willy-nilly; they must correspond to real-existing entities even though the latter elude full articulation through propositions or language. The way that a scientific object exerts its existence is at times mysterious, subtle, and amorphous, but always real.

<footnote n="27">27. Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, “Truth, Incoherence, and the Evolution of Science,” in *Interpreting Kuhn: Critical Essays*, ed. K. Brad Wray (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 202.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">28. See for instance: “Wolfgang Pauli, in the months before Heisenberg’s paper on matrix mechanics [...] wrote to a friend, ‘At the moment physics is again terribly confused. In any case, it is too difficult for me and I wish I had been a movie comedian or something of the sort and had never heard of physics.’” Quoted in *SSR*, 84.</footnote>
I.4 Incommensurability’s Implication

In Ruth Ronen's realist interpretation of Kuhn's notion of incommensurability between theories, she insists that "When one remains on the level of signifiers, incommensurability is in fact just a difference in meaning and can always be translated away. Incommensurability emerges when one acknowledges the representational aims of a language."<fnref n="29" /> For incommensurability to be real and substantial, it is necessary to move beyond the realm of mere signifiers. The signifier must butt heads with the signified — the autonomy of the object, or the thing “out there,” is palpable and fundamental in pushing for paradigm change. Therefore, the autonomous act of perception in the scientific subject is, on the one hand, *dependent* on the automatic immersion in the paradigm, and on the other, *inseparable* from the autonomy of the scientific object — the pendulum, in some sense, exerts itself as different from a swinging stone. However, recognizing and acknowledging the scientific object's claim on us is no easy task; becoming aware of anomalies is difficult given both the highly determining character of traditional or established practices and the inaccessibility of nature as it is. Kuhn's post-Darwinian Kantianism, made more explicit in his later writings, concedes a realm "like Kant's *Ding an sich* [...] ineffable, undescribable, undiscussable."<fnref n="30" /> How, then, does one come to see glimpses of the object's autonomy, or hear its silent murmurs?

As Kuhn highlights, the transition from the paradigm in crisis to a new one is not continuous in nature. It is emphatically not the case that scientists simply build on or modify the existing paradigmatic descriptions of nature. Nor do they just offer different *readings* of the same observed facts. "No ordinary sense of the term 'interpretation' fits these flashes of intuition through which a new paradigm is born."<fnref n="31" /> Like a revelation, the change is akin to a gestalt switch — it takes a specific kind of vision and viewing something as specifically different. We must take Kuhn seriously when he hesitates to liken gestalt switch completely with the recognition of anomaly and crisis or seeing under a different paradigm.<fnref n="32" /> Not only does the metaphor of a gestalt switch fail to do justice to the idea that the scientist does not see something *as something*, but simply

<footnote n="29">29. Ruth Ronen, "Incommensurability and Representation," *Applied Semiotics* 2, no. 5 (1998): 183.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">30. Kuhn, "The Road since Structure," in *The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview*, 2nd ed., ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago, IL: The Chicago University Press, 2000), 104.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">31. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 122.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">32. "That parallel can be misleading." Ibid., 85.</footnote>
sees it, or to the fact that the scientists do not have a choice or freedom in choosing
which object they are seeing (duck or rabbit); importantly, I believe, the metaphor does
not make explicit the autonomy of the object that is crucial in setting scientists up to
achieve a new perception.<fnref n="33" /> It is not entirely up to us, whether we are students of nature
or masters of the scientific discipline, to dictate laws or regulate ways of action for the
object. What needs to be highlighted is the sense of agency or dignity in the object; the
fact of its separation and independence from us remains to be emphasized.

Meanwhile, a different but related account, also sensitive to the interconnections
between automatism and autonomy, could help us see more clearly how the ackno-
wledgment of the autonomous object — though “ineffable, undescribable, undiscussa-
ble” — is arrived at. When discussing the “impulses” for his speaking of an artistic me-
dium as an “automatism” in *The World Viewed*, Stanley Cavell mentions that the effort
of this thinking is “to free the object from me, to give new ground for its *autonomy*.”<fnref n="34" />
What kinds of automatism is he referring to? The autonomy of which objects? And how
is this achieved? I now turn to Cavell’s reflections on automatism in art and more speci-
fically, film, to see how this might ultimately help us better understand the path from
automatism to autonomy and find an alternative visual example to the gestalt switch
for describing the revolutionary process of seeing and acknowledging difference.

Part II. Cavell and *The World Viewed*

II.1 Automatism: A Brief Overview

Cavell’s use of the term automatism, in Sean Keller’s words, “is complicated, perhaps irredeemably so, encompassing within it the mechanical automation of the motion-picture camera, the material techniques of painting and music, and the working methods of artists generally.”<fnref n="35" /> To this list we might also add: “a way of situating novel instances, thereby allowing them to be viewed as seemingly ‘happening on their own,’” a way of re-conceptualizing the notion of medium, the style and genres, the

<footnote n="33">33. Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">34. Cavell, *The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film*, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 108.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">35. Sean Keller, *Automatic Architecture: Motivating Form after Modernism* (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 151.</footnote>
works of art themselves, and possibly, the objects that the artworks and artists seek to represent or express.<fnref n="36" />

Cavell borrows the term “from surrealism and deploys [it] in new senses,” and his other two impulses for speaking of automatism at the end of the titular chapter (ch.14) give us a glimpse of the complexity and breadth of the use.<fnref n="37" /> The first intuition of automatism is that the medium is self-generating — once discovered, it compels new instances of this medium. In other words, the medium can be understood as automatism because the work, independent of the artist’s will or presence, continues to effect other instances, even though, in some sense, it will always be the same instance. The medium of painting, drama, or film, for instance, serves as an ever-replenishing source of inspiration that pushes contemporary and future artists to continually experiment with its existing and potential forms — in painting there could be works in the style of Leonardo da Vinci but also those of Jackson Pollock. The second impulse “codes the experience of the work of art as ‘happening of itself.’”<fnref n="38" /> Similar in spirit to Gadamer’s description of a genuine poem and its autonomy, the work “does not stand before us as a thing that someone employs to tell us something. It stands there equally independent of both reader and poet.”<fnref n="39" />

Despite the richness in the variety of its use, there are two major senses of automatism that *The World Viewed* delineates. First, there is the peculiar mode of artistic representation in cinema, different but in continuation with photographic automatism. What we conventionally refer to, when speaking of photographic automatism, is the mechanical manner in which an image of the world, or reality, is being reproduced. This is also what Cavell’s use of automatism starts with in *The World Viewed*.<fnref n="40" /> In line with André Bazin’s ontology of film, Cavell points out the significance in photography’s possibility of overcoming human interference: “Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting [...] by automatism, by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction.”<fnref n="41" /> The automa-

<footnote n="36">36. Martin Shuster “The Ordinariness and Absence of the World: Cavell’s Ontology of the Screen — Reading *The World Viewed*,” *MLN* 130, no. 5 (2015): 1085.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">37. Keller, *Automatic Architecture*, 151.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">38. Cavell, *The World Viewed*, 107.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">39. Gadamer, “On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for Truth,” in *The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 107.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">40. The concept is covered in Cavell, *The World Viewed*, ch. 2, 4, 11, and 14.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">41. Cavell, *The World Viewed*, 23.</footnote>
tism exercised in photography is inherited and incorporated into film.<fnref n="42" /> For the sake of clarity, let's refer to the first kind as “cinematic automatism,” and the second kind “general automatism,” which is formal and possibly subtends to every instance of art.<fnref n="43" />

“General automatism,” related to the first but different because of film’s specificity as a medium, is a broadened use of the concept to apply to artistic media in general, but especially modernist art.<fnref n="44" /> The second kind of automatism induces from the medium what Cavell refers to as “presentness.” The aesthetic achievement of modernist art lies in the creation of not just new works, but new media, as if, in R.M. Berry’s words, “the meaning of painting or theatre as such were happening here and now.”<fnref n="45" /> Modernist art emphatically discovers the powers and constraints that its medium offers, which were given as if automatically.

## II.2 Convention, Automatism and Modernist Art

Immediately following the exposition of these “intuitions” in *The World Viewed* is a chapter titled “Excursus: Some Modernist Painting.” This chapter, though in no way explicitly related to the ontology of film, nonetheless provides a crucial commentary and supplementary understanding to the mysterious impulses the previous chapter ends with. Harking back to Cavell’s reflections on aesthetic modernism and modernist literariness in his earlier essays such as “Music Discomposed,” “A Matter of Meaning It,” and “A Reading of Beckett’s *Endgame*,” this chapter is central to analyzing modernist aesthetic media at large. Specifically, tending to this chapter carefully has implications for our conception of convention and nature, the discussion of which in *The Claim of Reason* brings in Kuhn as an explicit interlocuter.<fnref n="46" />

<footnote n="42">42. Siegfried Kracauer, *Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality* (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 28. When discussing film’s properties, Kracauer claims that “[t]he basic properties are identical with the properties of photography. Film, in other words, is uniquely equipped to record and reveal physical reality and, thence, gravitates toward it.”</footnote>

<footnote n="43">43. Lisa Trahair prioritizes cinema’s “primary automatism,” therefore names general automatism as “secondary automatism” which “while ontically distinct are ontologically the same as the automatism of other arts.” See Trahair, “Serious Film: Cavell, Automatism and Michael Haneke’s *Caché*,” *Screening the Past* 38 (2013), http://www/screeningthepast.com/issue-38-cinematic-thinking/serious-film-cavell-automatism-and-michael-haneke%E2%80%99s-cache/.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">44. Cavell, *The World Viewed*, ch.14 “Automatism” and ch.15 “Excursus.”</footnote>

<footnote n="45">45. R. M. Berry, “Stanley Cavell’s Modernism,” in *Stanley Cavell: Philosophy, Literature, Criticism*, ed. James Loxley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 41.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">46. This will be explicated in more detail below. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy*. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), see ch. 5 “Natural and Conventional.”</footnote>
Consider the work of Jackson Pollock. Similar to scientific revolutions such as Lavoisier’s “discovery” of oxygen, Pollock’s revolutionary contribution to painting is not cumulative — not simply another instance of the same kind of painting as before, but a total rethinking of the medium. Gombrich describes Pollack as effectuating the triumph of modernism writing:

> Becoming impatient of conventional methods, he put his canvas on the floor and dripped, poured or threw his paint to form surprising configurations [...]. The resulting tangle of lines satisfies two opposing standards of twentieth-century art: the longing for childlike simplicity and spontaneity [...] and [...] the sophisticated interest in the problems of “pure painting.”<fnref n="47" />

With a work like *One*, its sheer size, the spontaneous outburst and apparent lack of premeditation all suggest a radical response to tradition and a new vision of the material of paint and canvas. His practice, or creation, is not a re-interpretation of the established rules or facts; instead, in Cavell’s analysis, “the mode is revelation.”<fnref n="48" /> The revelation brought forth is closely connected to acknowledgment in the sense that responding to modernist art requires the form of accepting or rejecting it as painting.

In pointing out the inadequacy of calling Pollock’s work “action painting,” Cavell speaks to Pollock’s “discovery” or “automatism.” What he finds remarkable is Pollock’s discovery of a fact of painting — its “total thereness” — that fact that it is “wholly open to you, absolutely in front of your senses, of your eyes, as no other form of art is.”<fnref n="49" /> The dripped dots and lines, like Beckett’s words in his dramas, “strew obscurities across our path and seem willfully to thwart comprehension; and then time after time we discover that their meaning has been missed only because it was so utterly bare — totally, therefore unnoticeably, in view.”<fnref n="50" /> Missing the meaning that was right there, or has been there all along due to willful ignorance or insatiable demand for other meaning, shows us that it is *we* who had been recalci-

<footnote n="47">47. E. H. Gombrich, *The Story of Art*, 6th ed. revised, expanded and redesigned (London and New York: Phaidon Press, 1995), 602-4.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">48. Cavell, *The World Viewed*, 109.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">49. Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">50. Cavell, *Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays*, updated ed. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 111.</footnote>
trant, blind and uncomprehending. Acknowledging the condition of painting, or
modernist literariness, as “total thereness,” “presentness,” or “hidden literality” is,
for Cavell, also to accept *our* presentness to it and its world. In the process of disco-
vering this automatism, something entirely new of the medium itself *and* its relati-
onship to the world is revealed to the artist. The revolutionary transformation that
the artists have brought to the field, or to the medium they work with, makes it
*seem* like their break with the discipline is so radical that it departs completely from
the past, or that their works have single-handedly created a world that was non-
existent before. But just like how normal science provides the methods and stan-
dards and the scope of the questions to be asked for science to function, there are,
in art as well, explicit and implicit rules governing artistic genres and conventions
that artists necessarily abide by or rebel against. In Keller's words, "It is crucial that
with an automatism the artist establishes a form of practice that, to some extent,
*proceeds on its own, independently of the artist*, that the artist creates a process in
which he or she is then caught up."<fnref n="51" /> Indeed, there are constitutional similarities in
how autonomous artists' or scientists' revolutionary endeavors depend on the au-
tomaticity in the established rules and paradigm.

By describing the task of the modern artist — “creating not a new instance of
his art but a new medium in it” — as “the task of establishing a new automatism,” Ca-
vell does not mean that the artistic products will be automatically assured excellence,
but that “in mastering a tradition one masters a range of automatisms upon which
the tradition maintains itself, and in deploying them one’s work is assured of a place
in that tradition.”<fnref n="52" /> The sense of “mastering” here is nuanced. Instead of being un-
derstood as domineering, what is required of the artist, in terms of mastery, is that
one must *pay attention to* and give *respect* not only the medium’s tradition and his-
tory, the circumstances or rules that make the medium possible and sustainable, but
also the idea of the medium itself — its inherent conditions and possibilities.

The ambiguity in “mastering” and its paradoxical proximity to “succumbing”
becomes even more poignant when Cavell discusses the intimate relationship
between nature and convention in *The Claim of Reason*. Building on Wittgenstein’s

<footnote n="51">51. Keller, *Automatic Architecture*, 152 (emphasis added).</footnote>

<footnote n="52">52. Cavell, *The World Viewed*, 104.</footnote>
notion of culture, which “does not fight against nature but brings it into being,” Cavell establishes that nature, or quasi-nature, is acquired in the process of socialization.<fnref n="53" /> That is to say, in contrast to Freudian insistence on the innate drives of sexuality and aggression which meet, resist, get incorporated into or altered by civilization, Cavell reads Wittgenstein as emphasizing the priority of forms of life, such as human speech, values, and cultural practices, in rendering nature visible, and in responding to its claims. The simple bifurcation of nature and culture is no longer viable, which requires higher attentiveness to each of them *and* their interrelatedness. Perhaps one does not necessarily stand opposed to the other: conventionality is not something that human beings decide upon *completely* arbitrarily or deliberately, but in its immediacy derives from nature’s demands. In Cavell’s words, “Only masters of a game, perfect slaves to that project, are in a position to establish conventions which better serve its essence.”<fnref n="54" /> In this light, we see that if mastering denotes an autonomous action, its subjugation to external rules and circumstances is in fact indispensable. The master-as-slave persona is the one that Cavell deems the person who brings about deep revolutionary changes—be it in philosophy, art or science. It is in this context that Cavell gives a reading of Kuhn’s *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*:

> that only a master of the science can accept a revolutionary change as a natural extension of that science; and that he accepts it, or proposes it, in order to maintain touch with the idea of that science, with its internal canons of comprehensibility and comprehensiveness, as if against the vision that, under altered circumstances, the normal progress of explanation and exception no longer seem to him to be science.<fnref n="55" />

What we can learn from these revolutionary moments, on Cavell’s account, seems to be two-fold. First, conventions, rules or established and agreed-upon criteria are vital for the possibility of expanding or changing them. Cavell elaborates that if the task of

<footnote n="53">53. Ursula Göricke, “Custom Is Our Nature: Cavell and Wittgenstein versus Freud,” in *From Virgin Land to Disney World: Nature and Its Discontents in the USA of Yesterday and Today*, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 71.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">54. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 121.</footnote>

<footnote n="55">55. Ibid.</footnote>
the modernist artist is to show that we have no *a priori* knowledge regarding what counts as an instance of their art, then this task, “or fate, would be incomprehensible, or unexercisable, apart from the existence of objects which, prior to any new effort, we do count as such instances as a matter of course; apart from there being conditions which our criteria take to define such objects.”<fnref n="56" /> “A matter of course” suggests the habitual and automatic nature of our dependence on the established conventions, thereby rendering them requisite for any ground-breaking changes.

Second, revolutions come about because these thinkers, artists and scientists have a devotion to the idea of that discipline and wanted to guard it from lapsing into falseness, insincerity, or indolence. Importantly for Cavell, that idea, or ideal, is not limited to the discipline *per se*; it must have similar bearings on the self, the world, or the relation between the two.<fnref n="57" /> Even though Cavell starts by referring to the autonomy of the *art object* in the “Excursus” — be it in the sense that the work is completed, “done, given over, the object declared separate from its maker, autonomous,” or the sense that it is the canvas and paint and idea realizing itself (such as in Pollock or Louis’s *Unfurleds*) — he eventually arrives at autonomy in a different dimension, the autonomy of nature:<fnref n="58" />

> But to speak of an automatism which admits a sometimes overpowering beauty is a way of characterizing nature. The works of Pollock, Louis, Noland, and Olitski achieve in unforeseen paths an old wish of romanticism—to imitate not the *look* of nature, but its conditions, the possibilities of knowing nature at all and of locating ourselves in a world...For the work of the modernists I have in mind, the conditions present themselves as nature’s autonomy, self-sufficiency, laws unto themselves.<fnref n="59" />

<footnote n="56">56. Similar comments can be found in Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” in *Must We Mean What We Say*, 219, and *The World Viewed*, 106, where the modernist painting proves to us that “we do not know a priori what painting has to do or be faithful to in order to remain painting,” and that “what a painter or poet or composer has to achieve in his painting or poetry or music is not a landscape or sonnet or fugue, but the idea of his art as such.” Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 123.</footnote>

<footnote n="57">57. See for instance Cavell’s claim in *The World Viewed*, 22: “Apart from the wish for selfhood (hence the always simultaneous granting of otherness as well), I do not understand the value of art. Apart from this wish and its achievement, art is exhibition.”</footnote>

<footnote n="58">58. Cavell, *The World Viewed*, 111.</footnote>

<footnote n="59">59. Ibid., 113 (emphasis in original).</footnote>
In inventing new automatisms, the modernists faced head-on the crisis of no longer
knowing which forms worked or how to sustain the tradition in which they found
themselves. For Cavell, the modernists' autonomous search for new criteria — so as to
stay faithful to the *idea* of the art — does not necessitate a departure from Romantic
metaphysics, despite the fact that Modernist artists and Romantic poets understand
and express nature differently. Specifically, the modernists' art lets nature's autonomy
shine forth — “not a return *to* nature but the return *of* it,” highlighting the reality and
the weight of nature rather than that of us.<fnref n="60" /> Paradoxically, through human art, the
sense of nature can be perceived as what Keekok Lee formulates as the “ontological
contrast to human artifacts.”<fnref n="61" /> We realize that nature's self-sustaining and self-genera-
ting quality constitutes its autonomy by being made co-present with nature.

How is this achieved? How does automatism in art give us “the release of natu-
re from our private holds” and therefore the autonomy of the natural object?<fnref n="62" /> Exa-
mining Cavell’s conception of cinematic automatism, which he discusses in detail,
sheds light on this question. Numerous other important thinkers have devoted parts
of their investigations of cinema to understand the power of automatism. However,
as Lisa Trahair points out, Cavell, along with others — Benjamin, Bazin, Deleuze and
Rancière — is “the one who most explicitly takes it [automatism] on and makes it the
fulcrum on which his entire argument about the ontology of cinema pivots.”<fnref n="63" /> What
needs to be emphasized, but is often overlooked, is that within cinematic automatism,
there are *two* separate yet connected automatisms — the automatism of photography
and that of projection. These two substrates together constitute the material mecha-
nism of *filmmaking* and *film-viewing*, and exercise automatism’s power in cultiva-
ting a more sensitive vision that recognizes the object’s autonomy.

II.3 Cinematic Automatism: Photography and Projection

The first form of automatism (of photography) within cinematic automatism is expli-
cit and widely discussed. Bazinian realism, a starting point for Cavell, values the art

<footnote n="60">60. Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">61. Keekok Lee, “Is Nature Autonomous?,” in *Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature: Theory and Practice*, ed. Thomas Heyd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 59.</footnote>

<footnote n="62">62. Cavell, *The World Viewed*, 114.</footnote>

<footnote n="63">63. Trahair, “Being on the Outside: Cinematic Automatism in Stanley Cavell’s *The World Viewed*,” *Film-Philosophy* 18, no. 1 (2014): 128.</footnote>
screening.”<fnref n="68" /> However, the quick, additional inclusion of the nature of *screening* belies a simmering thought that he doesn’t fully develop until later chapters (“Automatism” and “Excursus”). There is something exceptional in how cinema automatically *projects* the filmed world for us to view, while keeping us at a distance from it, and this specific automatism most resembles how Cavell conceptualizes automatism in modernist art. In order to see the connection, we have to appreciate the “magic” of film: “How do movies reproduce the world magically? Not by literally presenting us with the world, but by permitting us to view it *unseen*.”<fnref n="69" /> The key concept of “unseenness,” mentioned here, is crucial to our understanding of the power of film’s automatism (in projection), and it is easily overlooked.<fnref n="70" />

## II.4 Unseen-ness and Invisibility

Our wish for invisibility has a long history, Cavell points out. The almighty invisible ring alone finds its recounts in Plato, Wagner, Tolkien, and others. What underlies this desire constitutes an ethical problem regarding justice — would we act justly even when we do not have to be held responsible for the consequences of our actions? If by chance we found a ring that could make us invisible, would we, like Gyges, immediately contrive to seduce the queen, slay the king, and take the kingdom?<fnref n="71" /> The desire for invisibility seems to take a different shape now in the modern age, as Cavell suggests: “this is not a wish for power over creation [...] but a wish not to need power, not to have to bear its burdens.”<fnref n="72" /> Our relationship with the world has taken on a more contemplative and theoretical stance, leading to inaction enveloped in anxiety. The voyeuristic activity in cinema speaks to our desire for privacy and anonymity. It is not that we want the power of invisibility to do

<footnote n="68">68. Ibid., 73.</footnote>

<footnote n="69">69. Ibid., 40 (emphasis added).</footnote>

<footnote n="70">70. Both Trahair’s main explication on Cavell’s four “meditations” of automatism and Shuster’s article offer helpful and excellent analyses of the concept, but they give the idea of “unseen” marginal attention, and both highlight the importance of “the world” instead of the fact, nature, and form of *projection* within cinema.</footnote>

<footnote n="71">71. See Plato, *The Republic*, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 38. Glaucon, in telling the story, intends to prove Socrates wrong, who insists that it is to our advantage to be just and disadvantage to be unjust, no matter what the circumstances are. But Glaucon makes the case that no one is just willingly, and once laws and conventions do not apply, or when fear of punishment is out of the question, people will go about and do wrong to others when it is of advantage to themselves. And if a man were to take hold of such a ring and “were never willing to do any injustice and didn’t lay his hands on what belongs to others, he would seem most wretched to those who were aware of it [...] and most foolish too.”</footnote>

<footnote n="72">72. Cavell, *The World Viewed*, 40.</footnote>
active injustice, but more so that we can “do nothing in the face of tragedy, or [...] laugh at the follies of others.”<fnref n="73" />

As Cavell elaborates later in *WV*, “Our condition has become one in which our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling unseen. We do not so much look at the world as look *out* at it, from behind the self. It is our fantasies, now all but completely thwarted and out of hand, which are unseen and must be kept unseen. As if we could no longer hope that anyone might share them.”<fnref n="74" /> The isolation of the self and the fear of the impossibility of interpersonal communication shape this new form of “feeling unseen.” Herein lies the crux of our desire for invisibility: to be invisible is not to be absent, but present and not *seen*. To be *unseen* assumes an *other*, to which/whom I appear and matter. It implies that there is always someone who *could* see me or might want to see me. And it goes reciprocally: wanting to be “unseen” is to deprive, or avoid, the possibility of this interaction, this impact. The desire to be invisible belies a desire not to bear responsibility, to avoid consequences or judgment. David Foster Wallace’s description of TV watching is kindred in its spirit:

> For the television screen affords access only one-way. A psychic ball-check valve. We can see Them; They can’t see Us. We can relax, unobserved, as we ogle. I happen to believe this is why television also appeals so much to lonely people [...]. Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans.<fnref n="75" />

The spectator’s distance from the projected world is similar to the outsided-ness of the camera to the (pro-filmic) world, but more deeply felt. The poignant separation between us and the filmed world is embodied in the film screen — “a barrier.”<fnref n="76" /> The world we see is nothing if not real, yet absent. Whereas we are nothing but present, yet invisible. It is the separation and barrier between each other that arouses loneliness; it is the skeptical conclusion, viz. an “inability to know” — I of the world and the

<footnote n="73">73. Ibid., 26.</footnote>

<footnote n="74">74. Ibid., 102.</footnote>

<footnote n="75">75. Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in *A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again* (New York, Boston, and London: Back Bay Books and Little, Brown and Company, 1998), 22. Later in the essay Wallace cites Cavell directly. The influence seems indeed direct.</footnote>

<footnote n="76">76. Cavell, *The World Viewed*, 24.</footnote>
world of me — that fosters pessimism in our relationship with the world and with each other. We get cozy in the darkness of our subjectivity by keeping our fantasies to ourselves out of fear that others won't understand them or might use them to exploit our vulnerability. Our unseen-ness in front of the theater screen is like wearing a ring of Gyges rendered dull.

But this separation does not warrant a tragic ending at the outset. In highligh-
ting, embracing, and acknowledging this condition of separateness, cinematic auto-
matism uncannily — “magically” — helps to overcome the anxiety engendered by the
ineliminable distance. Through film, nature is now “found,” not created. Cavell, in
delineating the medium specificity of the photographic method, goes on to say that
“To maintain conviction in our connection with reality, to maintain our presentness,
painting accepts the recession of the world. Photography maintains the presentness
of the world by accepting our absence from it.”⁷⁷ The automatism in photography has
a different mode of establishing conviction or encouraging our faith in the external
reality, compared to other art forms — put crudely, if “presentness” shows traces of
agency and freedom, then painting (especially traditional painting) preserves *our* au-
tonomy, while photography presents the *world’s*. We see the world’s independence,
the validity of which needs no categories of a Kantian subject.

Film continues this project of foregrounding the givenness of the world, initia-
ted by photographic automatism, and furthers it by helping us test, resist, and rethink
this givenness through *projecting* the world *automatically* to us in moving images.
The world's existence on the screen reminds us that its reality is not subjectively crea-
ted through our mind or out of our words; moreover, its mystery and out-of-reach-
ness instruct us that to read its autonomy adequately is no easier task than under-
tanding or achieving our own autonomy. Film's education and redemptive power lies
in a re-examination of distance and separation, which does not necessarily lead to an
epistemological impossibility, inducing either despair or a vengeful desire to domina-
te and manipulate, although it may be likely to do so.

The distance that cannot be bridged between us and the filmed world in fact
grounds the possibility of genuine viewing, which receives, processes, words, and acts
on the claims that whatever being within our view makes upon us. Only at a certain
distance can we put the object and the ground it stands on fully in view without crop-
ping out its head or toe. Our ethical relationship to the world is not fundamentally a
matter of knowing; our separation should not be an excuse that further fosters our
moral stupidity and obtuseness. The automatism that is possible in film's world-pro-
jection is akin to what modernist art is capable of for Cavell, which "reasserts that
however we may choose to parcel or not to parcel nature among ourselves, nature is
held — we are held by it — only in common. *Its declaration of my absence and of na-
ture's survival of me* puts me in mind of origins, and shows me that I am astray."<fnref n="78" />
Viewing it, without "altering it illegitimately, against itself," can establish our connec-
tion with the world and others.<fnref n="79" />

Notably, the world on screen does not (usually) look back at us, but it always
could. The automatic display of our being denied to the filmic world while longing to
be part of it gives rise to a renewed perception of separateness, which does not excuse
callousness or cruelty but lets us see that the objects in front of our eyes can be freed
from our grip. Putting the world at a distance inspires in us the realization that we
can see the world passing as it is, or let it happen of its own accord. The world was
there without us present, and it will continue to be when we are not. It survives and
outlasts us.

A specific cinematic example might be helpful here to show how this is achieved.
The scene selected below unveils the essential profundity in how various automatisms
— the mechanical reproduction in the photographic automatism, the automatism in
projecting and viewing the world, and the “automaticity” in animals — could re-orient
our sight and lead us to see that our blindness to the beings in front of us translates into
violence, leading to their pain and suffering, and that distance between us does not
hinder but even contributes to understanding them as autonomous.

Section III. Bresson's Balthazar

Robert Bresson famously deemed automatism the essence of the natural mode of
existence. He terms his actors “models,” who are the performers who lay bare their

<footnote n="78">78. Ibid., 114 (emphasis added).</footnote>

<footnote n="79">79. Ibid., 102.</footnote>
soul in front of the camera: “Models who have become automatic [...] their relations with the objects and persons around them will be right, because they will not be thought.”<fnref n="80" /> Bresson’s models, importantly, are neither “actors” nor “parts” — they need neither “staging” nor “directing” and are “BEING instead of SEEMING.”<fnref n="81" /> His diligence in cultivating automaticity in his models naturally extends to involving animals, who, one assumes, by nature cannot act to the same degree as human beings but more simply *be*. Au Hasard, *Balthazar* (1967) follows the titular character’s entire life from birth to death. Almost at random, the donkey Balthazar is given to one owner after another, escorted to one setting and escapes another; but no master plan is explained, he is at one moment baptized, caressed, worshipped, and praised as a genius, at others mocked, beaten, labored or considered a nuisance.

Situated at the diegetic midpoint of this dramatic piece is a striking series of shot/reverse-shots portraying the donkey Balthazar exchanging looks with four other fellow circus animals. Its temporal centrality buttresses its symbolic significance for understanding the film, though this silent section defies immediate comprehension. In this radically non-anthropocentric sequence, the technique that is often used to depict human conversation — a fundamentally linguistic form of communication — is used to give us one minute of absence of verbal speech, or explicit human perspective. This sequence of shot/reverse-shot of the animals’ looking shatters the human/animal binary and transcends it from within, since usually in shot/reverse-shots we see humans looking at each other or at other animals. Laura McMahon, evoking Derrida, observes that in this scene that “Certainly something *wholly other* appears to be at stake” — that we encounter a shared finitude that we can never own, and the sense of commonality arrived at refers to but exceeds frameworks of human understanding.<fnref n="82" /> The triangulation between the camera’s eye, Balthazar’s eyes and the fellow animals’ eyes compels us to take on a visual education.

This sequence opens with a medium-long shot of Balthazar standing still, while the circus worker loads more hay on top of its back cart. A tinge of resistance from Balthazar can already be sensed when the worker leads him to the next position. The

<footnote n="80">80. Robert Bresson, *Notes on Cinematography*, trans. Jonathan Griffin (New York and London: Urizen Books, 1977), n. 32.</footnote>

<footnote n="81">81. Ibid., n. 1 (capitalized in original).</footnote>

<footnote n="82">82. Laura McMahon, *Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis* (London: Legenda, 2012), 56.</footnote>
exchange of looks starts with the circus worker's leaving the frame as we hear roaring of a tiger. Balthazar diverts his eyes slightly (fig. 1), and the scene cuts to a tiger, lying on his belly in an iron cage, with chains dangling in the air (fig. 2). The shadows of the iron bars dissolve and merge with his beautiful furry stripes. One of the iron bars blocks exactly his left eye. He looks at Balthazar, paws in front, mouth slightly open, sits absolutely still save the breathing motion in the chest. The shot/reverse-shot is repeated and this exchange between them is shown to us twice. Similarly, Balthazar looks at a polar bear (fig. 3), an ape, an elephant, in their respective cages, silent or raucous. But only the first two exchanges have two reverse-shots while the last two were given *one* reverse-shot. What marks the difference between the last two and the first? What type of progression is suggested by this subtle numerical change?

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1: Balthazar looks at the circus animals.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2: First exchange – tiger.</figcaption></figure>

"There is a logic here, but what is it?" Brian Price in his analysis continues to observe about the ordering and structure of the shots, "What might be passing through that structure is a recognition: the coming together of beings united in suffering."<fnref n="83" /> How the recognition is arrived at and how this *togetherness* is portrayed are of the utmost importance. When we get to the ape (in the third exchange) — the only animal in the sequence that makes sounds upon seeing Balthazar — we see the dangling chain foregrounded. This highlights a double imprisonment since he is already *within* the cage — as if his expressiveness is a threat, his likeness to us a menace. This exchange contains a quick and subtle gesture: the ape looks directly into the camera, however briefly (fig. 4). We realize the conventional shot/reverse-shots established in

<footnote n="83">83. Brian Price, *Neither God nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics*, new ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 82.</footnote>
the first two exchanges have been possibly replaced by a point-of-view shot of Balthazar. Before, we assume and understand that Balthazar and the circus animals are looking at each other; now, we view the scene as Balthazar views it.

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3: Second exchange – polar bear.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4: Third exchange – ape looking into the camera.</figcaption></figure>

The last exchange confirms the subtle but mysterious shift in perception and remains the most striking. If this were taken as a shot/reverse-shot, it would have broken the 180-rule — we see indeed both Balthazar’s and the elephant’s left eye (fig. 5 and 6). Both the camera position and the fact that the elephant looks directly into the camera suggests that, again, we are taking up Balthazar’s point-of-view. The ape’s expressiveness is replaced with complete silence on the elephant’s part; its indeciperability is absolute. It is the most extreme close-up so far — for both Balthazar and the elephant. In fact, what we have are two eyes, *tout court*. The close-up of the elephant’s eye, with its surrounding area, looks like a wrinkled old human’s eye: a circus animal now appears almost indistinguishable from us. Its head fills up almost the entirety of the frame; no trace of its imprisonment is visible on the screen.

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5: Fourth exchange – Close-up on Balthazar’s left eye.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 6: Fourth exchange – Close-up on the elephant’s left eye.</figcaption></figure>
We feel astonished by the sequence because, as Arnaud puts it, “the reciprocity of looks constitutes for us an indecipherable abutment: that they have an exchange, a recognition that testifies to the thoughtfulness or the screams of animals, is perceptible but always inaccessible.”<fnref n="84" /> This astonishment can also be understood as resulting from a shift in vision, however (un)conscious we are of it. Looking at the fellow caged animals through Balthazar’s perspective — a specific vision that is grounded in the animal’s world — gives us a world *observationally incommensurable* to the one seen through human eyes. We now see what we couldn’t before — that these animals have a life of their own, and their dignity is untainted by human manipulation or use. In foregrounding the animal’s point-of-view, it reminds us of our blindness and crudity, an illiteracy in reading living beings’ bodies or souls. It leads us to see the world differently, or in Kuhn’s theorization, a different world.

The possibility/mechanism of this shift of vision, where the autonomy of the other becomes primary, can be further illuminated by Cavell’s reading of the revolutionary moment described by Kuhn.<fnref n="85" /> Cavell highlights, on the one hand, the importance of the scientist/artist’s intellectual “conscience” in realizing the idea and possibility of the discipline/medium, and on the other, the inherent autonomy of the depicted object. In this case, Bresson’s innovation in staging the camera-eye to assume a non-human animal’s vision, however subtle, is guided by, and underscores, the inadequacy of how the animals have been viewed. The sequence teaches us the indispensability of, in Christine Korsgaard’s words, “getting animals in view” and getting *others* in view, in the sense of not only seeing what they are, but also realizing that other beings’ lives are as just important to them as ours is to us.<fnref n="86" /> Through Balthazar’s active looking, we see the animals and recognize their condition. They appear as different from mere tools for people’s merry-making or money-making; instead, they are inscrutable, dignified, putting our manipulation and cruelty to shame.

Furthermore, the way Balthazar is brought to look at the four animals resembles how film audience looks at “a succession of automatic world projections.” A ge-

<footnote n="84">84. Philippe Arnaud, *Robert Bresson* (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1986), 62.</footnote>

<footnote n="85">85. See II.2 above.</footnote>

<footnote n="86">86. Christine Korsgaard, “Getting Animals in View,” *Point Magazine* 6 (2022), https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/getting-animals-view/.</footnote>
nuine recognition of the distance between the onlooker and the object that *could* look back is one of the most crucial lessons we can learn from Balthazar and his fellow companions. These animals occupy different sides and separate frames, yet their unity of a shared suffering is realized despite the barriers of the cages or the discreteness of the shots or cuts. This sequence, significantly, ends with *seeing* as such — a speechless vision that perceives each other’s confinement. It makes palpable the apparatus and essential condition of film-*viewing* — explicated in Cavell’s account — being given views of the world on screen but kept at a distance from it. A true acknowledgement of that distance revises how we habitually receive the phenomenological separateness in the self-other or human-animal distinction. What we historically take as a necessity in the said distinction or hierarchy, manifested in the cruelty or caliousness in inter-personal ethical understanding, or the captivity of the non-human animals in a human society, might be tested and resisted. An alternative can be imagined. “A relation of co-exposure and finitude — ungraspably shared with animals” becomes palpable.<fnref n="87" />

Exuding an uncanniness that is strange, *other*, difficult to interpret, this sequence shows us, as Kuhn points out, that learning to adjust to a different paradigm can be demanding and takes time.<fnref n="88" /> The perceived otherness expresses autonomy, which is precarious, easily subjugated to contingent or overpowering forces. It can be inaccessible but remains real and recognizable. The shift of vision, given to us through what McMahon terms as the “patient, durational aesthetic of the film,” cultivates “a mode of ethical responsiveness, which attends [...] to a life lived rather than displayed and to the unfolding of an intimate history rather than a public spectacle.”<fnref n="89" /> To see the “unfolding” requires radical perspective shifts, which cinematic automatism materializes; the reassessment of the condition and meaning of our separateness helps us notice, even at a distance, or precisely because of that distance, the object’s suffering, no matter how quiet it is.

<footnote n="87">87. McMahon, *Cinema and Contact*, 59.</footnote>

<footnote n="88">88. For instance, see Kuhn, *SSR*, 53, that having awareness of anomalies is difficult; and 150-51, both Darwin and Planck’s comments suggest the difficulty of their new theories being accepted by older generation, and that there is often life-long resistance to new paradigms.</footnote>

<footnote n="89">89. McMahon, “Dead Funny: Laughter, Life, and Death in Philibert’s *Nénette* and *Un animal, des animaux*,” in *The Zoo and Screen Media: Images of Exhibition and Encounter* (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 257.</footnote>
Conclusion

Cavell and Kuhn share a similar commitment to the path from automatism to auto-
nomy. Underlying both accounts of the co-presence and inter-relatedness of automa-
tism and autonomy is an emphasis on seeing plurality and difference in scientific,
aesthetic, and ethical encounters. To be able to perceive anomalies and scientific cri-
ses, the “narrow and rigid” textbook-based scientific education *alone* is inadequate.<fnref n="90" />
In “truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceeding to
supply a substitute for what they have eliminated,” this education makes it difficult
for students of science — or of philosophy, understood as “the education of grow-
nups” — to understand historical scientific theories or discoveries on their own
terms.<fnref n="91" />,<fnref n="92" /> Of course, this is not to suggest a major overhaul of the conventional and
established scientific training or its progressivist understanding, which provides stu-
dents with “tools of the profession, both conceptual and instrumental,” and “supplies
community members with a past which is not foreign but domestic, which can be as-
similated directly, and which can serve as a platform from which to move ahead.”<fnref n="93" />
As this paper shows, the automatism present in these practices is in fact crucial to the
autonomous “discoveries” of the revolutionary moments. But these discoveries can-
not be divorced from a vision sensitive to the observed object — its agency, indepen-
dence, autonomy, and how it might be different from how it has been seen. This visi-
on, essential in both science and ethics, requires genuine historical consciousness. It
can also be honed by reading/viewing works of art and giving ourselves to them. As
Cavell puts it, “we are at the mercy of what the medium captures of us, and of what it
chooses, or refuses, to hold for us.”<fnref n="94" /> Film, specifically, satisfies our desire to be unse-
en by the world by projecting it at a distance from us; but instead of exonerating our
responsibilities for the viewed world, film restores our sense of obligation to it by pre-
senting the other as *other*, as autonomous. We realize that it has its own laws that
might be inscrutable to us, that we cannot know it as it knows itself, but it nonethe-
less needs acknowledgement, attention, interpretation, and action from us. The can-

<footnote n="90">90. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 165.</footnote>

<footnote n="91">91. Ibid., 137.</footnote>

<footnote n="92">92. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 125.</footnote>

<footnote n="93">93. Kuhn, *The Last Writings*, 88. I am grateful to Brad Tabas for pointing me to this passage.</footnote>

<footnote n="94">94. Cavell, *The World Viewed*, 126.</footnote>
didness of the camera and the automatism in projection constitute possibilities of the medium and teach us to “let the world happen, to let its parts draw attention to themselves according to their natural weight.”<fnref n="95" />

<footnote n="95">95. Ibid., 25. I would like to thank Brian Price for his incredibly helpful comments at earlier drafts of this paper. Special thanks are due to Luke Lea for the productive conversations on Kuhn and various editorial suggestions. I am also deeply grateful to Brad Tabas and Paul Jenner for their patience and kindness in all the constructive criticism, edits, and feedback.</footnote>
6. The Claim of Reason in a Planetary Age:
Martian Objects and Ordinary Language

BRAD TABAS

Naming appears as a queer connection of a word with an object.
— And you really get such a queer connection when the philo-
sopher tries to bring out the relation between name and thing
by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name or
even the word “this” innumerable times. For philosophical
problems arise when language goes on holiday.<fnref n="1" />

WITTGENSTEIN, *Philosophical Investigations*

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets
them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to
be the most unhandsome part of our condition.<fnref n="2" />

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, *Essays & Lectures*

Geology was called a descriptive science, and with its pitted
outwash plains and drowned rivers, its hanging tributaries and
starved coastlines, it was nothing if not descriptive. It was a
fountain of metaphor — of isostatic adjustments and degraded
channels, of angular unconformities and shifting divides, of
rootless mountains and bitter lakes.<fnref n="3" />

JOHN MCPHEE, *Basin and Range*

<footnote n="1">1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, *Philosophical Investigations*, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, MA: Blackwell 2003), 24.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, *Essays & Lectures*, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Viking, 1983), 473.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. John McPhee, *Basin and Range* (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981), 25.</footnote>
1) After Kuhn After Cavell

This essay is a creative inheritance destined for a volume celebrating the ongoing re-
levance of Thomas Kuhn and Stanley Cavell. But if it is inspired by, and converses
with them, it is neither a reconstruction of their conversations nor a textual exegesis,
but an attempt to reflect critically on the rationality of Earthlings in the Anthropoce-
ne while drawing orientation from Kuhn and Cavell. Arguably, such philosophical
modernism is in spirit intensely Cavellian. Pursuing Emersonian self-reliance, this
paper aims to make “philosophy yet another kind of problem for itself.”<fnref n="4" /> Therefore,
this text is not Kuhnian. It couldn’t be — Kuhn claimed that his “vocation” was to be a
“historian of science,” a member of the “American Historical, not the American Philo-
sophical, Association.”<fnref n="5" /> But in its concern with science and history, and above all in
its acceptance that our current historical context, the Anthropocene, cannot be
thought outside of paradigmatic shifts within the history of science, notably the deve-
lopment of planetary science as a comparative and thus inter-planetary model for
understanding our own terrestrial condition, what follows is Kuhnian.<fnref n="6" />

More concretely, this paper is about screened objects on Mars and their stan-
ding in ordinary language. It is about the scope and reach of everyday words in an age
in which technoscience has enabled us to view worlds that are not our world. Our or-
dinary language is to an almost unsounded degree planetary. It is a deep expression
of our terrestrial forms of life. As Cavell once put it: “whether or not there is a man in
the moon, and whether or not there is life, or we put life, on the moon, it is analyti-
cally true that men do not inhabit the moon.”<fnref n="7" /> But if what we are inclined to call rea-
son in ordinary language is the reason of Earthlings, that does not mean that we are

<footnote n="4">4. Cavell, *Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays* (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 74.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5. Thomas S. Kuhn, *The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change* (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 3. His posture on this point comes across slightly differently in his just-published posthumous work, though even there, where he more prominently presents himself as doing philosophy, he remains deeply wedded to history, writing that his concern is “primarily philosophical” but then immediately clarifying that what interests him in philosophy is “the nature of the historical process or the nature of human knowledge.” Kuhn, *The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science*, ed. Bojana Mladenović (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 87.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6. The clearest articulation of the connection between our planetary age and the interplanetary dimension of Earth System Science is found in Dipesh Chakrabarty, *The Climate of History in a Planetary Age* (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2021).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7. Cavell, *The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film* (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 105.</footnote>
condemned to silence or blindness when confronted with objects on the Moon or Mars, nor that we can make no pretentions to universality within our expressive rationality. Only that these zones of univocity across planets are linguistically local: there is simply more of Earth in our language and in our thought than we might acknowledge before submitting the world in our words to critique.<fnref n="8" /> Doing that, performing a critique of the place of the planet in our expressive reason, is what will occupy us in the following.

Returning to Cavell, this essay is about viewing Mars televisually. It emerges from a strange reading of *The World Viewed*. This discussion of Martian objects is about what happens when we screen a world. But Mars is not a Hollywood star. The screening of Mars is mostly done for planetary scientists. That world screened is not the world that Cavell meant when he wrote about movies. To classify and make sense of what is screened in terms of the geological history of Mars is a question for science, and yet thinking reflectively about the ethics of using everyday terrestrial words in this practice is a philosophical concern. It is in this space of tension between historical practices of making sense of the planetary system and making sense of the linguistic means by which we are making sense of that planet, and so are conditioning how we imagine and project our future selves with respect to that planet using our language, that ethical concerns with alterity arise. For Mars is a world viewed, but it is not our world viewed. When we view it, we project presence, we think that what is there exists in ontologically the same way as tables and chairs, and thus sometimes feel as if we can talk about being there as if that were equivalent to being here. But at what cost?

<footnote n="8">8. One of the attractions of this particular and paradigmatic case is the ways in which it allows a defense and clarification of recognizably Cavellian and Kuhnian postures, in particular with respect to realism and the epistemic justifications of truth claims, that seem to stand outside of the norms of science and technology studies, film studies, and (to be honest) normative practice in the humanities and interpretative social sciences. So far as I can tell Cavell did not address these questions head-on, though his students, for example William Rothman and Toril Moi, have done an excellent job of tracing out the fault lines. Kuhn, on the other hand, wrote extensively against what he mostly called the strong program and the identification of his own work with the strong program, though it is not clear, given the direction but also the unfinished state of his last work, that he himself felt that he had found the right arguments to defend his posture. Though this is a war that will mostly here be waged only implicitly or in the footnotes, I would hope that readers will understand this text as illustrating a form of scholarly practice very much at odds with the current anti-realist norms. For helpful critiques of those norms within the humanities, see: William Rothman, Marian Keane, and Cavell, *Reading Cavell's The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film* (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2000); Toril Moi, *Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell* (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2017).</footnote>
## 2) Extraordinary Ordinary Language Philosophy

"Philosophical problems arise when language *goes on holiday*," when language *feiert*, celebrates, goes on vacation, ceases working.

It is easy to take Wittgenstein as saying philosophers ought to police extraordinary uses of language. From which it might follow that philosophical problems are nothing but "houses of cards," "plain nonsense," "bumps that the understanding has got by running up against the limits of language," and the "bewitchment of our understanding by means of our language."<fnref n="9" /> Thus this observation about words going on holiday resonates with the quietism of the *Tractatus*, and Carnap's critique of Heidegger, with his reproach to metaphysicians that they build philosophical problems out of "meaningless terms" (*bedeutungslosen Wörter*), ordinarily (*gewöhnlich*) words taken in metaphorical senses.<fnref n="10" /> The cure for philosophical problems would thus be silence or positivism.

But there are other readings of this phrase. Following Cavell, we could take
what the tradition has ordinarily called philosophy, with its explorations into the
epistemic concerns arising from "generic objects," which are improbable situations
expressed in vacationing words, as missing out on the real depth of philosophical
problems.<fnref n="11" /> Leading (*führen*) words back from metaphysical to ordinary use (*alltagli-
che Verwendung*) would then not abolish philosophy and its problems, it would only
rid it of its alienated avatars.<fnref n="12" /> It would bring philosophy closer to "our lives."<fnref n="13" />
Within the philosophy of philosophy, ordinary language philosophy thus appears as
"second order philosophy," a gestalt shift within what we call doing philosophy, but
one which finally follows the same aversive regularity that has always characterized
philosophy.<fnref n="14" /> But this new philosophy, in a way announced by Emerson, would inde-
ed be re-oriented:

<footnote n="9">9. Wittgenstein, *Philosophical Investigations*, 52 and 54.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10. Rudolf Carnap, *Scheinprobleme in der Philosophie und andere metaphysikkritische Schriften*, ed. Thomas Mormann (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2004), 95.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11. For example, Cavell, *The Claim of Reason : Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy* (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 56 and 141.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12. Wittgenstein, *Philosophical Investigations*, 55.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13. Cavell, *Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays*, 167.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14. Wittgenstein, *Philosophical Investigations*, 53-54.</footnote>
I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Ara-
bia; what is Greek art, or Provençal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I ex-
plore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day,
and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know
the meaning of?<fnref n="15" />

Within the horizon of this turn towards the ordinary, another reading of language
going on holiday becomes possible. What happens when ordinary language goes on
what we would ordinarily call a holiday? What happens when a terrestrial language
goes to another planet? What happens to language, to a philosophy rooted in what we
ordinarily say and mean in one world or planet, whose words we have learned and
taught in "certain contexts," and based on the expectation, and our expectation of
others, to be able to project those words "into further contexts," when we find that we
have strangely gotten ahead of ourselves in feeling that we have encompassed our
world in our words, encountering a context which in its estrangement from the nor-
mal course of our historical experience prompts us to ask, with the skeptic, whether
in this alien context we really do or ought to acknowledge that we have a right to say
what would ordinarily say?<fnref n="16" />

Let us take our words on such a journey. This picture was taken on Feb. 24,
2022 by the Mars Curiosity Rover:

<figure><img src="image_10.png" /><figcaption>*Nasa Curiosity Rover Photo.*</figcaption></figure>

<footnote n="15">15. Emerson, *Essays & Lectures*, 68.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16. Cavell, *Must We Mean What We Say?*, 52.</footnote>
I take it that everyone, and not only professional students of Mars, sees things in this picture. I take it that this is only minimally a function of our gaze being theoretically enriched or informed by the special conceptual knowledge that Janet Vertesi calls “professional vision.”<fnref n="17" /> Which is not to say that there is nothing “theoretical,” nothing tied to philosophy of mind in our being able to pick out that there are things in this photo rather than nothing. But it is to say, with the last Kuhn, but also with Tyler Burge, and with a great deal of work in the empirical psychology of vision, that discerning objects in an image (including this one) is something different from having explicit propositional knowledge about what is seen, is separable from the state of engaged conviction that Vertesi describes, using language borrowed from phenomenology, as “seeing as.”<fnref n="18" /> Accepting that we see something, and maybe don’t see it as anything analogous to the items in our past experience, what are we inclined to say about what we see? Which words are warranted? What authorities, experiences, feelings, warrant that our ordinary criteria for wording this image, say if it wasn’t an image of Mars, or was a fabrication, are applicable? How should we orient ourselves within the skeptical recital, when should we seek words to express doubts, to highlight self-awareness relative to the planetary impoverishment of our language, its terrestrial limits, its biases, its seductive ways of inducing misstatements based on se-

<footnote n="17">17. Janet Vertesi, *Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars* (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 205.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18. Ibid., 3069. Her usage of “seeing as” is derived from Merleau Ponty via Hans Radder, who she quotes as claiming: “Any observational process is always materially realized and conceptually interpreted right from the start.” The issue with this claim, which entangles percepts with concepts, is that it risks over-intellectualizing perception and particularly its entanglement with language. The late Kuhn calls our ability to perceive something the “basic-object concept” suggesting that such perception is available to both “human infants and nonhuman animals,” i.e. to beings that do not yet use language or do not necessarily have human linguistic concepts. The work of Tyler Burge has enormously enriched this direction in the late Kuhn by bringing the philosophical discussion on the psychology of perception into dialogue with the enormous empirical literature on human and non-human perceptual capacities. The point is not that perception is not in a certain manner of speaking theory-involving, but the ways in which it is so risks courting confusions when we align that theory with concepts and language. As Burge explains: “perceptual groupings and categorizations depend more on ways individuals are physically and functionally related to specific types of entities in the environment than on individuals’ ability to describe or know something about what they perceive.” One might in this context suppose that there is a degree of agreement in judgments with respect to the first forms of perception that is not reflected in later predicative judgments expressed in ordinary (or scientific) language bearing on the meaning or contents of these more primitive “first forms” of mind. To be fair, Vertesi’s book, and I will return to this later, is concerned with the manipulation of alien data to produce images that produce events of perception, so her concern is not with the philosophy of mind, but rather the philosophy of robotic image capture. Kuhn, *The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn*, 199; Hans Radder, *The World Observed, the World Conceived* (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006). Tyler Burge, *Origins of Objectivity* (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 208. Burge, *Perception: First Form of Mind* (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).</footnote>
ductive similarities, and when should we, despite it all, swallow our inclination to
skepticism and acknowledge the claim that we can simply say what we ordinarily
would? It may seem that all answers involve science or nihilism.

In one way these are metaphysical questions, but metaphysical in a way that
has nothing to do with what we would ordinarily call metaphysics. They are meta-
physical insofar as they involve going beyond what we would, in the terrestrial light of
everyday language, be in the habit of calling φύσις:: nature.<fnref n="19" /> For if science is relevant
to what we should say about Mars, most (but not all) of what we call nature and natu-
ral, say as nature it is evoked in Emerson’s *Nature* as the “floods of life [that] stream
around and through us,” just is terrestrial nature.<fnref n="20" /> Terrestrial nature is the one, the
flowers and the forests and the fields, that poetry or *Dictung* brings to expression.<fnref n="21" />
Terrestrial nature just was nature before Mars was screenable. In looking at the wor-
ding of that which lies beyond nature, extraordinary ordinary philosophy might seem
merely a poetics of science fiction, an exploration of what poetry, as opposed natural
science, might make from that world. But that may also be no catastrophe. Bringing
philosophy close to literature and to science, particularly to poetry as understood by a
Hölderlin-inspired Heidegger, who claimed that poets found “*Was bleibt*,” call it a
concern with what might remain, may not imply alienating it from itself, but rather
remaining faithful to the spirit of philosophical inquiry voiced in the last line of *The
Claim of Reason*: can “philosophy become literature and still know itself?”<fnref n="22" />

<footnote n="19">19. Extraordinary ordinary situations involve encounters with realities that, from the point of view of the historically acquired resources of our ordinary language may seem to pose metaphysical questions, to the extent that these extraordinary contexts may present us with entities that have no existing place within the lexicons of physical objects contained in what we would ordinarily call nature. Thus, extraordinary ordinary language philosophy dialectically returns to metaphysics beyond the turn to the ordinary (as Martin Heidegger wrote in his *Einführung in die Metaphysik, “Philosophieren ist Fragen nach dem Ausser-ordentlichen”*). But here the extraordinary is only so on ordinary grounds, and so too the metaphysical is located within the physical and within the tensions of how we use language, resituated on the very threshold of ordinary experience and within our form of life and linguistic practices. If we were to go back to the roots of the term metaphysics, μετά, meaning beyond or after, and φύσις which approximately expresses “nature” in Greek (Heidegger glosses it as the “*das von sich aus Aufgehende*,” something like the auto-emergent or auto-poetic), it seems clear enough that our ordinary languages, and the words for nature that articulate it, which is to say our understanding of what we would ordinarily call nature, or how things are, are terrestrial. So this metaphysics of the extraordinary ordinary, this focus on what we can do within ordinary language to confront that which seems to lie beyond the ordinary but is within what we would ordinarily call nature or the world, and not even as a speculation or a science fiction scenario but as what (I think we can agree) may be called ordinary reality, is different from what we normally call metaphysics. Heidegger, *Einführung in die Metaphysik* (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1966), 10-11.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20. Emerson, *Essays & Lectures*, 7.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21. Angus Fletcher, *A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 496.</footnote>
### 3) On Ordinary Estrangements and the Limits of Language

Extraordinary situations, contexts in which one acknowledges one does not know how to go on, or feels dissatisfied with the words at hand, are (in a sense) ordinary situations, and so performances for dealing with the alien exist in ordinary language.

We have all imagined and rehearsed encounters with alien “its.” Works of what Lovecraft called supernatural horror are full of exempla:

> “God! If you could see what I am seeing!”

> I could not answer. Speechless, I could only wait. Then came the frenzied tones again:

> “Carter, it’s terrible — monstrous — unbelievable!”

> This time my voice did not fail me, and I poured into the transmitter a flood of excited questions. Terrified, I continued to repeat, “Warren, what is it? What is it?”

> Once more came the voice of my friend, still hoarse with fear, and now apparently tinged with despair: “I can’t tell you, Carter! It’s too utterly beyond thought — I dare not tell you — no man could know it and live — Great God! I never dreamed of this!”<fnref n="23" />

But we are not always speechless or oath-full when we come face to face with alien facts. We spin variations in the subjective register associated with encountering sublime objects. In a less sublime (and less xenophobic) register, we have the excuses, the circumlocutions, and the forms of pidgin. These are in the language of the traveler. We say things like “Sorry but I don’t know how to say” — or perhaps express divergences from the ordinary “We say this, however.” We have a rich grammar of pointing and gesturing (but that is hard to talk about).

Aside from these strategies, our vocabulary, viewed historically, bears the marks of struggles to overcome the bewilderments afflicting travelers and settlers. The American English of every child with the least curiosity about their world is rich

<footnote n="23">23. From H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randoph Carter,” in *Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft* (London: Gollancz, 2008), 13.</footnote>
with words gifted by first nations peoples. Raccoon comes from a Powhattan word, *arahkunem*, meaning “he who scratches with his hands,” while opossum comes from the Virginia Algonquian words *wa. p-*, meaning "white," and *-aʔθemʷ-*, meaning "dog, small animal." Obviously, these deep roots are alienated from most speakers, but to those who speak attentively, the strangeness of the phonemes betrays debts. The production of extraordinary ordinary language has historically been part of discovering the world, or of discovering worlds, though in terrestrial cases, these discoveries were rarely encounters with natures radically unknown to all humankind and to language as such, but rather, as in the case above, cases where one lexicon is enriched from another already existing one whose world is different, but in a far less extreme sense than the one that concerns us.

## 4) On Scientific Revolutions as Extraordinary Ordinary Contexts

Scientific language is possibly more fertile ground for studying language coined ex-
nihilo and with respect to absolutely alien conditions, not least because modern sci-
ence has so often been characterized by a movement away from what Husserl called
the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) towards what Kuhn, in his late work, characterizes as
“artificial” objects, entities that only exist for us because of technology, and so stand
exterior to any historically pre-existing “natural” linguistic kinds.<fnref n="24" /> Because of this,
the history of science would amount to a treasure chest of extraordinary situations
in which ordinary scientific language users encountered a novel situations and re-
corded these meetings by generating new ordinary scientific languages and kind
terms. Kuhn, in *Structure*, explains revolutions in precisely this way, writing that in
them, it is as if “the professional community had been suddenly transported to
another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by
unfamiliar ones as well.”<fnref n="25" /> Wording alien objects on Mars thus falls within a histo-
rical norm that is reflective of what happens in periods of revolutionary scientific

<footnote n="24">24. Edmund Husserl, *Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie*, ed. Elisabeth Ströker (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2012), 238. Kuhn, *The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn*, 20.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">25. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, ed. Ian Hacking (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 111.</footnote>
change, with the exception that scientific language as we usually think of it begins outside of everyday usage and ends outside of ordinary usage (albeit while borrowing figures and metaphors from ordinary language along the way), while in the specific case of Mars, technological artifice has brought something that was distant from everyday terrestrial experience within the range of ordinary words that may seem to apply in the ordinary way.<fnref n="26" /> Which is to say that in the ordinary language of science, we have less inclination to suppose that ordinary language might apply, or when it applies, it does so only metaphorically and in light of grounding metaphors, presenting an analogy between an ordinary thing and some abstract and seemingly unnamable equivalent.

Most of the revolutions studied by Kuhn involve theory-caused shifts in the meaning of existing terms. Duck/rabbit-like, an existing word takes on a new aspect, with this new meaning encouraging the scientist and their peers to find and name other new and theoretically and observationally derived terms.<fnref n="27" /> Lexically, these new terms are often exported from existing non-scientific lexicons (the term quark famously comes from Joyce's *Finnegans Wake*), or from paleonymic or patronymic naming procedures (the official Mars topological nomenclature as voted by the AAU is comprised of Latin terrain terms, while the Higgs boson is named after Peter Higgs).<fnref n="28" /> Kuhn, as a historian, did not arrogate the right to dictate the use of words in

<footnote n="26">26. Hans Blumenberg, *Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie*, ed. Anselm Haverkamp, Dirk Mende, and Mariele Nientied (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013).</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27. Kuhn explains this point by explaining how the discovery that Earth was a planet with the moon rotating around it inspired other scientists to discover other moons rotating around other planets, with these additional observations deriving from the increased attentiveness to the relationship between moons and planets that emerged as a result of the Copernican revolution.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">28. It is important to emphasize the degree to which the basic logic guiding this process is epistemically contested terrain. Strong program thinkers would tend to suggest that this entire process occurs totally at the level of language and theory, with “reality” (however this is understood) playing no role. Kuhn opposed this reading of his work. He insisted that making theory choice depend only on collective judgment (agreement in *verbis*) without assuming some progressive improvement in the parsing of reality did indeed make scientific theory choice “a matter for mob psychology.” Yet he also acknowledged the impossibility (or at least the extreme difficulty) of grounding science on reference rather than on linguistic practice. One of his strategies to avoid the slippage towards strong program constructivism was an insistence on the specialness of scientific language as opposed to ordinary language. He even insisted that students in science should be taught Whig history as opposed to historical history of science as a kind of “noble lie,” meaning that he wanted to shield scientific practitioners from the knowledge that scientific language could function in ways alien to contemporary theories, and likewise to maximally separate scientific language practices from ordinary language practices. In practice, this attempt to cordon off the language of science from other ways of using words seems unlikely to succeed, not because Kuhn is not right about the general difference between ordinary words and the terms as they are employed in scientific languages, but because there is frequently a degree of promiscuity with</footnote>
science, precisely opposing those who would justify doing so as illegitimately politici-
zing of science.²⁹ More staidly, Kuhn considered the practice of the historian of scien-
ce to consist in documenting (against more idealizing narratives of a continuous
Whig history of science), the linguistic variability marking extraordinary ordinary
events (revolutions) as indexed by the existence of ruptures or anomalies within the
ordinarily stable senses attributed to scientific words. Within the hermeneutic postu-
re taken by the Kuhnian historian of science, these symptoms of linguistic rupture
appear as homophonous but not quite homologous terms located within revolutio-
nary texts. Grasping the “alienated” aspect of these terms, the historian embarks on
an epistemic and ontological “reeducation” in the alien reference worlds of “older le-
xicons” which permits an inter-terrestrial voyage into a linguistic world from scien-
ce’s past.³⁰ Once alienated, the historian then engages in a textually mediated dialog-
gue with the ghosts of past scientists. As Kuhn writes: “the past of science should be

respect to the frontiers between both domains, such that terms like “carbon” which clearly belongs to
the abstract language of science become profoundly loaded in ordinary language, just as (in particular)
figures and metaphors from ordinary language can play roles in theory development within scientific
language. One way of putting this is to suggest that while Kuhn is doubtless basically right that scienti-
fic theory choice follows rules that are different from the (call them mob rule) logics governing the de-
velopment of ordinary languages, he (despite his critique of idealism in the history of science) is too
idealistic about the separability of these two lexicons. That said, one interesting feature of Mars is that
it is a case in which the gap between scientific and ordinary language is relatively clear: a-priori all sci-
entific language already applies to Mars abstractly, while a-priori all ordinary, call it presence-level
language doesn’t, since all of that language, at least so far as natural kinds go, comes from our natural
history on our planet, and so need not automatically apply to what we find on Mars. Kuhn, *The Essen-
tial Tension*, 88; Kuhn, *The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn*.

29. Obviously, some version of this kind of politicization of science, and scientization of political dis-
course has been critical to the work of thinkers like Bruno Latour and his constructionist followers.
As I have indicated in the note above, Kuhn is clearly right to resist this politicization, but he is
doubtless himself too idealistic with respect to the boundaries and frontiers between science and
politics. Performatively, the interest of the Martian objects case, and, let us say extraordinary ordi-
nary language philosophy in general, is that it on the one hand remains true to Kuhn’s intuition that
scientific language is not necessarily political in scientific contexts while acknowledging that the
boundaries between contexts and employments of science terms are porous, and that there is clearly
a role for philosophy within the negotiations associated with the ethical and political implications of
these shifting frontiers. In the following, for example, which deals with a language that may seem to
belong exclusively to science, specifically Martian geomorphology, we will suggest that it is only in
the case of certain infelicitous lexical choices by scientists, above all cases in which they employ or-
dinary language lexical items in a recognizably everyday sense that their science becomes political.
Note that this is a far cry from claiming that all scientific theory choice and language is political, for
that argument can only be arrived at thanks to a far more transcendental argument linking all truth
claims to politics via empirically hard to cash, but also sophistically hard to disprove, claims regar-
ding how they ideologically lend support to the hegemonic political order (i.e. capitalism). See Bru-
no Latour, *Les Microbes: guerre et paix, suivi de Irréductions* (Paris: La decouverte, 1984). Also,
and with particular reference to capitalism and ideology, see Mark Fisher, *Capitalist Realism* (Lon-
don: Zero, 2009).

30. Kuhn, *The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Inter-view*, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 86.
approached as an alien culture, one that the historian strives first to enter and then to make accessible to others.”<fnref n="31" />

Yet if the historian only learns and reports on how scientists used words, he does something philosophically different when writing history. Kuhn was not a “text-book” historian of science precisely because he invented a novel kind of historical language.<fnref n="32" /> This was not the ahistorical language of the present, but a historically ali-enated writing. It derived from an exercise of expressive judgment (reflections on whether and how one means what one says) aimed at somehow squaring the circle of bringing out (on the one hand) the incommensurability of past scientific languages, and (on the other) of remaining scrutable to contemporary readers. With careful ex-gesis, one could make explicit how Kuhn goes about doing this, deriving from Kuhn’s historiographical practices a Kuhnian extraordinary ordinary language philosophy or “theory of translation.”<fnref n="33" /> But I will not pursue that project. Translation matters less than invention here. On Mars there are no alien informants, and Kuhn’s practice pre-supposes the existence of historically alien textual witnesses writing on a common planet. Likewise, Kuhn’s animating concern was epistemic accuracy (whether that ac-curacy was found in natural science or historical hermeneutics), and this, to put it bluntly, might seem to need no philosophical justification. But what will matter most

<footnote n="31">31. Kuhn, *Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912* (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 368.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">32. “History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed. That image has previously been drawn, even by scientists themselves, mainly from the study of finished scientific achievements as these are recorded in the classics and, more recently, in the textbooks from which each new scientific generati-on learns to practice its trade.” Significantly enough, the late Kuhn consistently defended the pedagogical utility of textbook science writing, which he calls a “noble” lie is given that attempts at a properly histori-cal history of science are “at best a slow and inefficient way” of teaching science and its norms. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 1. Kuhn, *The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn*, 88.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">33. To offer a bit of an example, Kuhn often mentions but does not use terms, as he illustrates in this passage, from *The Road Since Structure*, which bears on Quine’s reflections on translation and trans-latability in *Word and Object*: “Why is translation, whether between theories or languages, so difficult? Because, as has often been remarked, languages cut up the world in different ways, and we have no access to a neural sublinguistic means of reporting. Quine points out that, though the linguist engaged in radical translation can readily discover that his native informant utters “Gavagai” because he has seen a rabbit, it is more difficult to discover how “Gavagai” should be translated. Should the linguist render it as “rabbit,” “rabbit-kind,” “rabbit-part,” “rabbit-occurrence,” or by some other phrase he may not even have thought to formulate? I extend the example by supposing that, in the community under examination, rabbits change color, length of hair, characteristic gait, and so on during the rainy sea-son, and that their appearance then elicits the term “Bavagai.” Should “Bavagai” be translated “wet rabbit,” “shaggy rabbit,” “limping rabbit,” all of these together, or should the linguist conclude that the native community has not recognized that “Bavagai” and “Gavagai” refer to the same animal? [...] These examples suggest that a translation manual inevitably embodies a theory [...]. To me they also suggest that the class of translators includes both the historian of science and the scientist trying to com-</footnote>
in what follows are the ethical and even the aesthetic dimensions of what we say,
thus, we turn to Cavell.

5) The World Viewed or A World Viewed

We relate to Martian objects through screens, so Cavell’s question “What happens to
reality when it is projected and screened?” raises its head here.³⁴ But in shifting the
context from Hollywood films to objects on Mars there is a shift in the grammar of
the word “reality.” When Cavell talks about reality, prompting resistance in his critics
and sometimes embarrassment in his defenders, he is making a pitch for something
that is hard to accept philosophically because of the narrow entanglement of skepti-
cism and epistemology, but which is also hard to deny with respect to how we use the
word “reality” in ordinary language.³⁵ Stated somewhat flatly, when Cavell says that
film shows us reality, do we feel we don’t understand him? More to the point: what
else would we call it? Isn’t that just how we use the word, “reality,” for example, in the
context of comparing a photo to a painting of a similar object? But if this is so, Mars
forms an interesting case. Unlike on Earth, where we may be satisfied that we know
the reality of ordinary things independently from their projections on screens and
thus feel that we can identify realism in painting and reality in photos, we realistically
lack criteria for judging the realism of what we see on Mars. With respect to the rea-
lity of Mars in the photo, our justification is heavily based on our faith in photography

municate with a colleague who embraces a different theory.” What Kuhn seems to be saying here is that writing the history of science implicitly demands producing a theory of translation which is, (in other words), an extraordinary ordinary language philosophy, but that this historian, insofar as they are doing the work of the historian (and not the work of the ordinary language philosopher) does this implicitly, without voicing justifications (as does the ordinary language philosopher in their very practice of doing philosophy, why we say what we say in the way that we say it). Historians just do it. (Kuhn, and I am supposing this expresses a judgment about himself derived from his multiple conversations with Cavell, explicitly claims that he wasn’t good at doing it, saying that he lacks “the skills of an ordinary language philosopher.”) Kuhn, *The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview*, 165. The second citation is from Kuhn, *The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change*, 336. See also W. V. Quine, *Word and Object* (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013).

34. Cavell, *The World Viewed*, 38.

35. This point has been brought out marvelously by Markus Gabriel in his work on the place of skepti-
cism within the “epistemic economy” of the theory of knowledge. Markus Gabriel, *An den Grenzen der
Erkenntnistheorie : die notwendige Endlichkeit des objektiven Wissens als Lektion des Skeptizismus*,
Originalausg. ed., Alber Philosophie (Freiburg: Alber, 2008).
itself, our belief in what Cavell calls its “automatism,” and our belief, though wholly ungrounded in concrete experience, that Mars is like the Earth.

Martian things in photographs viewed on Earth, seem, by automatism, to have a familiar relationship with terrestrial things in photographs.<fnref n="36" /> This seems true even if the things the photos show are alien, strange to us and our common terrestrial experience because they are products of Martian, and not terrestrial history. That means that what we see in images of Mars is not what we would, at least not ordinarily, call the natural world, but we also hesitate to say that what we see is neither really the world nor natural. Maybe we can say that we do not know where to place objects on Mars because we have not yet been present on Mars and so come to know, in practice, hypothetical reality as real. Are they within or without of our world? Maybe we want to say that what we see is real, but that we really don't know what we really are seeing. So, they are alien, but not completely, since they are, in another way, just ordinary things.

But more proximately, objects in images of Mars pose ontological questions that are also questions of grammar. Of movies, Cavell writes: “Photography maintains the presentness of the world by accepting our absence from it. The reality in a photograph is present to me while I am not present to it; and a world I know, and see, but to which I am nevertheless not present (through no fault of my subjectivity), is a world past.”<fnref n="37" /> Much of this fits when it is Mars that is viewed, but in the case of Mars presentness is not maintained but somehow discovered or affectively created through the photo, generated as a future promise via our belief in the reality of the pasts present in the photo by automatism, a presentness that is factually, at least for Earthlings, a fiction, for we have

<footnote n="36">36. I take this to hold true even and despite the fact that we can know, thanks to the work of Vertesi, that images such as this one have been digitally manipulated so as to make the data render something visible. This is so to the extent that I also know that images on Earth can be digitally manipulated, or that the development and processing of images can in normal cases count as such manipulation. Thus, even if I know that the image is a product of processing, I feel inclined to doubt that this processing is deeply disanalogous from what occurs ordinarily with photographs, and likewise disinclined to believe that the manipulations of the scientists amount to something akin to the efforts, on the part of Earthlings, to dupe us into believing what is not. Put otherwise, even in full knowledge that photographs are constructed, I am not inclined to believe that we are in a Reality + type scenario with respect to these photos, even if (as a point of fact) I couldn't tell from the images whether they were not (for example) the result of Martians hacking the image to make us Earthlings think that Mars was a dead planet so as to keep us distant. Put somewhat otherwise, the evidence that she offers regarding the institutional construction of the image precisely offers up, within the overall epistemic economy bearing on the interpretation of these images, justifications for believing that what one thinks one sees — Mars — is, within the horizons of ordinary epistemic uncertainty, what one sees. On the idea of a Reality + scenario, see the David John Chalmers, *Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy* (New York: W. W. Norton, 2022).</footnote>

<footnote n="37">37. Cavell, *The World Viewed*, 45.</footnote>
never, in fact, been present on Mars. But somehow, and thanks to our ordinary sense of
the relation between presence and photos that constitutes something of the essence of
their reality for us, we find it almost impossible to deny that Mars viewed is anything
but reality, or at least a reality, viewed. Nevertheless, rather than seeing, as with film, a
world past, we seem more inclined to imagine and describe what we see on Mars (even
if it is, as is automatically the case in all photos, a world past) a future world, maybe our
future world, at least insofar as we are speaking about it in ordinary language. That is
perhaps a concession to the fact that the presence glimpsed on Mars in photos is preci-
sely a projection of telepresence, a technological avatar of our being there. Which me-
ans that when we express the judgement that the photo of Mars shows reality, and rea-
lity in the normal sense, we are not saying the same thing as saying that a photo of our
world shows reality. If anything, our claim about the reality in the Martian photo ex-
presses our faith in the effectiveness of what we might call realist magic of photo-
graphy: our belief in the reality of technology's capacity to automatically capture reality.

We acknowledge that things are present on Mars, but we know that this is an
analogy, but one that seems to resonate with the ways in which we use the words real
and really. This a question of grammar, a question of where we stand relative to what
we are ready to call reality within an ordinary discourse that makes everyday sense
which differentiates Cavell's world viewed from the Martian world viewed, and ought
to be taken as orienting the claims being made in the sections that follow.

6) On Words and Things on Mars

It may seem that our best bet for naming Martian objects and articulating Martian
reality are the procedures of natural science. Describing Mars is the job of planetary
geomorphologists. Victor Baker, perhaps the most philosophically inclined of them
all, describes his work as a “reality-dominated” as opposed to “theory-dominated”
science.<fnref n="38" /> It moves not from concrete to abstract, but employs the abstract to make
sense of the concrete, with the concrete here referring to the reality screened. To this

<footnote n="38">38. Victor Baker, “Extraterrestrial Geomorphology: Science and Philosophy of Earthlike Planetary Landscapes,” *Geomorphology* 7 (1993): 21.</footnote>
extent, we could understand Martian geomorphology as the historical science of naming remotely sensed things on Mars via science-driven explanations of how these things came into being over the course the planet's history. Yet even if Martian geomorphologists and experimental science employing Mars analogues offer special insight into naming, there is still space for philosophy, for the question of which word to choose, and the mere question as to whether there is a question, which is also a question regarding the inevitable degree to which we ourselves as Earthlings are the problem and the source of our skepticism, attests to the truth of skepticism.

*In extremis*, science does not resolve borderline cases so much as discover them.<fnref n="39" /> Yet before passing to a challenging case, let us consider a few normal cases.

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>*Nasa Opportunity Rover Photo.*</figcaption></figure>

Take the round things in this picture from the Mars Opportunity rover. The rover has many sensors other than an optical camera, and their data offers insight. From abstract analyses, scientists know that in their chemical composition is not absolutely alien.<fnref n="40" /> They are made of hematite. We might wonder if a terrestrial equivalent exists.

<footnote n="39">39. It may seem that the choice of the specific lexical terms and their origins makes no difference. For example, we might imagine that the sense of the word comes from their function within the sentences, much as it may seem—following an argument made by Gustafsson, that the actual material of chess pieces matters not for playing the game of chess (that it would be the same game, for example, if it were played with other than standard pieces). However, this seems at most partly true, not so much with respect to the playing of the game (in this case science) but with respect to the interpretation of the game (here moving back to chess). For example, given that the characters in chess are political figures, we are inclined to call it a strategy game. But if the queen was a rat, and the pawns were diseases, perhaps we would say that is a game about how the devil, or at least badness, uses cleverness to destroy the world. The difference is not nothing. Martin Gustafsson, “Wittgenstein on Using Language and Playing Chess: The Breakdown of an Analogy and Its Consequences” in Sofia Miguens, *The Logical Alien: Conant and his Critics* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).</footnote>

<footnote n="40">40. The sensors included on Opportunity include: 1. Panoramic Mast Assembly a. panoramic cameras (Pancam) b. navigation cameras (Navcam) c. miniature thermal emission spectrometer (Mini-TES) 2. Mössbauer spectrometer (MB) 3. alpha particle x-ray spectrometer (APXS) 4. magnets (to collect dust particles) 5. microscopic imager (MI) 6. rock abrasion tool (RAT). Data from Asif A. Siddiqi, *Deep Space Chronicle: A Chronology of Deep Space and Planetary Probes, 1958-2000* (Washington, DC: NASA, 2002), 125.</footnote>
In the language of the literature, it doesn't: they are called “Martian blueberries” (sometimes with, sometimes without the scare quotes). This expresses some aspect of what we are inclined to say. They look like blueberries, and (at the same time), they are not what we would ordinarily call blueberries. Ironically, the familiar word keeps the object alien while allowing us to speak about it. Now consider the implications of calling them marbles. Now in a certain sense marble could fit. But it would also generate confusions: marble already exists as a semi-technical term for certain terrestrial things. Below are moqui marbles, round hematite balls found in the Utah desert:

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>Moki Hill – HITTR, Grand Staircase.</figcaption></figure>

If blueberries were “marbles,” that would articulate a strong analogy inducing an ex-
pectation that there exist “marbling” processes on both Earth and Mars. But “blue-
berries” holds in abeyance this grammatically elicited process. When we speak of blu-
eberries, and to quote Cavell: “the paths of action, the paths of words, are blocked,” or
rather, they are opened and shut at simultaneously.<fnref n="41" /> Thus, our hematite spheres re-
main alien until more data can be acquired and or new words imagined. That is not a
tragedy. Should we wish to unblock marbling as a multi-planetary phenomenon, we
could do more research.

Sometimes that will liberate our desire to project our words into other worlds,
and so dispel skepticism, other times it won't, and skepticism towards our own ex-
pressive capacities will have proven an epistemic virtue. One question debated among
the first generation of geomorphologists was whether there were “canyons” on Mars.

<footnote n="41">41. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 125.</footnote>
Many assumed that there were, because they saw familiar shapes in the images from
the Mariner and Viking missions. However, as Robert Sharp argued in a 1973 article,
those features could be “closed depressions” or “fretted troughs.” Even if they looked
like “the deeply dissected high plateaus of the western United States” there was no
evidence that they “compose a normally integrated trunk and tributary system” nor
that they owed their genesis to “running water.”<fnref n="42" /> Sharp was wrong: there was once
abundant liquid water on Mars, so scientists now speak of there being canyons. But
he was right to provisionally seek out ways of alienating that world, for in the absence
of cultivated alienation whole lines of questioning are closed.

Our examples stand inside scientific practice, as if the only thing that matters
with respect how we use our words is the cultivation of epistemic virtues such as cu-
riosity and skepticism. Yet not all word choices only bear on scientific practice. Some
bear on the future of humanity and the planet. Deciding whether there is “soil” on
Mars is one such case.

7) Soil or Regolith?

When looking at the previous images many may fancy having seen soil. This is a proof,
in a way, that soil belongs to the lexicon of everyday language. The alternative term, re-
golith, is neither ordinary nor richly invested in cultural practice. People use soil all the
time, and more to the point, soil is a word that plays a deep role in how we imagine the
world and the nature of nature. We use soil, in a general way, to express what the
ground is. But in this way soil often plays a grounding role in how we imagine the struc-
ture of the historical logic of nature. In Walt Whitman's poem, “Song of Myself,” soil
articulates metonymically the matrix from which the entelechy of life itself springs:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

<footnote n="42">42. Robert Sharp, "Mars: Trougħed Terrain," *Journal of Geophysical Research* 78, no. 20 (1973): 4063.</footnote>
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the
same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.<fnref n="43" />

Soil here is the fount and foundation of American being, that from which springs, po-
etically, the nation, since Whitman, in these lines, is finding and founding the repu-
blic in verse, composing that democratic hymn for and from the American land: *Lea-
ves of Grass*. We use soil, also ordinarily, to speak about things that are soiled, things
that are ruined. Elsewhere in *Leaves*, this double sense of soil is spun into a kind of
metaphysical paradox making the word encompass the mystery of terrestrial life it-
self, such that the sense of soil involves an entity that brings contraries together
within a paradoxical composting union:

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of di-
seas'd corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at
last.<fnref n="44" />

To speak like an astrobiologist, soil in Whitman is the ordinary language answer to the
Fermi paradox's question regarding why we are alone in our solar system: on Earth
alone there is soil, elsewhere there is mere regolith. I invoke Whitman here not because

<footnote n="43">43. Walt Whitman, *Leaves of Grass, and Selected Prose* (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 18.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">44. Ibid., 221.</footnote>
we all use soil as he does, only to suggest that there is more culture and Earth built into
soil than we might imagine. That said, my reference to Whitman is not totally arbitrary.
As Jed Rasula's fine study *This Compost* shows, Whitman's soil fertilized a rich crop of
subsequent American poetry, such that the modernist poetic idiom of the United States
might be said, with little exaggeration, to bloom from recompositions and decompositi-
ons of Whitman's discovery of the poetic power of American soil.<fnref n="45" /> In sum, for earth-
lings, and for American earthlings in particular, soil is not just any word.<fnref n="46" />

Thus, to say that there is soil on Mars, and to say so as a scientist, is to say that
others can project, with all the epistemic confidence encouraged by science, this ordi-
nary but grounding word, out beyond our soil, out into space, out into the terrain of the
future. If the scientific data showed that Martian surface matter just was identical to
terrestrial surface matter, there would obviously be soil on Mars, and so there would be
no space for philosophy. But therein lies the rub. Terrestrial soil and Martian regolith
are not chemically identical. Saying that there is soil on Mars not like saying there is
hematite. Until 2017 there were institutional conventions which forbid anyone from
claiming that there was soil on Mars. Soil, according to the SSSA (Soil Science Society
of America) Glossary of Soil Science Terms, was defined as follows: "The unconsolida-
ted mineral or organic material on the immediate surface of the earth that serves as a
natural medium for the growth of land plants."<fnref n="47" /> But now, thanks to lobbying by plane-
tary scientists, it reads: "The layer(s) of generally loose mineral and/or organic material
that are affected by physical, chemical, and/or biological processes at or near the plane-
tary surface and usually hold liquids, gases, and biota and support plants."<fnref n="48" /> This rede-
finition of soil did not result from a new discovery or confirmation: only from a desire

<footnote n="45">45. Jed Rasula, *This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry* (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2012).</footnote>

<footnote n="46">46. This claim can of course be extended to nearly every culture, though in raising the question of the soil, and in claiming it as universal, it would seem immediately to demand that we attend to differences and incommensurabilities, the senses in which *sol*, or *terre*, or *boden*, or *Erde* or even just ground are or are not soil, and that is only to speak of the words used in the languages in which I myself most frequently sojourn.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">47. The full definition reads as follows: (i) The unconsolidated mineral or organic material on the immediate surface of the earth that serves as a natural medium for the growth of land plants; (ii) The unconsolidated mineral or organic matter on the surface of the earth that has been subjected to and shows effects of genetic and environmental factors of: climate (including water and temperature effects) and macro- and microorganisms, conditioned by relief, acting on parent material over a period of time. A product-soil differs from the material from which it is derived in many physical, chemical, biological, and morphological properties and characteristics. See Harold van Es, "A New Definition of Soil," CSA News 62, no. 20 (2017).</footnote>

<footnote n="48">48. Ibid.</footnote>
to institutionalize and so justify the practice of projecting that ordinary terrestrial word
into alien contexts. As J. F. Bell et al. explained in a paper published in in *The Journal
of Geophysical Research*, the term typically being used to talk about what they were
petitioning to call soil was “regolith,” but as they were inclined to use it, regolith see-
med to refer to “the thick, jumbled-up layer of rocks and debris created on an ancient
planetary surface like the Moon or Mars,” but didn’t seem to properly describe the
“fine-grained, porous, uppermost layers” of the Martian surface, while they felt that soil
did.<fnref n="49" /> In other words, what they felt was the right word wasn’t available. But rather
than coin a new one, as Bell explains elsewhere (in a popular history of the discovery of
Mars written with William Sheehan), they simply wanted to employ “plain old ‘soil’” as
opposed to some monstrous term like “fine-grain regolith,” judging the latter “too cum-
bersome” and too “jargonistic.”<fnref n="50" /> This is a kind of ordinary language argument, but one
that rather than wrangling with the salutary skepticism that is raised by monstrous
terms, seeks to repress it, and so to treat the extraordinary as a mere extension of the
ordinary by fiat. In doing this, Bell et al. fail to acknowledge the weight of moral res-
ponsibility implicit in making claims “to be speaking with a universal voice.”<fnref n="51" /> In the
stead of a way of wording that retains fidelity to the alien and so throws us back upon
our faculties, our limits, and so also alerts us to our responsibilities towards others
whose alterity we acknowledge, we find, in the transportation of the ordinary word
“soil” onto that alien world, a failure to wrangle seriously with the consequences of set-
ting conventional precedents with respect to what we say, all pitched, so it seems, in the
name of convenience.

8) *Soiling Astrofuturist Dreams*

But is convenience all that is at stake? In saying there is just plain old soil on Mars,
we also affirm we don't need education. We eliminate the fear and even the respect

<footnote n="49">49. J. Bell et al., “Mineralogic and compositional properties of Martian soil and dust: Results from Mars Pathfinder,” *Journal of Geophysical Research*, v. 105, 1721-1755 105 (2000): 1722, https://doi.org/10.1029/1999JE001060.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">50. William Sheehan and Jim Bell, *Discovering Mars: A History of Observation and Exploration of the Red Planet* (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021), 322.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">51. Cavell, *Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism* (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 118.</footnote>
for the alien that is so manifestly present in horror fiction writing such as the passage
from Lovecraft that I have cited above. In such writing the initial impetus comes from
the acknowledgement of the truth of skepticism, the recognition of the insufficiency
of our criteria, what Lovecraft once described as "the inability of the human mind to
correlate all its contents."<fnref n="52" /> But science (or rather shallow scientism), often arises out
of a refusal of skepticism and the cognitive and localizing limits that it brings to light,
and one way in which it does this is by repressing all trace of the alterity of the alien
by translating it and metaphysically naturalizing it into the everyday language of
Earth. What this does in turn is breed space colonization fantasies. But these are
dangerous fantasies predicated on a lack of respect for the difference of the Martian
biosphere, a lack of care towards that wild planet, and a lack of attention to the tight
webs of debt and dependency entangling our human forms of life and imagination
with the fertile soil of our home planet.

Consider with critical intent how Martian soil functions in the thinking of Robert
Zubrin, the president and founder of the Mars Society. Zubrin's *Case for Mars* is a vita-
list pitch for settling space. He sees the need for a Martian settlement in terms of Fre-
derick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis.<fnref n="53" /> More specifically, he follows Turner in belie-
ving that the growth of America "resulted primarily from the great frontier," and he as-
serts that the closure of their frontier has generated an existential crisis for American
identity, a crisis that can only be averted if the frontier is opened again, starting with
Mars.<fnref n="54" /> For "without a frontier from which to breathe new life, the spirit that gave rise
to the progressive humanistic culture that America has represented for the past two
centuries is fading."<fnref n="55" /> But re-rooting the frontier spirit on Mars requires vigorous soil,
or at least something that has the paradoxical properties of making life spring from de-
ath that Whitman associates with the American ground. Yet if we do know anything
thing about Martian regolith it is that it appears biologically dead. Nevertheless, for Zu-
brin, who rigorously applies the paradoxical speculative logic of soil with its (to quote
Eliot's *Wasteland*) quality of breeding "Lilacs out of the dead land" and growing life
"Out of this stony rubbish," this apparent deadness must hide a double potency: "on the

<footnote n="52">52. Lovecraft, *Necronomicon*, 201.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">53. Frederick Jackson Turner, *The Frontier in American History* (Norwalk, CT: Easton Press, 1989).</footnote>

<footnote n="54">54. Robert Zubrin, *The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must* (New York: Free Press, 2011), 324.</footnote>

<footnote n="55">55. Ibid., 325.</footnote>