Exit Chantal, to the west

Word has just come today of the death of Chantal Akerman yesterday (October 5).  I spent a week with her in 2001, just post September 11; we really hit it off and I always hoped to see her again and imagined I would (because who would have thought I'd ever meet her anyhow?).  I arranged for the U.S. premiere of La Captive, and she came to discuss it, and to talk about Jeanne Dielman in my film class.  Leslie Camhi and Stanley Cavell joined Chantal (as it seems more faithful to my memory of that week that I should call her) for a discussion after the screening of La Captive.

Chantal insisted in class and in conversation (which always took place through a cloud of Gitane smoke) that Jeanne Dielman was not a feminist movie -- she hated hearing it described that way; she hated seeing it analyzed that way.  Stanley talked about it a little bit after the screening of La Captive: he saw it as being about skepticism, about being part of the line of theatrical and cinematic treatments of the desire to be a skeptic, to abolish other minds, to secure oneself from the world, that he has traced from Shakespeare to screwball comedies and melodramas.  Jeanne's murderous response to having an orgasm was for Cavell a response to losing control (of course) because of her relation to another, followed then by the abolition of the other.  Although he didn't say this, Jeanne's relation to her son would be part of that skeptical dynamic, that skeptical recital which Jeanne's whole life constitutes.  Cavell sees the creation of a world for another, so that skepticism can't be the point or the shield, as the reason that Shakespeare's women don't hide within skepticism.  They transcend it, but that's something that Jeanne manages to dodge.

Unskeptical myself, at least among the truly great, I worried about how Chantal would respond to Stanley.  I needn't have.  She was ecstatic.  This was one of those rare moments where I felt perfectly happy to embrace the intentional fallacy.  Well, that's what was thematized, wasn't it?  Chantal's sense of Delphine Seyrig's sense of Jeanne -- all of them other minds.

This was partly the case because Chantal had a very intense relation to her actors, and there was some continuity between actor and role (as when she played in her own movies).  I liked how much she loved and mourned Seyrig.  I was fascinated by her dislike for Juliette Binoche, who starred in A Couch in New York (she liked William Hurt well enough).  I liked her arms-length professional-peer memories of Godard, who let her observe him making movies in the late sixties.

After that week, she was off to Douglas, Arizona, to make her documentary on Mexican immigrants, De l'autre coté.  I'd been to Douglas, and to Agua Prieta, on the Mexican side.  Douglas was a dirt-poor town, Agua Prieta a ridiculously energetic place.  It seemed great that we both knew those obscure towns.  We had fun talking about it, and about everything else.  I am so sorry that will never happen again.

Automatic ciphers

First something obvious, and then a meta-comment.

One thing I sometimes post are duh-moments: instances of the obvious that weren't obvious to me. Here's one from the other day. In Paradise Lost Adam describes to Raphael his first experience of experience, his finding himself in the world. There he was:

But who I was, or where, or from what cause,
My tongue obeyed, and readily could name
Whate’er I saw. ‘Thou Sun,’ said I, ‘fair light,
And thou enlightened Earth, so fresh and gay,
Ye hills and dales, ye rivers, woods, and plains,
And ye that live and move, fair creatures, tell,
Tell, if ye saw, how came I thus, how here! (8.270-77)

I'd long realized that Wordsworth ("And, O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, / Forbode not any severing of our loves!" and Shelley ("Show whence I came, and where I am, and why") must both be remembering this moment (and other resonating moments in Paradise Lost).

But what struck me the other day was the idea that this is perfectly autobiographical, that what Milton is describing here is poetic vocation, the combination of ease (of style) and wonder (about existence itself, including the fact of ease) that make a poet a poet. He can describe the world as he found it, including his own being in the world, and the fact that he can describe the world. Unlike Wittgenstein's self, his blank, Sartrean opacity is part of his world too: part of the world a poet thinks about (even when living a skeleton's life).

As I say, completely obvious, and yet I'd never realized this before, being too absorbed in the plot, and also perhaps in my own memories of my 1.75-lingual childhood: I remember one day noticing that I could understand Yugoslav, noticing, then, that it was a different language from English, and noticing therefore that I could understand English as well.

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So my meta-comment is this: there's a way in which everything you see in a poem should be obvious when you see it, should be a duh!-moment. Even if you can't or didn't readily name it in your first or fifth or hundredth reading, that would have been a failure of attention, not of intelligence.

That's what Stanley Cavell means by "the ordinary," the things that escape notice because you just don't pay attention to them, because it's an essential, ordinary part of what they are that you don't pay attention to them.

One place that I think you can see this at work is in canonical titles, the way they become "automatic ciphers." Why, for example, Reservoir Dogs? Well that's easy: it's the name of Quentin Tarentino's movie. It's called Reservior Dogs. Before you see the movie, you assume you'll understand the title when you see it, so that's fine; and after you see the movie, you know what the title designates: that great, violent, grueling picture you've watched. But at no time does the meaning of the title explain itself. The title is always ordinary, in Cavell's sense: always just the perfect, obvious, transparent designation of the movie. Similarly, who's Hoon in Stevens's "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon"? His answer to Norman Holmes Pearson (I wonder if he knew that Pearson had been a leader in the O.S.S.):

You are right in saying that Hoon is Hoon although it could be that he is the son of old man Hoon. He sounds like a Dutchman. I think the word is probably an automatic cipher for "the loneliest air", that is to say the expanse of sky and space.

For Cavell, the late Wittgenstein (and J.L. Austin) is like the Kant of the Third Critique in paying attention to the ordinary. One of Cavell's great insights is that aesthetic judgment shares with Wittgenstein's grammatical remarks (Bemerkungen, as he always calls them) the fact that you can't prove something beautiful or sublime (or whatever). There's no philosophical argument for beauty. It's something you have to see. In the same way, ordinary language, ordinary things, aren't amenable to an analysis that moves beyond the visible or apparent. The visible or apparent is all that counts, all that can count.

So all you can do is pay attention, and the idea is that if you do pay attention it might be obvious to you too. That's how reading should work, and how I think it does work in the great critics: they draw your attention to the automatic ciphers, which (as Kant says of the "pure reflective judgment" that is aesthetic experience, experience which isn't the application but the observation of a judgment) will then just decode themselves to you, and make you happy.

THE SURROUND OF THE LIVING

I've just been reading a bunch of Cavell, and I had been thinking about Lem's great novel Solaris ("better than any movie!") and it occurred to me how much the book is an allegory of Cavell's thinking about Cartesian skepticism.

That is, it's obvious that Solaris belongs, more strictly than Dick, to the category of philosophy done as science fiction. What if we could reify characters who existed only on our mind? (Not surprisingly the character so reified is named Rhea, a pun I think on reification as well as an allusion to Heraclitus's "panta rei" (πάντα ῥεῖ) - everything flows: Solaris is an ocean planet.) Or put differently, what if we literalized psychoanalytic fantasy, so that memories came alive, transferential relationships become material and actual? It seems obvious that the book is about such psychoanalytic reifications: hence the glimpses into the circus of the repressed fantasy lives of Kelvin's colleagues.

But if we moved from the psychoanalytic to the philosophical we'd be up against the telescoped skepticism that Descartes considers: the outside world may simply be my projection or dream; other people may be my projection or dream. Then I realized that this would make the planet Solaris itself play the role of the genius in Descartes (he calls it evil, but we could see it, as Lem does, as completely inscrutable), the entity that makes us believe in the false or non-existent outside world that we perceive.

Lem's depiction of the planet brings out the psychoanalytical dimension of this philosophical meditation: like the analyst's the planet's inscrutability is at the heart of the transferential relation. And Rhea's state of being is transitional, again in a completely psychoanalytical way. She is at once a part of the inscrutable mind of the planet, with superhuman powers and strengths, and a lonely, confused, unhappy human who has no connection with the sources of her being. Her bewilderment and vulnerability is essential to the love story, to the story of recovered love. Transference onto the planet being impossible (that might be how to describe the twin goals of analytic neutrality: to elicit transference in its most direct form and to make transference impossible), it finds its target in Rhea instead. Of course what's transferred onto Rhea is not, quite, the love of another being, prior to Rhea. It's love of Rhea herself. (That's why it happens twice.) The short circuits of analytic transference are canceled out when it comes to the planet, and intensified when it comes to Rhea.

Cavell too sees Cartesian skepticism from a psychoanalytic perspective: why do we want to disbelieve in the outside world? Because we want to disbelieve in other minds. Why? Because they threaten us, threaten our own sense of psychic integration and self-protection. How do we know this from Descartes? Because this threatening personage is an evil genius. What must we do? Acknowledge Rhea.

This would make Solaris more or less like Merrill's Book of Ephraim. One telling moment is Ephraim's own moment of confusion and clarification, confusion-as-clarification from 1962:

AM I IN YR ROOM     SO ARE ALL YR DEAD WHO HAVE NOT GONE INTO OTHER BODIES     IT IS EASY TO CALL THEM BRING THEM AS FIRES WITHIN SIGHT OF EACH OTHER ON HILLS     U & YR GUESTS THESE TIMES WE SPEAK ARE WITHIN SIGHT OF & ALL CONNECTED TO EACH OTHER DEAD OR ALIVE     NOW DO U UNDERSTAND WHAT HEAVEN IS     IT IS THE SURROUND OF THE LIVING