Locating American Experience

Cavell’s Paths to Film and Transcendentalism

Abstract

For Cavell, American transcendentalism and film share the capacity to provide an education in taking an interest in one’s experience. The results of such interest are for him ultimately political, allowing for self-cultivation and hence for mutual progress; an aspiration both romantic and liberal. However, the meeting of an experiential focus with political hopes extends beyond Cavell, and the wider fact of this convergence allows us to conceive his project as part of a broader milieu. One way to think Cavell historically is to consider some of the contexts in which his voice was forged. Although he sometimes alludes to it, we don’t readily associate Cavell with 1960s radicalism, the counterculture, or the New Left. His sensibility and concerns seem more abstract than this, and operate on other planes than activism or polemic. His voice also unmistakably belongs to both a disciplinary training in philosophy (specifically, a 1950s analytic context) and to an earlier generation. Yet granting the unmistakable significance of these, we can still observe that despite his originality, and his anomalousness as an analytic philosopher, Cavell is not an a-contextual voice in American letters. He is not alone in exploring the value of attention to (American) experience as a resource for improvement, a fact to which he himself draws notice. Further, he anticipates certain developments in our critical present centred around the possibilities for a tone of hope and optimism with more than personal implications.