Michael Fried and Philosophy by Mathew Abbott

Author:Mathew Abbott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

If you do not respond to pain in the normal (“conventional”) ways, you don’t know what pain is. It is not the case that one first comes to recognize, to identify, to know (“descriptively”) pain and then to respond (“emotively”) to it.

The core of skepticism is the failure to acknowledge this interconnectedness between our concepts and our responses, which is a failure to acknowledge the limits of knowledge or, more accurately, of knowing as an approach to the world. This leads to a basic insight into the nature of the theatrical: the theatrical or literalist sensibility is one in which this failure to acknowledge the limits of knowing as a means of connection to the world is converted into a basic, positive stance toward the world.

The literalist work is one which purports to be revelatory about the fundamental nature of the human condition.16 That condition is one in which skepticism is true, a condition in which we most basically do observe the world as a “passing scene.”17 Literalist works are meant to make us realize that this is our true condition and give us a feeling of exhilaration in that realization. I think that the exhilaration is supposed to come from a feeling of liberation from the demands of action in the world. It is as if David Hume found an exhilaration in the “cold speculations in his chamber” because they released him from the burden of “sympathy.”18

An approach that links literalism and skepticism explains Fried’s reliance on the concept of “objecthood” in describing literalist art. Fried says of literalist art that it aspires not just to be an object but rather that it “aspires … to discover and project objecthood as such” (AO 151). Literalist works “project objecthood as such” not in being formless or in being “raw matter” but in providing for a theatrical experience in which what is “staged” for the viewer is just the theatrical relationship itself. This presents the viewer with a vision of himself as a passive knower set over and against the entire world as an object. This is the sense in which the literalist work projects not (just) its own objecthood but “objecthood as such.”

To repeat: the literalist or theatrical work does this by presenting the viewer with objects to which he or she can react without responding, which make no demands. Our reaction to them purports to take place outside of the sphere of action, the sphere of human responses and necessities. They are simply there to be interpreted, where “interpreted” is given a purely subjective sense. That is, “interpretation” here is an action that entails no commitments and no responsibilities. In Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell gives this description of the human condition as it is depicted in Frank Capra’s film It Happened One Night:

Only of an infinite being is the world created with the word. As finite, you cannot achieve reciprocity with the one in view by telling your story to the whole rest of the world. You have to

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