"Is there no real way out of this air of self-defeat, no way to get satisfying answers?"
p. 76, Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosopy, Cavell

There is no way to get satisfying answers. Further, there is no need to answer questions such as “can one paraphrase a poem?” For an artist, entering into the discussion immediately admits defeat by way of admitting to a latent content that one can understand rationally.

“When Croce denied the possibility of paraphrase, he at least had the grace to assert that there were no metaphors.” p. 79

I agree with Benedetto Croce’s argument made in “Aesthetic as Science of Expression & General Linguistic”:

“These and all other determinations of modes or degrees of expression reveal their philosophical nullity when the attempt is made to develop them in precise definitions, because they either grasp the void or fall into the absurd.”

Is it all so complex as Cavell pretends? Is Juliet not the sun? Does Romeo orbit her? Is he not warmed? Does his increasing proximity cause his death? The measure of a poem is not the latent content, the message, and how “creatively” or “lyrically” or “clever” it is hidden. It is the way in which a system is built in such a [ ] way as to invent sensations escaping the language to which they are inexorably bound in rational speech. To reconnect these words to reality in repulsive. I cannot do better than DH Lawrence in his Introduction to Harry Crosby's “Chariot of the Sun”:

“Poetry is a matter of words. Poetry is a stringing together of words into a ripple and jingle and a run of colours. Poetry is an interplay of images. Poetry is the iridescent suggestion of an idea. Poetry is all these things, and still it is something else. Given all these ingredients, you have something very like to poetry, something for which we might borrow the old romantic name of poesy. And poesy, like bric-a-brac, will forever be in fashion. But poetry is still another thing.

The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention, and 'discovers' a new world within the known world. Man, and the animals, and the flower, all live within a strange and forever surging chaos. The chaos which we have got used to, we call a cosmos. The unspeakable inner chaos of which we are composed we call consciousness, and mind, and even civilization. But it is, ultimately, chaos, lit up by visions. Just as the rainbow may or may not light up the storm. And, like the rainbow, the vision perisheth.

But man cannot live in chaos. The animals can. To the animal, all is chaos, only there are a few recurring motions and aspects within the surge. And the animal is content. But man is not. Man must wrap himself in a vision, make a house of apparent form and stability, fixity. In his terror of chaos, he begins by putting up an umbrella between himself and the everlasting chaos. Then he paints the underside of his umbrella like a firmament. Then he parades around, lives, and dies under his umbrella. Bequeathed to his descendants, the umbrella becomes a dome, a vault, and men at last begin to feel that something is wrong.

Man fixes some wonderful erection of his own between himself and the wild chaos, and gradually goes bleached and stifled under his parasol. Then comes a poet, enemy of convention, and makes a slit in the umbrella; and lo! the glimpse of chaos is a vision, a window to the sun. But after a while, getting used to the vision, and not liking the genuine draught from chaos, commonplace man daubs a simulacrum of the window that opens onto chaos, and patches the umbrella with the painted patch of the simulacrum. That is, he has got used to the vision, it is part of his house-decoration. So that the umbrella at last looks like a glowing open firmament, of many aspects. But alas, it is all simulacrum, in innumerable patches. Homer and Keats, annotated and with glossary.”

“...the dangers of fraudulence, and of trust, are essential to the experience of art.”
- Music Discomposed, Cavell

While he is correct, unfortunately Cavell attempts to use his dog’s breakfast (a phrase for the brain taken from Kurt Vonnegut and used here to indicate derision for rational thinking in the realm of art) to plow through this issue. Despite coming so close to art, especially from the bottom of 192 to the top of 193, Cavell reduces art to a communicative tool, a way in which to communicate an experience one already knows in a format that must necessarily use information that another person already knows. Thus, for Cavell, art becomes reconfiguration of “the same” in order to communicate the inexpressible. What he is missing is the discovery that takes place in the aesthetic experience of the artist and then between the artist and those experiencing the results What he fails to grasp is the removal of rational process, rational thought, from the authentic artistic experience. There is “no one” there”, if “one” is a rational being, at the moment of an artistic breakthrough, or via Deleuze and Guattari, there is a pack, or Elias Canetti, a crowd. There is an absence and a multiplicity but never a one, never an experience, never an individuality. There is no rational intention. Yes, one communicates but it is a very special sort of communication that Cavell begins to open to and, unfortunately, at the same moment, slams back into a rational experience.

Adam Trowbridge