SKEPTICISM AND THE ORDINARY From Burnt Norton To Las Vegas

Visible Language, 2003 by Vinegar, Aron

ABSTRACT

The premise of this article is that Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour's Learning from Las Vegas exemplifies a full-scale engagement with the implications of philosophical skepticism. Drawing on the philosopher Stanley Cavell's work on skepticism and the ordinary, I take up the classical questions of skepticism and bring them to bear directly on questions of language and architecture in that text. I argue that instead of light irony, complicity with the "culture industry," or the simple equation of architecture with communication, Learning from Las Vegas is fundamentally about the "intolerable wrestle with words and meanings" in the city.

Words strain, crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, will not stay still. Shrieking voices scolding, mocking, or merely chattering, always assail them. The Word in the desert is most attacked by voices of temptation.

T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton," The Four Quartets

__ Challenging texts such as Learning from Las Vegas do not make reading easy. They are "difficult" to put it in Eliotian terms and are deceptive, as if calling forth a weak skepticism in response to their robust version. In fact, much of the criticism and commentary on Learning from Las Vegas from its initial publication in 1972 has circled around the question of skepticism without directly addressing its philosophical premises. At its furthest extreme skepticism manifests itself in nihilism: the radical denial of shared meaning altogether; the other extreme - to live without skepticism-would be to fall in love with the world.1 Some critics took Venturi and Scott Brown's evaluation of the Las Vegas Strip as "almost all right," to mean simply all right. Other cultural critics, mostly from the perspectives of critical and postmodern theory, would implicitly identify them with their full-blown nihilistic interpretations of America, Las Vegas and the "culture industry." In between the two extremes, they were most often branded as liberal ironists embracing a witty, but ultimately innocuous and possibly reckless, cultural pessimism.2 But I have a hunch that what made the book so infuriating is that it had more of the flavor of courting the extremes without occupying them or the middle ground. This state of affairs is best captured in the graffiti that the "pop-artist" Ed Ruscha saw scrawled in the ruins of an abandoned hotel structure near Glassell Park in Los Angeles: "FUCK THE WORLD... AND FUCK YOU IF YOU DON'T LOVE IT."' I take this as a more prosaic formulation of the real stakes of skepticism as outlined by Stanley Cavell: that there are endless specific succumbings to the conditions of skepticism and endless specific recoveries from it, and between the temptations of excessive despair and false hope is a quest for the ordinary and its perspicuousness.

Simply stated, the premise of this essay is that the visual and textual arguments in Learning from Las Vegas exemplify a full-scale engagement with the implications of philosophical skepticism. I am by no means claiming that Venturi and Scott Brown "intended" to exemplify skepticism when they wrote Learning from Las Vegas, merely that the resultant book does so. I take my basic orientation from the two fundamental aspects of the threat of skepticism: the uncertainty of knowing the world out there and knowing other minds. These aspects of skepticism are not mutually exclusive-far from it. So-called other minds and external world skepticism often allegorize their respective commitments.4 Further, I take it that the approach to words in Learning from Las Vegas is allegorical of both external world and other minds skepticism. "As if," as Cavell has put it, "to write toward self-knowledge is to war with words, to battle for the very weapons with which you fight."5 A position also echoed in T.S. Eliot's lines from the Four Quartets that ends the first part of Learning from Las Vegas: "That was a way of putting it not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings. The poetry does not matter..."6 Thus my core argument in this essay is as follows: In Learning from Las Vegas Venturi and Scott Brown explore the fact that we are constantly stumbling over our words, our visible language, in the face of imagining its ability to "word the world" and communicate with others.

Wonder, Disorientation, and Turning Things Around

Stanley Cavell, echoing Plato in his Theaetetus, has suggested that philosophy begins in wonder: "...it is philosophy's power to cause wonder, or to stun-to take one aside -that decides who is to become a philosopher."7 The English word wonder captures the connotations of both the pleasure of amazement and intellectual curiosity. These "wonderful" experiences are not merely one among many, but a kind of rebirth that can initiate a life-long love and labor. For example, Cavell talks about his own ecstatic experience learning to hear the near perfect pitch of music with Ernest Bloch at Berkeley before the "revelatory effect" of studying with the ordinary language philosopher J.L. Austin at Harvard in 1955." Most interesting projects, not just philosophical ones, start in wonder. The art historian Michael Fried writes of being "knocked on his heels" by his first encounter with Anthony Caro's sculpture.9 Fried's experience captures another important dimension of wonder: the condition of being literally thrown off balance; a state of disorientation and "not knowing" that precedes the "a-ha" moment marking the fall into orientation, meaning and "learning from." If bodily orientation is the phenomenological basis of meaning as such think of being firm, upright, lowly, base, etc., -then one must entertain the possibility that philosophical problems might also begin with disorientation. In the words of Wittgenstein: "A philosophical problem has the form: "I don't know my way about."10 Or as Cavell has glossed this passage: "...one can take the idea of not knowing one's way about, of being lost, as the form specifically of the beginning or appearance of a philosophical problem."11