![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
Abstract
Stefan Ramaekers and Joris Vlieghe’s ‘Infants, childhood and language in Agamben and Cavell: education as transformation’ is an insightful discussion of an important facet of educational experience. In the article, they consider a Fred Astaire dance sequence from the 1953 Vincente Minnelli film, The Band Wagon, in combination with a remarkable article about this same sequence by Stanley Cavell. On the strength of this, they develop an interesting line of thought regarding the experience of language, exploring connections between the ideas of Cavell and Agamben. Rich and thought-provoking though their discussion is, I find that it deflects attention from the most important aspects of the film sequence and the literature that has developed in response – specifically regarding questions of race and praise. The present discussion attempts to address these matters.
Keywords:
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Ramaekers and Vlieghe lean rather heavily on the following line in The Claim of Reason, where Cavell is speaking of the entry into language of a small child, in fact his daughter. She is experimenting with words newly acquired: ‘If she had never made such leaps she would never have walked into speech. Having made it, meadows of communication can grow for us’ (Cavell Citation1979, 172). These lines are just a small part of a larger account, which in a sense extends through the 500-odd pages of Cavell’s book and which is richly suggestive, important and persuasive. But this is something other than a theory. In the light of this, the parallel that Ramaekers and Vlieghe are drawing is interesting but less tidy than their discussion implies.
2. In the light of this, the characterisation of my account that is offered by Ramaekers and Vlieghe in their main text – ‘Paul Standish … draws attention to a certain subversion of gender roles happening in this scene, i.e. Astaire acting in a rather effeminate way and enjoying this’ (Ramaekers and Vlieghe Citation2014, 293) – seems partial and somewhat obtuse. I am grateful for the acknowledgement in the notes to their text of earlier discussions of this sequence.
3. Both papers appear in revised form in Cavell (Citation2005).
4. In fact, Rogin’s remarks directly about the film are much briefer than Cavell’s response might imply. They are couched within a larger discussion in a chapter entitled ‘New Deal Blackface’ (Rogin Citation1996, chap. 6).
5. Cavell is thinking primarily of great tragedy here, and in this essay, ‘The Avoidance of Love’, the primary topic is King Lear. But he also acknowledges, almost immediately after these words, the fact that theatre can theatricalise its own conditions.
6. Ramaekers and Vlieghe refer to my reply to their paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society at Albuquerque, New Mexico, in March 2014, and also to an earlier lecture, which has seen various iterations, sometimes in the course of my teaching. Further discussion can also be found in Cavell and Standish (Citation2012).
7. Is it necessary to spell out the ways in which philosophy has profited from empire, or the prominence of its dead, white males, or its collusion at its origin with slavery? Or, since this is America, to remember that, for most of its history, the United States has not been a democracy?
8. The lyrics of the original song, from the Broadway musical Flying Colors (1932), extend to just thirteen lines and include none of the ‘frenzied’ elaboration seen in The Band Wagon.
9. A frankfurter; but also in North American slang, a man’s penis.
10. This phrase was used at an earlier stage in the discussion.
11. Gooding-Williams takes the blacking of Astaire’s shoes to be not just an insemination of the white man by the black but also a coding of the putting on of blackface, in spirit if not in actuality. But is it just a detail that the shoes are not black but brown, noticeable perhaps in part because of their questionable relationship to the grey suit Astaire is wearing.
12. ‘You have just dined, and, however scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, – expensive races, – race living at the expense of race’ (Emerson Citation1983, 945).
13. It was not uncommon for a shoe-shine man to do a quick dance turn between customers.
14. ‘Scepticism’ is an overtly philosophical term, whereas ‘the ordinary’ is not. While Cavell’s pondering of the latter run more or less throughout his work, a key illustration of his concerns is found in his reading of Wittgenstein’s desire to return language to its everyday use and of the recurrent disturbance, in the Philosophical Investigations, of this return. The rich ambiguities in the title of Cavell’s discussion of the earlier scene, ‘Something Out of the Ordinary’, clearly allude to what is at stake in this.
15. In respect of Astaire, he mentions especially Swingtime (1936), which includes ‘a blackface “homage” to Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’, to whom there is further reference in The Band Wagon (246–247): ‘There is no difference’, Cordova says, ‘between the magic rhythms of Bill Shakespeare’s immortal verse, and the magic rhythms of Bill Robinson’s immortal feet’. Robinson (1878–1949) was an innovative, successful, and highly influential tap dancer, who gave great support to younger dancers, including Astaire. His collaborations with such stars as Shirley Temple and Bing Crosby have been described both as breakthroughs in interracial relations (see, e.g. the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Robinson) and as collusion in new hierarchies of power, within the aegis of the New Deal (see, e.g. Rogin Citation1996).
16. I owe this observation to William Rothman.
17. As far as I can see, the only reference to absolution or its cognates in Cavell’s discussion is his comment that the ‘refrain, or song proper, “There’s a Shine on Your Shoes,” contains in its title an impropriety so absolute as to threaten to undermine from the outset the celebratory air we seem to be preparing for’ (Cavell Citation2005, 74). This seems to pull in exactly the opposite direction to what Gooding-Williams has in mind.
18. I have come towards this view through helpful discussions with Adrian Skilbeck.
19. See also Gregg Crane’s excellent discussion in ‘Ellison’s Constitutional Faith’ (Crane Citation2005).
20. See especially ‘Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of Language’ (Cavell Citation1979, 168–190).
21. An artiste is a performer in music-hall or Vaudeville, for example.