Stanley Cavell's The Fact of Television began with such promise. I was expecting something like Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. Unfortunately the article became mired in nit-picky definitions and terminology and an over-eagerness to categorize and subcategorize. He may have been aware of this, as he asks on page 202: What difference does any of this make?
Q1: The author is "over qualified." I don't mean that he has too many advanced degrees, but that he has qualified his writing in a handful of ways. He is very present in the writing. There are a lot of instances of "I" and such. He acknowledges in places that he is taking a "perhaps unjustified" leap of faith. On page 195 he says that everything he has to say in the article depends on what "seems" (his quotes) to be so to him actually being so. He claims that the relevant writings he has read "far too unsystematically." There are plenty more. What is he up to with this type of approach?
Q2: Cavell is, apparently, rather fond of his own writing. Not only does he cite his previous works numerous times, he does so with a narrative writerliness. For example, he writes about his own response to a colleague, "what surprised me was to find myself going on to object: but in live television..." etc. (205) This is a circuitous and suspiciously calculated way of saying something simple. This is not the sole example. Again, what is he up to with this literary maneuver?
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