A hallmark of Cavell’s prose is the repertoire of strictly superfluous, oddly indelible phrases on which he likes to draw to introduce, hedge—withdraw the assertiveness of—his assertions: “I would like to say…,” “I am prepared to say…,” “I wish to understand…,” “It may help to say…,” “call it…,” “let’s say…,” “and again I have to say…” A selection drawn from the new collection: “Suppose I say…,” “I would like to assume…,” “What I wanted to say…,” “I have to ask myself…” “Here, so I would like to say…,” “the canonical reading is, let me say…,” “I wish to say something like…” Turn to section §300 of the Investigations and you find: “It is—we should like to say—not merely the picture of the behavior…”

This may seem a flimsy example—“we should like to say” is perhaps not a Wittgenstein original. But in broader terms, Cavell’s prose is suffused by the influence of the techniques and ethos of ordinary language philosophy—by its invitation to ask yourself what you would want or be tempted or inclined to say when. The auto-narrating trail Cavell leaves in his prose—his tendency to voice, even dramatize, his promptings or temptations to certain utterances—bears the unmistakable imprint of Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s methods.

“There would seem to be no reason why I am better fitted than anyone else to open this discussion. As I listened to the papers I felt that I have only a historical connection with this thing called “operationalism.” In short, I feel that I have created a Frankenstein, which has certainly got away from me. I abhor the word operationalism or operationism, which seems to imply a dogma, or at least a thesis of some kind. The thing I have envisaged is too simple to be dignified by so pretentious a name; rather, it is an attitude or point of view generated by continued practice of operational analysis. So far as any dogma is involved here at all, it is merely the conviction that it is better, because it takes us further, to analyze into doings or happenings rather than into objects or entities.”

“He has also finished a screenplay for a film adaptation of ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.’ The process required him to learn an entirely new genre of writing. ‘I’m most myself when I’m learning,’ he said. ‘In martial arts, it’s called the white-belt mentality. So even if you have a black belt, the black belt starts to corrode and dissolve if you don’t approach the art as a white belt.’”