Pragmatism, Practice and the Politics of Critique

contemporary pragmatism 14 (2017) 212-220 brill.com/copr Pragmatism, Practice and the Politics of Critique Alexander Livingston Department of Government, Cornell University, 215 White Hall, Ithaca, ny 14853-7901, 607-255-8270 alexander.livingston@cornell.edu Abstract Colin Koopman’s Pragmatism as Transition offers an argumentative retelling of the history of American pragmatism in terms of the tradition’s preoccupation with time. Taking time seriously offers a venue for reorienting pragmatism today as a practice of cultural critique. This article examines the political implications third wave pragmatism’s conceptualization of time, practice, and critique. I argue that Koopman’s book opens up possible lines of inquiry into historical practices of critique from William James to James Baldwin that, when followed through to their conclusion, trouble some of the book’s political conclusions. Taking time and practice seriously, as transitionalism invites pragmatists to do, demands pluralizing critique in a way that puts pressure on familiar pragmatist convictions concerning liberalism, progress, and American exceptionalism. Keywords pragmatism – practice – critique – liberalism – American exceptionalism – time No question has proven more contentious within the history of American pragmatism than that of the meaning of pragmatism itself. Pragmatism has been described, alternatively, as a method of inquiry, a theory of truth, a distinctively American expression of the will to power, a practice of criticism, a therapeutic exercise, and more.1 As Arthur Lovejoy quipped over a century ago (1908), the word “pragmatism” contains such multitudinous designations that it can appear to have no particular meaning at all. Colin Koopman’s ambitious 1 Inter alia James (1987a), Russell (1992), Dewey (1981), and Rorty (1979). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/18758185-01402006 Pragmatism, Practice and the Politics of Critique 213 Pragmatism as Transition (2009) stakes an original position in this conversation. The book offers an argumentative retelling of the history of the pragmatist tradition from Peirce to Rorty in terms of the persistence of one central theme: transitionalism.2 Working in the spirit of William James’s characterization of pragmatism as an orientation rather than a theory, Koopman’s neologism names the time-bound sensibility informing pragmatist approaches to questions of epistemology, ethics, and politics. The transitionalist is always already in the middle of things. She lives in a world of historical processes and durational flows where past and future meet in a living present that is a time of action and transformation. Koopman’s book proposes this master category to do more than settle the meaning of pragmatism once and for all, however. Putting time at the centre of pragmatism is an invitation to develop “new forms of pragmatism that seek out new pragmatists, marginal pragmatists, barely pragmatists, and almost pragmatists” (2009, 71). By reaching out beyond the confines of the canon to pursue conversations with social and political thinkers like Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Iris Marion Young, Koopman proposes a needful path for reconstructing pragmatism as a theory and practice of “meliorist cultural criticism” (5). Central to the book’s retelling of the pragmatist tradition is its recovery of the category of practice. Embodied social practices are the ‘stuff’ that find themselves temporally transitioning between past and future. The category of practice is a familiar pragmatist concept whose genealogy reaches back to Alexander Bain’s definition of belief as a rule for action rather than a mental representation. Koopman, however, argues that pragmatism’s previous “waves” inadvertently displaced practice’s historically-situated and socially-mediated nature. First wave pragmatists, like James and Dewey, sought to recover the register of practice from the vicious intellectualism of the tradition of western metaphysics through a capacious conception of experience. Experience, however, only buried practices again by serving as a different sort of timeless metaphysical foundation. Second wave pragmatists, or neo-pragmatists, responded to the foundationalism of experience by turning to language. The linguistic turn offered a salutary correction to the first wave’s quest for the grounds of knowledge by reorienting philosophy to the practical fields in which knowledge operates. But this correction only went halfway. In their anxiety to evade the myth of the given that ensnared the first wave, the second wave’s exclusive concern with language enacted a different sort of evasion of the temporal and historical field of practice. Transitionalism, or third wave pragmatism, proposes to learn from this history of insights and failures in order to reconstruct a 2 On argumentative retelling see Bernstein (1995). contemporary pragmatism 14 (2017) 212-220 214 Livingston robust conception of practice that is neither purely linguistic nor grounded in a metaphysics of experience. “What we need in the place of these overarching conceptual edifices are thick conceptual and empirical elucidations of our practices explicating what would be adequate for discriminating relations between past projection and future realizations” explains Koopman (111). As a political scientist, I find much to admire in Koopman’s reconstruction of American pragmatism as “a cultural-critical conception according to which the labor of philosophical thought devotes itself to clarifying and amplifying the melioriative reconstructions already underway in our present cultural moment” (105). I read statements like this as calls to radically reimagine the politics of third wave pragmatism as something more than the philosophical handmaiden of political liberalism that contemporary pragmatism has become. Indeed, Koopman faults both John Rawls and his pragmatist followers for remaining captured by a picture of politics as applied moral philosophy that “works from the ideal back to the real rather than from reality towards ideality” (162). A critical pragmatism, by contrast, takes the practice of politics seriously. Yet Koopman’s third wave makes for choppy waters here. It calls for a corrective return to practice as the horizon of critique but it stops short of following this line of thinking into an engagement with real practices of critique. The book’s engagement with practice remains a strictly theoretical proposal. In the remarks that follow I invite Koopman and his readers to consider how engagement with historically-situated practices of critique provides an avenue for further developing some of Pragmatism as Transition’s insights, even if doing so troubles many of the book’s political conclusions. One lens for examining transitionalist practices of critique is found in the political writings of the old, new, marginal, and barely pragmatists themselves. As I have argued elsewhere (Livingston 2016), William James’s writings on United States imperialism provide critical insights for interpreting and evaluating the political implications of his pluralistic pragmatism. A common place for beginning an investigation into James’s anti-imperialism is his 1910 essay, ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’. The essay is a Janus-faced critique of both the imperialist celebration of warfare as a theatre of civic regeneration as well as the moralism of pacifist criticisms of war. James hated the violence of modern warfare while admiring the moral virtues of courage and self-discipline called forth by the battlefield. In order to divorce these virtues from war’s brutality and carnage, James (in)famously proposed a national system of public service to enlist young men in “a war against Nature” (1987b, 1291). Koopman glosses James’s essay as exemplary of the practice of meliorist critique. Unlike a moralistic pacifism that simply denounces the reality of war in fidelity to an ideal of nonviolence, James’s proposal “is meant to provide a transitional link between contemporary pragmatism 14 (2017) 212-220 Pragmatism, Practice and the Politics of Critique 215 some untenable present reality and some improved future possibility” (Koopman 2009, 168). More precisely, James’s proposal to demilitarize civic virtue exemplifies “the triadic relation of transitionality (from ab to bc by way of b)” (170). Critique draws on past “resources” – a rather vague but capacious category in the book’s analysis of critique – in order to craft novel paths of transition that transform the present into a meliorated future. When we place James’s essay in historical context as a concrete practice of political criticism, however, the transition seems more fraught than the formalism of Koopman’s account would suggest. Critics are entangled in historical language games, practices, and idioms; often they are entrapped by them.3 James’s essay is at once a response to and appropriation of a Gilded Age language of imperial freedom. Imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt invited American men to imagine themselves as pioneers continuing the national legacy of conquering the wild on a new imperial frontier. The promise of the strenuous life, as Roosevelt called it, promised a path to both personal and civic renewal. James often spoke in similar idioms, but did so to refashion the language of manly courage in a distinctively anti-imperial manner. In the ‘Moral Equivalent of War’ James perform a practice of critique that, as he puts it, enters “more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view” of the opponent in order to “move the point” (1987b, 1288). This is transitionalism as subversive repetition. But in speaking in the language of imperialism, James’s anti-imperialism unwittingly repeats and reinforces elements of its political grammar. The moral courage James’s calls forth is cast in the same sovereign, masculine, and nationalist terms of Roosevelt’s rhetoric of imperial citizenship. Traces of the settler colonial imaginary James’s draws on as the resources of meliorist critique linger in his reiterated vision of an anti-imperial political future. I raise this point to underline how attending to the historically-situated nature of critique should draw our attention to the fact that the politics of meliorism lie in the transitions. Problematic situations call for reconstruction, but these reconstructions are often no less objects of political contention than the perceived problems themselves. Pragmatism as Transition opens up conceptual space for such a pluralistic perspective on the politics of critique at moments. One example is its discussion of adjacent and connected criticism. The adjacent critic is situated at the boundaries of existing political identities, language games, and practices. To be adjacent is to be dislocated, displaced, out of order. Koopman borrows the concept of adjacency from anthropologist Paul Rabinow to name the practice of occupying the space of the problem. 3 I borrow this language of entrapment and entanglement from Tully (2008). contemporary pragmatism 14 (2017) 212-220 216 Livingston Connected criticism, by contrast, is the practice of insiders. They speak in the authoritative voice of their communities’s deepest commitments to criticize their current practices. Unlike the discomfort and estrangement that marks the experience of adjacency and introduces dissensus into existing practices, the connected critic occupies a place of authority as the voice of consensus in need of repair. Koopman’s categories pluralizes critique without repeating Michael Walzer’s forced dichotomy of connected versus disconnected critics. They instead invite us to attend to the different ways actors are situated in relationships of power and authority within the field of practice. “Understanding liberalism,” Koopman argues, “involves understanding the way in which liberalism is actually lived and experienced” (173). Or better, understanding liberalism means understanding the radically divergent ways life is lived under a liberal regime and its modes of political subjectivization. Unfortunately, the fuller implications of this distinction remain only gestured at. The discussion of the politics of transition displaces the practice of critique in its own way by collapsing the experience of adjacency into the terms of the connected critic. Consider Koopman’s discussion of the American context of meliorist critique. Pragmatism, we are told, is the philosophical expression of “an inborn American commitment to meliorism” with America understood as “a hope, a project, a generous past and a fragile future” (45, 48). Cultural criticism in the American context is one that does without metaphysical grounds or final foundations. It is the art of looking forward to the future as a horizon of hope that can better embody the creedal values that pragmatists and Americans hold dear. The meliorist critic appeals to what is best in American history as inspiration to “renew American hope” and “counter prevailing tendencies in the United States” (48–49). This picture of cultural criticism is clearly indebted to Rorty’s liberalism and, by extension, the idea of connected criticism he championed. Like Rorty, Koopman’s transitionalism takes the nation’s shared commitments and creedal values as the normative grounds of critique. But for all of transitionism’s attention to uncertainty and contingency, there is little doubt about the value of these values themselves. They are taken as given. No failures of the present to realize national ideals seem to put hope of their triumph into question. This is a political iteration of the myth of the given, but one that does away with a search for deeper grounds of the community’s convictions by projecting foundations into the future as universal values that are always already settled but awaiting actualization in the present. A connected criticism that takes the ultimate values of a dream country called America as settled convictions, independent of whether or not the finite citizens making up the historical political association called the United States honor or evade them, slides into a triumphalist sort of narrative of perpetual contemporary pragmatism 14 (2017) 212-220 Pragmatism, Practice and the Politics of Critique 217 progress that displaces both radical challenges to the nation’s past and hopes for alternative political futures. There is a name for this kind of triumphalist narrative of hope in the United States: American exceptionalism. As Sacvan Bercovitch (1978, 1993) and other scholars of have argued, American exceptionalism trades in a prophetic language of present danger and future redemption to call the community back to the authority of past covenants.4 This ritual of consensus has played an ideological role in American political development by demanding fidelity to a particular vision of liberal nationalism, even when critics marshal it as a language of dissent. We might fairly object to Bercovitch’s account as totalizing but doing so should not be an excuse to deny how the connected critic’s claims to consensus, and the rhetoric of future promise and redemption, can work to entrap practices of critique in an illusion of progressive change that is in fact only a repetition of the past. Fortunately, this is not the only way critique might engage practices in the transitional present. Koopman points to another angle in the same passage when he cites Cornel West’s account of pragmatism as “a continuous cultural commentary or set of interpretations that attempt to explain American to itself at a particular historical moment” (cited at 45). The work of critical commentary can take many forms. One might be Rorty’s jeremiad that calls the nation back to its founding ideals and narratives. But another might be a redescription of existing practices and institutions that puts these ideals into sharp relief, that raises the question of whether they really mean what the community thinks they mean, and of whether the community’s narratives are in fact descriptions of who it wishes to become or only myths sheltering them the hard facts of a less edifying reality. These are views gleamed by occupying spaces and practices outside of the perceived safety of the vital center. They are the provocations of the adjacent critic. There is no formula or science to this sort of criticism. The critic occupies an “experimental terrain” (166). But how does she come to occupy this space? Where does she stand when she is adjacent? What moods, affects, and practices of self sustain this critical relationship? Koopman poses these critical questions but does not pursue answers. The lived experience of American politics Koopman seeks to recover is instead depicted as temporally plural but socially monistic. Taking the plurality of practice seriously, however, might push the analysis in different directions as the book comes close to in its discussion of James Baldwin. Baldwin’s language of hope in The Fire Next Time (1993) is celebrated as “the characteristically melioristic attitude toward America so needful again today” (Koopman 2009, 48). Baldwin’s language of hope, however, is 4 See also West (1999), Glaude (2000) and Shulman (2008). contemporary pragmatism 14 (2017) 212-220 218 Livingston sharply at odds with that of connected criticism. Baldwin writes in the voice of the adjacent critic, both inside and outside, to make the language of prophecy stutter. His prophecy stages a division between two different Americas, black and white, adjacent yet entangled with one another. The result is a practice of social criticism that continually resists the seductions of the very nationalist language it trades in. “The American Negro has the great advantage of never having believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has even seen…Negroes know far more about white Americans than that” (Baldwin 1993, 101).5 Occupying this space of dislocation is not a refusal of community or collective political struggle. It is, rather, a statement of dissensus that problematizes idealized presumptions of consensus in order to open the political space for confronting the very different ways American liberalism is lived and experienced as a provocation to transform it. Many transitions, many politics. Koopman is under no illusions concerning pragmatism’s philosophical problems and its political shortcomings. The project of reconstructing a third wave aspires take them on as provocations to hybridize pragmatism, drawing insights and tools from neighbouring traditions and schools of thought. This exercise in hybridity is most clearly on display in the book’s final chapter on pragmatism and genealogy. Pragmatism as critique must aim for more than simply reconstructing problems; it must also problematize settled solutions. Governing practices and values need to be critically unsettled to continue the work of meliorist transition. Pragmatist inquiry recovers its critical edge by borrowing diagnostic tools from Foucault’s genealogical studies of madness, prisons, and sexuality. Koopman has explored the elective affinities between pragmatism and genealogy in greater detail in subsequent work (2013), but the discussion in Pragmatism as Transition remains haunted by a certain ambiguity. Is genealogy a tool for the theorist-spectator or as a practice of the citizenparticipant? Does pragmatism, as a theory, lack some theoretical or normative integrity in need of intellectual supplementation? Or is transitionalism, as a sensibility, a way of resisting the seductions of intellectualism and the pursuit of final grounds that mask the ways the present is both practiced and problematized by actors themselves? Pragmatism as Transition makes a persuasive case for renewing Dewey’s original vision of pragmatism as a method for dealing with the problems of 5 See discussion in Shulman (2002). This point could be pushed further by attending to how the construction of race and racism mediates the experience of time. On “racial time” see Hanchard (1998). contemporary pragmatism 14 (2017) 212-220 Pragmatism, Practice and the Politics of Critique 219 men and women by pluralizing its canon and reimagining its politics. Moving from the real to the ideal invites both novel perspectives and jarring challenges to the tradition’s received political wisdom, however. Deidealizing practice means deidealizing politics and with it the conceits of American liberalism that have always been central to pragmatism’s previous waves. This is a lesson American philosophers might learn from one of the barely or almost pragmatists who traverses Koopman’s churning waves: W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1986) retells the history of Reconstruction as one of broken promises and violent retribution in order to reorient the readers’ relationship with liberalism and its promise of perpetual progress. Du Bois folds problematization into his call for reconstruction by making civic confrontation with the past a crucial element of the politics of building a national future. Souls attempts to explain America back to itself at a particular historical moment in order to call his readers back from the comforting myth of history’s liberal bent and onto an acknowledgement of where they really stand in the present. 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