And Americanism is one _identity politics_ that Rorty, Alterman, etc. would love us to embrace. So much for 'critiques of identity politics.'
Yoshie
[Kenneth Mostern] This is absolutely key and I thank Yoshie for bringing it up. The desire to 'Americanize' marxism with pragmatism has always been a politics of turning it into 'evolutionary' social democracy, as Brian Lloyd argues with exceptional cogency in Left Out (Johns Hopkins, 1997), a book detailing the origins of US Marxist Thought. All philosophies have a pragmatics; most of us aren't arrogant enough to call our pragmatics 'pragmatism'. Other than that, the only possible reason to defend James' or Dewey's mediocrity at this late date is to prove that Americans are real philosophers too -- which, I admit, is partially a reaction to the equally idiotic notion that philosophy only happens in France and Germany. Since its obvious to me that the most important philosophy of the 20th century has come from the Pan-African world -- inside and outside of the US -- I guess I don't have that problem :)
One more thing to add to this -- since Whitman is being positioned by Doug and others as 'really' queer and not really on Alterman's or Rorty's side, its worth reminding everyone that he did more than anyone to create an American nationalist poetry, quite explicity pro-manifest destiny, sentimental about the petty bourgeois and far more romantic about the workers' dripping sweat than interested in their factory conditions . . .
Kenneth Mostern Department of English University of Tennessee
"Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimented rage."
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