I can't possibly respond to everything Maureen wrote. I've tried to be selective with an eye toward focusing on what I hope will be clarifying.
Maureen Therese Anderson wrote:
> So I'd appreciate a clearer statement from you about "theory" and what
> role you think it plays in your pragmatism.
I’m a glutton for theory. But PoMo “theory” is a totally different matter.
I hope I can clarify this by responding to your next point:
> Next--system. You know I'd have probably just figured
> you one of Keynes' frenzy-distilling madmen by now,
> except that for every handful of rabid anti-pomo posts,
> you do go and post something really astute. For instance
> your capital-punishment post a while back was so pithy
> that I saved it: you were cautioning against a narrow
> focus on individual intentions/cases, because it how ot
> served to cloak larger structures they participate in:
>
>[*Paul when he's Lovely*:]
> "Today's racism is largely sustained by this dualism.
> White privilege is structural and doesn't require
> anyone's intent -- at least for the most part. But
> it still has a multitude of devastating effects. The
> same is true of class oppression, gender oppression,
> you name it -- what's most damaging isn't intentional,
> it's structural. So, the point of calling the factory
> owner a murderer isn't to put him on trial or to sweep
> aside considerations of motive, etc. as you suppose.
> Rather, it's to dramatically expose this dualism.
>
> It's like the Wobblies used to do.
> A man would run out into a public space and yell,
> "I"ve been robbed!" Everyone would immediately draw
> up around him, and he'd begin telling them how -- just
> like them -- he'd been robbed by the capitalist system.
> And he was absolutely right."
>[**End of Paul on a Good Day**]
>
> So so nice: you stressed the importance of seeing
> the multi-leveled workings of larger system, implying
> how symbolic representations and social forms mutually
> form each other. I'd like to think that this is the
> real Paul, and that some rabid little gremlins with your
> password are posting all those anti-theory rants.
> Because the above insightfulness, whcih acknowledges
> some kind of system, implies more "theory" than you let
> on.
I’d like to call your attention to two things:
(1) Nothing I said depended on PoMo “theory”. It simply depended on being able to use (not deconstruct!) well-known categories.
(2) Notice how jargon-free the passage you quoted was. Some big words, not suitable for the op-ed pages, I admit, but all the words have been in wide use in the sense I use them for eons. The clearer the expression, the easier it is to talk about subtle and/or complex ideas. I am all in favor of subtle ideas, and complex ones, too, where called for.
But, here’s the catch: one should ALWAYS try to simplify complex ideas. Doing so allows them to become building-blocks to create a more elaborate edifice. This is what PoMo seems utterly incapable of doing to save its soul.
This leads directly back to the following:
> (So you can keep your pat-on-head "just respond to
> what I've written. Pragmatism need not be made too
> complicated. It's better that way.")
>
> Now actually I'm curious what you think of something
> like _Capital_. You know Marx used up an awful lot
> of ink for what's probably the most sustained reflection
> in modern thought on the relations between meaningful
> action, collective representations and social structure.
> How much of it is fluff? Can your pragmatist "purpose"
> short-cut that fatiguing climb that Marx mentioned in
> the preface to the French edition? (cf. Doug's recent
> post, and btw I remember seeing amazing statistics
> somewhere about the percentage of french workers of the
> period who did read _Capital_.)
(1) I think a lot of things about _Capital_, just like anyone else.
(2) I’m not criticizing PoMo “Theory” as fluff. Besides, fluff has its uses and its place. I crank my radio whenever I happen upon a great piece of pop fluff like “Cruel Summer”.
(3) Pragmatism -- Jamesian-style fountain-head pragmatism -- fundamentally rejects the notion of single purposes. _Capital_ quite obviously serves a variety of purposes, and its fair to say that most anyone trying to succede as well as Marx at all those purposes would probably do a much worse job and produce something REALLY dense and garbled.
(4) But damn few workers of this period are reading it -- or anything else remotely like it. For purposes of getting them interested in Marx’s ideas there were some really good comic books back in the late 70s, I think it was. (BTW, Are they still around?) They don’t replace _Capital_ by any means. But they do testify to the fact that major ideas in _Capital_ can be expressed in a popular media, and retain their power to move people.
(5) By itself, IMHO, none of this sheds much light on PoMo “Theory” or my gripes with it.
> If your pragmatism can avoid those steep paths
> while retaining Marx's insights, great. We'll go
> to the mountains and sing folksongs about you.
Well, that’s not what pragmatism is for, really. Rather, it’s for understanding that sometimes hard work really is necessary for the deep insights to really sink in, and therefore it’s necessary; but that other times hard work is there to make shallow insights seem deep (as with PoMo “Theory”, for the most part).
Still, if you want to sing folksongs, Rob Schaap recently posted a passage from “The Fever” by Wallace Shawn. You could sing folksongs about him, for sure. Just make sure to include a verse about him playing the part of the Grand Nagus of the Ferengi Empire on “Star Trek, Deep Space Nine”. The ironic juxtaposition is a must.
> But what's at issue here is how much of, say,
> Marx's notions of conscious action _within_ larger
> structures, is retained in what seems to me like
> praxis-lite pragmatism.
Pragmatism isn’t praxis-lite. It’s available as a framework, which can be used for a variety purposes. (It is, however, far more congruent with dialectical materialism than positivism is.)
> So question two requests a statement on the relation
> between your brand of pragmatism and system (any kind
> of system: open, dialectical, messy, unstable, multiple,
> contradictory, etc.).
Pragmatism has to do with the MANNER in which one approaches things/systems. My *application* of pragmatism differs from James more than any fundamental philosophical difference about the nature of pragmatism itself.
> On to your brand of pragmatism:
>
> >It's not "my brand" of pragmatism.
Is there a converse echo in here?
> >Pragmatism says that one must evaluate meaning in terms
> >of purpose. Purpose creates the epistemic context for
> >meaning. Because there are an irreducible plurality of
> >purposes, there are in irreducible plurality of meanings.
> >Of course, there's also the purpose of reconciling such
> >differences, but it's a purpose that must be carefully
> >watched, so that it doesn't simply crush differences it
> >can't honestly reconcile. James was very sensitive to
> >existence of irreducible differences that can't be gotten
> >rid of.
>
> But that "purpose" is itself generated out of prior meanings
> reflecting larger sets of relations.
Of course it is. That’s surely one reason that James very early on regarded Freud as representing the future of psychology -- because Freud was exploring purposes that had previously been not just unknown, but unimagined.
> So for bigger questions you can't just start with lists
> of isolated "purposes." You have to think about how they
> relate to each other and to larger structures.
Well, it all depends on your purpose. If your purpose is to try and break bigger questions down into a series of manageable little chunks, the list approach works just fine (provided you’ve got a good list, that is). That’s a limited purpose, of course. But often it’s the only approach that can get you started. Analysis before synthesis.
I’m not saying this just to be a smart-ass. I’m trying to illustrate how *I* see pragmatism relating to the questions you raise -- which is, I think, a very different KIND of relationship than the one you are looking for. Pragmatism is about my contextual approach to things, it’s not part of the content -- though of course it does have consequences that affect matters of content.
That said, yes, of course. If your purpose is comprehensive understand, you must, sooner or later, try to assemble a systematic understanding of how purposes relate to each other, to larger structures they’re embedded in, etc. Who could argue with that?
> You did this in your capital punishment post. But in your
> gremlin posts, this is exactly what you deem unnecessary,
> insisting that if we trendy theorists would just attend
> more closely to the _particular_ purpose or details of the
> case (a tv show or whatever), rather than interpreting it
> all through our fact-starved pomo theory, we'd get it right.
All I’m saying is “Don’t put the cart before the horse.” This seems to be incredibly hard for some to grasp. A Procustean approach to specific cases is not a good sign in this regard.
> For some "purposes," narrow specificity is fine. But not
> for others. For instance in the notorious Buffy post
> ("note to self: religion creepy"), I'd seen enough of Buffy
> to generalize in _some_ ways about how it cast "religion."
TWO SHOWS????
> After all, Buffy is a product of a society that even
> designates "religion" as a distinct sphere (separate from
> economics, politics, art, etc.). This "common sense"
> distinction was forged in the past several hundred years,
> and since the broader purpose of my post was precisely to
> point to some of the still-relevant social history bound up
> in that very forging, for _that_ purpose, my exposure to
> Buffy was adequate.
>
> Of course as Buffy connoisseur, you could well bring out
> ways the show does destabilize or "rupture" some common sense
> aspects of religion. (Wherein the LBO pomo-brigade will put
> a gold-star on your head, because that's a rather pomo thing
> to do.)
That’s another thing I find so irritating about PoMo. They act as if they invented contradiction.
> But the empirical facts you brought out (Willow
> dabbling in magic) did not contradict my larger point.
Not about Western Civ, perhaps. But about “Buffy, The Vampire Slayer”. Which is what we were talking about.
I had no objection -- in fact I rather enjoyed -- what you said about Western Civ. It was the Procustean approach to “Buffy” which rankled me, and appeared so symptomatic of PoMo “Theory”-blindness. Gremlins, ATTACK!
> All of which makes me wonder if your empiricism/pragmatism
> is helpful even where it's supposed to shine brightest.
> Your decoder ring is supposed to be good at separating out
> different "purposes." But this should properly include
> separating out different _levels_ of purpose (unless you
> think everything is fragmented purposes, in which case--
> another pomo gold star).
I think that how you characterize purposes (discrete, interpenetrative, fragmented, structured in hierarchical levels, etc.) is in turn a function of the purpose you have in mind.
> So next question: how does your decoder ring distinguish
> levels of purpose?
My decoder ring is SECRET, DAMMIT!
Seriously, tho, there’s no apriori answer to this in pragmatist philosophy. It’s a function of WHAT you are studying and WHY (for what purpose) you are studying it.
> On to pragmatism and individualism. [Snippets of your gist:]
>
> > Basically, I think it's mistaken to perform a simple
> > reductionism to bourgoise individualism. I believe that
> > individualism is present as polarity throughout all of
> > human culture [...]
> >
> > As societies change, the ways in which individuals are
> > embedded in them changes. But individuality and sociality
> > always coexist, only in different forms.
> >
> > that individuation is ALWAYS and everywhere a part of
> > human life, even as humans are always and everywhere
> > social animals as well.
>
>Big big disagreement here. You note that "individuals are
>embedded" in society in various ways, but you have not
>convinced me that you recognize the vastness of this
>qualification, and even your enframing seems to smuggle
>in inappropriate notions of enclosed individuals.
I wish people would read me more carefully. I take pains to write very carefully.
In this case, what you’ve overlooked is the quick shift from “individuals are embedded” to “individuality and sociality always coexist”. The shift from “individivuals” to “individuality” was intended to capture in plain English what PoMoManiacs so skillfully obscure in bookshelves of brain-numbing prose.
>For some purposes (e.g., understanding praxis in the
>modern West), your "polarity" is fine. But you're
>universalizing it.
I was NOT universalizing the concept of “individual”, even in the loosest, most undefined form. That’s why I shifted from “individual” to “individuality”.
(ASIDE: We are social animals. Have been since many millions of years before we became “human”. Among social animals (mammals and birds that is -- social insects excepted) the mediation of individuality and sociality represents a vast range of activity. We humans are quite ordinary in this regards. While I don’t believe in reductionism, I do believe in recognizing ontological contexts.)
Rather than slog through the rest of Maureen’s post, I think it’s best to end here, not because I find what she says uninteresting or unimportant, but because she has mis-attributed a position to me, which most of the rest of her post is dedicated to attacking.
While I would take exception to some aspects of what she says in the remaineder of the post, I am certainly in sympathy with major thrust, and would see little point in getting into the minor quibbles at this point. (CP MacPherson's _Political Theory of Possessive Individualism_ is one of my favorite books, for example, though I haven’t read it in years, and would love to revisit it, since I have to anyway for a book I’m working on.)
However, there is one point that needs to be clarified.
Maureen goes on to talk about “your individualistic pragmatism”.
But James himself was highly skeptical about individualism.
For example, he argued, quite famously, that consciousness does not exist. There is no object that corresponds with the word “consciousness” he argued from phenomenoloogical reflection. Rather, there is a stream of conscious perceptions, feelings, memories, ideas, etc. -- the “stream of consciousness” which his student Gertrude Stein picked up on and ran with to a fair-the-well.
Furthermore, along with pragmatism, James was known for his philsophy of pluralism, which was explicitly related to pragmatism -- a plurality of purposes being self-evident in the human condition, though those purposes differ from culture to culture and age to age. James wrote about pluralism as intrinsically part of the human experience -- at least for a whole lot of people. Being of two (or more) minds about things is simply par for the course, he argued, no matter how much we might yearn to be an integrated unambiguous whole.
His research into altered states of consciousness reflected this attitude. It revealed even more radically how much more there was to human nature than the narrow confines of Victorian individualism, rooted in unitary moral rectitude.
Another aspect of his work further reflected his skepticism toward the concept of the isolated individual -- his interest in parapsychology. Granted, a large number of other Victorians shared his interest, but not his underlying philosophy. For them, it was a kind of escape from the straight-jacket of their newly-found secular individualism. For him it was another field that promised to reinforce his other lines of research and reflection that undermined that individualism.
So, pragmatism got it’s start in the context of a fundamental QUESTIONING of individualism, not as an expression of individualism.
Back to you, Maureen.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"