Pragmatism and Culture

Pragmatism and Culture

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

And Joseph said this is the interpretation thereof.

Pragmatist philosophy celebrates the idea of culture. It not only recognizes that culture is both an essential value and the ineliminable matrix of human life; it further insists that philosophy itself is the product of culture, changing with cultural change. Philosophy's meth- ods, aims, and problems reflect those of the culture that shapes it. Even its concepts like truth, knowledge, identity, means, and ends get their concrete significance from the roles they play in a culture's (historically changing) language games. Like other rich traditions, pragmatism presents no monolithic school but .rather a variety of approaches. In this essay, I shall characterize and contrast two differ- ent pragmatist approaches to culture. One I dub the descriptive- metaphysical approach, the other the reconstructive-poetic approach.

The first is particularly concerned with the ontology of culture, with second-order, metaphysical questions of legitimation: questions about what sort of objects cultural discourse is grounded on and what al- lows or guarantees the coherence of cultural discourse in conditions of change. This approach can be seen as largely Kantian-a quest for the conditions of possibility of coherent discourse. The second approach is less concerned with the metaphysical grounding and logical legitimation of our cultural discourse than with employing and revising it to address concrete problems and to overcome obstacles that block the road of inquiry. More Hegelian than Kantian, it legiti- mates (and challenges) not by transcendental of "conditions of possibility," but by composing polemical narratives and advocatory depictions, by suggesting new ways of thinking and talking of cultural phenomena.

The first approach has its source in Peirce and is most fully and

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the possibility of truth and knowledge which themselves depend on discourse. Because this view seeks foundations in an invariant, au- tonomous reality apart from human practices, let me call it invariant realism. Such realism can, of course, allow for change; otherwise it would be implausible. It merely insists that something (some form of foundational atoms, as it were) remains invariant. Such realism has always dominated philosophical thinking, and its abandonment has usually been taken to entail a vitiating skepticism. Both forms of pragmatism-the desaiptive-metaphysics of Margolis and the reconstructive- poetic approach I prefer--challenge the argument that invariant realism deserves its dominance because it is in fact conceptually necessary for the very possibility of coherent discourse and knowledge. In challenging invariant realism, pragmatism deploys at least three

central strategies. The first is shared by the descriptive and reconstructive approaches, while the two others are more closely linked to reconstruction. Let us start with the shared strategy.

1. It challenges invariant realism's claim that coherent discourse z. .d knowledge are impossible without invariant objects to serve as the shared objects of discourse and objective truth. Invariant realism's argument is that without fixed objects to ground our referential discourse, there is no way to reidentify anything as the same things, and thus there is no way of establishing reference that is stable enough to sustain discourse on a common object. But without the possibility of a common object of discourse, an object that can be reidentified (hence sustained) for more than one utterance, the very notions of discourse and shared knowledge are rendered impossible. Since coherent discourse and knowledge are, however, achieved, then the conclusion is that there must be some invariant objects.

hiargolis's central strategy in Interpretation: Radical but Not Unruly is to challenge this argument by showing how pragmatist philoso- phes of the flux can allow for reidentification of particular objects without presuming their fixity. There is no need, he argues, to prove that there is vari-e. Since change is surely evident and history seems open to further change, the burden of proof rests on those who insist invariance is instead necessary for coherent discourse.

The key maneuver is to show how we can individuate and reidentify an object as the same object without denying that that object has in fact changed radically and without appealing to a core of essential properties that always remain stable throughout all the changes of the object. Margolis's crucial tactic is to distinguish the referential fixity of an object-that is, the fixity necessary for establishing that object as an object of discourse-from the substantive fixity of that


"Agreement about referential identity can be secured by agreeing on \ a certain minimum number of identifying descriptions, or it can be

(and most often is) simply assumed by our deeply entrenched cultural habits of individuation" (PA, 94). As Margolis puts it, "What ensures the success of discourse . . . are the collective resources of a natural-language community's habits of life" (I, 75). In short, Margolis and I regard artworks, texts, and even human selves as cultural entities that are constituted and identified as the individuals they are by the social and linguistic practices of the culture they serve. Their iden- tities thus car! change as these practices change, but given the stabil- ity of our linguistic practices, such cultural artifacts can be "relatively stable" (I, 45; PA, 94).

What then is the difference between Margolis's descriptive-metaphysical pragmatism and the reconstructive-poetic pragmatism I favor? Part of the difference is in reconstruction's advocacy of two other strategies for challenging the claim of the necessity of invariance. One is a genealogical, reconstructive narrative that undermines the claim of invariance (and by extension other undesirable claims) by explaining the historical motives that generate its power. The other strategy is simply the creation of new linguistic means, new vocabularies, or ways of talkmg, which by the very fact of their variance yet coherence challenge the doctrine of invariance.

Another important difference, however, is Margolis's great concern with ontologizing the cultural and linguistic practices that allow individuation and reference. He is intent on claiming that "some form of cultural realism would be required" to ground our linguistic practices, to give them a logical coherence or rigor (I, 25). He is preoccu- pied with providing a metaphysics of cultural objects, for determining the precise mode of being of the referents of cultural discourse. Al- though he opposes fixity in the identity of such objects, he is much concerned with fixing their ontological status and for sharply distg- guishing the status of these cultural referents from that of natural objects. Although he insists that cultural objeck have no natural nay ture but only histories (i.e., they are not natural kinds), he gives them a metaphysical nature as "Intentional objects."

Cultural objects he insists are special entities that "differ from natural objects essentially in possessing Intentional properties"; and though as yet unrealized, his aim is "a full account of the ontology of artworks or cultural phenomena in general" (I, 46). The apparent motive for

158 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

this concern or the metaphysics of cultural referents is that cultural i discourse wou d be incoherent without the positing of entities to which such discourse refers and without an account of the metaphysical nature of such entities.

Reconstructive pragmatism is hardly interested in these metaphysical questions. It embraces the idea that our reality is plastic and contingent and largely structured by human discourse and action. But it doesn't see the point of trying to ground cultural discourse in an elaborate metaphysics of cultural objects when the ground of those very cultural objects is simply, by Margolis's own account, those same discursive cultural practices that metaphysics seeks to ground. If a culture's linguistic practices are, as Wittgenstein and Margolis argue, the bedrock for all justification and grounding, what need do we have to construct a metaphysics to render these practices coherent? Is it not enough proof that they work in practice? How does elaborating a metaphysics of Intentional entities either improve or justify ling~i-tic practice, when language itself is invoked to explain the Intentional ("language is its paradigm," I, 52)?

To borrow an image of Wittgenstein, there is no need to elaborate clouds of metaphysics, if their justlficatory or explanatory function is already condensed effectively in drops of grammar. In other words, there is no crucial legitimative reason, after adducing the concrete linguistic means by which reference is secured, to plunge ourselves into metaphysical theories of the objects referred. to.

Such metaphysical analyses had much more point and legitimative function when reality was conceived in terms of fixed or necessary essences on which language depended and which it sought to mirror. For in that case, once we achieved an adequate metaphysical account of the real, it would always remain valid and effective as a criterion for assessing ordinary understanding. However, once reality (at least in its human, cultural dimension) is grasped as historical contingent flux that is itself the symbiotic product of language, the value of elaborating a rnetaphysics'becomes questionable. For here the metaphysical picture neither can ground our changing linguistic phenomena nor can predict or illuminate their changes. blargolis's metaphysics by being historicist can at least accommodate linguistic and cultural change and is in this way far superior to nonhistoricist metaphysics of culture. But for radical pragmatism, the question remains, what useful explanatory or legitimative work does such a language-grounded metaphysical system perform that is not already gained by simply recognizing that language structures human thought and practice and that it changes over time through contingent developments and in variant ways?


One couid, of course, defend the project of a systematic historicist metaphysics of culture by simply saying that philosophy tradition- ally demands a metaphysics of everything, so that even if metaphysics has lost its old grounding legticnative role, it must be pursued nev- ertheless as a central philosophical undertaking. For what could philosophy be without metaphysical systems? However, if we recognize that philosophy itself is a cultural practice and we take the full meas- ure of hlargolis's insistence on cultural flux, there is reason to allow that philosophy itself can change and has already changed, and that we are moving slowly but surely beyond the age of metaphysical systems. Margolis's extremely elastic,. contingent, and historicized metaphysics can be seen as a progressive station on the way to this new age of philosophy, though with its face largely turned backward to the metaphysical concerns of the past.

There is yet another way to argue for the usefulness of elaborating a historicized, Linguisticized metaphysics of culture Bla Margolis. Our linguistic practices are extremely complex and confusing; hence their metaphysical import is obscure and requires a systematic metaphysics to provide a perspicuous representation of the reality and objects constituted by language. This argument is perhaps the most persua- sive. But the question remains whether Margolis's metaphysical sys- tematization, with its complex terms of art like "the Intentional" and its subtle distinctions of the "lingual" from the "linguistic," is indeed more perspicuous than the linguistic practices it seeks to capture and more enlightening than the vivid images of flux and the plastic universe. This raises the further question of what is the standard or variety of perspicuity one seeks, as well as the question of perspicuity for whom. Is it perspicuity for academic specialists in metaphysics or perspicuity for intelligent readers who want to understand their cultural world?

Reconstructive pragmatism does, however, recognize other reasons for going beyond our actual concrete linguistic practices. These reasons are not concerned with the metaphysical grounding of actual practice but with its improvement. This reconstructive improvement is pursued by actively pursuing change in our linguistic practices by composing narratives to undermine the myth of fixity that would encourage a linguistic status quo, but also by proposing new vocabularies or new ways of talking about certain things that concretely show how coherent linguistic change is possible by actually effecting such change. These strategies of narration and of novel, performative characteriza- tion are why I portray reconstructive pragmatism as narrative-poetic in contrast to the descriptive-metaphysical pragmatism of Margolis.


Let us briefly,consider how these reconstructive strategies are used to challenge the metaphysical doctrine of invariance.

The pragmatist strategy of deploying genealogical narrative to undermine the philosophy of fixity finds perhaps its most famous and influential exemplification in John Dewey's critical account of philosophy's traditional "quest for ~ertainty."~ According to Dewey, prirni- tive man's deep desire to "escape from peril" in an unmanageable "world of hazards" generated a religious attitude of appeasement and conformity to the transcendent powers assumed to control the hu- manly unmanageable flux of nature. This primitive religious disposi- tion for fixity and certainty was the underlying inspiration for "phiIosophyfs search for the immutable," a search that would even- tually substitute absolute being and its fixed, rational laws for -he gods and their capricious acts and verdicts (QC, 3, 21).

To appreciate the power of this strategy of genealogical narrative, one must get at least some sense of the scope of the story. I, therefore, am obliged to quote at some length from Dewey's account of how "insecurity generates the quest for certainty" and fixity, thus creating a long philosophical prejudice of privileging the theory of the immutable over practice within the flux.

Absence of arts of regulation diverted the search for security into irreievant modes of practice, into rite and cult. . . . Gradually there was a differentiation of two realms, one higher, consisting of the powers which determine human destiny in all importad affairs. With this religion was concerned. The other consisted of the pro- saic matters in which man relied upon his own skill and his mat- ter-of-fact insight. Philosophy inherited the idea of this division.. . . Because of the growth of mathematics, there arose also the ideal of a purely rational knowledge, intrinsically solid and worthy and the means by which. intimations of rationality within changing phenomenoa could be comprehended within science. For the intellectual class the stay and consolation, the warrant of certainty, pro- vided by religxon was hencefoth found in intellectual demonstration of the reality of the objects of an ideal realm (QC, 202).

The Greeks, therefore, institutionalized a distinction between the certainty of theory and the flux of practice.

Practical action . . . belongs in the realm of generation and decay, a realm inferior in value as in Being. . . . Because ultimate Being or reality is fixed, permanent, admitting of no change or variation, it


may be gasped by rational intuition and set forth in rational, that is, universal and necessary demonstration.. . . the unalterably fixed and the absolutely certain are one. (QC, 16)

Alter the Greeks, the identification of certainty with immutability was reinforced and extended into ethical matters by Christianity. "The authority of ultimate Being was, moreover, represented on earth by the Church; that which in its nature transcended intellect was made known by a revelation of which the Church was the interpreter and guardian" (QC, 202-3). Dewey concludes that although the discoveries of modem science have undermined our belief in fixity with respect to practical and material matters, the habit of fixity and certainty still pervades our philosophical thinking and drives us to search for absolute values, immutable categories, unchanging entities, and eternal laws.

By this compelling, tendentious narrative, Dewey discredits the phlosophical prejudice for fixity by tracing it to emotions of insecuriry, primitive religion, undeveloped science, and rigid Christian dogma- tism. The view that knowledge and discourse require invariant objects is shown to rest not on logcal compuIsions but on compulsive primitive fears.

The same type of narrative strategy can, of course, be used to challenge other entrenched philosophical views. Dewey deploys it to undermine the privileging oppositions of theory/pratice and ends/means, which, apart from their connection with the quest for certainty, are shown to stem from dass hierarchies in ancient Greece and the primitive conditions of labor there. Ln Pragmatist Aesthetics (chaps. 7-8), I sirni- larly employ the reconstructive narrative strategy in challenging the rigid privileging dichotomy of high art versus popular art. By relat- ing historically how today's high art was once viewed (and often condemned) as popular, I show that this distinction marks not permanent, essential aesthetic qualities but changing and alterable social conditions. By tracingthe power and aura of high art to its conserva- tive, undemocratic sources in court aristocracy and high church "other- worldliness," I also discredit its claim to be the exclusive aesthetic vehicle of progressive social value.

Such genealogical narrative may taint the image of high art but does not suffice for aesthetic legitimation of the popular. Here reconstructive pragmatism of culture needs another tool: the third strategy I mentioned for challenging invariance. This strategy involves linguistic innovation, either inventing new vocabularies or applying familiar vocabularies to things not formerly described in such terms. To give rap cultural legitimation as art, I therefore analyzed it in


culturally valqed aesthetic and philosophical terms in which it had never been discussed. To speak of it in such new, better ways can help effect a new cultural valuation. For cultural or aesthetic value is not permanently, ontologically fixed, but rather the product of changing human practices informed by language. Of course, philosophical talk alone cannot in itself give popular art full social legitimation. That would require also change in the discourse and institutional practices of other, more socially powerful, groups.

The logic behind this reconstructive challenge to invariance is sim- ple. By actually effecting coherent linguistic change, by adding to the flux, it manifests that language varies yet maintains coherence through change. Nor is such linguistic change merely linguistic; it can amount to a substantive change in o w cultural world. Take, for example, the new linguistic terms of "sexual hattassment" and "stalking." These terms are not simply faithful descriptions of previous, invariant forms of behavior that were already immoral or criminal; instead, such :o- cutions reconshwct sexual relations to create these new criminal acts. Early in this century as in the remote past, ardent but unrequited lovers were not stalking, sexual criminals, even if they could be rather annoying. Changes in sexual language, like the changes of PC-discourse, have effected substantive cultural change, a change in actual s i a l relations whose effects go well beyond language and even reach the most basic, nondiscursive sensual dimensions of our experience. The sexual ambience has been radically altered (at least on American cam- puses); thus not even the apparent permanence of sex escapes invariance.

Having described pragmatism's three strategies for challenging the necessity of invariance to ground our discourse and cultural world, I shall conclude by reviewing, in nuce, the relation between Margolis's descriptive-metaphysical pragmatism and the reconstructive-poetic pragmatism I favor. While Margolis concentrates on the f i s t strategy and on metaphysical representations of linguistic practice, teconshwctive pragmatism goes beyond the logical solution of the first strategy. It offers the strategies of new narratives and ways of talking that not

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only expose the questionable motives and sources of invariance but contribute themselves to new, variant linguistic practices that can improve our culture.

Margolis is a f i e philosophical poet in his own right. But he con- fines his new locutions to what he calls second-order philosophical discourse, to his technical terms of art lie "unicity," "Intentional," and


"lingual," p d he insists on marking a clear distinction between first- and second-order discourse, criticizing pragmatists suchs as Rorty and Stanley Fish for denying a role for second-order projects. Reconstructive pragmatism, as I construe and practice it, recognizes a functional distinction between these levels of discourse, but it insists on con- siderable seepage and flexiblity between them. It also insists that philosophy's poetic efforts of innovative discourse should be directed at fist-order discourse, not simply at higher grounding or justificational levels of inquiry.

Reconstructive pragmatism is actively interventionist, aimed at effecting-not merely representing or metaphysically accommodating- cultural change. It seeks more than a philosophical account of culture, but substantive cultural improvement. Its first stage of argument, which it shares with Margolis, is this: If the world is partly the result of human Linguistic practices, then it can in part be changed by chan@ng those practices. Margolis seems satisfied with this important :or,c,~- sion and devotes himself to patiently, skillfully showing how such change is compatible with the rigors of referential discourse and how it can be embodied in an ontology of historicized, variant, vague but still identifiable cultural entities. But reconst~uctive pragmatism is not so simply satisfied and pursues its argument further: If our cultural world is altered by changing linguistic practices, why should not philosophy play a more active role in such change by advocating linguistic reforms, by advancing new ways of talking that would improve the concrete practices of our actual life world and not merely the second order, philosophical practices of ontologically representing it?

There is a familiar objection to reconstructive pragmatism: In tak- ing such an activist role, philosophy abandons its essential posture of disinterested neutrality and its defining role of interpreting rather than changing the world. But this objection is easily countered. First, much of classic philosophy (e.g., Plato's theory of art or Locke's theory of government) is far from disinterested and devoid of reformatory agen- das. Second, on the view of culture's flux I share with Margolis, philosophy, like any cultural product, is variant and open to change. So even if it once displayed Olympian neutrality, it need not maintain this posture. The crucial question, for the pragmatist, is only one of cost accounting: whether the gains of philosophical activism out weigh the advantages of philosophical neutrality. I think they do, not only because of my skepticism of putative philosophical neutrality, but also because the stakes of our cultural struggles are too important to be neutral about.

Let me close by addressing a question I raised at the outset. Although

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I have contrastgd the descriptive-metaphysical and reconstructive-poetic as rival forms of pragmatism, are they indeed incompatible, and must we choose only one between them? I would like to think that the approaches can be reconciled and used to complement each other. Endorsing the general metaphysical and epistemological themes expressed in Margolis's notion of the world of flux, I would find it hard to refute the elaborate ontology of cultural entities that he pro- poses. I hope and trust it is adequate to whatever metaphysical tasks he constructed it for. But practically speaking, for the reconstructive pragmatist, such ontological exercises seem relatively pointless, for reasons already delineated. In any case, they leave me cold, so I choose to do other things.

Margolis might protest this cavalier dismissal of ontology, arguing that I must address the question of the entities of discourse. Other- wise, he would claim, discourse itself remains incoherent and ungrounded, and the cultural world is reduced tofaqons de parler. But I just don't see how his ontological constructions of the flux, which explicitly rest on discursive practice, provide m y more robust grounding than those discursive practices themselves. Moreover, the refusal to ontologize the life world is hardly tantamount to treating it as a mere faqon de parler. Discursive practices involve actions and objects as well as words, and there is also, I would argue, an important nondiscursive (though discursively alterable) dimension to the life world, expressed, for example, in immediate somatic experience. .

This questioning of the ubiquity of text and interpretation is another place where my pragmatism differs from Margohfs.' But rather than pursuing this new issue here, I prefer to end with a chord of reconciliation. For, to make a personal confession, I might never have found my way to reconstructive pragmatism, had I not encountered Margolis's pragmatist metaphysics. Nor would I have ever been so free to pursue my flaky new topics of reconstruction in the class- room, if Margolis-my senior, exemplary departmental colleague- had not been there to take care of the traditional business of metaphysics.

Despite my own lack of zeal for his ontological efforts, I can imag- ine how a pragmatist could be a Margolian metaphysician in the morning (particularly if he's a very early riser) and a reconstructive poet in the afternoon. Philosophy and pragmatism should be big enough for both enterprises and tolerant enough to allow their independent cultivation. I hope Margolis thinks so as well.


Notes \

1. See Margolis's trilogy, 7'ke Persistence of ~ e a l i t ~ , including Pragmatism Without Foundations, Science without Unity, and Texts without Referents (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, 1987, 1989). See also his recent books, 73e Flux of History and the Flux of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and Interpretation: Radical but Not Unruly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). I shall be citing extensively from this book, using the abbre- viation "I." See Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), henceforth abbreviated PA; and Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge, 1997, henceforth PP.

2. I already made the point in an earlier essay, "Interpretation, Intention, and Truth," lournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 47 (1988): 399411, which included a critique of Margolis's earlier theory of interpretation that pos- ited a core of fixity in descriptive properties of a work that were con- trasted with interpretive properties and served as the necessary substratum for the latter.

3. See John Dewey, Tke Quest for Certainty, 1929 (Carbondale: Southern Illi- nois University Press, 1984), henceforth cited as QC.

4. For my arguments against the ubiquity of interpretation and a crucial nondiscursive, somatic dimension of experience, see the chapter "Beneath Interpretation" in Pragmatist Aesthetics and "Somatic Experience: Foundation or Reconstruction?" in PP, chap. 6. Margolis's affirmations of the ubiquity of interpretation and the complete textualism of the self are most apparent in the first and final chapters of Interpretation: Radical but Not Unruly.

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